Hierarchy

The Awareness of Rank

Religion, said the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is “the feeling of sheer dependence on God.”¹ One term of this famous and influential definition was inspired by Goethe, whose Faust declared that in religion “feeling is everything.” It is not the Romantic aspect of feeling, however, that will be in focus here, but the acknowledg­ment of “sheer dependence,” the acceptance of inferior rank vis- à-vis a flow of power emanating from the superior.

Yet Schleiermacher’s definition, challenging the rational eigh-

reenth-century views, itself builds on a much older foundation. Religion is generally accepted as a system of rank, implying de­pendence, subordination and submission to unseen superiors. The awareness of rank and dependence in religion is particularly clear in all the ancient religions. God means power, rule, and honors due. Already in Sumerian a god may be invoked as “my king.'" In Akkadian, a common word for “lord” is belu; in par­ticular this is the title of Marduk, the most important god of Babylon; its West Semitic equivalent is haal, the title of local gods in Syria and Palestine.

It is surprising that the expressions of power and lordship are much less obtrusive in the language of Roman religion. Dominus got its prominence only with Christianity, translated from kyrios. Was it the ban on the word rex that became a linguistic barrier,

or was it the system of clearly defined sectors of potestas—prae­tor, consul, dictator—that forbade metaphor?¹³ The important gods are called pater. Still, luno regina was worshiped at the 82 Aventine Hill, introduced from Veii, and Jupiter imperator at Praeneste,¹⁴ while Mithraists were allowed to call Mithras rex.^u From Achaemenid Persia, even the word satrapes, “guardian of the king’s power,” spread as designation of a god.¹⁶

Traditional forms of domination nevertheless always include some mutual obligation.

It is tempting to associate the ideology of rule and dependence in religion with the evolution of the first high cultures that in­stalled kingship as the central social organization.²² But clearly it is much more widespread. Moderns will be more prone to translate dependence and submission into psychological terms, in the wake of Sigmund Freud.²³ According to one school, god or gods represent the father figure, as the child’s experience of helpless dependence on the powerful father has been interiorized in the acceptance of an almighty god; conversely, feminists intro­duce or reintroduce a great goddess instead, recalling the child’s even more intimate dependence upon the mother. Still, if we ac­cept an evolutionary view of anthropology, as Freud himself did, it is necessary to broaden the perspective and to account for the role of authority in both society and the structure of the psyche by going back to earlier stages in the evolution of life.

A highly developed awareness of authority within a complex

system of rank is well established in all primate societies.²⁴ While the intellectual capacities of monkeys and apes have scored higher than expected in experiments, it seems that most of these capacities go into the incessant social games concerning inferi­ority and superiority that are played within the group.

Note that high rank is immediately and generally visualized by humans in a vertical dimension, rather than as a horizontal sequence or some centripetal arrangement. There is no logic to this; what dominates the imagination is the reminiscence of the prehuman habitat. Gerhard Baudy has made reference to the trees in which many primates live, trees that provide both food and safety, escape from predators, and also the place to play the games of rank from branch to branch.²⁷ It is from the tree that the vertical image derives. If the most successful primates are for the most part found moving bipedally along asphalt streets to­day, this does not mean that humans have renounced those games of lower or higher rank while continuing to “exalt” the “higher” ideals. In religious veneration the image of the tree still looms large; it grows to cosmic dimensions in myths about the “world tree.”²⁸ But it can be outdone by the mountain which no doubt is more exalted,²⁹ and the mountain in turn is superseded by heaven;³⁰ at all events, gods are high, preferably the highest.³¹ The awareness and feelings of inferiority and superiority on the vertical axis are part of our biological inheritance.

“Whatever is powerful, is taken for a god.”³² Dominance and submission in the religious sphere require that the “attention structure” be redirected toward a nonobvious but final and ab-

solute orientation.³’ It is characteristic of a mental world, en­coded in language, that it becomes independent from time and place.

Whether enthusiastically accepted by homines religiosi or crit­icized by the advocates of emancipation, dependence is a form of “making sense.” It is a truism that we are unavoidably depen­dent upon a variety of circumstances both known and unknown, whether personal, political, economic, or environmental. Germs and radiation and cancer cells possibly developing in our bodies are but instances of the innumerable factors that cause concern and are quite impossible to control. Religion makes all this sec­ondary by turning the attention structure toward one basic au­thority, thereby achieving a most effective “reduction of com­plexity” and creating sense out of chaos.³⁵ A sane world is structured by authority which determines what is high and low. Since Sumerian times gods, men, animals, and plants have been neatly arranged in superimposed registers, descending from top to bottom.³⁶ An early Byzantine writer put it this way: “In the universe we find beings who rule exclusively, i.e. the divine; oth­ers who both rule and are ruled, i.e. the humans, ruled by the divine but ruling the animals; and others who are ruled exclu­sively, i.e.

