Against His-story, Against Leviathan

1983

People :

Author : Fredy Perlman

Sections (TOC) :

• Chapter 1
      5,070 Words; 30,433 Characters

• Chapter 2
      6,389 Words; 37,395 Characters

• Chapter 3
      7,950 Words; 47,202 Characters

• Chapter 4
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• Chapter 5
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• Chapter 6
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• Chapter 7
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• Chapter 8
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• Chapter 9
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• Chapter 10
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• Chapter 11
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• Chapter 12
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• Chapter 13
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• Chapter 14
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• Chapter 15
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• Chapter 16
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• Chapter 17
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• Chapter 18
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• Chapter 19
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• Chapter 20
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• Chapter 21
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• Chapter 22
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• Chapter 23
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• Chapter 24
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Sections (Content) :

• Chapter 1

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight
Where ignorant armies clash by night. (M. Arnold)

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain... (T.S. Eliot)

The darkling plain is here. This is the waste land: England, America, Russia, China, Israel, France....

And we are here as victims, or as spectators, or as perpetrators of tortures, massacres, poisonings, manipulations, despoliations.

Hic Rhodus! This is the place to jump, the place to dance! This is the wilderness! Was there ever any other? This is savagery! Do you call it freedom? This is barbarism! The struggle for survival is right here. Haven’t we always known it? Isn’t this a public secret? Hasn’t it always been the big public secret?

It remains a secret. It is publicly known but not avowed. Publicly the wilderness is elsewhere, barbarism is abroad, savagery is on the face of the other. The dry sterile thunder without rain, the confused alarms of struggle and flight, are projected outward, into the great unknown, across the seas and over the mountains. We’re on the side with the angels.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs... (W.B. Yeats)

...is moving its slow thighs against the projected wilderness, against the reflected barbarism, against the savage face that looks out of the pond, its motion emptying the pond, rending its banks, leaving an arid crater where there was life.

In a wonderfully lucid book titled Beyond Geography, a book which also goes beyond history, beyond technology, beyond civilization, Frederick W. Turner (not to be confused with Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontiersman’s advocate) draws the curtain and floods the stage with light.

Others drew the curtain before Turner; they’re the ones who made the secret public: Toynbee, Drinnon, Jennings, Camatte, Debord, Zerzan among contemporaries whose lights I’ve borrowed; Melville, Thoreau, Blake, Rousseau, Montaigne, Las Casas among predecessors; Lao Tze as long ago as written memory can reach.

Turner borrows the lights of human communities beyond civilization’s ken to see beyond geography. He sees with the eyes of the dispossessed of this once beautiful world that rests on a turtle’s back, this double continent whose ponds emptied, whose banks were rent, whose forests became arid craters from the day it was named America.

...a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight …

Focusing on the image, Yeats asked,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

The vision is as clear to Turner as it was to Yeats:

The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

Seers of old returned to share their visions with their communities, just as women shared their corn and men their hunt.

But there is no community. The very memory of community is a fogged image out of Spiritus Mundi.

The seer of now pours his vision on sheets of paper, on banks of arid craters where armored bullies stand guard and demand the password, Positive Evidence. No vision can pass by their gates. The only song that passes is a song gone as dry and cadaverous as the fossils in the sands.

Turner, himself a guard, a professor, has the courage of a Bartolomé de Las Casas. He storms the gates, refuses to give the password, and he sings, he rants, he almost dances.

The armor comes off. Even if it is not merely worn like clothes or masks, even if it is glued to face and body, even if skin and flesh must be yanked off with it, the armor does come off.

Of late, many have been storming the gates. Only recently one sang that the net of factories and mines was the Gulag Archipelago and all workers were zeks (namely conscripts, inmates, labor gang members). Another sang that the Nazis lost the war but their new order didn’t. Ranters are legion now. Is it about to rain? Is it the twilight of a new dawn? Or is it the twilight in which Minerva’s owl can see because day is all done?

• Chapter 2

An armored one asks: If the Age of Gold was so valuable, so beautiful, so pure, why did people leave it? If the Civilized remember it, why don’t they rush back to it? If it was so comfortable, why don’t farmers throw away their plows and return to digging sticks? (This same questioner also asks: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?)

There are answers to these questions. But the questioner does not want to hear them. He already knows the answer. Humanity left the state of nature because Civilization is a higher stage. (Higher stage of what? The armored one will never tell. He quickly turns to something else.)

The theory of the higher stage is as old as Civilization itself. One of its more influential modern versions originated with a nineteenth century lawyer who lived in upstate New York, Lewis Henry Morgan.

A consultant to speculating businessmen, a Republican politician and a racist, Morgan nevertheless found time to do a study of his neighbors in upstate New York, devastated remains of once-numerous Iroquoian communities. Morgan’s racist predecessors Washington and Jefferson had insisted the Iroquoians were children but Morgan thought the Iroquoians had reached a stage between childhood and adolescence.

Morgan generalized his racism into a ladder, every rung of which gleams with racist polish. He made no effort to disguise his contempt; on the contrary, he flaunted it; such contempt was (and still is) a mark of refinement in America. He named the lowest rung, the stage of infancy, Savagery. He named the next rung, the stage of childhood, Barbarism. And of course he named the top rungs Civilization, the topmost American Civilization. On this topmost rung sat Morgan with the Great White Race. The professors of America were so flattered they elected Morgan president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The professors would later regret their vote. Morgan’s racist ladder was borrowed by the agitator Karl Marx and the revolutionary businessman Friedrich Engels. Marx intended to patch the ladder but never found the time. It was Engels who patched Morgan’s ladder. He didn’t patch much. He borrowed the ladder intact, with all the racist polish of Morgan’s nomenclature: Savagery, Barbarism, etc. Engels patched only the ladder’s summit. He renamed Morgan’s topmost rung, and he placed a yet higher rung above it.

Engels changed the name of Morgan’s Great White Race to Capitalist Class, and on the rung above it he placed the leaders and followers of Marx’s political party. And in this form, Morgan’s racist ladder became the official religion of the USSR, China, Eastern Europe and other lands where the names of the rungs are stuffed into the heads of schoolchildren as a catechism.

Of course as soon as the agitators got hold of the ladder, American professors didn’t want to be caught with their hands on it. They forgot Morgan. (This is easily done in places where memory is at the mercy of publishers of written words.)

But racism did not vanish from America, and Morgan’s ladder was too good a thing to leave to the agitators. The archaeologist V.G. Childe, although himself a Marxist, gave the ladder an aura of respectability by filling its rungs with all the latest Positive Evidence. And the ladder came back to America, not quite as an official religion but more as a last resort, as something to use in emergencies. Reference to “the state of nature” always creates emergencies.

The ladder, the theory of higher stages, of course explains why people left the state of nature. That’s what it is designed to do. The title of Engels' book is The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. The explanation is simple, lucid, in fact mechanical, and can be taught in elementary schools. All we have to do is look away from living beings and concentrate on things. The ladder is a thing. So are its rungs. And the connections between lower and higher rungs are also things. They’re devices. Childe misleadingly named his book Man Makes Himself, giving the impression that his subject was a living being. For Childe, Man himself is a thing, a container of objects and devices; Matter is the core and Man the excrescence.

The device responsible for Man’s passage from the rung called Savagery to the rung called Barbarism is a gadget called the Material Conditions, or more fully, the Level of Development of the Productive Forces. This same device is responsible for the passages to all the higher rungs.

Marx and Engels, and also Morgan, lived at a time when the material conditions, literally the ground itself, slipped from under the feet of the former rulers, the hated barons and bishops: capitalist owners of mines and factories were buying up the lands of the aristocrats. Marx and Engels prognosticated that the ground would similarly slip out from under the capitalists, and they projected their wish to the first dawn.

In terms of this projection, Man exists for thousands of generations as a Savage. Then, three hundred or so generations ago, material conditions become favorable for something higher than savagery. These conditions include agriculture, metallurgy, the wheel, etc. Once he has all these things, Man is able to generate a surplus product, a margin. (Turner, too, succumbs to this part of the theory.) This surplus, this margin, is what supports, literally feeds, the brave new world that now becomes possible: kings, generals of armies, slavemasters, bosses of labor gangs. Man had always wanted rulers, permanent armies, slavery, division of labor, but he couldn’t realize these dreams until the material conditions became ripe. And as soon as they did become ripe, all progressive-minded Savages leaped unhesitatingly to the higher rung.

(Reader: do me a favor and reexamine the theory of higher stages first. Then tell me if you still consider my caricature exaggerated.)

This theory of higher stages can be taught to small children because it is a fairy tale. There’s nothing wrong with fairy tales. But the proponents of this one claim it is something else; they are contemptuous of fairy tales.

• Chapter 3

The surplus product, the famous margin, did not give rise to the Leviathan. On the contrary, it is the Leviathan that gives rise to the margin. Communities of human beings needed this margin no more than communities of wolves.

