[…] Doncières, is precisely the same as Saint-Cyr, Dominus Cyriacus. There are plenty of names of towns where sanctus and sancta have been replaced by dominus and domina.
Proust, M., In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 4: Sodom and Gomorrah. London, Vintage, 2000, p. 579
Any discussion on the sacred suffers from its failure to be seen as an integral part of historical reality, or from the absence of any general definition. In the first scenario, without saying so directly or even being aware of it, theologians favour a particular type of historical situation and unjustifiably generalize their ideas in a theory which is only part of the whole picture. The most frequent case is one which consists of seeing the sacred only in the form it took in the context of the major monotheistic religions, and more particularly, in Christianity.1 However, such established forms of religion are only one form amongst many others of the ways the sacred manifests itself and is responded to. More precisely, Mauss says:
It is not the idea of god, the idea of a sacred person that one finds over again in any religion; it is the idea of the sacred in general. In the most obscure totemism, in the most primitive ancestor worship, or the most infantile nature worship, we find beings, things, ill-defined, dead phantasms, animal species or natural phenomena which are the objects of a clearly religious effect, separate from the profane world. The notion of god, worship centred on a personality, is only one case, a specific example, a further differentiation of the sentiment of respect originally bestowed on those impersonal and formless powers. In the last analysis, the notion of god is resolved in the notion of the sacred.2
In the second scenario, historians, anthropologists or sociologists study phenomena associated with well-determined places and times using a diversified vocabulary, without realizing that the phenomena they are studying – mythology, magic, superstition, witchcraft, religion, theology, the church, etc. – are merely variations of a general phenomenon which could be subsumed under the category of the ‘sacred’.3
One point on which everyone, since Durkheim, agrees, is the fact that the ‘sacred’ is defined in opposition to the ‘profane’.4 The domain of the sacred (which is made up as much by divinities, spirits, heroes and superhuman ancestors as by human beings, objects or places) is clearly separated from the domain of the profane and, regardless of what form the sacred or the society takes, care is taken to distance the profane from the sacred. To be profane (pro-fanum) means being outside the consecrated place (the temple for example): ‘The sacred thing is, par excellence, that which the profane must not and cannot touch with impunity […] Sacred things are those protected and isolated by prohibitions; profane things are those to which such prohibitions apply and which must keep their distance from what is sacred.’5 The ban on touching sacred things in stateless societies has its structural equivalents in State-governed societies which maintain a distance between sacred objects and beings and profane objects or beings: distances imposed by protocol, distances between judges and the accused, between the stage and the audience in the theatre, the separation of pictorial works or sculptures in spaces which are specifically assigned to display them (museums and galleries) and the ban on touching them, the distance between the lecturer and the students in a lecture theatre, and so on. The separation associated with the sacred finds its material equivalent in the creation of specific places: the ‘institution of temples and sanctuaries’ as ‘spaces […] assigned to sacred things and beings, and [which] serve as their residence’6 is, from this perspective, equivalent to the introduction of museums in European societies at the end of the eighteenth century.
It is clearly in inter-human relationships and not in the relationship of human beings with nature7 that the sacred/profane relationship finds its origin. ‘Respect’ towards the sacred, no innocent term, must include respect towards the people, institutions and social practices which are linked to the sacred. Yet the Durkheimian hypothesis, which consists in seeing the origin of God in the whole of society, is a bit too amorphous to be pertinent. For it is not ‘society’ as a whole which is projected onto the figure of a god, but rather that which matters for society or for the different clans which make up the tribe. Durkheim wanted to avoid linking the question of power (or of domination) with that of the sacred, but cannot deny the evidence of a certain number of facts which all contribute to supporting the hypothesis of an extremely strong solidarity between dominators and the dominated. This is evident in the fact that all the vocabulary associated with the sacred reflects the consideration shown to the powerful and that the profane does not merit anything like the same degree of respect;8 the fact that sacred objects must be handled with care while profane objects do not require any particular care; the fact that, in stateless societies, the sacred is more clearly linked to ancestors, chiefs, elders and men than to the living, those without rank, young people and women; the fact that the gods of State-governed societies are presented as being supremely powerful (the all-powerful, omnipotent, omniscient, etc.); the fact that any modifications to the organization of the divine order always closely follow transformations in the organization of power, etc. All of this is far from being simply anecdotal and is evidence of the structural link which binds together the sacred and the dominant on the one hand and the profane and the dominated on the other.
What often clouds the issues in terms of this structural solidarity is the fact that researchers focus on the sacred in general, without necessarily distinguishing between the form it takes in segmental societies which are far more egalitarian than our own, and the form it adopts in the different types of state-governed societies, from the most authoritarian to the most democratic, from the most federal to the most centralized, etc.
Thus, in a stateless segmental society, the various totems and the different cults associated with them correspond to the different clans which make up the tribe. And we sense already that the totemic religion, as a system formed by the coming together of the different cults associated with each of the clans, prefigures the ‘Greek polytheism […] formed by the union of all the cults addressed to different divinities’.9 But since power was limited and controlled, only the ancestors, spirits, heroes or divinities were clearly associated with the sacred, and the human beings who personified the sacred (notably chiefs and shamans) were not distinguishable from the rest of society in the form of an institution with separate power.
On the other hand, as soon as an institution with separate power appears, it is this institution (and not ‘society’) which harnesses the sacred and represents it. By referring to the State as a ‘terrestrial divinity’ (Hegel)10 or to a ‘mortal God’ (Hobbes), certain philosophers had indeed sensed the profoundly religious aspect concealed within such an authority, however rationally it functions. If the gods were seen as beings superior to humans, it is because the latter now divided themselves into superior and inferior, dominant and dominated, leader and subordinate. And if mankind created gods to whom it thought itself answerable, it is because one group of individuals is indeed answerable to another segment of humanity. Rather than making an analogy between Society and God, the analogy should instead be made between the dominators and the gods: ‘Generally speaking, a society is quite capable of arousing the sensation of the divine, simply by its influence over the minds of its members. To them it is like a god to the faithful. Indeed, in the first instance, a god is a being whom man imagines is superior to himself in some respects and on whom he thinks he depends’.11 If the individual’s respectful attitude to the sacred is indeed the result of what Caillois describes as ‘the conception he has of the prodigious forces, from which he protects himself, and which he wishes to possess at the same time’,12 it is because the sacred is simply the transfigured face of power.
As I am neither a religious historian nor an anthropologist specializing in acephalic societies, though nevertheless referring to the results of their work, I make no pretence here to identify the different forms the sacred has taken throughout the course of history, but simply underline the existence of important structures linking together relations of domination and the opposition of sacred/profane. Essentially my objective here is to provide the image or to trace the outline of the glass bowl in which we evolve. On this level of macro-sociological analysis and on a long-term historical scale, my task is essentially to reveal the canvas and the coloured threads which are used, but not to linger over the subtle details of the different patterns created in a particular era and by a particular society.
‘Fingebant simul credabantque’ (Tacitus, Annals V, 10), ‘To believe what they had just made up’.
Carlo Ginzburg, Fear, reverence, terror. Five essays in Political Iconography, 2017, p. 8. Max Weber Lecture Series. European University Institute
1. In all known human societies, the question arises as to the source or focal point of meaning which gives rise to, binds together, justifies or legitimizes the community: all societies are characterized by one (or more than one) symbolic matrix (mythology, theology, ideology) which separates the sacred and profane and orders beings between these two extremities.
Scholium 1. It is unquestionably Durkheim who has provided us with the decisive analysis of the sacred as a central collective value. The divinity (or the spirit) and society are only two sides of the same coin:
We have seen that the totemic image represents two things at the same time: the form in which the god is perceived, and the clan, of which it is the emblem, the distinctive mark. But if these two things are thus represented in the same way, is it not, in the end, that there is no distinction between them, that god and the clan, or in other words, the two collectively, are one? The totemic divinity is therefore nothing other than the clan, that is to say, society itself, but somehow sublimated and hypostasized.13
For the sociologist, ‘the gods are merely the symbolic expression’ of society.14 If the sacred represents what is essential in the eyes of the whole group, then this notion of the sacred is intrinsic to the cohesion of the group in question. As Radcliffe-Brown noted, quoting from the Chinese Book of Rites: ‘the function of religion (in the wider sense of the term which includes mythology as well as theology) is to maintain the symbolic order: “Ceremonies are the bond that holds the multitude together, and if the bond be removed, those multitudes fall into confusion”’.15
Scholium 2. Ever since social groups have existed, communal life has given rise to certain unvarying elements, a sort of collective grammar which is not inherent in human biology, but which is part of the ‘natural’ conditions of life as a group, whatever form that group takes. Thus, just as there are no societies without relations of domination (which does not mean ‘without class’ or ‘without State’), neither are there any societies without the sacred (which does not imply ‘without Religion’).
With reference to this second point, the source of meaning or of the legitimacy of the group is a common element present in all societies. It is a principle that Weber placed at the very heart of his sociology of religions. Passeron expresses it as follows:
The principle, often evoked by Weber, that any social group needs to construct, in their language and their system of values, the image of a ‘cosmos endowed with meaning’ is expressed here through examples which illustrate the generality of this ‘symbolic need’ within a given range of religious, theological or intellectual ‘rationalizations’: all of these in fact share the common desire to bring a thinkable and liveable order into the natural or social world.16
The reasoning underlying this ‘symbolic need’ comes from very far away, and we inherit it even if it is constantly evolving. The variations should, however, never make us forget the invariable elements, the trans-historic logic which explains that, in the last analysis, we are never completely incapable of understanding societies, however distant from our own. If that were the case, no history and no anthropology would in fact be possible. Such societies may be very different from ours, but they construct and connect social logics which are never without links to our own.
2. The opposition of the sacred and the profane is linked to relations of domination specific to each society.
Scholium. In his analyses of religious life, Durkheim seems to completely ignore the structural solidarity of the opposition between the sacred and the profane on the one hand, and between the dominator and the dominated on the other. Normally very sensitive to connections between the various forms of symbolic classification and the modes of collective organization, he seems intent on turning the opposition between sacred and profane into an exception which cannot be associated with any other example, and notably not to an opposition of the type superior/inferior or worthy/unworthy: ‘The underlying notion behind religion essentially implies the classification of things into two groups: the sacred and the profane. But how should the sacred be defined? Is it a matter of the superiority and exceptional dignity of sacred things? Not at all; for all sacred beings are not equally respectable or respected; the black man has no reticence about using his fetish object, and certain primitive peoples resort to violent behaviour in order to obtain what they want from their god. In fact, the sacred can only be defined through its opposition to the profane; this opposition is, indeed, a distinct genre: it is absolute and such that no other can be compared to it.’17
In The elementary forms of religious life, Durkheim reiterates this analysis by dismissing the hypothesis of a link between the sacred and the question of power or of domination. As he expands on his argument, it becomes clear that his conception of the sacred is a limited one. It is because he sees the sacred only in the form of the magic of stateless societies or in the monotheistic religion of State-governed societies that he fails to detect its presence in a certain number of perfectly ordinary social relationships, amongst members of societies in which religion is simply one institution amongst others:
One might be tempted to define them first by the place they are generally assigned in the hierarchy of beings. They are naturally considered superior in dignity and power to profane things, and particularly to man, when he is only a man and has nothing sacred about him. One thinks of himself as occupying an inferior and dependent position in relation to them; and surely this conception is not without some truth. Only there is nothing in it which is really characteristic of the sacred. It is not enough that one thing be subordinated to another for the second to be sacred in regard to the first. Slaves are inferior to their masters, subjects to their king, soldiers to their leaders, the miser to his gold, the man ambitious for power to the hands that keep it from him; but if it is sometimes said of a man that he makes a religion of those beings or things whose eminent value and superiority to himself he thus recognizes, it is clear that in any case the word is taken in a metaphorical sense, and that there is nothing in these relations which is really religious.18
Even if he wrongly considers that ‘a purely hierarchical distinction is a criteria at once too general and too imprecise’,19 Durkheim is nevertheless obliged to recognize that the relationship between sacred and profane is linked to oppositions between superior and inferior, dominator and dominated, worthy and unworthy.
Yet the same Durkheim who theoretically refuses to define the sacred in relation to power is capable, a few hundred pages later, and with unusual acuteness, of emphasizing the profound link between the phenomena of domination and of authority and the nature of the sacred.
Furthermore, the simple deference that men invested with high social positions inspire is not inherently different from religious respect. It is translated by the same gestures: keeping our distance from a high-ranking person, approaching him only with precautions and gestures other than those we use with ordinary mortals. Our feeling in these circumstances is so closely akin to religious feeling that many people have combined the two. Princes, noblemen and political leaders are considered sacred to explain the regard they enjoy. In Melanesia and in Polynesia, for example, people say that an influential man has mana and impute his influence to this. It is clear, however, that his situation is solely the result of public opinion. Therefore, the moral power conferred by opinion and the moral power invested in sacred beings have the same underlying origin and are composed of the same elements. This explains how the same word might be used to designate both.20
The hierarchical distinction is not only precise, it is also fundamental. The different ways of separating the sacred from the profane are linked to the forms in which relations of power manifest themselves within society. From the omnipresent sacred of societies without a separate institution of power, we move to a sacred situated in a transcendent world of State-governed societies legitimized by transcendent gods, and finally to the inherent sacred separated within society itself, even when the powers (economic, political, legal, scientific, artistic, etc.) no longer allow themselves any recourse to transcendent forces in order to exercise domination. This last situation is evoked by Durkheim on the subject of the French Revolution.
Society’s capacity to set itself up as a god or to create gods was no more visible than in the first years of the [French] Revolution. In the general enthusiasm of that period, things that were purely secular in nature were transformed by public opinion into sacred things: homeland, liberty, and reason. A religion propelled by its own momentum was established with its dogma, symbols, alters and holidays. […] in this particular case we can see society and its essential ideas become the object of an actual cult directly, without any kind of transfiguration.21
Durkheim’s starting point is also contradicted when a number of very central facts are taken into consideration. While he does not establish a link between power and the sacred and does not explicitly theorize about the relationship between the nature of power and the nature of the sacred, Durkheim gives many arguments and numerous empirical proofs which support this hypothesis. First of all, there is the tacit recognition of a link between the opposition of sacred/profane to relations of domination between men and women and between elders and the young (see below, Proposition 6 and Scholia). But it is also the recognition of a solidarity between power and the sacred from the moment he broaches the question of the prohibition of contact between the profane and the sacred. Thus, in his study on ‘La prohibition de l’inceste et ses origins’ (The prohibition of incest and its origins), published in 1898 in the first volume of L’Année sociologique, he sets the domain of the profane against that of the sacred and demonstrates that the sacred is profoundly linked to the representatives of spiritual and temporal powers:
This second domain at first appears like one in which power (the chiefs) and religion (the priests, the cult, the gods) overlap: ‘Thus, it is strictly forbidden for a common man to touch either a priest, a chief, or any sacred object. The reason is that such exceptional things are inhabited by a god, a force so far superior to that of humanity, that an ordinary man cannot come into contact with it without experiencing a tremendous shock; such a strength so far surpasses his own that it cannot be communicated to him without smashing him apart …’ (p. 39). It is in this way that the divine, from the very fact of being separated from the ordinary, seems endowed with a dangerous power […] (p. 40).22
In his general theory of magic, Mauss is even more explicitly conscious of the fact that the efficacy of magic is linked to power. In stateless societies, he observes, only those who hold the rare positions of power have ‘active spirits’: ‘the souls of dead chiefs, for the most part family heads.’23 And Mauss also notes the connection between ‘magical virtue’ and ‘social position’. The values attributed to individuals or to things and their magical force are not the result of their ‘intrinsic qualities’ but depend on ‘the status or rank attributed to them by all-powerful public opinion’.24
3. The history of all societies up to the present day is the history of the transformation of the sacred, that is to say, the history of the transformation of the relations of domination on which the opposition between the sacred and the profane is based.
4. In societies without a system of writing and without a separate institution of power, human power is very broadly limited and controlled. The chief merely recalls the past era of heroes and gods which must be endlessly repeated; the separation of the sacred and the profane therefore distinguishes, over and above everything, the ancestors from the living.