Hierarchy is a term introduced by the most infliirnl in I work of Christian Neoplatonism, PseudoDionysius Areopagila, in the 8 s fifth century a.d. fhe philosopher examines New Icsiamcm texts that speak of the stages of powers surrounding god “thrones, lordships, leaderships, powers”—and develops them into a consistent system.”* Neoplatonism sees the totality of be..........

ings dominated by a great golden chain of authority proceeding from a single principle, the One.¹⁹ It has often been remarked that Neoplatonic-Christian hierarchic! is represented in architec­ture by the building that has set the model for Greek Orthodox church building and later even for the Moslem mosque: the cu­pola of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople-Istanbul.

Rituals of Submission

If, according to Schleiermachcr, religion occupies the realm of feeling, it is evident that practical religion is less introverted than that, and more demonstrative. Such feelings as exist are acted out, reinforced, and even generated anew through common ac­tion. In other words, dependence and submission in religion ap­pear, first of all, in ritual. Encountering the divine, “we shape ourselves to all kinds of representation of modesty.”⁴⁰ Rituals of submission, strikingly prominent in religious activities, are or were common forms of behavior in other contexts and are not specifically religious in themselves.⁴¹ Hence they are widely un­derstood. Not confined to one particular civilization, these ritu­als are found around the globe, and several of them are demon­strably prehuman. A comparative survey of ritual submission in primates, in human secular interactions, and in religious practice reflects the basic unity of the world we live in.

The obvious aim and function of demonstrative submission, especially in prehuman societies, is to avoid or to stop aggression and the ensuing pain, damage, or even destruction. The simplest means to impose one’s will and to make threats is merely to be

big—remember nature’s trick of hair-raising.⁴² In order to stop aggression, by contrast, one has to be small and humble, humilis, which originally meant “close to the soil.” To create this impres­sion, one has to bow, to kneel down, to cower to the ground, to crawl—in short, not to puff oneself up.⁴³ Humans have invented hats and varieties of clothing to enhance their contours; submis­sion entails taking off these accessories. It is of special impor­tance to avoid staring: the staring eye is an evil eye and sets off an inherited program of alarm.⁴⁴ The signals of smallness applied to reduce aggression are reinforced by childlike behavior; ani­mals are normally programmed not to attack their own children. Human adults commonly revert to weeping, but it is also possible to try smiling. Another means to ward off aggression is to make and keep personal contact: to touch the stronger one if he allows it, to stroke his chin without being bitten, to extend at least an open hand, all of which are signs of dependence.⁴⁵

We commonly understand these gestures and forms of behav­ior. Most of them may be observed among chimpanzees and go­rillas. While they do not weep, they express themselves in a range of moans. In the movie Gorillas in the Mist, which deals with the work of Dian Fossey among gorillas in central Africa, the way to avoid damage by a charging silverback was to cower to the ground, touching it with one’s head, and above all to avoid staring. Assyrian reliefs show envoys to the king of Assyria as­suming a strikingly similar position; the Akkadian expression was “to wipe one’s nose” on the ground.⁴⁶ In the wake of Assyr­ians and Babylonians the Persian king insisted that visitors per­formed proskynesis, touching the ground with their forehead.⁴⁷ Later, sultans did not hesitate to follow suit. European monarchs, somewhat more civilized, still required everyone to bend his knee to do homage. The minimum act of submission is to bow one’s head while taking off one’s hat, which is still widely used and taken for granted as a gesture of politeness.

More dramatic and more formal were the rules of surrender in warfare. The defeated, or even their envoys, would approach their victorious adversaries in ragged clothes or half naked, bent

