Myth and Religion in Foreign Encounter

The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion

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Also available by Kees van der Pijl from Pluto Press

Nomads, Empires, States:Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy, Volume I

Global Rivalries from the Cold War to Iraq

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The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion

Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy

Volume II

Kees vAn der Pijl

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First published 2010 by Pluto Press345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010

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Contents

Preface viAcknowledgements xiv

1 TribalForeignRelationsandMythicalAncestry 1 identity and Memory in ethnogenetic Myth 2 Pseudo-speciation and the Constitution of the Foreign 15 Mythical exchanges 28

2 Sedentary–NomadEncountersinSemiticMythandReligion 37

ethnogenesis and Foreign relations in Mesopotamian Mythology 37 imperial and nomadic Antecedents of the semitic Monotheisms 49 Foreign relations in the Bible and the Koran 66

3 WarriorHeroesintheIndo-EuropeanLineage 85 From Aryan–dravidian synthesis to Hindu nationalism 85 Heroes of the Hellenic World in the Mirror of Western imperialism 102 Warrior and Fertility Myths from the scythians to Wagner 118

4 ImperialCosmologiesandtheNomadCounterpoint 133 imperial Confucianism and Frontier Buddhism 134 Contending Buddhisms on China’s Frontier 144 Frontier Origins and imperial Transformation of roman Christianity 149 Crusaders and Muslims 159

5 RivalFundamentalismsontheImperialFrontier 178 Militant Calvinism and Western Hegemony 179 Zionism and jewish Fundamentalism in israel 189 islam as the new nomad Creed? 204

References 223Index 236

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Preface

This is the second of a planned three-volume project entitled Modes of Foreign Relations and Political Economy. My intention in volume i, Nomads, Empires, States, was to show that the world order of sovereign states is only one historically specific form of foreign relations. if we define these as the relations between communities occupying separate spaces and considering each other as outsiders, it is obvious that there are and have been other forms of foreign relations besides inter-state diplomacy, just as there will be in the future.

All human society, then, is historical. society arises in the exploitation of nature; but nature continues to set limits to what we can achieve, so societies must reorganise themselves over time. Change in other words occurs in a contradictory setting from which it cannot escape – in the case of foreign relations, the inner tension between separate community and common humanity. Marx developed the notion of modes of production in this perspective, as a way of denaturalising given patterns of relations of production as historical, subject to change, with the aim of returning the ability to make history to subjects under their spell. i apply the idea of ‘modes’ to foreign relations, aiming to develop a ‘critique of international relations’ (ir) in the spirit of Marx’s critique of bourgeois economics. reproducing itself on an ever larger scale as civilisation and other forms of transforming nature advance, any given pattern of foreign relations has a limited shelf life, as do types of economy and society. Crisis, war, and revolution then signal that the limits of the possible have been reached, or crossed already.

it is not just a temporal, historical sequence that is involved in modes of foreign relations. Obviously a spatial dimension is included, albeit one that is bound up with time, and anchored, like the relations of production, in the development of the productive forces. relations of exploitation, both within and between societies, internalise and reproduce the general, exploitative relationship with nature; thus the Western state form and the sovereign equality mode, along with the capitalist mode of production, have also been imprinted on outlying areas as one aspect of european expansion. ‘Modern colonialism won its great victories not so much through its military and technological

vi

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prowess’, nandy points out in this connection (1988: ix), ‘as through its ability to create secular hierarchies incompatible with the traditional order.’ For those subjected to these structures as much as for those imposing them, they were usually seen as conducive to progress. As an integral part of modernity, independent statehood and territorially bounded nationality were seen as key markers of shaping one’s destiny in accordance with the most advanced insights. This was implanted across all societies which did not enjoy the first-mover advantage of north-west europe and its settler outposts, the Atlantic ‘West’ or, as i call it, the lockean heartland. it is my claim that the propagation of formal sovereign equality and the accompanying academic discipline, ir (as well as international law), have been an underrated aspect of the ways in which this central, liberal structure has continued to occupy the commanding heights of the global political economy (compared to, say, finance, or monopoly capitalism, or ‘white man’s burden’ chauvinism).

The present volume analyses the mythical and religious articulations of tribal and imperial foreign relations, which antedate relations of sovereign equality. Foreign relations take shape in ethnogenesis and ethno-transformation; they sum up how communities and societies, in dealing with others they consider as outsiders, occupy space, protect it, and exchange with each other. Who constitutes the community, and on what title, and also what sorts of space are actually occupied – single territories, oasis trails, neighbourhoods that are home to members of a diaspora, or inter-oceanic constellations as for the modern West – and how they are occupied; all these are matters of historical variation and evolution. in the tribal mode, sovereignty over living space is ancestral, protection a matter of ritual, and exchange typically involves exogamy and barter; the empire/nomad mode is about universal sovereignty, protection by frontier auxiliaries, and tribute. A crucial divide here, as Petrov has argued (2005: 3), is what societies do with their ‘redundant’ people: are they put to work to build the monuments of empire – pyramids, Chinese walls, or irrigation infrastructure – or do they swarm out, as the nomads throughout history have done, and implant themselves and their world onto the worlds of others?

likewise, the form of protecting space, by a land army recruited from the nation or otherwise, and the legitimacy of different aspects of exchange (crucially including norms of endogamy and exogamy), all hang together in more or less systematic ways as modes of foreign relations. Myth, religion, and ethical philosophies like Confucianism

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viii The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion

have shaped the ways different communities and societies have historically engaged in these relations, long before they crystallised into inter-state relations of the european type. They continue to operate, under different conditions and with hugely varying effect, to the present day.

As i shall argue in volume iii, the lockean heartland has not just historically constituted itself as a transnationally linked constellation. it has also theoretically defended such a form of occupying space. The conceptual schemes developed in the process prefigure the global-governance mode of foreign relations, albeit mortgaged to liberal interests and preconceptions. Paradoxically, the West has simultane-ously prescribed the territorial national state form to the rest of the world, as if it had not itself gone beyond this early on by embedding it in a wider, transnational social space – thus transforming the very nature of the relation between state and society. The discipline of ir is at the heart of the prescription to organise society ‘nationally’. However, in laying down the rules of engagement, the Anglophone heartland placed before all other societies a task in most cases impossible to fulfil; a recipe for global ethnic cleansing, if not actual genocide. in the present work, i seek to demonstrate how the seeds of the Western, globalising vision, as well as a range of alternative frameworks, can be retraced in the legacy of tribal and imperial metaphysical thought. The international discipline, intellectual and practical, which the West has sought to impose on the world (granting an exception only to itself), has worked as a straitjacket undermining social stability and progress. it called into being phenomena like ‘minorities’, which only arise as a result of imposing a framework, the territorial nation-state, that was a misfit for most if not all other societies. Al-Barghouti describes (2008: 148) how the British consul general, the earl of Cromer, in the early twentieth century designed such a structure for egypt; but

The automaton Cromer wanted independent Egypt to be had a structural defect, for it was built over the body of a people who, like any other people, was very much alive, and whose movement contradicted the movements for which the automaton was built.

in an age of ‘fundamentalisms’ and religious revival, analysing the fault lines in the mental ecology of a globalising world and retracing the sources of difference are urgent tasks; just as the roots of the Western world-view in this respect deserve to be highlighted. Of course non-mythical, practical thought has always been around as

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Preface ix

well, and not just in Greece and rome. The Mari eponym chronicle dating from the early second millennium bc,1 which deals with the campaign of shamshi-Adad i, the ruler of northern Mesopotamia, against Yamhad in syria, is entirely ‘secular’ already. later writers, such as sun Zi in China, or Kautilya, the author of the Arthasastra, are proto-Machiavellian in their reflections on the art of war and diplomacy, and many more examples can be given. But in this domain, too, the Western route, prefigured by Greek intellectual development and Christianity’s permissiveness towards scholarly endeavour, constituted a first-mover advantage which has often wrong-footed others. Yet all historical societies rely on some form of transcendent logic to legitimate their political–economic order and motivate people to abide by its routines; in emergencies, this aspect of collective will is only intensified. God was invoked in the attacks on Us targets in 2001, and also apparently sanctioned the invasion of iraq two years later, or so the Us president, George W. Bush, believed. His accomplice in london did not demur on this score either.

As the world moves towards greater integration and mutual exposure, the process of socialisation, in the sense of Vergesellschaf-tung (from Gesellschaft, society), works towards enmeshing the way of life of peoples of different origin to an ever greater degree. Political economy is the key here. it also generates spiritual socialisation but not necessarily Vergemeinschaftung (from Gemeinschaft, community), which according to Weber (1976: 21) accompanies socialisation even under supposedly modern conditions. Vergemeinschaftung, ‘communitisation’, draws on sources which may cut across the grid of spiritual socialisation. so whilst we are increasingly aware of and often familiar with the world-views of communities which are different from ourselves, the actual process of communitisa-tion does not necessarily operate in this ecumenical sense. new ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991) may form in apparent contradiction to the coordinates of spiritual socialisation, and myth and religion play out in this context. As schüler writes (2008: 145), ‘religions provide their adherents with symbols, practices, images and narratives that permit them to move about in “imagined global communities” and “sacral landscapes” that are independent from national and cultural boundaries.’

1. As in volume i, i use ‘bc’ and ‘ad’ without any religious connotation. ‘(Before) Common era’ or other alternatives after all refer just as much to the supposed year of Christ’s birth.

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x The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion

How myth and religion structure these landscapes, drawing new lines of mutual foreignness, is an emotionally charged and deeply political issue. When encountering ‘others’, we are in fact looking in a mirror – except that we then also risk seeing what May (2003: 33) calls ‘an undiscovered, repressed or forgotten dimension’ of ourselves. it is the terror generated by this confrontation that has too often entailed extreme violence.

in Chapter 1, i discuss those aspects of mythical ancestry that accompany the earliest forms of tribal foreign relations. i analyse what i call ethnogenetic myth on the basis of insights from ethology and psychology dealing with how concepts of collective identity and the foreign become inscribed into the consciousness of communities. i then analyse pseudo-speciation, a key principle of identifying others as non- or subhuman, as well as actual myths dealing with foreign relations. Myth and religion are meant to reassure people that what they are doing collectively and individually is warranted and legitimate (van Baaren 1960: 212). in this respect they have the same confidence-building capacity as contemporary, supposedly secular theories. However, investigating the mythical past is not just a matter of adding a missing chapter to the history of ir thought. i also want to demonstrate how regression and progression are inherent in the operation of the multidimensional temporality that is involved here. By this i mean that the level of social relations can under certain circumstances become uncoupled from the level of development of civilisation and other productive forces, allowing radical shifts in collective mental constellations. Utopias may look forward, but also turn to the past and, especially when guided by mythical conceptions of the foreign (who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’), extreme regressions can take place. Bloch (1971: 131) calls this ‘non-contemporaneity’, Ungleichzeitigkeit, between the basis and the superstructure, or as i would prefer to phrase it, between the level of development of the productive forces and the ideational aspect of social relations. All along, the need to fit communities into a particular spatial grid like the territorial nation-state works as a powerful determinant of how this slide-rule effect actually works out.

in Chapter 2, i argue that monotheism in the Middle east emerged on the empire/nomad fault line. in the epic proto-imperial mythology of Mesopotamia, the oldest written ‘theory’ of foreign relations, the Gilgamesh epic, stands out as an early instance of how contemporaries articulated the universal sovereignty bestowed by the gods, protection by incorporating semi-barbarian foreigners, and

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tribute. The semitic monotheisms, beginning with judaism, emerged later, partly building on ancient Mesopotamian myth. in volume i (2007: ch.4) i sought to demonstrate how nomadic and imperial practices became synthesised in the empire of Western Christianity and, more particularly, in the maritime breakaway of its english-speaking frontier sector. in the present chapter, the roots of this synthesis are traced back to the origins of judaism, which connects an Abrahamic, nomadic lineage, with the imperial monotheism first proclaimed by the pharaoh Akhenaten. i look at the Old Testament through the lens of nomad/sedentary foreign relations, investigating its mythical content against the background of the settlement of the jewish ethnos. islam in turn emerged as an ethical code unifying Arab tribes into a universalising civilisation. The Koran, too, contains important themes referring to foreign relations, but unlike judaism (and allowing for a time lag of almost two millennia) it does not single out a particular people as divinely chosen; it charts a foreign divide only between the community of believers (the Umma) and those outside it.

A separate strand of epic mythology and polytheistic imagery concerning foreign relations emerged in the indo-european conquests and migrations in the second millennium bc. in Chapter 3, i discuss, first, the emergence of Hinduism as a synthesis between the Aryan vedic heritage and the pantheon of the indus valley civilisation. The resulting tradition is rich in epic tales about foreign conquests, from which some of its heroes drew surprisingly pacifist conclusions. indeed synthesis long characterised the religious ecumene that is Hinduism. The Hindutva ideology, an attempt to found a right-wing nationalism on the basis of a one-sided reading of india’s own history, represents a break with the syncretistic legacy of Hinduism; as i argue, this is an instance of how the territorial nation-state inflects the ideological heritage as part of the post-colonial adjustment (in addition to transnational processes of class formation). Whether the vedic religion of ancient Hinduism disseminated its triadic pantheon (combining gods of sovereignty, protection, and exchange) along with indo-european expansion will be investigated for the Graeco-roman as well as for the scythian and nordic–Germanic lineages in epic mythology. The Hellenic tradition discarded its actual religiosity early on and could thus become part of the Western, maritime–imperial world-view; the scythian and Germanic mythologies on the other hand operated on the slide-rule of multidimensional time as forward (1917) and backward (1933–45) movements respectively. in both

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cases, the confinement within states facing the globalising West fatally inflected their historic impact.

The cosmologies that emerged on the frontier between the historic land empires and nomads constitute the subject matter of Chapter 4. Here i return to the contrast between China and Western Christianity, analysed in historical outline in volume i. China’s imperial Confucianism developed as an amalgam of different approaches articulating the imperial hierocracy – the ethical, ‘hegemonic’ one that lent it its name, and the legalist alternative stressing the coercive aspect of authority. Chinese imperial universalism, however, as with most other land empires, remains immanent: it applies to the realm it actually controls. imperial Confucianism has no space for any barbarian contribution; the religions it encountered on the inner Asian frontier and to its south remained largely unassimilated even though Buddhism (on which i concentrate in this chapter) at several junctures acquired great prestige in imperial China too. The frontier Buddhisms of japan, Tibet, and sri lanka (and others on the southern ‘Theravada belt’) over time hardened into nationalisms ill-befitting their egalitarian and pacifist original inspiration. Christianity too originated as a frontier phenomenon, in the far east of the roman empire; but it was gradually incorporated into it, entailing a trans-formation of the apostolic communion into a hierarchical, priestly church. Christianity owes it to Augustine that it could survive the demise of the Western empire. Augustine projected a transcendent imperial universalism, reaching beyond its temporary worldly shell. This was the perspective animating papal imperial aspirations in the Crusades, the frontier campaigns of Western Christianity. in this protracted encounter, the frontier once again worked as a transmission belt of crucial innovations. Western Christianity was its net beneficiary by far, notably in its absorption of the revolutionary materialism of Averroes (ibn rushd). However, by 1300 the Mediterranean sector of the imperial frontier froze again into a fruitless antinomy – as testified by the sterile imperial fantasy of dante’s Divina Commedia and, a generation later, the idealisation of the original islamic nomadism by ibn Khaldun.

it took until the twentieth century for Western Christianity to engage in a new assault on the eastern Mediterranean homeland of islam. in Chapter 5, i turn first to the radical Calvinism which in the seventeenth century became the guiding spirit of transatlantic settlement. Having contributed first to the development of a transnational capitalist political economy in the english-speaking

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world, the world-historic synthesis of universalism and nomadic exploratory spirit that is at the origin of Western expansion once again turned to the Middle east. ‘The territory today shared and contested by jews and Palestinians’, writes Gershom Gorenberg (as in Phillips 2004: 242–3), ‘is the stage of myth in Christianity, judaism and even islam’ – it is their Holy land in various ways. Here the ‘fun-damentalist’ versions of the three Abrahamic monotheisms and their conceptions of foreignness, rightful place, protection, and trade are the spearheads in the encounter. Fundamentalism is a sign that the processes of spiritual socialisation generated by Western expansion and the globalisation of capitalist discipline have reached a critical threshold. Tourism, migration, and flight allow or force people to move across each other’s sacral landscapes on an unprecedented scale, defying the compartmentalisation by territorial nation-states. The need continually to negotiate access intensifies the foreign encounter in endlessly complex ways; at the same time, deepening inequalities cut across tentative mutual adjustment and recognition of common symbols and codes, giving rise to an intense, if deterritorialised, foreignness. The idea of representing a ‘chosen people’, which runs through the most exalted versions of the three monotheisms, is one of the ways in which people deal with this.

Meanwhile, not one of the monotheisms is monolithic. just as Christianity has been refracted into many different shades and denominations, and Zionism exists in a definite tension with jewish orthodoxy, islam denotes a world of inner diversity that only in an imperialist perspective can be seen as a single historical force. But such a subtle understanding is being steamrollered in contemporary struggles over the control of the planet’s diminishing resources and deteriorating life-support base. The spectre of new ‘wars of religion’, remote in itself but fanned by the aggressive expansion of the Western way of life, eclipses the far more urgent need to transcend the world of states and private property in order to save humanity from planetary disaster.

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Acknowledgements

This is the second volume to come out of a research project supported by the leverhulme Trust, ‘Tribal and imperial Antecedents of Contemporary Foreign relations’, awarded for the period 2006–09. i thank Thomas Ferguson, Andrew linklater, and jan nederveen Pieterse for their support in obtaining this grant, as well as the anonymous referees who judged the application on behalf of the Trust.

volume i, Nomads, Empires, States, was awarded the deutscher Memorial Prize for 2008. i thank the jury for their generosity in judging this work. My gratitude also goes to the successive cohorts of students whose open-minded commitment and inquisitiveness will hopefully ensure that the University of sussex remains the unique place it has been since its establishment in the tumultuous sixties.

Paul Aarts, Mohammed Afridi, Benoît Challand, radhika desai, sylvia van der does de Bye, james Fairhead, Bhabani nayak, renk Özdemir, ronen Palan, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Fabio Petito, nuno-Gol Pires, dieter Plehwe, Magnus ryner, julian saurin, and Frank schröder at various stages helped with comments on drafts, suggestions for further reading, encouragement, or otherwise. Throughout the period that i worked on this project, ishan Cader provided research assistance. eva Benova kindly shared with me insights from the soviet-era Encyclopaedia of Atheism. in 2004 and 2007 i had the opportunity to present ideas on myth and foreign relations to panels at BisA annual conferences, at the Universities of Warwick and Cambridge respectively. i thank the organisers and the discussants at both events for keeping me on my toes on the topic. As i was doing the final editing, Alexander Kovryga of the Ukrainian Forum sent me a paper on the social revolution of Greek antiquity by the russian thinker, M.K. Petrov, translated for me by Yuliya Yurchenko. i thank him for this reference and for the Forum’s invitation to speak in Kiev in november 2008.

As with volume i, Anthony Winder did a splendid job editing the manuscript. i thank him and the team at Pluto (robert Webb, Melanie Patrick, and everyone else involved) for seeing the book through to publication with their usual skill and efficiency.

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it goes without saying that for any remaining errors, which are inevitable given the scope of the subject matter, i alone am responsible. As to the spelling of foreign names and terms, i have used Pinyin for Chinese, and have written Arabic and Farsi words without accents.

in 2003 the United states and Britain invaded iraq, in breach of existing international law and morality, ignoring the objections of the majority on the Un security Council and in spite of mass protests the world over. The consequences of this criminal adventure, for which George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and others sharing the responsibility still have to be brought to justice, included the termination of the Ph.d. project of my student, Adil Ali. Adil, an exile from saddam Hussein’s iraq, had good reason to be away from his country of origin. But it was only the Anglo-American invasion that truly put an end to his hopes to return there within the foreseeable future. The cruel details of how his own aspirations, his family in Britain and in Basra, and iraqi society fell victim to the imperial delusions of politicians in Washington and london are best left aside here. Adil, a shia Muslim himself, helped me to select a reliable translation of the Koran to consult for this book and enlightened me on various aspects of islam and on the political economy and civilisation of the Arab world, which i can only hope to have put to good use. We have lost touch, but it is to him and his family (as he once proudly told me, it was a signal feature of the old iraq that his brothers included a sunni Muslim and a communist) that i dedicate this volume.

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1Tribal Foreign Relations and Mythical Ancestry

A community’s collective identity emerges from the exploitation and socialisation of its relationship to internal and external nature. Of the forces in a group’s natural environment, other communities obviously require particular attention. They potentially constitute a threat, or may be hunted for prey; but they can equally provide spouses which a small group is unable or unwilling to find within its own unit. The dilemmas associated with these questions (friend/enemy, mate or meal) constitute the groundwork for mythologies of foreign relations. Once language develops, it raises consciousness to a level unknown to other species, whilst differentiating separate communities in the process of ethnogenesis. Social action now requires a frame of reference that animal instincts can operate without. Myth offers such a framework.

The oral record is rich in myths about the origin of ‘mankind’, but only to the extent that mankind can initially be aware of itself, that is, as a specific community. All across the world, communities imagined themselves as having descended from some form of heaven or extra-temporal world, and as destined to return there. In the deep past it was not self-evident that others might have had comparable spiritual experiences and claims. Ethnogenetic myth will therefore typically be ethnocentric; if it deals with others at all, it will rely on pseudo-speciation to identify foreigners as monkeys, dwarfs, demons, or otherwise.

Tribal foreign relations are characterised by the occupation of space on account of ancestry; protecting it by ritual and threats; and exchanging women and gifts. This is not a passing phenomenon. The experiences of many millennia deposit a sediment of habits in human communities which under specific conditions can be reactivated in later epochs. However, tribal foreign relations have obtained longest among communities which existed in a less demanding interethnic milieu, with more space but fewer resources. As a result, some of the high roads of cultural development were left unexplored.

1

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2 The Foreign Encounter in Myth and Religion

Hard metal technology, horses, writing, or an economic surplus to sustain a specialised class of administrators and a state were long absent among Australian Aborigines, Polynesians and other Pacific island populations, and many Amerindian and sub-Saharan African communities. The ancestors of these peoples were human as early as those of Manhattan stockbrokers or Japanese engineers – there is only one human species. But the challenges such communities faced could be handled on the basis of an initial fund of cultural achievements for much longer and only proved inadequate when they were ‘discovered’ by Europeans. By then, the means at their disposal proved so unequal to those available to their unexpected visitors that the chances to adapt their way of life on conditions set by themselves were minimal.

It is ethnogenetic myth and its role in the context of tribal foreign relations that will concern us in this chapter. I first look at how myth arises from the instinctual substratum in anthropogenesis and ethnogenesis and draw some general conclusions about the multi-dimensionality of human consciousness. The remainder of the chapter deals with how, in the expanded ‘memory space’ available to linguistically articulate communities, myths have crystallised that deal with the various aspects of tribal foreign relations.

IDENTITY AND MEMORY IN ETHNOGENETIC MYTH

Myth plays its part in the mobilisation of the community as a unit capable of concerted, conscious action. In that sense it is not different from contemporary social theory. It serves to overcome fear, empower leaders, and establish presence authoritatively, by providing the human group with narratives for which its genotypic mental equipment lays the groundwork. So when Lévi-Strauss (1962: 126) claims that myth relies on the ‘architecture of the spirit’, he means that the mythical imagination springs from the neurophysiological possibilities of the human mind functioning in a group. There is no other source of insight available.

The animal brain evolved from the primary neural apparatus. Already in reptiles, sensory–motor functions require the operation of higher segments of the nervous system as well. In mammals, these evolved into the limbic system, which is roughly 200 million years old. The development of the limbic system, according to Vroon (1994: 108–10), among other things enlarges the scope of analogical communication (facial expression, body language) by

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Tribal Foreign Relations and Mythical Ancestry 3

ideophonic proto-language – angry shouts, ‘curses’, and expressions of fear or pain. The communicative repertoire now comes to include combinations of sounds with differing pitches and timbres. In a hostile encounter, as with the hominids wielding bones in the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the ‘music’ will be loud and intimidating; more subdued tones will serve to reassure and soothe kin. Tests measuring facial temperatures (which record brain temperature and metabolism, and hence mood) have established various ‘meanings’ in this proto-language.1 Particular sound packages early on evolved into ‘dialects’, which have been found to exist in communities of great apes along with other behaviour passed on by learning (Sherwood, Subiaul, and Zawidzki 2008: 428–9).

Analogical communication and ideophonic language interacted with size increases of parts of the brain; in hominids, the frontal cortex. This made learning and the selection among alternative cognitive strategies possible (Smail 2008: 93–4). In a growing brain, responses triggered by particular starters find more complex neural pathways available to them, amplifying the emotions whilst enlarging the reflective possibilities. ‘The processes emotionally perceived by individuals as “thought”’, writes Shirokogorov (1970: 39), ‘are chemo-physical in their nature [and] form a chain of absolute and conditioned reflexes … the origin and location of which are not confined to the central nervous system only.’ Traces of electromag-netic signalling (of the type that allows insects to coordinate their actions in swarms) are operative too; according to A. Szent-György (as in Vroon 1994: 106, 284; Bohm 1983: 175), proteins serve as semiconductors for such signals. In this way we may sense tension, or share an unspoken thought, but not much more. ‘A human’, Petrov writes (2005: 11), ‘in that respect is a genetically inadequate being, incapable – unlike bees, ants, or termites – of coding individuals into a matrix of differentiated kinds of activities by bio-code means.’ Yet acquired skills too rely on a biological substratum.

1. As Vroon records (1994: 99–100), among both Germans and English-speakers, the ‘ü’ sound in such experiments produces a rising temperature and is experienced negatively, even though this sound is frequent in Ger-man and absent in English. The ‘aa’ sound on the other hand produces the most consistent lowering of temperature. The ‘o’ sound (like ‘om’, the sacred sound of Buddhism, supposed to resonate from the creation of the universe) likewise is experienced as calming.

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The mechanisms of sign coding are deeply concealed in the subcortex of consciousness, especially when we speak of traditional societies. It is no easier for a carpenter, potter, or farmer to explain the essence of their experiences and translate those into the logic of notions, than for any of us to explain coherently how we walk, write, or talk.

The genotype of Homo sapiens sapiens has not basically changed since the ‘human revolution’ (between 70,000 and 150,000 years ago; Renfrew 2007: 88) and the out-of-Africa dispersal of actual human communities from the start of that epoch. Articulate speech, made possible by mutations in throat architecture, was part of the human revolution. Since humans operated in small groups held together by a complex of shared practices that often differed from those of others, language developed differentially too. The use of different words leads to abstraction along divergent paths, the more so as language becomes stimulus independent. Language, in the words of Piaget (2001: 35), is ‘a partial substitute for action’ and ‘replaces things by signs, and movements by their evocation’. Thus each community developed its own culture, defined by Geertz (1973: 44), as a ‘set of control mechanisms – plans, recipes, rules, instructions (what computer engineers call “programs”) – for the governing of behaviour’.

Ethnic specificity is cultural in this sense. It is constructed around a particular discipline articulated along a given linguistic–semiotic spectrum; different cultures also occupy specific sectors of the neuro-physiological ecosystem. Just as it is difficult to get rid of one’s accent in a foreign language because, from around the age of two, the particular synaptic ‘wiring’ for one’s mother tongue crowds out other pathways, a cultural discipline shapes brain–body states dif-ferentially too. As Smail notes (2008: 159), testosterone and cortisol production in response to an insult have been found to be ethnically specific. Cultural advances are transmitted to every new generation, and neural states and brain–body chemistries adjust to ensure that the functional package can be articulated and shared. This develops in relatively bounded sets, with speech demarcating areas of common understanding. Words have various functional values and are related to a distinct way of life, so ‘the language as a complex of starters has … certain limits for its variations and spreading’, Shirokogorov observes (1970: 45), and in turn is ‘conditioned by the existence of interrela-tions between the units’. Through such (proto-)foreign relations, spiritual socialisation develops across communities, charting paths for further ethno-transformation. When different branches of a socialised

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set disperse, common mindsets can remain operational even when people can no longer understand each other. Structure and syntax will retain commonalities (like the way of thinking), even when vocabularies diverge with distance and changing circumstances.

The human mind, then, does not concern the individual brain alone. It is not entirely ‘human’ either, nor is it immaterial in contrast to matter. Consciousness is a layered structure through which individuals are connected with others and with their environment. Renfrew (2007: 119–20) in this connection speaks of the distributed mind. In addition, every single mind, according to the same author, is ‘embodied’ (i.e. intelligent action relies on the entire body, as when we say, ‘a skilled hand’) and ‘extended’ (in the sense that purposeful action incorporates situations and materials to which it is applied). As population density increases along with sedentary life, these extensions become interlocked more densely as well, producing, in Smail’s reading (2008: 155), ‘a new neurophysiological ecosystem, a field of evolutionary adaptation in which the sorts of customs and habits that generate new neural configurations or alter brain-body states could evolve in unpredictable ways’.

The older instinctual reflexes, however, remain operative too. They may resurface when cultural discipline fails or malfunctions. Le Bon (1952: 6) famously argued that the pre-human substratum can emerge again in a crowd and overwrite the cultural heritage that is ethnically (in his terms, ‘racially’) specific. ‘From the mere fact of their being assembled, there result certain new psychological characteristics, which are added to the racial characteristics and differ from them at times to a very considerable degree.’ They constitute an ‘atavistic residuum of the instincts of primitive man’, he notes elsewhere (ibid.: 51), ‘which the fear of punishment obliges the isolated and responsible individual to curb’. This takes us to how we may imagine that mental dispositions, of which myths are the narrative expression, actually originate.

Instinct and Fantasy

The contradiction within which ethnogenesis and foreign relations develop is that between the separate community/society and the unity of the species. Contradiction here should be properly understood as arising in the process of exploiting the relationship with internal and external nature, including other humans. In Knafo’s words (2002: 153), contradictions ‘do not exist in the world but only in the way subjects invest the world with meaning’. To interpret events and

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appearances, early humans necessarily relied on reflexes developed for dealing with conflicting inner drives with which they are genetically equipped. This also constitutes the groundwork for myth. Grimal (1973: 14–15) in this connection speaks of ‘ancient modes of thought, instinctive moulds into which thought flows’. Ritual, mood equilibration, and the role of the subconscious in maintaining emotional stability are of particular importance here.

Animal ethology counts ritual as one way of avoiding potentially self-destructive reflexes. Nieburg (1970: 59) cites the example of feigning an act of feeding, not for nourishment, but to neutralise the effects of another animal’s presence by ostentatious nonchalance. Thus action is displaced to neutral terrain apparently unrelated to the fight/flight dilemma. Intra-specific aggression likewise tends to be ritualised to prevent a species from fighting itself to extinction (Ardrey 1966: 278–9). Sequential mood equilibration is a psychological process of ‘restoring order’ by counterbalancing emotional states generated by the limbic system with their opposites. Thus, as Vroon highlights (1994: 181), aggression tends to follow on fear, melancholy on merriment, etc. Post coitum omne animal triste est. Finally, there is the Freudian understanding of the subconscious as a reservoir that absorbs and represses disturbing mental content; a parallel-geared system of mood equilibration in which dreaming has its own role. Here the mythological imagination can be said to arise directly from the primordial mental configuration. ‘How else’, Jung asks (1972: 35),

could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos … into a bright day-world and dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?

The mythical reflection, then, develops as an interpretation of these different genotypic responses in the process of assimilating the world outside the mind. Following van Baaren (1960: 197), myth transmutes objective processes into subjective mental states, blurring the divide between the two. It is inherently social, built around a ‘fantasy’; not as a random mental leap unrelated to social structure, but as a particular line of thought that bridges the divide between self and other (R.D. Laing, as in Nieburg 1970: 57). Myth provides the group with a story of how the world originated, as well as narratives to make sense of human drives; a narrative infra-structure in which each storyline is the equivalent of a compelling

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theory about otherwise frightening aspects of existence, including the relations with other groups.

The incest taboo would be the most obvious example of a mythical fantasy. Regulating marriages by prohibiting incest is a crucial marker of the evolutionary entry point into history, the transition from species to community. Exogamy regulations are part of a cultural discipline, but as Smail notes (2008: 152), the continuity with nature should not therefore be overlooked. Many mammals besides humans have ways of avoiding kin mating, often by driving out young males when they reach sexual maturity. So assuming that the incest prohibition somehow bridges the natural and the cultural, how do humans deal with it once they become linguistically articulate?

The abstraction and objectification inherent in language and articulate thought turn people’s own instincts into something confronting them as an external force through alienation. The instinctive sexual drive and the equally preprogrammed inhibition to mate with one’s kin thus create what Freud calls (1938: 46) an ‘ambivalent emotion’ towards the object; the taboo serves as a way out of the dilemma between attraction and repulsion. It combines the conflicting feelings by raising the ‘positive’ drive to a platonic level, the level of the sacred; there it is aligned with the ‘negative’ impulse into a fear of touching, or even of visual contact, both equally aspects of sacrality. It is through amplifying the contradictory instinctual responses (recognised as conflicting in articulate thought) into a more complex, ritual/ceremonial mental construction, a ‘fantasy’, that people can come to terms with their own naturalness. Only thus, via a shared imaginary, can a human being, in Jung’s words (1972: 44), ‘find his way back to a world in which he is no longer a stranger’.

We have, in other words, a genetic substratum with conflicting impulses which at the most elementary level are balanced instinctively and physiologically. Sexuality as well as the (biological) prohibition of incest are regulated by the limbic system, which itself, as Vroon (1994: 109) explains, is an outgrowth of the smell functions. This brain segment in later development also becomes available for regulating the rearing of offspring, body language, play, emotional development, and operational learning. In this more complex field, fantasies made explicit by signs and words connect individual experiences into the explanatory narrative of a myth. As a vector of spiritual socialisation, myth, like social ritual, functions ‘to transmute events into a form of knowledge, learning, and consensus which modifies the behaviour of those involved and others who are affected’ (Nieburg 1970: 63).

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Nothing of this is optional; in an early community, collective and individual behaviour hang together in the strict observance of the rituals and the belief systems into which they are inscribed. That is the disciplinary aspect of culture – to allow deviance would mean putting the unit in jeopardy. I come back to this below.

Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of the structure of (ethnogenetic) myth (1962, 1989; Carroll 1977) is based on the assumption that (a) the mind (the embodied, extended, and distributed mind) seeks to neutralise opposites through mediation (finding a psychological ‘way out’ of disturbing binary distinctions); and that (b) these mediations, once made part of a narrative, obey particular rules of transforma-tion in which symbolic roles tend to be reversed. Now it may well be that there are aspects to Lévi-Strauss’s methodology for interpreting myths which have been derived, as Mounin argues (1970: 199–214), from a problematic reading of linguistics. But the basic idea is compatible with the aforementioned properties of early humans’ instinctive mental configuration. Early myths seek to mediate the extremes and in the process tend to shift roles (though not always reverse them: it is enough symbolically to reconcile or ‘neutralise’ conflicting emotions). Victor Turner’s description of social ritual (as in Taylor 2007: 49) puts it thus: ‘Every opposition is overcome or transcended in a recovered unity … [as] a means of putting at the service of the social order the very forces of disorder that inhere in man’s mammalian constitution.’

The emotionally disturbing aspect of incest has been recorded in various mythical narratives in ways that end with a reconciliation of antagonistic forces, often by a comforting displacement to neutral terrain. A myth of the Papua of Waropen, recorded by van Baaren (1960: 83), tells of a man who kills himself out of shame over an incestuous sexual act. From his dead body originate the sago palm and the banana. Thus his transgression and the atonement combine into the staple food, the source of the life of the community. Shame is also central in the myth of Tane, the god of the forests and birds of many Polynesian communities. Tane emerges victoriously from a struggle with other deities and, as we learn from Panoff (1973: 493), he creates the first woman, Hine, out of clay. Then he mates with her. When Hine finds out that her husband is also her father, she is overcome with remorse and flees to the underworld to become its resident queen, Hine-Nui-Te-Po, the Great Lady of the Night. Because incest brought death into the world along with humanity (the offspring of Tane and Hine), Hine in her dark abode presides over the dead.

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Here two separate binary oppositions, life–death and lust–repulsion, are reconciled through a single narrative. Thus the individual who is subject to ambivalent, fear-inspiring emotions is reassured by a comforting, ‘authoritative’ account making sense of it all.

The neo-Sudanese civilisations of Mali and Ghana have a comparable myth, in which incest is seen as an aspect of the disorder brought into the world by the first offspring of divine masculinity and nature. In a myth of the Dogon tribes of Mali recounted by Bastide (1973: 527–8), the supreme god Amma creates Earth and marries her. However, the clitoris of the Earth, represented by a nest of termites, rises up against the divine phallus and Amma is compelled to cut it out before taking possession of her. Out of the union with Earth, thus subordinated by mutilating her, Yurugu is born; it is he from whom all mischief springs. Being without a partner, he commits incest with the Earth, his mother. Not only do wicked bush spirits emerge from this act, but the Earth becomes impure too, as evidenced by the first appearance of menstrual blood. Amma then turns away from his initial creation and continues his work by creating the eight ancestors, four male and four female, whose descendants go on to populate the world. The reality that humanity forever faces evil is thus explained by the fact that Amma inadvertently began his creation by initiating a series of incestuous unions before he got the better idea.

Many more such tales are on record, but this should suffice to illustrate the structure of contradiction and resolution that Lévi-Strauss proposes. But can we really claim that such stories are extensions of mental material from the instinctual, hominid past, as Smail maintains (2008: 48–9), and not just literary inventions? Le Bon (1952: 45) writes in this connection that ‘the starting point of the [crowd’s] suggestion is always the illusion produced in an individual by more or less vague reminiscences, contagion following as the result of the affirmation of this initial illusion’. Freud agrees (1967: 126–7) that the ‘archaic heritage of mankind includes not only dispositions, but also ideational contents, memory traces of the experiences of former generations’, specifying that these consist of ‘thought-connections between ideas which were formed during the historical development of speech and which seem to be repeated every time the individual passes through such a development’.

Jung’s archetypes, such as the mother (mother deity, Mother Earth), can also be understood as such trace elements. These symbolic figures do not come with a story attached. We are conscious of their

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potential narrative possibilities and implications holographically, Vroon explains (1994: 61), as fragments with the hint of an integral ‘truth’ that still requires narrative articulation. Witzel (2001: 4.4) may therefore be right that Jung’s archetypes are not universal, but that does not mean that such inborn mental shapes do not exist; they have simply been elaborated into myths in some cultures and not in others.

Having memories before we are conscious of them is possible because all matter contains information, which can combine at a distance and non-causally. The experiments of Einstein, Rosen, and Podolsky in 1935 established that photons separated from a pion in a beam of light carry information (left- or rightward spin) that is ‘memory’ from a state of the combined particle that no longer obtains. Einstein was at a loss to explain this, famously referring to ‘spooky interactions’ (as in Park 1989: 423–4). With quantum mechanics, however, such events were found to be entirely predictable. Renfrew’s claim that the mind is embodied, extended, and distributed remains the supposition. Yet once we assume that brain matter too may hold content dating from preconscious experiences, it can be argued that social consciousness draws on that source as well. In this way, again according to Smail (2008: 117), a community will be endowed with ‘moods, emotions, and predispositions inherited from the ancestral past, where they evolved at the intersection of human biology and human culture’.

Humans become aware of this inheritance once they activate and interpret the mental substratum holding it. They also continue to ‘remember’ facts about the world (in which their brain evolved along with everything else) when they begin investigating it. Kepler and Kant were among those who speculated that there is an element of recognition in cognition; Wolfgang Pauli, the physicist and a co-author with Jung, claims (as in Park 1989: 238) that ‘becoming conscious of new knowledge [is] a coming into coincidence of pre-existing inner images in the human psyche with external objects and their relationships’. In the final analysis, brain matter is just a slice of all other matter, and whilst the creative ability to combine and totalise is crucially mediated by social consciousness, an inner material connection obtains too.