Bes need a margin to feed their queen. The Leviathan needs a margin to feed, not only the gods and their shrine keepers, but mainly the Lugal and the Ensis and the Scribes as well as all the springs and wheels with which to make war.

The first Leviathan does not revolutionize the material conditions of production, for it institutes these; it is itself synonymous with material conditions of production. The first Leviathan revolutionizes the conditions of existence itself, and not only of human beings but of all living beings and of Mother Earth herself.

The surplus product makes its appearance together with the vessels that hold it. Human communities have long had baskets and vases, although rarely more than they could carry from winter to spring camps. They did not need them. With the rise of the first Leviathan there is a virtual technological revolution in vessel production. Turner, and Mumford before him, mention the proliferation of bins, storage jars and clay vats that now makes its appearance.

In fact Ur, enclosed by walls and stocked with grain, is itself a large vat, a town-sized storage bin.

The surplus product is merely another name for Leviathan’s material contents, its entrails. It can hardly exist by itself, suspended in mid-air, “ripe” for the beastly carcass to form around it.

Communities of free people had usually stored enough food to last them through an average winter, and although some of their dreamers were excellent weathermen, they often had to skimp and squeeze when the sky outwitted the dreamer.

The first Leviathan stores enough for the worst possible winter and then some, since free people no longer do the work. A living being so stuffed would suffocate and explode. There are hoards of every conceivable product. And where there are hoards, there’s trade.

Trade is very old. In the state of nature, trade is something people do to their enemies. They don’t trade with kin.

A person gives things, just as she gives songs or stories or visions to her kin. The receiver may or may not reciprocate on some other occasion. The giving is the source of satisfaction. We will be so far removed from this, we will not understand. That will be our shortcoming, not hers.

She trades only with enemies. If a hostile group, whether near or distant, has something she wants, she and several well-armed cousins go to the hostiles with something the hostiles might want. She offers her gift, and the hostiles had better offer the thing she wants on the spot or she’ll carry her gift right back to her village.

Soon after the rise of the first Ur, trade becomes extensive. Virtually everyone is now everyone else’s enemy. When you give someone a gift, you expect what you went for; you keep careful records on your clay tablet, and woe to him who defaults.

A single view of the hoards gives rise to a new human quality. This quality becomes so widespread that we will not believe it did not always exist: Greed.

You can see that over half the grain in the storage bins rots every year, unused. And you know that in the Zagros Mountains and in the Levant there are camps of foreigners who rarely store enough food to tide them through a hard winter. Those in the Zagros Mountains wear beautiful fur garments, and those in the Levant derive a purple dye from shells.

You, a Priest’s brother and an Ensi’s cousin, set out toward the Zagros Mountains with forty zek-drawn cartloads of grain, a years output of forty zeks. You go at the end of a long, hard winter. You get ten fur robes for every cartload. They claim not to have so many furs. Perhaps it has dawned on them that they are being plundered, that the relation they’ve established with you is not a relation between their furs and your grain, but between themselves and the zeks who harvest the grain, and that you are a thief who is stealing from both.

So you rush back to Ur with your grain and return to the foreigners’ camp with you cousin the Ensi and a band of well-armed men. The Ensi’s men remove the robes from the foreigners’ backs. There still are not enough robes, so the Ensi’s men return to Ur with several of the foreigners’ sons and daughters.

Ur has progressed to the stage of engaging in foreign commerce.

• Chapter 4

The book at the origin of today’s Civilizing Religions does not begin with Civilization-builders, say with Sumerians who launched the first Leviathan. Its first chapter tells of an earthly garden, Eden, a place reminiscent of the state of nature. Its second chapter tells of the withdrawal of people from the entrails of a large Leviathan. The book then uncritically describes these people’s attempt to launch a Leviathan of their own, but the Book goes on to tell of painful and often insupportable captivities in the bowels of other worms. The overall impression it gives is that the wonders of Civilization are not positive, life-enhancing wonders.

Withdrawals from Civilization are so numerous and so frequent that the life-eating worms appear to be in a continual state of decomposition.

The exodus of Israel from Egypt is not a major withdrawal, but it is a well-documented one, so that we can get an inside view of some of the actions and even some of the thoughts of the participants.

The subjects of the exodus are zeks in Egypt, but they seem relatively privileged zeks. They are pre-literate. They are not people of a single mind, as they reveal later in the story, and if they are not even of a single tribe, they will be welded into one by their later common experiences.

They have not been in Egypt long, only a few generations, so that they remember there’s a world outside of Egypt. Their reference to the earthly garden may even be a memory of a world outside Leviathan. Turner will suggest that the only garden they remember is the Mesopotamian garden of the Lugal and his Akkadian successors.

This may actually be the case with some of them, but I suspect that most of them have something else in mind.

Forty generations after their exodus from Egypt, these people’s scribes will write their Book; in it they will accurately tell of political and military events described on tablets and scrolls available to modern scholars, but not available to the scribes. The memories of pre-literate people are long. People who remember the deeds of Pharaohs, Hittites and Assyrians can also remember that their own ancestors once lived in communities of free human beings, whether in Yemen or Ethiopia, and that these ancestors communed with animals, with Earth, with the spirit of the sky and the spirit of the apple tree.

I suspect that they remember, and call Eden, what others remember as the Golden Age. And if they are uncomfortable in Egypt, the memory that there is an outside, even a pleasant, idyllic outside, must stimulate in them a desire to leave the greatest and wealthiest of all ancient Civilizations.

Despite their nostalgia for what Morgan and Engels will call a more primitive stage of existence, a stage that was not a mode of production, these relatively privileged zeks are not unaware of the material and social conditions of their own age. They know that the Egyptian Leviathan is only one monolith among others, and they seem to know a great deal about the others. This is not surprising, since they remember recent ancestors more vividly than they remember Eden’s Adam, and at least one of these recent ancestors, a man called Abram, hailed from Harran, a town at the very crossroads between the world’s major Leviathans. Even if this Abram did not live near the governor’s palace or the Temple but on the outskirts, he was surely familiar with the inner city and its gardens, and probably with the gardens of other cities as well.

Abram must have been even more familiar with the merchants and soldiers of the great Leviathans, since Harran lay on the road taken by Assyrian traveling salesmen seeking windfall profits in Anatolia, and the salesmen’s peaceful daytime commerce led almost inevitably to clashes of ignorant armies by night, transforming Harran’s outskirts into a darkling plain.

Abram’s kin were surely swept into the confused alarms of struggle and flight. They might even have fought alongside Egyptian or Hittite armored men as auxiliaries. It is unlikely that they were ever auxiliaries to Assyrians, since their Book will express only horror and fear of the death squads sent out by the tyrants of Ashur and Nineveh.

The scribes will write that their ancestor Abram already worshiped only Yahweh, but this is surely wishful thinking on their part, since Abram’s grandchildren will still be honoring several nature gods in their later captivity in Egypt.

We are not told exactly when or why Abram’s kin made their way, or were taken, to Egypt, but there were many occasions when such a journey would have been opportune or even necessary.

• Chapter 5

The Israelites who withdraw from Egyptian captivity and then proceed to set in motion a worm of their own do not, by their efforts, introduce anything new to the Levant, despite their mentor’s innovative theories.

They occupy fields and lodges of those they are able to defeat militarily, and then they try to follow the dead leader’s precepts.

In addition to giving them the abstract Yahweh, Moses, is said to have been given his heirs numerous laws by which to keep themselves clean in the Abstraction’s immortal eyes. After keeping themselves clean for two or three generations, they start to copy the ways of their unclean neighbors. Raving orators have fits of frenzy as they try to figure out just what it was that Moses had had in mind.

Such public outbursts, fits and trances seem to have been common in all the ancient Leviathans, and they make those places seem almost free compared to the controlled-communication cages we will live in.

Having gotten used to the lodges and fields of the expropriated Canaanites, some of the orators wonder if Yahweh might not want his chosen people to have some of their Phoenician neighbors’ “good things,” or some of their Philistine neighbors’ iron weapons and military efficiency. One raving prophet discovers that the Israelites have only the concept of King of Kings whereas the people of the east, the Assyrians, have the real thing in the person of Ashur-rabi the second.

A man called Saul accepts the challenge and quickly emulates the Assyrians by levying troops. Saul is killed while testing the strength of his troops against the iron Philistines, and a man more familiar with the ways of iron giants reconditions the Israelite Leviathan into something comparable to the Philistine worm. King David then reduces the sons of Levi who have survived until now into efficient killing machines deployed in a permanent army supplemented by iron mercenaries.

With this force, the monarch is at last able to fulfill the rest of Moses’ and Deborah’s dream, to reduce Moab, Ammon, Edom and Aram. He then allies with the Phoenician Baal-worshipers of Tire against his former Philistine allies, revealing by the ease of his victory that the iron men were not giants.

The victorious monarch, egged on by another orator, emulates the Baal-worshipers by building a Temple for his god. The fact that this god is not a dead relic from a pre-Leviathanic past but the King of Kings, the abstraction of Leviathan itself, bothers no one. The god of this Temple is treated exactly the same way as the gods of the Ziggurats.