down, with their hair undone; they would weep and throw them­selves at the feet of the victors. Ancient historians, including Cae­sar, indulge in scenes of this kind.⁴⁸ Homer describes the special practice of the hiketes, a warrior pleading for his life even on the battlefield. As the word indicates—it means “he who reaches”— the success of the plea depended on coming so close to the ad­versary that he could be touched. Even the leaders of the enemies “in the turmoil of battle... grasped my hands, for the sake of their lives,” Assurbanipal recounts. Odysseus, in the midst of battle, “took the helmet from his head, the shield from his shoul­ders, threw the spear from his hands, and... kissed the knees of the enemy king.”⁴⁹ In a graphic scene from the Iliad, young Lycaon runs to touch the knees of Achilles, while Achilles’ spear, which had already been thrown, hits the ground behind his back. Touching the knees sends a message to the powerful one to relax and sit down, instead of remaining ready to attack.⁵⁰ In another gesture Priam, pleading for the release of Hector’s corpse, “ex­tended his hands toward the mouth” of Achilles in supplication; he also kissed Achilles’ hands.⁵¹ Kissing hands has remained a sign of deferent greeting in parts of Europe, especially those within reach of the imperial court of Vienna, and also within the Catholic Church; it combines bending down with making con­tact. More modern styles of democratic behavior have made most of these forms disappear from our experience. There may still be some families left in which wife and children fall to their knees before a dominant father. But archaic ways are preserved or resuscitated in extreme situations. A modern press photo­graph in Time magazine, taken at the time of the war between India and Pakistan, still shows the gesture of touching the su­perior’s knee in exactly the way we see it in ancient illustrations and texts.⁵²

It almost goes without saying that all these forms of submissive ritual also appear in religious contexts. The most general act of veneration clearly is to bend, to bow. “To bend down” is the term for veneration of gods in Hebrew as in Akkadian.⁵³ Abra­ham “throws himself down on his face” in the presence of Jah-

weh.⁵⁴ Moslems touch the ground with their foreheads when praying to Allah. The vocabulary used in Greek is the same in both religious and civil use, “to grasp the knees,” “to place a kiss,” “to reach” (gounazesthai, proskynein, hiketeuein). There has been some controversy about whether kneeling down for prayer was common in Greece; it did occur at least in certain cases.⁵⁵ In extreme anguish some worshipers will prostrate them­selves at the image or altar.⁵⁶ There is no ambiguity about Latin supplex, supplicatio, bending one’s knees; even an Assyrian king knelt down for prayer.⁵⁷ Christianity was even more emphatic about bending one’s knees before god—Eusebius calls this “our common form of worship”—at least until Protestants decided to oppose Catholic ritual.⁵⁸ The universality of behavior does not preclude the cultivation of special forms to distinguish individual groups or denominations.⁵⁹

Further tokens of humiliation may accompany the encounter with god or gods. In antiquity, loose hair, outstretched hands, and free-flowing tears were expected of people taking part in processions to entreat the gods for mercy in moments of crisis. Tears are also commonly mentioned in Hebrew psalms and later in Christian forms of prayer and repentance; they already mark Sumerian and Akkadian prayer.⁶⁰ To extend the arms with the palms up is the usual posture for prayer in oriental and Hebrew as in Greek and Roman worship;⁶¹ Christian custom, however, turned against such open pleading and directed that prayer be performed with folded hands.⁶² Note that bowing one’s head also prevents one from staring. In the model scene of prayer in the New Testament, the publican does “not raise his eyes toward heaven”; he “beats his chest” while saying “have mercy on me, the sinner.”⁶³ Propitius sis mihi peccatori has become a liturgical formula in Christian service, and it follows much older rules. When Inanna returns from the netherworld with an infernal ret­inue, all those who throw themselves at the feet of the goddess or sit humbly in the dust are spared; but Dumuzi, still “sitting on the high seat,” is destroyed.⁶⁴ To be humble before the gods is a lesson taught long before Christianity.⁶⁵

Students ol religion have attempted to make a clear distinction between veneration and submission. Yet they may be trying to differentiate two tilings that are at least quite close to each other. Most ancient religions did not hesitate to postulate the fear of gods. In Akkadian fear or even terror, puluhtu, is the basic con­cept associated with gods; in Solomon’s Proverbs, “the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom”; for Aeschylus, the fear of Zeus is the “highest fear.”⁶⁶