Scholium 1. As the sociologists Berger and Luckmann wrote ‘mythology represents the most archaic form of universe-maintenance, as indeed it represents the most archaic form of legitimation generally.’25 The foundation for this legitimization of the group through its myths is based on the ritual invocation of heroes, ancestors, spirits or divinities which are supposed to have introduced the customs and traditions that the men and women of today are happy to repeat or to continue. Reference to a founding past which has no specific date and is inaccessible is fundamental to the functioning of these societies which are more possessed by their myths than really in possession of them: ‘the obstinate fidelity to a past conceived as a timeless model, rather than as a stage in the historical process, betrays no moral or intellectual deficiency whatsoever. It expresses a consciously or unconsciously adopted attitude, the systematic nature of which is attested all over the world by that endlessly repeated justification of every technique, rule and custom in the single argument: the ancestors taught it to us.’26 If obedience exists, it operates between unattainable beings (ancestors, heroes, spirits, divinities), situated in a mythical past, and the living members of the community: ‘The men who live in these societies obey the orders of their ancestors, the spirits or the gods instead of obeying, as we do, one of their kind who is still living. If they fail to do so, they are punished by supernatural forces (and Mauss has clearly demonstrated that the sanction was effective), or else by the rest of the group […].27
Society is maintained thanks to the rites and myths performed and spoken by the chiefs of the clans, by shamans or by oral poets, in a register which is not contemporary with that of men but with ‘a time before men’28 handed down by ancestors, cultural heroes or gods,29 which is ritually referred to. Society is not seen as being self-founded, within the reach of human capabilities, and the origin of society is radically outside contemporary practices. And ‘Each ceremony is a new opportunity to remember that if society is good, liveable, it is due to the respect of norms previously bequeathed by the ancestors. We can then see that the reference to the ancestors is logically implicated in the initiatory rites: only the mythical discourse and the word of the ancestors guarantee the permanence of society and its eternal repetition’.30
‘The leader’s main task being to safeguard his group’s welfare’,31 the chief often fulfils the function of reminding the others of what they already know: ‘His discourse basically consists of a celebration, repeated many times, of the norms of traditional life: “Our ancestors got on well living as they lived. Let us follow their example and in this way we will lead a peaceful existence together.” This is just about what the discourse of a chief boils down to.’32 He recalls, for example, that the conditions of harmony and cohesion depend on the respect shown by everyone to what was set in place by the ancestors: ‘There are many tribes in which every day either at dawn or at sunset, the chief must gratify the people of his group with an edifying discourse. Every day the Pilaga, Sherente, Tupinamba chiefs exhort their people to abide by tradition. It is not an accident that the gist of their discourse is closely connected to their function as “peacemaker”. … “The customary theme of these harangues is peace, harmony and honesty, virtues recommended to all the tribesmen”.’33 Not only does the chief say nothing that is not already known, but nobody seems even to make the effort to listen to him: ‘Almost without exception, the leader addresses the group daily, at daybreak and at dusk. Stretched out in his hammock or seated next to his fire, he delivers the expected discourse in a loud voice. And his voice certainly needs to be strong in order to make himself heard. As a matter of fact, there is no gathering around the chief when he speaks, no hush falls, everybody goes about their business as if nothing was happening.’34 Yet this apparent inattention on the part of the tribe members does not in any sense exonerate the chief from performing these ritual words which represent his duty to the group.35
Marcel Gauchet sums up the foundation of the myth in the following way:
The underlying belief is that we owe everything we have, our way of living, our rules, our customs, and what we know, to beings of a different nature – to Ancestors, Heroes or Gods. All we can do is follow, imitate, and repeat what they have taught us. In other words, everything governing our ‘works and days’ was handed down to us. Major obligations and petty exploits, the whole framework encompassing the practices of the living, had their origins in a founding past that ritual both revitalizes as an inexhaustible source and reaffirms in its sacred otherness.36
The reference to a mythical past underlying the founding of the social order and of behaviours is a way of placing power beyond the reach of individuals. Indeed, it as though the members of these societies were collectively divesting themselves of the reasons and the justifications for their existence.37
The absence of any form of State (‘primitive’ societies have been variously described as ‘acephalic’, ‘stateless’, ‘lineage-based’ or ‘segmented’38 societies), that is to say, of an institution of power separated from other institutions and which would impose itself on the whole of that society, means that no single individual amongst the members of the community can claim to embody or hold the authority allowing them to command or to rely on ‘the probability that a command … will be obeyed’ (Weber). The role of the chief of the clan is limited and very carefully controlled by the community.39 Not only must he speak in a ritual manner to the group, but he receives gifts from its members and must absolutely give generously in return, just like the Fijian chief, who Hocart tells us, ‘At every turn he had to give: if they built him a house he had to make offerings in return, and, unless the offerings were lavish, he became unpopular, and might even be murdered’.40
Georges Balandier notes that these societies ‘possess secret (but effective) mechanisms for limiting the holding of powers and the accumulation of wealth. Thus, the Gabonese Fang, among whom death threatens anyone who disrupts clan solidarity and the egalitarian tendency by satisfying his ambition and private interests, justify the means used to contain inequality.’41 From an economic point of view, this obligation to reciprocate prevents any early accumulation of wealth. Hocart observes, for example, the absence of ‘storing [of food] except for a few days in preparation for a feast’42 amongst the Australian Aranda.
The chief is obliged to speak, and his power is controlled by the community, but it is the community as a whole who must respect the traditions without any coercive force, apart from the community itself, intervening to compel and sanction. The whole is held together by the force and coherence of the socialization of the members of the group:
It is true that, in societies of limited size, most accounts converge on this point: the word of the chief represents authority without the need of any organized public force. The legitimacy of this spoken word is never contested. Indeed, it is founded on the unanimous agreement of the group, instilled throughout the children’s education, violently marked on the body on the occasion of the initiation ceremonies for the young and continually reinforced through rituals. Transgressing the traditional social order, disputing the word of the chief who tells and retells the ancestral customs would amount to risking rejection by the whole of the group, exclusion from social relations, and what would practically amount to a death sentence. The ‘primitive’ chief does not have a monopoly on the use of legitimate violence because he has the monopoly on the use of the legitimate word and no one can speak in opposition to his words without committing a sacrilege unanimously condemned by public opinion.43
All ‘the functions of government’ (‘theft prevented and punished, murder avenged, international peace maintained, and war subjected to rules, the distribution of food and wealth arranged’)44 exist without any real ‘government’ being put in place.
The first royalties in Indo-European societies, presented to us by Benveniste, are closer to acephalic societies than state societies where the political role is very marked:
In this way we can give definition to the concept of the Indo-European kingship. The Indo-European rex was much more a religious than a political figure. His mission was not to command, to exercise power but to draw up rules, to determine what was in the proper sense ‘right’ (‘straight’). It follows that the rex, as thus defined, was more akin to a priest than a sovereign. It is this type of kingship which was preserved by the Celts and the Italic peoples on the one hand and the Indic on the other. This notion was bound up with the existence of great colleges of priests whose function it was to perpetuate the observance of certain rites. It needed a long process of evolution and a radical transformation to reach the kingship of the classical type, which was founded exclusively on power, political authority becoming progressively independent of religious power, which in the end devolved on the priests.45
Scholium 2. The absence of writing is an important element of the collective organization of these societies. In social formations, where everything is linked together and knowledge and know-how, customs and traditions are integrated, myths cannot be separated from the situations in which they are spoken. They are local, always contextualized and are the object of a practical mastery which is not the symbolic, distanced mastery needed for writing. They own them and produce them themselves but in such a way, and in such a manner, that they are more owned by them than truly owning them. The solution – which could be described as logical, but in this case it is an entirely social logic – to this situation of dispossession in terms of knowledge and know-how, myths and rites, amounts to a collectively shared dispossession in relation to a founding past.
A separate power would imply some sort of centralization of myths and rites. Yet there are no structural variations of a myth,46 but only mythical tales as they have been assimilated (there are no ‘reference texts’) always spoken in particular situations. As Jack Goody notes, ‘the spirit cults are associated with local practices’.47 This is the case with the Winnebago of North America, studied by Hocart: ‘Each clan has its own chieftain in charge of a specific cult: the thunder-bird clan feast, the bear clan feast, the snake clan feast, and so on’.48 In order for a separate power to exist, there has to be, all at the same time, an objectivization of myths, detached from individuals (disincorporation), their relative detachment from the multiple immediate situations in which they act, and their relative and progressive delocalization.
Moreover, many of the cases studied by anthropologists demonstrate degrees of transformation. Just as Mauss noted in certain societies the start of a detachment process from the myths relative to ritual practices, Hocart shows how societies gradually transform their initial social logic. Noting the ‘striking similarity’ between ‘the Fijian and Winnebago organizations’, the author points out that there is nevertheless a considerable difference between them. For the Winnebago, ‘each small group has its own peculiar cult which is not like that of the others except in structure’,49 whereas ‘in Fiji the chieftains are not the heads of rituals which can be carried out separately, but office-bearers in a great common ritual […] The clans are not distinguished by having different cults, but by having different functions in the common cult.’50 Hocart adds that ‘In all the periods covered by our records we see centralization making steady progress’.51 From one society ‘of autonomous, but cooperating, parts’ we go to a society made up ‘of specialized parts controlled from a centre’, and community rites which are, at first, ‘interdependent, but to some degree autonomous’, eventually forming ‘an elaborate, organization centralized and controlled from above’.52
The process of setting up a separate institution of power involves the incorporation of what gives meaning and value for the group, notably the incorporation of rituals which are specialized and can only be performed by certain specific actors:
In the societies which we rank in the fifth degree of our scale, the role of specialized governor can be clearly seen. It is attributed to a person or a group of people whose regulatory and managerial decisions are accepted as legitimate. […] The emergence of governors in a political system concentrates the sovereign authority and strength – if only through the appropriation of the rituals most important for the survival of the group – in clearly differentiated roles which demonstrate a clear distinction between governors and governed.53
5. Societies without writing and without a separate institution of power are societies where there is little differentiation, which are characterized by a culture in which functions are relatively little dissociated.
Scholium. Any attempt to grasp the mythico-ritual reality of stateless societies without a writing system by starting with the concept of ‘religion’ is therefore likely to result in a series of misunderstandings. Any reference to religion might first of all imply that this is a domain with particular practices which are specific and distinct from other domains of practice. Yet, as Goody observes on the subject of African societies, we find ‘no equivalent for the Western word “religion” (or indeed ritual), and more importantly the actors do not appear to look upon religious beliefs and practices in the same way that we, whether Muslim, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Christian or atheist do – that is as a distinct set’.54 Benveniste emphasizes the same particularity in the context of Indo-European institutions: ‘Since the Indo-Europeans did not conceive of that omnipresent reality which religion represents as a separate institution, they had no term to designate it.’55 The absence of a generic term is not a linguistic failing but is a reference to the social reality of ritual practices, omnipresent and inseparable from the multiple social settings in which they are carried out.
If it is true that religion is an institution, this institution is nevertheless not separated from other institutions or outside them. It was not possible to evolve a clear conception of what religion is or to devise a term for it until it was clearly delimited and had a distinct domain so that it was possible to know what belonged to it and what was foreign to it. Now in the civilizations which we are studying, everything is imbued with religion, everything is a sign of, a factor in, or the reflection of, divine forces. Thus, outside special confraternities no need was felt for a specific term to designate the complex of cults and beliefs, and that is why to denote ‘religion’ we find only terms which appear as separate and independent creations.56
If we wish to continue to speak of religion, we need to specify that we are talking about a total religion which organizes and gives meaning to all its practices and not just a relative vision of the world (in other words, one vision of the world amongst others) which we can choose to be part of or not. As Serge Gruzinski so clearly puts it, on the subject of what he calls the ‘idolatry’ of the Mexican Indians, this ‘cannot be dissociated from a social framework and […] far from occupying an external sphere, it constitutes a way of expressing, of informing and of playing out social relationships’;57 it is by no means simply ‘a supplement which would serve to prolong or amplify the real or add its ritual support to the most diverse manifestations of human activity’.58
The culture of imbrication – of the sacred and the profane, of the supernatural and the natural, of the human and the natural, etc. – is the culture of societies who have not introduced any separate institution of power (with specific places, times, agents and texts). If nature is respected as a person, it is simply because men and women are in social structures where the balance of power is much less dissymmetrical than in societies where domination is clear, visible and acknowledged: ‘The rules of relationships with the land’, write Bourdieu and Sayad on the subject of traditional Algerian society, ‘are the very rules of relationships with others, those of honour: the same verb qabal (show, offer, honour, introduce oneself) serves to express the right attitude, both with regard to people and to the land […] The peasant has an extremely intimate relationship with his land and his animals. He knows how to talk to them and can command them with his voice. He accepts nature, out of respect for it; he does not confront nature in order to combat and overthrow it.’59 That utilitarian relationship with nature, characteristic of the farmer, is merely another version of the relationship of domination which develops between individuals. Likewise, the moral and respectful relationship to nature is only the transposition of a less directly violent social relationship between human beings. The radical separation of dominators in relation to those dominated allows the clear separation between man (the subject) and nature (the object), the equally clear separation between the sacred and the profane; and the relationship of control which is established between dominators and dominated makes possible the mastery of man over nature.
If the sacred seems to be everywhere (in fact it makes a clear distinction between the ancients and men on one side and the young and women on the other), it is because it has not been appropriated by any specific group. Transformations in the balance of power will have consequences on the perception of the sacred and the profane, of the supernatural and the natural, etc. Heads of families, of clans or of the tribe are all under the permanent control of the members of the group or of the community which do not allow them to develop any autonomy. The oral nature of this culture prevents any accumulation of knowledge and of texts by demanding permanent contact and performance in front of specific audiences. On the other hand, writing allows the accumulation of specialized knowledge, the separation of experts and lay people and, by the same token, the clearer separation between the sacred (which the experts are responsible for) and the profane (which is associated with the lay people who increasingly find the sacred taken out of their hands).
6. If, in societies without separate institutions of power, nobody has the power to control the sacred or to harness it to their own advantage, differences operate within the social world between those who are closer to the sacred axis and those who find themselves much closer to the axis of the profane: older people and men versus younger people and women. The two major forms of domination which are strong and proven in societies without writing and without a separate institution of powers are therefore masculine domination and domination by the elders.
Scholium. Acephalic societies are made up of mutually supportive and relatively egalitarian clans. It is only when a clan begins to gain ascendancy over the others that the opposition sacred/profane begins to operate as an opposition between dominators and dominated. But these societies are not, however, entirely egalitarian. Even when clans are relatively equal, they still function on the basis of these two forms of domination: one based on age and the other based on gender.60
Confining the analysis of domination to the domain of institutionally organized political domination is the childhood illness of political philosophy. Thus, Clastres appears to see ‘primitive societies’ as societies without power or domination because they contain within them no separate institutions of power, or in other words no State, even though the whole of his ethnographic work on the Guayaki Indians in Paraguay, or on the Guarani Indians between Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina, shows that the sexual division of tasks is very marked and that masculine domination is omnipresent in such societies. As Terray so clearly puts it,
A simple and free society? To accept such a concept, we must first, in our reading of Society against the State, skip chapter V, The bow and the basket, which covers the relationships between Guayaki men and women. And what would we find there? ‘An extremely clear opposition organizes and dominates everyday life for the Guayaki: that of both men and women, whose respective activities, strongly marked by the sexual division of tasks, form two separate fields which are, here as elsewhere, complementary’ (1974: 89). But this complementarity does not mean equality: ‘At the basic level of “production” of food, the entirely minor role played by women leaves men with an absorbing and prestigious monopoly. Or, more precisely, the difference between men and women in terms of economic life can be interpreted as the opposition between a group of producers and a group of consumers’ (ibid.: 90). The gap thus formed manifests itself by means of ‘a system of reciprocal prohibitions: one forbidding women to touch the hunters’ bow, the other preventing men from handling the women’s baskets’ (ibid.: 93). Yet here too, any symmetry is deceptive given what happens when these prohibitions are transgressed: ‘If an individual is no longer capable of being a hunter, he ceases at the same time, to be a man: going from the bow to the basket, metaphorically he becomes a woman’ (ibid.: 93). Yet, as Loraux mischievously observes (in Abensour 1987: 167), the reverse does not apply: the woman who touches a bow does not in so doing become a man, she simply renders the bow unusable. The fact that this opposition between men and women, which Clastres stresses ‘imposes its mark on all aspects of Guayaki life’ (1974: 96), is indeed a hierarchical relationship of inequality and discrimination, is clearly proved when we turn to the field of language: ‘It seems that there exists with the Guayaki some kind of gender divide in terms of linguistics in that women take charge of all the negative aspects of existence, whereas men dedicate themselves to celebrate, if not the pleasures of life, at least those values which render it bearable’ (ibid.: 97).61
Durkheim was adamant that, in primitive societies, it is not just the totem (e.g. the representation of a pelican) and the totemic being (e.g. the pelican) that are sacred. The ‘domain of the sacred’ extends far beyond that, beginning with all the members of the clan who are distinguished from men from other clans. For example, as a member of the pelican clan, each man considers that he is linked to the pelican and, as the pelican is sacred, he is himself a bearer of the sacred character. The sacred is thus widely present in societies where no separate institution of power has yet seen the light of day.