King David’s son inherits the crown and reduces yet more people in the god’s name, and powerful subservient men fill their houses with good things, also in the god’s name, exactly as Babylonians do in Marduk’s name, Assyrians in Ashur’s and Phoenicians in Baal’s. The god’s origins and traits are different, but nothing else is, even after the unified Leviathan splits into two bickering Leviathans called Israel and Judah. The stories are Sumero-Akkadian, the Law is Babylonian, the proverbs are Egyptian, the psalms are Phoenician.

There is a glimmer of something different when the orator Elisha rages against this lack of originality on the part of a people with such an unusual god, but this orator does not succeed in launching a new start or even a second Exodus.

Stanley Diamond will point out that the Book of Job is an apology for this unwillingness to move in a humanly more meaningful direction. Personal wealth in a sea of poverty seems unreconcilable with older modes of sociability to the archaic-minded Job, until he convinces himself to accept the wealth as a reward for blind submission to the inscrutable god.

The smugness of the much later Puritans described by Max Weber is already being publicly aired. Such complacency will not be denounced until the Egalitarian shepherd Amos rails against it, but by then it will already be too late, as Amos himself will see from the writing on the wall. The third Tiglath Pileser will recondition a moribund Assyrian Leviathan into an efficient war engine and start swallowing all of Mesopotamia and the Levant. The militarist’s successor, the second Sargon, will swallow the first State of Israel and will deport its inhabitants, and Sennacherib will deal a similar blow to the State of Judah. It will be during their long captivities in Assyria and then Babylonia that the heirs of Moses will forge something new. The memory of the Messiah who led them out of an earlier captivity will give them not only hope but a solidarity uncommon among captives of any age.

• Chapter 6

The Phoenician octopus and its later Greek, Venetian and other offspring will come to be seen as something altogether different from the Assyrian worm. There will even be those who will see the octopus as a form of human freedom. I intend to show that this is an optical illusion.

There is no doubt that the two Leviathans differ. The artificial worm’s claws and fangs, its armies, are usually attached to the body, whereas the tentacles of the artificial octopus detach themselves from the body and can be said to move about freely, especially if the tentacles are ships. The worm is largely landborne whereas the octopus tends to be seaborne.

There is no doubt that two different types are in question. The point is that these are not types of human community but types of Leviathan. Both are what Hobbes will call “artificial men.” Each of them is an automaton, a machine, and like other machines it can sometimes be converted or adapted to do what the other does.

The main difference between them does not lie in the way the tentacles move nor in the medium through which they move nor in the size of the head, but rather in the way the two automata use the already-mentioned surplus. Both live off the surplus product of zeks’ labor. But the worm uses most of its surplus to enlarge its head and body, its officials and armies, whereas the octopus keeps most of its surplus continually circulating between sources and destinations.

This different treatment of the surplus gives each a specific advantage over the other. The one tends to have greater wealth, the other greater power. An efficient and flexible octopus—and the Phoenician cities seem to have been both—can suck an ever greater part of Mother Earth into its tentacles. The Phoenicians not only could but apparently did carry a vast proportion of plundered and denatured Biosphere in the holds of their ships. But with all this wealth, the Phoenician octopus was still at a disadvantage to the Assyrian worm in terms of power, as a single campaign led by the third Tiglathpileser revealed.

We will be surprised by the ease of the Assyrian conquest. We will think the wealthy can buy power as easily as the powerful can grab wealth. We will think of the British Empire, an octopus with the power of a worm, or of the American Empire, a worm with the tentacles of an octopus.

The Phoenicians do buy armies. A few of Levi’s grandsons, in fact, distinguish themselves as mercenaries in those armies. But armies eat up the surplus in the ships’ holds, and the heads of the mercantile houses know that all the wealth of Phenicia comes from taking the things in the holds to places where they’re precious, and from filling the holds with cheap things that are precious elsewhere. The merchants also know that large armies acquire insatiable appetites and threaten to swallow all the things in the ships’ holds. And of course the merchants are right.

When the third Tiglathpileser’s war engines knock down Phenicia’s gates, the Assyrians do not inherit a world empire of floating tentacles. The Assyrian militarists do not need to deport Phenicia’s merchants, and they may not even want the floating empire to end. But the moment their hungry armies plunder the ships’ holds, the Phoenician octopus collapses. All that’s left of it are the pieces of tentacles beyond Assyria’s reach, the outposts on both shores of the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic. The parent of all these outposts rots like the empty ships in its harbors. The ships, whose holds now contain only what’s left of a once lush Levantine forest, will eventually sink. The trees in the ships’ holds will have no heirs because the soil on which they grew has been washing into the sea since the day it lost its cover. This soil, still rich with living organisms, will join the sunken ships in the bottom of the Mediterranean, where both will gradually turn into offshore oil.

• Chapter 7

With the Arrival of Medes, Persians and Scythians, we get a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of what has been brewing in the cauldrons of the witches and shamans of the Eurasian steppes and mountains.

When the Guti, Kassites, Hittites and Greeks arrived, we couldn’t look into their past because they forgot or repressed every memory of it. The Greek Hesiod remembered only that the past was golden compared to his own age, but he forgot most of the details.

When the Persians arrive, they remember a visionary, or a movement of visionaries, called Zarathustra, and they will preserve the surviving traces of this memory in books.

It is not known if this Zarathustra lived in the steppes or on the outskirts of the neo-Babylonian empire, or even if he was a man or a community.

Zarathustra reduced Hesiod’s five generations to two: one is outside the Leviathan, the other is inside.

The outsider is Light, Ahura Mazda, associated with the spirits of fire, earth and water, with animals and plants, with Earth and Life. Ahura Mazda is the strength and freedom of the generation Hesiod considered the first, the golden.

The insider is Darkness, Ahriman, also called The Lie. Ahriman is the Leviathan as well as the Leviathanic armor that disrupted the ancient community.

Nietzsche is going to recognize that Zarathustra called on human beings to rise in stature, to be more than merchants of wine and olives. Zarathustra announced and perhaps even proclaimed the war of Ahura Mazda against Ahriman.

This war would not be a polite exodus led by an official. Zarathustra knew that followers led by the nose would not recover their freedom. Ahriman is in the world and in the individual. The war against Ahriman is waged in the world and in the individual. It is simultaneously a struggle against Leviathan and against the armor. It is waged with fire, the great purifier. The mask is burned off, the armor is burned out, the Leviathan is burned down. And woe to the world if the fire should fall to Ahriman, to the hands of armored men!

In spite of Zarathustra’s warnings and precautions, the fire of Ahura Mazda does fall into the hands of an armored man, Cyrus, great-grandson of Achaemenes the Persian. This Cyrus did not hesitate before leading people by the nose. Trained by the Medes who inherited not only Elam but also everything the Elamites had learned from a hundred generations of Mesopotamian Leviathans, Cyrus like Moses let himself be pulled by his armor.

Those who are letting themselves be pulled by the nose don’t see Cyrus’s armor. All they see is Cyrus’s mantle, the mantle of Zarathustra. They think Cyrus isn’t leading them back into the same old trap, but to an altogether different place.

Among these followers are numerous outsiders whose communities have been mauled by the Mesopotamian Leviathans, people from steppes and mountains, from Parthia, Afghanistan and India. Numerous armored insiders also follow Cyrus, those who earlier expected the Chaldeans to destroy, not restore, the Assyrian monster.

One of these armored insiders, a man called Isaiah who can think of liberation only very narrowly, only in terms of his own immediate circle, thinks Cyrus is the Messiah:

I [the Lord] have roused up one from the north, and he is come...
And he shall come upon rulers as upon mortar,
And as the potter treadeth clay.

To open the blind eyes,
To bring out the prisoner from the dungeon,
And them that sit in the darkness out of the prison-house.

Thus saith the Lord to his anointed,
To Cyrus, whose right hand I have holden,
To subdue nations before him,
And to loose the loins of kings;
To open the doors before him,
And that the gates may not be shut:
I will go before thee,
And make the crooked places straight;
I will break in pieces the doors of brass,
And cut in sunder the bars of iron...

The expectations of the less armored are undoubtedly larger. The Persian wearing Zarathustra’s mantle can give rise to such expectations because there is revulsion from the Strait of Gibraltar to the China Sea, and the object of the revulsion is Leviathan.

In distant China people are saying that the armor and the mask of Leviathan are not the Way. They are learning to experience joy from the rising of the sun and the gushing of a brook from a source, not from the fall of an enemy and the gushing of blood from a wound. They are starting to shed the armor. They are saying that the human being, who was so much, is becoming very little.

In India people are saying the Leviathan and its artificial distinctions and hierarchies is not the ultimate reality, is no reality at all. They are breaking all their ties to the Leviathan and concentrating on burning out the armor that has wrapped itself around their innards. They are intent on removing every last splinter, for they too remember that human beings were much, that human beings used to fly.

From one to the other extremity of the wide continent, circles of women are dancing around fires celebrating the emergence of new human beings out of the ashes. All of Eurasia is dancing.