Sacred Time and Transcendence

That a community solves the contradiction between its own separate existence and the humanity of others by not recognising them as

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humans can be traced back to how collective memory is constituted. People’s primary affiliation is not with other human communities but with their own ancestors, who reside in a sacred sphere remote from daily experience and yet all-embracing. Ghanaian tribesmen denote this abode as ‘time immemorial’ (Apter 1968: 83); Australian Aborigines call it, ‘the dreaming’ or ‘dreamtime’ (from the Aranda word alcheringa, May 2003: 30–2). A.P. Elkin (as in Priestley 1989: 141) mentions other Aboriginals’ use of ‘the great time’. Eliade (1964) refers to illo tempore (‘in that time’). J.G. Bennett speaks (as in Priestley 1989: 273) of ‘eternity’. Eternity in Bennett’s analysis constitutes a ‘second dimension’ in the context of the three-dimensionality of time.

The community becomes aware of itself as distinct from others by tracing its origins to the sacred universe of second-dimension time. Ethnogenetic myth is therefore also cosmogonic myth. ‘The grappling with cosmogony implies a vision of reality in which all Being is essentially cosmogonic’, van Binsbergen writes (2005: 343b). ‘All human life [is] a challenge to participate in the cosmogony of Being, and all initiation, all ritual, all intimacy, all making, nothing but a reviving of the fundamentally cosmogonic nature of Being’ (hence he rejects Witzel’s 2001 claim that sub-Saharan and Australian myth is not cosmogonic). Every cultural practice serves to ensure that earthly existence remains embedded in the larger, sacred scheme of things. This centrally concerns the observance of the prohibitions of totemism – not eating the totem animal, the symbolic ancestor, and no sexual intercourse within the same totem community (clan, moiety; Freud 1938: 54).

Let us follow through the steps by which the three-dimensionality of time can be reconstructed as specifically human, community-specific, and temporal (in the sense of historical).

The first dimension of time concerns the linear succession of moments, straightforward clock time. However, as Bennett argues (as in Priestley 1989: 273), this would not allow us to situate ourselves in the flow of events. ‘If there were no other time but this, existence would be whittled away into an elusive “present” that is gone as soon as we reach it.’ Piaget (2001: 133) conveys the same when he notes that the time of sensory–motor intelligence ‘consists solely in co-ordinating successive perceptions and (also successive) overt movements’. The mind here relates to ‘a succession of states, linked by brief anticipations and reconstructions, but never arriving at an all-embracing representation’. The ‘now’ in lived time – not a static point, but ‘the gathering together of past into present to project

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a future’, as Augustine described it in the Confessions – must be recognised in its full complexity. This implies, Taylor comments (2007: 57), that ‘as well as the “horizontal” dimension of merely secular time, there is a “vertical” dimension, which can allow for the “warps” and foreshortening of time’. Hence ‘everything relates to more than one kind of time’.

In the second dimension, then, time loses its chronological quality and merges with space. The arrow of time can spin around freely, just like a compass needle as it approaches the magnetic pole. According to Piaget (2001: 133), the mind in this condition

breaks away from … short distances and physical pathways, so that it may seek to embrace the whole universe including what is invisible and sometimes even what cannot be pictured; this infinite expansion of spatio-temporal distances between subject and objects comprises the principal innovation of conceptual intelligence and the specific power that enables it to bring about operations.

An ‘all-embracing representation’, he continues in the same passage, ‘can only be established if thought makes [the succession of states, anticipations and reconstructions] simultaneous, and thus releases them from the temporal sequence characteristic of action’ (emphasis added). This is possible because of the reversibility of linguistically articulate thought, in contrast to the irreversibility of sensory–motor functions and the perceptions associated with them. In the second dimension, ‘[human] thought always remains free to make detours’ (Piaget 2001: 45). It is the suspension of temporal sequence (or spatial distance, for that matter) that lends both dreams and myths their ability to connect disparate events symbolically, bring back the dead, and so on. Myth, van Binsbergen writes (2005: 326), tends towards timelessness, ‘an overwhelming mythical present’. Or in Nandy’s words (1988: 59), myth ‘allow[s] one access to the processes which constitute history at the level of the here-and-the-now’.

Paradoxically, it is only in the second dimension that a sense of direction can occur. Bennett sees it as the dimension in which alternative paths of change, ‘potentialities’, are thinkable. The narrative sequences and time-independent displacements by which the conflicting impulses of the instinctual repertoire are elaborated into myths rely on the timelessness of second-dimension time. Yet whilst the consciousness of alternatives is only possible if we project our actions in second-dimension time, we are by definition inactive in that domain, just as we cannot intervene in a dream. No progress is possible, because the sequential concatenation of actions and events

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is suspended. There must, in other words, be ‘a sort of feedback loop’ with chronological, irreversible action (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 56); or, in terms of the Bennett model, a third dimension of time, that of real-time behaviour framed by the social imaginary.

It is third-dimension time through which movement in the first dimension (the times of chronology, action, and ageing) and mental displacement in the second dimension, in the universe of symbolic consciousness (which as we saw, is community-specific, ‘cultural’), come together again in actual human history. ‘Successive time does not allow choice. Eternity presents us with the choice, but gives us no room to make it. A third degree of freedom is needed to pass from one line of time to another’, writes Bennett (as in Priestley 1989: 273, emphasis added). Only in this third dimension (which he calls hyparxis; Piaget speaks of ‘the final operational level’, 2001: 54), do we reach the point where development occurs, because in this dimension our actions follow some sort of design sourced from the common stock of collective memory. ‘Objectivity’ now becomes possible too, since goal-oriented action is mediated by the awareness of a larger field of possibilities, selectively validated relative to others, and thus decentred from immediate self-gratification (Piaget 2001: 84). Mass delusion, too, is standard fare here; history is necessarily made and experienced through a cultural prism, it is always ‘ethnically’ inflected.

2nd dimension time(+ or –)

3rd dimension time(hyparxis) t3y = –t2x.t1y

t1x

– t2x

+ t2y

t1y

+ t2z

t1z

Figure 1.1 Three-Dimensional Time, at a Point ty

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In Figure 1.1, first-dimension time gives the real ‘date’, t1y, a point from which time can only move forward, so it always adds up positively. In second-dimension time, on the other hand, the ‘moment’ in eternity, the time of truly human consciousness, may be set at a different point. It can move either backwards into the imagined past relative to t1y, at t2x, or ahead of it, to a point t2z, a ‘utopian’ move by which possibilities that strictly speaking are not yet realisable come into view. Such a perspective is not actually chronological (hence, dimensions). It enables, to name but one possibility, the move away from the ethnocentric consciousness of the initial group, to universalism. Revolutions are the most clearcut cases of such movements of the collective mindset. Operational thought and intelligent action, ‘hyparxis’, is the product of the two time-lines – in the example of Figure 1.1, a regressive movement, so t2x.t1y, is negative.

The figure, for all its obvious limitations, may help to visualise why we can speak of a particular historicity of social time. Meaningful historical action relies on the space-time of the second dimension, in which some conception of eternity constitutes the frame of reference. Self-sacrifice for instance ‘makes sense’ only because action is mediated by ‘eternal values’; it is a choice absent from the instinctual repertoire, in which a voluntary death is not an option.2 Eternity, a condition obtaining on the plane of reversible collective thought, in turn requires historical action, ‘hyparxis’, to be connected again to a chronological sequence of events. In the phrase of Masao Abe (as in May 2003: 115), ‘Time becomes “history” when the factor of spatiality… is added to it. History comes to have meaning when time is understood to be irreversible.’

The figure also highlights the chronology of magic and early religion. The earliest form in which the multidimensional curvature of social (space-)time becomes a lived reality is through animism, the idea that everything exists in a dual condition – as physical reality and as spirit in second-dimension time. The symbolic thus remains tied to each person or object separately (as in primitive language, in which words are still assembled out of a verb plus the object of action; Whatmough 1956: 52–3). Once the arcs of fantasy widen, however, the degree of separation between the here and now and second-

2. As Sherwood, Subiaul, and Zawidzki highlight (2008: 442–3), the asymmetry of the two cerebral hemispheres makes ideologically motivated action (disobeying biological commands) possible. Humans in this way are ‘wired for transcendence’.

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dimension time increase as well. In Panoff’s account of the mythology of the Carolinas and other Micronesian archipelagos (1973: 508), the world of the living is seen as entirely divorced from the higher world, the sky. Each possesses its own inner structure. Such a mimesis of the mythical, the cosmic, the sociological and individual, has also been noted in Africa. As Bastide comments (1973: 536), in its mythology ‘everything happens as if the world were divided into watertight compartments, but these compartments correspond, they are “analogical” to one another’.

Once a culture achieves this level of differentiation of the collective imaginary from immediate existence, we may assume that the slide-rule aspect of second-dimension time will operate too – the regressive or progressive movement of the frame of reference in which current actions are conceived and validated. The normal state of this connection (except when a society makes a revolutionary leap forward), is that conception and validation rely on the past, and thus lag behind what is objectively possible. Ogburn’s theory of ‘cultural lag’ (1964) conveys just that. I give examples of this slide-rule effect in later chapters.

PSEUDO-SPECIATION AND THE CONSTITUTION OF THE FOREIGN

Myths are not just creations of human groups. They are also constitutive of communities, building blocks of culture differenti-ating them from others. ‘The mythical tradition’, van Binsbergen writes (2005: 343b), ‘may well have been Anatomically Modern Humankind’s main instrument for competitive survival.’ Merlin Donald (as in Renfrew 2007: 112–13) speaks of the ‘mythic’ stage of human development. Their specific cosmogony allowed the earliest communities to make sense of their own existence, but also tended to deny or denigrate the humanity of others through pseudo-speciation. This has remained a feature of foreign relations throughout human history. When Europeans first encountered Australian Aborigines, May reminds us (2003: 27), ‘there was earnest debate about whether they were human at all’. All racism is rooted in pseudo-speciation. An SS ideologue (Gauch 1989: 409) actually claimed in 1933 that ‘the non-Nordic human … occupies a position in between the Nordic human and the animals, first of all the primates’, ‘an intermediate stage’ for which the best term would be ‘subhuman’ (Untermensch). Such views are no longer current, but remain operative in more muted forms. The point is always to postulate the ‘natural’ superiority of

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our side, lend it the imprint of the sacred, and relegate others, if they have a right to life at all, to secondary status.

The oldest mythical material, then, has been traced to the out-of-Africa migration that coincided with the human revolution. Van Binsbergen (2005: 346, Table 3: i) suggests that this may have included cosmogonic elements such as the lightning bird motif, the earth as primary element, and the cosmic snake or rainbow. Some of it may have been connected with the domestication of fire, or with finding richer land once the relatively poor soils of Africa had been left behind. The ‘trickster’ figure, another of Jung’s archetypes (1972: 17), may also be traced to a very early stage of development. It is related to the lack of success inherent in the hunting and gathering way of life and, more generally, to the discovery of confusion and unexpected mental leaps. With this small initial fund of mythical imaginaries, early communities had to confront two tasks – occupying space confidently and authoritatively and dealing with others.

Ancestral Authority and the Foreign Encounter

It is now broadly accepted that in the course of the human revolution, primate-type dominance hierarchies mutated into egalitarian units (Boehm 1999; Allen 1984). This mutation generated a community ethos which Smail claims (2008: 148) became ‘at least loosely wired in the human brain’. No narratives recording the attendant changes can be expected to have persisted, but the standard myth of the social contract proposed by Freud (1938: 188–94, 1967: 102–4) stylises the transition.

The myth assumes an original human horde ruled by the all-powerful father, who is entitled to the females in the horde. He sires all offspring and rules with terrible brutality. The other males (brothers, sons) are either castrated or driven out to live on their own. At one point, however, they club together and kill the father, eating him to appropriate his qualities (an act in which hatred and admiration are conflated). Next, the brothers, fearing a fratricidal fight over succession, agree a social contract by which they renounce the claim to be the sole ruler. They also renounce the right to marry mothers and sisters (thus establishing patterned exogamy). The original father continues to be worshipped in the form of the totem, a sacred animal or other token signifying the origin of the group, thus reconciling the patricide with the need for community. Now the contract terminology is an obvious projection. We may think back, though, to the phenomenon that at a low level of development,

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communities disperse or even fight to resist the formation of a separate ruling group, which they cannot (yet) afford.

Of the return migration into Africa and the spread of humans to Australasia, which occurred some 18,000 to 20,000 years ago, narrative traces do remain. Van Binsbergen (2005: 343b and 346, Table 3: ii) argues that (proto-)Khoisan speakers (today’s Khoi herders and San hunters, aka the ‘Hottentots’ and ‘Bushmen’ of southern Africa) brought along mythical themes that had gestated in south or west Asia for many millennia, such as the mantis, the cosmogony of the tree, and shamanism (an early form of priestly authority to which I return below). Recorded Khoisan mythology (I follow Bastide 1973: 520–1) includes ‘an ancient matrimonial association between a group of praying-mantis-men and a group of serpent-women’. A daughter of Cagn, a magician (identified as I Kaggen, a praying mantis), marries serpents who then turn into men and become subjects of Cagn. In the tribal context, the praying mantis and the serpent thus become clan totems regulating marriages. All along, the encounter with Pygmies of the equatorial African forests (there are people of their size also in the Philippines, Brazil, and elsewhere) only made pseudo-speciation myths more plausible, both for Khoisan and proto-Bantu speakers. Again according to Bastide (ibid.: 520), ‘there are grounds for regarding the myths of gnomes, sprites and little sylvan spirits that one comes across all over Africa as inspired by the first meeting between the Negroes and Pygmies’.

In the Indonesian–Melanesian archipelago, there are many instances of mythical pseudo-speciation, although the age of these accounts cannot be established with certainty. Van Baaren (1960: 68) mentions the Karo-Bataks of north Sumatra, who believe that gnomes, or omang, live in the mountains. The omang display a peculiar mixture of deviousness and benevolence; one does well to sacrifice a white chicken before climbing the mountain. They also have a taste for abducting mates, a perennial concern of early communities, from the Bataks. A more elaborate myth of the Katinga Dayaks of Borneo, recorded by the same author (ibid.: 107) identifies a neighbouring tribe as the descendants of a runaway monkey, another as the offspring of a dog, also a runaway. Given that these animals originally belonged to them, this is how these Dayaks construe their right to headhunt or make slaves among both ‘monkeys’ and ‘dogs’. The myth serves to embolden them in their relations with these tribes, remove doubts, and suppress hesitations. In New Guinea, Panoff records (1973: 501–3), Melanesian settlers who on arrival

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encountered resident Papuans fitted them into their mythology as ogres and magical cannibals. Such adjustment can work in both directions: when Australian Aborigines encountered Melanesians and Indonesians in the north, they exchanged the general, archetypical veneration of the earth for a more discriminating worship of the land, in combination with other modifications of their imaginary, such as a hero cult and the cult of the Fertility Mother (May 2003: 31).

At this stage of tribal foreign relations, communities rely on their deities to keep others at bay. The Khoisan supreme being (Kaang, Khu or Kho, or Thora; under Bantu influence Kaang later turns into a creator god) has an enemy, Gauna or Gawa, the leader of the spirits of the dead. Bastide ventures (1973: 520) that since Gawa happens to be the supreme god of the Damara tribes (a little-known ethnos living between Khoi and San), his presence in their pantheon as a wicked deity articulated the ethno-cultural difference between Khoisan and Damara.

Shamanism served to invoke the gods directly. It has been traced to Central Asia (as far back as around 15,000 bc) and was associated with the detailed observation of the sky, useful for long-distance displacement and assessing the weather for hunters and pastoralists (van Binsbergen 2005: 334). The shaman or shaman-like figure combines human qualities as entertainer and miracle-maker (Lévi-Strauss 1989: 409), with characteristics of the mythical trickster figure. The ‘vertical’ world-view of shamanism includes the theme of the celestial axis connecting under- and upper worlds. Van Baaren (1960: 172) describes such a tree, the Libaka, in the mythology of the Ngombe of northern Congo. It connects the living with the ancestors and with Akongo, the creator and supreme god; every new settlement must be marked by planting a Libaka tree. As we see in Chapter 3, the world-axis trope is also indigenous to Indo-European mythology.

In the Upper Palaeolithic, out-migration from South Asia brought more pastoralists into Africa. As van Binsbergen records (2005: 331), the kings of the Nkoya people of Zambia have names that also appear in the Mahabharata. They have their common origin in Witzel’s ‘Laurasian’ mythical complex (i.e. proto-Semitic and proto-Indo-European myth, 2001: 4.2). These mythologies each comprise a cosmogony, a theogony (with different generations of gods), semi-divine heroes, the creation of humans, and ‘royal’ lineages; the universe itself is understood in organic terms of birth, growth, and decay. A key theme is the Flood (van Binsbergen 2005: 329–30; 346, Table 3: iii). This has been traced to the rise of

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sea levels from the beginning of the Holocene, 8000 bc; as Smail notes (2008: 195), the Black Sea flooded only around 6,000 years ago, well within the limits of oral transmission. Many peoples in lower-lying areas must have passed on stories about it. We find the Flood story in the Indo-European tradition (Chapter 3), and even among Amerindian peoples in South America (Métraux 1973: 491), with striking similarities to the Mesopotamian–Biblical account to which I return in Chapter 2. Witzel claims that there are no Deluge myths in the (sub-Saharan–Australasian) ‘Gondwana’ complex, so the Masai version (complete with the family saved by the ark and the dispatching of birds to find land) must be of ‘Laurasian’ origin.

In Africa, according to van Binsbergen (2005: 347, Table 3: iv), further mythological development in the Mesolithic and Neolithic focuses on kingship and moon and star worship. It was associated with the spread of proto-Bantu languages. The myth of Lituolone prevalent among southern Bantu tribes and recounted by Bastide (1973: 522) provides an instructive example of how a trickster figure acquires the characteristics of a ruler in this context. The story tells of a monster which devours all humans except for one old woman. She somehow gives birth to a child who assumes the stature of a grown man on the first day of his life – Lituolone. The boy–man hears from his mother what has happened and sets out to fight the monster. Initially Lituolone is vanquished and swallowed up, but he cuts himself free from the monster’s stomach; with him emerge the thousands previously devoured. No gratitude awaits him though, because the others mistrust somebody born and grown up in such an unusual way. They decide to kill him; but Lituolone is a trickster, a magician, and always escapes.

The similarities with theogonic myths of Indo-European origin are obvious. One only has to think of Kronos (Saturn) swallowing his children. The key point of the Lituolone myth is that the trickster–magician is separate from the community. This is also true in other Bantu tribes, which have the same myth using different names. Zulu tribes have Hlanganu, and Basuto tribes have Huveane. The crafty trickster of one ethnos (Huveane of the Bapedi) may actually be the supreme god of others (Huvé of the San Bushmen); trickster and ruler are obviously interchangeable. All of them share the same CV – a miraculous birth, rapid growth, fight against monsters, the need to be on their guard against their own people, and a miracle-making capacity which they share with the supreme being. The myth in other words expresses the distance between the semi-divine magician and

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hero, who holds worldly authority, and the rest of the community, without breaking the community bond itself. The divinely mandated ruler, like the trickster figure and the shaman, has access to the gods; like them, Taylor writes (2007: 150), he ensures that the benevolence of the gods retains the upper hand over their malevolence.

There is a second route to power and authority, sometimes branching off from the trickster figure, sometimes with a different background altogether. This concerns the ‘culture hero’ – the technocrat in modern parlance. The culture hero is the mythical figure who brings fire, techniques for tilling the land, metals, and other innovations to his people. In South American mythology, the culture hero is often accompanied by a fraternal trickster figure who corrupts the very culture his brother brings (Métraux 1973: 485). In the eastern Sudan there is a mischievous deity who is a jester, although as Bastide notes (1973: 530), he is simultaneously credited with bringing the arts and crafts to the people. Different tribes give him different names, and the figure can be man, animal (or half man, half animal), or even a celestial constellation. Like the Prometheus figure of the ancient Greeks, he steals fire (and in this case, water, too) and thus allows people to raise their quality of life. Invariably the trickster annoys the supreme being, but his mischievous behaviour is beneficial for the community. In Polynesia, Panoff recounts (1973: 496), Maui, a popular mythical figure, is a trickster and a culture hero. He is credited with finding new land: after a quarrel with his brothers, Maui takes to his canoe and uses his magical jaw-bone as a hook to drag up several islands from the depths of the oceans (ibid.: 500). But a jester in the long run cannot be entrusted with authority. So the Polynesians have a second hero figure, Tahaki, who is handsome and strong and not inclined to clowning.

The rudimentary forms of semi-detached authority in between gods and men (trickster, shaman, culture hero) converged into kingship and priesthood in the Neolithic transition to agriculture and animal husbandry. All across the Extended Fertile Crescent (from the Sahara prior to desertification to Iran, van Binsbergen 2005: 333n.), a new hierarchical order replaced the egalitarian communities of the human revolution (Boehm 1999: 91; Smail 2008: 170). Its historical role was to compel the expanding community, by manipulating fears and superstitions, to adjust its food intake to the size of the harvest and store reserves. The tasks associated with it fell to priests and sacred kings (in Frazer’s characterisation, ‘men of the keenest intelligence

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and the most unscrupulous character’, 2000: 47; Weber speaks of ‘religious virtuosos’, 1920a: 108).

Sedentary existence also changed the mythical imaginary, beginning with the occupation of space in the form of permanent dwellings. Gaston Bachelard (as in Renfrew 2007: 144) characterises the (communal) house as ‘our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’. The distribution of spaces in the home (the hearth, the altar to worship the ancestors, the main living areas) conformed to sacred rules, which in turn provide clues to a mythological universe that otherwise remains closed to outsiders. The only way to decipher it, Bastide explains (1973: 519), is by studying ‘symbols and mystic correspondences’, or ‘by patiently reflecting on the features of material culture, the way rooms are arranged in houses, the design of a musical instrument, certain modes of stereotyped behaviour, or the sequences in agricultural, artisan, or religious ritual’. The monumental repre-sentation of the universe in many early sedentary civilisations always includes a habitable cave or house. Mumford (1961: 9) mentions ‘the pyramid, ziggurat, Mithraic grotto, and Christian crypt’ as examples of how the idea of the original permanent dwelling is replicated symbolically to house the dead in eternity.

The foreign relations of such settled, segmented societies were accompanied by more elaborate mythologies as well. In the case of the Nilotic Shilluk or Chollo, a sedentary, cattle-raising people in southern Sudan (alongside the Dinka and the Nuer), we see a pantheon combining home-grown and foreign deities. Besides their own ancestor god, Nyikang or Nyakang, there is a creator god, Juck, who is of non-Shilluk origin. Just as Shilluks and non-Shilluks coexist, so do the two gods; but Shilluks can gain access to Juck only through Nyikang. Frazer (2000: 266–7) claims that Nyikang (Nyakang) is reincarnated in each king of the Shilluk, but only as long as the ruler remains vital. According to Bastide (1973: 527), the mythical origin of this arrangement is a lost fratricidal battle over a royal succession which forced Nyikang (Frazer speaks of Nyikang as ‘divine or semi-divine’) to flee and create a kingdom of his own, populating it with wild animals which he changed into men (civilising them, in other words).

Even such elaborate mythical constructions fell short of accounting for the advent of a class of people whose abilities exceeded anything the sub-Saharan Africans, Amerindians or Australasians could match – the Europeans. Certainly there was an attempt to fit the newcomers into a mythical frame. After all, there had to be a secret spirit behind

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the whites’ supremacy. Locals tried to discover and imitate its action through so-called ‘cargo cults’. May (2003: 50–7) qualifies these as ‘rites of passage’ in that they often laid the foundations for later protest movements. A new class of myths, explaining European superiority by a separation in the deep past, emerged later. May records (ibid.) the Melanesian myth of two brothers, Manub and Kilibob, one of whom (roles differ in different versions) is more enterprising and sets off with his canoe. He makes discoveries of all kinds and on his return appears as superior to his (often darker-skinned) brother. The Bantu-speaking Fan tribes in Africa have a comparable myth about the supreme god whose three sons, the White Man, the Black Man, and the Gorilla, lived in the centre of Africa. As Bastide recounts (1973: 526), the Black Man and the Gorilla disobeyed the supreme god, after which the god guided the White Man to the African west coast and gave him all his wealth. The Gorilla retired into the depth of the forest, and the poor, ignorant blacks followed the course of the sun until they reached the coastal regions of Africa, where they encountered the White Man again. He slowly poisoned them (a reference to malaria) and they died on the seashores, dreaming of the happy past in which they had all been part of a single family.

The mythical elaboration of the tribal foreign encounter thus ends in a melancholy spirit. It served throughout to resolve the contradiction between identity and non-identity among different communities. It is not that people did not recognise other humans as such; there is usually no doubt that they have before them men and/or women of their own species. But cultural differences were equally real, whether these concerned language and behaviour, appearance obtained in the process of ethnogenesis and reproduced by endogamy (height and facial traits, skin colour), or features added by choice (headgear and other attire, plumage, weapons, or body paint, together with the habits associated with these things). Earlier I cited Knafo’s discussion (2002: 153) of how contradictions arise from phenomena that must be invested with meaning. It is the contradiction between recognition and difference that gives rise to the notion of the foreign and explains the intensity of the emotions accompanying the encounter. Myths resolve these tensions by restoring an ordered unity to the world, in which a prime concern, the legitimate presence of one’s own community, is confirmed.

Therefore there is no primordial, natural animosity, as assumed by Hobbes and other seventeenth-century thinkers influenced by the dissolution of community bonds and the ravages of civil war

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in a commercialising society. If every man really were another’s wolf in the state of nature (and not just in a competitive economy), there would not be such a rich mythology of tribal foreign relations, because so much inner conflict and ambivalent emotions requiring narrative resolution could not have arisen. The Hobbesian view, however (like ‘realist’ IR orthodoxy), has only pre-Hegelian logic available to it, and hence no place for contradiction. Yet it is the very uncertainty produced by the encounter with strangers, the fear of a fight and the simultaneous eagerness for exchange, that gives rise to heightened temperatures (as in the encounter in a Brazilian forest recorded by Lévi-Strauss, cited in vol. i, 2007: 52–3). Foreign relations are a potent source of mythology precisely for that reason. This takes us to the issue of protection.

Spiritual Defences

Under conditions of limited control of its surroundings, the human group occupying a certain space, temporarily or permanently, will not find it easy to protect the space against foreigners. The entire environment of an early community is alive with spirits, and enemies will make use of proxies recruited in the neighbourhood of their designated victims. An epileptic attack, or ecstasy, or any other act of ‘possession’, for instance, Fiske explains (1996: 222), will be a sure sign of an enemy or evil spirit actually having penetrated and taken over someone’s body. Since there cannot be any doubt as to the operation of such forces, a native Australian who has suffered even a superficial wound, but who believes that it was inflicted by a weapon that has been sung over and thus endowed with magical powers, will lie down, refuse food, and die, in the unshakable belief that he is bound to perish (Frazer 2000: 205).

Tribal relations are not primarily territorial, and occupation is not necessarily exclusive, so access is usually negotiable. Negotiation to handle potential threats is the paramount option anyway, because the danger will in almost all cases be more powerful than the community exposed to it. Awarding the right of passage is not enough either. People may agree among themselves, but the potential conflict of the respective totemic sovereigns must also be reckoned with. When Maoris enter foreign land, Frazer records (2000: 197), the possibility of treading on enchanted ground prompts them to perform certain ceremonies in order to make it ‘common’, neutralising its particular sacrality. Australian tribes permitted to enter the land of foreign groups, he adds, carry burning bark or sticks in order ‘to clear and

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purify the air’ of spiritual influences potentially hostile to their visit. Another example given by the same author is that when Bechuana return from a distant journey, they are subject to purificatory practices to ensure no demons from afar are inadvertently brought back.

As noted above, the protective barrier communities erect in this way is only effective if all members of the group observe the taboos and rituals. If not, the community will be exposed to immediate danger. ‘Turning “heretic”’, writes Taylor (2007: 42), ‘… is not just a personal matter. Villagers who hold out [against the consensus], or even denounce the common rites, put the efficacy of these rites in danger, and hence pose a menace to everyone.’ Indeed the careful and collective observance of ritual practices is one of the functions of a powerful myth. By providing a compelling ‘explanation’, it ensures that no one would dream of doubting the need to draw together. Thus to the pastoral tribes in the Middle Eastern deserts or semi-arid regions, the rules governing feud are as fixed as the stars in the night sky on which they orient themselves when moving their herds. In one myth recounted by Goldziher (1876: xxviii–ix), it is told that the constellation of Capricorn once killed that of Bear; the latter’s daughters, however, circle around it in quest of revenge. Anyone doubting the social practice by which communities seek to contain potentially unrestrained violence need only look at the night sky.

Feud as a rule-based practice of retribution within a community prefigures the regularisation of relations among different groups. Its principles still resonate today in the demand for proportional-ity and restraint in the use of force in international relations. Early communities, however, avoid actual fighting as much as possible. Tribes in New Guinea have ‘great fights’, which are meant to demonstrate military prowess whilst minimising casualties. They are one-day contests, rule bound and carefully contained so as to prevent all-out warfare. Following individual duels, bows and arrows are produced for a test of wills and endurance involving everyone. In the end, only a handful of fatalities tends to result from these contests. An audience adds to the cathartic effect of the event (Boehm 1984: 213). Long before the Eurovision Song Contest, ‘song duels’ in which accusations and insults were exchanged melodically, served the purpose of sublimating conflict (Kelly 2000: 23, 29). Van Baaren (1960: 54) describes forms of actual sports, such as the ball games developed by Amerindians to vent off aggression. But here of course we come full circle to contemporary society, in which football fans often display behaviour that reminds us of tribal foreign relations.

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When unregulated conflict does erupt, one line of attack is again via the spiritual sphere. The shortest route here, as Frazer explains (2000: 13), is to ‘injure or destroy an enemy by injuring or destroying an image of him, in the belief that, just as the image suffers, so does the man, and that when it perishes he must die’. Today we may think of the ritual burning of a flag as a late echo of this practice. A real fight must always be justified by divine powers. The chief of the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil will hide an arrow in the bush; only if a search party brings back the arrow the next day with bloodstains on it will they fight (Lévi-Strauss 1989: 398). The weapon itself is also a magical conductor of good or bad. If in Melanesia the arrow that has wounded somebody is recovered, the victim’s side put it in a damp place or under cool leaves so that the wound will heal quickly; the enemies who shot the arrow on the other hand try to aggravate the pain of the victim in various ways, by heating up the bow or twanging the bowstring, for example (Frazer 2000: 41).

Killing in an early community is recognised as necessary. Nonetheless people feel guilty about it, not just when killing other people but also when killing animals. Polynesian mythology accounts for the superiority of peace over war in a tale recounted by Panoff (1973: 493). A primordial fight erupts between Tu (who will later evolve into the god of war) and Tane, god of forests and birds, over how they should separate their parents, the sky and the earth. Only thus may light and darkness become distinct, and life flourish. The bellicose Tu wants to do this by destroying both parents, but Tane is in favour of achieving it peacefully, by placing himself between the sky and the earth. This solution gains the approval of all the other gods accept Tawhiri, the god of winds and tempests, who sends an army of storms which only Tu rises to resist, whilst his other brother gods all flee. Tu is angry with their defection, and vanquishes them. Certainly this suggests that Tu’s courage at a critical moment was all that stood between the world and the fury of Tawhiri’s cyclones; in other words, his role may be necessary when no other way of protecting a community is possible. Even so, Tu in the myth is defeated by Tane, who banishes him from the sky (the abode of the gods) to earth, leaving humanity to struggle with the dilemmas associated with waging war.

All myths and rituals serve to sustain the knowledge that war is costly. To kill a man, an animal, or even a tree (by felling it), necessitates atonement, and may require asking the victim to consent to his/its demise. As Varagnac argues (1973: 18), this also works as a form of mental preparation and planning. ‘Actual events were forecast

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… ineluctably guided by the negotiations between human desire and the spirit of the victim.’ For a primitive group, Freud writes (1938: 60), the killing of people, members of foreign groups included, requires reconciliation with the slain enemy. Various rituals of expiation and purification of the man-slayer are on record, as are obligatory excuses and apologies – ‘he stood in front of my arrow’. Among the Bagesu of east Africa, a ceremony must be performed to cleanse the warrior who has killed before he can be readmitted into the community (van Baaren 1960: 81). Van Binsbergen (2005: 342) counts this among the oldest mythological themes coming out of Africa.

On the island of Timor, warriors who have killed are secluded in specially prepared huts. As Frazer relates (2000: 212–13), ceremonies lamenting the victim and asking for his forgiveness are performed to cleanse the warrior. In New Guinea, among the tribes of the Wanigela River, the ceremony to remove the impurity of the warrior who has killed also includes the passing on of his courage to younger men, which by its bloody ritual simultaneously serves to frighten the ghost of the slain man. Blood especially is a source of concern. People believed that the soul is in the blood, so spilling it can cause all kinds of problems; the warrior himself is taboo because he will be in contact with death. Frazer (2000: 210–11, 230) gives the example of the Maori, who cannot be approached when on the warpath, any more than can their Australian aboriginal cousins. All are taboo. The vessels from which Amerindians on a raid drink or eat may not be touched by anyone, and the warriors themselves will drink from the opposite side of their own bowl when returning from the fight.

Tribal relations were already evolving towards a more developed stage of foreign relations when the Ashanti confederation of Ghana faced the Denkyera kingdom’s invasion at the close of the seventeenth century. Concerned over a possible disintegration of the confederation, Osei Tutu, the chief of the leading division of the Ashanti (the Kumasi), and a priest, Anokye, prepared a magical potion which was imbibed by all the tribal chiefs to ensure unity. As Apter (1968: 103) tells the story, a mythical event ensued: a wooden stool descended from a thick cloud amidst thunder and darkness, landing on the knees of Osei Tutu. Anokye promptly declared that this magical object contained the spirit of the whole Ashanti nation. Thus, upon victory over the Denkyera the Golden Stool became enshrined as the most sacred object of the Ashanti people, the symbol of ancestral sovereignty.

Five centuries earlier, the north of Ghana had been conquered by invasions from the Sudan and become part of the Mole–Dagbane

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or Moshi empire, which stretched from the Northern Territories to Timbuktu. The locals, a people of remote Akan origin (the Akan are the main ethnos of Ghana), had relied on their totems for protection, but in vain. Yet the Moshi warriors respected their traditional pattern of land tenure by priests, tendana, who traditionally took care of the land as mediators between the people and the Earth god (Apter 1968: 54). The new rulers left this arrangement in place and in doing so conformed to a general practice in the aftermath of conquest. The practice, according to Victor Turner (as in Taylor 2007: 48), involves the retention by a vanquished community of a measure of autonomy by virtue of the community’s entrenchment in their mythical–religious powers – the ‘power of the weak’ against the juridical–political power of the strong. Whilst the invaders control political office and the means of physical coercion, ‘the indigenous people, through their leaders, frequently are held to have mystical power over the fertility of the earth and of all on it’.

Not infrequently this is accompanied by the integration of the different pantheons. Bastide (1973: 532) gives the example of the Fon tribe, a warlike people of Dahomey, who without much ado incorporated the gods of the peoples they vanquished and soon became oblivious to the origins of the various divinities they worshipped. This is what spiritual socialisation is about: the integration, wholly or partly, of the mythology and religion of a conquered people into a common imaginary, from which new community bonds may (or may not) spring. We will see more examples of this when we discuss the Indo-European invasions in Chapter 3.

Conquest too acquired a new quality with the advent of Westerners. Their appearance among other things complicated intertribal relations, and the intensity of magical and mythical conceptions tended to increase. The inadvertent reverence for mythical beings who were ‘white’ often served to disarm local populations and made them defenceless against Europeans – the Aztecs ‘expected’ Cortes, and Europeans fitted well into the Aryan caste hierarchy as well. Van Baaren (1980: 148–50) records how a nineteenth-century German traveller was received enthusiastically by Urundi tribesmen as a Mwesi, a sacral king who according to their myth lived on the moon, had a white skin, and would come from the north. When the visitor’s armed escort misunderstood the Urundi’s overenthusiastic welcome and killed 30 of them, the survivors were even more jubilant, because a Mwesi who would not kill people would not be the real one. This takes us to the subject of exchange.

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MYTHICAL EXCHANGES

Through exchange, spiritual socialisation will obviously develop more propitiously than by conquest. The assimilation of mythical accounts and representations of the divine across the imagined demarcation lines between different communities now proceeds peacefully and more or less equitably, and opportunities for communitisation are obviously much greater. In this way, through ethno-transformation, the contours of larger entities, as well as the widening limits of the thinkable, become manifest. There are two aspects of the mythology of exchange in tribal foreign relations we look at here: the exchange of obligations other than wedlock, and exogamy.

Reciprocity and Division of Labour

Exchange in tribal foreign relations is characterised by reciprocity – with nature in its entirety, with the dead, the spirits and the gods (through sacrifices), and with actual foreigners. Honour, prestige/respect, and mana (the good spirit present in things) are all involved and ‘accounted for’ in exchanges. ‘Everything – food, women, children, property, talismans, land, labour, services, priestly functions and ranks – is there for passing on, and for balancing accounts’, Mauss writes (2002: 18).

This balancing is not confined to the living. The notion of a comprehensive cycle of life and death requires that those in the other world share in the proceeds which the community secures in this world. Only if the ancestors, the totem and the gods receive their due too, the means for life – food as well as space, security, and posterity – will be available to the community. A myth from the Indonesian island of Ceram recorded by van Baaren (1960: 81–2) tells about the girl Hainuwele, who is killed in a cruel dance by being pushed into a prepared grave. When her parents discover her body they go round the village, telling the people: You have killed her, now you must eat her. This has given rise to the popular belief that the tubers that are the staple food of the island grow from the body of Hainuwele. This is how myth serves to reconcile people with the unacceptable; sacrificing living beings for the greater good is part of the same mental structure. In the imaginary of many early agricultural communities, M. Eliade has argued (as in van Baaren 1960: 86), life can only emerge if other life is sacrificed. It is not difficult to see that to sacrifice oneself for, say, the survival of one’s own community is not different in this respect from a deadly ritual to ensure a good harvest. Van Binsbergen

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(2005: 347, Table 3: iv) sees human sacrifice to ensure social cohesion in the exploitation of nature as a practice that migrated from south or South-East Asia in the Mesolithic and Neolithic.

The sacrificial mindset is an obstacle to the idea of emerging from a transaction as the net beneficiary, ‘with a profit’. Incurring an obligation, being landed with a good really intended for somebody else and for which one still has to ‘pay’ at some future point, is avoided at all cost. Potlatching among north-west American native peoples and comparable practices of competitive generosity on the Andaman islands (Kelly 2000: 104) and in Melanesia (May 2003: 46) are meant to ensure that there remain no obligations to fulfil (Mauss 2002: 47). In exchanges with foreign communities, the entire way of life comes into play. For Melanesians, the underlying spiritual power of paua (Polynesian mana) on which cultural discipline rests, remains inaccessible to foreigners because of its secret, taboo nature. And then, who would want to live like a foreigner? Van Baaren (1960: 30) gives the example of the adulterous wife of the king of the Banyoro of east Africa, who could choose to be punished by drowning or by being married off to the chief of a neighbouring tribe, the Bukedi. The woman considered the latter fate far more cruel, because the Bukedi went about naked and were grain-eating agriculturalists whereas the pastoral Banyoro were used to a rich protein diet and to elaborate attire.

Trade properly speaking, the exchange of equivalents, is part of extensive rituals (as in the kula cycle of the Trobriand Islanders, or the Australian merbok). But these would not have developed so propitiously had there not been some exchange of use values involved as well (van Baaren 1960: 52; May 2003: 42). The ritual however is indispensable to account for all the imponderables attached to the trade. A division of labour in Wallerstein’s sense (1974), a complementary exchange in which each participating unit supplies particular products for the combined entity or assumes specific tasks for it, must therefore be accounted for mythically, as a cosmic design. Guardian deities or spirits of separate professions (hunter, tiller, smith, etc.) accompany the division of labour as it develops. Thus, Petrov notes (2005: 3), innovations in each field are socialised under the presumed auspices of the patron deity, ‘through myths and not via journals or monographs’.

An example of a division of labour would be the cosmogony of a branch of the Sioux of North America. As interpreted by Lévi-Strauss (1962: 93–4), the mythical ancestors emerging from the depths of

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the earth consisted of a peaceful vegetarian group and a bellicose carnivorous one. They decided to unite and exchange their food with each other. On their migrations, they encountered a third, ferocious group of scavengers, with whom they united in turn, after which the community regrouped internally into clans devoted to peace, and clans devoted to war. Thus the contradiction between peace and war, and the complementarity between different economic activities are resolved in a single narrative. In another example studied by Lévi-Strauss (1989: 236–8), the Mbaya of the Brazilian–Paraguayan borderland legitimate their role of rulers in a myth in which the Supreme Being allots the Guana people space for agriculture; other tribes are assigned to hunting. ‘The Trickster, who was the other divinity in the native pantheon, then noticed that the Mbaya had been forgotten ... and ... since there was nothing left for them, they were granted the one remaining function, which was to oppress and exploit the others.’ Note the connection of the trickster with rule: the sovereign power of the Mbaya overrides the claims of groups relating to nature more directly. It is, as Lévi-Strauss explains in the same passage, a ‘social contract’, implying that the rights of the ‘functional’ tillers and hunters are subordinate to those of the Mbaya.