Humiliation can take drastic forms. Some rituals anticipate a dreaded outcome and counter it by conscious and controlled ac­tion: a person that is pursued by demons will kill a substitute victim.⁶⁷ In a similar way, in rituals of submission certain forms of debasement may be executed before they are requested. Thus in fear of the evil eye, of jealousy of the gods and ensuing disaster, Greeks would spit on their own garments; this is “to honor Ad- rasteia,” the goddess who has “inescapable” in her name.⁶⁸ By this token of defilement the penitent hopes to escape the ines­capable. This category encompasses acts like rending one’s clothes, making oneself filthy, even wallowing in the mud. “The Syrians, if they have eaten fish in failure of self-control, swell up at their feet and their stomach. Then they take a sackcloth and sit down in the street, in the dirt, and pacify the goddess by humbling themselves so much.”⁶⁹ “In the mud hole your servant lies,” intones a Babylonian penitentiary psalm.⁷⁰ A more violent form of self-abasement is self-wounding, which occurs in various ancient cults and has also been observed in other societies.⁷¹ Ev­idence for self-flagellation has recently turned up in a Cretan sanctuary at Kato Symi.⁷² Processions of flagellants were a fea­ture of the late medieval epoch in Europe, appealing to the mercy of God amidst the spreading pestilence. In some places such rit­uals of penitence persist to the present day. The human capacity for reorienting or even abusing such forms of ritual is striking: the galli and similar fanatici, castrated priests of Semitic and An­atolian goddesses, of Dea Syria, Mater Magna, or Bellona, made a public show of self-wounding and self-flagellation to elicit gifts from the onlookers. They claimed they were in the grip of divine

possession when they performed their superhuman sacrifices.⁷³ In cases like this, humiliation is an instrument of selection.

Humiliation could take another form, that of sexual submis- 90 sion, which means that men accept female roles. This seems to apply to the fanatici just mentioned, eunuchs who presented themselves for homosexual encounters.⁷⁴ Requirements of celi­bacy and transvestism exist in other contexts: Heracles’ priest at Kos was dressed as a woman, and one myth held that Heracles had once fled and hidden in woman’s clothes, an extreme reversal of his normal role.⁷⁵ The Eleusinian hierophant had to undergo a kind of chemical castration by drinking hemlock.⁷⁶ In early Sumerian ritual priests sometimes appear naked—statuettes of such priests survive—in contrast to the Jewish and Christian traditions, which do not allow priests to show the slightest in­dication of nakedness or sex.⁷⁷ We must acknowledge the highly ambivalent status of sex in all human societies, with all sorts of disclaimers, secrecy, and repression, and the concomitant possi­bility of outrageous reversals.⁷⁸ The reaction to the galli could be both awe and contempt; normal religion claimed solemnity. Conversely, religious practice could seek to ensure continuous good relations with a male god by offering him a concubine or even a legitimate, permanent wife. This was ceremoniously done for Amun in Egyptian Thebes and in the Bronze Age in Syria, as a recently discovered text has shown in great detail.⁷⁹ An offering like this attempts to replace submission by familiarity.

The Strategy of Praise

The other pole in a construct of humiliation is the exaltation of the divine. This is most commonly expressed in iconography, which, in turn, reflects ritual. Once again there are striking par­allels in the codes of representation for rulers and for gods. Di­vine statues are raised up and carried in procession, but at Per­sepolis it is the king’s throne that is lifted up and carried by his people.⁸⁰ The goddess or god, like the king, has an elevated throne with a footstool: Isaiah saw “the Lord sitting on a high,

sublime throne.”⁸’ A wall painting from Minoan Thera depicts the seat of the goddess on top of a stepped pedestal/'² Bronze Age gods dwell on mountaintops, and the final exaltation is heaven.

The Great Goddess in the Near East and in archaic Greece is distinguished by a tall headpiece called polos/³ Other gods wear crowns to increase their height, or a pyramid of horns as in Mes­opotamia. Temples are developed into towers, a striking feature of sacred architecture in Mesopotamia as in Mesoamerica. Wor­ship means exalting the superiors to whom we bend in venera­tion; and the higher they are raised the less we are forced to bow down ourselves.

This has given rise to an ingenious language game. It achieves something that would be impossible in ritual action, that is, to do the work of exaltation without toil and even to unite sub­mission with exaltation. It is the invention of praise.

Praise may have a special basis in preverbal behavior, what we call cheers, which means identifying with one side in a combat and encouraging the champion by vocal display. Greeks used the ritual cry ieie paian in the cult of Apollo in that sense;*⁴ and while few Christians understand what halleluja and hosanna mean, it makes powerful music.⁸⁵ Rhetorically developed forms of ver­balized praise are frequent in many civilizations. Since the ear­liest times it must have been a challenge for noble, stylized poetry to give praise to both rulers and gods. In a way the work of the poet is a double trick. The performer expressly acknowledges the difference of rank, looking up from the depths to the splendor at the heights, but by force of his verbal competence he not only rises to a superior level in imagination but succeeds in reversing the attention structure: it is the superior who is made to pay heed to the inferior’s song or speech of praise. Praise is the recognized form of making noise in the presence of superiors; in a well- structured form, it tends to become music. Praise ascends to the heights like incense. Thus the tension between high and low is both stressed and relaxed, as the lower one establishes his place within a system he accepts emphatically. Praise is rarely infor-