If we must label the dance, we can call it a generalized rejection of Civilization and all its masks and armors.

We cannot call the dance “religion.” The way of a free human being is All; there is nothing above it. Religion is a part of a Leviathan; it may have started as a way but it is no longer one; it has been mangled and turned into a part of a Leviathan’s armor.

We do not learn of the revulsion or of the expectation of human renewal from the dancers themselves because ignorant armies, Cyrus’s foremost among them, break up the circles.

We learn from the children and grandchildren who have not themselves danced, but who have heard.

In China the visions of Zarathustra’s equally shadowy contemporary Lao Tze are gathered up in books and come to be known as The Way.

In India the visions of one called Gautama are collected and come to be considered by masked and armored as techniques for removing the mask and armor.

In Greece, echoes of the hopes stay with the women who continue to dance and who remember having seen a new Dionysus emerge from ashes. Echoes stay with musicians who gather with Pythagoras of Samos in order to renew the hopes.

The main outlines of what Turner will call “the crisis cult,” Christianity, precede it by twenty-five or thirty generations. And the main outlines of the inversion of the crisis cult also precede it, and by at least as many generations. The Persian Cyrus who wears the mantle of Zarathustra and the later Indian Ashoka who wears the mantle of Buddha are both forerunners of Constantine and the Popes.

• Chapter 8

Returning eastward from Thrace, the Persians tangle with Aegean and Anatolian Greeks, people called Mushki on ancient tablets. The Persians’ own one-time Scythian companions.

It is true that the Aegean and Ionian seas are veritable hornets’ nests of petty quarrels, feuds and never ending wars among puny cities.

But on closer inspection the former Mushki are not at all as the Assyrian and Babylonian tablets describe them. They speak the Greek dialect of the Persians’ own original tongue, but in all other respects those the Assyrians called Muski are Phoenicians-not like the Phoenicians of Darius’s day, but like the ancient world-embracing Phoenicians. They write their Greek with Phoenician characters, wear Phoenician garments, tell Phoenician tales, travel in Phoenician ships, and every little city has trading posts in every part of the Mediterranean, just like the Phoenicians.

Every city, called a Polis, has shrines to gods, some of them Phoenician. But the Temple is not where the gods are. The gods are in Agora, the marketplace.

The men of the polis are all merchants of wine and olives-all, that is, except the slaves-and all swindle and lie as expertly as Phoenicians. They claim to derive their physical strength from their vigorous exercising in the sun, but the Persians quickly learn that at least part of the Greeks’ strength comes from the shiploads of wheat which arrive daily, and although the Greeks try to lie about the source of the wheat, Darius discovers that these former Mushki have no trouble locating the Scythians; like true Phoenicians, they give a few jars of olives and some jugs of wine to a few Scythian strongmen and they return to the Aegean with all the wheat they can eat.

The Assyrian-armored Persians instinctively see the weak spot of these tiny Greek Phoenicias with their floating empires: the Greek cities cannot feed large armies; they must keep their wealth afloat and even to maintain it. The Persians know they can be masters of every Anatolian polis in a single campaign.

But such a campaign is unnecessary. The Greeks also know their own weakness, and each Ionian polis outdoes all the others in emptying all its visible coffers and ships to regale Darius the Great with more gifts than his army can carry to Persepolis. Like the second Hiram of Tire, the Greeks try to buy their way out of the world-embracing Leviathan’s entrails.

The great Darius, cynically “King by the grace of Ahura Mazda,” surely recognizes something that makes these Greeks differ from all their predecessors.

The Greeks know that their gods are dead, that the Temples are empty. When they listen to a recitation of Hesiod’s description of the age when gods mingled with men, the listeners concentrate on counting the strophes in Hesiod’s lines.

Darius must wish the Persians who listen to recitations of Zarathustra’s visions would learn to concentrate on meter and verse. Darius’s own cynicism surely helps him recognize that the Greeks are becoming something we call Secular, and he surely thinks them unique in this, for he cannot know that distant Chinese are at that very moment hurling themselves into a similar secularism.

The Greeks still make, or pretend to make, sacrifices and offerings to their gods; they don’t kill and plunder for the sake of killing and plundering. But when they go to their Temples and shrines, the Greeks do not concentrate on gods, even dead gods. They concentrate on the lines, forms and colors of the roofs and columns.

How is this possible? The old Phoenicians couldn’t bear to live without their dead Baal, they couldn’t bear to see themselves as mere merchants of purple and ivory.

The Greeks can bear this no better than their mentors. They dread the thought of a new Hesiod describing a sixth generation made of no metal whatever but of wine and olive oil stored in clay vases. They speak of everything except the wine and olive oil and the slaves who harvest, squeeze and store the olive oil and the slaves who harvest, squeeze and store the juices. No, they do not think themselves merchants of wine and olives. They think themselves expert judges of lines, forms and colors, even those on the outside of the vases.

The Greeks are what we call Connoisseurs of Art. They’ve performed the feat of transferring the Temple’s activities to the Agora. They’re able to do this because few of their Temple’s activities came from their own past; many come from Phenicia and never had much meaning for the Greeks.

When they’re through ransacking the Temple, they’ve forged activities that no longer have any connection to their own or anyone else’s past. What to all others is the sole reality loses all its reality among the Greeks. The great enactments are reduced to Drama, the shrines to architecture, the visions to Painting and Sculpture. The externalization of visions becomes Art; the internal probings become Philosophy; the sharing becomes Rhetoric.

The Greeks have inverted the relation between the Temple and the Leviathan. For all their predecessors, the artificial beast, however large and strong, was a mere tool, an instrument for feeding the dead gods in the Temple. But the Greeks have taken the fragments of their disemboweled Temple and turned them into mere ornaments of their Leviathan. The only god they worship is this polis, although they worship only a polis that is properly adorned.

Their Aristotle will think that their enactments and ornaments serve to purge people of their armor, to purify them, but this man will see many things through lenses that invert for him things clearly visible to others. The Greeks’ enactments and ornaments serve to prevent people from purging and purifying themselves, for they cover up the armor, mask it, give it the appearance of Art.

Darius the Persian must know that the Greeks are far ahead of his Canaanite subjects on the Levant who actually worship the abstraction of Leviathan, but who treat this abstraction as if it were a Sumerian god and make their actual Leviathan subservient to it. These Canaanites even persecute Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, Samaritans, Phoenicians and other Canaanites who do not worship the abstraction in their Temple.

Only much later people who claim to be heirs of Moses will learn to worship the actual Leviathan, but in this they will be heirs of the Greeks and of the later English Greeks of Hobbes’s age who will try to perform the feat of worshiping Leviathan unadorned.

Darius and his strongmen learn what they can, and soon their capital Persepolis and their administrative center Susa fill with buildings which are not Temples and with monuments which are not shrines. Soon Architecture rises on the Fertile Crescent, for the first time, and Persians who had sought the light of Ahura Mazda find the artificial light of Art.

During the reigns of Zerzes and Artazerzes, the Persian Leviathan becomes increasingly adorned, and by the reign of the second Darius it is as pretty as a polis.

By the time the third and last Darius flees from Aristotle’s world-renowned pupil, the Persians will know of Zarathustra almost as little as the Greeks, and although the Greeks will render the name as Zoroaster, they will know only the name.

• Chapter 9

We will be able to look at Rome closely. It will be an extremely well-documented Leviathan because it is enamored with its own His-story. We will be able to ask if Latin tribes really did step out of the “darkness” of the Eurasian steppes into the “light” of Mediterranean Civilization because the productive forces were ripe and waiting for them, if the “Barbarians” stormed the gates of Civilization because they were eager to take on the refinements and enjoy the amenities of the Higher Stage. In the case of Rome, we will not have to speculate; the story is set down and preserved.

Only the beginnings are shadowy. The Romans say they desended from twins suckled by a wolf. They share this myth with Turks, so it may be that one group borrowed its origin myth from the other, or that a section of a once-single people changed its language but retained its origin myth. In any case, a totem animal is important in Rome’s past, and a wolf at that.

We first see the Romans camped on the outskirts of Etruria.

The Etruscans, we may remember, are Phenicia’s clients. They are the Greeks of Italy. The Etruscans are octopus-like. The Greeks call Etruscans Pirates, which means merchants whose competition the Greeks don’t want. The Etruscans have fleets of ships, like the Greeks and Phoenicians. They have cities with temples and shrines, like the Sumerians.

The Latins are to the Etruscans what the Mushki were to the Assyrians and the Scythians to the Greeks. The Latin language, in fact, is of the same family as that of the Mushki and Scytians, and it seems likely that these people were close kin in a not too distant past, and that women and Earth deitities were as important to them as they remain among other kindred people called Sarmatians.

Etruscan merchants, in order to placate and please their gods, exploit not only overseas victims, but also those in their hinterland, namely Samnians, Sabines and Latins.

The exploited tribes form a league to defend themselves from the exploiters.