Once different communities mutate into a single, segmented society, exclusion from ritual is one way of maintaining such privileges. A ruling mythology and its affirmative power is thus made the preserve of one community or moiety. Among the Aborigines of Arnhem Land in Australia, as recounted by Panoff (1973: 513), only one moiety, the Dua, observe the rituals associated with the myth of the Djanggawuls, the ancestors who arrived by canoe, wearing red plumage (a reference to the rising sun in the east). So they are the ‘original’ inhabitants, a familiar trope to the present day; the other moiety, Jiritja, also recognise the sun daughters as ancestors, but do not take part in the ritual practices. In Uganda, Hamite pastoralist shepherds settling among tillers evolved into an upper class–caste (the Bahima); the peasants became their serfs (the Bahera). The Bahima class–caste have developed a full-blown pantheon and the entire contents of Witzel’s ‘Laurasian’ mythological complex (2001: 4.2, as cited earlier: cosmogony, theogony, etc.), but the Bahera peasants, as Bastide explains (1973: 523), are not supposed to share this imaginary and are only entitled to terrestrial spirits or genii.

A comparable class –caste structure exists among the Bororo Amerindian people, whose internal division into exogamous moieties is mythically represented as the ‘strong’ and the ‘weak’. The strong moiety are associated with the physical terrain, and their mythical

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ancestors are responsible for the natural topography (water, rivers, fish, natural vegetation), but also for manufactured objects. The weak on the other hand are the ‘social’ party, further removed from nature – the pacifiers and organisers. In Bororo mythology, a transfer of power from the strong moiety to the weak is believed to have taken place in the past; it registers, Lévi-Strauss points out (1989: 317), ‘the transition from unrestrained nature to civilized society’. But, given their limited control of nature, the myth also reminds the nominally powerful rulers (by their designation as ‘weak’) of their ultimate dependence on those directly associated with the land. As we saw above, this also happens in the aftermath of conquest, except that the labels ‘weak’ and ‘strong’ are usually used the other way around (the strong are those holding political power and the weak are the tillers who yet retain a measure of mythical autonomy because they have access to the forces governing fecundity).

The subordinate communities within a functionally segmented society may actually be able to confront the mythology of the foreign rulers with an elaborate one of their own. The Moshi, one of the tribal aristocracies ruling the north of Ghana already referred to, have a myth of origin which holds that the people descend from four brothers, each of whom was assigned his station in life by the god of the sky (Apter 1968: 28). The eldest brother chose a tract of land that contained iron; he became the first smith. The second occupied a spot where oxen passed by, and the Fulani pastoralists descend from him. The third got a site full of bales and donkeys and became the first merchant. The youngest brother, finally, was given a palace and the others had to pay homage to him as their king. The Fulani themselves however, as Bastide documents (1973: 528–9), in their mythology explain that they became cattle-raisers because a water spirit gave them a cow, and that a monkey–smith taught them how to milk it. Hence, from this perspective, the Fulani pastoralists freely entered into an enduring alliance with the artisans–smiths (the eldest brother in the Moshi account) – no reference here to rule by the youngest of the mythical Moshi brothers. The Fulani even retain their independence from the artisans–smiths, because the obligation not to make war on each other is accompanied by a commitment not to intermarry, on the grounds that both war and exogamy are associated with blood.

Gender Archetypes and Totem Exogamy

A key precondition of orderly exogamy is the control over wives and daughters. This was not always so – initially women were superior

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because short life spans made securing progeny essential. Since the ability of women to give birth was much more self-evident than the contribution of men, woman was honoured and revered. Statuettes with exaggerated female characteristics found in Eurasia and dated as late as 27,000–20,000 bc are testimony of this primacy (Varagnac 1973: 17). However, once primary kin groups began to establish more durable links to each other in order to exchange mates, the position of women deteriorated. Amongst the Aborigines of Arnhem Land only men may perform religious ritual; a rule which probably signifies, according to Panoff (1973: 517), that ‘initially, in the field of ritual, women had precedence, and this was not taken from them for some considerable time.’

In mythology, the reversal of gender primacy is articulated by stories picturing women as created by male figures, or actually from the male body, in the way that Eve in the Bible is sculpted from Adam’s rib. Procreation through male masturbation, skipping the female role altogether, is another way of expressing masculine dominance (van Binsbergen 2005: 336). Gledhill (1994: 35) records in this connection a myth of the Sambia of New Guinea, in which the first woman is created by a transsexual operation on the younger of the two men constituting the original couple. Van Baaren (1960: 81) mentions a myth from the Indonesian island of Ceram which relates how men originally menstruated and had children; once they acquired the habit of raiding, they lost this ability.

To rationalise giving away women after male supremacy had been established, a myth current among several North American tribes, recorded by Lévi-Strauss (1962: 169–70), describes buffalo as man-eating. Buffaloes themselves, however, were inedible; they consisted only of bones. One day a buffalo falls in love with a girl, who happens to be the only female in an all-male community – their ancestor was a man who got pregnant by a thorny bush, another example of the masculine imaginary. The men, uneasy about the buffalo’s advances, yet decide to marry the girl off. Her dowry gives the buffalo edible muscles and organs so that after this mythical wedding, it became worthwhile to hunt and consume buffaloes, and giving women in exogamous marriage made sense too.

Mythical exogamy also has been given a stylised treatment by Freudian psychoanalysts. The ‘average myth’ of the hero by Otto Rank (as in Freud 1967: 7–9) tells of a young man growing up in deadly fear of his father, escaping and eventually killing him. The mother plays a duplicitous role, sometimes as a faithless mistress.

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This fitted Freud’s and Rank’s understanding of the psychological development of boys growing up in fin-de-siècle Vienna, but the basic storyline is ubiquitous in mythology: for example, the myth of Moses, or various Greek myths such as that of Perseus, as we see in Chapters 2 and 3. Even Krishna, the Hindu avatar of Vishnu, has been interpreted in terms of Rank’s average myth (Chakrabarti 2008: 68–9). However, psychoanalysis is not all there is to it. My claim would be that the Rank schema can equally, and equally plausibly, be read as describing (and mythically resolving problems of) exogamy in the context of tribal foreign relations.

Let me go through the three steps of the average myth and juxtapose the psychoanalytic interpretation (in the left column) with the exogamy version that we can also read in it.

1. The hero is the son of parents of the highest station, usually a royal couple. His birth comes about in spite of difficulty in conceiving him; either because of sterility, the illicit nature of his parents’ union, or otherwise.

2. The father receives a warning in an oracle or dream that the child’s birth will entail mortal danger to him, and orders the killing or exposure (usually in a basket placed in the water) of the baby.

Psychoanalytic reading: the young child initially greatly over-estimates its parents, especially the father – what Freud calls ‘the family romance’. Yet there is a hint of future trouble in the notion of the problematic birth.

Exogamy reading: the offspring of exogamous marriage, especially that of high social station, retains the birthmark of difference – of different groups, moieties, or tribes.

Psychoanalytic reading: the father–son relation passes from original love/admiration to distrust and rivalry over the love of the mother (Oedipus myth).

Exogamy reading: there is always the possibility that the community with which inter-marriage occurs will become an enemy and that its leaders will return to claim authority on the basis of the kin connection. Women in particular can play duplicitous roles here.

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3. Wild animals or poor people find the child and feed and raise him until, after many adventures, the hero discovers his true roots, kills his father, and achieves fame and glory among his people.

The mythical story of the hero is by definition an epic myth, belonging to the stage of historical development in which human exploits move into the foreground. But already in the tribal mode, elements of the exogamy version are traceable. Unnatural birth, abduction and magical protection, or the reversal of clan hierarchy, all figure in ethnogenetic myth, too – certainly if we take the shift in gender primacy as our starting point. Freud in fact notes elsewhere (1924: 91) that the Rank ‘average myth’ (see Chapter 1) is a story specifically constructed around the male line of inheritance. However, communities intermarrying may be matrilineal, but they are usually not matriarchal; exogamy rules are typically applied by male elders.

In oral, tribal mythology, the hero makes his first appearance in stories which see him as freeing an abducted woman. Before it became regulated by custom and ritual, the exchange of women was often a matter of capture and abduction, even though women occasionally consented to escape their miserable condition (Kelly 2000: 48). Giving away a woman was also sometimes an act of protection, to buy off raiders or robbers. The hero who defends or liberates such a woman from her captor (pseudo-speciated as a monster, a serpent, or dragon) and then marries her, as Frazer reminds us (2000: 146), is an almost universal figure.

The untrustworthiness of women, a pivotal element in the Rank myth, is also accounted for in ethnogenetic mythology. Often women are depicted as the cause of the community’s misfortune; in myths the world over, there is an Eve forfeiting paradise. A sacred tale of the Melanesians of the New Hebrides tells the story of Tortali,

Psychoanalytic reading: the son grows up in the care of parents from whom he feels alienated, challenges the authority of his father, and acquires paternal authority himself.

Exogamy reading: the lesser clans among whom descendants of the senior clan grow up may reverse the clan hierarchy within the tribe (or between tribes in intertribal exogamy). Wild animals and poor people would be a reference to this ranking or already to the civilisation–barbarian divide.

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master of the sun and the day, who marries a human woman, Avin (Panoff 1973: 503). They live in a wondrous garden with food in abundance, but one day Avin uses the absence of Tortali to give herself to Ul, master of the moon and the night. When Tortali finds out, he drives Avin from the garden; henceforth women have to work to get food from the earth, besides being punished by menstruation. The inability of the day to maintain its authority over the night’s powers of seduction thus is used to legitimise the subordination of women, a precondition for organising exogamy by the elder males.

Communities from an early date consciously attempted to encourage certain types of marriages in order to avoid the alienation of their kin as a result of random intermarriage (vol. i, 2007: 56). Along with the hero liberating the abducted woman from a monster’s clutches, this would corroborate the exogamy reading of the second step in the Rank average myth – the requirement to be on guard against exogamous moieties turning into enemies. Also, once intermarriage patterns began turning constitutive kin groups into moieties of a tribe, the anxieties transpiring from the exogamy reading of the Rank myth would be very much alive. The hierarchy among moieties was often contested. Van Baaren (1960: 48) describes endless quarrels among clans of the Iatmul of New Guinea over the question of whose totem (Twat-malis) is the real sun (the other must do with a stray rock that lies somewhere north of the Sepik river). Allowing too many women to be married off into a different unit endangers the existing hierarchy; maintaining a balance or ‘surplus’ is crucial. Once foreign groups are incorporated into a tribe as clans, avoiding improper marriages becomes a major concern. Thus the aforementioned Mbaya of Brazil even prefer the adoption of foreign children to having their own offspring. One of the chief aims of their warriors’ raids was to procure children (Lévi-Strauss 1989: 233, 254).

From the above we may safely conclude that exogamy in tribal foreign relations requires extensive mythological reassurance. Given the tension between desire and incest prohibition referred to earlier in this chapter, as well as the status uncertainties inherent in the relations between exogamous units, this is one terrain where jealousies can explode into violent conflict easily. As Kirk observes (1970: 53): ‘There is no doubt that in exogamous tribes, especially matrilineal ones, the proper interchange of women is a subject of abiding interest and enormous potentiality for social stress.’ The importance assigned to exogamy as an ordering principle (in combination with the incest taboo) is reflected in the fact that different mythologies situate the

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principles of intermarriage in the context of their cosmogony. When the universe came about, it supposedly contained the exogamy rules. As Bastide puts it (1973: 539):

All the rules of kinship and all the matrimonial alliances likewise repeat or echo the various moments of myth, with the result that human existence down to its slightest detail falls within a mythical system, and the actions of men both at home and outside continue and maintain the order and progress of the world.

This sums up the exogamy aspect of tribal relations. Its legacy remains with us as a determinant of the foreign encounter, as explosive as it was in the deep past.

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2Sedentary–Nomad Encounters

in Semitic Myth and Religion

With the rise of alluvial agriculture and urban civilisation in the Fertile Crescent, signs of an imperial mindset made their appearance as well. Monotheism was articulated in this context, first in Egypt. Semitic-speaking nomads roaming the frontiers of sedentary society, too, adopted notions of universal sovereignty under a sole God (I use a capital ‘G’ when speaking of a monotheistic deity); on their migratory routes and commercial highways across the Sinai, the Arabian peninsula, and beyond, this powerful inspiration was then carried to new zones of conversion.

The way of life of the desert nomads bequeathed one common legacy to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam: the concept of human dominion over nature. ‘Coming from the arid regions of the Middle East’, Amin writes (1977: 30), the Semitic monotheisms ‘asserted the original separation of people from nature, the superiority of humanity – the image of God – and the subjection of nature which has no soul and is reduced to being the object of human action’. This underpins the compulsion to subordinate and exploit the environment, which remains characteristic of Western civilisation and capitalism.

In this chapter we look at Judaism and Islam and their roots in the sedentary–nomad divide. To Christianity, which mutated into an imperial religion, I return in Chapter 4. First we investigate Mesopotamian mythology and the oldest known written tale about foreign relations, the Gilgamesh epic.

ETHNOGENESIS AND FOREIGN RELATIONS IN MESOPOTAMIAN MYTHOLOGY

The mythology of Mesopotamia is the product of a sedentary civilisation. It was recorded in written sources (steles, clay or stone tablets, temple inscriptions), which can be dated fairly exactly. Most Sumerian myths have reached us indirectly, through Semitic (and in some cases Hittite–Hurrian) versions. They comprise cosmogonies,

37

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conceived from the perspective of hydraulic agricultural society, and epics. The primary task of the gods, Viéyra writes (1973: 57–8), was to give ‘canals and ditches their proper course’ and ‘establish the banks of the Tigris and the Euphrates’; Nammu, the mother goddess who gave birth to heaven and earth, is represented by the Sumerian ideogram for ‘sea’. Epics record the heroic exploits of princes in the service of their communities, which usually earn them divine or semi-divine status. Transmuted into local gods, they then extend guidance and protection to new generations of heroes, inspiring them with the confidence to perform similar great deeds. Relations with foreign communities often constituted the setting of these heroic exploits.

With the epic turn, a historiographic aspect becomes evident in myth as well, compounding its functions of assurance and encouragement. One recurring theme is of a golden age in the past, an original (and invariably lost) paradise. The Greek word for paradise means ‘large hunting domain’, ‘wild park’, and we may assume that the myth of its ‘loss’ had something to do with the transition from the healthy hunting and gathering way of life to settled agriculture. The Semitic term on the other hand derives from ‘orchard’; here ‘paradise lost’ would signify ecological changes that left communities without the abundance of previous, lush environments. Myths about a fatal sin or misdeed that caused the expulsion then helped to inculcate people with an inner discipline under the changed circumstances – to limit immediate consumption, maintain stores and hydraulic infrastructure, and build the monuments many sedentary societies have left behind. In the extended Fertile Crescent, a priestly class entrusted with keeping the people under this discipline was also in charge of the sacrificial cults that implored the gods, and eventually the sole God, to bless their precarious lives, bring rain, harvests, and offspring. Nowhere, writes Frazer (2000: 325),

have [fertility] rites been more widely and solemnly celebrated than in the lands which border the eastern Mediterranean. Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay and revival of life, especially of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually died and rose again from the dead.

Let us first look at how foreign relations transpire in the mythical legacy of Sumer and the Semitic peoples who subdued it in the late third millennium bc.

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Sedentary–Nomad Encounters in Semitic Myth and Religion 39

Polytheism and Foreign Relations

Sumerian mythology is characterised, Kirk writes (1970: 117–19), by the association between gods and cities, and hence, by a ‘unique blend of cosmology and politics’. As larger entities came to enclose the separate spaces of urban formations, myths about gods associated with particular cities trying to trick each other into submission referred to real events. Eventually a syncretistic polytheism emerged, without entirely overcoming local attachments. The pantheon thus became ‘a replica of urban Sumerian society, with a “leader” who could take decisions only in accordance with the advice of the eminent in the land or of the assembly of warriors’ (Viéyra 1973: 57). The god of heaven, An or Anu (an means ‘the sky’), originally associated with the city of Uruk, ruled the sky; Enlil, associated with Nippur, had the air and the earth (the air was the substance with which he held up the sky). Nippur had a terraced tower representing the cosmic tree by which the worlds of humans and of the gods are connected, a motif which, as we saw in Chapter 1, is traceable to shamanism.

Foreign adventures were recorded in Sumerian myth early on. When in the twenty-second century bc Gudea of Lagash conquered Elam, in today’s Khuzistan, which was besieged by both Sumerians and Akkadians because of the wealth in stone, timber, and metals of the Zagros mountains, he dedicated a poem (as in Ostler 2006: 58) to the goddess Ninhursag (Aruru, see entry in Coleman 2007 under ‘Ninhursaga’). In it, her son, the war god Ninurta (like Enlil, associated with Nippur) promises her that gold and silver, copper and tin shall be ‘carried to you as tribute’ – a geological survey legitimating the conquest. Such references to foreign connections suggest that the Sumerians were aware that the Mesopotamian way of life depended at least in part on the contributions of outsiders. There may in fact have been an earlier urban culture in the area, because many place names in Sumer were not Sumerian. Neither does culture descend directly from the skies; long-distance exchange is acknowledged explicitly.

Thus the god Enki (his name includes ‘earth’, ki) is sometimes described as an intruder, a foreign god, sometimes as the son of the mother goddess and demiurge, Nammu (as noted, representing the sea). In one poem he is resident in a paradise, Dilmun, with the first woman, called ‘the pure Virgin’. Heralding Semitic notions of paradise, wild animals here refrain from eating others, and there is no ageing (denoting, respectively, the domestication of animals and longer life expectancy). Enki and the Virgin must still secure a

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supply of fresh water, however, essential to eke out an existence by working the land. To the people of Sumer, life without agriculture was a more ambivalent memory than for Semitic nomads; only when the grain goddess and the cattle god have been created does life become bearable from the Sumerian perspective. Indeed as Viéyra argues (1973: 60–2), the purpose of the myth of Dilmun seems to have been to explain the origin of vegetation from fresh water, but also ‘to establish Enki as the organiser of the world and the founder of divine and human institutions’, including the technical infrastruc-ture of civilisation, i.e. as a culture hero.

The world of the Sumerians ended with the Third Dynasty of Ur around 2000 bc. Sumerian literature was handed down to the new Semitic rulers, often through the intermediary of Sumerian priests and scribes who were bilingual in Sumerian and Akkadian, the conquerors’ speech (Ostler 2006: 53–4). The intermediaries in spreading this legacy possibly included the Hurrians, an ethnos living in Syria/Upper Mesopotamia, whose language was neither Indo-European nor Semitic (Gurney 1952: 123–4). The Hurrians were a regional power as early as the twenty-third century bc, at the time of Naramsin, the grandson of Sargon of Akkad. Eventually united under an Indo-European-speaking dynasty in the fifteenth century bc, their syncretistic religion facilitated the transfer of Mesopotamian views into the domain of the Hittites, who subjugated the Hurrians and who translated their mythology into their own Indo-European language which can be read today. It was via the Hurrians, Viéyra notes (1973: 73–4), that the Hittites absorbed Sumerian mythical notions. The main novelty of Hurrian mythology itself appears to have been the notion of generations of gods, enthroned and dethroned in wars. In the theogonies, the earliest gods, those associated with the cosmic elements, are defeated by a subsequent generation who, rather, symbolise the activities of actual society (human virtues and ways of life). As Kirk highlights (1970: 122), such a struggle, in which culture takes the place of nature as the frame of reference and epic is woven into ethnogenetic myth, generally characterises the transition to urban civilisation.

The Sumerian legacy was also incorporated into Babylonian mythology, which has its own creation poem (named after its first line, Enuma Elish, ‘When on high’). It records the triumphal establishment of the First Dynasty of Babylon, hitherto an insignificant locality; its chief deity, Marduk, rose to supremacy in the Mesopotamian pantheon along with it. Written on nine tablets dating from the beginning of

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the first millennium bc, the poem uses a literary Akkadian that was no longer current as a vernacular at the time (Ostler 2006: 61). Water again is the primeval medium. It is from the spiritualised fresh water, Apsu, and the salt water of the sea, Tiamat (the Babylonian equivalent of the Sumerian mother goddess Nammu), that successive couples of gods emerge. After An-shar (‘things of the sky’) and Ki-shar (‘things of the earth’), comes Anu (‘the sky’), and then his son, Enki-Ea (mostly identified only as Ea), all of Sumerian ancestry. As related by Viéyra (1973: 64–8), Apsu gets annoyed about the noise the gods make (just as Enlil will unleash the Flood out of anger over the noise made by people; a reference perhaps to overpopulation).

The myth then relates how existence was secured by taming the waters, both the rivers and the sea. Ea prevents Apsu from destroying the gods by putting him to sleep and takes up his residence in the subterranean sweet-water ocean from which the Mesopotamians believed the rivers and marshes sprang forth, thus depriving Apsu of active divinity (see entry in Coleman 2007, under ‘Abzu’). Ea henceforth is the god of apsu, the element of fresh water. It is from apsu too that Marduk, the sun, is born. However, when Anu unleashes the winds, Tiamat literally becomes agitated and a fierce battle ensues with Marduk. Whether the myth denotes a struggle with attackers from overseas, the taming of the sea itself, or both, Tiamat, along with her army of demons, is defeated. The ferocious dragon that she has sent against Marduk (serpents and dragons symbolise rivers or coastal waters in most mythology), ends up lying timidly at his feet, signalling the triumph of Babylon as well as the taming of the waters (Canby 1995: 16–17; Kirk 1970: 86).

Foreign relations are also recorded in the myth of Oannes and six other fish–man-like beings who ‘rose from the waters of the Persian Gulf and instructed the Babylonians in the arts and sciences and all other useful knowledge’ (Heidel 1967: 141–2). These pseudo-speciated visitors may well have been emissaries from the Indus civilisation. Heidel also refers to myths about encounters with the gods during a temporary stay in heaven (comparable to the New Testament story of ii Corinthians 12: 2–4, about a man lifted to ‘the third heaven’) ‘where he hears words which no man can utter’, i.e. in a foreign language. The Bible too speaks of a conflict between Yahweh and the Sea during the creation of the world in Psalm 74 (12–17), in a clear echo of the Babylonian myth of Tiamat and Marduk (Pitard 1998: 51). Harnessing sea and rivers was the key premise of the alluvial, hydraulic agriculture of the Fertile Crescent. But as we saw

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in the last chapter, myths of the Flood must have had a geophysical counterpart too.

The Sumerian version tells the story of Ziusudra, king of Shurippak (a historical city on the Euphrates), who receives the message that humanity will be destroyed – for no apparent reason. As Viéyra recounts (1973: 62), Ziusudra constructs the ark in which the ‘seed of humanity’ survives seven days of complete inundation. He acquires divine status and may live in Dilmun, the original paradise, here described as ‘the place where the sun rises’, i.e. in the east of the alluvial plain. In two other Mesopotamian epics summarised by Heidel (1967: 226), overpopulation is indeed identified as the cause of divine anger. In the Atrahasis epic, it is said that the people had become too numerous and were so noisy that they kept Enlil from his sleep, provoking the god’s fury; a repeat of the original trouble that led to the taming of the fresh water supply, apsu. In the Irra epic, Anu places seven gods at the disposal of Irra, to help him,

When the tumult of the people of the earth has become too painful for thee, and thy heart moves thee to set the snare, to kill the black-headed people, to lay low the beast of the plain, then let these be thy raging weapons and let them go at thy sides. (‘Black-headed’ is the standard designation of humans in Sumerian myth; it is not an ethnic reference.)

The Babylonian Flood story is also part of the Gilgamesh epic, to which we now turn.

The Barbarian Encounter in the Gilgamesh Epic

A defining characteristic of (proto-)imperial consolidation is the ambivalent relationship with the barbarian nomads on the fringes of the urban civilisation. Here the contradiction between separate community and common humanity plays out in all its aspects – spatial, protective, and in terms of exchange. The earliest written record of how people coped with this issue is the epic of Gilgamesh. It is a compilation of stories about a legendary king of Uruk in the first half of the third millennium bc. In many ways the Gilgamesh epic is a meditation on death, with the conclusion that if heaven is to be attained, it must be in this life (Heidel 1967: 12). But Gilgamesh’s encounters with barbarian foreigners (probably, as Kirk ventures, on timber expeditions to the western or eastern highlands, 1970: 133–4), constitute the other major theme. The attempt to evade mortality by heroism is bound up here, for the first time, with recruiting barbarians. Enkidu, the barbarian who becomes Gilgamesh’s friend,

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owes his name to Enki, the god whom we saw appearing from time to time as a foreign intruder into the Sumerian pantheon, the ‘earth lord’ sometimes cast as a son of Enlil.

Some subplots of the Gilgamesh epic were already part of the literary heritage of the Sumerians before the Babylonians included them in their ‘great national epic’ (Heidel 1967: 14). The twelve cuneiform tablets containing the story were found in the ruins of the temple library and palace of the Assyrian king, Ashurbanipal (668–c.633 bc), but there are also fragments of tablets that come from the Hittite library at Hattusas, from the mid second millennium. The fact that old Sumerian deities such as Anu and Enlil figure prominently, but Marduk, the god of the Babylonian creation story (his cult was installed by Hammurabi) does not, suggests that the Gilgamesh story dates from around 2000 bc at the latest, Heidel infers (1967: 15).

The ‘empire’, which began to crystallise as the Babylonian and Assyrian cities drew together closer than the cities of Sumer had done before them, brought issues of political institutions and justice to the centre of attention. It also redefined relations with foreign communities (Kirk 1970: 119). Gilgamesh, a historical personage on the Sumerian king list from the first dynasty of Uruk (not the ‘Nimrod’ of the Bible as sometimes assumed), is presented in the myth as the son from a union between a high priest of Uruk and the goddess Nimsun, the wife of the god Lugalbanda (the tutelary god of the city after Anu had moved on to a higher office). Having begun as a demigod, Gilgamesh ends up as a deity of the underworld (Heidel 1967: 3–5). The epic also gives a role to Shamash, the sun; as Caquot explains (1973: 85), Shamash was a Semitic god (cf. Hebrew shemesh, ‘sun’) associated with the rise of the Arameans in the later phases of the Babylonian empire. In the Aramaic pantheon, Shamash operated under the auspices of Baal-shamin (‘Master of the Skies’), and alongside Shahr, the moon.

Gilgamesh, we read (Tablet i; I follow Heidel’s translation, 1967: 16–101, omitting his brackets), ‘engraved on a table of stone all the travail’. Thus he records the work on the walls of Uruk, the enclosure of holy Eanna, and ‘the sacred storehouse’, the temple of Anu (An), head of the Sumerian pantheon; all administrative tasks typical of civilised, urban life. But Gilgamesh is also an arrogant ruler with undisciplined desires. He avails himself of the young women of the city while the young men work long hours. Freud’s social contract myth discussed in Chapter 1 comes to mind: the mythical father

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of the original horde indulges in sex without restraint but imposes complete chastity on his sons (in another Sumerian myth, sexual misconduct by the god Enlil also has him banished from Nippur to the underworld, Kirk 1970: 99). In the case of Gilgamesh, the inhabitants in desperation plead with the gods to get rid of him; the gods respond by creating a counterpart to Gilgamesh to divert the latter’s attention to other matters, and to have a sort of sparring partner to bring out his better self.

Here we have the mythical representation of how an autocratic formation must turn to the outside if it is to avoid becoming corrupt within its own domain. This motif of the ennobling and morally rejuvenating effect of the encounter with barbarism has remained a driver of imperialism across the ages. Indeed Gilgamesh’s double, Enkidu (he is created by the goddess Ninhursag/Aruru, cf. above), is a wild-looking man of titanic strength but also of superior morality. His body is covered with hair, ‘long hair like a woman’. As Heidel (1967: 6) sums up the epic’s description of Enkidu’s nomadic ways, ‘with the game of the field he ranges at large over the steppe, eats grass and drinks water from the drinking-places of the open country, and delights in the company of the animals.’ Enkidu is ‘clad in a garb like Sumuqan’ (the god of cattle and vegetation) (Tablet i, 1967: 19). So he is a hunter and a pastoralist, a man of the steppe north of Sumer.

Enkidu’s conversion to civilisation (which he will later regret bitterly) includes eating bread, unknown to him, and ‘strong drink’. Note how he leaves his pseudo-speciated self behind:

He rubbed his hairy body; he anointed himself with oil, And he became like a human being. He put on a garment And now he is like a man. He took his weapon to attack the lions, So that the shepherds could rest at night. (Tablet ii, 1967: 29, emphasis added)

So the first role assumed by the wild man is to guard the animals of the shepherds of Uruk.

Gilgamesh then sends a courtesan to lure Enkidu to Uruk. The barbarian, we learn, brings a moral purity with him, resisting the lurid propositions made to him (which Heidel gives in Latin). Upon his arrival in Uruk Enkidu actually tries to prevent Gilgamesh from indulging in his perversions; they fight, but obviously he cannot be allowed to prevail. ‘Enkidu acknowledges Gilgamesh as his superior, and the two, admiring each other’s strength and prowess, form a friendship’ (Heidel 1967: 6). Gilgamesh now dreams of adventure and the two men set out on an armed expedition to fight a terrible

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ogre, Huwawa (or Humbaba). Huwawa has been appointed by Enlil, the lord of the gods, to guard a distant and almost boundless cedar forest, which obviously points in the direction of Lebanon. As Pitard highlights (1998: 34), its cedars, as well as precious metals from Anatolia, were traded with southern Mesopotamia via Syria from the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur to the close of the third millennium bc.

This part of the myth has been reconstructed from different versions of Tablet iii. Enkidu’s prowess for war is recognised in all of them: the goddess Aruru (Ninhursag) who creates him, is the mother of Ninurta, the god of war. In the oldest retrieved written version, the Babylonian one, the two men on their departure receive the blessing of the city elders: ‘May Shamash cause thee to gain thy victory’ (Tablet iii, 1967: 39). The specific role of the frontier warrior comes out more strongly in the later, Assyrian version. Here the elders say to Gilgamesh: Do not count too much on your strength, trust Enkidu!

He who goes before safeguards the companionHe who knows the way protects his friendLet Enkidu go before thee.He knows the way to the cedar forest.He has seen conflict and is experienced in warfare.

(Tablet iii, 1967: 40, emphasis added)

On Tablet iv of the Assyrian version, Gilgamesh addresses Enkidu (1967: 44–5) as ‘My friend who art experienced in warfare, skilful in battle’. The implication is obviously that to live beyond civilisation entails perennial exposure to violence, hence to be alive at all is proof of one’s ability to fight.

When they reach the forest after some minor adventures, Gilgamesh is overcome by terror when he sees Huwawa, but Shamash sends mighty winds that topple the monster. On Tablet v, Huwawa begs for mercy: ‘Let me go, Gilgamesh; thou shalt be my master, And I will be thy servant. And the trees That I have grown on my mountains … I will cut down and build thee houses’ (Tablet v, 1967: 49).

The offer of tributary vassalage is rejected however, and Gilgamesh and Enkidu cut off Huwawa’s head and return victoriously to Uruk. There, with festivities being prepared, Ishtar, the goddess of love, approaches Gilgamesh, offering to become his wife. But as recounted on Tablet vi (1967: 49–55), Gilgamesh rejects Ishtar. In fury, she asks her father Anu to send a heavenly bull into Uruk in revenge, but Enkidu and Gilgamesh kill it and Gilgamesh dedicates its horns to

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Lugalbanda. The notion of a jealous goddess also appears in other epics. In the Kirta epic, a Canaanite myth discovered on tablets found in Ras Shamra on the Syrian coast (called Ugarit in its day), a king Kirta is shown by the lord of the gods, El, how to win the heart of the beautiful princess Hurraya. He is then struck down by a deadly illness for failing to fulfil a vow made to the goddess Asherah (Pitard 1998: 51). The god El saves Kirta, but the king then faces a rebellion of one of his own sons because he fails in his duty to protect his people (Hackett 1998: 142), and so on.

Now although it was Gilgamesh who has humiliated Ishtar, it is Enkidu who gets punished for having killed Huwawa as well as the bull. Is this a source perhaps of the notion, attributed by Dumézil (1970) to the Indo-European lineage, that the warrior in his protective role also commits a sin against the community? Or is it because for Enkidu, as a barbarian, tribal prohibitions on killing still obtain, whilst Gilgamesh enjoys ‘imperial’ impunity? Enkidu wakes up mortally ill, having seen the vengeful gods in council in a dream. There is even a hint of ecological accountability when, as related on Tablet vii, Anu, Ishtar’s father, says that whoever ‘stripped the mountains of the cedar’ should die (1967: 56; cf. Kirk 1970: 144).

The Hittite version stops there. From the surviving fragment of the Assyrian version, it can be reconstructed that Enkidu on his deathbed reviews his life and now regrets that he ever left the steppe and allowed himself to become civilised. Cursing the huge gate of Nippur (made of cedar timber), he exclaims, ‘O gate, had I known that this was thy purpose, And that thy beauty would bring on this disaster, I would have lifted an axe and shattered thee all!’ (Tablet vii, 1967: 58). This is a recurring concern of the tribal warrior recruited by the empire; as Ibn Khaldun would write in the fourteenth century ad, city life corrupts the nomad and makes him powerless.

After Enkidu’s death Gilgamesh becomes obsessed with his own mortality. He sets out on a journey to discover how he can become immortal. In other words, once the limits of (proto-) imperial sovereignty have become evident (the fact that Enkidu dies shows that the frontier encounter is decisive in bringing this to light), the ‘emperor’ must reflect on what a more limited sovereignty means. His lament is on Tablet viii. On the next Tablet, ix, he exclaims (1967: 64): ‘I am afraid of death and roam over the desert. To Utnapishtim, the son of Ubara-Tutu, I have therefore taken the road.’ Utnapishtim, ‘the Babylonian Noah’, has gained eternal life by saving his relatives, his associates, livestock and pots with seedlings from the Deluge. So

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instead of an ideological universalism, a conception of taking care of the population and the sources of its survival and prosperity comes into view; but the knowledge of how to succeed must be obtained from abroad.

Tablet x gives the story of the perilous journey. Foreigners are depicted as monsters (here as strange scorpion people). On the Phoenician coast, Gilgamesh encounters the goddess of brewing, Siduri (in Heidel she is called a ‘barmaid’; see entry in Coleman 2007). She warns him that the sea cannot be crossed except by the sun (Tablet x, 1967: 74). However, Utnapishtim’s boatman, Sursunabu (in Assyrian, Urshanabi), will be able to take him to the world beyond. Obviously, a sea journey from the Phoenician coast to Cyprus or Crete was associated with certain death in the eyes of an Assyrian; Gilgamesh has to cut his own wood for a ship built to Urshanabi’s specifications before they take to the sea.

Tablet xi then relates the encounter with Utnapishtim, named ‘the Distant’, so a foreigner too. Gilgamesh tells him he is surprised to find a man, not ‘perfect for doing battle’, but idly lying on his back, and asks him how he has succeeded in entering into the company of the gods and obtaining everlasting life. Utnapishtim then tells the story of the Deluge. The gods decided to visit a deluge on the city of Shurippak on the banks of the Euphrates, made up of reed huts. They tell Utnapishtim to tear down his own reed house and build a ship, the ark, and forget about his possessions. ‘Cause to go up into the ship the seed of all living creatures.’ As he follows the exact instructions on the measurements of the ark (3,600 square metres deck surface, six lower decks, etc.), Utnapishtim hears from the god Ea that Enlil hates him and that he is no longer allowed to live in the city; he must flee to the marshlands. All the gold and silver, the seeds of all living creatures, his family and relations, the ‘game of the field, the beasts of the field and all the craftsmen’ have been brought on board when Shamash gives the instruction to close the doors. Black clouds gather, destructive rains strike, and ‘the dikes … give way’ (Tablet xi, 1967: 84). ‘Even the gods were terror-stricken at the Deluge. They fled and ascended to the heaven of Anu.’

Ishtar, the goddess of love and fertility, now makes a terrible scene and reproaches herself for having commanded such evil to be visited on her people. Here we should not forget her role in the Mesopotamian theory of the seasonal cycle: as related by Frazer (2000: 325–6), every year Tammuz (equivalent of Adonis), Ishtar’s youthful lover, died and the goddess supposedly went to search for

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him, ‘to the land from which there is no returning’, suspending all the reproductive forces in humanity and nature until she found him again in spring. Ea, the freshwater god, then sends a messenger to the mistress of the netherworld, Allatu or Eresh-Kigal, who reluctantly lets Ishtar be sprinkled with the water of life and take away Tammuz with her. However, Ishtar’s intervention to save humanity from the Deluge is not seasonal routine. For six days, the tempest rages, and the downpour causes the land to flood. As the waters finally recede, the ark becomes stranded on Mount Nisir. After seven days, Utnapishtim releases a dove, and then a swallow, but they return, as there is still no place to land. Only when he lets out a raven does the bird fail to come back; so he concludes that the waters have receded enough to allow it to find land and food.

The epic at this point articulates people’s doubts about the gods’ intentions with humanity. They can only hope that the god associated with the water on which their hydraulic agriculture depends, Ea, has no part in the disaster visited on them. Indeed Ninurta, the war god, says to Enlil, ‘Who can do things without Ea? For Ea alone understands every matter’ (Tablet xi, 1967: 87). It is also Ea who reproaches Enlil for having brought on the Deluge. Could he not have sent wild animals, a famine, or a pestilence to punish mankind for their sins? Apparently mollified, Enlil goes aboard the ark and blesses Utnapishtim and his wife, telling them that they ‘shall be like unto us gods. In the distance, at the mouth of the rivers, Utnapishtim shall dwell!’ (Tablet xi, 1967: 88).

We need not go into the various relaxation exercises and herbal recipes that Utnapishtim gives Gilgamesh to enable him to gain immortality, none of which serve their purpose anyway. The important point is that Utnapishtim, having negotiated the tidal floods and salvaged his relatives, cattle, and seeds in the ark, now enjoys a secure existence. Gilgamesh, the warrior prince, who at first is amazed that somebody lacking fighting skills can have such an easy life, recognises that immortality is unattainable (Heidel 1967: 10). This is the moral lesson of the epic: the outside world offers opportunities to bring out the better side of rulers, but there is no chance of gaining eternal life. The best they may hope for is to protect their community against danger – natural, foreign, and divine (which in the cosmology of the age, were not separated). In Tablet xii, a later addition, Gilgamesh is busy making furniture for Ishtar. The futility of military campaigns is underscored by his vain quest for Enkidu’s

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dead body (Tablet xii, 1967: 101). ‘He whose body lies unburied on the steppe, hast thou seen him?’

IMPERIAL AND NOMADIC ANTECEDENTS OF THE SEMITIC MONOTHEISMS

The Mesopotamian legacy resonates strongly in the Bible (the Old Testament). But the perspective from which the Bible is composed is different. It synthesises an imperial strand (the Mosaic lineage), tentatively traced to the Egyptian experiment with monotheism under Pharaoh Akhenaten (Akhnaton, Ikhnaton), and a nomadic pastoral tradition usually associated with Abraham.

The synthesis that is the Judaic Bible was edited long after the events it records, and one reason why the prophesies in it were so accurate is that they profited from the benefit of hindsight. As Spinoza already observed (1951: 121), ‘it was not Moses who wrote the Pentateuch [the first five books of the Bible], but someone who lived long after him’. ‘All these details, the manner of narration, the testimony, and the context of the whole story lead to the plain conclusion that these books were written by another’ (ibid.: 123–4). As we now know, the oldest sections date from the eleventh century bc, the time of King David. After the destruction of the two kingdoms, Israel and Judah (in the eighth and sixth centuries bc respectively), exiled priests and scribes began to edit ethical precepts and prophesies of return, mythical and historical materials, into a single narrative. Impressed by the agrarian warrior empires that had destroyed their people’s independence, they cast its history as an epic of ethnogenesis and state formation (Goudsblom 2001: 99). Different editorial teams emphasised various components – the cosmogony (the Creation), genealogical lists, dynastic succession stories, prophetic warnings and expectations – and sometimes even different versions of the same events are included. I begin with the imperial strand.