mativc but I’.ithcr tautological·—laudamus te, benedicimus te, adordiiiits /r, glorifuainns te... prop ter magnam gloriam tiiani—but it lilts the heart in a resounding experience of com- 92 niunity. Note the vertical dimension of gloria in excelsis where glorification means exaltation/⁶ Exaltation even transcends logic: “Zeus is rhe universe—and what is still higher than this.”⁸⁷ This is not the place to enter into a detailed analysis of the genre of hymns, which has been a common and recognized form of religious poetry in the Near East and the Mediterranean from antiquity into the present.⁸⁸ The expected parallels in metaphors, whether praising the ruler or praising a god, especially in the older forms, appear in Sumerian and Egyptian texts. A visible model for praising the one on high is the sun, rising in splendor all over the earth; hence the sun is a favorite metaphor of praise in different languages.⁸⁹ Terror, however, remains mixed with ex­altation. The higher being is also able to kill or to grant life. Incessant praise will move him to exercise his benevolent powers and discourage his hostility. May he be “good-humored,” hilaos, as Greek hymns put it.

Praising the king will bring direct emoluments to artful per­formers; sanctuaries likewise invite and remunerate hymnic praise. Apollo of Klaros, through his oracle, routinely com­manded delegations of singers, hymnodoi, to come to his site and to perform there.⁹⁰ In this way the god organized his own festival. Praise serves to stabilize the system of rank and power: the king is declared and, in a way, made to guarantee safety and good life, while the god upholds the world. Religion operates to sta­bilize the accepted order, praising its highest starting point.

Music is the most frequent accompaniment to praise. Song is the musical form that combines uncommon sound with distinct clarity, and with a resonance that casts a spell upon the listeners. The spiritual world they share finds perhaps its most forceful expression in music, and the repetition in song provides further reinforcement of this commonality. Songs of praise are thus one of the most powerful means of expression, of attraction, and of propaganda in many forms of religion.

The world of the gods also admits hierarchies: “The gods of heaven bow to you, the gods of the Earth bow to you, whatever you say, the gods fall down before you,” is a climax of praise for an exalted Hittite god.⁹' Even the praise of monotheistic Jahweh 93 is not destitute of similar effects, as heavens tell the glory of the eternal God.⁹² The hierarchic structure of praise replicates itself and embraces all the more forcefully the human worshipers far below, allowing them to feel secure in their own position through voicing their hymns of praise.

Two-Tiered Power

To take submission as the main characteristic of religion is defi­nitely one-sided. The other side, often disclaimed or deplored in the Christian tradition but still permanent and obtrusive even there, is the rise to power and the exercise of power in the name of religion and through religion.

In the ancient world the alliance of religion and power is frankly proclaimed. Sargon II, the Assyrian king, boasts how he united people of diverse languages in his capital and put Assyrian overseers above them, “to teach them how to fear god and the king.”⁹³ As a consequence, enlightened skeptics in antiquity held that religion had been invented for the interest of those who hold power, of the rulers and the state. Polybius found that religion— or rather, superstition (deisidaimonia)—“held together” the Ro­man republic; religious ritual, he said, had been elaborated into a kind of theater that dominated private as well as public life.⁹⁴ He suggests that this was done “for the multitude... full of unlawful desires, irrational anger and violent rage,” which must be kept in order “by nonobvious fears.” Aristotle makes similar remarks.⁹⁵ That thesis can be traced back at least to the sophists in the fifth century b.c., and evidently there was much in reality to support it.

Long before the rise of Mediterranean city states, oriental des­pots had been wont to claim the special protection of their re­spective gods. The Pharaoh was a son of god; everywhere it was

the gods who granted victory, and indeed the gods themselves were believed to hold power as a consequence of their own myth­ical victories. Myths told how a god had violently overcome his 94 adversary—a dragon or Tiamat the Sea in Mesopotamia or Ty­

phon the impersonation of drought in Egypt—and thus estab­lished order in the cosmos. Whenever a ruler subdued his enemies by force and cruelty, he was repeating what the gods had done.⁹⁶ Power was handed down by the god, directly if symbolically.