But Durkheim’s comments on the variability of the degree of intensity of this sacred character tend to confirm that the line separating the sacred and the profane is drawn not only between the elders or the mythical heroes and the living, but also, on the one hand, between men and women and, on the other, between the elders and the youngest members: ‘It is’, he explains, ‘more intense for men than for women, for the elders rather than for the young.’62 A footnote clarifies the concept with some further examples:
The sacred character of women is less marked than that of men: before initiation, the child lives in the women’s camp, separated from that of the men; as soon as he has been initiated, he goes to live with the men, and especially during an initial period, women are not allowed to touch him. As for older men, various things show that they possess a very marked sacred character; they are allowed to touch sacred objects, thereby proving that they are themselves sacred; they are no longer subject to any dietary prohibitions.63
Durkheim no doubt wishes to emphasize the exceptional extent of the domain of the sacred in societies having neither State nor a system of writing, in comparison to State societies and those with monotheist religions like the one in which he himself lived. But the ethnographical facts force him to recognize a presence of the sacred which, far from being equal, follows, and this is no coincidence, the lines of division between dominators and dominated characteristic of these societies: men/women, elders/young people.
This analysis is confirmed by the Durkheimian anthropologist Robert Hertz. In a study on the opposition between right and left, he shows the complementarity of clans in societies lacking separate institutions of power, whilst at the same time indicating the two principal fault lines which traverse societies collectively more egalitarian than hierarchical societies, notably the opposition between men and women and that between the oldest and the youngest members. In such societies, the sacred and the profane contribute to separating these categories, rather serving to enhance the hierarchical relationships between groups:
The two halves which constitute the tribe are reciprocally opposed like the sacred and the profane. Everything which is within my phratry is sacred and is forbidden to me; that is why I may neither eat my totem, nor spill the blood of one of my own, nor even touch his corpse, nor marry within my clan. On the other hand, the other half is, for me, profane; the clans which belong to this half must provide me with food, with women and with human victims, bury my dead and prepare my sacred ceremonies. Given the religious character with which the primitive community feels itself invested, life within society has as its essential condition, the existence, within the same tribe, of an opposed and complementary segment which can freely assume the functions forbidden to members of the first group. Social evolution replaces this reversible dualism by a hierarchical and rigid structure [footnote: a rough form of this exists from the primitive stage: men and women form, in comparison with adult men, an essentially profane class]: instead of separate but equivalent clans, classes or castes emerge, where one, at the summit, is essentially sacred, noble, devoted to superior works, whilst the other, at the very lowest, is profane or unclean and attends to lowly duties. The principle which assigns men to their rank and their duties remains unchanged: social polarity is always a reflection and a consequence of religious polarity.64
The opposition feminine/masculine is linked in particular to oppositions between nature and culture, left and right, high and low and profane and sacred. The relation of domination between men and women finds its expression in the bipartite conception of the universe: ‘Human conditions were projected onto nature, and male and female forces were recognized. The Above was regarded as masculine, the Below feminine; so the sky was father, the earth mother. The heavenly bodies were conceived as having sex; so the sun was masculine, the moon feminine, consequently day was male and night female’.65 Whatever is high, above (and which ‘has the upper hand’), illuminates, radiates and demonstrates strength is masculine, and whatever is at the bottom, below, more dull or dark, is feminine. It is therefore clear that the relationship between profane and sacred leads back to a relation of domination.
Finally, the anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown points out that ‘in the simplest societies, there is little more than the very important differentiation on the basis of sex and age and the non-institutionalized recognition of leadership in hunting or fishing, in warfare, and so on, to which we may add the specialization of the oldest profession in the world, that of the medicine man.’66 It is the balance of power in these societies, in other words, the fact that relations of domination do not operate through a clear separation between an institutionalized central power (with its agents, its places and its timescales) and the rest of the group, but essentially structure intergenerational relationships and relationships between the sexes, which explains the collective dispossession, the process of putting the underlying structures and the raisons d’être of the group beyond the reach of each and every one. But the absence of State is not the same as an absence of power or of domination in society.
7. Since the arrival of the first societies with a separate institution of power, we see a kind of shift from a completely inaccessible past to a transcendent and relatively inaccessible present. Rather than separating the living from a distant mythical past, the opposition sacred/profane now begins to separate individuals from each other. It becomes a principle of separation between dominators and dominated.
Scholium 1. If, for convenience sake, researchers refer to ‘State societies’ when referring to the first societies to include an early form of separate institutions of power (Sumerian city-states or Egyptian societies) and, often, of bureaucracy, it should be pointed out that the ‘state-based’ reality was only conceived and designated as such relatively late in the history of societies. It was in Europe, and particularly in Italy, around the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that the State appeared as a category for the designation of separate institutions of power.67
Scholium 2. In societies endowed with a separate institution of power, we end up defining the limits of the group in terms which refer to everything covered by the institution of power in question. Benveniste notes, with reference to the concept of society for Indo-European peoples: ‘It may be recognized under the name of kingdom: the limits of society coincide with the extent of a given power, which is the power of the king.’68 Kingdom or empire, it is the separate institution of power that allows society to exist by establishing the boundaries of the group.69
Scholium 3. As soon as a separate institution of power sees the light of day, we begin to see a transition from a society where relations of domination were mainly established between ancestors and the living, and on a secondary basis, between the elders and the young and between men and women, to a society politically based on a vertical hierarchy. The sudden shift from ancestors, from heroes, spirits, or divinities which until then had occupied a position of precedence (mythical past) on a horizontal axis, now places them in a transcendent position. Such a shift accompanies the separation of an institution of power which has taken control of all the mythical-ritual practices and which dominates the whole group. From that point on, all the oppositions structuring the myths start to operate in the service of the dominators: the dominator is in opposition to the dominated just as the sky is in opposition to the earth, the sacred to the profane, the superior to the inferior, the high to the low, culture to nature, etc.
This transition from a horizontal organization which is an ‘egalitarian or complementary organization of social functions’ to a ‘vertical hierarchy’70 is confirmed by many anthropologists, even if the conditions of such a transformation (effect of internal logic or of inter-society struggles) are far from being definitively established. The more extensive and complex society becomes, the more the hierarchy involves degrees, ranks, grades or levels. As Hocart puts it:
Gradually, the high rise higher, the low sink lower, until the state is rearranged in a vertical hierarchy such as ours. The great height reached by our social edifice will be brought home to the reader if he will trace all the gradations of our state from king to able-bodied seaman, to private, or to mason in government service, and then compares them with the three or four storey society of Fiji.71
It is a process of power being successively seized, from a head of family or of a clan over other heads of family or clans, from a tribal chief over other tribal chiefs, from a city-State over other city-States, etc., which also evokes the situation in Indo-European societies. The basileus is more a ‘local chieftain, a man of rank’ than a king in the strictest sense of the word, in that he seems stripped of any political power.72 The basileus basileon, on the other hand, is in a sense, the ‘King of Kings’. ‘This is a curious expression’, as Benveniste points out, ‘which does not mean “king amongst the kings”, but “he who reigns over other kings”. It is a suzerainty, a kingship of the second degree which is exercised over those considered by the rest of the world as kings.’73 The Greeks refer to the ‘great king’ (basileus megas), to the ‘King of Kings’ or to the ‘King of the country’ to describe to the king of Persia: ‘The second title, “King of Kings”, makes him into the supreme sovereign, master of an empire which comprises the other kingdoms. Finally, “King of the countries” establishes his authority over the provinces of the Achaemenid Empire; Persia, Media, Babylonia, Egypt, etc., which are so many “countries”.’74
Scholium 4. The establishment of a separate institution of power changes the nature of the sacred in a quite radical manner. From the sacred being close to each member of the group, we move to a sacred which is more distant, more alien and also more disturbing. This transformation of the nature of the sacred, noted by anthropologists, makes perfect sense given that the sacred cannot be dissociated from the nature of power. Thus, when power becomes separated and distanced from ordinary mortals with the earliest institutionalized forms of government, the sacred becomes a reality as terrifying as the power which now embodies it:
The gods of the primitive are not in his eyes, strangers or enemies: on the contrary, to him the gods were relations, friends, ancestors. The moral power to which the cult is addressed is not imagined towering above him, but as though within him, like a part of himself; and his ideal is not to shelter from this power, to flee it, but on the contrary to try to approach it and to make it descend into the intimacy of the individual being. It is primarily feelings of joy, of confident expansion, which form the basis of these primitive religions; what predominates in totemic ceremonies are dances, games: there is no question of atonement. Such notions will only come later and under the influence of different social forms; a society organized into clans, to which the primitive man belongs, is democratic; all individuals are equal; it is wholly within each of them. It is only when society goes well beyond individual consciousness, when individuals begin to feel its power acting from outside, that gods unknown to the individual will appear, imposing and inspiring terror.75
Durkheim senses the profound link between forms of power and conceptions of the sacred (when, for example, he observes that the divinities are perceived as friends rather than as superior beings ‘towering above’ members of the group), but does not clarify this in detail. By referring to ‘Society’ in general, he fails to explore the more specific issue of power.
From acephalic societies to State societies, what is new is a dependence and subordination with regard to gods who are only the transfiguration of powerful earthly beings. Isambert observes, for example, that for Frazer as well as for Hubert and Mauss, ‘magic is indeed characterized by an attitude opposed to that of dependence and subordination towards the gods’.76 The transcendent God is in the image of the sovereign.
8. The writing down of myths and rites introduces a symbolic mastery of what had until then only been mastered on a practical level. It is therefore an element in the establishment of institutions of power and in the division of dominators and dominated at the level of social formation as a whole.
Scholium. The separation of a power comes with the invention of writing.77 The gap between those bodies holding power and the rest of society means that the shared values of the whole group which permeated every moment of social life and which the chiefs were content to recite in a ritual manner, now had specific representatives and were under the control of a minority who wrote down the myths and the rites and controlled their use. Those who represented the values of the group were thus positioned on the side of the sacred, whereas the majority of the members of the society were confined to the side of the profane.
The writing down of myths and rites which took place in Mesopotamia and in Egypt between 3,000 and 2,000 years before our time, is not merely a technical transposition of one code of communication to another. It transforms the relationship people had to their myths and rituals, their status and their social function. Although the gods are omnipresent, legitimizing all the royal activity, justice, the work of canalization, the wars, all knowledge, writing (to which a divine origin is attributed78), divination techniques, etc., the scripturalization of myths, rites, hymns and prayers or poems about the gods demarcates a relatively specific field of knowledge and practice which becomes manifest in the form of religious authority figures (the priests) and a specific place (the temple). Not that there was a separation between the ‘Church’ and the ‘State’, since the temple is at the very heart of the Sumerian or Egyptian royal palace, and whether for Mesopotamian King or Egyptian Pharaoh,79 their existence makes sense only in total complementarity with the priests. However, if religion is all-powerful, its existence, represented by an institution, forces it into a more relative position in terms of the situation of a total religion. Indeed, it is this which will at a later stage lead to a dissociation between political and religious functions and to a ‘struggle between the two powers’.80
The writing down of rites and myths stabilizes the function of divinities, standardizes ceremonies and rites, rebuilds the divine hierarchies at each political change resulting from the victory of one city-State over others. The more stable existence of the gods and of their relationships with each other, is indissociably linked to the ‘incorporation [of deities] in a text, partly by their fixed position in the schema’, as well as their ‘institutionalization in a temple’.81 Just as the first chronological lists of events enabled them to be retold in the form of accounts, chronicles and annals (both in Egypt and in Mesopotamia),82 simple hierarchized lists of divinities allowed the scribes to establish relationships between them and thus to practise a new kind of reflection, which the great Assyrian scholar A. Leo Oppenheim describes as ‘theology’.83
By putting the myths and rites into writing, the scribes would both specialize the expressions used but also standardize and fix both the gestures and the words enacted and said. Mesopotamian or Egyptian texts which ‘prescribe, often in considerable detail, the individual acts of a ritual, the prayers and the expressions which must be recited […] as well as the offerings and the instruments required for the sacrifice’84 led to a standardization and a specialization of the gestures and utterances used. In doing so, they create a rift between, on the one hand, the priest-experts who follow ‘to the letter’ the textual inscriptions (functioning as dictates, models of reference according to which any lapses can be sanctioned) and, on the other hand, the profane who participate in ceremonies they are not always fully capable of understanding. It is no coincidence that Weber defined priests as ‘the professional functionaries who influence the gods by means of worship with those magicians who coerce demons by magical means’,85 by their attachment therefore to ‘the presence of certain fixed cultic centres associated with some actual cultic apparatus’ and to ‘special knowledge, fixed doctrine and vocational qualification’.86 Writing practices alone allow the objectivized knowledge associated with an institution to be codified and specialized.
If the writing down of myths and rites paved the way for the separation of the institution-temple, the beginning of a relativization of religion, the standardization of rituals as well as the specialization of a body constituted around this new knowledge, the very operation of objectivizing the myth changed relationships to it. By writing down the myth, the scribe was not only transcoding it from an oral to a written form, but was also removing it from the practices which gave it meaning. The myth was no longer acted out and lived and no longer had an immediate audience. From that time on, the scribes, and more generally the priests,87 are less possessed by the myth, or put another way, they are less dispossessed of it than when it was indissociably linked to different local ritual practices. They begin to take control over what had hitherto escaped them and which had implied a split between human beings and their origins, their founding past. Not that the scribes and the priests saw the myths as their own social production, as ‘we’ attempt to do today, by resorting to social sciences in order to make sense of them, since for them, it was indeed the gods who led the world. But these gods, in their very transcendence, had now become more accessible and it was possible to try to understand their will and to communicate, in a certain way, with them.
Transposing onto the gods the characteristics of the most powerful men, the idea of gods whose intentions are discernible through a reading of their written account of the world begins to take hold. The king as a legislator, whose decisions are associated with codes of law, is the inspiration for the image of gods writing their decisions on the pages of the world:
The ancient Mesopotamians were convinced that the world could not be explained by itself and to give meaning to the world, they were forced to set up superhuman personages who had to have created the world and who governed it. In order to represent these superhuman beings they did not find a better model than their own political powers, with the monarch at the top of a pyramid of subordinate authorities, whose power emanated from his. They transposed this system to the supernatural level in order to organize their pantheon and to represent the way the pantheon functioned. Just as their king governed the country, directly or through ‘vicars’, by expressing his wishes, by making decisions and by communicating them, the gods also made the world function according to their designs, by deciding the destinies of all beings as individuals or collectively. And in this country with an ancient writing tradition, where the decisions of the king were regularly promulgated in writing, the gods had to fix and memorialize their will in some way. How? We cannot forget that the fundamental principle of the cuneiform writing system, invented in Mesopotamia and whose discovery and functioning profoundly marked the mind, was pictography, both originally and later always maintaining its power – in other words the possibility of representing objects by other objects. The drawing of a foot also evokes walking, standing up and transport. The drawing of a stem with an ear of cereal also represents the products of agriculture. From there the conviction was born that the ‘scripts of the gods’ consisted of the things themselves that they produced when making the world function.88
It was therefore possible to attempt to know the will of the gods by interpreting unexpected or surprising events in the world ‘just as one decoded the pictograms and ideograms of the script.’89 The gods were supposed to inscribe in the world events or phenomena which could be deciphered as pictograms. Divination consisted in identifying certain events perceived as anomalies as portents and to produce predictions from an interpretation of these. But, since everything could be a portent, ‘All areas of nature required close attention and observation in the divinatory perspective’.90 The Mesopotamians were therefore attentive to the stars, to events associated with the calendar, to human and animal births and deaths, to the configuration of the land, watercourses, towns, plants and animals, to human behaviour, dreams, etc.