Egyptian Monotheism, Moses, and the Exodus

It is extremely unlikely that the religion of the Jews (the name is derived from Judah, one of the tribes) was the sole product of the nomadic way of life they shared with other Semitic-speaking peoples. Freud, in Moses and Monotheism, has argued that their religion must be traced to the Egyptian empire, of which they were a frontier people (Freud 1967: 80). ‘In Egypt monotheism had grown … as an ancillary effect of imperialism; God was the reflection of a Pharaoh autocrati-

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cally governing a great world empire.’ As we shall see, there was also a Canaanite prototype of the monotheistic God; but let us look at Egypt first.

The imperial religion of Egypt was anchored in a solar theology that articulated the cosmology of an agricultural society dependent on the fertility of the Nile valley. Its theology, Amin writes (1977: 29), was ‘remarkably consistent with the requirements of … a full-fledged tributary mode of production’. It developed out of the merger of different urban centres; the animal forms or attributes of many gods (cow, hippopotamus, or human in form but with the head of a falcon, lion, or jackal) go back to totemic figures from a more distant past. Imperial unification in Egypt dates from around 3100 bc; the ‘Old Kingdom’ established by the third imperial dynasty (c.2778), lasted until 2181 bc.

The oldest imperial theology was associated with the city of On (Greek ‘Heliopolis’, sun city, on the edge of what is now the Nile delta and, at the time, possibly still on the coast). It was elaborated by a dedicated priestly class, whose learning was still praised by Herodotus (ii: 3, 1908: 95). The central god, the sun, Ra (Re), possessed an eye, the morning star, later identified with Maat, his daughter. The cult of Maat articulated one of the fundamental notions in Egyptian philosophy, cosmic balance. From it flow concepts of social and moral order and, eventually, the observance of divine and imperial laws, justice, and truth. As van de Walle (1973: 38–9) explains, the various Egyptian myths in which the eye plays a role have as a common trait the alternation between the functioning eye, absorbing light, and the malfunctioning eye, which results in darkness. The struggle between the sun, Ra, who sails along the celestial Nile and the force of evil seeking to submerge the world into night (later personified as Apep, Greek Apophis, a monstrous serpent associated with untamed water; see entry in Coleman 2007) provides a classical example of a solar myth. Ra in fact had many names, one of which was an absolute secret. Frazer (2000: 260–1) records how the goddess Isis obtained her own divinity by setting up a trap for Ra and thus got hold of the secret (it was believed, in Egypt as in other civilisations, that to get hold of someone’s name also entailed capture of the spiritual powers of its bearer).

Aten (Aton), the god who would later be elevated to the sole divinity, the first God of monotheism, was already a key figure in the Heliopolis theology. ‘Aten’ means ‘the whole’, ‘the complete’, and originally stood for the conscious principle in Nun, the chaos from

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which everything derives. He was the first in the divine line which in the third generation produced Osiris and Isis, as well as Seth and Nephthys. Osiris, the god of the dead, was a deified king–ancestor, associated with the city of Busiris in the Nile delta. He was, like all Egyptian gods, mortal himself; his mummy was entombed at Mendes (Frazer 2000: 265). The Osiris myth recounted in the Pyramid Texts, with some romanticised additions by Plutarch, provides a number of elements of the Egyptian imperial concept of sovereignty.

Osiris, the king–god who is assassinated by his jealous brother Seth (the conflict would be about the ability to control the waters; the serpent, Apep, was an incarnation of Seth) and is saved by his wife–sister Isis, represents the continuity of a monarchy based on alluvial agriculture. As he dies (according to Frazer’s account, 2000: 362–3, he is killed upon his return from a world tour to diffuse among the world’s peoples the blessings of his agricultural inventions) he passes on his title to his son (who appears on earth in beatified form as Horus, the falcon god – identified by Herodotus, ii: 144, 1908: 152, with Apollo). Horus avenges his father in a fight with Seth, emasculating him in combat, albeit losing an eye himself. The eye is restored to him on the order of the gods; as time went by, the eye of Ra, the morning star, and the eye of Horus, referring to the authority of the divine pharaoh, blended together. Every pharaoh relived the natural cycle of the Nile’s seasons, in which Osiris is the seed which dies in the ground and, as the floods recede, is reborn as a rich crop (cf. his identification by Herodotus, ii: 123, 1908: 144, as Dionysos, and his sister Isis as Demeter) – the revenge of Horus.

The foreign relations of the empire were in the portfolio of a dedicated goddess, Hathor–Sakhmet. She was a complex divinity of modest local origin (Hathor means ‘the house of Horus’), but eventually handled the sky as well as imperial foreign relations. Ra, feeling that age was catching up with him (I follow the account in van de Walle 1973: 40–5), sensed that the people were becoming arrogant towards him, rebellious even. The gods in council decide to send Hathor–Sakhmet, who usually has the shape of a cow but now assumes the guise of the eye of Ra, to spread destruction among humanity. The goddess eagerly sets about doing this, but Ra then repents and decides to restrain her, for which he has to dupe her because her cruelty knows no bounds. Because of her association with the eye of Ra, or perhaps with the sky (i.e. as an incarnation of Nut, the original goddess of the sky, also represented by a cow), Hathor in addition was ‘the mistress of foreign lands’. She was the patron

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deity of Byblos, the Egyptian trading settlement in Phoenicia, of the turquoise mines in the Sinai, and of Punt, the mysterious source of gold and incense usually located in Somalia. These were remote frontier locations which the pharaohs occasionally had to fight for; in the mythical accounts of these struggles, solar notions figure as well. Indeed in an early example of how the order represented by the empire and its divine pantheon is seen as confronting barbarity as the epitome of chaos, Ra is said to have sent Horus to fight the myrmidons of Apep, the ruler of darkness in Nubia (a rebellious southern frontier province of the empire, as well as the source of the unruly Nile).

What we see in the further evolution of the empire are shifting centres, each of which seeks to promote its own patron deity to a better place in the pantheon (for example, the god Ptah with the rise of Memphis, just south of On/Heliopolis), but with Aten always in the background. In the closing century of the third millennium bc, however, the empire landed in a crisis. Civil strife and Bedouin incursions brought the Old Kingdom to an end. From around 2040 bc the princes of Thebes (Luxor) in the south restored order (the Middle Kingdom, lasting until the 1780s bc). Just as Ptah probably owed his ascent to the rise of Memphis in the Old Kingdom, it was now the turn of Amun (Amon), the patron god of Thebes, who was associated with the fertility god Min. By calling him Amun–Ra, the Heliopolitan pantheon was incorporated too, and Amun was made the lord of the gods. The Greeks recognised in him their own king of the gods, Zeus, and hence they referred to Thebes as Diospolis, the city of Zeus (Herodotus ii: 42, 1908: 111; van de Walle 1973: 34). Hathor, the ‘mistress of foreign lands’, in Thebes presided over the necropolis, welcoming and soothing the dead.

From the eighteenth to the mid sixteenth centuries bc, the Middle Kingdom fell prey to Semitic-speaking warriors from Canaan (the eastern Mediterranean littoral from Syria to the Sinai; ‘Phoenicia’ is Greek for Canaan). The Egyptians called them ‘rulers of foreign lands’, bastardised in Greek as ‘Hyksos’. They conquered and ruled most of the delta, making northern Egypt virtually an extension of Canaan (Pitard 1998: 42). Was their eventual expulsion the Exodus as described in the Bible? In answering this question, Redmount has argued (1998: 76–8) that whilst there may have been proto-Israelite elements among the Canaanite Hyksos, the period between the expulsion in the 1550s bc and the Israelites’ settlement in Palestine is too long and runs up against inconsistencies with known circumstances.

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To situate the Moses story and the Exodus, we should look for events some 200 years later, in the New Kingdom. Thebes once more played a critical role in restoring imperial fortunes. With the resurgent empire, the hereditary priesthood of Amun also rose to prominence again. Several pharaohs were called after the god, but under Amenhotep (Amenophis) III and Amenhotep IV (who ruled from 1364 to 1347 bc), priests of the sun temple of Heliopolis also revived the notion of the other universal god, Aten. Crucially, they emphasised the ethical aspects of his divinity; attributes of Ra’s daughter, Maat, the goddess of truth, order and justice. In the sixth year of his rule, Amenhotep IV, enamoured with this idea of a just and benevolent god and wary of the Egyptian obsession with death and the related Osiris cult, made the dramatic change to monotheism.

The pharaoh decreed that Aten henceforth would be the sole God of Egypt. He changed his own name to Akhenaten, denoting something like splendour or executive of Aten; he left Thebes for a new capital near Amarna down the Nile which he called Akhetaten (‘horizon of Aten’). Here the correspondence with the rulers of Mitanni, the Hittites, and Babylonia, was later discovered. Indeed the late Bronze Age was a highly cosmopolitan period with unprecedented foreign contacts. ‘People, goods, and ideas flowed freely, by sea and by land, to an extent unparalleled in earlier times’ (Redmount 1998: 79). Asiatic gods were also imported and recognised. There was a colony of Phoenicians in Memphis who worshipped the Semitic war goddess Astarte in a temple of their own; because Astarte paradoxically was also the goddess of love, she was sometimes confused with Hathor–Sakhmet or even with Isis. It was in this context that Akhenaten’s experiment with monotheism must be placed. Nefertete, his wife, may have been one of the Asiatic princesses he married; Freud concedes (1967: 23) that the notion of monotheism itself may also have been nurtured by foreign ideas in addition to having its background in Heliopolitan theology.

Syncretism, the merging of different gods into new, composite deities (like Amun–Ra) now took a quantum leap forward. For the first time in known history the idea of a single, universal God was turned into official doctrine; all myth and magic and natural symbolism were suppressed. The divine symbol became a round disk with rays around it of which the tips turn into human hands – no personal or animal images any longer. Aten is not the god of the sun either, but an abstract deity, the sole ruler of the universe, the God of providence. Ensuring the well-being of Egypt and of foreign races, he unites them

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in his love (van de Walle 1973: 52–3). Aten was all-powerful and dedicated to truth and justice (Akhenaten regularly described himself as ‘living in Maat’ – truth, justice; Freud 1967: 61).

However, the new religion proved hugely unpopular. Not only did it challenge the social status (including the income) of the Amun priesthood, but it also had to combat the popularity of Osiris, the death god. This popularity was rooted in the obsession with immortality in Egypt – not a trifle when life expectancy was minimal. The dream of an afterlife, growing from the miseries of earthly existence, could not be extinguished by even the mightiest pharaoh. Hindu and Buddhist reincarnation, or the concept of life in heaven for that matter, cater to the same sentiment. But at the time these comparisons were not available, and the Egyptians considered themselves unique, far superior to barbarians. As Herodotus describes them (ii: 35, 1908: 108) they ‘have adopted customs and usages in almost every respect different from the rest of mankind’. Such customs as male circumcision, or prohibition against eating pork, were based on the idea of others as unclean, i.e. closer to nature and further away from the imperial gods.

Under Akhenaten’s weak successor and son-in-law Tutankhaten, the Amun priests had the chance to roll back the experiment. Certainly traces of the monotheistic Aten cult remained, but, as van de Walle recounts (1973: 53), the pharaoh was forced to return to Thebes and to replace the ‘Aten’ in his name with ‘Amun’. The dynasty ended in anarchy; its conquests were lost and Akhenaten’s new capital was destroyed and plundered. Rameses (Ramses) II restored military glory to the New Kingdom, but droughts at the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the twelfth centuries bc triggered a new crisis for the empire. Food shortages set in motion mass migrations. The break-up of the empire entailed a major redrawing of the geopolitical map of the Middle East. Whilst Egypt began its terminal decline, the settlement of the Israelites in Canaan must have been among the changes of the epoch (Pitard 1998: 45–6). This was facilitated by the stand-off between Egypt and the Hittites following the battle of Kadesh, fought by Rameses II against king Hattusilis III (Redmount 1998: 78–9; cf. Kishlansky, Geary, and O’Brien 1993: 28).

Shortly after 1200 bc, the collapse of both the Hittite empire in Anatolia and the Mycenaean empire in Greece inaugurated what Stager calls ‘a dark age’ (1998: 90). It led to re-ruralisation and fragmentation as well as the migration and settlement of the Sea Peoples, communities of seafaring trader–warriors who hailed from

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the Illyrian coast. The Philistines (Peleset) were the best known of the Sea Peoples; another branch of these sea nomads, the Shikalayu or Sikils (‘who live on ships’ and who gave the name to Sicily), appears as the Vikings of antiquity. They are depicted on Egyptian pictures with oared galleys with single sails and finials in the shape of water birds at prow and stern (Stager 1998: 119). Iron, the metal of which the Hittites had long had the secret, now became available to other peoples, ushering in the eponymous new age.

The ethnogenesis of the Israelites is perhaps best understood as a coming together of different Semitic-speaking tribes under a common religion. Here the Freud thesis would pertain, that monotheism, as attempted by Akhenaten, was somehow picked up by Moses. Yet, whilst the Aten idea was in the air, the question whether it reached the Israelites through Moses is another matter. The proto-Israelites were pastoral nomads and tillers in the frontier areas between Egypt and around the Canaanite heartland (the region around Jerusalem and the Jordan valley). They included the so-called Habiru or Apiru (the probable origin of the word Hebrew); the term denotes something like gypsy. The Habiru were vagrants roaming the land, hiring themselves out as workers or fighters and often difficult to control. They were found all across the Fertile Crescent during the second millennium bc, and apparently had no common ethnic affiliation or language. As Redmount emphasises (1998: 72), they ‘led a marginal and sometimes lawless existence on the fringes of settled society’; they are identified in various texts as outlaws, mercenaries, or slaves. An additional factor that kept them in a state of dependence was their lack of rights as foreigners. In times of turmoil they would transform themselves into raiding bands under a warlord (a ‘judge’), such as Jephtah (Judges 11) or even David before he rose to the kingship (Stager 1998: 103).

In the Amarna diplomatic correspondence with Akhenaten, the Habiru figure in messages from frontier vassals of the pharaoh, who complain about Habiru banditry. In one letter cited by Pitard (1998: 47), the ruler of Jerusalem begs the pharaoh to send archers to help him keep control of his sector of the frontier against the Habiru. It is likely that the Habiru problem was more widespread, and although the precise location in Egypt where Israelites were resident, Goshen (Exodus 8:22, 9: 26), has not been found, the eastern Nile delta would certainly have been an attractive region for banditry in the aftermath of Hyksos expulsion and the restoration of empire. A campaign by the army to restore order is therefore most likely, and the eastern delta with its marshes may well have been the stage of frequent guerrilla

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activity and pursuit. The myth that God allowed the Israelites to escape from such an expedition by parting the Red Sea, and then destroyed the pursuing army by drowning the pharaoh’s troops, is better situated in the delta; according to Redmount (1998: 65) there are good grounds for translating the biblical Hebrew into Reed Sea, suggesting the delta marshes or even the Bitter Lakes.

There is also evidence that by the close of the thirteenth century bc the Israelites were an identifiable ethnos. On the victory stele erected by Pharaoh Merneptah in 1209 bc, which lists his defeated enemies, we read (as in Stager 1998: 91) that ‘Tenehu [Libya] has come to ruin, Hatti [the Hittite realm] is pacified. The Canaan has been plundered into every sort of woe’. The port cities of the Canaanites are then mentioned as captured or destroyed, and ‘Israel is laid waste and his seed is not; Hurru [the Hurrian kingdom] has become a widow because of Egypt’. Israel however is the only ethnos identified by the hieroglyph for ‘people’ instead of ‘land’, suggesting they were perceived as nomads (Hackett 1998: 146). That they were nomadic tribes is not in doubt, and that some of them migrated across the Sinai is plausible. So what about Moses?

Moses is not a Semitic but an Egyptian name, meaning ‘son of’, so ideally there should be an element added as a pre- or suffix: Ra-moses (Rameses), son of (the god) Ra, Tuth-moses, son of (the god) Tuth, and so on. But then, Aaron, Moses’ brother, and Aaron’s son, Phinehas, have Egyptian names too (Redmount 1998: 65). Now assuming we have an Egyptian before us, in what context might Moses have become a leader of the Israelites? Freud’s supposition is that Moses may have been a governor of a delta sector of the imperial frontier, who in the crisis following the death of Akhenaten decided to lead the tribes under his authority to Canaan. Whether the mythical and repeatedly edited character of the Exodus epic allows such straightfor-ward conclusions is doubtful, but the thesis has a certain plausibility.

The Moses myth is a key source of Rank’s ‘average myth’ (discussed in Chapter 1). The pharaoh, concerned over the rise in their number, orders all male Israelite/Hebrew babies to be thrown into the Nile. Moses, abandoned in a floating basket, is found by the pharaoh’s daughter and raised at court. A non-Egyptian could no doubt rise to a position of power in Egypt; Redmount (1998: 75–6) gives examples of personalities from across the Sinai, one a chancellor and the other a vizier under both Amenhotep III and his successor, Amenhotep IV/Akhenaten (but the vizier was called not Moses but Aper-El, a reference to the Canaanite god El). Of course in the Bible and in the

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Koran there is also the episode of Joseph, who is sold by his brothers to passing traders. In Egypt Joseph rises to become the pharaoh’s highest civil official (Carroll 1977: 674). The exogamy aspect, which I claim may provide an alternative interpretation of the Rank average myth, in the case of Moses is corroborated by his flight to Midian (the Arabian Hijas) after he has killed an Egyptian in a quarrel. There he marries, and from Midian he returns to plead with a new pharaoh to allow the Israelites to migrate to Canaan (Exodus 1: 7–14; 3: 8).

This takes us to the second lineage of the Judaic religion, Canaanite and Arabian nomadism; here, in spite of a huge leap in time, we may also bring in Islam, which has a comparable background.

Canaanite Polytheism and the Abrahamic Lineage

The God of Akhenaten’s Egypt was a benign, universal ruler. The religious imaginary of the Semitic-speaking pastoralists of the Sinai, Negev, and Arab deserts on the other hand centred on grim (sand)storm deities who had to be placated by human sacrifices. How could the nomadic conception of a vengeful tribal deity blend with the notion of a supreme, just, eventually single God?

Here the mediating role may have been played by El, the lord of the pantheon across the Middle East during the first millennium bc. ‘Elohim’, the Hebrew term for God, and Arabic ‘Allah’, are both related to El. The word Israel (the honorific title given to Abraham’s grandson Jacob after he wrestled with God) comes from Yisra’el, ‘God contends’ (Pitard 1998: 54). Elohim is also used for men in authority or for God’s representatives on earth (Heidel 1967: 195–6). When the Bible speaks of ‘God’ (rather than ‘the Lord’) it is the translation of Elohim.

It was under the supreme authority of El that Baal (meaning ‘lord’, ‘master’) rose to become the leader of the pantheon of the sedentary western Semites. Baal too can be traced to a nasty storm god, the equivalent of Hadad of the Arameans, or the Hebrews’ Yahweh, to whom we return below. However, in the Ugaritic mythology recorded on the Ras Shamra tablets, Baal’s career has already gone well beyond that, to a more elevated plane and with a complex role which won him great popularity. El, who was conceived as male and patriarchical (his wife was Asherah or Athirat), is symbolised by a bull; Baal as a bullock, a male calf (in the biblical story of the golden calf, ‘calf’ refers to this: Caquot 1973: 89; Friedman 1997: 35, 47). Sometimes he is identified as the son of El, but it is obvious that Baal rose on his own account, in struggles from which El tended to remain aloof.

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The first of these conflicts pitted Baal against Yamm, the sea. The theme of struggle against the waters, as we saw, was widespread in Mesopotamia, but usually as a creation story or as the Deluge (the notion of a personified sea may actually have been of Canaanite origin, Viéyra 1973: 74). The Canaanite version relates the story of a house that Yamm would build for Baal with the assistance of Kathar, the artisan god, ‘the Clever One’. Kathar according to Caquot (1973: 89) stands for ‘the wondrous civilisations beyond the sea’, since, as a Canaanite poem says, ‘Crete is his dwelling-place, Egypt his patrimony’. Hence we are looking at actual foreign relations, an apparent conflict about exchange and tribute. Unlike the myth of Marduk of Babylon and Tiamat, this reads more like an epic about the resistance of the inhabitants of Ugarit under their deified ruler (Baal) against an attack on the Phoenician coast by the Sea Peoples, Sikils in this case. These finally subdued Ugarit around 1185 bc after protracted harassment. In the myth, however, Baal refuses to pay and Yamm asks for an audience with El to settle matters. The gods are overcome with fear, but not so Baal and his sister Anat, as well as the horsewoman goddess Astarte. Kathar provides Baal with two magical swords and Yamm is slain.

This was not the only challenge to Baal’s attempts to establish himself as a deified ruler. His sister Anat is especially concerned about the fact that Baal has no temple of his own; after the Yamm episode, she summons Kathar from Egypt to help with the building. Anat is the war goddess, often portrayed as a particularly combative lady, as is Astarte. Van Binsbergen (2005: 337) sees this in light of the masculine ascent that began in the Neolithic, which made virgin goddesses more ‘manly’ too. The warlike pharaohs of the nineteenth dynasty in the New Kingdom, notably Rameses II, who restored Egypt’s glory after the Akhenaten crisis, picked out these Semitic goddesses for special worship (Caquot 1973: 90). Anat was also the goddess of fertility and life (her name is connected to ayn, ‘source’), as was Astarte; in the temples dedicated to her, young girls had to prostitute themselves to cultivate sexual prowess and ensure the fertility of the community once married. As Frazer highlights (2000: 330–1), this practice was carried over to the Armenian cult of the goddess Anaitis, and to the temples dedicated to Aphrodite in Greece.

In another myth, Baal, as the storm god and also god of fertility, is seen as presiding over the reproduction of livestock, before assuming the form of the rain. As he literally expends himself in heavy showers, he dies in the jaws of the god of sterility and death, Mot (‘death’),

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who is also the incarnation of grain. Caquot (1973: 90–1; cf. Pitard 1998: 51) explains this tale as a fertility myth associated with a highly emotional ritual involving self-flagellation in recognition of Baal’s sacrifice for his people. Anat however finds Baal with the help of the sun goddess Shapash, kills Mot, and (the implication is) brings Baal back to life. The voluntary death of Baal in order that the corn will grow (which is made possible by the fact that the house built for him by Kathar has a window through which he could escape) made him intensely popular with his people. This is associated with the ritual, extensively recorded by Frazer, of the corn spirit associated with the last sheaf of corn. Even the prophet Elijah prayed to Baal to end a drought (i Kings 18). Since Baal also carried the thunderbolt, he was in the final analysis a god of war, a deity associated first with the nomadic way of life, who then assumes tasks arising from agriculture, with a strong protective accent.

The idea of an activist lord of the gods who acts for the benefit of the community under the supreme authority of a more distant creator god, is a feature of Canaanite mythology and religion. Indeed El, although all-powerful, appears to have lost interest in his creation. Living far away, in the juncture of the two heavenly rivers, he has turned away from the world. In one myth alone he appears, exposing his male member on the seashore to two women, who are both enthralled by its exceptional proportions. They become his wives and give birth respectively to Shahar (‘dawn’) and Shalim (‘peace’ or ‘twilight’). The babies are kindly suckled by El’s official wife, Athirat, the merciful. The poem, says Caquot (1973: 89), was meant to accompany a fertility ritual. But apart from this one outing, El is the distant father, usually in a benign role; leaving the task of leading the pantheon to Baal, the divine warrior. In that sense there is a similarity in character between the Aten figure that may have influenced the tribal Hebrew people migrating from the Nile delta and the image of El back in Canaan.

Yahweh on the other hand (also spelled Jahve, and translated in the Bible as ‘the Lord’, Pitard 1998: 28), was a god certain proto-Israelite tribes adopted from the neighbouring Midianites. He is much closer to Hadad of the Arameans and the original Baal. There are no epic myths in which Yahweh plays a role, because this stage was not reached by the pastoral tribes who worshipped him as a patron deity (Caquot 1973: 92). As Freud claims (1967: 39, perhaps again taking the biblical story a little too literally), Yahweh cannot have been the God who supposedly gave the Ten Commandments to Moses on the

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mountain during the Exodus from Egypt, because he was a volcano god and there are no volcanoes in the Sinai. The western border of Arabia however had active volcanoes until relatively late. Indeed as early Hebrew poetry suggests, in Stager’s reading (1998: 107) the mountain of God was probably a volcano in the Arabian, not the Sinai peninsula. Neither was the original character of Yahweh that of the merciful God of the Bible at all – he really is in a different class from El, let alone Aten. As Freud puts it in the same passage, Yahweh was an ‘uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by nights and shuns the light of day’, a nomadic figure, in other words (the desert pastoralists used to move their herds in the cool nights; hence the imagery of crescent moon and/or star in the western Semitic tradition).

This takes us to Abraham. He was the mythical ancestor of pastoral tribes who lived in Canaan (the name, Ibrhim, is derived from the term for ‘moving about’, Goldziher 1876: 66). The forbidding character of their way of life and the scarcity of pastures is brought out in the story of Abraham’s nephew Lot, who drives his flocks to the other bank of the Jordan river to find fodder, following conflicts over grazing grounds. In the Koran, Abraham, like many other Old and New Testament figures, is equally present, and is actually designated a Muslim (Koran iii, 1982: 54–5; Roman numerals refer to the sura, pages to the Arberry edition (1982), which does not give verse number). Here the patriarch implores God to bring fertility to the land occupied by his descendants (‘some of my seed’), who ‘dwell in a valley where there is no sown land’ (xiv, 1982: 250–1).

Canaanites, and hence Israelites too, had ancestor cults; but as in other patrilineal communities, the ancestors were not revered as deities. They served rather as a focus for social bonding in tribal relations (Hackett 1998: 156). In Genesis 22, Abraham receives the order from God to sacrifice his only son Isaac. At the time of the writing and editing of the Bible, however, the arch-ancestor doing such a thing, and indeed a god instructing the ancestor to this effect, would no longer fit into the more sophisticated theology of an urbanised population. In the pastoral past, this was seen differently; the older Canaanite version of the myth is that Abraham actually kills Isaac. The nomadic preference for the night would then arise in the fact that the name Isaac, by its association with the word for laughter, signifies the daybreak (Goldziher 1876: 58–60, 124). There are various passages in the Bible in which God still commands that the firstborn son should be sacrificed (Exodus 22: 29, as in Goudsblom 2001: 101). But then, as Pitard notes (1998: 29, cf. 26–7), ‘several aspects of proto-

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Israel’s religion as recorded in Genesis differ significantly from Israel’s religion as depicted in the rest of the Bible’, and this is certainly true of human sacrifice. In the eventual, edited version of Genesis, the narrative is modified: an angel from ‘the Lord’ (Yahweh, surprisingly; the God giving the instruction was Elohim) rushes in to tell Abraham not to kill Isaac but to sacrifice a ram instead (Goldziher 1876: 57, cf. 124; Genesis 22: 1–15). In the Koran, the episode of Abraham being ordered to sacrifice Isaac is not recounted, but then the issue of a change from a pastoralist to a settled way of life did not have the novelty for the Arabs that it had had for the proto-Israelites, two millennia earlier. The only related precept of the Koran (xvii, 1982: 277) is that killing children for economic reasons is outlawed. ‘And slay not your children for fear of poverty’.

The myth of Isaac’s near-sacrifice marks the metamorphosis of Yahweh. As Caquot writes (1973: 92), ‘when the nomadic Israelites from the steppe settled in Palestine, they came into contact with urban populations whose superior level of civilisation could not fail to impress them’. These urbanised Canaanites worshipped the benign, merciful El, the chief god of the western Semites. Baal had become more civilised too; now it was Yahweh’s turn. As Freud puts it (1967: 78, spelling adapted), ‘For a people that was preparing to conquer new lands by violence Yahweh was certainly better suited [and] what was worthy of honour in the Mosaic God was beyond the comprehension of a primitive people’. But the rise in civilisation pushed the original characteristics of Yahweh into the background, just as the need to distinguish the Israelite population from others became urgent. The later version of the Isaac story may have been meant to emphasise the cultural difference between the settled Israelites and nomadism, but the older religion of Canaan continued to exert great attraction. Deuteronomy contains explicit warnings to the Israelites against mingling with the Canaanites, singling out the latter’s sacrificial burning of sons and daughters as an issue of special concern.

The god Moloch in particular was a dangerous rival. Leviticus 18: 21 warns against handing over children to be sacrificed to Moloch (Frazer notes that the Carthaginians did the same, 2000: 281). The Biblical prophets still railed against child sacrifices to Baal performed by Israelites (Jeremiah 2: 31–32). This did not change when the Israelite tribes were unified under the kings, Saul, David, and Solomon. Under David and Solomon there occurred a transforma-tion of collective consciousness towards monotheism and the level of

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abstraction and conceptualisation on which it is premised (Goldziher 1876: 319, 324). Yet these kings never claimed to be emperors, and the universal aspect of the Judaic religion cannot be traced to endogenous sources either. Goudsblom (2001: 102) highlights that the Bible even records how King Solomon built a Moloch altar; two of his successors sacrificed their own sons to the deity (i Kings 11: 7, ii Kings 16: 3, 21: 6). By then the old tribal confederacy had collapsed into two separate formations, Israel in the north and Judah in the south, both destined to be destroyed. In other words, long after Abraham had been told to refrain from killing his son, the habit of human sacrifice persisted. Only the pious King Josiah abolished these practices, by having the shrines destroyed to ensure that nobody would henceforth throw his son or daughter into the fire for Moloch (ii Kings 23: 10).

In the actual composition of the Bible, the two traditions, the Mosaic–imperial and the Abrahamic–nomadic, each have their own authors. The ‘J’ sections (named after Jahve/Yahweh) record the story of the tribal confederacy back to Abraham; their first version goes back to a priest named Ebjatar, a contemporary of King David, at the start of the tenth century bc (Meyers 1998: 174; Friedman 1997: 24). Since David descended from the tribe of Judah, this tribe is obviously favourite with the ‘J’ version. The version highlights the covenant between God and Abraham rather than that between God and Moses, although many stories in the ‘J’ and the Elohim (‘E’) versions are identical (Friedman 1997: 81–4). The metamorphosis of Yahweh into a universal, merciful God was therefore very much an editorial matter. In the biblical account, a good many other gods still figure in its various stories, but as Caquot notes (1973: 93), to the Israelites this was not an actual polytheism: for them the other gods represented ‘foreign powers that the people of Yahweh had brought into subjection or must subject to their god and their law’.

The ‘E’ sections date from the late tenth century bc, when the federation broke up under Solomon’s son Rehoboam. The ten northern tribes constituted their own monarchy, Israel, under King Jeroboam; Judah (with Benjamin) was in the south. Jeroboam adopted the cult of Elohim, the God whose characteristics are of the benign El, worshipping him by erecting golden bulls in holy cities. The Levites, a priestly elite who saw themselves as the descendants of the Egyptian Moses (‘tradition maintains that Moses was a Levite’, Freud 1967: 45), denounced this as heresy; Jeroboam however ignored their right to the priesthood and appointed his own. This further downgraded the Levites, who were relatively urbanised (with no tribal area of their

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own), and who had already suffered when Solomon ceded key cities to the Phoenicians (Friedman 1997: 36, 45–9; Freud 1967: 47).

The writer of the ‘E’ component of the Bible was a Levi priest critical of the religious establishments of both Israel and Judah and who obviously hoped to reinstate the Levites in their former dignity. The chances to realise this were best in the north (Friedman 1997: 74). Moses in the ‘E’ material is therefore much more of a hero than in ‘J’; in ‘E’ he is the active leader of the Exodus whereas in ‘J’ this is the work of God. God in the entire ‘J’ component is Jahve/Yahweh; in ‘E’, God is Elohim, until Yahweh reveals himself to Moses in a burning bush (as related in Exodus).

Now whether the Elohim lineage of the God of the Bible also refers to Aten, is not straightforward – how could it be? Certainly the Aten episode resonated across the Middle East for centuries, and it was inserted into the Israelites’ theological repertoire as well. ‘The memory of this radical monotheism survived’, writes Stager (1998: 111); the poet who composed Psalm 104 borrowed straight from the Egyptian ‘Hymn to the Aten’. God in this psalm is depicted as the sun god, addressed by the poet as ‘[Thou] who coverest thyself with light as with a garment’, ‘stretchest out the heavens like a curtain’, and ‘who maketh the clouds his chariot’. Freud’s claim (1967: 27) that the Hebrew proper name of God, Adonai, is related to Aten, is less likely, because Egyptian was not a Semitic language and Adonai has an etymology of its own (as acknowledged by Freud as well). It comes from Phoenician adoni, ‘my Lord’ (Caquot 1973: 94). In Hellenised form, this becomes Syrian Adonis, a Semitic fertility god, possibly even an incarnation of Baal. As Frazer points out (2000: 325–9), the name Adonis was borrowed from the Babylonians and Syrians by the Greeks as early as the seventh century bc. Adonis, a god of exceptional beauty, was shared as a lover between Aphrodite and Persephone on a seasonal basis, in a classical fertility myth.

The problem, then, is not whether Egyptian ideas about a resplendent monotheism were in the air, but whether Moses could have been their harbinger. In Freud’s view (1967: 53), the Bible solves the issue of the double identity of Moses (as an Egyptian frontier commander in the ‘E’ perspective, and as the nomad son-in-law of the Midianic priest Jethro in the narrative of, or closer to, ‘J’) by having him travel from Egypt to Midian and become a shepherd–preacher in western Arabia. It is there that God speaks to him from the burning bush to tell him to return to Egypt. There is a very cryptic passage (Exodus 4: 24–6) in which God threatens to kill Moses in an inn,

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after which his Midianite wife performs a circumcision on their son, although she next addresses her husband as if she has circumcised him. The Egyptian custom of circumcision, according to Herodotus (ii: 104, 1908: 133), was otherwise practised only by the Colchians (in today’s Georgia; Herodotus claims they were also Egyptians) and the Ethiopians. As noted earlier, it underpinned the Egyptian sense of imperial superiority (clean versus barbarian). To make the Israelites ‘at least the equals of the Egyptians’ (Freud 1967: 34), would have been a key concern of the Egyptian Moses, as would also preventing the Israelites from mingling with others; but the belated circumcision in Midian suggests that the Moses who was the son-in-law of Jethro was never an Egyptian frontier lord.

In the synthesis of the imperial–universalistic and tribal–particular-istic perspectives, there also occurs an inversion of the subject–object relation between ethnos and deity. Instead of an inseparable bond between a people and their god, as is the rule, the Jewish God, who is universal, uniquely ‘chooses’ a people, ‘making it “his” people and himself its own god’, writes Freud (1967: 55). This aspect of ‘choice’ may be explained by the breakaway of the frontier Jews from the Egyptian empire in the hour of crisis; with the imperial universalism gone, a particular group, however small, claims to have been chosen to somehow resurrect the divine promise of eternal bliss. This made the Jews a ‘chosen people, whose special obligations would in the end find their special reward’ (Freud 1967: 79). Moses the Egyptian had died in a violent rebellion; this, according to Freud, is also the basis of the idea of the return of the Messiah, which the Jews towards the end of the Babylonian exile hoped would compensate for the murder.

The world of ‘J’ and ‘E’ ended with the Assyrian conquest of Israel (the north) in 722 bc. The Assyrian and the subsequent Babylonian empires both sought to defeat Judah and reduce it to a tributary formation; its position on the trade route between Africa and Asia and on the doorstep of Egypt condemned Judah to becoming a vassal. Assyrian gods were given statues in the temple at Jerusalem, and with the growth of Assyrian influence and religious conflict, the role of the tribes expired. As Friedman explains (1997: 90), ‘J’ and ‘E’ were now compiled into a combined narrative of the Jewish nation’s sacred recollections (Judah would be destroyed in the sixth century bc).

The authors at work here were a priestly collective, ‘P’. The priests, concerned that the people united under their religious authority might drift apart again, (re-)wrote those parts of the Bible that contained the ethnogenetic mythology of the Jews. Thus according

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to Carroll (1977: 669), the first sections of Genesis (until 2: 4a) can be attributed to the ‘P’ authors of the exile period; here God is central. The second, anthropocentric part of Genesis, 2: 4a to 25, were left in the ‘J’ version dating from the Davidic period. God then retreats more and more as the text unfolds. So whereas he is initially directly present (walking with Adam in Eden, closing the door of Noah’s ark, wrestling with Jacob), Vroon observes (1994: 397), after Moses (who still faces God once, and hears him speak from the burning bush), God becomes ever more abstract and distant. The Jewish religion even goes beyond the Egyptian one by abandoning all visual repre-sentation and also the association with the sun – from their roots as desert nomads, the Jews took the star as their symbol (of David, a historical, not a religious reference).

The Deuteronomic historian(s), the fourth main editorial source of the Bible, ‘D’, then wrote the story of the conquest of Canaan (the book of Deuteronomy). As Meyers explains (1998: 170), they were a collective or school of scribes who probably worked in the northern kingdom after the split and who moved to Jerusalem following the collapse of Israel. They collected the ancient stories and presented them in religious terms: the people sin, Yahweh sends a ‘judge’ (a warlord–hero) to save them and establish peace, but upon his death the people relapse into sin again, and so on (Hackett 1998: 133). We return to these ‘judges’ in the next section.

In one crucial respect, the contradictory origins (imperial–universal versus tribal) of the Israelite God were never truly overcome. The Jewish God remained a very jealous deity. He was the Lord of the Universe, the only God, and yet singled out one people as chosen. The belief in the eventual redemption constitutes the ‘mythic core of Jewish political life’ (Lustick 1988: 20). What remained of this core after successive insurrections, often furiously fought but defeated in the end by the Romans and others, was a highly apocalyptic political culture. The Judaic rabbis put all their effort into weaning the Jews from this insurrectionist, activist messianism; yet troubled times would often see false Messiahs stand up, who called on their followers to return to Israel and rebuild the Temple.

In Islam, the nomadic imprint transpires in the fact that Abraham is an even more central ancestral figure, the sole true patriarch of the religion. Nomadism was the preferred way of life for all the Semites; even as imperial formations and territorial states adopted the religion later, Islam would always retain this birthmark.

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FOREIGN RELATIONS IN THE BIBLE AND THE KORAN

The mythologies and historical narratives included in the Bible together constitute an ethnogenetic myth of the Jews, a story about the loss of their original lands, their turn to nomadism, and the conquest of the ‘Holy Land’ promised to them. The Old Testament contains a wide variety of literary genres, but it is held together by what Moye calls (1990: 591), a unified ‘mythical paradigm of dissociation from and reunion with the divine’, combined with a ‘historical paradigm of exile and return’. In the Christian adoption of the Jewish Bible, the stories were emptied of their specific ethnic association, turning into mere anecdotes. For the Jews, however, the Bible was national history.

The Koran is not really mythological at all. ‘Compared to the epic and dramatic fusion which constitutes the Old Testament’, writes Stetkevych (1973: 220, spelling adjusted),

The Koran is more like an abstraction. It is a metaphor – perhaps – but not an allegory. The Koran is not the story of the Umma; it is not the mythos of the Arabs as a people … The Koran is, in this respect, a far more universal book.

Its exceptional poetic beauty, coupled with the Arabic identifica-tion of poetry with true knowledge (al-Barghouti 2008: 8–9), gave the Koran an epistemological status that spans the chasm between mythical and rational thought. Or, in the words of Rodinson (1977: 78), ‘The Koran is a holy book in which rationality plays a big part’. Certainly, as Stetkevych observes elsewhere (as in Kennedy 1998: 382), pre-Islamic Arabian myth echoes in it. The co-optation of the mythical nuclei however puts it ‘to the service of a rhetoric that was almost inimical to “narrative” itself’. There are passages in the Koran which have a mythological ring to them, like Moses’ journey by ship in the sura of the Cave (Koran xviii, 1982: 296–8), but as Stetkevych (1973: 220) notes, even these remain essentially symbolic and archetypical.

Let us go over the three aspects of foreign relations – the sovereign occupation of space, protection, and exchange – as they transpire in the Old Testament and the Koran, to discern the different mental universes that have been sedimented into the collective consciousness of different communities over the centuries.