The Etruscans try to pacify or exterminate the federated resisters. But like Phoenicians and Greeks, Etruscans are not overly strong on land. They are an octopus. Their strength is in the holds of their ships.

Thefederated tribes of Latins, Sabines and Samnians do not aspire to install themselves in the mercantile establishments of the Etruscans. On the contrary, they figght to eradicate Etruscan Civilization from the Italian Peninsula. They are animated by revulsion toward the “fleshpots,” not by admiration.

They war against Etruria for four generations.

The fighters’ goals and souls are maimed by the long war. Yet even then the former outsiders do not rush to become what the Etruscans were. They let the Etruscan commercial empire sink into the sea. They let the ships rot. Romans will still be shy of ships when they themselves set out to sea many generations later.

The Latins and their confederates are not lured by the “ripeness of the productive forces.” They are repelled by these forces and they federate to destroy them. But while federated for four generations something happens to them. They undergo what P. Clastres will call a “political revolution,” although the transformation is gradual. The generals become permanent, and so do the soldiers. The peasants who feed the army also become permanent, and their contributions come to be expected and finally enforced.

During four generations a community of equals is metamorphosed into a society of three classes, and the federated tribes become terribly similar to the destroyed Etruscans.

Roman narrators speak of two classes: plebs and nobles.

The plebs are under consraint. They are no longer free human beings. In some respect they haven’t changed much: they hold festivals to the goddess Ceres, Mother Earth, who nurses their seeds. This Ceres is the twin sister of Demeter and other Indo-Iranian goddesses.

The nobles have changed much. Their war god is an abstraction they call Optimus Maximus, and thiks god is surprisingly like a deified Etruscan merchant: on receiving a given quantity of offerings, he is expected to confer a given of number of advantages or military victories. The nobles have become suspiciously like Etruscans. They are not at all the men of the people their grandfathers were.

The magnitude of the challenge maimed the original community, and in this sense, despite their seeming victory, the Latins are defeated. They are maimed because most of them cannot cope with the new-fangled military machine and some of them can cope with their most basic requirements only be coercing and expropriating others.

At this point the Romans themselves look like Etruscans to some of their own confederates and to other outsiders, but not to themselves. The Romans do not realize that Samnites and Celts are turning against the very things Romans turned against earlier. Perhaps plebian soldiers do realize this, but they are dpendent on the grains the noblemen expropriate from peasnats, and the Roman military nobility is renowned for an unusual lack of imagination. The Romans turn their forces against the egalitarian Celts as if the Celts were Etruscans, and then they lead their armies against their former allies, destroying every Samnian village.

The Roman nobles, like the earlier Spartans, have become armors frozen to their spears, but unlike the Spartans, the Romans are going to try to spread their armors over the world’s entire surface. They begin by annexing and repressing their former Sabine allies.

Roman plebs seced and refuse to give further support to the arrogant nobles. The haughty nobles face this challenge by resroting to a Periclean device: they raise the plebian soldiers to the status of lesser nobles with plebs of their own. Now the interests of the former plebs coincide with those of the highest nobles. This is a device we will call cooptation or recuperation.

The Romans then set out to swallow every other tribe, federation and city on the Italian Peninsula. The Romans are more singlemindedly militaristic than the Assyrians ever were. Rome not only has a powerful army; Rome is a powerful army, and it is nothing else.

• Chapter 10

The Persian King covered himself with the mantle of Light, of Ahura Mazda. The Christian Church will cover itself with the mantle of reborn Osiris. Both have to lie continually to deny that they’ve put the mantles over machinery and to keep the mantles from slipping off.

The fire that spews out of Leviathan’s jaws is a stolen fire. It is stolen from those who come to burn the monster. Neither lives nor fire are freely given to the monster; both fall into it as a trap, and once inside they try to find a way out, to burn their way out.

The reign of Octavian Augustus the first Emperor of Rome is not a time of first things but of last things, it is not dawn but dusk. It is the time when the fourth beast, the beast with great iron teeth and ten horns, has already devoured the whole earth, has already tread it down, has already broken it in pieces.

O ye hypocrites, ye discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?

We will be trained. We will see the colossal architectural monuments rising up in the metropolis and will think they are beautiful, they are the signs of the times. We will hear the demented outcries of the idol-worshipers abandoning themselves to uncontrolled orgies and will think they are an abomination.

But there’s sorcery in the air, for suddenly the orgies grow beautiful and the architectural monuments turn into abominations.

Anatolians once abandoned themselves to Cybele, Earth, mother of all Life. Greeks of Anatolia and Acheae once took part in orgies around Earth’s daughter Demeter, the Grain that sprouts yearly from Cybele’s womb, and around Persephone, Earth’s granddaughter who caught and cradled the seeds in the nether world. The dance with Cybele and her brood was all that was real to them, all that had meaning. When the Greeks hurled themselves into war and commerce they tried to forget Cybele, but they still remembered her son the spear thrower and her daughter the huntress with the arrows, and they built shrines to Cybele’s grandchildren, and they ornamented the shrines.

Roman legions carried off Greek builders and ornamentors, and now shrines rise up in Rome — but look closely: the ornamented shrines rising in Rome are not shrines to Cybele or to any of her grandchildren. Cybele’s daughter Ceres-Demeter is remembered in Rome only by slaves, and not well remembered even by them. The copies rising up in Rome, copies on a colossal, intimidating scale, are absolutely empty. They are not shrines. They are nothing but monuments to the victories of Rome’s legions, colossal monuments to colossal massacres. Rome’s architecture is a celebration of human sacrifice. It is an abomination.

Roman celebrants of Death are raising their abominations in every provincial capital from the Nile to the Ebro. But the plazas in front of the rising monuments are becoming desolate. Only dead souls stay in the vicinity of the abominations and only bribes and circuses keep even the dead souls from abandoning the plazas. Living people are withdrawing. They sense in their guts that “This generation shall not pass.”

On the Nile, people rush into their Temples to protect their gods from Roman architecture. It is a wonder there are still people in Egypt with such strength in them. They were bent by the weight of Persian tribute, emaciated by the burden of Greek Ptolemy’s plunder, utterly destroyed when Roman generals grabbed all that was left and sent it to Rome. They have abandoned fields that were fertilized by the Nile since before the first Pharaoh, and rather than forcing the Nile to feed Rome, they are letting the fields revert to sand. Once the world’s envy for their wealth of grain, they are beggars now; they barely eat.

Yet here they come, carrying dead Isis and her twin Osiris and the twin’s double Serapis out of the Temples. It is the first time those stifled gods have been out in fresh air since the first wall was built around them.

And then the emaciated beggars perform a feat that seems superhuman for people in their condition. They begin to dance around the dead gods, they go on dancing, and the dance itself seems to give them strength, for they stop feeling the exhaustion and the misery, they feel weightless and free. And the eyes of the calf-like Isis seem to come alive, and her nostrils seem to breathe — surely this is a delusion; the goddess has been dead for a hundred and twenty generations.

Delusion or not, others who are less emaciated also see the gleam and feel the breath. Roman soldiers weighed down by their armors rush into the Temples that have not yet been turned into architecture, and they too rush out carrying Isis, Osiris and Serapis into the fresh air.

The soldiers carry the Egyptian deities to every region where Roman legions march, to every region from which soldiers are recruited; North Africa, Gaul, Italy itself, Greece, Anatolia, the Levant.

And everywhere people recognize in Isis their own abandoned past, their golden age. And they too withdraw from the architectural monuments, they too abandon the plazas, they too join the circles of dancers and feel strength returning to their limbs and meaning to their minds. They discover beauty far from the architectural wonders which are places of desolation.

Can ye discern the signs of the times?

Isis is neither an idol nor a cult, and she is not a stranger to any of the people who welcome her. Wherever she is carried, the people recognize her as Earth, abandoned and betrayed Earth, the mother and the daughter, the soil and the grain. The recognition brings people alive, and their life brings her alive.

It Italy Isis is recognized as Earth’s daughter Ceres — we will still call her Cereal, but we will be trained to think farmers or agricultural zeks make the grain; some of us will think machines make it.

In Greece and Anatolia, Isis is recognized as Cybele’s daughter Demeter, and her twin brother Osiris or Serapis is obviously and alter-ego of Demeter’s daughter Persephone, the one who went underground, the one Demeter tries to bring back up.

And of course Isis is familiar to everyone on the Levant, even in Judaea. She’s the one the fleeing Israelites danced around as soon as they reached the desert — until Moses chained them to his Law.

The reborn Osiris is also familiar on the Levant: he’s the Babylonian Tammuz, the Anatolian Attis, the Greek Adonis. He rises every spring and descends every fall. He’s all vegetation.

Just as new vegetation rises every spring, the dancers will rise renewed after the long night. They know this because they feel it in their limbs as they dance. A vanished strength is in their emaciated limbs. It is a strength which will vanquish all of Rome’s legions.