The writing of myths and rites is by no means a passive recording. It severs the myth from its roots and from the oral cultures from within which it draws its meaning. As a result, the myth, now copied and recopied, is controlled in a new manner. Individuals can begin to take ownership of it, they can move on from a purely practical mastery, in the multiple contexts of enunciation, which prevented them from distancing themselves from the myth. The practice of writing, with everything that the process implies in terms of de-contextualization and of the potential to go back to the myth, changes its nature, its function and people’s relationship with it. The split between those who are on the side of the gods and those who are not would be inexplicable without taking into account the shift which the practice of writing imposes on the myth. How has it been possible to shift the sacred relationship between society and its founding past in order to enable the distinction to be effective within society itself? There is no Machiavellian plot in action here. One group does not ‘take’ power by ‘pretending’ to be on the side of the divine. It actually believes this and the important thing is to understand what renders such a situation possible. As Bourdieu writes: ‘The legitimate deception only succeeds because the usurper is not a calculating cynic, who deliberately deceives the people, but someone who, in all good faith, thinks he is someone other than he really is’.91
Once a social group (made up of scribes, priests and kings, the latter sometimes scribes themselves), has taken control of the myths and rites through writing, they then set about appropriating the ‘founding laws’ instead of being ‘dispossessed’ in relation to them. By taking control of the myths and controlling the rites, they put themselves in a situation of privileged intermediary between the ‘invisible’ and the rest of the population, who continue to live in a state of dispossession in terms of the sacred and who are relegated to the domain of the profane. In this way, the group controls access to the divine, to the sacred, to the invisible. In the context of social reality, this involves the institutionalization of power within the social structure and a religious shift which sees the gods move into a superior, transcendent position.
When Gauchet talks about the re-appropriation of the ‘source of meaning and law initially transferred beyond the grasp of human actors’,92 he is describing, in abstract terms, the impact of the scriptural operations associated with secular and sacerdotal powers. When he explains that in these social universes, ‘Meaning has now ceased to be given and is instead something emergent or reconstructed. God’s intentions are inscrutable yet essentially knowable’93 and that the will of the gods is ‘deciphered and interpreted’,94 he is describing the very precise effect of the practice of writing, particularly of that associated with divinatory techniques.
Through the practice of writing, the scribe escapes from the world of the myth lived and experienced and enters that of the objectified and interpreted myth. This then opens the way to the possibility of a symbolic power, allowing them to appropriate the gods and, by the same token, the privileges and power which result from this privileged position vis-à-vis the gods. Those who become masters of the myth through writing, that is to say those who write, decipher and interpret it, at the same time place themselves close to the gods. The institutions of power function through a process of harnessing. They harness the sacred, and notably the legitimacy collectively assigned to myths. The objectified (and symbolically mastered) myth undergoes a shift in relation to the directly experienced myth (practically understood and from which the group is now partly dispossessed). In the first societies where separate institutions of power were established, the State had to rely on the existing ritual practices and harness their legitimacy by transforming both their status and their function in the overall logic. As a result, these became practices associated with the recognition and legitimization of institutions of power which draw their legitimacy from the gods. Gauchet writes:
On the one hand, those who participate in the essential otherness of the powers of the beyond and, on the other hand, the common mass of those who must bow before the supernatural truth which has somehow materialized within society. The man of power is born: a being from within, but shot through with the supreme difference of the outside, and through his very nature, situated at an infinite distance from the common man.95
All of that is in no sense Machiavellian or intentional. As Berger and Luckmann said, ‘The coexistence of naïve mythology among the masses and a sophisticate theology among an elite of theoreticians, both serving to maintain the same symbolic universe, is a frequent historical phenomenon’.96 Except that here, we are not dealing with a sophisticated theology but rather with a process of reclamation-transformation, a shift of the myth through writing which transforms the legitimacy, the nature of gods and the relationships between social groups. The beginning of a symbolic mastering of myths and rites is not the sign of a mastery which could be bluntly labelled as ‘political’, but radical religious alienation is gradually replaced by a relative religious alienation.
For this is all that power is: this ability to make us raise our eyes to what looks down on us and concerns us.
Boucheron, P., The Power of Images. Siena, 1338, Cambridge: Polity, 2018, p. 133
9. The vertical and hierarchical vision, which is that of the separate institution of power, pervades all domains and structures all perceptions: heaven/earth, god(s)/men, high/low, superior/inferior, above/below, etc.
Scholium 1. Benveniste emphasized the fact that the notion of ‘God’ as a transcendent entity, common to all Indo-European languages, corresponds to a vertical vision of the world: ‘This is well attested in the form *deiwos, the sense of which is “luminous” and “celestial”; this is the quality which marks the god off from human beings, who are “terrestrial” (such is the meaning of the Latin word for “man”, homo).’97 The very definition of ‘transcendent’ implies the existence of a high and a low in the sense that it refers to a reality ‘which is situated above’ and which is ‘superior’. If the gods occupy the higher part of the universe, it is because they dominate and are all-seeing, and because, when we address them, we lift up our gaze. This simple posture of the dominated man, lifting his eyes to the heavens towards the one who dominates him, is the physical manifestation of a whole topology of high/low, superior/inferior, heaven/earth which corresponds to the symbolic opposition gods/men and is based on the social opposition between dominators/dominants.98
The concept of the ‘great chain of life’ or the ‘chain of beings’ so skilfully studied by the historian of ideas, Arthur O. Lovejoy,99 has been a recurrent schema in Western thinking from the time of Plato and, in particular, of Aristotle (with his scala naturae which classifies all beings according to their degree of perfection), right through to the Western societies of the seventeenth century. It is based on the belief that everything in the universe occupies a clearly determined place in a hierarchical order. The chain in question is arranged vertically in the form of a ladder, and all beings are classified from high to low depending on the relative proportion of ‘spirit’ and of ‘matter’ they are seen to possess. The less ‘spirit’ a being has, the lower he is situated in the hierarchy: conversely, the more ‘spirit’ a being possesses, the higher he is positioned.
Variation of the great chain of being
|
God(s) Angels Human beings From emperors, kings, lords, priests, scholars, artists, writers … … to servants and slaves Animals Plants Minerals |
On the lowest rungs, therefore, are the inanimate objects (minerals, metals), then the plants, animals, humans, sometimes angels and, at the summit, (the) God(s). But each of these great classes of beings is also organized hierarchically. For example, gold was long considered the most noble of metals, whereas lead was seen as having less ‘spirit’ (alchemy being based on the conviction that lead could be transformed into gold thanks to an injection of the spirit). The different species of plants and animals or the different categories of humans were also classed from low to high in their respective order. Thus, in the order of living creatures, Aristotle’s De anima placed zoophytes, animals resembling plants such as corals or sea anemones, at the bottom of a scale in which man, of course, occupied the superior position.
In the same way, powerful men and scholars were also placed very high in the hierarchy of human beings as opposed to the more manual, ignorant and servile workers. In a work entitled Oration on the dignity of man (1486), the Italian philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola imagined that certain human beings could succeed in raising themselves to the level of angels thanks to philosophical contemplation. In the seventeenth century, La Fontaine would compare Descartes to a god and place the servant (‘beast of burden’) at the bottom of the scale.100 A century later still, in his article on ‘Leibnizianism’, Diderot states that there is nothing between God and man, and that at the summit of the human population are great men, scholars or politicians: ‘But the existence of intermediary spirits between man and God is too absurd a supposition for us to dare to claim that the immensity of the interval is empty, and that in the great chain, after the universal creator, who cannot even be admitted in philosophical terms, it is man who comes next; and at the head of the human species, either Socrates, or Marcus Aurelius, or Pascal or Trajan, or Julien, or Bacon, or Bayle, or Descartes, or Newton, or Leibniz (xv, 436–7).’101 Anything spiritual is superior to anything material or corporal, in the same way the theoretical is superior to the practical.
Aron Gurevich also identifies the same vertical and hierarchical conception which organizes the entire vision of the world in the Middle Ages:
The paired sets of diametrical opposites into which medieval dualism divided the world were arranged vertically: heaven is opposed to earth, God to the devil, the ruler of the underworld. The concept of ‘up’ is connected to the concepts of nobility, purity, goodness, while the concept of ‘down’ is tinged with shades of baseness, coarseness, impurity, evil. The contrast between matter and spirit, between body and soul, also contains the antithesis of up and down. Spatial concepts were indissolubly bound up with religious and moral concepts. The ladder which Jacob saw in a vision with angels flocking up and down it between heaven and earth is a dominant leitmotif in the medieval world. This notion of going up and down is expressed with a particular force in Dante.102
This symbolic opposition of high/low even plays a role in the appreciation and classification of musical instruments in the Middle Ages.103
It is difficult to consider the concept of the ‘great chain of being’ which hierarchizes all categories of beings – from God(s) to minerals – without associating it with the hierarchical vision of the State which orders everything – roles and duties, living creatures, objects – from the most spiritual to the most material. This ‘great chain of being’ whose presence Lovejoy followed from Plato to the authors of the seventeenth century, not only finds its roots in societies dating back further than Greek society, but is still evident in the heart of our secularized societies. As we have seen, the first major traces of writing in Mesopotamia and in Egypt, several millennia before our time, present us with hierarchized lists of gods and men. Yet these lists show that a hierarchical and vertical vision was already present in those societies which are characterized by the establishment of separate powers (sacerdotal or secular). It is clear that the principle of classification is based on an opposition between the spiritual and the material. Gods are all spirit whereas human beings have a body and a soul and can be distinguished from each other according to their degree of proximity to the spiritual axis.
The shift from the relative horizontality of segmented societies towards a verticality of social relationships results in a hierarchical ordering of beings from the most spiritual to the least spiritual. This opposition corresponds in society to a social division of work between intellectuals and manual workers or between those who have the ideas and those who carry them out,
It is a necessary part of this centralization that the brain workers supplant the manual workers at headquarters as the controlling body. The king’s secretaries oust the king’s serjeants. In India, the brahman, the holder of the Word, rises to dominance, while such castes as potters drop into the position of poor relations. The Samoan master of the word has advanced beyond his Fijian compeer and got the country into his grasp. With every advance towards centralization the man who uses his hands is brought under subjection by the man who wields the word or the pen.104
Relationships between gods and men are formulated on the model of the relationship between dominators and dominated: legislators/the governed, intellectuals/manual workers, those who have the ideas and those who execute them, etc.
This hierarchical vision founded on the model of the division of labour between those who have the ideas and those who execute them, those who think and give orders and those who put them into effect and obey, still shapes our State-controlled societies. Bourdieu observes this at work in particular in bureaucratized societies:
This famous great chain of being, which is so recurrent in the texts, could have both metaphysical and political foundations, as often happens. In other words, the great chain of being is perhaps a political ontology. What I am describing here is the great chain of being whose summit is the king; then, from one (de)gradation to the next, you end up with the petty executant. I believe that this metaphor is there in the unconscious of everyone in bureaucratic societies. We all have in our unconscious this view of relations between model and execution.105
The series of pairs of opposites which echo each other: dominant/dominated, sacred/profane, heaven/earth, god(s)/men and women, high/low, superior/inferior, spiritual/material, big/small, etc., forms a framework which so completely encompasses our societies that it defies the positivist logic of the administration of proof. This symbolic matrix of perception, of ranking and of judgement is omnipresent. It is at work in the most ordinary utterances as well as in the most scholarly discourses on an ‘upper (or bourgeois) France’ and a ‘lower (or peripheral) France’, on the ‘high earners’ and the ‘people of modest means’; on the ‘social ladder’, the strategies of ‘climbing’, of ‘elevation’ and the individual trajectories of ‘decline’ or of ‘fall’; in the hierarchy of diplomas and of professions; in the implicit distribution of cultural institutions from the ‘high’ to the ‘low’ brow; in the separation of the soul (or the spirit) and the body;106 in the architecture and places which aim for majesty and lofty grandeur (from the New York sky-scrapers to the tower of Dubai and by way of all the cathedrals and pyramids107); in the way a company’s offices are arranged from highest to lowest; in the movements of the face (raise the head/bow the head; lift the eyes heavenwards, lower the eyes), in gestures (raise hands in prayer; the finger pointing upwards or downwards as in pictorial representations of the Last Judgement108) and postures (standing straight/stooping or bowing; in the action of bowing low in genuflexion or in an act of respect, in which an individual lowers himself, lies down, bends over, bows low as a sign of profound respect), etc.109
The arrival of separate institutions of power and the invention of transcendent gods are linked movements which have had enormous organizational and cognitive consequences, and which have continued to influence social structure even without us being aware of it. Bourdieu’s study on the lifestyles and mechanisms of distinction in industrialized, educated and bureaucratized societies is simply a historically orientated illustration of these very enduring phenomena which he refers to himself at the end of Distinction: ‘The matrix of all the commonplaces which find such ready acceptance because behind them lies the whole social order’. The sociologist describes: ‘The network of oppositions between high (sublime, elevated, pure) and low (vulgar, low, modest), spiritual and material, fine (refined, elegant) and coarse (heavy, fat, crude, brutal), light (subtle, lively, sharp, adroit) and heavy (slow, thick, blunt, laborious, clumsy), free and forced, broad and narrow […] has its ultimate source in the opposition between the “elite” of the dominant and the “mass” of the dominated’.110 He was, however, wrong to limit his study to ‘class-based societies’, which only appear at a relatively late stage in the history of humanity, when he could instead have chosen to link relations between dominated and dominators, which precede class relations by a long way, to the relationship between the sacred and the profane and to identify their origins in the establishment of separate institutions of power. Bourdieu somewhat awkwardly links the hypothesis of a ‘division into classes’ with examples of societies like those of the Middle Ages or those ancient Indo-European societies studied by Dumézil:
reduced to their formal structure, the same fundamental relationships, precisely those which express the major relations of order (high/low, strong/weak, etc.) reappear in all class-divided societies. And the recurrence of the triadic structure studied by George Dumézil, which Georges Duby shows in the case of feudal society to be rooted in the social structures it legitimates, may well be, like the invariant oppositions in which the relationship of domination is expressed, simply a necessary outcome of the intersection of the two principles of division which are at work in all class-divided societies – the division between the dominant and the dominated, and the division between the different fractions competing for dominance in the name of different principles, bellatores (warriors) and oratores (scholars) in feudal society, businessmen and intellectuals now.111
Ginzburg is one of the rare historians to have questioned the obviousness of the symbolic opposition of high/low:112 ‘Significantly, we say something is “elevated” or “superior” – or, inversely, “low” or “inferior” – without asking ourselves why those things to which we attribute greater value (goodness, force, etc.) must be placed in a high position.’113 In order to try to understand this, he links it to two great realities: that of the universal experience of the human child, who is fundamentally dependent on the adults (‘grown-ups’) who surround him and who is used to looking upwards to the adults who are both admired and feared at the same time, and that of the representation of divinities and of the institution of separate powers. On the first point, Ginzburg is right to point out that, amongst the most universally shared social experiences is that of the ‘little one’ (first baby and then child) who for a long period remains dependent on the ‘grown ups’ (adults in his entourage and family in particular): ‘Man’s long infancy, the unusual slowness of his physical and intellectual development, probably explains the immediate identification of what is “high” with force, goodness, and so on. To the child, lacking in resources of any kind, the all-powerful adult is the incarnation of every “value”’.114 But this experience would perhaps not be interpreted in this way, that is as the relationship between an inferior and a superior, between low and high, or between child to a grown up, if the social world did not support such a vision with its representations of the sacred and its institutions of power: ‘Nevertheless, all civilizations have located the source of cosmic power – god – in the heavens. Moreover, the symbolism of height is intimately related, as Indo-European languages still show, to political power’.115 Placing God in the heavens and the powerful ‘high-up’ in a hierarchized order are two movements which form part of the same reality.116
The image of a social world in the form of a space structured according to a high and a low, or the even simpler one of the social ladder, have been so commonly used in both the human and social sciences that we end up scarcely realizing that these images work for us all the more effectively because they have been inscribed in the many thousand-year-old symbolic matrix which has constantly imposed itself since societies first began to acquire separate institutions of power. The notion that there is a topology or an architecture of the social world is indissociably linked to the invention of the State, and researchers should be aware that this is the case rather than simply speaking in terms of the language of power. This was what David Hume was already doing in A treatise of human nature:
Any great elevation of place communicates a kind of pride or sublimity of imagination, and gives a fancy’d superiority over those that lie below; and, vice versa, a sublime and strong imagination conveys the idea of ascent and elevation. Hence, it proceeds, that we associate, in a manner, the idea of whatever is good with that of height, and of evil with lowness. Heaven is suppose’d to be above, and hell below. A noble genius is call’d an elevate and sublime one. Atque udam spernit humum fugiente penna [Horace, Odes, 111, 11, 23–24. ‘And she left the humid earth with a disdainful flight’]. On the contrary, a vulgar and trivial conception is stil’d indifferently low or mean. Prosperity is denominated ascent, and adversity, descent. Kings and princes are suppos’d to be plac’d at the top of human affairs; as peasants and day-labourers are said to be in the lowest stations. These methods of thinking, and of expressing ourselves, are not of so little consequence as they may appear at first sight […] Virtue, genius, power and riches are for this reason associated with height and sublimity; as poverty, slavery and folly are conjoined with descent and lowness.117
By writing this, Hume is proposing a dismantling of the political fiction on which many of our notions are based. Highlighting the existence of such a topology is the starting point for an analysis of the elementary structures of all separate power (whether sacerdotal or secular).