Rival Conceptions of Occupying Space and Sovereignty

The sovereign claim to ancestral space by the Israelites, Eric Voegelin has argued (as in Stager 1998: 111–12), is made by turning historical

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events into ‘a spiritual exodus from the cosmological form of imperial rule. Being the son of God, an imperial title of the pharaoh, is transferred to the people of Israel in immediate existence under Yahweh.’ This provides the overall framework in which sovereign presence is proclaimed, whether it is then ‘historicised’ (in a mythical sense) as God’s covenant with Abraham or with Moses. Both are oaths of loyalty to the religiously conceived ethnos (Hebrew am; Arabic umma and imam, derived from ‘to lead’, ‘to guide’, and associated with ‘destination’, al-Barghouti 2008: 36–7). Unlike umma, however, am is also an ethnic category (Stager 1998: 113). Hence religious conversion was the driver of ethnogenesis.

In the centuries following the Maccabees’ revolt against the Romans in the second century bc, Judaic kingdoms sprang up all across the Middle East and along the Mediterranean littoral. Jewish proselytising (and not the mythical exile in the year ad 70), according to Sand (2008: 3), explains why Jews are found in Yemen and in North Africa; their presence in Ukraine and southern Russia was a result of mass conversions in the Khazar kingdom in the eighth century ad. The descendants of the Judeans of antiquity, on the other hand, are the peasants of Palestine, who later converted to Islam. The sovereignty of the Jews, in other words, is religious first, based on ritual and customs like circumcision. Endogamy then served to reproduce certain common facial traits, whilst exclusion from land ownership generated the social habits – characteristics which in combination have so often been mistaken for being ‘racial’.

Myth is one way of retrospectively turning ethnogenesis into a divinely mandated event and projecting a ‘national’ homogeneity back into history. The myth of creation in the Bible is an obvious rephrasing of Mesopotamian elements, although these may in turn have built on an older Canaanite cosmogony (Caquot 1973: 93–4). The cosmogony and the creation of man (the ‘primeval history’) are in Genesis 1–11; these are followed by the ancestral, ethnogenetic mythology (12–50), the ‘patriarchal history’ (cf. above on the authorship rupture at Genesis 2: 4a). The genealogies beginning with Adam and Eve are meant, first, to link the creation of the universe with the creation of humanity, and then to combine mythological–historical narrative into a single whole (Moye 1990: 580–1). The Semitic paradise is a garden planted by God; it contains the trees of the knowledge of good and evil and the tree of life. Humanity is granted the dominion over the earth.

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In Islam, nomadic motifs take precedence over other forms of occupying space, and the concept of the Umma reaches beyond any particular nationality. Moorish architecture is inspired by tents; Caliph Omar in his testament designated the Bedouin as his heirs because they embodied the Arab roots and the core of Islam (Goldziher 1876: 98, 102). As Lattimore writes (1951: 180), Islam may be called the Protestantism of the oasis world of North Africa, the Near East, and Central Asia; it sought to unify the outlooks of pastoral nomadism and oasis, of town and tent and field, the life-worlds of the trader and the peasant herdsman. As with the Jews before Zionism, the Muslims have a non-territorial concept of their legitimate presence. Unlike Judaism, however, this has not been nationalised or ethnicised. The flight of Mohammed and a handful of followers from their native Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 further added a particular significance to movement as ‘emigration-cum-conversion’, the hijra, a constitutive event resonating in Islam to the present (Mandaville 2001: 70).

God donates the world in its entirety to the Muslims. Their actual sovereignty then pertains to the dar al-islam, the empire of surrender to God (or empire of peace); it faces the dar al-harb, the realm of war, also known as dar al-kufr, the world of the infidels (Rajewsky 1980: 27). Whilst its creation story is broadly identical to the biblical account (Koran vii, 1982: 49), there is one incident in which the angels are told to bow before Adam. Iblis (Eblis) refuses, on the ground that God created him out of fire, whilst Adam was made of clay (vii, 1982: 143–4; xviii, 1982: 294). Iblis is then chased away, but vows to try to divert the believers from the right path (vii, 1982: 144; xxxviii, 1982: 469). Throughout the Koran, this remains the key marker of difference – believers against infidels. Even when an ethnic imagery is used, as when the children of Adam are told to beware of Satan, ‘he and his tribe’ of Satans (plural) who will try to tempt them (vii, 1982: 145), the antagonism is with the unbelievers.

The Muslim concept of mobile occupation of space can be traced straight back to nomadic pastoralism and the caravan trade. The Prophet Mohammed (c.570–632), who belonged to the Hashem clan (‘house’) of the Koraish tribe (al-Barghouti 2008: 13), was entrusted with protecting camel caravans against tribal raiding. As with the Jews at the time of the Exodus, the dominant imperial formations (in this case, Persia and Byzantium) were in retreat, and new creeds were in the air. Arabs known as Abid Shems, servants of the sun, and Chaldaean astronomers were actively proselytising, as were

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(Nestorian) Christians from Persia. There were also large Jewish colonies in the big cities of Arabia. But the Arabs were too proud to copy a foreign faith like Judaism, and their interest in religion in turn was dismissed by the learned rabbis. When the Muslims eventually expropriated the houses and possessions of the Jews of Mecca, this not only gave them their initial material base; it also provided continuity with the raiding tradition, Lal maintains (2001: 50) – the prospect of booty. It instilled a powerful motive aiding later conquests. ‘Eat of what you have taken as booty, such as is lawful and good’ (Koran viii, 1982: 177). Nomad wars of movement welded surrender to God and the abjuration of idol worship into a much more emphatic, universal monotheism, compared for instance to the compromises that Pauline Christianity had to make with Indo-European traditions in the provinces of the Roman empire. In the Koran, the struggle against tribal idolatry and ancestor worship pits Abraham even against his own father, Azar (vi, 1982: 130; xliii, 1982: 507).

Mecca became the centre of Islam in 629. In what Glubb (1978: 39) characterises as a political masterstroke, the Prophet declared the Kaaba, the temple said to contain 365 idols, as the House of God. The Ummayya clan of the Mecca Koraish, which had earlier driven him away because they feared they would lose out if the annual pilgrimage and the highly profitable fair were abolished, could now accept Mohammed’s assertion that the Kaaba had been built by Abraham. A year later, the Prophet led an army of 10,000 followers to Mecca and accepted the surrender and conversion of the Ummaya, whose warriors had earlier defeated the Muslims (but true to tribal tradition, had not been interested in finishing them off).

There is no territorial aspect involved when God promises to make Abraham a leader of the people; there is a covenant with Abraham and Ishmael (his son with Hagar, Sarah’s maid) and those who ‘raised up the foundations of the House’ (Koran ii, 1982: 15–16). The spot where Hagar hid from the jealous Sarah is marked by the black stone of the Kaaba. ‘Abraham was a nation obedient unto God’ (xvi, 1982: 272), and Ishmael shares in this ancestral authority. In Genesis (16: 12), on the other hand, the angel says to Hagar about Ishmael that ‘he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him’: an unruly barbarian, in other words.

Judaism has an explicit mythology that articulates the shift from pastoralism to sedentary farming, but Islam does not. In the ‘P’ account of the Creation and the story of Cain and Abel (the

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sons of Adam and Eve), Carroll (1977: 670) discerns a continuity in the way in which sedentary and mobile occupation of space are contrasted. Whether this really applies to the Creation (‘static’ features of the landscape and the elements during the first three days; mobile, living creatures during the next three) may be left aside here. Cain’s occupation, sedentary farming, and the nomadic herding of Abel, however, are truly symbolic in this respect. For all Semitic-speaking peoples, working the barren land was seen as tortuous and compulsive, hence the curse of being driven from paradise and having to gain one’s bread in the sweat of one’s brow (Goldziher 1876: 68, 71, 104). When God refuses the sacrifice of Cain, accepting Abel’s, Cain in fury kills his brother and flees for fear of revenge; yet he is granted God’s protection. The myth thus transfers God’s blessing to settled life, whereas before it was bestowed on nomadic existence. Cain means ‘possession’, from kanan, to acquire (Augustine xv: 17, 1984: 626; cf. editor’s note in ibid.: 626n.).

The sedentary turn and the conflict with nomads is a pervasive theme across the Middle East, but resistance to urban life was not confined to actual nomads. As late as the twelfth century ad, Le Goff reminds us (2000: 67), Cain’s killing of his brother was being offered as proof that cities (whether Cain’s, or Jericho, destroyed by Joshua, or Babylon, or others) were all doomed, ill-fated resurrections of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is even more pronounced in the Koran. The story of the ‘two sons of Adam’ is not elaborated on; one brother (the Abel of the Bible, unnamed here) makes his sacrifice and exclaims that ‘God accepts only of the godfearing’. Yet the killing that ensues merely serves as a lesson never to retaliate (Koran v, 1982: 104–5), not to legitimate urban life as in the Bible; on the contrary, the Koran explicitly makes movement, going about, an activity that is rated much more highly than sedentary existence.

The Prophet’s flight from Mecca inspires a number of passages in the Koran in which ‘emigration’ means just that. But otherwise, spreading the true religion in the world is continuous with the nomadic way of life (the Arab word for religion, din, also means way of life; F. Rosenthal in Ibn Khaldun 1967: 25n.). ‘Such believers as sit at home – unless they have an injury – are not the equals of those who struggle in the path of God with their possessions and their selves’ (Koran iv, 1982: 87). As the Hadith, the collection of the Prophet’s sayings and doings, explains (as in Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 25), ‘Islam began in exile and will return in exile in the [end of history]. Blessed are the exiled.’ When angels question

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people about their livelihood and they say they are stuck in one place, they reply: ‘But was not God’s earth wide, so that you might have emigrated in it?’ ‘Whoso emigrates in the way of God will find in the earth many refuges and plenty’ (Koran iv, 1982: 87). Some of the people of the city on the other hand ‘are grown bold in hypocrisy’ (ix, 1982: 191; cf. Goldziher 1876: 97).

The Deluge motif, as we saw, is an almost universal myth, a single story even; it is also about controlling the waters for agriculture. In the Bible only the cast has changed. The biblical myth, as Moye (1990: 586) interprets it, is meant to convey that just as Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden, now it was the turn of Noah and his kin to be separated from the rest of humanity, the only ones exempt from destruction. Noah is ten generations from Adam (biblical lives are often six or seven centuries in length), and Abraham comes ten generations after Noah. For the second time, the injunction to ‘be fruitful and multiply’ is given, now to Noah; dominion over the earth is likewise renewed. As to livelihood, Noah becomes a ‘tiller of the soil’ (like Adam and Cain before him); so according to the Bible, nomadism returns only with Abraham. This reminds us that nomadism is not just any migratory way of life; it is almost always a by-product of settlement, not an original condition prior to civilisation. Noah’s problem is alcohol (a product of agriculture). Whilst under its influence, he is dishonoured by his son Ham, who under Noah’s curse is then condemned to be a slave to his brothers Shem and Japheth (Genesis 9: 21–5; Carroll 1977: 675). Indeed Noah’s descendants, in the words of Augustine (xvi: 11, 1984: 669–70), were the ‘founders of nations’. Foreign relations are ubiquitous in the narrative. ‘Hamite’ Canaanites (Ham is identified as the father of Canaan, who here is an ancestor, himself father of ‘Sidon’) and, by implication, ‘Hamite’ Africans are assigned slave status. An ‘ethnic’ difference with the Gilgamesh account is also that Noah’s ark runs aground on mount Ararat in the Caucasus, which Mesopotamians knew as Uruarti. This, Caquot suggests (1973: 94), points to Hurrian influence: the Hurrians came from lands bordering on Armenia, settling in Canaan in the second millennium bc.

In the Koran, the agricultural transition following the Flood is absent. After saving Noah and those with him, God ‘appointed them as viceroys’ while the others drowned (Koran x, 1982: 205, cf. the sura on Noah, lxxi, 1982: 608–10). No fathers of nations here either. Aren’t the Arabs the chosen people of the Koran then? Lal maintains (2001: 51) that Mohammed’s genius lay in integrating the Semitic

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monotheistic legacy with the ethnic identity of the Arabs; but the Prophet is emphatic in explaining that there is no specific ethnic bond involved. ‘Those are the signs of the Manifest Book. We have sent it down as an Arabic Koran; haply you will understand’ (Koran xii, 1982: 226; repeated in xx, 1982: 319). ‘Every nation has its Messenger; then, when their Messenger comes, justly the issue is decided between them’ (x, 1982: 202). But this concerns practical issues of language; Islam is not confined to ‘the midmost nation’ (ii, 1982: 18) or even those who read Arabic. ‘If God had willed, He would have made you one nation.’ What divides people is whether they follow God or not, and ‘unto God shall you return all together; and He will tell you of that whereon you were at variance’ (v, 1982: 107–8).

The Judaic territorial claim to space according to the Bible goes back to Abraham. God promises Canaan as the land to which the latter’s descendants will hold the title; it is then that Abram changes his name to Abraham. Even today Israeli settlements are being constructed on Palestinian land with reference to this biblical promise. In fact, Genesis 15: 1–21, according to Friedman (1997: 256), is a text heavily edited to bring the ancestral history into line with the Exodus. Thus Abraham is forewarned (Genesis 15: 13–14, as in Moye 1990: 594): ‘Know of a surety that your descendants will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs, and will be slaves there, and they will be oppressed for four hundred years.’ The Israelites were nomads; but the most ancient psalms are documents of a Zion cult that has links, not with Israel’s nomadic past, but with an urban culture that existed in Jerusalem, a Canaanite city, and which they inherited after the conquest. The ‘ark’, a chest housing or symbolising Yahweh and carried along by the migrating tribes (‘the ark of the covenant’) now obtained a fixed abode in the temple (cf. Hackett 1998: 156–7).

The combined reigns of Saul, David, and Solomon cover about a century. David’s ascension to the kingship is usually dated 1005 bc, Solomon’s death at around 928 bc. Under Solomon the confederation was territorialised into twelve provinces corresponding with the tribal names; they were also tax departments, each supposed to provide the equivalent of maintaining the royal household for one month (i Kings 4: 7–19, Stager 1998: 112). As Meyers has argued (1998: 175–6), that Israel could experience this century of prosperity and security may have been the result of a period of contraction in the empires surrounding it. When they recovered, centrifugal forces and pressures from the outside combined to break up what had all along remained a tribal confederation. This takes us to the subject of protection.

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From Tribal Raiding to Jihad

Yahweh, like Baal, was originally a warrior god. Hackett (1998: 159) quotes Exodus 15 about Yahweh’s triumphs: ‘horse and rider he has thrown into the sea’, ‘Yahweh is a warrior’, his right hand ‘shattered the enemy’, and so on. The Psalms and prophets like Isaiah take up mythological themes that read as if Baal has been metamorphosed into Yahweh. Psalm 74: 13–14 says, ‘Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou brakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. Thou brakest the heads of Leviathan in pieces.’ The Leviathan, the serpent referred to by Isaiah (27: 1) is Lotan of Ugarit; Yahweh rides on the heavens like Baal (Psalm 68: 4; Caquot 1973: 93). There are obvious references to polytheism. Yahweh’s army is composed of planets and stars, understood as inferior deities with whom he wins the battles against the Canaanites (Hackett 1998: 159). In conflicts with foreign tribes, gods on both sides were always involved, and often the religion added the aspect of fanaticism, because it was bound up with a people’s very existence. Today this is often glibly presented as a characteristic of Islam, but as Taylor writes (2007: 274): ‘Many of the stories in the Old Testament portrayed God as egging the people of Israel on to terrible deeds, not excluding genocide.’

Whether there was ever a real conquest of the Holy Land or whether the Bible merely turns demographic shifts and migration into a heroic account is not certain (Stager 1998: 93–7). The conquest narrative in the Bible conveys the image of a lightning campaign from east to west; it involved crossing the Jordan river and then moving north into Galilee, and so is from the opposite direction to that from which the Exodus would have come. In the book of Judges, the conquest is described in the poem of Deborah (‘Then sang Deborah and Barak the song of Abinoam on that day’). The Canaanites, who are equipped with war chariots, are defeated by the Israelite tribes (still ten in number) and their Midianite allies. At the time of Moses, relations with Midian were cordial, although Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, declined to join in the conquest (Numbers 10: 29–32). Here too, they are aided by a flash flood (in the Wadi Kishon), reminiscent of the Red or Reed Sea that swallowed the pharaoh’s army during the Exodus. Conflict with the Canaanites apparently broke out as Israelite income from caravan trade protection dried up and they were displaced. ‘In the days of Shamgar the son of Anath, in the days of Jael, the highways were unoccupied and travellers walked the byways’, we read in Judges 5: 6. This means (I follow Stager’s

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interpretation, 1998: 109) that the caravan trade had been diverted. As the Israelite villages along the route became depopulated (‘the inhabitants of the villages ceased, they ceased in Israel’, Judges 5: 7), this led them to seek other lands, which then entailed a contest over the living space of the Canaanites and fights with the Philistines, one of the Sea Peoples.

The invasions of the Sea Peoples in the twelfth century bc were aimed at coastal cities. In the correspondence between King Ammurapi of Ugarit (as in Stager 1998: 118) and the king of Cyprus, Ammurapi receives the advice to concentrate his troops and chariots in the towns and fortify them; but he replies that his chariots are stationed in Hittite country and his ships are also out and about – Ugarit, in other words, is lost. In their raids on Egypt the Sea Peoples sailed up the Nile delta, but they also fought land battles with horse-drawn chariots. When Rameses III defeated them, he turned contingents of Sea Peoples, in classical imperial fashion, into auxiliaries to guard the frontiers; thus the Philistines were garrisoned in Canaan (Hackett 1998: 152–3). According to the biblical prophets, the Philistines came from Caphtor (Hebrew for Crete); as noted, they originally hailed from the Illyrian coast. Their arrival in Canaan coincides with the Israelite settlement in the early twelfth century bc. After the breakdown of Egyptian control following Rameses’ death in 1153 bc, they expanded from the Gaza area in the century that followed, forcing the Israelite tribe of Dan to migrate northwards. It has been argued that the tribe of Dan may itself have been one of the Sea Peoples, as suggested by biblical references to their nautical activities (very unusual for Israelites) and their lack of genealogy or fixed territory. Stager prefers (1998: 125, cf. 115) to see them as an Israelite tribe pushed north, however, rather than as Greek Danaoi (to whom we turn in Chapter 3).

The myth of Shimshon (Samson) refers to the raids accompanying the displacement of Dan (Goudsblom 2001: 115). ‘In those days there was no king in Israel: everybody did what was right in his eyes’ (Judges 21: 25). Stager (1998: 124–5) actually identifies Shimshon himself as a ‘judge’–warlord of Dan and notes that he marries a Philistine woman. The Bible depicts Shimshon as a nomad, a wild man: his long hair (cut while he sleeps to debilitate him) resembles Enkidu’s in the Gilgamesh epic. Since his name is derived from Shemesh, Goldziher (1876: 25–6) concludes that he is also a solar hero struggling against darkness, but that is at best an honorific title. He fights for himself, not for his tribe (as Hackett notes, 1998: 136, at this period violent

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conflicts arose among the Israelite tribes). Shimshon’s tactics are typically nomadic and tribal, based on surprise and deception. Thus he uses foxes with torches tied to their tails to set fire to the fields and orchards of the (sedentary) Philistines.

Gideon and Jephtah were warlords like Shimshon. They are all real outsiders, outlaws whose status within their tribes (Manasseh, Gilead, Dan) borders on expulsion (Hackett 1998: 135–6). As I have argued in Volume I (2007: 100), such marginal warriors are a feature of tribal society in the process of adjusting to more civilised sedentary formations. This changed when in the latter half of the eleventh century bc the Philistines pushed deeper into Canaan and all-out war ensued. Saul, the first of the ‘kings’, was anointed by a priest, Samuel, to fight them. This act raised the status of a warlord to that of a divinely sanctioned leader; but the priesthood also set limits to royal prerogative. When Saul overstepped these limits, David, also originally a ‘judge’, was enthroned to restore the balance (Friedman 1997: 37–8). In the books of Samuel, David is actually not designated as a king, Hebrew melek (cf. Arab malik) but as nagid, prince or ruler (Meyers 1998: 178). In the story of David and Goliath, David’s tribal warrior status is brought out by the extensive description of Goliath’s Mycenaean-style body armour and weapons, as against David’s sling and stone. It was David, Stager relates (1998: 116), who pushed the Philistines back to the Gaza area. There, one is tempted to add, they remain confined today, three millennia later; except that today’s Palestinians, as noted above (cf. Sand 2008), are probably the descendants of … the biblical Israelites.

Whether the Israelites at the time of the Judges had iron weapons and tools or not, remains contested. Stager calls it a ‘modern myth’ that they did not (1998: 126). Iron was not yet widespread though; it had long been monopolised by the Hittites and was only gradually replacing bronze in armament. Its possession bestowed a major military advantage. Goudsblom (2001: 115) notes that the Bible emphasises that the Israelites did not have iron and, according to the account of i Samuel (13: 19), the Philistines were concerned to keep it that way: ‘The Hebrews should not be allowed to make swords or spears.’ Stager (as above) claims this is a misreading, and that the real advantage lay in chariots, of which parts have been excavated in the Philistine port cities. Judges 1: 18–19 actually ascribes the failure of the Israelites to prevail in the fighting in the lowlands to Philistine chariot use; but far more important than any weaponry, of course, was the participation of Yahweh. As Hackett relates (1998:

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156), when the Philistines capture the Israelite ark of the covenant, Yahweh ensures that the statue of their god Dagon breaks into pieces. Wherever the ark is taken, chaos erupts. In the end the Philistines are happy to send it back (i Samuel 5). But then it is in the nature of mythical accounts to highlight divine intervention as a way of explaining victory.

The turn to a sedentary monarchy under David also changed the mode of warfare. David, writes Augustine (xvi: 43, 1984: 710), ‘marks the … manhood of God’s people … The period from Abraham to David [was] the adolescence of this race.’ Now the sedentary–nomad roles were reversed, and the Israelites recruited Philistines (ii Samuel 8: 18 speaks of Cheretites, probably Cretans, and Pelethites) as auxiliaries to guard the Negev desert frontier, under Israelite commanders (Stager 1998: 126). These auxiliaries served the king directly, whereas the main army was controlled through tribal loyalties. Saul relied on Benjaminite officers, David trusted only his fellow Judeans, and these were the main beneficiaries of the spoils of war distributed to ensure their loyalty (Meyers 1998: 193). Under Solomon, the same author notes, the prominence of the military receded and tribute replaced war as the means of controlling the adjacent territories. Solomon’s standing army had chariots and worked rather as a deterrent; David still had to be violent and brutal. Yet seen through a theological lens, this was warranted by the fact that the enemies David fought were God’s enemies.

This takes us to Islam. One of the few passages in the Koran that conform to a mythical structure, combining human and divine action in a symbolic narrative, is a story from one of the many military campaigns in Arabia by which Islam was established. It concerns the she-camel that God sent to convince the Thamood of the true religion and begins in sura vii, ‘The Battlements’. ‘How many a city We have destroyed’, the Prophet says, recounting how, using surprise tactics characteristic of nomads, ‘Our might came upon it at night, or while they took their ease in the noontide’ (Koran vii, 1982: 143). The Thamood are urged by their prophet, Salih, to convert to Islam. God then dispatches the she-camel and Salih reminds the Thamood that it was through God’s help alone that they conquered Ad (another ancient ethnos), ‘[lodging] them in the land, taking to yourselves castles of its plains’ (vii, 1982: 152). However, the Thamood are stubborn and do not heed the instruction to let the she-camel roam free. According to Stetkevych (as in Kennedy 1998: 383), this may be traced to a historical event in which Mohammed himself, in one

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raid (on Tabuk), when his leadership of the Muslims appeared to be questioned, lost track of his she-camel. Mocked for pretending to know the ways of heaven but not of his own riding animal, the Prophet then miraculously located the camel. In the Thamood story, the disbelievers, against express instruction to the contrary, tie up the she-camel; they challenge Salih’s status as a prophet, whereupon an earthquake strikes. In sura xi, ‘Hood’ (the prophet of the Ad), the story is repeated and we hear of the destruction of Thamood, ‘their habitations fallen prostrate’. They disbelieved, ‘so away with Thamood!’ (Koran xi, 1982: 219).

The tribal past resonates powerfully in the Koran’s prescriptions concerning violence. Feud is identified as proper for retaliation, but should not be transgressed beyond retribution. ‘For him who commits aggression after that – for him there awaits a painful chastisement’ (Koran ii, 1982: 23). If somebody is nevertheless killed unjustly, the victim’s next-of-kin is entitled to retaliate (xvii, 1982: 278), ‘but let him not exceed in slaying’. All of this is typical of the tribal rules of proportionality in feud, but, as so often, people did not really live up to ethical precepts. Even in the hour of their appearance before God, when God will say, ‘Enter among nations that passed away before you’, quasi-tribal petty quarrelling must be expected to continue. ‘Whenever any nation enters, it curses its sister-nation.’ The peoples will try to blame each other for their evil acts and beg God to punish those who led them astray (vii, 1982: 147). ‘The first of them shall say to the last of them, “You have no superiority over us, then; so taste the chastisement for what you have been earning”.’

Since the Umma was meant to overcome tribal divisions, a believer should never kill another, and if he does so by accident, he should set free a believing slave (Koran iv, 1982: 86). ‘If two parties of the believers fight, put things right between them’ (xlix, 1982: 537). In the agreement that settled the fight between the Koraish and the converts from Yathrib (Medina), these rules were spelled out explicitly, with an interesting provision for incorporating the Jews (as in al-Barghouti 2008: 60–1). ‘Believers are one another’s allies vis-à-vis the rest of the world, and whoever follows us of the Jews would be helped and supported and they are not to be oppressed.’ Even so, again in the tribal tradition, warfare continued to be seen as a path to glory, a way to reclaim honour after an insult or injury (rather than sustained war and militarism). In actual battle God’s help will allow a smaller force to defeat a much larger one, as the

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early history of Islam demonstrated: ‘God most surely helped you at Badr, when you were utterly abject’ (Koran iii, 1982: 61).

There is no systematic treatment of war in the Koran. ‘Fight in the way of God with those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors’ (Koran ii, 1982: 25). ‘In the war, deal with them in such wise as to scatter the ones behind them’ (viii, 1982: 176). The instruction is to slay those who attack the believers, but when they surrender, to extend God’s grace and forgiveness to them. The concept of jihad is obviously crucial here. It implies a duty of the believers to participate in a militant spread of the creed. But then it must be remembered that the concept was formulated in what was effectively a context of civil war; its universalisation, according to Rajewsky (1980: 21–2), came about only after the Prophet’s death. From the idea that jihad was a matter of volunteers fighting on their own, in campaigns not part of the wars waged by a state or empire, the notion developed that jihad is a personal commitment, a religious duty of the individual Muslim. That is not the same as a commitment to violence. On the contrary, throughout the Koran militancy is prefaced by mercy and compassion; every sura invokes God ‘the merciful, the compassionate’. In Koran i, ‘The Opening’, this is emphasised by calling God the ‘All-merciful, the All-compassionate’. This should remind us that whatever else is said in the Koran is framed by a description of a benign God whose mercy and compassion extends to all and everything.

Once the conquests had created a vast Islamic sphere across Asia and North Africa and the European periphery, certain imperial practices, like the deployment of dedicated frontier warriors, also made their appearance. The converted frontier tribes (Ghazi, originally ‘frontier fighter’, later ‘warrior for the faith’) are often described in connection with particular religious virtues and an ascetic way of life; in the Hadith (as in Rajewsky 1980: 23) they are sometimes called ‘monks of Islam’. As a result the term ‘ghazi’ in the eighth and ninth centuries became an honorific title, something like ‘hero of the faith’. Dervishes, Islamic mystics, the same author notes, also participated in military campaigns, exhorting the warriors to fight for the faith.

Babylon and After

The myth of the Tower of Babel follows the Noah story in the Bible. It is about humanity’s ethnic and linguistic diversity, which in the context of the city of Babylon becomes a source of disorder (in fact the place was as monolingual as any, Ostler 2006: 59). The story

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is not included in the Koran; Islam is not concerned with ethnic difference. The Bible too might here have profited from more editing. After a catalogue of Noah’s offspring, including Shem’s son Eber (the mythical, eponymous father of the ‘Hebrews’), whose sons are Joktan and Peleg (which as the Bible emphasises means, ‘splitting’, ‘divided’), and Japhet’s descendants, including Ashkenaz (a name still used for European Jews in distinction from Sephardic, ‘Spanish’ Jews), we are first told (Genesis 10: 20) that these genealogical lists are drawn up ‘after their tongues, in their countries, and in their nations’; then we read that ‘the whole earth had one language and few words’ when building on the tower was begun by men who ‘migrated from the east’ (Genesis 11: 1–4).

Babel or Babylon (according to Augustine, xvi: 4, 1984: 657, the name derives from babal, confusion; but it really means ‘Gate of God’, Bâb-Il, editor’s note in ibid.: 657n.) is located in the realm of Noah’s great-grandson Nimrod, ‘a hunter’ and mighty king sometimes mistakenly equated with Gilgamesh. The Babylonians want to find their way back to God by building a skyscraper in the city. It is in watching this sacrilegious attempt to reach the heavens that God decides to confuse their tongues ‘that they may not understand one another’s speech’, thus fulfilling their fear of dispersal. In Moye’s words (1990: 589),

The Lord demolishes the single unity of humanity, the ‘one language’, and, in scattering humans abroad over the whole earth, not only creates division within humanity but also reinforces humanity’s separation from himself, making exile from the divine universal.

Here we see how the contradiction between separate community and common humanity, operative in all foreign relations, finds its resolution in a myth of the quest for a return to the single God, who embodies the unity that must eventually be restored. In the case of the Jews, however, their being ‘chosen’ (through Abraham and Moses) is of course the opposite – an enduring separation, to be resolved only for them. But then it was the Jewish priesthood which had the final editorial role in compiling the definitive text. In Moye’s reading of the Old Testament, the story then moves from primeval to patriarchal narrative, the actual ethnogenetic myth. Its central theme has been articulated however: separation from God on several occasions (Adam, Noah, etc.), and separation for God, that is, constitution of the chosen people against foreign ones. Christianity and Islam would later transcend this perennial separation and hold

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out salvation for everybody, restoring the original intent of the myth. Yet they fundamentally differ as to how sexuality and exogamy accompany these separations from and for God.

In the Bible, God’s injunction to Adam not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, on penalty of death (Genesis 2: 16–17), is followed by the decision to give him a companion, woman. It is Eve who then listens to the serpent which tempts her to eat from the tree – the familiar figure of woman as the source of problems. She and Adam are expelled in consequence, and also, as Moye explains (1990: 585), to prevent them from eating from the other mythical tree, the tree of life, and living for ever. In the Koran on the other hand, after God’s decision, over the protest of the angels, to make Adam the ‘viceroy’ of the earth (ii, 1982: 5), both Adam and Eve sin when Satan encourages them to eat of the tree of life (vii, 1982: 144; ‘The Tree of Eternity’, xx, 1982: 320). Whilst the theme of the couple becoming ashamed of their nakedness is the same, the fact that in one case this is caused by Eve and in the other they are in it together, according to Lal (2001: 58–9), explains the radically different views of sin and sex in the Judaeo-Christian and Muslim traditions. Whereas in the former, there is an obsession with sin and a guilt that must somehow be expiated, God’s verdict in the Koran (vii, 1982: 145, when the couple are expelled from Paradise) is, ‘Get you down, each of you an enemy to each’. Their lives on earth will henceforth be temporary, albeit with ‘enjoyment for a time’. Sexuality here is a compensation for the expulsion, not itself a sin; it is actually a prominent feature of life in heaven, whereas the Christian heaven is more like a well-provided church library set in a pleasant field in Virginia.

Cain, in the biblical story, is forced to flee after killing his pastoralist brother. He then marries, has a son, founds a city, and becomes the ancestor of herdsmen, smiths, and musicians. The killing of Abel may actually have been a sacrifice known in many agricultural societies, a ceremonial act to fertilise the soil with human blood. Indeed, as Carroll points out (1977: 672–4), Cain’s subsequent success would suggest a role consonant with Lévi-Strauss’s idea that culture emerges from the exogamous exchange with other groups, not from one’s own kin. If looked at through this lens, Carroll notes, the sequence of (a) a violation of the kin connection (intended or actual murder), (b) flight or otherwise departure, and (c) marriage in a different community, characterises not only the Cain and Abel myth. It also structures the story of Jacob and Esau (Jacob tricks Esau out of his right as the

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firstborn, flees, and marries elsewhere to become ‘Israel’, the founding father of the eponymous twelve tribes, Genesis 27–32).

The myth of Lot, Abraham’s nephew, a pastoralist who ‘goes east’ (Moye 1990: 592), takes him to Sodom, the Las Vegas of the biblical world (Genesis 13: 13). There he learns that he will have to leave that city, again emphasising the theme of separation and reunion with God. Carroll (1977: 675) shows that this myth is structurally similar to that of Noah: destruction by the Flood and by fire, respectively; being chosen to be saved (Lot’s wife however dies because she disobeys the instruction never to look back at the burning city); and an incestuous incident, perhaps not so clear in the case of Noah and Ham, but quite certain in that of Lot, who is seduced by each of his daughters because they think he is the last man alive (Genesis 19: 30–8). Out of this union Moab and Ammon were born, tribes that later became trans-Jordanian kingdoms (Stager 1998: 113). Such a mythical genealogy is not relevant to the Koran, the origins of which lie in the Arabian peninsula further south. Here, envoys tell Lot that they have come to save him and his family, except his wife. They order him to set forth with his family at night, and ensure that no one looks back at the ‘people of sinners’ (Koran xv, 1982: 256–7; xxix, 1982: 406).

In the biblical story of Joseph, the general pattern – violation of kin connection, departure, and exogamy – also transpires. The Koran here follows the biblical account fairly exactly. The incident in which Potifar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph but, being rejected, then accuses him, is the same (Koran xii, 1982: 228–9). What appears to be missing in the Koran’s version is Joseph’s marriage with the daughter of an Egyptian priest and his rise to a position of imperial authority, which Carroll (1977: 674) highlights as being crucial in the biblical story. In the Koran (xii, 1982: 232), Joseph is entrusted with the king’s storehouses, no mean position either.

The Koran addresses issues of exogamy and gender relations in a separate sura, iv, ‘Women’. Here it is said that ‘Men are the managers of the affairs of women’ because men have expended their property to get hold of them and ‘righteous women are therefore obedient’. If not, they should be beaten (Koran iv, 1982: 77). Such were the rules of tribal society in the seventh century ad. In the same sura, incest rules are spelled out. There is one instruction (to the wives and daughters of the Prophet and the believing women) to ‘draw their veils close to them; so it is likelier they will be known, and not hurt’ (xxxiii, 1982: 434). This too was tied to the specific circumstances of the Prophet’s flight; in light of Islam’s non-hypocritical attitude

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to sexuality, a general rule to hide one’s face from the outside world would seem out of place.

In Jewish practice, endogamy was ensured when the Judeans were granted permission by Persia to return to their homeland in the fifth century bc (the northern tribes had disappeared). Limits to exogamy were imposed by the prophets Ezra and Nehemiah. As Freud notes (1967: 51n.), ‘By these reforms the regulations aiming at the consecration of the chosen people were taken seriously: the separation from the other tribes was put into force by forbidding mixed marriages.’

Finally let us briefly look at trade and tribute. In the Bible these are often entwined with exogamy. Meyers (1998: 179–81) emphasises that the highland core of Palestine was not the Land of Milk and Honey, but a marginal ecological zone difficult to make productive. To secure labour on family farms, rapid population growth was encouraged, pushing surplus population into the surrounding countryside, for example, in the Judean hills. The presence of Philistines on the coast, Ammonites in the east and Amalekites in the south had to be reckoned with all the time. Hence, the Mediterranean package of grain, wine, and olive oil could be obtained only through exchange. The Israelites traded with the Midianites of the Hijaz, their allies in the days of Moses and Jethro (but enemies after 1000 bc). The two peoples both considered themselves to be descendants of Abraham, as would the Muslims later; the Midianites claimed descent from Abraham’s concubine Keturah. Her name means ‘incense’, and her mythical sons were the tribes (Midianites and Ishmaelites) who ran the caravan trade in Arabian aromatics and spices (Genesis 25: 1–4, Stager 1998: 108). In the Bible their conflict with the Israelites is described as resulting from disagreement over Baal worship and exogamy. Even so, Kenites and Amalekites, both Midianite clans, apparently still intermarried with Israelites and were allied to them. Jael, a heroine of the war with the Canaanites, is the wife of a Kenite (the Kenites mythically descend from Cain, which in Aramaic means metal-smith, Stager 1998: 110; the Hebrew association, as noted, is with ‘possession’).

When the Israelite social formation rose to great power under Solomon, the queen of Sheba (modern Yemen) brought camel loads of aromatics, gold and gems as tribute (‘gifts’) (i Kings 10: 2). In i Kings 9 and 10 there are references to a fleet built by Solomon to sail across the Red Sea to get these items himself from east Africa (Meyers 1998: 190). Solomon’s legendary coterie of wives and

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concubines signalled not so much his sexual appetite as the wide range of tributary formations subject to the Israelite monarchy, all signalling their loyalty by marrying off princesses or giving them in concubinage. Solomon was a ‘hegemonic’ ruler, to which the references to his wisdom attest; as Meyers highlights (1998: 196), this was an aspect of ‘the internationalism of his reign’.

Trade in the Semitic tradition is associated with wandering, movement – in Hebrew, shachar, in Arab, sahar (Goldziher 1876: 140). It had relied on the one-humped camel, the dromedary, from the final centuries of the second millennium bc, when it came into use as a pack animal. The dromedary was indispensable for crossing the desert; as Stager notes (1998: 109), it helped make the aromatics trade the most lucrative business of the Bronze Age. In the Koran, merchants are held up for high esteem (Rodinson 1977: 16), but not without strictures. Believers are urged not to consume goods in vanity and, when trading, do so by mutual agreement (Koran iv, 1982: 77). Towards the end of the Koran there is even a very short sura dedicated to the Koraish, the Prophet’s tribe, complimenting them on their work on ‘the winter and summer caravan’ and reminding them of God’s blessing, which protected them from hunger and fear (cvi, 1982: 661). Infidels on the other hand were best dealt with by plunder. According to Rajewsky (1980: 24–5), this precept has a background in pre-Islamic Bedouin raiding and the right to booty, which Mohammed succeeded in incorporating into the Muslim religion. On ‘People of the Book’ who were subjected to Islamic rule but unwilling to convert, tribute was imposed, and later a tax.

Usury (riba) is forbidden in Islam. The Koran gives details (ii, 1982: 42) on how to regulate debt (notably by having a written record). ‘God has permitted trafficking, and forbidden usury’; those who provide such credit are doomed: ‘Those who devour usury shall not rise again’ (ii, 1982: 41). As Rodinson emphasises (1977: 21), whilst there is no dispute with the right to ownership, excessive gain is forbidden. The emphasis is on using wealth wisely and taking care of the poor; towards the end of the Koran there is a special sura, ‘Charity’ (cvii, 1982: 662). Piety is faith, but is also ‘to give of one’s substance, however cherished, to kinsmen, and orphans, the needy, the traveller, beggars, and to ransom the slave’ (ii, 1982: 22–3). These are matters to be decided individually, a personal responsibility that has sometimes been compared to Calvinism. As Rodinson argues (1977: 92),

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Mohammed was reacting in his own way against the fatalism of pre-Islamic ideology, the view current among the Arabs of the dominance of blind laws of fate imposed upon men as upon the gods … He replaced the omnipotence of fate by that of a personal will, the will of Allah, whom one could at least invoke, pray to and supplicate.

In this sense, religion covers an intermediate space between magic and science, both of which, as Frazer maintains (2000: 51), ‘take for granted that the course of nature is determined, not by the passions or caprice of personal beings, but by the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically’. In the Semitic monotheisms, such fatalism is absent. The final balance will be struck on judgment day, in economic as in other matters. ‘Those who expend their wealth night and day, secretly and in public, their wage awaits them with their Lord’ (Koran ii, 1982: 41).

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3Warrior Heroes in the

Indo-European Lineage

The Indo-European-speaking pastoralists who descended from the grassy plains of southern Russia and Ukraine in the second millennium bc were barbarians compared to the agricultural civilisations they invaded, very much like the nomads discussed in the last chapter. Unlike the Semitic monotheisms, however, the cosmologies that crystallised in the ensuing ethno-transformations left the spiritual realm not just fragmented, but also immersed in daily life, with gods, demigods, and heroes intermingling freely. In addition, as Dumézil has famously argued (1952), all across the vast belt of settlement that runs from India to Iceland, pantheons and the political orders they enshrine display a characteristic common structure. Sovereignty is fractured into magical–royal and juridical–priestly authority; the war-making, ‘protective’ force poses a challenge to sovereign rule; and the ‘economy’ (fertility, the aspect of exchange in foreign relations) is potentially out of control too. Still, as Dumézil also emphasises (1970: 4), ‘the world and society can live only through the harmonious collaboration of the three stratified functions of sovereignty, force, and fecundity’. How they combined, varied greatly. ‘Aryan’ warriors might become pacifists, as in India, just as Germanic heroes would refuse to reconcile themselves to the fact that gold could buy valour and honour.