The relief on the famous Hammurapi stele shows the Sun God Shamash handing the royal insignia to Hammurapi, and the in­troduction to Hammurapi’s Laws proclaims that when the su­preme gods Anu and Enlil determined the supremacy of Marduk and his city Babylon, they also “named me to promote the wel­fare of the people, me, Hammurapi, the devout, god-fearing prince, to cause justice to prevail in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil... and to light up the land” (I: 1-41).⁹⁷ We sympathize with the king’s ideals of justice that lights up the land, but putting them into effect nevertheless presupposes that power must be used “to destroy the wicked and the evil.” Who decides whom to destroy? A direct line connects Hammurapi to Darius, king of Persia, who says in his great proclamation preserved at Behistun: “According to the will of Ahuramazda I am king; Ahuramazda presented the kingship to me.”⁹⁸ Nor did Darius hesitate to destroy the false and the wicked and the adherents of “falsehood,” drug. Moderns even suspect him of playing the foul­est of tricks: killing the legitimate king, Bardiya-Smerdis, and branding him as an impostor and magos. His god was with him. That iconographical tradition continued, displayed in the Sas- sanian reliefs with Ahuramazda investing the kings.⁹⁹

The ancient Greeks had no “great king, king of kings, king of the lands.” But even on a more modest scale a “sceptre-bearing king” would claim to have received his power and authority from Zeus; his kydos as Homer puts it. A king is simply first among peers.¹⁰⁰ The tyrant Pisistratus came closest to the Oriental model, claiming that the goddess Athena in person installed his rule at Athens. Whether the masquerade described by Herodotus

(of a girl dressed up as Athena leading Pisistratus back to Athens) is historical in this form will remain controversial. But some form of Pisistratean propaganda about Athena’s special protection of the tyrant must have been its source, although democratic and 95 rational citizens found the relationship less than convincing.’⁰¹ Alexander the Great fell back on the Egyptian model; he claimed to have been sired by a god, Zeus himself or rather Zeus Ammon; the Diadochs were hence obliged to follow his lead in various ways.¹⁰² Later, when the Roman world turned Christian, the Christian god was claimed to be the source of victory and power; hence the ruler became installed “by the grace of god,” deigratia. This formula remained attached to the title of every decent mon­arch in Europe.¹⁰³ The mosaic at Palermo, which has Christ pre­senting the crown of Sicily to King Roger, is equivalent to the message of the Hammurapi stele, even without a direct icono- graphic line of tradition.¹⁰⁴ “As all people which are under Ro­man rule do military service to you, emperors and principals of the world, you yourself do service to the all-mighty God and to the sacred Faith,” St. Ambrose wrote to Emperor Valentinian.¹⁰⁵ Neither Hammurapi nor Darius, nor a Sassanid king nor Con­stantine relied on prayer alone to establish their kingships; but it was from religion, from the authority and power of the god that they sought legitimization. The gods stand behind those who exercise worldly power; conversely, the monarch is “the head, immersed in prayer.”¹⁰⁶

Submission and sovereignty inhabit the same hierarchic struc­ture. Dependence on unseen powers mirrors the real power struc­ture, but it is taken to be its model and to provide its legitimi­zation. It is a two-tiered sovereignty that stabilizes itself through this structure; god is to ruler as ruler is to subjects.¹⁰⁷ This lends theoretical support to the ruler, who ceases to be alone at the top of the pyramid as a target of potential aggression. In reality, while power games are played out in a continuous dialectic of aggres­sion and anxiety, in the stabilized power structures of the human mental world this duality has become neatly dissociated, pro­ducing fear of god or gods along with constant readiness to at-

tack and destroy lower humans, buffered by the good conscience provided by piety.

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Sumerian King Gudea built a house, a temple for “his king,” the god; in this way the actual king exalted the unseen to the status of superking.¹⁰⁸ When Jahweh, through his prophet, prom­ises that King David’s throne shall be set up to last forever, King David, offering his thanks, emphatically proclaims himself the “slave” of his Lord—which does not alter but rather validates the fact that he and his offspring will continue to be kings over all the others.¹⁰⁹ A Hebrew psalm is repeatedly quoted in the New Testament: “Jahweh spoke to my lord: Sit down at my right hand, until I set your enemies a footstool for your feet.”¹¹⁰ As “my lord” is exalted by Jahweh, than whom none is higher, even he who is singing this praise will find himself in an exalted po­sition.

