The Lecture Series
-- first -- previous -- next --


Perhaps we’ll get back to modern excesses later. I was trying to lay some ground work for early religion in the very first urban centers. The transition from Shamans to Princes.

The picture is, admittedly, muddled. Taking what we can decipher from archeology, myth, and fragmentary records, we can at least make an educated guess. The first nations for which we have actual records, courtesy of some clay tablets, were the city-states of Mesopotamia, from Ur to Babylon and [research]. The national border was the city wall, a universe encompassed in a nutshell, and the Lord God of this universe was it's King.

“Hail to the King, baby. Gimme some sugar.” [ha ha]
[sigh] Go back to sleep, Jimmy.
“Nah, man, I'm up. I'll be serious for a minute, too.”
Color me five different kinds of shocked.
“Ha ha, prof. So, these guys were the first royals, princes and princesses and paparazzi and all that? Do those old royal families still exist?”
No.
“What, they got beat in battle?”
No...
“so they dried up and blew away or something?”
Actually, their subjects killed them
[beat]

Frazer's “Golden Bough” is on your reading list, so I'll just touch on this rather than go into excruciating detail. The first king was also a priest, the consort of the goddess. He in his aspect as priest and god would carry out rites with the priestess acting as goddess, ceremonies intended to secure the blessings of the goddess on the city-state, ensure the harvest and the regular change of seasons, fertility rites which were fairly pornographic
[gasp] “Oh!” [giggle]
Settle down there, Miss Habersham. And before you pull yet another movie quote, Jimmy, I'll beat you to it: yes, it was “good to be the king”. There was one drawback, though. The king as god was also occasionally required to stand in as a sacrifice to ensure the continued wellbeing of his people.

We don't know exactly how long the god-king was allowed to reign, though a term of seven years seems to crop up occasionally, and who knows, they might have offed a new king each year to ensure the spring came back on time. Whatever the interval, a new priest would be chosen as king and consort.

Now the recycling of kings seems common enough, but the fate of his priestess is cloudier. We have residual myths and stories that point both ways; either a priestess who survives, and chooses her new king, or one who shares her husbands fate. Often it would be a young couple chosen to serve as king and queen, and the two of them would be offered up for the sake of the tribe.

This is part of the overall Earth Mother complex, which has many different permutations depending on local influences-- but it was linked to the farmers, those who depend on plants and agriculture. The death-leading-to-rebirth-and-growth trope is common in goddess worship, and stories from cultures as far apart as Africa, Polynesia, and the Americas all have either a young woman or a young couple who are sacrificed, chopped up & planted, and then the staple food crop for that culture magically appears from the grave. Not too appetizing if taken literally, but here we also see the communion-metaphor that is still recognized as a modern miracle in some faiths.

“Dude. I bet the guys didn't like that so much”

Well, the original kings were also priests, so they not only knew what was expected of them, I bet they were volunteers. But you are right on that point, Jimmy, and I'll get to that before the end of the hour today.

Speaking of our priests-- the shaman was an outsider, a hermit. He interacted with the people but lived apart. The king also lived apart, but there has been a subtle change: he wasn't just linked to higher powers, he has become a higher power. He is worshiped by the people, perhaps as a symbol of some god, maybe as a god himself over time. The change here was likely facilitated by the development of a priesthood. Instead of a single holy man, who after all can only serve so many, we have a professional organization of such men and women.

Maybe it was a natural evolution, as numerous tribes gathered in the city and each brought their own mystic with them. I have no idea what kind of negotiations went on, to figure out who was right and which connection to god was the correct one. At some point somebody figured out it would be better if they all just cooperated, and this idea really caught fire. It was the first church, the first “faith”

The first farm villages were likely very similar to farm co-ops today. Things could be run by mutual consent. But eventually a village will grow into a town, and then a city. When a city gets too big, you can't make decisions by consensus anymore. It'll need some kind of administration, a ruling class, and in early societies it was the new priesthood that stepped into that role. And they selected one of their number to be King.