In this chapter, I look at the Hindu, Greek and Roman, and Scythian and Germanic–Nordic mythologies of foreign relations. In each case, the past imposed itself on the present through forward and backward movement in second-dimension time, as outlined in Chapter 1. Hindu nationalism against Islam, British imperialism inspired by Greek antiquity, and anti-liberal, anti-Western revolts in Russia and Germany are the cases in point.

FROM ARYAN–DRAVIDIAN SYNTHESIS TO HINDU NATIONALISM

Hinduism developed as an ecumenical spiritual realm, incorporating existing religions as it spread. India, A.C. Bouquet writes (as in Sen

85

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1961: 15), ‘furnishes within its limits examples of every conceivable attempt at the solution of the religious problem’. Its key mechanism was incorporation – of foreign gods into its pantheon, and of tribal totems as avatars (incarnations) of Hindu gods, in particular, Vishnu (the ‘All-Pervasive’). There is no society as generous in bestowing divine status on such a broad range of beings. In one sacred scripture (as in Narayanan 2005: 38–9), the number of gods is estimated as anywhere between one god and 330 million.

The population movements that brought illiterate Indo-European-speaking Aryan nomads into the Punjab began around the middle of the second millennium bc. Herodotus in the fifth century bc still noted (iii: 98, 1908: 214; 1963: 201–2) that ‘there are many nations [ethnea in the original, from ethnos] of Indians, and they do not speak the same language as each other; some of them are nomad[s], and others not’. The nomads ‘in the east’ eat raw flesh and, occasionally, each other too; whilst those in the north ‘are the most warlike of the Indians’.

The cosmology of the Aryan pastoralists was suffused with themes of danger, violence, and death. They had a nature religion and worshipped the sun, the moon, fire, sky, storm, air, water, dawn, rain, and so on, all as separate deities. As wave after wave migrated into north-west India, however, the range was narrowed to a more limited body of gods, each with a broader remit. In the view of V. Grönbech (as in Toynbee 1935, ii: 89), packing up and moving to new lands tends to generate ‘a new conception of gods and men’:

The local deities whose power was coextensive with the territory of their worshippers were replaced by a corporate body of gods ruling the World ... Time-honoured myths setting forth the doings of mutually independent deities were worked up into a poetical mythology, a divine saga.

The Aryan mythology already contains traces of other civilisations, from the Indus Valley and also from Mesopotamia. Even the Vedas (from the word for ‘knowledge’), dating from around 1000 bc, are not ‘pure’. As Kirk emphasises (1970: 209–10), they contain stories and symbols from an epoch when the Indian and Iranian lineages had not yet been separated; even their language reveals non-Aryan traces (Chakrabarti 2008: 62–3).

In the Rig-Veda, the oldest Veda, gods of light and gods of darkness represent the twin poles of sovereignty. Agni, fire, is a crucial deity; in the Rig-Veda he is related to Mitra, the god associated with the sun. ‘I call for you Agni, shining with beautiful shine, praised with

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Warrior Heroes in the Indo-European Lineage 87

beautiful praise, the guest of the clans, the receiver of fine offerings, who is desirable like Mitra’ (as in Sen 1961: 120). The counterpart of the juridical–priestly Mitra was the magician–king Varuna (Ouranos of the Greeks), originally the god of space, the night sky, and later of good (‘right’, rita) and evil (Narayanan 2005: 17; see entries in Coleman 2007). Varuna is at the origin of the monotheistic undercurrent of Hinduism. As the Rig-Veda states (as in Sen 1961: 48), ‘He is one, (though) wise men call Him by many names’. The other proto-monotheistic god is Prajapati, the sky; he later becomes the Lord of Creation.

Unlike the nomads of the hot deserts of the Middle East, the Aryans did not have a special reverence for the night, although Goldziher (1876: 81–5) interprets Varuna’s portfolio as proof to the contrary. Perhaps the Aryans themselves were part tillers, as archaeological finds suggest (Thapar 1995: 92–3). In the Rig-Veda, however, day and night revolve in apparent harmony in their eternal cycle (as in Sen 1961: 117):

Akin, immortal, following each other, changing their colours, both the heavens move onward. Common, unending is the Sisters’ pathway; taught by the Gods, alternately they travel.Fair-formed, of different hues and yet one-minded, Night and Dawn clash not, neither do they tarry.

Protection centred on Indra, the storm god, who owes his name to the rain (indu, water drop). D.D. Kosambi describes him (as in Chakrabarti 2008: 61) as ‘a model of the marauding bronze-age chieftain’. In the ‘Hymn to the Goddess Earth’ in the Atharva-Veda (as in Sen 1961: 122–4), Indra is designated as ‘the bull’, ‘the lord of might’, who ‘has made (the earth) friendly to himself’ (he mates with the mother goddess Earth). In the Rig-Veda he also appears as Rudra, the thunder, ‘whose bow is strong, whose arrows are swift, the self-dependent god, the unconquered conqueror, the intelligent, whose weapons are sharp’. ‘Being the universal ruler, he looks after what is born in heaven’, the text continues (as in Sen 1961: 119–20). ‘Protecting us, come to our protecting doors, be without illness among our people, O Rudra!’

The two Asvins, finally, are the Vedic deities who account for the aspects of fecundity and prosperity. They are the divine physicians, gods of the dawn, and have the colour of gold (or honey). They are so close that they are seldom identified separately. Like Varuna and

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other gods, but of lesser status, they are sons of Aditi, supreme nature (hence their designation as Adityas).

The peculiarity that the gods of sovereignty have an alter ego is not confined to Mitra and Varuna. It also applies to other gods in the sovereign body, such as Arya-man, who holds what Dumézil (1952: 48–9) calls the ‘Ministry of Nationality’. He protects the community of Aryans; his counterpart across the divide is Daksa, son of Brahma and father-in-law of Shiva (whom the Aryans inherited from the Indus Valley civilisation). Bhaga, an aspect of the sun entrusted with the ‘economic’ portfolio within the sovereign triad, doubles with Amsa (the unity with the divine essence, Herbert 1973: 233).

In Table 3.1, I compare the structure that Dumézil discerns in the Rig-Veda, with the pantheon of the Indo-Iranian Zoroastrians as recorded in the Avesta (sacred scriptures attributed to Zarathustra). In both, we see the triangular configuration (shown in boldface type in Table 3.1) of the juridical –priestly sovereign, his magical–kingly counterpart from the world of darkness, and the deity of force, as well as the triadic functional structure corresponding with the three aspects of foreign relations (enumerated in the table as 1, 2, 3). Yet there is also an important difference. As we see in Chapter 4, the Iranian Mithra cult would influence Christianity by gaining followers among the Roman frontier legions. This was possible because Zoroastrian theology, midway between a nomadic and a fully-fledged imperial religion, articulated the need to inculcate rules of behaviour required for a sedentary way of life. Nomadic raiders in this perspective had come to embody the forces of evil. Hence Ahura Mazda (Ohrmazd in Pahlavi language) is closer to a monotheistic god, whilst Angra Mainyu (Ahriman), the prince of darkness, here is the devil – the alter ego of Arya-man, protector of the Aryans in the Rig-Veda. The two groups of Amesha Spentas (‘powerful immortals’, somewhere in between gods and angels) cover the three social functions. Mithra is a mere assistant to Kshathra (or Shatre Var, ‘power’; cf. Kshatriya, India’s warrior caste).

In India, the origin of Hinduism in the foreign encounter and the related caste system bequeathed a pervasive quest for ‘purity’ embodied by the Brahmin upper caste. In Hindutva nationalism this crystallised into a political ‘fundamentalism’ directed against Islam. Hindutva emerged in the aftermath of the Khilafat campaign, a Muslim movement protesting against Britain’s policy of breaking up the Ottoman empire, the realm of the last caliph, in 1918–19. It challenged colonial authority in India, but also activated communal

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fault lines (Aziz 1963: 94–113). Articulated in V.D. Savarkar’s 1923 pamphlet Hindutva: or Who Is a Hindu? militant Hinduism obtained its own volunteer defence force in the Rashtriya Svayamsevak Sangh (RSS) soon afterwards. The RSS was outlawed following Gandhi’s assassination, but, as Bhagavan (2008) argues, Hindu nationalism was sufficiently assimilated and protected by the Congress mainstream to be resurrected later. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP, ‘World Hindu Society’) was formed in 1964, and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) brought Hindu nationalists together into a single party in 1980.

The ‘Vedic’ ideology seeks to essentialise the Hindu heritage. It obscures its heterogeneity, adaptability, and fluidity, whilst anchoring it in the bounded territorial entity that is India. Any ‘return to the sources’ however will find they are too diverse. Besides the Vedas, there are the Upanishads (‘sitting near’ [the teacher]); they date from the early sixth century bc and were contemporary with Buddhism and Jainism. In addition there are the great Hindu epics and the Puranas (‘ancient’ [lore]). The Upanishads challenge the harsh nomadic–pastoral world of the Vedas; they instead propagate a doctrine of harmony, advaita, non-duality, in which each atman (self) aspires to fusion with brahman (the all-pervading divine1). Their emphasis on

Functions Vedic Zoroastrian

1. Sovereignty(occupation of space)

3. Bhaga (goods)

2. Arya-man (community)

1. Mitra(Ruler of this world)

Amsa

Daksa

Varuna(Ruler of the Other World,

magic)

Ahura Mazda(Ohrmazd,

supreme God)

Vohu Manah(Good spirit)

Asha(right)

Angra Mainyu(Ahriman,

Devil)

2. Force(protection)

Indra Kshathra(with Mithra)

AmeshaSpentas

3. Fertility(exchange)

the two Asvins Spenta Armati(with Haurvetat

and Armetat)

Table 3.1 Triadic Structures of the Vedic and Zoroastrian Pantheons

{ {{

I

II

Source: compiled from Dumézil 1952: 59, table xi; de Menasce 1973: 189–90; Coleman 2007.

1. Not to be confused with the Vedic creator god, Brahma, or with the priest-ly caste of the Brahmanas, English ‘Brahmins’ (also sometimes spelled as ‘Brahman’).

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karma, ‘works’, lends the Upanishads a distinct humanistic flavour. In Sen’s words (1961: 55), ‘it is men who hold the centre of interest, the gods are subsidiary’. The aim is a way of life that allows one to escape from the cycle of rebirth and reincarnation. Paradoxically, the social force whose world-view was articulated in the Upanishads (as well as in Buddhism and Jainism) was the Kshatriya warrior clans from the eastern provinces.

The epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata (the longest poem in existence; it contains the Bhagavad-Gita, ‘the sacred song’), have pre-Vedic roots, but evolved as they were orally transmitted throughout the epoch of the Aryan invasions (Sen 1961: 72). They exist in various versions, finalised between the fourth and second centuries bc, and were edited and written down in the first few centuries ad. Vishnu and his many avatars, such as Krishna (‘black’), figure prominently in them. Indeed the combined figure of Vedic Vishnu and pre-Aryan Shiva, one half with a dark skin, the other with a light one (Herbert 1973: 222–3), is testimony to Hinduism’s appreciation of harmony in difference. The same combination was part of the Trimurti, a trinity articulating the cosmology of agriculture. Here creation (Prajapati, transformed into Brahma), collaborates with preservation (Vishnu), and destruction (Shiva’s task, necessary for a new cycle of life). Since, according to Narayanan (2005: 35), the Trimurti was never really popular, the cycle early on was projected onto each of the gods separately. Brahma in the process was eclipsed by ‘the Goddess’, who assumes the various identities of Devi, the Indus Valley mother goddess (she becomes the wife of Shiva as Parvati), the fearsome Kali, or Lakshmi, wife of Vishnu. Let us review how foreign relations are accounted for in this ecumenical legacy.

Shared Spaces, Fractured Sovereignty

The Vedic ‘Hymn to the Goddess Earth’ (as in Sen 1961: 122) articulates the concerns of pastoralists. ‘May this earth, the mistress of that which was and shall be, prepare for us a broad domain!’

The earth whose are the four regions of space, upon which food and the tribes of men have arisen, which supports the manifold breathing, moving things, shall afford us cattle and other possessions also!

The earth upon which of old the first men unfolded themselves, upon which the gods overcame the asuras [demons], shall procure for us (all) kinds of cattle, horses, and fowls, good fortune, and glory!

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The actual space claimed by the legendary first king of the Aryans, Manu (from manava, mankind, born directly from Brahma and author of the Manava dharmasastra, the oldest treatise on right conduct, dharma), was north India. The concept of India as a holy land, Aryavarta (‘country of the noble ones’) took hold around the beginning of the Christian era, Narayanan relates (2005: 70). It comprised the region south of the Himalayas, bounded by the Indus in the west and the Bay of Bengal in the east.

The story of Prithu, the son of Manu, according to Thapar (1985: 30), reflects the way in which the Aryans cleared the forests of the Ganges plain. From the alluvial agricultural perspective of the Indus Valley civilisation, the Ganges would have had to be controlled too. In one myth, recounted by Herbert (1973: 221–2), their god Shiva implores the river to fall upon its head, whereupon it gently divides into seven streams, slowly washing uncleanliness away. But irrigated land was too swampy for the herds of the Aryans. In the Rig-Veda, Indra therefore destroys the flood-control agriculture of the Indus Valley, which figures as a snake-like demon, Vritra (meaning ‘covering’, Kirk 1970: 211, and possibly derived from a word for obstacle or barrage, Chakrabarti 2008: 61). The Aryan Flood story on the other hand was imported from Babylon. In the version recounted by Thapar (1995: 30), a tenth-generation descendant of Manu, also called Manu, survives the Deluge because he is warned by Vishnu; Vishnu in the shape of a fish tows Manu’s ark with the princely family and the seven sages of antiquity to a mountain top, and so on.

To organise the division of labour in the geographically homogeneous Indo-Gangetic alluvial plain, Lal argues (2001: 29–32), caste provided a mode of incorporation, under an overarching, sacral canopy. In the varna (colour) hierarchy, Brahmins, the sacrificial officers of the Aryans, are white (‘fair’); Kshatriyas, the warriors, red; Vaishya peasant cultivators, are ‘yellowish’. The Shudras (‘servants’), on the other hand, owe the ritual colour black to their Dravidian roots and skin. The Rig-Veda calls them dasa (‘slave’). They are described in Herodotus’ account (iii: 101, 1908: 214) as ‘black like Ethiopians’, living ‘very far from the Persians, towards the south … never subject to Darius’. The colour prejudice is articulated in a myth about Devi, the mother goddess, who here is Sati, Shiva’s consort (see entry in Coleman 2007). Sati displeases her husband because of her dark skin, and Brahma, the Aryan creator god, allows her to be reborn as Parvati, with a lighter hue.

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The Dravidian legacy was never obliterated. It even acquired new life as Tamil religious motifs and practices travelled north. The Bhagavata Purana, which dates from around ad 500, describes the journey of ‘Lady Devotion’. ‘I was born in the Dravida and came of age in Karnataka’, she relates. ‘I was respected in Maharashtra, but coming into Gujarat, I have become old and feeble … It is after I reached Vrindanava that I have become young again and filled with beauty.’ This, Narayanan comments (2005: 25), highlights how vernacular devotional poetry with its origin in the deep south moved north (where hitherto sacred texts had always been in Sanskrit) in the early centuries of the first millennium ad.

Jainism and Buddhism had their origins in the Himalayan foothills. It was in one of the princely frontier formations on the edge of the fertile Ganges plain that the Buddha (‘the enlightened’), Gautama Siddharta (c.560–480 bc), a Kshatriya warrior, gathered a following by speaking to the people (in vernacular rather than Sanskrit, Jaspers 1964: 108). There are no texts that reveal the Buddha’s thinking directly, only records, nikayas, in Pali (close to Sanskrit) and compiled by others. In the Samyutta Nikaya (as in Eckel 2005: 150), the Buddha advises a group of monks to avoid extremes and follow the ‘Middle Path’ which alone will bring calm, insight, awakening and nirvana. The idea of a cycle of rebirth, which Buddhism shares with Upanishadic Hinduism, emerged as one possible response to the fact that life was too short for virtuousness to be rewarded in one’s own lifetime, and miserable enough for one to want out of it altogether (Senghaas 2002: 62).

Buddhist monks initially descended from the Hindu upper castes, the ‘noble followers’. As more and more kings, merchants, aristocrats, and famous prostitutes converted to Buddhism, large estates came into the monks’ possession, on which they then built temples which provided them with a roof during the rainy season (Jaspers 1964: 123). Since everybody can qualify for rebirth on the basis of karma (‘good works’), Buddhism reached across classes as much as beyond the particularist religions and associated regionalisms of Hinduism. Hindutva nationalism, too, seeks to overcome this diversity and hence considers Buddhism and Jainism as ‘indigenous’ (Bhagavan 2008: 44). I return to Buddhism, as a Chinese frontier phenomenon, in Chapter 4.

Jainism was founded by Mahavira, a contemporary of Buddha. M.K. Gandhi was born into a Jainist family and raised in its spirit of ahimsa (‘don’t hurt [anything]’); his adopted name, Mahatma, refers

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to the Upanishads. Gandhi’s aim, Nandy maintains (1988: 48–9), was to synthesise these teachings into a doctrine, not just to mobilise Indians behind Hind Swaraj (‘Hindu Home Rule’, the title of his tract of 1908), but also to bring out the ‘marginalised reflective strain’, the softer side of the coloniser, in the process. Gramsci (1971: 229) saw this as the key to Gandhi’s ‘war of position’ strategy.

After his return to India following 20 years of activism in South Africa, Gandhi manoeuvred carefully between the extremes of sectarian Hinduism and all-Indian nationalism, concerned that the latter might slip into the orbit of the Bolshevik revolution. In 1919, in a show of unity against Britain, Gandhi assumed the presidency of the Khilafat conference; the Non-Cooperation campaign a year later broadened anti-colonial agitation across the communal divide. As both movements were subsiding, however, he not only expressed his adherence to Hinduism and its scriptures, but also spoke out in favour of idol worship (a particularly sensitive issue for Muslims). In 1922 he even endorsed the Gospel of Swadeshi by D.B. Kalelkar, which urged its readers to avoid intimacy with alien social customs so that their lives would not become polluted. Rolland (1924: 135) wondered how Gandhi could ever have lent his name to this book. Early in the Second World War, however, Gandhi turned against Hindutva again, forcing a prominent Hindu nationalist, K.M. Munshi, to leave the Congress (just as he saw to the expulsion of the founder of Indian communism, M.N. Roy, Bhagavan 2008: 42). Yet in 1946 he asked Munshi to rejoin, distancing himself from the Muslims amidst a mounting tide of social contestation that was eclipsing religious divisions. When mutiny broke out in the Royal Indian Navy, Gandhi even condemned Hindu–Muslim unity among the sailors as an ‘unholy alliance’ (as in Roy 1986: 18).

Reluctant Warriors

Divine protection was an obvious need of the warlike Aryans, but it is a key characteristic of the Indo-European legacy that the warrior also poses a threat to the community (Dumézil 1970). The ‘Hymn to the Goddess Earth’ in the Atharva-Veda (in Sen 1961) implores that the enemies of the Aryans be defeated to secure them living space of their own. ‘Him that hates us, O earth, him that battles against us, him that is hostile towards us with his mind and his weapons, do thou subject to us, anticipating (our wish) by deed!’ These enemies included, in north India, the Panis, troublesome cattle thieves; cattle theft was a perennial problem for pastoralists (Thapar 1985: 34). In

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the eponymous myth, the cows stolen by the Panis are owned by the gods; one interpretation is obviously that the Panis were Dravidians and the gods Aryans. But as Herbert writes (1973: 227–8), go (gau), the Sanskrit word for cow, also means ‘ray of illumination’, just as asva, horse, has the second, sacred meaning of ‘vital force’. So when Hindu nationalism from the late nineteenth century adopted the protection of the cow, ‘Mother Cow’, as one of its most urgent tasks in challenging both colonial authority and Islam (van der Veer 1994: 86), this was not just animal welfare. The Vedic gods, especially Indra, are entrusted with ensuring that the spiritual substances these animals embody are not lost to enemies. Agni too is of assistance here, Herbert notes (1973: 228), as are the Asvins, ‘who rejoice in the mental faculty, and are the first to step over the threshold of the current of the go’.

Victory over the asuras, a mythical representation of the foreign conflicts in which the Aryans were involved, celebrated in several scriptures, was never a foregone conclusion. The Aryan gods were able to reverse a losing battle only after they had elected Indra as king to lead them (Thapar 1985: 36). But the fact that Indra, the storm god elevated to kingship, is only a second-echelon god, below the sovereign gods, is related to the ambivalent attitude to war making. It is a challenge to a higher order (the realm of magic and law in the original pantheon); in the tribal perspective, exchange is preferable to war (Dumézil 1952: 50). Indeed the myth of the war with the demons on closer inspection bestows a degree of honour on the enemy as well; it is not a matter of annihilating evil at all. Vairocana, the leader of the asuras (‘the radiant’ in Buddhism, Eckel 2005: 138–9), acts equally with Indra under instruction from Brahma and is as dedicated to performing his divine task as his opponent. It is this polarity from which the world emerges; indeed as Herbert highlights (1973: 210), Indra and Vairocana even work together in holding Ananta (the snake representing infinity) by head and tail, so that it becomes coiled around Mount Mandara.

In contemporary Hinduism, ‘the Goddess’, the most prominent deity along with Vishnu and Shiva, in one of her most popular incarnations is the warrior goddess Durga, who rides a big cat to fight the buffalo–demon Mahisa. But in the epics and the Puranas, the warriors are usually very cautious, practical, and remarkably pacific at that. Often Vishnu has to appear on the scene himself to do the handiwork. Herbert (1973: 213) recounts how Vishnu inspires Prahlada, the son of a malicious asura king, to resist his father’s

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preposterous claim to be the ruler of the universe. But it is the god himself, in the avatar of a man with a lion’s head, who has to step forward and tear the asura to pieces. The doctrine of how the divine (read Vishnu) appears in avatars whenever lawlessness requires his coming to establish the law is also contained in the Bhagavad-Gita. ‘I come into birth age after age’ (as in Sen 1961: 73).

The main epic, the Mahabharata, is the story of the struggle over the mastery of north India between two branches of the royal dynasty of King Bharata, the Pandavas and the Kauravas or Kurus (Herbert 1973: 218–19). The Pandavas are the favourite sons in the story, although some display remarkable human frailties and, typically, the Kaurava/Kuru warriors are also credited with real bravery. The epic describes the different cultures of India with sympathy and pride, conveying a sense of their integration into the larger unity of the subcontinent. The gods are also very human: they quarrel among each other too (another familiar trait across the Indo-European lineage). In one incident, Krishna, the avatar of Vishnu and, according to Sen (1961: 92), possibly once a nomadic tribal deity, challenges Indra with such impertinence that the Vedic storm god and warrior king, perplexed by this behaviour, descends from heaven. He implores Krishna to befriend his son Arjuna, the great warlord of the Pandavas. It is in the Bhagavad-Gita section that Arjuna conveys to Krishna, who acts as his charioteer, his doubts about what the impending battle of Kurukshetra may entail:

I desire not victory, O Krishna, nor kingship, nor delights. What shall avail me kingship, O lord of the herds, or pleasure, or life? They for whose sake I desired kingship, pleasures, and delights stand here in the battle-array, offering up their lives and substance – teachers, fathers, sons, likewise grandsires, uncles, fathers-in-law, grandsons, brothers-in-law, kinsmen also. Though they smite me I would not smite, O Madhu-slayer, even for the sake of empire over the three worlds, much less for the sake of the earth. (As in Sen 1961: 56–7; Madhu is another demon)

These doubts are dismissed by Krishna, who tells Arjuna that he must do his duty as a member of the Kshatriya warrior caste. He admonishes Arjuna that ‘action is better than inaction … your business is with action alone’. In addition, killing is just an appearance; the soul is immortal. However, the war ends with a terrible bloodbath, both armies being effectively annihilated. Krishna is one of the few survivors and hides in a forest to meditate. Mistaken for a deer by a hunter, he is hit by an arrow in his one vulnerable spot, his left heel

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(a motif that we also find in the Iliad and the Germanic Siegfried legend). The hunter is overcome by remorse, but Krishna consoles him, before rising to heaven in splendour, never to return to earth.

In 327–326 bc, Alexander ‘the Great’ of Macedonia invaded the Indus Valley, defeating the ruling Nanda emperor. When mutiny among his troops forced Alexander to withdraw, Kautilya, a semi-legendary Brahmin at the court of the Nandas, was instrumental in ushering in Chandragupta Maurya, the first of the Mauryan dynasty. Kautilya, to whom there are various references in the Vishnu-purana, became the author of the Arthasastra, the Indian manual on statecraft. This work, drawing on ancient oral traditions, articulates the need to overcome the crisis of the Aryan–Hindu cosmology and sacrificial culture after the defeat by Alexander. Law and order, authority, education, and economic organisation are the terrains on which the Arthasastra focuses the recovery. It includes a separate book on diplomacy, which earned its author his reputation as a proto- Machiavellian (the translation sounds too modern because of its prolific use of the word ‘state’; as T. Ramaswamy highlights in Kautilya 1962: viii, the original Sanskrit term means ‘king’).

Kautilya’s recommendations on making war, using allies, and political economy may have contributed to the spectacular military successes of the Maurya emperors. Ashoka, however, Chandragupta’s grandson, broke with conquest and converted to Buddhism. He sent his son Mahendra to Sri Lanka to proselytise the creed, which remains the religion of the island’s Sinhalese majority. However, in India itself, Kautilya’s lessons on statecraft subsumed Buddhism into the classical Indian tradition of devaraja, the divine kingship. Worldly power here is supported by Brahmin priests, but is not itself religious. In the Theravada Buddhism of Sri Lanka and South-East Asia, on the other hand, as May observes (2003: 88), royal and spiritual power are complementary and, at the apex, fused. We return to this in the next chapter.

It was not until the thirteenth century ad that Hinduism restored its primacy in India. When it did, the Buddhist doctrine of renunciation had profoundly pervaded it, notably by doing away with the Brahmin caste’s role as Aryan sacrificial officers. Muslim conquerors contributed to the demise of Buddhism in India by destroying its temples. The Sikhs, whose origins as a sect go back to the early sixteenth century, fought the advance of Islam more stubbornly, whilst absorbing elements of its monotheism. Their following was recruited from the Jat peasantry of the Punjab, descendants of the

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warrior pastoralists who, like the Rajputs, are widespread across north India. In 1704, the last of the ten Sikh gurus, Gobind, persecuted by the Mughals, founded the Khalsa (‘the pure’), a fraternity of holy warriors who added Singh (lion) to their name (Spear 1970: 57–8). By siding with the British against the Mutiny of 1857, they acquired a privileged position as colonial mercenaries. In the Partition, three million Sikhs were expelled from the Pakistani Punjab and resettled in India, creating enduring tensions there that were exacerbated in the 1960s, as we shall see below.

Ambivalence towards war and willingness to ascribe virtue to the enemy also pervade the Ramayana epic. Rama, the son of King Dasaratha of Ayodhya and another avatar of Vishnu, is told to go into exile in the forest because of an intrigue against him (I follow Herbert 1973: 214–17). His wife Sita insists on accompanying him, but Ravana, the king of the Rakshasas, abducts her from their forest abode in his airborne chariot and takes her to Lanka (modern Sri Lanka). In desperation, Rama sends out a vulture and an army of monkeys and bears to look for her. When she has been located, Rama, with the help of the animals (notably the monkey Hanuman, another avatar of totemic origin), succeeds in laying a bridge of boulders across the strait separating Lanka from the mainland. In a terrible fight with Ravana under the walls of Lanka, Rama cuts off one head after another, but each time a new head grows on his opponent’s shoulders. Only when he uses a Vedic formula to cast a spell on an arrow can he kill the abductor of his wife. Showing himself perhaps less than generous, he then wants confirmation that Sita has remained faithful to him whilst in Ravana’s power; it takes a trial by fire to provide absolute certainty in this matter. But as Sita steps onto the funeral pyre, Agni descends from heaven to lift her from the licking flames. In triumph Rama returns to Ayodhya to take up his reign.

Through the operation of three-dimensional time, the epic narratives about the imagined past can acquire immediacy and urgency in a modern context. Thus K.M. Munshi, the Hindu nationalist referred to above, claimed (as in Bhagavan 2008: 44) to have seen objects figuring in the Mahabharata with his own eyes. Temples too are timeless in this sense. As van der Veer writes (1994: 146):

Sacred sites – such as the shrines of Rama in Ayodhya and of Shiva at Somanatha – are contested not only as markers of space but also as markers of time. They are the physical evidence of the perennial existence of the religious community

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and, by nationalist extension, of the nation … The history of shrines, as told in religious tales and established by archaeological evidence, is the history of the nation.

In the 1980s, the Hindu nationalist VHP began a campaign to reopen the Ayodhya compound where in 1528 a Mughal general built an Islamic mosque, presumably on the spot of the temple devoted to Rama. Long cordoned off after several incidents (including even a magical reappearance, soon after independence, of Lord Rama himself), the site at Ayodhya became the focus of processions from the presumed nearby birthplace of Sita, culminating in the violent destruction of the mosque in 1992. Of course there was a more complex political economy behind such a revival of the past. Desai (2004: 53) traces it to the class–caste polarisation that followed the Green Revolution of the late 1960s. The ruling Congress Party under Indira Gandhi was unable to contain these tensions, neither by suspending democracy nor (after her return to government in 1980) by manipulating it. The mobilisation of dispossessed Jat farmers in the Punjab by a breakaway Sikh party supported by the Congress government ended with Mrs Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984 (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 159).

Under her son Rajiv Gandhi, the attempt to impose a fashionable, urban neoliberalism ill-fitted to the largely agricultural country only whipped up the sectarian nationalist tide. Middle-caste ‘link men’ in the northern countryside (the ‘Cow Belt’), who were evolving into provincial bourgeoisies with both rural and urban property, at this point shifted their loyalties to regional parties and to the BJP (Desai 2004: 49, 54). Hindu nationalist media control, the rewriting of history textbooks, school prayers, and ‘Vedic mathematics’ all contributed to the ideological tide underpinning the ascent of Hindutva. The serialisation of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata on television also fuelled growing Hindu consciousness.

In foreign policy, the anti-Islamic turn has brought India onto the side of the English-speaking West to a degree not seen since decolo-nisation. On a visit to Washington in May 2003, the BJP national security adviser, B. Mishra, addressed the American Jewish Committee to propose an ‘Axis of Virtue’ with the United States, Israel, and BJP-ruled India, in opposition to the ‘Axis of Evil’. The proposal was endorsed briefly thereafter by the Indian deputy prime minister and BJP leader, L.K. Advani, who compared the alliance between the United States and India as based on natural democracy, whereas

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the US–Pakistan alliance was a tactical sideshow dictated by events (Haynes 2007: 51–2). The extent to which this epic turnabout (which the Congress Party has not reversed) will further contribute to India’s growing military role in Asia remains to be seen.

In the television serialisation, Rama too is recast as a crusader; there is no doubt that the original Ramayana is a mythical rendition of the conquest of the south. It was attacked as a ‘hegemonic’ Brahmin tract by Dravidian agitators on that account, and there are even alternative versions reversing the roles of Rama and Ravana (van der Veer 1994: 174–8; Nandy 1988: 19–22). Apart from (Sri) Lanka, the epic refers to contacts with Suvarna-dvipa (‘Gold-island’, probably Sumatra and the Malayan Peninsula) and Yava-dvipa (‘Barley-island’, Java). Other Puranas identify a Malaya-dvipa. Yet Lord Rama in his original persona is not a violent warrior at all. He only turns into a hero because of Sita, not for some higher ideal. In the Ramayana, a Brahmin priest cautions him (as in Sen 1961: 64) that there is no point in renouncing the pleasures of the world, or sacrificing anything to ancestors. ‘O Rama, be wise, there exists no world but this, that is certain.’

Caste and Exchange Relations

The caste order is accounted for by the Vedic myth of the purusha. The purusha is a creature with a thousand arms, legs, heads, and so on, born from the primeval golden egg when it separates into the sky and the earth – a motif that goes back to the oldest layers of mythology (van Binsbergen 2005: 346). In the Rig-Veda the purusha is the entire universe, and when it offers itself to be sacrificed so that the world may be created, this symbolises that the divine inhabits every aspect of the universe (Herbert 1973: 210). Girard (1996: 3) sees the point of the myth in the purusha’s innocence and self-sacrifice for the world; but that may be too Christian an interpretation.

There are different versions of the actual dissection of the purusha, but they always include the caste order. In a brief verse from the Rig-Veda (as in Narayanan 2005: 102), we read: ‘From his mouth came the priestly class, from his arms, the rulers. The producers came from his legs; from his feet came the servant class.’ Thapar however (1995: 39–40) claims that this was a late hymn, possibly from the first centuries of the Christian calendar. From this time also date the treatises on right behaviour later compiled into Dharmanibadhas, which spell out the duties and privileges of the different castes.

The Dravidian dasas were only incorporated as the Shudra caste in the course of a protracted ethno-transformation. In the mythology

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this is captured in an ancient Hindu scripture, the Aitereya Brahmana (as in Sen 1961: 52). A rishi (a Vedic scholar–priest) has two wives, one a Brahmin, the other a Shudra. As he instructs his son with the Brahmin wife about a Vedic sacrifice, the son of his Shudra spouse is ignored. ‘We are Shudras, Mahi’s children [i.e. children of the Earth, the soil]’, the mother complains to her son. ‘We have no friends but the Earth.’ In response to her prayer, however, the Earth goddess takes the boy in her care, teaching him for twelve years. On his return he composes the Aitereya Brahmana, which contains various aspects of non-Aryan thought that thus gain a place in the Hindu canon. Doubts about the legitimacy of caste remained. The wise man of the Mahabharata, Vidura, is also the son of a Shudra woman; yet he is nevertheless considered as an incarnation of dharma, right behaviour. Another protagonist in the epic even proclaims (as in Sen 1961: 28): ‘If different colours indicate different castes, then all castes are mixed castes’, adding in the next paragraph: ‘We all seem to be affected by desire, anger, fear, sorrow, worry, hunger, and labour; how do we have caste differences then?’ In the Upanishads, too, the caste order is seen as less important than the human essence in its unity with the divine.

The jati sub-caste system refers to the horizontal networks of exchange, both of people (women) and of goods and services. It denotes descent and the kinship structure underlying relations among tribal groups; the term derives from jan, to be born (Thapar 1995: 100). It allowed the incorporation of new tribes into the expanding Hindu realm by assigning them sub-caste status with a rank in the overall sacral hierarchy, through what Shirokogorov (1970: 22n.) calls ‘the adaptation of ethnic units for special social functions in larger units’. Exogamy between villages is part of it, but marriage is always bounded by varna caste. Again in the Mahabharata (as in Sen 1961: 29), there is a scene in which a King Yayati (a Kshatriya) resists the idea of marrying Devayani because she is a Brahmin.

Caste has its origins in foreign and class relations, and this precisely made it such a stubborn legacy. Rolland (1924: 41–2) cites Gandhi’s claim that caste is not about privilege or superiority, but about the ‘economy of social energy, its proper distribution’. The British from the late nineteenth century used caste as a category in the Indian census, and various examples can be given of how relations on the land were congealed along caste or communal lines in the colonial period. But then the promises made at independence raised the aspirations of all castes and ethnic and religious communities beyond

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the limits of the possible in a class society. This has created immense pressures for emancipation, whilst encouraging the ‘organisation of interests on the basis of ethnic loyalties’ (Weiner 1965: 210). Over the decades this has produced a dual outcome. Sanskritisation, in which lower classes achieve emancipation by claiming a superior caste status, has worked to reduce ‘foreignness’ among the castes (Srinivas 1962: 44). Parallel to this, the homogenisation of Hindu society has highlighted the dividing lines with other religions. This has now reached the point at which strong pressures have built up to ‘homogenise’ the multicultural mosaic that is India, and Hindutva has made itself the mouthpiece of this movement.

All pre-modern exchange relations are rooted in concepts of reciprocity, and the idea of gaining from exchange is frowned upon. Buddhism and Jainism, as we saw, prescribe an ascetic lifestyle. By rejecting ritual sacrifice and war and prohibiting stealing and adultery, they fostered new concepts of private property and a commercial attitude alien to the Hindu cosmology. Traders were prominent among the Buddha’s lay followers (Chakrabarti 2008: 63). Also, by retreating into the monasteries and giving up sacrifices, and thus reducing their claim on resources appropriated from the Vaishya peasantry, the priestly class facilitated the growth of trade, property, and eventually capitalism. The Parsis, descendants of Zoroastrians from Iran, are India’s prime foreign commercial minority. The business dynasty of the Tatas are their most prominent representatives in India. In 1944, with the other key capitalist family, they drafted the Tata–Birla plan that laid out the country’s state-monitored development policy (Roy 1986: 13–14). Indeed even the business dynasties prominent in the more recent turn to neoliberalism have a distinct ‘foreign’ tinge, having been formed outside the sway of the all-embracing Indian state (see my 1998: 131).

Untouchability, being an outcaste, is of ancient origin even though it has little basis in the Vedas. It is also strongest in south India, and the connection with a subdued, disfranchised people seems obvious. The purity ideal that generates the aspiration to break out of the eternal cycle of rebirth achieves its most extreme form in untouchability. In the south, where caste is all-pervasive and more of a problem, social struggles often took the form of straightfor-ward anti-Brahmin movements. For untouchables, or Dalits, one option after independence was actually to adopt Buddhism, in an attempt to escape from the caste structure altogether (Srinivas 1962: 105–8; Joshi 1968: 192). B.R. Ambedkar, himself an ‘untouchable’

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from Maharasthra, became the leader of this conversion movement, which has not yet spent itself – on the contrary. As neoliberal policies have exacerbated inequality, hitting untouchables especially hard, Buddhists have grown again to an estimated 35 million today. As Caryl reports (2008: 24), in the last decade a third or more of new Buddhist converts have been Dalits. In Uttar Pradesh, the Bahujan Samaj Party, which holds half the state’s assembly seats, draws heavily on Buddhists.

According to Hindutva (and also in Gandhi’s view) untouchables can in principle be included in the Hindu nation. However, as van der Veer emphasises (1994: 52), this possibility required some form of purificatory re-education, as with tribal people. When Dalits began to convert to Islam as well, this route was foreclosed. Unlike when they converted to Buddhism, untouchables were here crossing the ‘foreign’ divide (Bhagavan 2008: 45) and by doing so provoked Hindutva fury.

HEROES OF THE HELLENIC WORLD IN THE MIRROR OF WESTERN IMPERIALISM

The religion of the West is Christianity; but in the nineteenth-century imperialist conjuncture, the hand that held up the banner of the gospel was also trained in the heroic school of Greek antiquity. Daring and cunning, alien to the teachings of Jesus, must be traced to this particular source as much as to the toughening of European attitudes in the Crusades and the Reconquista.

That Christian Europe could absorb the Hellenic heritage at all was premised on an early secularisation of Greek society. After the Persian wars in the fifth century bc, the Olympian gods retreated from involvement in the lives of mortals altogether. As Zimmern writes (1952: 182): ‘It was men and not gods who won Marathon and Salamis, and it was men and not gods who made and sustained the Empire of Athens.’ Certainly there were contemporaries (Herodotus for one) who continued to describe the world with reference to the gods. Yet on the whole, Greek mythology drifted off into the realm of literature, as metaphor and allegory. As the great poets and playwrights brought the exploits of the gods back to human proportions and the religious shell was discarded, logos took its place as a guide for action. This has its origins, as we shall see below, in the sea-nomadism of the Greeks, which broke with the hereditary social roles and reverence for tradition of sedentary society.