It is no coincidence that Hume chooses to use the aesthetic category of ‘sublime’, one Rudolf Otto associates with ‘numinous’. ‘Sublime’ comes from the Latin sublimis meaning ‘what is raised on high’ or ‘elevated’. As we will see,118 a whole topology of power comes into play in such a scheme of aesthetic appreciation: the oppositions between a sacred and a profane, between a high and a low, between a significant and an insignificant, etc., structure both perceptions and judgements in the field of artistic practices. Once painting, poetry or music were historically promoted to the status of liberal arts and, as a result, were distinguished from simple mechanical arts, they would occupy a high position in the structured space of social practices.
Scholium 2. When areas of learning gradually differentiate themselves from the first forms of religious knowledge (mythological or theological) and gain autonomy, they still remain profoundly linked to the political frameworks of the societies in which they develop. The major structural characteristics of power thus determine categories of perception of space, time, nature, etc.
In ancient Greece, many newly acquired areas of knowledge are indissociably linked to the context of the city-State. These include geometry, a science ‘entirely dominated by writing’119 which, with Euclid (third century BC) recognized ‘in the figure a universal character independent from the line and its empirical properties’,120 as is also the case of ‘law’ confronted with the different individual situations with which courts must deal. On the level of knowledge, the separation of an institution of power is the equivalent of the ‘theoria’ (that of Euclid). The same is true of geography and the invention of the map, with Anaximander (610–547 BC) and especially Eratosthenes (284–192 BC). The map, as Jacob makes clear, ‘presupposes a high degree of abstraction and above all offers a visible enactment of what, in reality, had always escaped the human gaze’.121 It assumes an almost divine, transcendent view, of the one who, ‘on high’, ‘dominates’ and can ‘contemplate’ everything. We can thus imagine the transformation of the relationship with space which occurs when, instead of the many real journeys which can be successively taken in the physical space, all potential journeys can be visualized on the graphic space. The map is to actual individual journeys what the concept is to multiple contextual significations, what the One is to the multiple, what grammar (which was also invented in ancient Greece) is to the utterances of real life, what the geometric figure is to empirical lines, what the law is to the cases to be dealt with or, finally, what the calendar (introduced around the seventh century) is to periods of time actually experienced.
It is also no coincidence that Bourdieu should intuitively link the Cartesian conception of space with the constitution of a totally monarchic State,122 associate theory and State viewpoint,123 or see in the Saussurean model, based on the opposition between language and speech and the idea of the execution or application of a model, a theory haunted by the vision of relations between dominants and dominated.124 Even the theory of the sign as a combination of a signifier (through sound or writing or acoustic image) and of a signified (concept, meaning, mental representation of something) reflects the opposition between the material and the spiritual, the vehicle of meaning and the meaning itself. It is as though the sign had, like the King, two bodies: a signifying body (material) and a signified body (spiritual). The material body is variable whereas the spiritual body stays the same, so that the same concept can be associated with different signifiers (e.g. sister, sœur, schwester, sorella, hermana, Irma, etc.).
Finally, no sociologist can ignore the fact that the macro sociological and objectivist vision, statistically based, implies this position of looking down on society which is that of the State. A separate institution of power can not only see things from above, but also has the technical means and the social force to count, register and categorize them. Scientific objectivism is therefore always linked to the State and, by the same token, to God.125
Scholium 3. We are familiar with the vivid way in which Jean-Luc Godard compared cinema to television: ‘When we go to the cinema, we raise our heads. When we watch television, we lower them.’ On the occasion of a public interview, we can even see the filmmaker illustrate his words with movements of his head and eyes. He was applauded by the audience without even needing to explain the reasons why it would be better to raise the head and the eyes than to lower them. The power of such a speech, together with the accompanying gestures, is linked to the fact that it condenses many thousands of years of mythology attached to the grammar of power.126
But what is Godard saying without needing to say it? That the cinema occupies in his mind a place equivalent to that of the transcendent gods and that television occupies the lowest position in terrestrial order. Culture raises and distinguishes (itself) from what is inferior and lowering. Moreover, the same director is quite at home with religious metaphor, declaring: ‘There is visible and invisible. If you only film the visible, you are making a television film.’
On the occasion of another interview, the film director once again draws comparison between the two forms of media: ‘A film is a projection which is bigger than you are, television is a projection which is smaller.’ High/low, big/small: this is the vocabulary of separated power. Through this defence of cinema in comparison with television, Godard is communicating with the Mesopotamians 3,000 years before our era, who placed their gods in the heavens, relying on the only hierarchy they knew which was the very terrestrial one of certain men (kings and priests) over other individuals. He is re-using the terms of a power structure to protect his art in relation to television. And, in so doing, he is unknowingly contributing to the perpetuation of the structures of power, to the repetition of this ancestral gesture which, for the dominated, consists in lifting his eyes to the heavens to admire, fear or seek the help and protection of the one who dominates. Raising yourself through art, admiring art, venerating it, setting it apart and turning it into something sacred are all expressions and actions which go back to a relationship of domination.
It seems to me, Usbek, that we never judge anything without secretly considering it in relation to our own self. I am not surprised that negroes paint the devil with a complexion of dazzling whiteness, and their gods as black as coal; that the Venus of certain races has breasts that hang down to her thighs; and finally, that all idolaters have represented their gods in the likeness of men, and have ascribed to them all their own passions. It has been very well said, that if triangles were to make to themselves gods, they would give them three sides.
Montesquieu, Persian Letters, 1721. Letter 59
10. Mythology and theology are deeply political fictions. God, or the gods, are the logical solutions to a political problem.
Scholium 1. Mythology and theology are the earliest forms of ‘literary creation’ (fictional) which allow us to speak about the real world in a manner which makes it seem as though we are speaking about something else entirely. Durkheim suggests this is because ‘social action works in circuitous and obscure ways’ and that it uses ‘psychic mechanisms that are too complex’, that it is impossible for ‘the ordinary observer’ to know the precise origins of the social influences he is subject to. Projecting these social forces into spirits, supernatural forces or divinities, is a first step – quite a sophisticated and circuitous one, all things considered – in objectivizing them: ‘So he must construct piecemeal the notion of those powers with which he feels connected. And from this we can see how he was led to imagine them in alien forms and transfigure them through thought’.127 But what is transposed from the real world into the realm of myth or theology, is not a vague ‘society’ but power, force and the sense of ‘feeling possessed and led by some external power’.128
Scholium 2. If this ‘feeling’ or this sense of dependence, of ‘being led’ is also universal, and forms a powerful element of magical, mythical and theological discourses, it is undoubtedly because one of the universal properties of the experience of human beings lies in the dependence of the child in relation to his parents, or, at least, to the adults who are in charge of his upbringing:
I suggest to you that what makes and keeps a man a social animal is not some herd instinct, but the sense of dependence in the innumerable forms that it takes. The process of socialisation begins on the first day of an infant’s life and it has to learn that it both can and must depend on its parents. From them it has comfort and succour; but it must submit also to their control. What I am calling dependence always has these two sides. We can face life and its chances and difficulties with confidence when we know that there are powers, forces and events on which we can rely, but we must submit to the control of our conduct by rules which are imposed. The entirely asocial individual would be one who thought that he could be completely independent, relying only on himself, asking for no help and recognising no duties.129
This hypothesis about the very general effects of the essentially human situation of the dependence of children on adults, a dependence linked to the fact that the young human is socially premature and owes his survival and his development to the scaffolding130 of the adult bearers of culture, is congruent with certain psychological or psychoanalytical studies. Thus, what the psychoanalyst John Bowlby calls the ‘attachment relationship’ is in fact this same link of dependence evoked by Radcliffe-Brown: ‘The human infant comes into the world genetically biased to develop a set of behavioural patterns that, given an appropriate environment, will result in his keeping more or less close proximity to whoever cares for him, and this tendency to maintain proximity serves the function of protecting the mobile infant and growing child from a number of dangers’.131 The child is in an ambivalent relationship with the external powers represented by his parents: he depends on them fundamentally and learns that he must bow to desires which are not his own; but he also knows that by appealing to them (crying, smiling, screaming, etc.) in certain circumstances, he can hope to obtain, as if by magic, what he wants. This structure of the relationship of dependence and of love for the person on whom we depend is an invariant of inter-human relationships, which, however, takes different forms according to the modes of behaviour of the adults and the culture they carry with them.
The fact that the paternal figure – God the Father – has been clearly mobilized in order to talk about god in monotheist religions is, from this point of view, deeply significant, in the same way that the shift of this paternal figure, from the model of the tyrant feared by everyone to that of the protecting and infinitely good father, is linked to the transformations of the structures of authority in the whole of society as well as in the family.
Scholium 3. If the Mesopotamian institutions of power can insist on collective labour to set up a network of canals, which involves digging many kilometres and re-grouping the population, making men work within the temple workshops; if these institutions can take over and rent lands, etc., it is because all of this is done in the service of different divinities. If the Egyptian pharaoh can reduce individuals to slaves in order to exploit the mines, quarries, royal domains and undertake major construction work, it is because he draws his power from the gods. If Mesopotamian and Egyptian institutions of power can impose a tax system, it is equally for the same reasons.
If Marx was right to detect the hand of men behind the gods, he probably did not place enough stress on the fact that the product of overwork cannot belong directly to dominant groups in these social formations. Thus, when he wondered who owned our activity, were we to be estranged from it and it did not by rights belong to us, he replied in the following manner:
The gods? To be sure, in the earliest times the principal production (for example, the building of temples, in Egypt, India or Mexico) appears to be in the service of the gods, and the product belongs to the gods. However, the gods on their own were never the lords of labour. No more was nature. And what a contradiction it would be if, the more man subjugated nature by his labour and the more the miracles of the gods were rendered superfluous by the miracles of industry, the more men were to renounce the joy of production and the enjoyment of the produce in favour of these powers. The alien being, to whom labour and the produce of labour belongs, in whose service labour is provided, can only be man himself. If the product of labour does not belong to the worker, if it confronts him as an alien power, this can only be because it belongs to some other man than the worker. If the worker’s activity is a torment to him, to another it must be delight and his life’s joy. Not the gods, not nature, but only man himself can be this alien power over man.132
What Marx said was valid but he still perceived these gods too much as simple veils thrown over ‘objective social relations’.
Marx’s materialism prevents him looking closely at the construction and the logic of this religious alienation. By confining himself to pointing out the action of men behind divine figures, he misses what is profoundly original and sophisticated about this invention of transcendent gods. Indeed, while retaining a certain detachment from the objective, it is important to be able to look with astonishment, and even a little admiration, at the collective solution societies bring to the problem of the legitimacy of power, of the origin of the world and of humanity, and of the meaning of collective existence. The invention of gods is typical of ‘that kind of man-made irreality’, that is to say ‘that strange construction of a human mind which finally becomes slave to its own fictions’133 referred to by Kantorowicz on the subject of theological-political thinking in the Middle Ages.
In Mesopotamia, around the third millennium and perhaps even earlier than that, the invention of transcendent gods is a way of both supporting and legitimizing separate institutions of power and of producing a knowledge of the world, as the Assyrian specialist Jean Bottéro emphasizes:
The image of royal power, transposed into the supernatural world, was thus not a simple matter of style, a lyrical metaphor, but a real analogy, i.e. a means of knowing: the gods were indeed the authors and the governors of the universe and of each of its elements, as the kings owned and were responsible for their territory and for all of its resources and each of its subjects. This proportional equivalence was at the centre and the foundation of cosmogony and anthropogony and, in the end, of the entire Mesopotamian theology about the relations between man and the sacred.134
11. Man created God in his image: the gods are the idealized transpositions of the powerful figures, men of power: king of kings, king, prince, lord, emperor, etc., but also father, as the dominant figure within the family structure.
Scholium 1. Xenophanes (around 570–480 BC) already observed the fact that humans have always represented their gods in their own image: ‘Ethiopians’, he wrote, ‘say their gods are snub-nosed and black; Thracians that theirs are blue-eyed and red-haired’ (fragment 16) and ‘And if horses, or oxen or lions had hands or could draw with their hands and accomplish such work as men, horses would draw the figures of the gods as similar to horses, and the oxen as similar to oxen, and they would make the bodies of the sort which each of them had’ (fragment 15). But the image is even more precise than that. In the history of religions, the shape or the face assumed by God (or by the gods in polytheistic societies) varies depending on the nature of power. God is the powerful one, the dominant figure par excellence: he is the All-Powerful. If we overturn theology, in the way Marx did by reviving Hegelian dialectics, we understand that theological fictions are in fact part of a process in which figures of human power are idealized and transposed. Indeed, contrary to what the sacred texts claim, it is not God who created man in his image but indeed man who created god in his own. More precisely, man created God in the image of the most powerful of men. Once this idealization has been effected, humans must necessarily be seen as imperfect beings. Yet it is they themselves who have invented this idealized fiction and who, subsequently, use it to think of themselves as imperfect beings. The ideal figure of the dominant being, God serves as the yardstick for all things human, in spite of the fact that he is only a human creation.