The king-as-Big-Chief likely made sense to early peoples. Somebody had to run things. The king-as-god was a tougher bill of goods to sell, but the people seemed to go along with this, because they could see it as part of an extended metaphor; Kings were merely stand-ins for the god, an actor playing a role in the play of heaven and earth. Besides, if the guy was a real ass about it, then watching him die in the routinely scheduled sacrifice would be particularly sweet.

“Sir, you're throwing around a lot of opinions here, and passing them off as fact. It's a good story, but what makes your version any more likely than accepted history, or myth?”
Miss Volstead, you are as always correct. And thank you for taking me to task; I might have continued in this vein for the rest of our time today and no one would have been the wiser. Your reading assignment
[groan]
OK, class, no extra assignment. I recommend that you not only read Frazer, but also the first volume of Campbell's “Masks of God”. Granted, both books are fairly large and can be tough going, but they'll give you some insight into the mind of early people, not just the stories and monuments they left behind.

There is another tradition to look into from this time period as well. The farmers worshiped the goddess, the earth mother. Their neighbors, the ones who didn't go down into the valley but rather stayed in the hills, were herders and hunters. They had a different view of a king, and their main focus of worship was a god, the big hunter, the shepherd in the sky.


It might be fair to say that they were more aggressive than the peaceful farmers in the valley. And that they weren't afraid to take what they wanted; after all, they were hunters. When they came down and conquered the cities, I'm sure some of the new things they found were to their liking. Killing the king every few years wasn't one of them. But that's easy enough to fix. You insert your own men into the ruling class, and the priesthood, and if you happen to be the new king you just refuse to be killed. And this is the start of a patriarchal, hereditary rulership that in many ways seems to have stuck with us to the modern day.

“[tsk] More opinions, Professor”

Yes. But here at least I can give you some food for thought, and using examples a bit more familiar than Gilgamesh or Polynesian creation stories. Let's look at Greek myth:

Zeus is The Man. Not only does he rule the other gods, he carries lightning in his pocket and is such a bad ass he fought off the titans and his own dad to get to where he is today. He won out over other, older gods. He is the conquering hero. Obviously he is a good role model for your average bronze age conquering tribal chief.

One of the things that Zeus is noted for is nailing anything that moves. He is an infamous womanizer and seducer.

Let's look at this reputation in new light. When a patriarchal, God worshiping culture overtakes a group that worships some local variation of the Goddess, they have to assert themselves. Re-educate their new subjects, and prove to them that their God is The Man. A goddess is re-cast as a nymph, sylph, dryad, nereid or some such-- an earth spirit, tied to a place, and as such still the local goddess, but now she is subservient. She becomes just another notch in Zeus's belt, part of his celestial tag-and-release program, and her consort becomes her son, though now also the son of Zeus. The whole of their mythic tradition is rewritten and absorbed, the old gods become new Greek heroes, and the stories are still passed down but the meaning is altered.

The pattern is repeated so often, I'd say that it is more than just coincidence.

The city, and the king, and their god-- all developed in concert, from earlier models and prototypes. It was a leap, but we carried parts of the tribe with us even as we urbanized. Of course, we like to think things are different now, but can we be so sure? The one big change was the development of the first organized priesthoods, the institutionalization of what used to be personal and private. Though as soon as kings and queens refused to be sacrificed, a new dynamic was set up: the conflict between church and state. Ancient Egypt, on one extreme, is an example of the Church-as-State, and on the other end we have the Roman Republic, before the emperors, where so many gods were worshiped that there couldn't be an official religion, and the government seems to operate completely outside the sphere of religion.

And I'll leave today's lecture at that, even though we have really only skimmed the surface. [sigh] But I guess that's all I can get to in a survey course like this one.


[link: Frazer. apparently the book is in the public domain, and as such is online]

-- next --