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Latin and Greek, necessary for studying classical philosophy, inevitably exposed European youth to Hellenic mythology too. Indeed, to assess how the European middle classes were won over to the cause of imperialism, Mangan suggests (1988: 8), studying the contribution of the grammar schools would be a worthwhile endeavour. Classical education sought to connect the history of nineteenth-century European imperialisms with antiquity, grafting its own heroes onto those figuring in Homer and Virgil. Italian fascism took its symbols from the Roman empire, but the Greek scientific tradition – the Spartan rejection of all sensuous experience, and formal Athenian philosophy – resonated most strongly in the Calvinist cultures of Holland and England (Weber 1920a: 95). Those destined to become the Anglo-imperial ruling class, Richard Mason writes (as in Aldrich 1988: 60), were ‘brought up in the traditions of the Sparta which Plato admired’. Britain’s public schools were the closest to Spartan rigour that any modern society had achieved. But who were the Greeks and their gods?

Greek geography, with its innumerable islands strewn between the core peninsula and the coastline of Asia Minor, inevitably imparted a maritime perspective to its inhabitants. The Sea Peoples of the eastern Mediterranean were referred to in Chapter 2; Graves (1996: i: 50–1) records that pottery finds point to Libyan immigration into Crete as early as the fourth millennium bc. Minoan civilisation dates from around 3000 bc. From 1900 bc, Mycenaeans, Achaeans, and other Indo-European speakers penetrated the peninsula in successive migrations. The conquest of the Peloponnese by the semi-barbarian Dorians, future rivals of Achaean Athens, occurred in two waves between 1200 and 1000 bc. Herodotus (vi: 53, 1908: 373) claims that the Dorians were of Egyptian origin, but in the early twentieth century it was discovered (Casson 1921: 70–1) that they were descended from the Hallstatt culture on the Danube, so their roots are Celtic.

The Greek pantheon is not exclusively Indo-European. Herodotus (ii: 50, 1908: 115) even claims that ‘the names of almost all the gods came into Greece from Egypt’, but this probably reflects his contem-poraries’ admiration for that country. Other gods were Libyan or Pelasgian (a pre-Indo-European people from Thracia, on the north coast of the Aegean). Asia Minor was also a major transit point. If we follow Hesiod’s Theogony, Elyun (Elioun), the oldest god, is Aramaic Elyon (also a title of the God of Israel in the Psalms). His successor (or son; see entry in Coleman 2007), Ouranos (Roman Uranus), on the other hand, is Vedic Varuna, the (night) sky and

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magician–king. Hesiod, who wrote around 700 bc, was from Asia Minor, and according to Graves (1996, i: 45), Ouranos/Varuna may have reached the Greeks through the Hittites. Ouranos’ son Kronos (Roman Saturn), who dethroned and emasculated him, is identified by Frazer (2000: 327) with the Semitic El.

The Olympians, too, are an eclectic lot. Zeus (Roman Jupiter), who avenges Ouranos and forces Kronos to regurgitate the gods whom he has swallowed, came to Greece with the Achaeans (Graves 1996, i: 49). His name derives from Dyaus-pitar, the clear sky, the father of Indra and Agni. Augustine already noted (iv: 10, 1984: 146) that Jupiter stood for the ‘upper air’. Apollo again is of Oriental origin. He too reached Greece via the Hittites, and then merged with a Dorian namesake (Grimal 1973: 121). Aphrodite (Roman Venus) is Mesopotamian Ishtar. Athena (Roman Minerva) according to Plato (as in Graves 1996, i: 50–1) was the Libyan goddess Neith. Her worship was widespread and predated that in Athens proper. Others claim that she was the Indo-European Ahana, the light of daybreak (Fiske 1996: 20), just as Sarameias, the summer morning breeze of the Vedas, became Hermes (Mercurius in Rome). Some of the gods of the Indo-European pastoralists settling along the Greek shoreline actually had to retrain as divinities of the sea. Poseidon (Neptune), the chief god of the Aeolians, who preceded the Achaeans, according to Graves (1996, i: 49) had his original thunderbolt turned into a trident. Nereus, another god of Indo-European origin (sometimes cast as a son of Ouranos; see entry in Coleman 2007), became the father of the Pelasgian sea nymphs, the Nereids. And so on and so forth.

Humans in Greek mythology descended from the body parts of the Titans (Kronos and others), defeated by the Olympians. Prometheus (‘he who thinks ahead’), the son of a Titan who had fought with Zeus, in one such story fashions the first humans out of clay. Of course Prometheus is best known for his role as culture hero, stealing fire and giving it to humanity, for which he was cruelly punished. There is no doubt, however, as van Groningen (1964: 31) highlights, that the notion of a ‘titanic’ human nature – the will, if need be, heroically to brave the gods, even in the knowledge that pain and grief may follow – arose as a consequence of the reception of Greek mythology.

Seafarers and Founders of Cities

The occupation of space in Greek mythology centrally hinges on the oikos–polis transition, mediated by seaborne exploration. Greek communities were originally organised around the large, ideally

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autarkic oikos, a fortified estate or manor (cf. oikonomia, rules of the household). The lord of the manor was an independent warrior who obtained metals and other items not produced on the oikos through raiding or trading. As they ventured further and further along the coastline and took to the sea, their explorations, as Petrov (2005) has argued, induced an epochal transformation of the Greek way of life. Homer’s epics record the beginning of this transformation.

The heroes of the Iliad and Odyssey were Mycenaean and Achaean local lords, each with his own oikos (Goudsblom 2001: 126). Petrov (2005: 6) traces the pattern of their maritime adventures to the early second millennium bc, when the Minoans of Crete, judging from the archaeological evidence, began using their surplus population for seaborne exploration instead of building monuments. The Achaean campaign against Troy (on the Anatolian coast) several centuries later likewise mobilised the ‘redundant’ people of Greece’s oikos society as oarsmen–warriors on pentekonteras (50-oared warships). In Homer’s account (n.d.: 33–40; 1962, ii: 508–10 and passim), there were more than one thousand pentekonteras before Troy. The poet gives the numbers per region, beginning with the largest, 50-strong fleets (from Boeotia and Athens), and on to the smaller squadrons. Homer wrote in the eighth century bc, but the oral account of the Trojan war, Bates argues (1925: 266), must date from before the Dorian invasions. A hymn to the aristocracy would not have failed to sing the praise of the Dorian lords of Argolis and Sparta had they been around; nor would Agamemnon, the legendary king of Mycenae, have been described without reference to the terrible fate that befell his city at the hands of the Dorians.

The Iliad, then, belongs to the life-world of the oikos and tribal foreign relations. At the root is a feud over the abduction of Helen, the wife of Menelaos of pre-Dorian Sparta. There is no military discipline. In the opening passages of the Iliad, Agamemnon as commander of the Achaeans demands that Achilles gives up a captured concubine to him; Achilles yields but also refuses to fight. When he eventually returns to the battlefield and meets his death, he is hit in the heel – the one spot where a fallen leaf stuck to his foot during the baptism that was meant to make him invulnerable – by a javelin (here thrown by Apollo), just as Krishna is in the Mahabharata. It is a matter for debate whether this similarity with Hindu mythology means, as Fiske claims (1996: 20), that the story goes back to an Indo-European original in which Helen is Sarama, the fickle twilight, whilst Paris, her abductor, is modelled on Dravidian cattle thieves. But given

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that in Greece these associations had receded, the war which in the Vedas was still fought in the skies in an epic exaggeration of the ‘drama’ of night, daybreak, and sunrise, in Homer’s hands becomes a heroic poem which is no longer ethnogenetic myth (and certainly not a ‘theory of IR’2). Kirk (1970: 210–11) even questions whether the Dumézil theory of an Indo-European lineage applies to Greek mythology at all.

However, it is clear from the Odyssey that by the eighth century a real restructuring of social relations was underway. As Vroon highlights (1994: 389), this work is far more modern than its predecessor. Odysseus (Roman Ulysses), returning home from the siege of Troy, is smart and cunning in a way that the heroes of the Iliad could not possibly be, and the gods play a much more restrained role, if any at all. Women appear more self-confident and are endowed with individual characters (Grant 2001: 145–6). Penelope’s resistance to the suitors assembled at Odysseus’ oikos is certainly heroic.

In the course of the first millennium bc, sea-nomadism had in fact become more systematic. Mobile seafarers exploited the advantages over foreign sedentary communities to the full, and consciously so; Petrov (2005: 8) cites Xenophon, the late fifth- and early-fourth-century Athenian mercenary commander and writer, to that effect. Life at sea also worked to socialise those on board in a new mould. Seaborne raiding educated its occupants in adaptive, non-traditional modes of action, based on signs, quick understanding and prompt action; what Petrov sums up as the ‘Do as I do’ principle (2005: 10–11). This contributed to dissolving traditional dependencies, just as agricultural work was devalued relative to crafts, and tribute in favour of market relations. When men who had become socialised aboard ship began to settle on foreign shores themselves (the verb, apoikeo, originally meaning ‘to live far away’, by Herodotus’ days had come to mean, ‘to colonise’, cf. apoikia, colony), they brought the new mindset with them, and were better prepared against naval attack as well. Thus Petrov’s understanding of the ‘ship–shore’ relation, and its role in engendering the theoretical–instrumental,

2. To claim, as Kauppi and Viotti do (1992: 22–3), that ‘realist notions of power and balance-of-power politics prevailed’ in Greek thinking in the Homeric age makes a caricature of things. For several centuries after the Dorian invasions there was little contact between settlements on the Greek mainland, and as Kelly highlights (1970: 976), communities were not capable of large-scale warfare.

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cause–consequence thinking characteristic of later Greek society, can be extended to analysing the new form of settlement, the polis.

Allan Bloom (as in Bratsis 2006: 26n.) characterises the polis as a ‘community of men sharing a way of life and governing themselves, waging war and preserving the peace’. The lord of the manor no longer rules the roost. Indeed, the deck of the ship is replicated in the agora, the main square of the polis. Petrov’s ‘Do as I do’ in the agora becomes equidistance, the root of the classical notion of democracy (isonomia, ‘equality of rights’, Stewart 1995: 578). When war had to be declared, only those in the agora voted; tillers and pastoralists on the frontier with the opposing polis were not entitled to a vote (C. Castoriadis as in Bratsis 2006: 29). Democracy (always associated with slavery) raised the level of civilisation and the ability of the polis to act. As Herodotus emphasises (v: 78, 1908: 335–6), it enhanced military effectiveness as well. An Achilles refusing to fight on the grounds that he is his own master is no longer possible.

Myths about the sovereign claim to space credit a patron hero of a polis with having proved himself on adventurous (sea) travels. Fighting or otherwise subduing other (usually pseudo-speciated) communities, ideally by outsmarting them, is the prerequisite for mythical sovereignty. The Rank ‘average myth’ (discussed in Chapter 1) finds its richest pickings here. Not only do we recognise the psy-choanalytic father–son motif, but foreign relations aspects (foreign adventures and exogamy) are abundantly represented too. Let me take the Perseus, Heracles, and Theseus myths as examples.

Perseus and Argos. Myth has it that the ruling dynasty of Argos on the Peloponnese descended from a king of Libya, Belos, who left his realm to his two sons, Danaos (as we saw in the last chapter, sometimes associated with the Israelite tribe of Dan) and Aigyptos. Following Aigyptos’ conquest of the entire realm, and his demand that Danaos give his 50 daughters in marriage to his, Aigyptos’, 50 sons, Danaos fled across the Mediterranean to Argos. The sons of Aigyptos built a fleet and followed them there. Danaos then ordered his daughters to assassinate their new husbands. Only one refused, and from her marriage with one of the Egyptians descends Danaë, Perseus’ mother. Graves (1996, i: 229) highlights the Egyptian connection by pointing at similarities between Perseus’ early life story and the myth of Isis and Osiris; but such commonalities run through all mythology. Whether, as Hoffmann claims (1959: 42), Perseus was inspired by a historical figure also may or may not be true; in the myth his father is Zeus, so he is a demigod. Because of a prophecy

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that he will kill his grandfather (a necessary variant of the Rank myth), Perseus and his mother are thrown into the sea in a trunk. They are saved, and Perseus grows up under the tutelage of others, quarrels with them, and finally returns home to fulfil the prophecy.

In its original function, in the ‘oikos’ setting, the Perseus myth may have served to help the men of Argos overcome their fear of taking to the sea (Hoffmann 1959: 42–3). The foreign king at whose court Perseus grows up, and who desires Danaë as his wife, sends the young man on a dangerous expedition to go and bring back the head of the Medusa, one of three monstrous Gorgons who live on the edge of the ocean. Equipped with the helmet of Hades, which can make its bearer invisible (the Tarnhelm of Wagner’s Ring), winged sandals, and other attributes provided by his divine protectors, Perseus kills the Medusa. He gives her head, the stare of which could petrify (i.e. paralyse with fear) any opponent, to Athena, who mounts it on her shield (Athens was the historical ally of Argos against Sparta; Kelly 1970: 984). On his way back from this adventure, Perseus saves Andromeda, the daughter of an Ethiopian king, from the wrath of Poseidon (i.e. he braves the sea) and marries her. Eventually he accidentally kills his grandfather by throwing a disc. With the prophecy fulfilled, he assumes the kingship of Argos. According to Herodotus (vii: 61, 1908: 433–4), the name ‘Persian’ in fact derives from the son of Perseus and Andromeda, Perses. The myth itself, however, consecrates the sovereignty of the polis of Argos.

Heracles, the Heracleids, and Sparta. The original rulers of pre-Dorian Sparta were the Atreids (from Atreus, a son of Pelops). They included Menelaos, the oikos lord (‘king’) over whose wife Helen the Trojan war erupts (Agamemnon was Menelaos’ brother). After the Dorian conquest, Sparta became an apoikia of the Dorians, but it remained weak and divided. Sparta’s constitution as a polis has been dated to the first half of the seventh century bc; it is ascribed to Lykourgos, who was either an adviser of the Spartan kings or a dictator in his own right (Forrest 1963: 170). The myth celebrating this event, which inaugurates Sparta’s rise to prominence, ignores the Atreids altogether. Instead each of the two royal families which now ruled Sparta as a diarchy claimed descent from Heracles (Roman Hercules). As Malkin notes (2003: 10), other Dorian cities also claimed Heracleid antecedents, but not as strongly as Sparta.

Heracles was a fictitious Dorian hero, even a supposed descendant of Perseus. Herodotus (vi: 58–60, 1908: 375) mentions that both the Perseids and the Heracleids were Lacedaemonians (from Lacedaemon,

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the region surrounding Sparta) and had customs typical of ‘Asian’ barbarians, highlighting the Indo-European lineage. Macedonian Greeks invading the Punjab indeed identified Krishna, the black hero and womaniser, as ‘their’ Heracles (Chakrabarti 2008: 68). The Heracles story may in turn have been modelled on the Gilgamesh epic, which reached Greece via the Phoenicians (Graves 1996, ii: 413–14). In the Greek version, Heracles too is fathered by Zeus, whose wife and sister Hera, out of jealousy, tricked the hero into a life of endless trouble (his name, ‘Glory of Hera’, was a later epithet). The large realm prophesied for him went to somebody else, Eurystheus, in whose service Heracles had to perform his twelve miraculous feats. A succession of monstrous animals, including a fearsome bull living in Crete, are all defeated; as are his sole human opponents, the Amazons, female warriors operating from the frontier areas east of the Black Sea, to whom we return below. An expedition to get hold of the Amazon queen’s girdle, coveted by Eurystheus’ daughter, ends with a dead queen. Heracles was a brute with women anyway, preferring to handle them in large numbers; he sired 50 sons upon as many daughters of a local king, young men who later colonised Sardinia (itself named after one of the Sea Peoples).

Seaborne exploration takes Heracles as far as the Straits of Gibraltar (‘the pillars of Hercules’). Hoffmann (1959: 42–3) claims that if the Perseus myth served to overcome fear, the Heracles myth emphasised overcoming death itself. Our hero achieved this no less than three times, as more and more local legends were added to his life story. But that only added to the later glory of the polis of Sparta.

Theseus and Athens. Theseus was again a semi-legendary figure, and not a demigod. He may have been the descendant of Lapithians from Thessalia (Graves 1996, i: 303), whose rise as a ruling clan in Athens was celebrated in the myth. It was in the sixth century bc, the epoch of the rise of the Athenian polis, that accounts of his adventures and images proliferated (Davie 1982: 26). Like Perseus, and in a further example of Rank’s ‘average myth’, Theseus grows up away from home, in this case in Troezen on the Peloponnese; his father, king Aegeus, hid him there to protect him from a violent rebellion by his nephews in Attica. A sword and sandals are left for him. When Theseus reaches the age of 16, he travels back to Athens. He encounters the most monstrous figures, scoundrels of unparalleled cruelty, but vanquishes them all by using his ingenuity. They are indeed human contests and this distinguishes Theseus from the Dorian Heracles, who mainly fought with bestial monsters, killing them by brute force. But then,

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as Davie emphasises (1982: 25), that was just how the Athenians liked to compare themselves to the Spartans.

Aegeus, who is still king, meanwhile lives with the sorceress Medea, the daughter of the king of Colchis (on the eastern shores of the Black Sea, today’s Georgia). Medea, who also plays a prominent part in the myth of Jason and the Argonauts, guesses Theseus’ identity and persuades Aegeus to poison the young man. The king however recognises the sword and the sandals as his son’s and banishes her from his court. After he has first subdued his rebellious cousins, Theseus then deals with a cruel human tribute paid to a descendant of king Minos of Crete – in other words, he sets out to end the tributary status of Attica to the Minoans. The youths who were sent annually to the island were fed to a monster bull, the Minotaur. Of course in mythological time, going back a millennium is not a problem; Graves (1996, i: 281) surmises that the girls dispatched to Minos were lunar priestesses from tributary settlements, and cites the fourteenth century bc as the era in which such an event might have taken place (ibid.: 320n.; cf. Frazer 2000: 280–1 on Minos’ identity as a sun king requiring this particular sacrifice to renew his mandate to rule).

Theseus of course kills the monster and with the help of Ariadne, the Cretan king’s daughter, escapes from the labyrinth (here the exogamy aspect of the myth becomes apparent). Absorbed by his adventures and an unhappy end of the love affair with Ariadne, Theseus on his return journey forgets to fulfil his promise to exchange the black sails of his ship for white ones, to signal that he has survived his dangerous expedition. Aegeus, seeing the black sails in the distance, in despair throws himself into the sea subsequently named after him; so in Freudian terms, although Theseus does not physically kill his father, he is nonetheless guilty of his death. As king, our hero then assembles the scattered villagers and farmers and brings them to Athens – this is synoikismos, the transformation of the world of the oikos into that of the polis – and he even unites the ten poleis of Attica into a proto-imperial federation, a feat celebrated by the Pan-Athenian Games (Davie 1982: 27–30). He also builds the city’s monuments, organises its constitution, gives it its coinage, and so on. But then, once a hero has been selected, his feats can be endless and are moved freely across second-dimension time. This takes us to the aspect of protection in Greek foreign relations myth and the role of (semi-)barbaric neighbouring peoples.

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Barbarian Allies, Tragic Warriors

Athens’ foreign relations also entailed a change in the relations with the aforementioned Lapithians. They had long been a nuisance as cattle thieves; however, their king, Peirithoos, eventually befriends Theseus. When Peirithoos celebrates his wedding, the Athenian hero (as noted, possibly of Lapithian descent himself) is among the guests, as are centaurs, mythically depicted as half-man, half-horse, and supposedly living in the mountains bordering on the plain of Thessaly. At Peirithoos’ wedding feast the centaurs get drunk and throw themselves at the female guests. A ferocious struggle ensues, with Theseus fighting alongside the Lapithians. Thus the myth celebrates the Athenian alliance with them.

Centaurs, satyrs, sirens, and harpies, all served to fine-tune the self-definition of the Greeks. The centaurs represent the pseudo-speciated alter ego of cultured humanity. If civilisation is monogamous, the world of beasts is promiscuous; instead of cooked food, they eat everything raw, etcetera. ‘Just as Amazons represent the wild, untamed, unmarried and potentially lustful females, the bestial in women’, writes Stewart (1995: 580), ‘Centaurs represent the same kind of male, more beast than man.’ They live in the border zones of civilised life, and many Greeks secretly yearned for such a life too. Frazer (2000: 386–7) interprets in this light the spread of the Dionysus (Bacchus) cult, which also hails from the frontier. Both this cult and the tales of actual savage creatures were meant to protect the limits of civilised society (King 1995: 140–1). Now although the centaurs were ferocious barbarians, wild and uncontrollable, the Greeks could usually count on one or more benign interlocutors; Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu comes to mind. Indeed one centaur, Cheiron (Chiron), stands apart from his barbarian fellows by his wisdom and his closeness to humans. Entering into the twilight zone between culture and nature adds to one’s vigour; to protect oneself against barbarity, one has to associate with it to some extent, as Gilgamesh demonstrates. By his association with a benign exemplar of the wild men, Kirk notes (1970: 157), the hero incorporates the forces of nature as such. None but a hero can afford to venture into this shadow zone; but that is just what epic myth must encourage all men to achieve.

Jason was just such a hero. He was a Thessalian who lived in the north, in the frontier area bordering on barbarian Illyria – centaur country. Unlike Perseus, Heracles, or Theseus, Jason is a leader of men; the context of the myth is the Greek conquest of the coastal

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zones of the Black Sea, not the sovereignty of one polis. Once again, events follow the structure of the average myth. Jason’s father is robbed of his kingdom by his half-brother Pelias. He entrusts Jason to the centaur Cheiron, to educate the boy. When Jason reaches adulthood, he travels back to his father’s lost kingdom and confronts Pelias with the claim that he is the rightful heir. Pelias does not reject Jason’s claim, but demands that he proves his worth by getting hold of the Golden Fleece, the fleece of a ram, also found in Germanic mythology. The fleece is kept in Colchis on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. Jason accepts the challenge and mounts an expedition on a ship, the Argo.

The war party assembled reads as a heroic celebrity list (Graves 1996, ii: 525–6). Orpheus signs up to provide the music on board and, in some accounts, Heracles also joins the expedition, although he is never to reach Colchis. Such inclusions, Davie notes (1982: 27), are meant to emphasise the pan-Hellenic nature of the enterprise. It is certainly all hands on deck when, on the island of Lemnos, a population of women who have recently killed their unfaithful husbands, invite the Argonauts to sire a new generation in order to repopulate the island. With morale strengthened by this episode, the expedition continues, although the passage of the Hellespont involves unforeseen fighting with locals. Having passed successfully through the treacherous rocks closing off the Bosporus, the Argonauts finally reach Colchis. Jason asks the king for the Golden Fleece, but must first kill the monster guarding it.

Here we encounter the sorceress Medea again, the daughter of the king of Colchis, albeit still in a benign role ‘prior’ to her appearance in the myth of Theseus. She helps Jason by putting the monster to sleep. With the fleece in their possession, the Argonauts escape with Medea across the Black Sea, sailing up the Danube. Their further adventures, and the ritual acts of purification because of the killings they had perpetrated (a tribal motif), need not detain us here; suffice to say that Jason finally becomes the king of his rightful land, but only after abandoning Medea for another woman. The revenge of the sorceress is terrible, and it is after her subsequent flight that she comes to live for some time with Aegeus of Athens, waiting for Theseus. Finally we find her in Asia, where the land of the Medes is named after her. Her father’s kingdom has meanwhile been conquered by Perses, the son of Perseus and Andromeda. Such cross-references, Kirk explains (1970: 206), were inserted to weave different storylines into a pan-Hellenic narrative; thus the geography of foreign relations was

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made accessible to a wider audience. Yet all these accounts are about naval daring too. They celebrate the courage that must be summoned up to board ship and take to the sea. It is a general characteristic of myth, by activating the second temporal dimension of our mental world, to inspire what the instincts are not eager to undertake. Myths in this sense are literally ‘superstitions’, beliefs imposed on a prior groundwork of mental urges and reflexes, as argued in Chapter 1.

Heroes stand on the dividing line between gods and men. Perseus and Heracles were given demigod status in recognition of their qualities as fearsome warriors, the ‘craft’ most emphatically admired throughout Greek antiquity. As Herodotus records (ii: 166–7, 1908: 163), all other trades were seen as demeaning, good only for slaves. But it is a key aspect of the Indo-European lineage that the warrior may actually put the community at risk by his action, and has to atone – a tribal motif. In this respect, Roman myth (which otherwise cuts a poor figure next to its Greek counterpart) is closer to the Indo-European mainstream. In the myth of the Horatii, three heroes fight for Rome against three Curiatii, of the polis of Alba Longa (Grimal 1973: 184). The Curiatii are wounded, but two of the Horatii are killed; as he flees however, the last of the Horatii awaits each of his wounded opponents in turn and kills them all. On his return, his sister, betrothed to one of the Curiatii, recognises the coat of her slain fiancé and laments loudly. The surviving Horatius then kills her too. Fighting and exogamy, protection and exchange, here become fatally entangled. The warrior protects but also constitutes a threat to the community; he must be disciplined. The Romans organised an annual purification ritual to wash off the blood, a ritual that Dumézil claims (1970: 19) can be traced back to a comparable event in Vedic Indian mythology, and which resonates in Celtic tales such as the Irish myth of Cüchülainn. It is in the Vedic–Roman–Germanic lineage (more than in the Greek) that this particular tension between the warrior function and the community is best articulated.

The twin sovereign powers of the Indo-European tradition, beginning with Mitra/Varuna, must discipline the fighter who has transgressed his mandate and put the community at risk. But how can they call back the armed men without compromising the protective function? (One may think of the situation that arose when General McArthur wanted to use nuclear weapons in the Korean War and President Truman had to rein him in.) In Dumézil’s words (1970: 48): ‘With what means, signs, advantages, and risks do the magician and the jurist operate when they have to take the place

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of the warrior, whom exceptional circumstances, in particular, most dreadful enemies, have rendered inadequate?’ The preferred solution in the Indo-European lineage was an appeal to the people, but also procedures for atonement and compensation. It is here that we must look, Grimal argues (1973: 184), for the sources of Roman law, meant to preserve order and stability in a community of arms-bearing men.

Amazons and Sabine Virgins

Femaleness was originally associated entirely with fecundity, so that the exchange aspect, exogamy, and agriculture were often part of a single mythological complex. This goes back to ancient Mesopotamia, and many myths revolve around the combination of ‘irregular sexual unions and agricultural innovation’, Kirk writes (1970: 105). ‘The continuing interplay of sexual action and cultural advance in the realm of agriculture may be a means of exploring and emphasizing certain parallels between human and plant fertility, and their natural limitations.’ Artemis (Diana in the Roman pantheon) was the Greek goddess of fertility before she became the goddess of the hunt. Since ‘she who fertilises nature must herself be fertile’, Hippolytus, her mythical lover, by consorting with her promoted ‘the fruitfulness of the earth, of cattle, and of mankind’ (Frazer 2000: 7).

The custom of marriage to sanction an alliance with foreign peoples was widespread. As Herodotus observes (iii: 1, 1908: 170), inter-dynastic exogamy frequently made it difficult to establish true paternity, even of prominent rulers. ‘Unknown’ paternity, i.e. exogamous fatherhood implanted into a female line, was a feature that can be observed from Greece to Rome and on to ancient Sweden. Hence, as Frazer argues (2000: 155–6), in Indo-European (‘Aryan’) mythology this produces a repeated storyline about princes leaving their native country (often, on account of a supposed murder) and marrying another king’s daughter in a faraway country, sometimes having to compete with others for her hand in some contest or race. It also gave rise to stories about virgin motherhood. This underscores the exogamy alternative to Freud’s interpretation of Rank’s ‘average myth’.

A complex case of exogamy mixed with mythological imaginary is provided by the Amazons. The term a-mazon (‘without breast’) of course referred to the supposed self-mutilation that allowed these ferocious female warriors better to aim their arrows (an alternative etymology is given by Graves 1996, i: 328). Fighting them always had a romantic side, and when Theseus waged war on the Amazons he

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abducted one to take home (Grimal 1973: 148); when the Amazons marched on Athens to set her free, they were defeated. In another version of the myth, the reason for the Amazon war was that Theseus married an Amazon with her consent, but abandoned her; her sisters then sought revenge. That the Amazon theme became so popular in fifth century Athens was also due, as Stewart explains (1995: 587–9), to the grave military losses in the Persian wars. In the circumstances, it was feared that the remaining young men of Athens might be attracted to the charms of the young daughters of the metoikoi, resident aliens in the city. ‘Amazon’ now came to refer to a boyish, sexually curious young girl, or parthenos, and was employed in the context of anti-immigrant sentiment. If Athenian men would forgo their own for such licentious foreign girls, the ethnic purity of an urban society which had only recently left the tribal organisation behind would be diluted. It was in this climate that the Amazon motif, foreign and ferocious and yet sexually intriguing, became widely used on pottery and in sculpture (Stewart 1995: 583). Pericles, however, Athens’ great legislator, then issued a law restricting citizenship to those with two Athenian parents.

In the case of Rome, exogamy became an early problem when the Romans found that the nearby towns were not willing to enter into marriage bonds with them. The first king and mythical founder–hero, Romulus, came up with the idea of inviting the neighbouring Sabines to a feast. Events turned ugly when Sabine virgins attending the party were abducted by young Romans, provoking the Sabines, under their king, Tatius, to march on Rome. The Sabine daughters intervened, however, declaring their willingness to marry. Romans and Sabines concluded a peace treaty, thus forming a single ethnos. The story also refers to a division of labour of the Dumézil type: the Romans were priests and warriors, whereas the Sabines were cultivators and cattle raisers. Indeed, as Goldziher (1876: 132) relates, when Romulus killed his shepherd twin brother Remus and erected the city in his spilt blood, this was meant to signify that he left pastoral life behind, just as Cain did after slaying Abel. But the warrior cannot hope to succeed on his own. His contribution in the end must be subordinated to the needs of the community; as Dumézil writes (1970: 45), the purification of spilt blood is necessary to ensure fecundity.

The Sabine myth was also related to the status of women in Rome. Since the Sabine spouses married under a treaty, a Roman woman enjoyed real respect; she was certainly not expected to do menial work (Rome too was a slave society). There was actually a festival

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which gave servant girls, too, a more honourable place in society. This was accounted for in another legendary event. After the sacking of the city by Celts from Gaul (dated 390 bc; Goudsblom 2001: 124), Rome, left greatly weakened, faced a demand from the united Latin cities that it surrender its virgins and widows to them. Because the Romans were not in a position to resist, servant girls volunteered to be abducted, dressed as free women. With their exhausted lovers fast asleep in the Latin camp, the girls sent an agreed signal to allow the Roman troops to surprise the enemy. All these stories remind us of the problems associated with exogamy with foreign communities and the possibility that matrimonial alliances might drift into conflict again.

Greek mythology, as we saw, was a source of inspiration of the late-nineteenth-century British ruling class in its turn to empire. Under the influence of John Ruskin, a new generation of imperialist thinkers in and around the Milner Group, the trustees of Cecil Rhodes’ fortune, applied the concept of commonwealth to the imperial context, emphasising the rule of law against the encroaching state. Against the background of the idealisation of Hellenistic antiquity by the pre-Raphaelite school in the arts, they were guided by one of their own, Alfred Zimmern, in his already cited The Greek Commonwealth of 1911. The Athenian empire had flourished, Zimmern argued (1952: 188–9), as long as Athens upheld ‘legal and commercial intercourse’; not just freedom against the Persians, but freedom of trade. That this was meant to inform contemporary politics is apparent in Zimmern’s claim (ibid.: 194) that after the peace with Persia (in 448 bc) ‘Athens could no more step back [from its commonwealth commitments] than most Englishmen feel they can leave India’. Only a minority of ‘Little Athenians’ (and of course, ‘Little Englanders’) thought otherwise. As Quigley (1981: 137) summarises the argument:

All culture and civilization would go down to destruction because of our inability to construct some kind of political unit larger than the national state, just as Greek culture and civilization in the fourth century b.c. went down to destruction because of the Greeks’ inability to construct some kind of political unit larger than the city state.

This fear had animated Rhodes, and it inspired the Milner Group to work for the transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations and embed it into a League of Nations. If their references also included the Celtic mythology of the British Isles (the imperialist ‘Round Table’ was established in 1909), ancient Greece was the dominant framework of the Milner Group imaginary.

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‘The funeral oration of Pericles became their political covenant with destiny’, writes Quigley (1981: 133). The concluding note of this oration (as in Zimmern 1952: 209), that Athens would now face ‘the foe in her own household, the desires and ambitions she herself has nurtured’, by 1900 prescribed continuous expansion and the furthering of global liberalism to avoid a confrontation with the ascendant working class at home.

One way of diverting the energies and gaze of working men, it was also recognised, was competitive sports. Here too, Greek antiquity was the source of inspiration. The Greeks were obsessed with achieving honour and being ‘the best’; law and justice were of less interest to them. The Homeric story of a father telling his son that it is essential ‘to always be number one and trump the others’ (as in van Groningen 1964: 16) gives the flavour. This also extended to the relations among the poleis; which one was recognised as the leading polis, was a matter of constant concern. The term hegemony has its origin here. Competition, sport, gymnastics, were the alternatives for war; also, because everybody wanted to be a commander, few were ready to follow orders. We saw earlier that ritual fights to avoid mass casualties were a feature of tribal foreign relations. But no people except the Greeks cultivated such an extensive array of competitions, culminating not just in the Olympic Games, but also in dialectics – the clash of opinion through stylised discussion. When the Greeks outside Troy mourned the death of Achilles, they honoured the fallen hero by organising an athletics competition.

For the British, too, ‘sports were to serve both a moral and a physical purpose’, writes Eksteins (1990: 120–1). ‘They would encourage self-reliance and team spirit; they would build up the individual and integrate him into the group.’ The Victorian age was obsessed with sport. It would ‘give a young man the body of a Greek and the soul of a Christian knight’. As one eulogy for the British public school system saw it (as in Mangan 1986: 48), ‘muscular Christianity’ was what had made the British Empire possible. ‘From the days of the Olympian games, there is assuredly nothing more splendidly Greek than the Eton eight in training for Henley.’ The homoerotic subtext is not difficult to detect. Homosexual relations, especially with young boys (‘pupils’), were widespread in Greek antiquity and ‘tended to be more intense, profound, and complex than men’s relations with women’ (Grant 2001: 32). Rosenstock-Huessy (1961: 348–9) discerns a comparable culture of male exclusivity in England. Here too, it created bonds among men from which women were excluded. Even

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in contemporary Britain, relations between the sexes are often highly problematic, although ‘overt’ homosexuality, a criminal offence until 1967, is not accepted either.

WARRIOR AND FERTILITY MYTHS FROM THE SCYTHIANS TO WAGNER

In Russia, nationalism in the late nineteenth century rediscovered the Tatars and Scythians of the steppe. It articulated the contradictory feeling that arises in every foreign encounter – fear and the wish to fraternise, in this case with classes and peoples which hitherto had remained beyond the pale. Vladimir Soloviev, a nineteenth-century philosopher, in a late essay entitled ‘Three Conversations on War, Progress and the End of History’ (as in Figes 2002: 420), thus pondered how an Asiatic invasion might destroy Europe, but revitalise the ‘Scythians’ (Russia) and reconnect them with nature.

The Germanic strand of Indo-European migration, on the other hand, evolved in the primeval forests of central Europe. The gods, too, had to adapt to the dense shadows cast by the canopies of the ancient trees. As Frazer writes (2000: 161), ‘a god of the oak, the thunder, and the rain was worshipped of old by all the main branches of the Aryan stock in Europe, and was indeed the chief deity of the pantheon’. Germanic mythology likewise came to life again in a later age, projecting the Nordic curse of gold on Europe’s Jews, before descending in a Götterdämmerung which took its own world with it into the abyss. I begin with the Scythians and Russia.

The Rite of Spring and 1917

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is without doubt the most spectacular expression of the recovery of Scythian mythology and its incorporation into the modern Russian imaginary. However, it was not only the deep past that was being revived in this music. Its intoxicating rhythms, choreographed by Diaghilev into pagan dances intended, by the standards of classical ballet, to be inelegant and hypnotic rather than gracious, also heralded a new world. Although soon disciplined by the siege laid on it by the West and the constraints imposed by the capitalist world economy, the October Revolution was an avant-garde experiment, a millenarian leap forward. Inspired by a utopia of social equality, it also drew on the imagined past to provide it with the authenticity without which nothing enduring can establish itself. Indeed, the tectonic pressures in Russian society which exploded in the revolution activated a deeper layer of consciousness in a

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population seeking solace in the face of rapid social change and the ravages of war.

The Scythians were nomads who spoke an Indo-European language (proto-Iranian) and roamed the steppes north of the Black Sea, the frontier zone of the empire of the Medes and Persians, and adjacent to the areas of Greek settlement. Their movement along the frontier typically involved large-scale displacements. Thus, according to Herodotus (iv: 11, 1908: 241), they settled north of the Black Sea and the Caspian, because the Massagetae, a related nomad people, pushed them into the territory of the Cimmerians, the original inhabitants of the steppe north of the Crimea. The Cimmerians refused to follow their kings in fighting the invading Scythians, and when the Cimmerian royal clan perished in the struggle, the remaining Cimmerians moved along the Black Sea coast southwards, settling in Cappadocia. In pursuit, the Scythians began their incursions into the lands of the Medes and the Persians.

Scythian mythology differs from its Germanic –Nordic counterpart in the way the functions of the Dumézil triad are valued. For the Scythians, gold (associated with fecundity), was the source of sovereignty, whereas for the Germanic tribes it was the cause of discord, to be decided by the sword. According to Herodotus (iv: 5, 1908: 238), the Scythians claimed to descend from Targitaus, the son of Zeus, and a daughter of the river Borysthines (Dnepr). Targitaus in turn had three sons, during whose reign a plough, a yoke, an axe, and a bowl, all made of gold, descended from heaven. When the elder sons wanted to take possession of these, the gold began to burn, which it did not when the youngest son reached for it, so it was to him that they yielded authority. From the youngest son descends the royal ‘race’ (genos, clan; Herodotus iv: 6, 1963: 227); from the others, the clans of lesser seniority. Gold is worshipped by all the Scythians. When the youngest son of Targitaus divided the vast Scythian territory between his own sons, the sacred gold was given to the son with the largest domain.

That the Scythians were indeed masters in the art of making splendid works of gold was documented when a tomb dated to 700 bc was discovered in the steppes north of Mongolia, an indication also of the extent of their movement along the Inner Asian frontier (Edwards 2003). Herodotus (iv: 23, 1908: 245) writes about how the Scythians transacted business, using interpreters, with ‘bald people’ with flat noses and large chins. In this way they also obtained ethnographic information about mountain dwellers ‘with goat’s feet’ living further

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north, and about people who sleep six months per year, and so on. The Greeks actually believed that the Scythians were descendants of Heracles, who in one of his adventures encountered a monster, half woman, half serpent. She had stolen the horses from Heracles’ chariot and would only return them if he slept with her; so it was the Greek hero, not Targitaus, who fathered the three brothers. Nomadism stood in high regard, and even as lower-ranking Scythians settled as tillers, the most powerful families continued to adhere to nomad habits and social organisation, like Cossacks avant la lettre (Grant 2001: 306). Herodotus (iv: 17, 1908: 243) mentions that the Callipidae, a Graeco-Scythian people living in the Dnepr estuary, displayed the same combination of agriculture and nomad social organisation.

The Scythians themselves are described in various sources as one-eyed Arimaspi, with griffins guarding their treasures. Griffins were mythical animals with the heads of birds of prey and the bodies of four-legged mammals, lions or dogs, but with wings. Their origin goes back to Mesopotamia and Elam. Writing a little before Herodotus, the playwright Aeschylus, in his tragedy Prometheus Bound, had already described griffins in the context of the Arimaspi. Prometheus in the play warns (as in Armour 1995: 76) of ‘the sharp-beaked hounds of Zeus that bark not, the griffins, and the one-eyed Arimaspian folk, mounted on horses, who dwell about the flood of Pluto’s stream that flows with gold’. Herodotus (iv: 27, 1908: 246) was sceptical of the one-eyed Arimaspi, and we are obviously looking at a form of pseudo-speciation based on incomplete information about distant, horseriding pastoralists. Griffins were seen as Apollo’s hounds; the chariot of the vengeful goddess of Justice, Nemesis (herself of Phrygian origin), was also drawn by griffins (Armour 1995: 77).