The double tier of power may be acted out through dramatic reversals. At the New Year festival in Babylon, the king is led to the Temple of Marduk. The priest takes away the king’s scepter, circlet, and sword and places them “before the god”; then he strikes the king’s cheek, accompanies him to the presence of the god, drags him by the ears, and makes him bow down to the ground. The king must say “I did not sin.” Then the priest con­soles him: “Have no fear... the god will exalt your kingship... he will destroy your enemy, fell your adversary.” The king regains his insignia, but is struck on the cheek once more. If tears flow, the god is friendly; if no tears appear, the god is angry, and “the enemy will rise up and bring about his downfall.”¹¹¹ The signals of submission, of bowing to the ground, receiving slaps, and shedding tears are essential means to win the favor of the supe­rior, the god of Babylon, for the king of Babylon; the god’s favor means destruction of the enemy, for within this world of strife which no king can escape, the enemy will either rise to bring the king’s downfall or will be destroyed. In the Book of Daniel King Nebukadnezar of Babylon, by the word of god, is expelled from his city and even from human society. He has to feed on grass like the cattle and to spend nights under the dew of heaven, until he acknowledges the highest god whose power is eternal; then Scbukadne/ar is reinstated to even greater kingship than before. Abjection and submission to the highest power can confirm the ruler's carthly power.9;

\\ c must go down to go up. brom.mother part of the ancient world, the Rome of Augustus, Horace gave this message its clas­sic formulation: “Because you keep yourself subordinate to rhe gods, you rule the empire,” dis te minorem quod geris imperas.¹·' 1 k was addressing Rome, the power that had conquered the

world, the power that was accused of recklessly sacking and dev­astating the oikumetie. But it was not through self-righteous in­solence, said the Augustan poet, but through bowing to the gods that the Romans acquired and kept their empire. Look at the temples which they dedicated to celebrate every victory—temples to be restored by Augustus. Already Polybius had noticed the great theater (tragodia) of religion at Rome. Every magistrate had both imperium and auspicia, the power to command and the privilege to get informed about the will of the gods; officials would do nothing without seeking the gods’ consent. The mighty one submits to the mightier one and can thus exercise his power in a legitimate fashion, with good conscience, and with success.

Outside the shadow cast by monarchic power the two-tiered structure seems less oppressive. The idea of civic equality is based on rhe postulate that power should operate in a circle of equiv­alence: to be ruled and to rule in turn.¹¹⁴ The religious two-tier theater of power still tends to manifest itself in the normal family structure. As the parents honor god, they educate their children: “Honor first god, secondly, your parents.”¹¹⁵ In the Christian monastic orders obedience is the major obligation, both to the monastic officials and to god. “Obey those who lead you,” the Epistle to the Hebrews says, “give in to them; for they work intensively for your souls, because they will be held responsi­ble.” ¹¹ -^f It can be observed in practically all forms of religious humility that the person who bows to gods makes others follow·· his example, and in this way may secure a leading role for him·· self.

The Language of Power: The Envoy

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One of the basic functions of language communication is to give orders."⁷ The essence of power among humans is to issue com­mands that are obeyed. Within a hierarchical system opportu­nities to give orders multiply, as verbalized commands can be passed on in a chain of dependence: A tells B what C shall do, and B is eager to tell C. Intelligent primates know, in their system of rank, that it is an advantage to be close to a high-ranking individual because his or her prestige will extend to those who keep up the connection; it is possible to use a partner as a “social tool.”¹¹⁸ But it is only through language that a full and wide­spread system of command can be established. The will of the superior becomes transferable in its verbalized form. This in turn creates the role of the messenger of power, someone who passes on commands that are not his own, telling others what to do. He administers the power of the stronger one without running the full risk of responsibility.

As the chain of power grows in extension and ramifications, systems of dependence arise that leave the individual unable to penetrate to the main source of power, either physically or intel­lectually. Think of Kafka’s tales, The Process and The Castle. Even in less complicated systems some unseen superior may gain authority and give commands without ever showing himself. The nonobvious source has the obvious advantage of being unassail­able; nothing much can be gained from fighting envoys. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, On the World, describes how the king of Persia remained invisible to everyone in his palace, closed in by gateways, doors, and curtains, but still communicated with all of his realm through his informants, administrators, and fight­ers; this, the author says, is just an imperfect model for imagining god, the invisible king of the universe.¹¹⁹

With the system of two-tiered power, royal orders and actions can take the shape of divine ordinances. An illustration is a text of Samsuiluna, king of Babylon about 1700 b.c. The highest god, Enlil, spoke to his son and his daughter, Zababa and Ishtar, and

they in turn “exultantly” communicated the message to the king: “Samsuiluna, seed of gods, Enlil has made great your destiny; we arc going to be at your side; we are killing your enemies;... but you shall build the wall of Kish higher than whatever there was before.” The king obeys, starts a war, wins a victory, and builds the temple for Zababa and Ishtar at Kish.¹²⁰ We are not told just how the king received the divine command, whether by dream or by oracle; in a later period messages from the gods are sent from their sanctuaries to the king of Assyria, while charismatic prophets and priests act as intermediaries.¹²¹ The chain of prom­ise and command is clear, starting from the highest god and transmitted to the ruler, with minor gods serving as messengers and the king acting accordingly. The real event, the war that destroyed cities and brought booty to Babylon, is framed by or­der and obeisance.