Soldiers themselves are removing their armor. Those who don’t find Osiris in Egypt find Mithras on the borders of Parthia, and they carry Mithra to every part of the realm. This Mithra was a minor light at the time of Zarathustra, but ever since Darius seized and extinguished the light of Ahura Mazda, people have been seeking the one who still carries the light. The Roman soldiers call him Mithras, the reborn, the carrier of Ahura Mazda’s light. They take him as far as the British Isles. In many places Mithra merges with Osiris. Those who celebrate with Mithra acquire the fire with which to bring the new dawn.

Soldiers overthow their commanders; at times they desert in mass. Peasants leave their lands untilled in order to keep food from Roman tax gatherers. Urban people move to the country so as to avoid all participation in official activities. The well-known Jewish dropouts called Essenes stay away from Roman as well as Judean burdens and obligations.

The forms vary. The withdrawal is vast and it keeps on growing. We would call it a generalized resistance with revolutionary overtones.

Unlike the first Persians, these resistors are not storming the Leviathan from outside. They are insiders; many but not all are zeks. Unlike the Israelites in Egypt, these resistors are not heading to a place outside, for they think there is no outside; the fourth beast has devoured the whole earth. Unlike Moses, these resistors are removing their armor before the great event, so as not to find themselves in the desert with nothing inside them but another Leviathan. Rome reveals all of Leviathan’s qualities, and none are preparing to walk into a fifth beast’s jaws. This is communicate in many ways; one way is: “The kingdom of heaven is at hand.” Whatever else “the kingdom of heaven” may mean, it does not mean Babylon, Persia, Rome, nor any other Leviathan. And it does not mean Death — not yet. An ode quoted by Turner says,

And I became like the land which blossoms and rejoices in its fruits.

People are joyous, not because their end is at hand, but because its end is at hand. They’re joyous because the new day will bring something as different from Leviathan as day is from night. “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” for the living, and as a living paradise, an Eden, a golden age, a community of free human beings in harmony with Isis and Osiris and all of Cybele’s children: plants as well as wolves, birds and fish as well as insects. Such a “kingdom” is a new dawn; it is the end of His-story, the end of Leviathanic time.

Furthermore, people are not waiting for the dawn. They are dancing already. They are recovering the lost community before the last day. They’ve stopped recognizing distinctions between masters and slaves; “neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things in common” as the later Book will say. They’ve started sharing while in the Leviathan’s entrails. Sharing is the heart of the lost community. It is antithetical to Leviathan’s very existence, as Shang Yang knew so well. By having all things in common, the resistors are melting the beast from within its entrails.

• Chapter 11

The Roman Empire continues to decompose rapidly-but not rapidly enough for the resisters. Every year brings new surprises; every season more springs pop, more wheels get jammed. But the artificial worm lingers on, and it keeps on lingering far too long for any resistance movement to remain what it was.

It must be remembered that machines have the perverse ability to do the same thing the same way for as long as they operate. The ability is built into machines. But people do not have this ability. They change, they die, they are replaced by others who perceive and behave differently.

The early resisters have some clear and powerful conceptions; the generations that follow them eventually invert every one of these conceptions and turn the initial commitment on its head.

In retrospect we can see that the paths of betrayal are already paved before anyone has recourse to them, but this tells why the betrayal follows these paths, not why the betrayal takes place.

I think the explanation is to be sought in the Leviathan first, and only secondly in the baggage inherited by the initial resisters.

The Leviathan places human beings in a situation they do not meet anywhere else in the Biosphere except in rare places like Sumer. In Sumer, the weather dried the fields up or else washed them away, not once or twice in a lifetime, but over and over again. Nowhere else, not in lands that border on ice nor in lands that border on sand, does Nature force human beings to become mirror images of their disasters. The Leviathan places every person it can reach in such a situation. Its tribute collectors, recruiters, procurers, rapists and cheaters beat on people with the regularity of a clock, forcing them into constant defensive responses which gradually also take on the regularity of a clock.

The rebels who take part in the feasts of Agape, in the festivals of rebirth and rejuvenation, suddenly or gradually withdraw from tasks expected of them by the guardians of Roman order.

The State responds to this withdrawal by maligning, persecuting and incarcerating resisters, even forcing some of them into arenas with unfed lions for the amusement of the circus crowds.

The resisters try to protect themselves by forging links outside the Agape feasts, even by seeking protectors among the guards. This is understandable in view of the persecution, but we can already see, with hindsight, that such links, which do not grow out of love and are not based on sharing, will in time form a noose which will strangle the initial commitment. The resisters are forming links which will bind them into what militants of our day will call The Organization.

Initially the rebellious visionaries were at one with every life-affirming strain, and they apparently borrowed freely from all of them. But as soon as they define themselves as Christains, they have to make it clear, to their patrons and to themselves, just how they differ from the followers of Moses, from enthusiasts of Mithra, from celebrants of Isis, Osiris and Serapis. And as soon as they make this clear, they have ton convince themselves that their own group has the most valid or the truest conception; if another group had it they would not have very good reasons for remaining Christians.

Once they turn away from other resisters, it does not take the Christians long to turn against them. The Christians are no longer at one with every life-affirming group. First they turn against the way others affirm life, gradually they turn against life.

At this point they find ready-made formulas — the paths paved for them by forerunners. “There shall be no other gods before me.” This puts an end to Isis, Osiris and Serapis. The Christians add insult to injury by calling former friends Idolaters. This is shouted in extremely bad faith. The Christians know perfectly well that Isis and her brother are powerful symbols of primordial events, symbols which the Christians have attached to their own Jesse, whom they now call Jesus. They are shouting Idolatry without looking into their own baggage, without seeing that the abstraction they’ve inherited from the old Book, the King of Kings, the abstraction of Lugalzaggizi, symbolizes nothing primordial or even natural. They are shouting Idolatry without remembering that they are the ones lugging around an Idol to every part of the world.

The Organization seems to have its own logic. Some members are better than others at explaining away the ido in their closet, and these quickly become the Sheperds; the title of those who do not explain things so well is obvious. Soon there’s talk of shepherds who mislead their flocks, of false prophets. But who can tell which prophet is false? Only the most conscious of the Shepherds; these are now called Presbyters and Deacons. But even Deacons err, and their errors can only be spotted by a Deacon of Deacons, a Bishop.

Each group of participants in an Agape feast becomes a Church. The past engagements of many of these Christians predispose them to accept some kind of hierarchic arrangement. They had though of Osiris as a Leader with Apostles. Many of them had thought of themselves as followers of the leader Moses.

Even so, to many of them the Churches are starting to look like provinces of the Roman Empire; all that missing is the Emperor. And an armored Roman who manages to rise to the post of Bishop now announces that the groupings are real churches only if their bishops are “appointed by Peter and Paul;: he means by a self-appointed spokesman for Peter and Paul, like himself.

• Chapter 12

The ancient Greek city called Byzantium inherits all the refinements of Roman Civilization and also all the rot. It becomes the head of half the former worm. It retains the machinery of the entire worm while the body continues to decompose and shrink.

The former boundaries of the Roman Empire are the only Kingdom of Heaven to which the Emperors in Byzantium are committed. The abomination abhorred by the early Christians is Paradise to the Byzantine Christians.

All that Christianity contributes to this eastern half of Rome is “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the fanatical attempt to impose what later imperialists will call Gleichschaltung. Such a Gleichschaltung will be realized by much later Leviathans which learn to reduce people to appendages of technology.

The Byzantine Empire fails to realize either its Roman or its Christian goals because it is nothing but a languishing sequel to the rapidly decomposing Roman Leviathan.

The war against all gods other than the three-headed Optimus Maximus is carried out with the fanaticism and thoroughness of the Israelites, from whome this bizarre undertaking is inherited.

The Temple-State is inaugurated already during Constantine’s reign, and Pagan centers are plundered to decorate the State Church. Bishops and priests are exempted from taxes, and since the fortunes of the rich are bequeathed to the Church, its officials become as wealthy as owners of Latifundia.

The taxes themselves are paid by serfs, cultivators who are fixed to plantations and forced to part with a third of their crops.

In the North African province, peasants armed with clubs rise up to restore their lost equality, and the Byzantine rulers declare a holy war against the priests who side with the peasants, stigmatizing the rising as a Donatist heresy.

The war against paganism and heresy halts briefly when an old-timer ruler named Julian tries to restore the pagan gods for the same reason Constantine chose the Christian god: to enhance the killing power of the legions. But Julian destroys all faith in the killing power of the pagan gods when he leads a legion to devestate Persia, orders his ships burned behind him, and perishes with most of his legion before reaching the Persian capital.

It is idle to speculate if Julian’s victory would have restored the respectability of the pagan gods; we know that his defeat seals their fate. His immediate successors ban all non-Christian practices, close the temples, expropriate them, and institute an inquisition. Celebrants of Isis, Osiris and Serapis become criminals who are hunted by the theological police; Manicheans are deprived of all rights and become objects of plunder and persecution.

• Chapter 13

When Byzantine Emperor Justinian dispatched to Persia the army that had devastated Italy, he set more waves in motion than he probably intended to.