Certain individuals can approach perfection, God is infinitely perfect. Certain individuals are sometimes very powerful, God, for his part is the All-Powerful, the most powerful of the powerful, the ‘king of kings’. Philo of Alexandria (12 BC–54 AD), in his De specialibus legibus (The special laws, I, 113–31), writes that God is the ‘King of kings’ (basileus basileon), comparable to the ‘great king’ of Persia (I, 18). And just as, according to him, homage must only be paid to the great king, but not to his subordinates, God alone must be honoured and never ‘the subordinates and porters’ (I, 31).135 God is thus clearly represented in the image of kings. This is a sublime, purified, idealized, generalized, intensified form of all powers, but notably of the power of creation. God is omnipotent, omniscient, infinite perfection. The most powerful State or sovereign cannot have the strength, the power, the vision, the wisdom, the creative capacity of a God who creates everything in the world, who is omnipotent and omniscient. In monotheist religions, God is the idealized absolute power. In response to the question ‘what is God and what is power?’ Valéry’s response was as follows: ‘One is the strongest absolutely (by definition). The other is the strongest, pragmatically.’136
Scholium 2. In Mesopotamia, Assyriologists observe the process of transposition of the realities of power to the world of divinities. The gods emerge more clearly as super-kings, rulers who would have no limits to their powers. They are, in a sense, idealized sovereigns, sublimate and absolute:
In order to represent the supernatural, the sacred, the object of their religious sentiments […] the ancient Mesopotamians simply transposed the image of what they knew here on earth to be the highest, their ‘ruling class’ as we would say, but by putting it, so to speak, in the superlative. By their function and by the life-style to which they adhered, Mesopotamian monarchs were more powerful and more lucid than their people and lived a life that was much less worrisome and more opulent. Their subjects suffered to produce this life for them, in order to allow them in a way, to devote their undivided attention to governing. In the same way they postulated an elite on a higher level that was even more sovereign, even more clairvoyant and whose life was so much more serene and blessed that it was endless – thus stressing its absolute superiority.137
At the same time that they emphasize the ‘distance between gods and men’138 and place the gods in a transcendent position, the members of these societies reclaim control of their destiny by putting themselves in a position where they can communicate with them or decipher their intentions. These gods are idealized as the essence of what even the most powerful human beings cannot be: immortal, infinitely powerful and supremely intelligent. The gods are ultra-powerful sovereigns. Enlil is presented, in a liturgical poem composed in Sumerian towards the end of the third millennium, as a being who is Lord and King, great and powerful, who has authority, whose decisions are followed without question, who decides the destiny of each individual, who is all-seeing and all-knowing, who is seated on a sacred and sublime throne and who dominates heaven and earth.139 The same applies to Marduk, in a text written in Akkadian from the end of the second millennium (a terrifying lord, who imposes his force onto all and who is of ‘unsurpassed wisdom’). As Bottéro makes clear, the texts that have been handed down to us ‘all reflect the same feelings of admiration, of respect and of fear – in fact of a certain transcendence […] But all of them are considered to be sublime beings, above all dominant and imposing. Before them, one bows down, one trembles.’140 The Mesopotamian gods are feared rather than loved by the faithful.
Scholium 3. A critical reading of the major work on the sacred, written by Rudolf Otto,141 the great Lutheran theologian whose speciality is the study of comparative mysticism (Eastern-Western), portrays a sense of the power which can be glimpsed behind the theological vocabulary aimed as describing the sense of the sacred.
Initially published in 1917, the book is at the same time idealistic (it is more interested in ideas than in practice, in emotions rather than facts, and it makes the category of ‘sacred’ an a priori category of the mind, a ‘disposition originating from the mind itself’), universalist (he unveils a largely ahistorical vision, even if it is clearly the Western civilizational eras which are, implicitly, largely focused on142), individualistic (he considers individual emotions as realities detached from any collective fact) and distinctly Christianity centred (he makes Christianity the most complete model of the sacred143). For all these reasons, Otto’s work is the kind of book typically rejected out of hand by social science researchers. However, in spite of all its limitations, if taken for what it is, that is to say an attempt at a structural analysis of the invariant traits and the opposing pairs which make up the symbolic universe of the great monotheist religions, rather than for what it aspires to be, it proves to be very useful.
The attitude to the sacred (or what he also refers to by the term ‘numinous’) is entirely characteristic of the relationship between subordinate and superior, dominated and dominant. First of all, the basic element of religion is, according to Otto, ‘holy respect’, a ‘respect which inclines before the most sacred of values’144 and which makes us ‘prostrate ourselves before God’.145 The ‘praise full of respect’ is the attitude which is most appropriate in the face of a ‘superior power’, but a power which ‘possesses’ and which is ‘worthy’ of being respected.146
God is characterized by his ‘inaccessibility’, but represents above all ‘might’, ‘power’ and, ultimately, ‘majestas’.147 The holy ‘fascinates’, ‘charms’, ‘attracts’, ‘seduces’;148 it is an ‘object of research and desire and yearning’ and something ‘man seeks to gain possession [of]’.149 But it is also associated with ‘fear’ (‘mystical dread’, ‘fear of God’) felt by the weak in the presence of what he perceives as infinitely more powerful than him and which ‘paralyzes’ him.150 A prayer addressed to God and quoted by the author refers to ‘fear mingled with respect in the face of all that you have created, so that all your creatures fear you and all beings bow down before you, joining together to do your will with all their might, as we acknowledge, Jehovah, our God, that domination belongs to you, that power lies in your hand’.151 When it comes to the profane, the emotions felt are feelings of fear, of self-effacement, of smallness, of weakness and of self-deprecation.152 In the Old Testament, God is ‘conceived as all-powerful, goodness, wisdom and fidelity’, but he is also characterized by his ‘wrath’, his ‘fury’ and his ‘anger’. Jehovah is a ‘devouring fire’. He is a god ‘acting according to the impulses of his nature, animated by violent “passions”’.153 He is represented as the dominant, capable of infinite love but capable too of unleashing his anger. Otto emphasizes the absolute arbitrariness of God that certain doctrines defend, making of him ‘a capricious despot’.154
A systematic reading of Otto’s book enables us to identify the lexicon and the grammar of the sacred and the profane:
| Oppositions supporting the opposition sacred/profane | Action of the profane in its relationship to the sacred | Action of the sacred in its relationship to the profane |
| Dominant/Dominated | Respect | Submit |
| Superior/Inferior | Obey | Order |
| High/Low | Submit | Impose |
| Grandeur/Smallness | Bow to | Punish |
| Power/Powerlessness | Kneel down | Look down on |
| Strength/Weakness | Self-efface | Remain indifferent |
| Splendour/Misery | Distance oneself | Ignore |
| Legitimate/Illegitimate | Admire | Paralyze |
| Noble/Ignoble | Desire | Impress |
| Worthy/Unworthy | Covet | Fascinate |
| Extraordinary/Ordinary | Pay particular attention | Captivate |
| Sublime/Non-sublime | to | Charm |
| Significant/Insignificant | Treat with care, | Attract |
| Value/Lack of value | precaution or deference | Bewitch |
| Impressive/unimpressive | Be impressed | Enchant |
| Tremble | Put a spell on | |
| Fill with wonder | ||
| Seduce | ||
| Delight |
We can clearly see that, in fact, theology simply makes absolute the behavioural traits of dominators and dominated as observed in the inter-human relationships which form within State-governed societies. The superior becomes absolutely superior, the Very-High, the All-Powerful, the absolute sovereignty or the sovereign power, and the inferior is reduced to nothing (‘I am nothing, you are everything’).
Otto adds to his reflection an extremely fundamental remark to the effect that the dominated is only dominated if something within him inclines him to see in the dominator some incarnation of a value in which he believes. On the basis of a dispositionalist and somewhat innatist view, owing little to sociology, he emphasizes the importance of innate dispositions which mean that only those who are impressionable – that is to say, disposed to be so, can effectively be impressed. The sociologist would want to point out that these dispositions are by no means natural, but are the product of implicit or explicit socialization. The impression ‘presupposes something capable of receiving impressions. The mind is not susceptible to impressions, if in itself it is only a “tabula rasa”’. In the sense in which we use the word here, we do not mean by ‘impression’ merely the impressio which, in the theory of the Sensationalist school, throws the perception into the mind and leaves its trace there. To be ‘impressed’ by someone, in the sense we use the term here, means rather to discover and recognize in them their particular importance, to be struck by it and to bow down before it. Yet this is only possible if there is in ourselves an element of cognition, comprehension, which reaches out to the object and comes from ‘the inner spirit’. In Schleiermacher’s language, the revelation is the intuition which reaches out in anticipation. Music can only be understood by someone who has a sense of music; none but he is capable of receiving an ‘impression’ from it. And so, to every kind of real impression there is a particular kind of congeniality, of affinity between the subject and the object which produces the impression. Only he who is verbis conformis, as Luther says, understands the word. Nemo audit verbum, nisi spiritu intus docente. Or, as Augustus says in his Confessions (10.6) ‘[created things] speak to everyone, but only those who compare this language with the voice of truth which speaks within them understand’.155
Scholium 4. A similar reading of the Catechism of the Catholic Church156 confirms the interpretation of a transfiguration of the relationships of domination into theological language. Inversing the real logic of things, the catechism sees in human nature the reflection of its creator. If there is grandeur, beauty, goodness or perfection amongst human beings, it is because they are in the image of their creator: ‘§41 All creatures bear a certain resemblance to God, most especially man, created in the image and likeness of God. The manifold perfection of creatures – their truth, their goodness, their beauty all reflect the infinite perfection of God. Consequently, we can name God by taking his creatures’ perfections as our starting point “for from the greatness and beauty of created things comes a corresponding perception of their creator” (13.5)’ Presenting the creator as ‘§42 God “the inexpressible, the incomprehensible, the invisible, the ungraspable” (Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Anaphora)’, it even points out the limits of the representation of this God by men. Created by men, the idealized figure of God is meant to be difficult for his creators to represent, describe or express. However, as with all idealization, God serves as a yardstick to measure and evaluate men: ‘§43 We must recall that “between Creator and creature no similitude can be expressed without implying an even greater dissimilitude”, (Lataran Council 1V: DS 806) and that “concerning God, we cannot grasp what he is, but only what he is not, and how other things stand in relation to him” (St. Thomas Aquinas SCG 1, 30).’ And how does man see himself in comparison with God? Small and weak (‘§208 Faced with God’s fascinating and mysterious presence, man discovers his own insignificance’).
For, if God is in the image of man, he is first and foremost in the image of the most powerful of men. In the Apocalypse, the royal power of God is omnipresent and makes itself felt through the use of an appropriate vocabulary borrowed from Hellenistic monarchies: there is mention of the throne of God, of his sceptre, his reign, of the fact that he is master-of-all, lord or king and that, in his presence, man must adopt an attitude of deference and submission (bowing down, adoring, acclaiming), etc.157
The texts cited by the Catechism refer to ‘§223 God’s greatness and majesty’, to an omniscient god (‘§223 “Behold, God is great, and we know him not” [Job 36:26]’, to an omnipotent or ‘all-powerful’ creator (‘§268 God who created everything also rules everything and can do everything’ [Gen.1:1; Jn 1:3], to a lord who reigns over everything and everyone (‘§269 The Holy Scriptures repeatedly confess the universal power of God. He is called the “Mighty One of Jacob” [Gen 49: 24; Is 1:24], the “LORD of hosts”, the “strong and mighty one” [Pss 24:8–10]. If God is Almighty “in Heaven and on earth” [Pss 135:6], it is because he made them. Nothing is impossible for God [cf. Jer 32:17; Lk 1:37] who disposes of his works according to his will [cf. Jer 27:5]; He is the Lord of the universe, whose order he established and which remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal; he is the master of history, governing hearts and events in keeping with his will [cf. Esth 4:17b; Prov 21:1; Tob 13:2]: “It is always in your power to show great strength and who can withstand the strength of your arm?” [Wis 11:21]’).158 Sovereign, lord, God is also an idealized Father, both authoritarian and protective: ‘§270 God is the Father Almighty, whose fatherhood and power shed light on one another: God reveals his fatherly omnipotence by the way he takes care of our needs (cf. MT 6:32): by the filial adoption that he gives us (“I will be a father to you, and you shall be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty”: 2 Cor 6:18).’
In the image of dominators who are endowed with authority recognized by the group, who can carry out performative acts, or in other words, do things with words (transform wine into the blood of Christ, dub a man so that he becomes a knight, name a minister, crown a king, etc.), God is the one who makes whatever he wishes happen (‘§275 With Job, the just man, we confess: “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted” (Job 42:2)’). Whatever he decrees is immediately followed by its creation: ‘God said: “Let there be light! And there was light”’; ‘§292 “There exists but one God … he is the Father, God, the Creator, the author, the giver of order. He made all things by himself, that is, by his Word and by his Wisdom” (S. Irenaeus, haeres. 2, 30:9).’ And, above all, the texts insist on the fact that God creates a radically new reality out of nothing: ‘§296 God creates freely “out of nothing” (DS800; 3025).’ For the model on the basis of which God is perceived is that of the dominant, the powerful, the one who is authorized by the group to carry out magical acts (the rites), and not the simple craftsman: ‘§296 If God had drawn the world from pre-existent matter, what would be so extraordinary in that? A human artisan makes from a given material whatever he wants, while God shows his power by starting from nothing to make all he wants (St Theophilus of Antioch, Ad Autolycum 11:4; Ps. 6:1052).’
12. The existence of gods and the relationships of subordination they maintain between themselves, are directly linked to the interests of those who created them and worship them.
Scholium 1. When powers are dispersed, each specific power has its own specific god or gods. Religious polytheism is a consequence of the coexistence of non-coordinated centres of power within a central unity:
The gods of polytheism certainly represent ideas and virtues like those of justice or prudence, but they also represent interests. This is what explains that the gods have a ‘functional’ character. Thus, in Rome, each family had its own divinities (the domestic lares), a town owned its protecting god, as well as other gods, such as the Chthonic divinities or local gods (inhabiting springs or forests) or even, as Usener explains, gods of the moment who were there to protect a specific and occasional process or manipulation. All these gods are the protectors of the individual interests of those who worship them. Moreover, they were not only associated with events considered to be benevolent and joyful, but to all the vicissitudes of life, such as war, poverty or want.159
Some anthropologists have pointed to the link between political organization and divine organization. Radcliffe-Brown, in particular, emphasized the importance of La Cité antique (1864), a book by Fustel de Coulanges, which established the ‘correspondence between religion and the constitution of society in ancient Greece and Rome’, and the fact that ‘in the course of history the two changed together’.160 Hocart also noted that ‘the human organization reflects the divine, and vice-versa, since the two are one’.161
Scholium 2. The life of the gods in Mesopotamia or in Egypt is linked to the political life of the city-States. If we follow the historical evolution of these two civilizations, we can clearly see how the gods are hierarchized as a result of military and political victories, how in particular the principal god of a dominant city becomes the god of an Empire and how the other gods disappear or occupy subordinate positions within the hierarchy of the gods (as monarchic power is consolidated, the number of gods diminishes, going from almost two thousand to a few hundred towards 1200 BC). As Bottéro writes, ‘It would become increasingly clear that the system of organization of the pantheon, vis-à-vis the world in itself, was in all aspects nothing but the magnified reflection of the political system. It tended progressively towards an increasingly centralized monarchical power’.162 But, more than a ‘magnified reflection’, this pantheon is indissociably linked to a political practice which is organized through this conception of the existence of gods who make the world, who write the world. The more power has been concentrated and centralized, the more a god asserts his authority on the whole world and on other gods. Monotheism and monarchy, polytheism and polyarchy are two sides of the same coin. The Assyriologist historian shows us in this way that the ‘principle of royal power’ in Mesopotamia is ‘simply transposed from earth to the supernatural universe by mythological reflection’.163
Studies in Assyriology, Egyptology and anthropology show that Schmitt was indeed correct in his observation that ‘The correspondence of theological and metaphysical world-pictures with the picture of the State is best grasped within the history of human thought. Its simplest examples are in the structural relationships of ideas between monarchy and monotheism, constitutionalism and deism’.164
Through peaceful integration, or more often through military conquest, the dominated communities are forced to adopt the divinities of the dominators. But, in order to avoid offending sensibilities and to remain on good terms with those who have been annexed, the dominator for his part, feels obliged to give their divinities a place in the shared system of cultural references. The organization of shared cultural references always reflects the logic of the structure of the balance of power within the different communities. Each new conquest of territories is an opportunity to reorganize the pantheon of gods. The god of those who dominate dominates the gods of the defeated, as is evident from the revised lists of Mesopotamian gods when the city-States became integrated into a much wider territory, or the reorganization of the Roman pantheon was open to divinities of conquered countries. In both Egypt and Mesopotamia, we find hierarchical lists which classify all the gods from the ‘highest’ to the ‘lowest’. Thus, the Instruction of Amenope includes a list which begins ‘at the top with the gods, demi-gods and the king; it continues with humanity beginning with the most elevated ranks and going down to the most humble trade of the free man, that of the shepherd’.165
The hierarchical lists of gods are reviewed with each political development. With each conquest resulting in the submission of one city-State to another, the local gods of the conquered city are placed in a subordinate position in relation to the principal god or gods of the conquering city.