We need not dwell here on the role of angels as messengers in the Jewish and Christian religions.¹²² It is more important to note that founders of religion repeatedly chose to present themselves as envoys of their god. Jesus relied on “the father who has sent me,”¹²³ as John the Baptist had already referred to “him who sent me to baptize people.”¹²⁴ Jesus sent out his apostles in turn to act as envoys of the second degree: “As my father has sent me, I am sending you.”¹²⁵ Mani, the founder of Manicheism, wrote to King Shapur of Persia:

God’s envoys do not cease bringing forth, from aeon to aeon, wisdom and works. Their advent happened to be at one age in the person of the envoy who was the Buddha, sent to the regions of India; in another age in the person of Zarathustra, sent to the land of Persia; again at another age in the person of Jesus, sent to the Western lands; then this revelation... pre­sented itself in this age, which is the last, in the person of myself, Mani, the envoy of the true god, sent to the land of Babylon.¹²⁶

Allah directly dictated to Mohammed the text of the Quran, us­ing the prophet as his mouthpiece in the propagation of Islam.

Although the revelation has become literate, the role of the mes­senger remains. The basic formula of Islam proclaims Moham­med to be “the messenger of Allah.”¹²⁷

100 This system is much less elaborate in the Greek world, but the commands of gods transmitted through their envoys are ubiq­uitous there too. Hesiod’s Zeus has 30,000 invisible guardians who roam around the earth controlling the deeds of mortal men.’²⁸ Later on, daimones were credited with the role of mes­sengers. ¹²⁹ Normal religious practice includes oracles, dreams, visions, and voices, all of which take the form of commands; in addition, there are interpreters who speak in the name of the god, through special knowledge and technique or through trance and ecstasy. They proclaim the will of the god; the fundamental role of language could not be clearer in this apparently irrational sphere. “Thus spoke Apollo,” the seer will solemnly pronounce. He takes his authority from Apollo, who in turn is the mouth­piece of Zeus.¹³⁰ The evidence of poetry is augmented by count­less votive inscriptions that claim that an offering to the gods has been made “at their command,” kat’ epitagen, keleustheis, iussu deorum. In the Hebrew Bible the term for prophet is nabi’, “he who speaks out.” “There was the word of Jahweh to Jonah, son of Amittai: go to Nineveh... and preach,”¹³¹ and Jonah tells the people of Nineveh what to do, and—quite unexpectedly—they obey. Nathan says to David: “Thus speaks Jahweh.”¹³² Again, in this chain of command the prophet-messenger is the intermedi­ary. Aristophanes parodies this in comedy when he has the seer say what Bakis said the Nymphs said—the chain appears more and more problematic with each additional link.¹³³ At Rome, in 102 b.c., a certain Battakes, priest of the Great Mother of the Gods from Pessinus, stepped forth announcing “that he was here on account of the command of the goddess,” and by this au­thority he gave order to the Roman authorities that public pu­rification ceremonies be performed. One official, unimpressed, had the priest driven off the Forum—and died three days later.¹³⁴ Men are cunning by nature and prone to disobey; this is the constant complaint of prophets. Ritual may invite imitation, and

this may he true even of rituals of submission if they make the oiliers feel and accept the presence of superior powers,¹³³ but individual needs and desires often cause men to disregard threats and claims of invisible actors. The question of how such other­worldly messages and commands can be made compelling brings back the fundamental problem of how to validate the nonob- vious.¹¹⁶ Systems for making the unseen authorities speak, forms of divination, and claims to direct experience by ecstatics, sha­mans, and mystics may or may not succeed.’³⁷ These charismat­ics are not hypocrites. Some of them experience an irresistible constraint to deliver their message at ail cost and are often ready to die for their cause. “The Lord has sent me... forced by ne­cessity, willing or unwilling,” a Montanist prophetess pro­claimed.¹³⁸ The messengers themselves are links in a chain: pherei pheronta. In the words of an ancient Greek proverbial saying, while the bearer of the load bears down on others, the load is heavy on himself.¹³⁹