The besieged Persian ruler Nushiravan, “The Immortal,” was the strongman most responsible for suppressing and massacring the peasants and Manicheans who had risen against Persia’s nobility. Unablte to count on the loyalty of the recently repressed Persian peasants, the Immortal sent recruiters to Arabia and confronted the Byzantines with an army of camel nomads.

The nomads fought well, and both Leviathans sent recruiters to Arabia. Then both tried to establish permanent garrisons on the peninsula.

Byzantines allied with Christian Abyssinians occupied Yemen and destroyed a Jewish kingdom in which Christians had been persecuted. The year Muhammad was born, the Persian army occupied Yemen and ousted the Christians.

Muhammad and his companions are not ignorant of the powers and ways of Leviathans.

By Muhammad’s generation there are probably very few people in Eurasia and much of Africa who are unfamiliar with Leviathans. Even the large islands beyond land’s eastern end have been shackled by an Emperor, and a successor to the first Japanese Emperor has already learned or rinvented the stratagem of wearing his robe “by the grace of Buddha.”

The Arabs have been closer than the Japanese to the main centers of Leviathanic activity. They have, in fact, been closer than most peoples, and for a very long time.

The Akkadians who became the heirs of the first Leviathan were very close kin of Arabs, as were the Canaanites and the Arameans; some of the Arabs’ Abyssinian cousins across a narrow waterway were Pharaohs of another Leviathan.

Much of the trade between India and the Mediterranean has been passing through Arabia for generations. Arab camel caravans have served as the carriers of much of this trade. And Arabs have become mercenaries and victims of the two warring Leviathans on their borders. So they know just about all there is to know about Leviathans, and they’ve been careful not to shackle themselves with one of their own.

• Chapter 14

To get something of an overview of what Turner calls “The Western Spirit,” I have to go back to the days when strongman Constantine transfers the Roman capital to Byzantium.

The transfer does not go over well in Rome. The Roman Empire may have been an abomination in the eyes of Christ, but Rome is determined to remain the abomination’s capital, even if it has to lie.

Prevarication becomes the West’s major art. From the day when a Church official names himself the Vicar of Christ and a Goth parades his puppet as Emperor of Rome to the day when the biggest empire of zeks in Leviathan’s entire His-story will speak of itself as The Free World, everything in the West is a lie.

Lying becomes necessary and then compulsive because the people who fall heir to the rubble of the westernmost edge of the Roman Empire are so dehumanized by their struggle against their adversary that they forget not only their initial intentions but also their very origins and identity. All that remains of their former selves is the violence of their struggle to preserve themselves, and sheer violence cannot view itself in a glass; it must prevaricate; it must cover itself with masks and then with more masks over the initial masks, because the violence keeps showing through.

Turner’s subtitle is far too polite. The Western Spirit is no only against Wilderness; it is against nature as well as humanity, against truth as well as beauty. The Western Spirit is adept at putting exceptions in showcases; in real life it represses the exceptions.

The story of the Western Spirit actually begins long before Constantine transfers the capital to Greece-at least twenty or twenty-five generations before. It begins when the Roman Res Publica, flushed with its victory over Etruscans, defeats and then subjugates Gauls or Celts, enslaves them, turns them into zeks, and then walls them in. In the long peninsula known as Gaul and later as France and Spain, the republican Romans force Celts, Iberians and the Iberian Phoenicians into gold and silver mines, plunder their crops, cheat them, and slaughter all who protest.

People to the north of Gaul, free people who had gone where pleased when they pleased, pause before they enter Roman Gaul, for they enter at the risk of their lives. When they return to Gaul in a different season, then find that a yet larger portion of the world’s land has turned lethal to freedom and life. It is as if the known world were sinking into the sea.

The loss is tragic. We well be able to imagine how those northerners felt about the warmth and beauty of the Mediterranean’s shores because we will know how later northerners will feel.

Some few people may be inhospitable and warlike, but no people can make a portion of the world off limits to a single bird, animal or person. The very notion is repugnant to free people. Not even gods have the power to keep people from going where they please.

The northerners enrage the Roman border guards in skirmishes, but the northerners invariably lose; they are massacred. Those Roman fight like unreal things; they walk directly into ambushes; they don’t flee even when half their own men fall; they just keep on advancing and killing; there fear on the faces of individual men but the column has no fear; it isn’t human.

We will know absolutely nothing about this part of the story because the people who live it take their knowledge to their graves. But it does not take much imagination to suppose that before long most northerners know that the world’s south is off limits to them, that half the world is occupied by something murderous and inhuman.

We will know from Roman writers that the skirmishes become more frequent, that several federated bands gang up against Roman strongholds. When Franks are first mentioned by name, they arrive with Turkic-speaking Alans who originate near China. The two groups may not know each other’s language, but they understand each other perfectly. They understand that the entire lower half of the world is occupied by something violent beyond description; they understand that if that thing continues to spread, it means the end of freedom and the end of life.

We’ve seen how Rome responds to the attacks: by genocidal massacres, by slaughtering every member of a hostile band.

A twenty year war is terribly long. A war that lasts twenty generations is beyond the imagination’s grasp. The weather in Sumer is benevolent compared to such an ordeal.

By the time the northern Franks, Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Burgundians and others at last succeed in breaching Rome’s frontiers, they fight like unreal things; they walk directly into ambushes and won’t flee when their men fall; they keep on advancing and killing. They still remember themselves as free human beings — Frank means free — but all they remember of their freedom is the freedom to kill Romans and the desire to destroy Rome.

By the time the Emperors scribe writes that Franks have been permitted to settle in one part of Gaul, Burgundians in a second and Visigoths in a third, the scribe is in the Emperor’s palace in Byzantium, the Emperor’s own army consists of Goths, Huns, Alans and Arabs, and the permission is a lie which the scribe may well believe, because he cannot believe that the westernmost part of the Roman Empire has completely decomposed. Later writers will not believe this either, and they will cover it up by listing the various rulers of the “Western Empire’ — but they will list a different ruler for every year, and several rulers for some years.

The Franks, Burgundians and Visigoths no longer need anyone’s permission: they now confront only each other. But they can’t believe this either. Something they fought so fiercely for so long cannot suddenly be gone. A Frankish strongman calls his puppet emperor of Rome, and the Goths go on warring against Rome until they set up their puppet as Emperor. Every lie is a pretext for renewed violence, and Rome’s main activity, human sacrifice, becomes the main activity of those who have ruined Rome.

The lies become bizarre when a Church official in the city that is no longer the Empire’s capital steps into the picture. This official undoubtedly seethes with frustration. He spent more than half his life climbing to his post, and now finds himself surrounded by Franks and Goths in the capital of a province which, god forbid! is no longer in the Roman Empire!

This Christian declares himself Potifex Maximus, a title venerable in Pagan Rome and attached to every Pagan emperor since Augustus, but a title hardly appropriate for a Christian. The official then proclaims that he’s a descendant of the apostle Peter, and even that he’s Peter in person. Arbogast, the Frankish strongman, is still listening, so the official raises himself yet higher. As Pontifex and Peter in Person, he is more than a mere apostle; he is the Vicar of Christ. And as Christ’s Vicar he is higher than the Emperor; he’s supreme; he’s Optimus Maximus.

The official can say anything at all, because Arbogast the Frank knows the simple man is a crude liar and Arbogast doesn’t care what the man calls himself. What interests the Frank is the information none will stop Arbogast and his Free Men from raping the remaining Vestal Virgins and plundering what’s left in the palaces of Augurs, pagan Pontiffs and Sybinllines. The Franks can continue their war on “Rome” with impunity: Church officials and Byzantine soldiers will consider Franks who commit such deeds holy and pious.

With the sanction of the self-styled Vicar of Christ, Arbogast and his band of Free killers proceed to rape, pillage, murder and expropriate people who consider the Pontifex Maximus a laughingstock. Our name for such an outrage will be “Pogrom.” The scribes of the Pontifex name it “The conversion of Rome’s inhabitants to Christianity.”

Dripping with blood and burdened with loot, Arbogast’s Franks go on to claim their prize. They enter Gaul, they march into the Paradise that was off limits to twenty generations of their ancestors. But they don’t enter to enjoy the warmth or the beauty of the Mediterranean lands. They enter to rape, pillage and expropriate. This is all they know how to do; it has been all they’ve known for generations.

In Gaul the victims are already Christians, but the agent of Pontifex who accompanies the Franks doesn’t blink an eye. The victims were converted by Arius, and Arius was a heretic, therefore they deserve to be cast down to hell alongside the Pagans. And none can impugn the Christianity of the Franks, for they are the scourge of god against all enemies of Saint Siricius, the Vicar of Christ.

Arbogast and his gang do not have the whole field to themselves. Franks are not the only people walled out of the south. Everyone in the north was walled out. And now others rush through the breach, all as marked as the Franks by the eternity of war.

Visigoths are joined by mounted and ferocious pastoral nomads from every part of the Eurasian steppes, people whose names are preserved as Alans, Sueves, Vandals, Burgundians and many others. The strongman Alaric puts himself at the head of these varied bands, calls himself the King of the Goths, and leads the hardened veterans through most of Italy’s cities.