When these villages became organized into larger political units around a city, the divine personalities must have undergone a mixing analogous to that of the political authorities: the principal god of the city became in a sense the head of the supernatural powers, and grouped around him were the deities of lesser importance, who became in this way assimilated to the high functionaries, in the image of the court and of the royal household. And the same process continued to the benefit of the capital city and its ruler when the cities were organized into kingdoms.166
This concentration of power, with the accompanying concentration of myths and rites, implies a continuous task of rewriting by religious personnel. This almost leads to a monotheism. So, in Mesopotamia, at the end of the third millennium, the god Enlil was regarded as the sovereign of gods and of men, and later, under Hammurabi, the same was true of Marduk. Many poems praise their intelligence, their strength, their authority, their transcendence, etc.
In Mesopotamia we find what has been named in a completely anachronistic fashion, ‘legal codes’: fragments of the ‘code’ of Ur-Nammu who founded the third dynasty of Ur around 2080 BC, fragments of the legislation of the town of Esnunna around 1950–1900 BC, fragments of the ‘code’ of Lipit-Istar, king of Isin around 1875, and particularly of the ‘code’ of Hammurabi (1792–1750 BC), the subject of a great deal of commentary. All these royal law-makers invoke the patronage of the gods. So, for example, the stele of Hammurabi shows the god Marduk dictating the law to the king who, in his prologue to his ‘code’ declares himself ‘appointed by the gods for the military glory and the political success of his country […] dedicated to the government and the prosperity of his people by the same gods’.167 At the top of the stele, we can see the god Marduk presenting the king with the insignia of royal power. Hammurabi is at the head of a sort of empire which has taken over from various rival city-states. The local princes have had to give up their positions in favour of governors appointed by the king, who, at the same time, imposes the god Marduk, thereby supplanting the gods of former cities, demoted in the hierarchized list of divinities. The change of divine references, and specifically, the movement of gods within the hierarchy, therefore always closely follows any transformations in relationships of domination between people or city-States. To paraphrase Weber,168 it could be said that, throughout the course of history, groups or communities have therefore often struggled for the monopoly of the legitimate reference, or for the legitimate imposition of the legitimate reference.
From integration to integration, from conquest to conquest, we trace in the history of societies the progressive rise of a polytheism of hierarchized divine references, then of a monotheism which assumes a common unique reference (a God, a sacred text, etc.). Depending on how concentrated the power is, the organization can take the form of a federation of societies which conserve a relative autonomy and their gods, while still being incorporated into a central power; or else that of a single society within which each group occupies a position within the hierarchy and only refers to a single and unique God. Of course, these two major scenarios exist in contrast with societies where the power is so little concentrated, so limited by the community, that it is no longer really possible to refer to a government or State:
We can thus distinguish two types of kings: kings who include in their divinity the divinity of their chieftains and kings who are one indivisible and only god, and whose chieftains consequently cannot be different gods, but only dimmer reflections of the same gods as their liege. These monotheistic kings belong to the ethical rights, for monotheism, centralization and moralization go very much together. Must we recognize a third type of society – in which there are no kings, that is overlords compounded of the deity of their vassals but only heads of families or clans, all coequal, and each in charge of certain objectives, none responsible for the whole? Aranda, Koryak and Winnebago societies seem to answer this description […].169
The sacred speaks to us of power, power speaks the language of the sacred. This is what Weber explained, analysing in a purely materialistic way the ‘monotheistic, and hence necessarily universalist transition’ of the Egyptian pharaoh Amenhotep IV (around 1372–1354 BC) as the ‘practical need for a monarch at the head of a bureaucratic unified State to break the preponderance of priests by eliminating the multiplicity of their gods, and to restore the ancient power of the defiled Pharaoh by elevating the monarch to the position of supreme solar priest’.170 Under Hammurabi in Mesopotamia, around 1750 BC, Marduk, the god of the town of Babylon, became a sort of god of empire, in the same way that Hammurabi reigned over an important kingdom and the town of Babylon became the capital of the kingdom.
Successive theological fictions are the transpositions of entirely prosaic political realities. They are indirect and reworked forms of knowledge which speak about the world without really appearing to do so. Considered in this manner, they are, for the historian, anthropologist or sociologist, a way of understanding the effort made by all societies to examine their global organization and, more precisely, the way they choose to organize power. Hocart had a good understanding of the political nature and issues of the different types of religious representation. Referring to societies with a king, he asserts:
He is expected only to carry out in society the same functions which God exercises in the universe. All this may sound metaphysical, but the sequel will show we are not dealing with metaphysics but with practical politics. The whole struggle of monotheism v polytheism is meaningless as long as we look upon it as a conflict of philosophies. What does it matter whether there be one god or many? Because by abolishing minor gods you abolish minor sovereignties: monotheism means monarchy; polytheism means polyarchy.171
This acknowledgement of a link between the celestial world and the world of terrestrial power is confirmed in the work of researchers specializing in diverse periods or areas of civilization and between whom there is little communication. Each can give the impression that the phenomena they study are unique to the society or the era in question, whereas in fact what they are describing and analysing are variations of much more widespread phenomena. For example, the analysis undertaken by Gurevich on the different categories of medieval culture merely returns to work carried out in their own fields by anthropologists, Assyriologists, Egyptologists or Indo-European specialists:
With the transition from paganism to Christianity medieval man’s conception of space underwent a radical structural transformation. Cosmic space, social space and ideological space were all given hierarchic structure. The earthly feudal system is an isomorph of the hierarchy of God’s creatures and the ranks of the angels; and while the lexicon of relations between lord and vassal is permeated with religious terminology, the vocabulary of the theological tracts is not infrequently laced with terms borrowed from feudal and monarchic procedure. All relationships are vertical, running from above to below; all beings are distributed on various planes according to their degree of perfection which depends on their relative proximity to God.172
It is, of course, the relations of human power which lie behind theological fictions, but when celestial transpositions of relations of power are held by sacerdotal institutions, we inevitably see an interplay of reciprocal influences.
13. Ever since the major shift representing the separation of an institution of power, the history of societies is that of the strategies and struggles which individuals or social groups implement in order to take control of or to transform the sacred.
Scholium 1. The actors of temporal power and the actors of spiritual power vie for the control of the source of the sacred. Each seeks to be on the side of the sacred in order to be in a position to dominate the profane. In the course of this long history, a range of strategies have been deployed to accumulate power and to make use of spiritual power in order to legitimize temporal power, to seize temporal power as spiritual power, or to make temporal power the sole autonomous source of legitimacy.
Scholium 2. In certain acephalic and largely undifferentiated societies, we sometimes see the beginnings of a differentiation of political and religious functions, where, for example, the shaman is not necessarily the chief. This differentiation triggers clashes or tensions between the two functions which subsequently intensify as the differentiation and consolidation of the two major forms of power evolve. The history of State societies can therefore be read as the history of the different combinations of spiritual and temporal power made possible over the course of history. It is this reading that Weber chooses in his sociology of religions which is indissociably linked to a sociology of power.
Depending on the relative strength of the two powers and the nature of their relationship to each other, the overall configuration of power which is then put in place, alters. The major distinction made by Weber between hierocracy and caesaropapism lies in the fact that, in the former, spiritual power dominates temporal power either relatively (when it brings its power of legitimation), or absolutely (when it replaces it and exerts the temporal power as sacerdotal power, in which case we are dealing with a theocracy), whereas, in the second case, temporal power dominates spiritual power:
In all cases, the relationship between political power and religious power is very different depending on whether the master: [1] is legitimized by the priests, either in so far as he is an incarnation, or because he corresponds to divine will; [2] is part of the sacerdotal institution, and therefore also confers, in his role as a priest, the royal functions – these are both examples of ‘hierocracy’; or finally [3] possesses equally, in his role as a secular sovereign and by virtue of his own specific right, supreme power in religious matters: this is caesaropapism. Wherever it existed in this sense, ‘hierocracy’ exerted a profound influence on the way the administration was structured (we can only speak of ‘theocracy’ strictly speaking in the second case).173
The general configuration of forces does not take an infinite number of forms but rather opens the way for a relatively limited number of possibilities: a more or less balanced conjunction of the sacerdotal and of the secular, a (more or less complete) subordination of the sacerdotal to the secular, or a (more or less complete) subordination of the secular to the sacerdotal.
The sociologist emphasizes that, as soon as the two spiritual and temporal functions are supported by strong institutions (with a ‘specific bureaucratic system’ and a ‘specific teaching system’174), it is very difficult for either of the two powers to completely dominate the other: theocracy and caesaropapism are ideal type models which occur relatively rarely in history. It is therefore the ‘compromise’ scenario that has dominated in history as long as the two types of power have maintained a certain social strength: ‘A compromise of this kind guaranteed each their sphere of power, while at the same time granting each a certain influence in the other’s sphere of power, for example, by allowing the secular power the right to make certain ecclesiastical appointments and allowing the ecclesiastic power to have charge of State educational institutions’.175 The ‘sacred status’ or royalty was, from the high Middle Ages to the eve of the French Revolution, as Schmitt explains, ‘in a subtle rivalry with the ecclesiastic sacredness’:
The stages are familiar, from the VIII century (apparition of the sacre and of the anointing of the French king on the model of the Davidic anointing), the XIII century (the regular institution of the ‘royal miracle’, canonization of Saint Louis), the end of the Middle Ages (definition, on the model of Roman law, of the crime of lèse-majesté, sanctification of the ‘mystical body’ of the king: cf. E. Kantorowicz), right up to modern absolutism (with, for example, the assimilation of the monarch’s rising in the morning and retiring in the evening with the movements of the sun …). The sacred status of the king exerts its influence on the places where his power is embodied (the palace, the bedroom) and on his memory (the necropolis: as in the Escorial) as well as on the officials who serve him.176
14. Even if they are political fictions, the great monotheist religions are based on a grammar which can give rise to contrasting usages: from those most hostile to temporal powers (from the prophets to the liberation theologians) to those most inclined to legitimize and comply (for example, the teachings of St Paul).
Scholium. Given that usages of the great religious grammars can vary, opposing interpretations of religious reality can emerge. In response to the question of what is the function of the religious, for example, the answer may well favour one type of usage to the detriment of another. One thing that is certain, and which it is difficult to argue with, is the fact that theological fictions, as a form of idealized transpositions of the political order, introduce gods drawn in the image of powerful terrestrial figures but who are more powerful than the most powerful of these. It is on the relationship between this image and the realities of temporal power that the main differences of usage come into play: either God is seen as the great legitimator of all temporal powers, given that he is perceived as being the origin of everything and that nothing escapes his will, or he is an idealized figure who can be looked to for support in order to challenge temporal power. In the first case, the analyst could say that religion provides legitimacy for the dominant. In the second case, analysis could highlight the gap between theological fiction and the reality of power, and the fact that all forms of resistance can exploit this gap by drawing on the idealized figure of power to criticize the temporal powers.
In terms of the legitimization of temporal powers, Saint Paul’s writings represent the ideal type of this usage of religious grammar. In his letter addressed to the Romans, Paul exhorts the Christians to submit to temporal powers, since these were put in place by God and their authority comes through him:
Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but that of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordonnance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good and thou shall have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon he who doeth evil. Wherefore ye needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake (The Epistle of Paul to the Romans, Romans 13, 1–5).
In spite of the most paradoxical or ‘comprehensive’ attempts at interpretation that have been applied to this text,177 in this context religion is clearly a call to submission and respect towards the established authorities. God and the terrestrial powers are one and therefore nothing allows criticism of human authorities in the name of a superior divine authority.
We continue to find traces of this attitude towards secular powers in the Catechism of the Catholic Church,178 which refers to the great texts of the history of Christianity. First of all, there is the idea that authority is indispensable for all collective life: ‘§1897 Human society can be neither well-ordered or prosperous unless it has some people invested with legitimate authority to preserve its institutions and to devote themselves as far as is necessary to work and care for the good of all’ (PT 46) or ‘§1898 Every human community needs an authority to govern it. The foundation of such authority lies in human nature. It is necessary for the unity of the State. Its role is to ensure as far as possible the common good of the society’.
Not only is authority a natural phenomenon, but it is desired by God and established by him, which means that anyone who resists secular order, also resists God himself: ‘§1899 The authority required by the moral order derives from God: “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement” (Rom 13:1–2; cf. 1 Pet. 2:13–17).’ The duty to obey is not therefore only towards God, but also towards all those who exert authority on earth: ‘§1900 The duty of obedience requires all to give due honour to authority and to treat those who are charged to exercise it with respect, and insofar as it is deserved, with gratitude and good-will.’
Yet the fact that human beings had imagined gods who were more powerful than themselves and supposedly totally independent from them, seriously complicates the task of the dominator. Any more or less Machiavellian theories of religion as a means invented by the dominant in order to legitimize their position and their action must at least take into account the fact that, if it were really that simple, the question would still remain as to why the dominators should have invented entities who were apparently outside their control and who could be turned against them. As we have seen, the divinities of acephalic societies, in common with those of State-governed societies, tend to be the sign of a collective dispossession. In societies without a written language who refer back to a mythical past for the origins of their collective existence, this takes the form of total dispossession and in State societies with written language who are beginning to ‘communicate’ with the transcendent gods and are seeking to interpret their intentions, it takes the form of a relative dispossession. The dominators in State societies are therefore constrained just as much as the dominated to ‘live with’ these entities. They use them to establish their domination, but at the same time an awkward situation can ensue when prophets with pure intentions, emphasizing the values of love, goodness, justice and solidarity attached to the All-Powerful, come along and challenge the legitimacy of the terrestrial power, whether it be secular or sacerdotal, in the name of these entities.
The existence of an absolute power infinitely superior to terrestrial and temporal powers helps to relativize temporal power. By directing their respect, their admiration, their obedience and their fear towards God, certain individuals thus deny others any claim to absolute power. In her commentary on a book by Peter Brown,179 Aline Rousselle points out that, for this historian of Late Antiquity, the men of the Roman Mediterranean turned to religious communities as an escape from political oppression: ‘Brown shows potential means of escape which the citizen could resort to in order to relieve the pressure of social control which was stifling his life and his conscience. These were social and geographical escape routes, but also spiritual ones which implied space, with the vertical dimension of contact with the divine, and the horizontal dimension of the contact with men and social power.’
The same Catechism of the Catholic Church, which highlights the very legitimist position taken by the church with respect to their relationship with the temporal authorities, also presents a different version of the use of the grammar of Christianity. Authority is not immediately associated here with the divine will, but can be appreciated, evaluated and criticized on the basis of certain values associated with God. The gap between what secular powers do and what is pleasing to God shows that individuals gain in autonomy in comparison with the plans and the will of their god: ‘§1902 Authority does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself. It must not behave in a despotic manner, but must act for the common good as a “moral force based on freedom and a responsibility” (GS 74, §2): “A human law has the character of law to the extent that it accords with right reason, and thus derives from the eternal law. Insofar as it falls short of right reason it is to be an unjust law, and thus has not so much the nature of law as of a kind of violence” (St Thomas Aquinas, STh. 1–2, 93, 3, ad2)’, or again ‘§1903 Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case “authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse” (PT 51)’.