All the generations of frustration, of pent-up hatred, at last find release in an orgy of violence which probably has no precedent. The marauders pillage and murder at will. Their animals turn Italy’s latifundia into pastures. Italians who are still in cities die of famine; those who eat die of plague.

Alaric’s hordes proceed to the famous Sack of Rome. They are joined by forty thousand slaves. Earlier slaves rose up to recover their lost equality, to reestablish human community. But that was many generations earlier. The slaves who join the Visigoth marauders want only revenge, they want blood, they understand the newcomers perfectly.

When the Visigoths are satiated and turn toward Gaul, Huns arrive, with allies picked up along the entire route between Mongolia and the Danube.

Roman Civilization becomes what it will remain forever after: colossal ruins. This is the holocaust the early Christians looked forward to. This is the last judgment, the day of reckoning, the end of the Fourth Kingdom.

Not since the demise of the Hittites has a large Leviathan decomposed so totally.

As the nomads from the forests and steppes turn more agricultural lands into pastures, the cities are abandoned, they become places of desolation where ornaments that once decorated Greek temples hide rotting corpses.

Roman architectural marvels become rain shelters, and soon their ornaments and inscriptions are incorporated in the walls of village lodges built by former slaves and outsiders. Large parts of Italy are completely depopulated .

The Emperor in Byzantium pays Attila the Hun a large tribute to dissuade the newcomers from devastating the last tiny seats of imperial power left in the west, Ravenna and Venice.

A scribe writes, for the record, that the puppet Roman Emperor of the Suevian strongman Ricimer exempts his subjects of all their debts to the State, rescinds all taxes, puts an end to tribute payments, and grants self-government to the inhabitants of cities. The scribe remembers better days; he cannot write that the Roman Empire has become a free-for-all, a wilderness.

Hobbes, too, will lie. He will say that the Leviathan has reverted to a state of nature. Rousseau will be the first to call Hobbes a liar. Such a “wilderness” exists nowhere in nature, and not a single element in it is natural. This wilderness is as artificial as Leviathan itself. The activities taking place now, pillage and murder, are the same activities that took place when the Leviathan was hale and hardy. The only difference is that they are done in a disorderly manner now; they were done in an orderly manner before.

People dehumanized by the Leviathan are playing with the artificial beast’s decomposing segments, they are playing with the artifices we call technologies. This is some form of play; it is some kind of dance. But it is not a dance found anywhere in nature, either among animals or among human beings. It is the death rattle of a decomposing Leviathan.

• Chapter 15

The Church’s project of rehabilitating the Roman Leviathan on its west-Eurasian home-grounds succeeds — but only for an instant, a fleeting instant which gives rise to lasting illusions.

Charlemagne’s neo-Roman Empire in Frankish garb is neither a rehabilitated Fourth nor a new Fifth Beast. It is no more than the last death-rattle of the moribund Roman worm, a sudden burst of flame among the cinders of a burnt-out fire.

The stench emanating from the unburied decomposing carcass will continue to attack western nostrils, but the artifice will never again be set in motion.

Muslims, Byzantines, Turnks and Mongols seeking a Leviathanic name for the West will continue to refer to Europeans as “Franks” because there was a Frankish Leviathan once upon a time, not because there continues to be one.

Western Eurasia will be treated like a single entity with a continuous story because trained falsifiers will have a monopoly on the West’s record keeping.

The Roman Catholic chroniclers of the heavenly and earthly Leviathan are schooled to see unity and continuity where there is none, to see what they’re looking for, not what they’re looking at. They tell of the Earthly City even when cities disappear from the West, when there is no Leviathanic unity nor continuity but only dismemberment and decomposition.

The centuries of militancy, preparation and propaganda yield the Church no Earthly City. THe Church’s chosen champion, the Frankish Roman Empire, is like ancient Pyrrhus, the king of Epirus, who went from victory to victory until he was totally ruined. The Church’s scribes will nevertheless depict ever-greater triumphs of their cause. They are trained not to recognize defeat. Self-defined as Catholic, namely all-embracing, the Western Church seeks total a dominion so vast, that every collapse of its real empire seems minor and ephemeral, even the collapse of its last empire.

Like militants of later days, Catholic militants seek ends so broad that virtually any means seem instrumental. Their daily practice degenerates into an unprincipled power-serving opportunism that is ever-ready to smear the previous day’s goals and perpetrate atrocities against the previous day’s allies. In the eyes of such opportunists Emperor Charlemagne was great and Holy Roman Emperor Otto is greater.

But if Charlemagne was barely more than the chieftan of a gang of marauders, Otto is neither Holy nor Roman nor an Emperor.

The Church cannot accept the fall of the Roman Empire because it sees the Empire as the World and itself as the Empire’s soul. The entire apparatus of the Church continues to act as a vast bureaucracy administering a world-embracing Leviathan during all the centuries when no Leviathan stirs in the West.

Charlemagne’s ephemeral Frankish Empire serves the Church as confirmation that the Beast does move, but a close look reveals that this Beast is not only ephemeral but also illusory. It is not a functioning machine. It is a composite made up of pieces that come from different machines, and the pieces don’t mesh together, they are like prows of ships combined with clock springs. Clocks will serve a purpose on ships, but a mound of prows and clock springs will not yield either a ship or a clock.

Another suggestive metaphor would be a nervous system existing apart from a body. The Church trains and deploys a vast bureaucracy fully capable of serving as administration and police of the Roman Emperor and his provincial governors and tax farmers in the time of Octavian Augustus. But in the time of Frankish marauders, this colossal bureacucracy dangles in a void, and no amount of anointing water can glue such a bureaucracy to such an army and make it a functioning Leviathan.

The Franks are still Free Men who prove their worth by their prowess, and the only loyalty they honor is loyalty to the brothers and comrades who help them get booty. Loyalty to an Emperor, devotion to the orderly functioning of the Imperial machine, are as alien to them as fealty is to the Roman Popes.

The Franks were glad enough to treat the very land as war booty, but this has not turned them into officials of a territorial State. On the contrary, the Franks have turned lands into attributes of persons. Thus Lotharingia, for example, is neither a colony nor a province, such as Gaul was in Roman days. Lotharingia is the sum of Lothar’s holdings in any given year, and it can change from one year to the next, like Lothar’s clothes.

This is true not only of Lothar but also of his sworn companions-in-arms, his vassals. Each vassal is rewarded with booty in the form of lands over which he is Lord, and he in turn rewards lesser vassals with large parcels of his lands.

The parcels, called Manors, are not fiscal and administrative units of a territorial State. The officials deployed to all these “parishes” by the Church officiate in a vacuum. The Lord of the manor serves as liege-lord, be he near or distant, and if his liege-lord is at war with his neighbor’s, he will war against his neighbor. And such wars are not rare. That’s why the walls of the Lord’s lodging are three feet thick, why there is a moat before the entrance, why the Lord and his retainers move about in heavy armor lugging tree-length spears. In such a context, trained administrators of territorial units are exotics from a different world.

The Frankish Lords are still familiar only with the personal relations of their vanquished community, whereas the Churchmen are trained to think the hierarchic relations of the Roman Empire are the only possible community.

The Lord and the Priest are not only exotic to each other. They are also incompatible. The world of each excludes the other. The Lord is probably grateful to the Priest for pacifying the cultivators of the land with stories of the evils of this world and the glories of the next. The Lord is grateful because he is fed, not by the land, but by its cultivators.

The peasants feed the Lord and all his companions, their families and thier horses. The peasants build the moat as well as the thick walls. They grind the Lord’s wheat and carry his water. On occasion they are even recruited to fight his wars.

The peasants, whether their ancestors were Franks, Latins, Celts, Levantines or Africans, are no longer free. Some resisted, some tried to flee, but all the liege-lord’s vassals ganged up against them. They are part of the manor. They come with the parcel a vassal receives as booty. They have been reduced to serfs.

It is among the serfs that the priests do their officiating. To the Priests, the Serfs are equal to the Lords in the eyes of God, they are all citizens of the Empire, as they were to Roman Emperor Caracalla, and therefore all are equally bound to pay a head tax, a tithe or tenth of all their produce.

This tithe is sent to Rome and from Rome it filters down the hierarchy in a properly Leviathanic manner, supporting the administrative apparatus of the inexistent Empire.

But the tithe is so much food that doesn’t reach the Lord’s table. The Lord hates to see the tithe leave this manor, and he will soon try to control not only the tithe but also the Priest on his manor. He wants the peasant’s surplus product on his table, not on the parasitical Pope’s.

Such an attitude could not be at greater variance with the Priest’s, whose Roman training predisposes him to want to gather all surplus produce and send it to the center, from where it would filter down in a properly Leviathanic manner.

In practice, Lord and Priest accommodate to each other, but during all the generations that they coexist, each of them draws a line he will not cross. They remain antithetical. Each remains a component of a different entity.