There are therefore two major political options possible vis-à-vis the initial grammar of Christianity. The theologian Jacques Vermeylen distinguishes between two antagonistic ‘intuitions’ present in the Old Testament: the ‘sacred intuition’ and the ‘prophetic intuition’.180 In both these cases, images of God, of man and of society are in conflict. The sacred intuition emphasizes the opposition between the sacred and the profane, between the divine and the human, with a strong tendency to oppose one against the other as an antagonism between good and evil. It is a discourse which finds its social origin ‘in circles close to the royal or sacerdotal power, on which it confers an indisputable legitimacy’.181 For its part, the ‘prophetic intuition’, of which Jesus is clearly the supreme example but who is preceded by a whole series of other prophets, is a form of resistance within the very heart of the Christian tradition:
Until the beginning of the VIII century BC, Israel had only seen variations of the sacred theology, but in a context of generalized impoverishment linked to the practice of usurious loans and the despoilment of lands, but, from the VIII century onwards, a cry of protest erupted from a handful of men who could no longer accept the use that the powerful were making of the religious traditions of their people: in the name of Yahweh, these crushed the weak and felt themselves invulnerable or at least claimed to be so. The prophetic message, which did not claim to be proposing another coherent theological system, therefore resonated as a vehement protest vis-à-vis certain practical consequences of the ‘sacred’ thinking.182
Prophetic intuition was therefore active within structures which are those of sacred theology. There is no divine without the sacred and the profane and no sacred or profane without the relationship between dominators and dominated. The prophets came to terms with the social order, by occasionally overturning hierarchies (as in Christ’s message that ‘the last will be first, and the first will be last’ and the preference given to the humility of the weak in contrast to the pride of the powerful). A society symbolically dominated by a God is fundamentally based on the appropriation of that god by a royal power (more or less distinct from sacerdotal power), but prophets can appear who will make use of God in order to denounce the injustices and the oppressions endured by the weakest. The prophets are not therefore without sacerdotal powers. They are part of the same symbolic order while at the same time representing a critical reaction to the use of this order organized only for the profit of the powerful.
The problem with an interpretation of the social function of religions which favours the split between religious fiction and the reality of power, lies in the fact that, not only do the powerful figures in the human order constantly appropriate divine powers for their own purposes, harnessing them to their profit and using them to legitimize their social power, but the resistance itself ends up tacitly agreeing to mould itself into the same symbolic matrix as the powerful figures within the human order. It does not fundamentally challenge the relationship of submission to an all-powerful god and the opposition between sacred and profane. Whether an individual submits to a God or accepts, moreover, to submit to a sovereign, a king, a prince, an emperor, a leader, an employer, a father or a husband, the structure of the relation of domination is maintained. From this point of view, it could be said that, whatever usage is made of religious grammar, this contributes to reinforcing domination through a process of becoming accustomed or habituated to schemas of perception and appreciation stemming from domination: high/low, superior/inferior, strong/weak, sacred/profane, etc.
What matters, is the insertion both of the French Revolution and of the Philosophers and the Enlightenment in a broader historical development, one that is itself the real Revolution and which is essentially the passage from a traditional form of the mythical (associated with religion, sacredness, religious and political authority) to a new form of the mythical, or a renewed shared faith, of which the most vehement affirmation is to not wish to be or know oneself to be mythical.
Alphonse Dupront, Les Lettres, les Sciences, la Religion et les Arts dans la société française de la deuxième moitié du XVIIIe century. Paris, Centre de documentation universitaire, 1964
15. Some of the theorists of secularization who interpret the relativization and the decline of religions as a process of disenchantment fail to see that the sacred and social magic are not disappearing alongside them.
Scholium. If researchers frequently tack categories of present time onto ancient realities, thereby committing the error of anachronism, the opposite phenomenon can be observed in the study of the sacred and of social magic. Indeed, the forms of past realities continue to dominate the way the present is presented and we are therefore no longer able to see the beliefs, the magical phenomena and the sacred which shapes our social development. It is, like the example of the phenomenon of retinal persistence, what could be termed an error of mental persistence.
‘Disenchantment with the world’, ‘desanctification’, ‘secularization’, ‘rationalization’, ‘dechristianization’, ‘increasing laicism’, etc.: numerous authors implicitly or explicitly support the idea of a historic abandoning of the myth, religion, the sacred and magic. There seems to be a general consensus which can be summed up as follows: there once was a time where men, from primitive societies to medieval ones, were permanently immersed in the sacred, in magic, in the supernatural and in rituals. Then came the time within societies when politics, the economy and science began to desanctify everything in their path. At that point, religions began to decline and the sacred, magic or belief disappeared from the social world, or relegated themselves to the margins (esoterism, paranormal, vestiges of magical or superstitious practices, new sects, etc.). Whether we choose to describe this development in one way or another (desanctification, disenchantment, rationalization, secularization, etc.), or focus on the role that Science or Reason have played in this movement (Greek philosophy and science, the Enlightenment or modern experimental science), or instead on the role of the (market) economy or of politics (the State, the phenomenon of bureaucracies), we are forced to admit that a great many people see in this transition an indisputable historical truth.
The fact that European intellectuals, and French intellectuals in particular, have generally subscribed to the secular ideology and the official myth of the decline of religion explains why they are mentally so ill-prepared to see magic emerging in present-day reality, in the very places where nothing is expected to flourish other than reason or scientific, technological, economic or bureaucratic rationality. Bourdieu claimed to have thus discovered ‘in [his] own head all the mutilations [that he had] inherited from a secular tradition, reinforced by the implicit presuppositions of [his] science’.183 Scholars and academics – in science, philosophy and sociology – have themselves actively participated in the movement to secularize education and the public space.184 The mentality of ‘lay men with some knowledge of science’ is compounded by an ignorance of the history of civilizations and of theology, along with the effects of a hyper specialization, which means that those who work exclusively as specialists in history, politics or legal sociology are no longer capable of realizing the extent to which theology informs their field of study. In the last analysis, all this has blinded researchers to the existence of the network of beliefs (the web of belief, according to Quine’s expression) and the magical effects which never cease to form or inform our behaviours, however rational or little religious they may seem.
Nevertheless, armed with the term ‘symbolic’ (which has replaced that of ‘sacred’, seen as too closely associated with religion185), we have often continued to describe effects which are undeniably magical. Or indeed we have continued to use the religious metaphor (when referring to faith, cults, religion, divinity, the sacred and consecration), but seeing it purely as a ‘manner of speaking’ (about culture, politics, institutions, etc.) and, by the same token, have completely failed to notice the underlying historical processes.
16. Those theorists who, unlike those above, place the emphasis on the profoundly religious nature of contemporary phenomena and describe all the instances of transfers of the sacred which take place, forget, for their part, that theological fictions were themselves, right from the start, only the transpositions of political realities, of realities of transfigured power.
Scholium. In reaction to all those who believe that the rupture with the old order has definitively taken place, some theorists have focused their attention on everything that the rational present owed to the religious past, by showing all the transfers of sacredness at work from one bygone era to another. Fighting against the myth of an absolute beginning, they point out everything that recent times owe to a rejected and supposedly bygone past. These are the people Jean-Claude Monod calls the supporters of the notion of secularization transfer (versus the defenders of secularization liquidation)186 who see in the cult of the State, faith in the Motherland or in the consecration of the artist or the writer ‘substitute religions’. For these authors, it could be said, taking up Ginzburg’s fine turn of phrase, that ‘secularization does not claim for a sphere autonomous from religion: it invades the sphere of religion’.187
Similarly, Roger Chartier emphasizes the underlying continuity which characterizes French society before and after the French Revolution: ‘Violently dechristianizing in the short term, on a deeper level the Revolution doubtless constituted the manifest culmination of a “transfer of sacrality” that, even before it rose to the surface, had silently shifted to a new family-oriented, civic and patriotic values the affect and emotion formally invested in Christian representations.’188 This is also what the medievalist J.-C. Schmitt suggests, drawing on the analyses made by Kantorowicz:
Should we not therefore substitute for the conception of a linear history of ‘desanctification’ (forerunner of ‘dechristianization’) the idea of different forms of the sacred, all rivalling each other so that the advance of one compensates the progressive retreat of the other? What is valid for the relationships between ecclesiastical sacred and royal sacred is, subsequently, valid for the relationships between this latter and a national sacred. It is indeed possible to see patriotism or nationalism as the secularized forms of contemporary sacredness. Kantorowicz closely analysed the mystique of the motherland, which includes its martyrs who ‘died for their country’, its war memorials and its Pantheon, its national holidays, its hymns and flags. It is easy to point out the insistent resonance of this religious vocabulary designating a sacred which, in spite of being of a different nature to the traditional forms of the sacred, continues to demonstrate its effectiveness. The schema whereby an historic evolution is reduced to a gradual ‘disenchantment of the world’ (M. Gauchet) is clearly too simplistic.189
Supporters of such arguments see contemporary political, legal, cultural or economic institutions as haunted by a theological logic which can sometimes go back as far as medieval societies. This is the case in particular for Carl Schmitt, Percy Ernst Schramm, Ernst Kantorowicz or Pierre Legendre.190 Schmitt also asserts that ‘all significant concepts of the modern theory of the State are secularized theological concepts’.191 For Kantorowicz, ‘It is evident that the doctrine of theology and canon law, teaching that the Church, and Christian society in general was a “corpus mysticum, the head of which is Christ,” has been transferred by the jurists from the theological sphere to that of the State, the head of which is the king’.192 Summing up the various studies and commentaries contributing to this reading of history, J.-C. Monod writes:
Atheism, nihilism, the (apparent?) removal of theology from politics would be merely the effects of Christianity, modern concepts would be simply secularized theological concepts, the spirit of capitalism an effect of the protestant ascetic-materialist ethos, the legal recognition of the equality of individuals would be only a secularization of the equality, proclaimed by Christ, of all men in God, the revolution a secularization of messianism while progress would have taken over from Providence and ideology from dogma or gnosis, intellectual or media based power would secularize spiritual power with its blacklists, its canonizations, its hierarchies, but surely scholars would also be the new priests (unless psychoanalysts and the secularization from the confessional to the couch would be preferable), method a new rigorism, death for one’s country would have simply been the surgeon of death for God before the economy became the new religion, etc.193
This argument, which emphasizes continuity, reproduction, the transfer of old schema to new institutions, or the continuation of former logics (emerging from religion, like the child emerging from its mother’s womb, means being her issue, being begot by her and preserving the traces of that heritage), of course stands against the argument which, seeing secularization as a process of abandoning religion, of the disappearance of religions, of the rise of Reason, and, ultimately, as a movement of emancipation in relation to the old frameworks, favours the split. But if we can criticize the former approach on the grounds that it subscribes to a mythology of new times and indicates a blindness to the magic and to the beliefs which are part of them, we cannot totally embrace the latter stance either, which often sees only the Christian dimension of the past (when in fact this is itself only one historical variation of a much larger phenomenon coexisting across all known human societies): the question of the sacred and the profane and how this links to the relations of domination characteristic of different social structures. Such a viewpoint poses the following question: ‘In what sense are we still intellectually, morally, legally, politically determined by the beliefs, values and conceptions of the being and of the human which come from the “Christian” or “Judeo-Christian” interpretation of the world (provided it is still possible to postulate that it is a united one)?’194 Yet it only rarely occurs to researchers to go even further back in the history of civilizations or to compare our situation to completely different, Stateless societies, in order to reveal the terms of a general problem (domination-sacred) which assumes distinct forms throughout the course of history.
Ultimately, the reproach that can be made towards the defenders of this argument, is essentially that their vision is too short term, that is to say, one that focuses on too short a time sequence, by only singling out the movement of the theological (past) to the political (present), without realizing that the theological in question is in itself simply a political fiction: a transposition into the sacred of relationships of power that are entirely human. In this way, when Schmitt asserts that ‘the omnipotent God has become the omnipotent lawgiver’,195 he is forgetting that the omnipotent God in question has himself been conceived on the model of the great monarchs and the great legislators. Those writers who point out the links between the Gods of the past and the power of the present State, with its ‘mortal gods’, act almost as though the gods had really existed one day. However, what actually existed was in fact sacerdotal power, from which secular power has gradually freed itself. But this sacerdotal power is itself only a roundabout way of making politics out of fictions which originate from and create their models among powerful human beings.
‘In the wording of the secularization theory’, writes Monod,
the reference to ‘omnipotent lawgiver’ refers to a concept which could appear to be the most decisive and the most flagrant conceptual ‘secularization’ implemented in Western thought – that of the ‘sovereign’. Is it not obvious that the notion of a ‘sovereign power’, of an authority which judges without being judged, of a source of law which has the exclusive right to undo laws, has swung from God to king, by way of the Pope? The concept which has enabled secular power to affirm its own substance, its autonomy, would therefore be drawn from that domain faced with which secular power has had to define and win this autonomy, by turning the enemy’s own weapons against it.196
Such an analysis, which requires the identification of movements of the theological towards the political, is pertinent, but it nevertheless overturns the structural sociological link. For it is indeed God who is made in the image of temporal power, and not the reverse. It is therefore as though we were forgetting that God does not exist outside the portrayals made of him and that he is a fiction which only has meaning in the context of the transposition of real powers. We tend to confuse, on the one hand, mutual influences, empirically attested, between sacerdotal and secular powers, which mean that secular power can use theological language to describe and present itself (the monarch can thus be described as the ‘vicar of God’ on earth and secular law can be inspired by canon law), and, on the other hand, structural sociological links which make theological language the product of an unconscious transposition of political reality.
Throughout this first book, I have set out to underline the impact of objectivized history and to demonstrate the importance of a reconstruction of the past in order to understand the present. This approach seems to me particularly important when it comes to understanding some of the important relations of domination which structure our social background and which often escape our immediate perception. I have also attempted to highlight the magical dimension of all power – sacerdotal as well as secular, State as well as familial – and to establish, as systematically as possible, the links between domination and the opposition of the sacred and the profane across a very wide range of societies. In order to understand to what extent the sacred is present in our supposedly secular societies, which are primarily societies in which religious institutions have seen their social and symbolic influence diminish to the point where they are now just one institution amongst many others, it was important to define the nature of this sacred and analyse the fundamentally fictional nature of the phenomena studied.
To sum up the focus of my analysis, I could say that if the historian or the sociologist can claim that, from a scientific point of view, ‘God does not exist’ or that holy water is an ‘illusion’, then the king, the coin or the art work should also be seen in the guise of social fictions. When I write that ‘God does not exist’, I am not adopting the stance of a peremptory and domineering atheist.197 I am simply saying that ‘God does not exist as a truly functioning power, independent from human kind’. God does not therefore have the same status and the same reality as, for example, the planet Mars which exists as a physical reality, independently from any notions and relationships which form between human beings inhabiting planet Earth. But the nonexistence of God as a real and active entity is just as limiting as those royal or monetary fictions. God clearly exists, therefore, in another sense. He exists in the words pronounced or written and the gestures made, in the institutions which claim to represent him or to act in his name, in the men and women who believe in him and adjust their behaviour, and that of others, accordingly, etc. Scientifically, there are no other manifestations of God other than these human ones. God does not exist ontologically, but he does indeed exist historically, culturally, institutionally.198
My argument here is that God (the gods of polytheist religions or the God of monotheist religions) is a necessary fiction, a fiction which is a logical solution to a collective problem. It is indeed precisely because it is such a logical solution to a collective problem that the same forms, the same processes, the same logic may be found at work in societies which have not necessarily been in direct contact with each other.199 Myths, like religions, have been, and in part continue to be, necessary illusions which allow human beings to organize themselves socially. As Ginzburg puts it, translating in his own words the thoughts of Tacitus and Hobbes, ‘men are inclined “to stand in awe of their own imaginations”’.200
Not only does the analysis I propose not strike the gods, the sacred and magic from the human map, but, very much to the contrary, it encourages us to detect in the most apparently secularized human institutions the presence of forms of the sacred and their magical effects. The kings are, from a certain point of view, just as fictional as the gods. The sacred is as much present in the fetishization of goods or the aura surrounding works of art as in religious institutions and mythological or theological discourses. Not only has the sacred not disappeared, but it has become more specific as societies have started to differentiate into so many relatively independent microcosms. As a result, art, which began to emerge during the Italian Renaissance, occupies a dominant structural position and represents a new form of the sacred. It will be this history that will be the focus of Book 2.