The pantheon of the Scythians was dominated by Tabiti, a winged fire goddess and patron of the beasts (Grant 2001: 306; she is equated by Herodotus with Istia/Vesta, iv: 59, 1963: 244). Such a dignity for an ‘economic’ divinity would be unimaginable for the Indo-European forest tribes. The Scythian equivalent for Zeus, Papaeos, was the husband of the earth, Apia (Gaia), not a god of thunder; he was closer to the original Indo-European sky god, Dyaus. Oetosyros and Artimpasa, the equivalents of Apollo and Aphrodite respectively, are also prominent in the Scythian pantheon. Shamanism too was a prominent feature of their religion (Grant 2001: 308).

The ‘Royal Scythians’, who supposedly descended from Targitaus’ youngest son, were the ‘most valiant and numerous of the Scythians, who deem all other Scythians to be their slaves’ (Herodotus, iv: 20,

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1908: 244). The Atlas zur Geschichte (1976, i: 8, map iii) locates them in the steppes south of the Caucasus, west of the Caspian; it would be from there that they harassed the Medes and the Persians. Beyond the river Tanais (Don) lived other Scythians who revolted against the Royals, but these were no longer exclusively Scythian. The Scythians were fearsome warriors, who sacrificed captured enemies to the war god (equated with Ares by Herodotus, iv: 63, 1908: 257). For this purpose, each tribe had a dedicated altar; of every hundred prisoners, one had to be sacrificed by having his throat cut. Herodotus in the same passage relates their habit of sawing off the top half of the skull of slain enemies and drinking their blood from it.

Nineteenth-century romanticism saw many instances of a turn towards the mythical past. In Russia, however, the exploration of the deeper layers of national consciousness in the recesses of prehistory had a revolutionary imprint early on. Thus Vasily Kandinsky, one of the most daring of avant-garde painters, initially envisaged himself as an anthropologist. As a student at Moscow University he made a trip to the far north-east, entering the forests where the Finno-Ugric tribes lived. ‘The shamanism he discovered there became one of the major inspirations of his abstract art’, writes Figes (2002: 358). The trip, he continues,

was a journey back in time. He was looking for the remnants of the paganism which Russian missionaries had described for that region from medieval times. There were ancient records of the Komi people worshipping the sun, the river and the trees; of frenzied whirling dances to summon up their spirits; and there were legendary tales about the Komi shamans who beat their drums and flew off on their horse-sticks to the spirit world. Six-hundred years of church-building had given no more than a gloss of Christianity to this Eurasian culture.

There was always intermarriage between Slavs and various strands of Tatars, and such famous figures as Gogol and Lenin bore traces of this ethno-transformation in their name or appearance. The Scythians, however, were the focus of the romantic turn. In his notes for The Rite of Spring (performed in Paris as Le Sacre du Printemps in 1913), Stravinsky defined the ballet as ‘representing pagan Russia’. The idea for it, the composer later recalled (as in Eksteins 1990: 39), was to have a chosen sacrificial virgin dance herself to death in a pagan ritual – a dramatic event which alone could do justice to what he characterised as ‘the violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an hour and was like the whole earth cracking’. Indeed, nineteenth-century Russian intellectuals came to see the Scythians

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as a sort of mythical ancestor race of the eastern Slavs. ‘In 1897’, writes Figes (2002: 417), ‘the artist Roerich, who was a fully-trained archaeologist before he became famous for his Scythian designs for The Rite of Spring, [had been excavating] the Maikop kurgan [a Scythian burial mound] in the Crimea.’

This movement, in the words of Eksteins (1990: 31), was no doubt a ‘revolt against rationalism’. Yet it simultaneously drew on ‘a corresponding affirmation of life and experience that gained strength from the 1890s on’. Relying on the insights gained by the new physics and Freud’s psychology, it entailed a particular nihilism, an ‘overt hostility to inherited form; [a] fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization’ (ibid.: 52). In the Russian context, the idea of the people as the source of fertility against the tsarist autocracy imposing itself by the sword thus contributed to the revolutionary leap into the future of 1917. From the tension between possibility and actual reality, operating in three-dimensional time, the forward movement in the minds of artists and intellectuals eventually captivated an entire population breaking free from the chattels of serfdom and the trenches.

Russia’s historic role as a protective frontier zone against nomad invasion was also revisited in this light. The poet Alexander Blok, in his epic The Scythians of 1918, defiantly proclaims (I quote from Figes 2002: 418–19),

You are millions, we are multitudes … Come fight! Yes, we are Scythians, Yes Asiatics …Like slaves, obeying and abhorred,We were the shield between breeds Of Europe and the raging Mongol horde.

Calling on Europe to join the revolutionary rebirth that Russia was experiencing, and holding out the promise of peace (‘sheathe the old sword, may brotherhood be blessed’), the poet simultaneously warned that Russia otherwise would no longer stand guard:

We shall not move when the savage HunDespoils the corpse and leaves it bare,Burns towns, herds the cattle in the church,And the smell of white flesh fills the air.

The ‘Hun’ would of course come from an unexpected direction. For just as Russia had mobilised its mythological heritage for a

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revolutionary leap into the future, so Germany’s defeat in the First World War triggered a movement into the deep past.

The Edda, the Ring Cycle, and Nazi Ideology

‘There exist in the life of societies as well as individuals hours of moral discomfort when despair and fatigue spread their leaden wings over human beings’, Eksteins quotes Charles Nordmann. ‘Men then begin to dream of nothingness’ (1990: 54, emphasis added). In post-Versailles, Depression-struck Germany, this mood revived another legacy of Indo-European mythology. In the Nordic mind, the strands of sovereignty, force, and fecundity had never been truly reconciled; Richard Wagner made the curse of gold the central motif of his largest and defining work, Der Ring des Nibelungen. Caught between the triumphant Anglophone West and a revolutionary proletariat, the German middle classes after 1918 appeared to be longing for a return to that heroic age to pit German warrior virtues against British perfidy and, the most perverse combination of all, ‘Jewish’ money power and socialism. This was not an optimistic fantasy either; both the Germanic pantheon and the warrior heroes were destined to perish in a terrible Götterdämmerung, a twilight of the gods.

The Edda is the poetic legacy of Germanic–Nordic mythology. It went through various editions until it was recorded by Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241), the most prominent Icelandic diplomat–statesman of his day, and the country’s historic poet. There are other, often contradictory sources: Tacitus in the first century reported on the Germanic tribes directly across the Rhine, but, as Grappin notes (1973: 357–8), he cast their deities very much as the equivalents of the Roman pantheon. The most reliable source is Snorri; but, by the time he wrote, knowledge of the Greek classics had contaminated the mythological legacy, and his country had been Christianised for more than a century. To be legitimately discussed, Paganism had to be placed in a literary, historicising context.

Snorri’s prologue to the Edda, which means something like the ‘art of poetry’ (it was meant to instruct young poets in traditional verse), dutifully opens with a recapitulation of the biblical creation story and the Deluge. It then turns to a description of how the world was created out of the clash between the hot south, Muspell (Muspelheim), the world of fire; and the icy north, Niflheim, the eventual world of the dead (Snorri 1966: 32–3). Rivers from Niflheim gradually filled the primeval ravine, Ginnungagap, with ice; hot winds from the south melted it and turned it into clay; from the clay emerged Ymir, the

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patriarch of the ice giants, who lived off the milk of a giant cow. It was from the animal’s tongue that the first god, Buri, was born. There is also a brief reference in Snorri (1966: 40) to a Golden Age which was ‘spoiled by the arrival of the women who came from Giantland’. Intermarriage with giantesses was widespread however.

The superimposed worlds in which lived humans, giants, and several races of gods were connected by a magical ash tree, Yggdrasill. There were continuous wars between the worlds; Asgard, the Nordic Olympus, in which one root of Yggdrasill was planted, had to be continuously defended against attackers. It was linked to the earth by a bridge, which humans perceive as the rainbow, but which was strong. Only when ‘the sons of Muspell are on the warpath’ and try to cross it, would it collapse under the weight of their horses (Snorri 1966: 40). Yggdrasill symbolised the constant renewal of life. For the Germanic tribes of the primeval forests that had covered Europe since days immemorial, trees were objects of worship, as they had been for the Celts (Frazer 2000: 109–10). The first humans, too, were made of driftwood, found on the beach by gods. The man, Ask, is made of the hard ash tree; the woman, Embla, from a softer wood, possibly elm – the idea being that new life, like fire, is produced by the friction between a stem of hard wood and a softer piece (Witzel, 2001: 4.4, sees this as a stray remnant of the most ancient mythical legacy).

Dumézil’s triad stands out clearly in the Nordic pantheon. Importantly, though, the warrior branch and the fertility branch emerged separately and actually clashed in a primordial struggle. The Aesir, the gods of sovereignty and war, according to Snorri were the ‘men of Asia’; they hailed from Troy. In fact, as Grappin points out (1973: 363), the origin of the word ‘Aesir’ is disputed, with connotations of authority, arrogance, and presence of mind all equally possible; Troy obviously comes from Snorri’s own education. The Vanir were the gods of fecundity. Snorri presents the mythology in which they all figure as a story told to the Swedish King Gylfi by three wise men, who inform him about the religion of the ‘Asian’ conquerors. Gylfi, like all locals, is completely enchanted by the Aesir, marvelling at how great they are, how everything works once they turn their hand to it, and so on. So it is obvious who is speaking here. Gylfi himself is actually married to an Aesir goddess, Gefjon, who demonstrates her prowess at ploughing (with the help of four oxen) by cutting off an entire island, Seeland, from Sweden and adding it to Denmark. Now there’s a woman for you! Yet Gylfi is wily enough to wonder whether this is not simply a matter of the divinities whom

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they worship and who lend them these great abilities (Snorri 1966: 29–30). Let us therefore first look at the Aesir.

Odin is the sovereign of the Norse pantheon (Germanic Wotan). He is the grandson of the first god, Buri, and the son of Bor; his mother was a giantess. In Snorri’s account Odin is the descendant of a grandson of Priam of Troy, Thor, who initiated a trail of Indo-European conquests. Thor, not to be confused with (Asa-) Thor, the Nordic god of war and Odin’s son, first conquered Thrace, before migrating further north. ‘Odin’, writes Snorri (1966: 26), ‘and also his wife [Frigg], had the gift of prophecy, and by means of this magic art he discovered that his name would be famous in the northern part of the world and honoured above that of all kings.’ Odin was also the god of knowledge; he obtained his wisdom whilst suspended from Yggdrasill for nine painful nights. When King Gylfi asks the three wise men who is their oldest god, they reply, ‘All-father’. He has twelve other names beginning with Herran (‘Lord’ or ‘Raider’). Gylfi is later told (Snorri 1966: 37) that ‘Odin may well be called All-father’.

Odin/Wotan was also a war leader, the harbinger of victory. His name means ‘fury’ (as in Wut in German); he was the spirit leading a troop of warriors on wild horses into battle. Further north he inspired the berserkir, warriors in bear’s skins and capable of superhuman fury. The berserkir would whip themselves up into a frenzy and thus become immune to fear and pain (Allan 2004: 118; Dumézil 1970: 141). As lord of Valhalla, the abode of fallen heroes, Odin is also called Valfather (Walvater); the Valkyries (Walküren), whose ride across the sky was immortalised in the eponymous opera from the Ring cycle, pick up the slain from the battlefield to escort them to Valhalla. Here the warriors are not so much retired as on leave, keeping up their preparedness until the clarion call sounds for the final battle, and drowning their fears of what awaits them in alcohol. This has been interpreted, Grappin explains (1973: 368), as articulating the Germanic peoples’ fear of their impending fate in the encounter with the Roman empire.

Odin was feared rather than loved. He seems to have represented the unpredictability of fate, although there was also a separate ‘trickster’ figure, the god Loki (whose morbid sense of humour runs into a wall of incredulous incomprehension in each of the many tales he figures in). Human sacrifices too, usually of prisoners of war, were made to Odin. The Odin cult crossed the Baltic relatively late, Allan writes (2004: 42–5); in south-west Norway his importance was limited, and in Iceland no sacrifices were made to him at all.

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Odin’s first son (with Earth) was Asa-Thor, the god of war. Thor is a charioteer, as indicated by the prefix ‘Asa’. With his hammer, Mjöllnir, Thor cracked many skulls, Snorri relates (1966: 50), and frost ogres and cliff giants know what is waiting for them when thunder roars across the sky. Thor was invoked in every oath sworn in ancient Scandinavia. He was the patron of the Althing, the annual meeting begun on the day named after him; he was seen as the friend of the common people, like the Iranian Kshathra. There is something dull witted about Thor, which he compensates for by showing no mercy for the hypocrites who try to take him for a ride (Allan 2004: 50–1; Grappin 1973: 374–5). Thor is called Donar in German; his day is Donnerstag (Thursday; in Latin Europe, this day is dedicated to Jupiter/Jove, just as Wotan’s day is the day of Mercurius).

Odin, Thor, and the war god Tyr are easily recognised as Indo-European sovereignty and warrior figures, although only Tyr can be traced right back to the Vedic pantheon. He was called Tiwaz or Tiuz by north Germanic tribes (from which ‘Tuesday’ derives), Ziu in the south; Tacitus identified him as Mars (Grappin 1973: 375–6; Sen 1961: 18n.). But that reminds us that one cannot simply attach lineages of gods to known migratory patterns, because on the way Tyr apparently lost the status of supreme god that Zeus still enjoyed. He became a secondary war god, indeed a god of justice, because for the tribal Germanic peoples, feud and law were conflated; for example, a duel was seen as a divinely sanctioned trial.

Snorri’s account, then, suggests that the Aesir were Indo-European warriors. Symbolically represented by their gods in myth, they migrated northwards across the European continent to Scandinavia. Having conquered Germany, where they lived for a long time (Odin’s second son, Beldeg or Baldr, ruled over Westphalia), they moved on to France and to Jutland, where they established the ruling dynasty of Denmark; and finally to Sweden and Norway. With its large plains and rich natural resources, Sweden seemed the proper residence for Odin, and the locals were apparently overjoyed to see him. Indeed, according to Snorri (1966: 27), the Aesir migrations

were attended by such prosperity that, whenever they stayed in a country, that region enjoyed good harvests and peace, and everyone believed that they caused this, since the native inhabitants had never seen any other people like them for good looks and intelligence.

Again it is obvious to whom we owe this assessment of the happy encounter between Indo-European-speaking conquerors (if such they

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were) and the native, sedentary ethnos of the Svears (who lived in the central parts of Sweden and after whom the country is called Sverige).

Odin next led his followers further north, until they reached the sea. There he installed his son over the kingdom that became Norway. Snorri records that the Aesir married the women of the land, as they had done in Germany, and that ‘their language, that of the men of Asia, became the language proper to all these countries’ (of Scandinavia and the Germanic lands). In the Heimskringla saga, Frazer records (2000: 155), the princes of the reputedly Swedish Yngligar family thus obtained no less than six Norwegian provinces by marrying royal princesses. In England, Nordic–Germanic and Celtic influences were both in evidence; certain ancient districts had non-Germanic names. Reading how Odin administratively organised the conquered territories (appointing chieftains ‘after the pattern of Troy’, with twelve rulers ‘to administer the laws of the land’, under a ‘code of law like that which had held in Troy’; Snorri 1966: 27–8), the Norman conquest comes to mind, as it may have in the case of Snorri himself.

The Aesir fought many wars on the way north, and the mythical record includes the ferocious battle with the ice giants led by Ymir. Ymir is killed and most of the other giants drown in the sea of blood that flows from his body. In a mythical representation of how locals were enslaved, the maggots eating Ymir’s corpse become dwarfs sent underground by the Aesir to mine gold; their counterparts, the elves, are dispatched to a spacious realm, Alfheim, not far from the Aesir’s own abode, Asgard. Yet as Grappin highlights (1973: 362), none of the Aesir’s enemies (frost giants, ice giants, and other superhuman races) are ever completely beaten; they all return again later in greater number.

The defining war with the Vanir, the gods of fertility, was also inconclusive. The Vanir had their strongest following in Sweden, and may have been the deified ancestors of the Svear ethnos, although contemporary scholarship suspects that Vanir and Aesir may both have been of Indo-European origin (Grappin 1973: 384). Tacitus describes a fertility cult of first-century Danes to a goddess Nerthus (linguistically associated with Njord, the Vanir god of the coastal waters and fisheries). Nerthus (according to some accounts, Njord’s wife; Allan 2004: 106–7) was the Earth mother and goddess of peace; warriors would lay down their weapons when the ritual oxcart in which she was supposedly moved around passed by. The root ‘Ne[r]’ reminds us of Neptune and the Nereids. The Aesir also had a god

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of the seas, named Aegir, who predates Njord (there are obvious problems with the sequence suggested by Snorri). Aegir was much feared because he had the habit of overturning ships at sea; his sister Ran operated an underwater Valhalla for the drowned. Once Njord was integrated into the Asgard pantheon, however, he eclipsed Aegir entirely, because he was seen as more benevolent (Grant 2002: 50–2). As navigational prowess increased, one would surmise, the relevant god acquired a more benign nature too.

Njord was the father of Frey (or Freyr, ‘Lord’ of the Vanir) and his twin sister Freyja (‘Lady’). Frey and Freyja were associated with agriculture and fecundity, with Frey sporting an outsize penis and the lustful Freyja reputedly granting favours to many different lovers, including her brother. Their origin may have been a fertility cult in which they were a single deity, including even Frigg, Odin’s wife, whose role in certain myths is almost interchangeable with Freyja’s (Grant 2002: 59, 62–3). Freyja is also called Vanadis, the goddess (dis) of the Vanir. Seid or seidhr, the sorcery associated with the Vanir, has been argued (Allan 2004: 101) to have originated in the cult of Freyja, who was obsessed by gold. The Vikings greatly feared seid; women could obtain magical powers through it.

Gold was at the root of the primordial war between Aesir and Vanir. It began when the Aesir captured and tortured Gullveig, a female giant whose name means ‘love of gold’, and who may in fact have been Freyja herself. The Vanir however rushed to Gullveig’s aid and the war was on. Under the armistice ending the inconclusive fight, hostages were exchanged. Yet the Aesir, whilst not victorious outright, seemed to get the better deal; one of their own was installed as a governor over the Vanir. Adam of Bremen, the eleventh-century clerk, describes the events in the Gesta Hamburgensis (as in Grappin 1973: 385):

Odin marched with his army against the Vanir, but they resisted and defended their country, and each side carried off alternate victories. Each army laid waste the other’s land … When at last they were weary, they held conference, concluded a peace and exchanged hostages. The Vanir surrendered their most distinguished men: Njord, who was rich, and his son Freyr; and the Aesir gave in exchange someone called Hönir, whom, they said, was well equipped to be a chief.

Freyja too joined the Aesir in Asgard, whilst Mimir, the giant who guards the root of Yggdrasill, joined Hönir in Vanaheim, the Vanir’s abode (Hönir in one version of Nordic mythology is Odin’s brother;

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he gave humanity its senses and the ability to move; Grant 2002: 12). The meaning of this exchange as a solution to the war is not difficult to decipher. The Aesir represent the forest warriors of ancient Scandinavia, who are embittered about the rise of a money economy, symbolised by Gullveig; the agricultural Svear were the real object of this envy. The warrior Aesir give wisdom, perception, and mobility to their settled counterparts; the Vanir contribute the two personi-fications of human and earthly fecundity, but also, with Njord, the treasures of the sea. In Snorri it is even claimed (1966: 100, emphasis added) that poetry itself emerged when the Aesir ‘were at war with the people known as the Vanir’ – and alcohol loosened the imagination.

Gold as the source of evil and conflict runs through many Nordic myths. In the legend of Sigurd (Siegfried), Fafnir (Fafner) changes into a dragon after he has killed his father to gain hold of the cursed treasure of the dwarf Andvari. In Wagner’s Ring, the Rhinegold is the ransom that Fafner, who has built Valhalla, receives from Wotan to ensure that he will get Freyja as payment. In another myth recorded by Grant (2002: 61–2), Freyja once ran into the smithy of the Brisings or Brosings, also dwarfs, whilst they were making a necklace of unsurpassable splendour, Brisingamen. The only way to get it was to submit to a night of lust with the dwarfs. This is observed by Loki, the trickster, thief, and liar. Loki reports what he has seen to Odin, who, jealous and upset about Freyja’s debauchery, tells him to get hold of Brisingamen. There are different versions of the story, and in one Freyja, discovering that Loki has stolen the necklace, goes to Odin to complain. The only way to get Brisingamen back, however, is to accept Odin’s verdict that she will henceforth be the goddess responsible for spreading warfare and misery – the price for obtaining the necklace with its gold shining as liquid flame. Gold, then, is here the perennial source of war and misery. There is a related task of Freyja’s, recorded by Snorri (1966: 53): of the slain in battle, half go to Valhalla, under Odin’s authority, but the other half are welcomed by Freyja to her domain, Folkvangar.

Germanic–Nordic mythology includes the spectre of a doomsday of the gods, Ragnarök, the Götterdämmerung. This was not an unexpected event. Ever since the war between the Aesir and the Vanir, northern Germanic life had been riddled with endless fighting. Gullveig had been banished to the land of ice in the east, but the gold that had caused the conflict remained as a source of discord, and the giants were always on the horizon. As a result, Grappin writes (1973: 395), ‘The world that they ruled, was divided, full of

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mysterious and frightening forces … an immense, permanent tragedy, in which nothing remained’. Ragnarök would come after a series of exceptionally harsh winters, even for the people of the north of Europe. Neither Odin nor Thor could hope to do more than postpone the final destruction of their world. In Snorri’s (1966: 86) version of the ancient poem ‘Sybil’s Vision’,

Brothers will fight and kill each other, siblings do incest;Men will know misery, adulteries be multiplied,An axe-age, a sword-age, shields will be cloven, A wind-age, a wolf-age, before the world’s ruin.

The death of Balder, the son of Odin and Frigg, is what triggers the endgame. It unleashes the fire giants from Muspell, as well as the force of the ocean, whipped up by the world snake Jormungand, Hindu Ananta – the taming of which had made civilisation possible. Whilst the world tree Yggdrasill shudders, Heimdall, the guardian of Asgard, blows his horn. The gods assemble the heroes of Valhalla for the final battle in which they will all perish, along with the world. Interestingly we do not hear of how the Vanir join in the struggle, but they too go under. Only two sons of Odin and Thor survive; two humans also miraculously escape the ordeal. It is they who in a distant future are to repopulate the earth; but the roots of evil will again be inscribed into their fate.

The discovery that the English-speaking West already occupied the commanding heights of the global political economy in many ways spoiled any illusions the Germans may have had after their country’s late unification. But the middle classes in particular were also uncomfortable with the fact that their own belated entry into urban, industrialised society (already a source of profound misgivings) was accompanied by the rise of the industrial working class. Wagner himself shared these feelings. He had participated in the revolutionary outbreak of 1848, in which the bourgeoisie and the workers still fought side by side, and he had to flee the ensuing repression. In a letter to a friend however (as in van Amerongen 1983: 53), the composer expressed his bitter regret over this brief association with the workers’ movement:

My entire political vision is nothing but the bloodiest hatred of our whole civilisation. I now must atone deeply for ever having cared anything about the workers as workers. In spite of their slogans they are miserable slaves who can be pocketed by anyone who promises them ‘work’. Servitude is deep in their

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bones. Nobody realises we are humans, except perhaps Proudhon – and even he is not entirely clear. In the whole of Europe I care more for the dogs than for these doglike people. Nevertheless I do not doubt the future. But only the most terrible and destructive revolution can turn this civilised animal rabble into ‘humans’ again.

It was in this spirit that Wagner turned to the Edda and other Nordic and Celtic tales to write his monumental operas. However, the composer’s early musings about a ‘terrible and destructive’ revolution, as well as his vitriolic anti-Semitism (which at the time did not prevent musicians of Jewish background from close association with him), in the wake of Versailles and the failed socialist revolution merged into the episode of ‘non-contemporaneity’ that was German Nazism. Mobilising a disposition that had been brewing ever since Bismarck had achieved the country’s unification by war and revolution from above, National Socialism moved back across second-dimension time into the mythical past, as a way of digesting an existential crisis of German society. It thus activated what Bloch calls (1971: 131) ‘an anachronistic superstructure’, moulding

a relative chaos into an ‘untimely’, non-contemporaneous reality, drawing on a backwardness that was even deeper [than Germany’s partly pre-urban, landed mode of production], namely barbarity … Needs and contents belonging to prehistory broke, magma-like, through a thin crust … turning non-contempo-raneity into the ‘natural’ state of affairs.

The resulting hyparxis called forth a Thousand-Year Reich going back to a tribal imaginary, but with the means of advanced industrial society at its disposal. How it raged across Europe and the world, only to collapse in 1945, with tens of millions killed and many more millions of lives destroyed, we need not recall here.

In April 1945, with the rumble of Soviet guns audible in the distance, the Nazi leadership in Berlin attended a final performance of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and concluding opera of the Ring cycle. The Führer himself, a lifelong Wagner devotee and friend of the composer’s family, remained deep in his bunker; but Goebbels and the other top brass were transported from their own collapsing world into that of the final struggle of the gods. When German radio broadcast the news of Hitler’s death on 1 May, it was followed by Siegfried’s funeral march, again from Götterdämmerung. Even so, as van Amerongen emphasises (1983: 160–4), many top Nazis had

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serious reservations about the ideological credentials of the composer and felt uneasy with the Führer’s infatuation with his music. Wagner, a radical rightist and racist no doubt, created some of the most sublime musical works ever written; on that count they constitute an inalienable part of the human heritage. It was only the tectonic slide back into an ugly resurgence of the tribal mindset that turned them into the accompaniment of the nightmare that was Nazism.

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4Imperial Cosmologies and the Nomad Counterpoint

The historic land empires lived in worlds of their own, mandated by heaven and acknowledging no equals. They interacted with the barbarians on their frontiers in what I call the empire/nomad mode of foreign relations. Sedentary versus mobile occupation of space, the recruitment of tribal auxiliaries for protection, and the incorporation of quasi-nomadic trading diasporas are the constitutive aspects of this mode. The cosmologies of China, Western Christianity, and mediaeval Islam that we look at in this chapter all originated on the empire/nomad fracture, but then evolved in different directions. China’s Imperial Confucianism, a doctrine of sovereignty and foreign relations, is hierarchical and static. By contrast, the religions percolating along the Inner Asian frontier, Buddhism and Islam, are egalitarian and associated with mobility. Buddhism never penetrated Chinese civilisation to the degree it impregnated Hinduism; in the frontier zones of Japan, Tibet, and South-East Asia, it evolved into a counterpoint to empire, with explosive consequences for relations with China and the outside world generally.

Christianity emerged on the frontier of the Roman empire and was eventually adopted in the imperial centre as well. In the fusion of the respective world-views, a neo-Platonic idealisation of religion, articulated in Augustine’s City of God, allowed imperial universalism to transcend its political shell and (unlike the orthodoxy of Byzantium, or China’s Imperial Confucianism) drive beyond the world it occupied. After the rise of Islam, the imperial reflexes of Western Christianity, infused with nomad mobility and the spirit of discovery, generated the Crusader mentality, which continues to exert its influence to the present day. From the fourteenth century on, this dynamic was displaced, by leaps and bounds, to the Atlantic seaboard; the Mediterranean frontier froze into unproductive antinomy again, after an extraordinarily rich exchange in the preceding centuries.

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IMPERIAL CONFUCIANISM AND FRONTIER BUDDHISM

Like all Oriental empires, China was a hierocracy, a monopoly dispensing or withholding sacred goods and services (Heilsgüter; Weber 1920b: 267). Unlike the transcendent universalism of Christianity, however, the sacred is immanent in the culture, confined to the social formation to which its discipline applies. Heaven (tien; its character combines the signs for ‘one’ and ‘great’) is a metaphysical sphere, not the abode of an anthropomorphic God. The empire is the ‘All-under-Heaven’ (or ‘Middle Kingdom’), the emperor the ‘Son of Heaven’. Everything in nature and society obeys the pervasive operation of ‘the Way’, Dao. As Giles relates (1915: 3–9), the mythical first ruler of China, Fu Xi (supposed to have lived in the early third millennium bc), began the great work of systematising the inner unity of the cosmos and the world order with the ‘Eight Diagrams’ that surround the Yin and Yang figure which denotes ultimate harmony. Fu Xi’s wife (or sister) Nugua, meanwhile, created the Chinese people (Soymié 1973: 275) – nobles and rich men from fertile yellow earth, the poor and lowly from mud-covered rope; a rare case of a creation story acknowledging class society.

Classical political philosophy emerged in the epoch of the ‘Warring States’, the fourteen states surviving by the early fifth century bc. These included the remnants of the ancient empire of Zhou; it finally collapsed in 256 bc. The memory of Zhou’s glorious past and reverence for court ritual, li, remained alive however. Political thought built on it as it sought to provide ‘solutions for overcoming the decay, decline, and decadence of the old order’ (Senghaas 2002: 26). Many of the classical thinkers were diplomats manqués in search of a state that would avail itself of their services; the texts ascribed to them are often compilations produced by schools of followers. There is a Chinese mythology, but it was sanitised early on in order to efface embarrassing ‘irrational’ detail, notably by removing examples of pseudo-speciation, such as bestial and semi-human shapes.

Dao, ‘the Way’, was the starting point of the eponymous school. Daoism is a quietist philosophy of contemplation, wu wei; as a mysticism of nature it has affinities with Buddhism. The scenes immortalised by Chinese painting, with a solitary scholar in his little pavilion dwarfed by an overwhelming mountain landscape, testify to the grandeur of its vision. Its political doctrine holds (as in Senghaas 2002: 29) that ‘the best way to reign is not to reign’ (‘order’ and ‘government’ in Chinese are depicted by the same character).

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This absolved rulers of initiative, but also excluded legitimate revolt. The principles of Daoism were elaborated in the third century bc by Zhuang Zhou (or Zhuangzi: zi means ‘master’). It remains contested whether in reality the book on Dao, Dao de jing, was originally written by Laozi three centuries earlier (Duyvendak 1948: 33; Zürcher 1995: 111).

Confucius (the Latinised form of ‘Kongfuzi’, c.551–497 bc) challenged the fatalism of Daoism. As chancellor of the feudal state of Lu in the north-east, Confucius was a conservative, advocating a return to empire and ritual. Yet he also preached a new bureaucratic ethos. ‘The significance of Confucius’, Lattimore writes (1951: 397), ‘is that he was both a product of feudalism and a prophet of a new order arising out of feudalism and superseding it.’ His ideas, like those of Socrates, his contemporary in ancient Greece, were recorded as dialogues, the Lunyu (Analects); they constitute the core around which a Chinese imperial ethics would evolve in later ages.

Whilst Confucius idealised Zhou, the Mohists, followers of a thinker of the same period, Modi (originally Mo Hi), took as their example the mythical Xia dynasty that preceded the Shang kings of the second millennium bc. Collins (1998: 141) compares the Mohists to an order of crusading knights. Modi rejected the emphasis on ritual, because it ossified social hierarchy; but the Mohists were not able to consolidate the real popularity of this idea (Duyvendak 1948: 34–5). As their armed might declined, they began to occupy themselves with intellectual pursuits. One thinker they influenced was Mencius (Mengzi, 372–289 bc; cf. Collins 1998: 144, Fig. 4.2), an adviser of the ruler of the central state of Wei, and the most prominent of the Confucians. However, in contrast to Confucius, who supposedly did not think people are by nature good (the Chinese characters on account of which this claim is made, according to Waley in Confucius 1938, only mean ‘people are close together’), Mencius believed (ii, i, 2: 13–15, 1930: 530) that the benign aspects of human nature are real. People just need to be protected against ‘passion nature’.

The counterpoint to Confucianism was the Legalist tradition, usually traced to Xunzi (c.300–230 bc). Xunzi was resident at the court of Qi, a veritable political–philosophical academy (Collins 1998: 143). He held that people were inclined to mischief, so they had to be kept under a tight lid. As Zürcher highlights (1995: 108–9), Xunzi also sought to rationalise political thought by removing the remaining religious connotations. Actual Legalism begins with Hanfeizi, who stressed despotic authority and a powerful coercive state apparatus.

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Hanfeizi studied with Xunzi, together with Grand Councillor Li Si, the prime minister of the western frontier state of Qin. Their hour struck in 221 bc when the Qin ruler, Shih Huang Di, restored the empire, and Li Si prevailed on him to silence all the other schools by burning their books. The extreme Legalism did not survive the Qin, but there was a synthesis in the making. An early example is provided by the writings of Heguanzi (Master of the Pheasant Crest, supposedly a Daoist sage). Conceived on the eve of the restoration of empire, this relatively unknown tract includes dialogues with Pang Xuan, a general of Zhao, the last Warring State subdued by Qin. Since the pheasant crest was an insignia of the elite warriors of Zhao and the text is more about military virtues than Daoist asceticism, Lévi suspects (in Heguanzi 2008: 7–8) that Heguanzi was perhaps a fictional character.

Yet the uncertainties surrounding the identity of their authors make the proto-imperial ideologies no less pertinent. They were all ‘used for the design of imperial institutions and systems of government and governance’, Zhang writes (2001: 51), and ‘particularly in the Han Dynasty [206 bc – ad 220], the Confucian–Legalist amalgam (the so-called Imperial Confucianism) became the prevailing ideology in the imperial bureaucracy’. The definitive integration of imperial doctrine dates from the Song era (ad 960–1234); Mencius was often taken as the starting point of the revival. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) became the great codifier of Imperial Confucianism, its ‘Thomas Aquinas’ (Jaspers 1964: 161). ‘Master Zhu’ (Zhuzi) collated the Confucian Analects, the Book of Mencius, and two other classical texts, along with his own commentary, into the Four Books, which for the remainder of the imperial age would be the basis of the examination system for entry into the bureaucracy.

Foreign Relations in the Mirror of Empire

Imperial Confucian political philosophy and what remains of Chinese mythology articulate the universal sovereignty of a hydraulic empire. The empire is the centre of the world; it protects itself by a powerful army adapted to the mobile warfare of its nomad opponents and auxiliaries, and demands tribute. Let us go over these aspects separately as they transpire in the mythological record and political philosophy.

Sovereign occupation of space. China’s key mythological image is the dragon. This has been traced to the serpent images of Egyptian

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Osiris and Hindu Indra; like them it is associated with life-bringing water, the key to the imaginary of alluvial agriculture.

The classic tale of flood protection is set in the reign of the mythical sovereign, Yao, when the realm was struck by a catastrophic flood lasting 22 years (I follow Soymié 1973: 286–8). Yao’s advisers recommended that Kun, the engineer and great-grandson of the legendary first emperor, Huang Di (not to be confused with Shih Huang Di, the Qin emperor), should combat the disaster by building dikes. Nine years of work proved fruitless; Yao in the meantime had abdicated in favour of a peasant and culture hero, Shun, who exiled Kun and had him killed. Kun’s son, Yu, was now given his father’s task. Yu abandoned the dam project and worked instead by hollowing out river beds, redirecting their courses (Mackenzie notes that Yu got the idea from a white-faced man with the body of a fish; 1994: 280–3). Yu also had to contest with marauding foreigners, who appear in the mythological imagery as serpent-like creatures with multiple heads – signifying water and elusiveness respectively. They were defeated, but their pastureland proved unfit for cultivation. The blood of the killed nomads had turned it into impenetrable marshes, posing new challenges to Yu’s drainage skills (Christie 1968: 88). Eventually Yu succeeded in taming the waters. He was recompensed by Shun by inheriting the empire itself, under a new dynasty (the Xia), tentatively dated to the beginning of the twenty-third century bc and mentioned earlier as the ideal state of the Mohists. Yu’s flood control systems brought great welfare, Mackenzie records (1994: 285): ‘the vegetation … became luxuriant, and green dragons lay on the borders of the empire’.

In ‘The Tribute of Yu’, a chapter from the Book of History (Shijing, claimed to date back three millennia but probably a compilation dating from the Warring States epoch), we read (as in Christie 1968: 89–90) that Yu also established that the earth was square, measuring 233,575 steps from pole to pole. He drew maps, and since he had to travel a lot, invented various means of transport, including different types of rowing boat. Yu’s role as a culture hero is connected with metal mining and tool making; he may have been the patron saint of clans of craftsmen involved in tunnelling through mountains for drainage schemes, or in providing iron implements for agriculture.

That Yu’s subtle hydraulic approach was successful (and Kun’s coercive one a failure) goes back to the immutable, inherent order of things. Yu is actually told (as in Giles 1915: 13) that this was how ‘God’ willed it, although it is only through the emperor, here Yu,

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that the necessity of the world is expressed. The empire allows the Dao to transpire; the Warring States in this sense violated the natural order. But so does the contradictory existence of community and humanity. As General Pang tells Heguanzi (2008: 76), unification of all those speaking the same language is necessary because if people ‘are subjected to the authority of different princes and leaders, they cannot place themselves at the service of their neighbours’. Heguanzi agrees, noting (ibid.: 84) that since all men bear the name ‘man’, they share the same nature, so ‘why would it be impossible, under these conditions, that the people living between the four seas are unified like the members of a sole and single family?’

To provide the empire with a governing class of gentlemen–scholars was the Confucians’ overriding aim. One could not be born into this class; candidates had to prove their moral virtue by observing and internalising ritual. Heguanzi (2008: 29) emphasises that ‘the civilising action achieves its goal when the subjects act without having received orders’. Hereditary rule on the other hand opens the way to incompetence (ibid.: 92). Certainly the governing class must protect ruling class interests first; as Mencius observes (iv, i, 6, 1930: 698), ‘the administration of government is not difficult; it lies in not offending the great families’. But the inherent order of things, Dao, dictates that rule must be hegemonic, not coercive. Just as Yu handled the waters by subtle guidance, the ruling gentry should pass over the small people like wind over grass (Confucius 12.19, 1938: 168).

A well-ordered empire exerts an irresistible force of attraction to all outsiders. ‘The Master said, Moral force never dwells in solitude; it will always bring neighbours’ (ibid.: 4.25, 1938: 106; cf. 9.13, 1938: 141). Territorial expansion is not the way. As Heguanzi puts it (2008: 46), a ruler takes care ‘not to spoil the confidence he inspires for a territorial gain’. It is the inner strength of the empire which places it in a position of superiority towards the outside world. In the Confucian perspective (16.1, 1938: 203),

If all [society] is well-apportioned, there will be no poverty; if they are not divided against one another, there will be no lack of men. If such a state of affairs exists, yet the people of far-off lands still do not submit, then the ruler must attract them by the prestige of his culture.

The same idea is found in Mencius (ii, i, 1: 10, 1930: 520): a well-governed state will grow by itself, and ‘collect’ a population. Since the ‘rude tribes’ on the frontier all yearn for good government

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by the emperor (i, ii, 11: 2, 1930: 499), an emperor who places the welfare of his subjects at the centre of his concerns will evoke the admiration of all other peoples of the world. If not (iv, i, 3: 1–2, 1930: 695), history shows that power will be lost just as easily. ‘It is by the same means that the decaying and flourishing, the preservation and perishing of states are determined.’ Since the barbarians themselves do not add anything worthwhile (iii, i, 4: 12, 1930: 633), the best they can hope for is to become civilised by the ‘doctrines of our great land’. Confucius on the other hand believed that under extreme conditions, when ‘the Way’ is not observed, the barbarians may provide a source of regeneration. In one passage (5.6, 1938: 108), he speaks of going abroad to seek moral rejuvenation.

Protection. In the imperial perspective, there are no enemies worthy of consideration as equals. ‘Punishment’ of tributary frontier formations was the only meaning the word ‘war’ could have (Weggel 1980: 196). A foreign prince lacking virtue will be chastised, Heguanzi warns (2008: 72), since the armies of a just ruler go where they please and ‘punitive expeditions are undertaken without anyone being able to oppose them’. In this respect there is a continuity between domestic and external power. ‘The sword, instrument of sovereignty, is nothing like an occasional expedient’, we read in the same source. ‘It dispenses life whilst distributing death; it emerges from the interior to regulate the exterior. Such is its fundamental principle’ (ibid.: 74, emphasis added).

Modi on the other hand speaks out against war as a waste of men and money. Nobody would deny that to kill an innocent man and rob him of his possessions is an injustice, he argues (as in Duyvendak 1948: 47). ‘Injustice on a large scale, however – to wit, attacking a state – is not condemned but instead applauded as justice.’ The Mohist military–religious order followed this up by specialising in defensive combat. They developed a reputation as experts in fortification, but as Collins relates (1998: 141), ‘the scale of warfare soon far outstripped the number of Mohist troops’.

Confucius too rejects the heroic connotations of war. When asked what is most important – sufficient food, sufficient weapons, or the consent of the people, he replies (12.7, 1938: 164) that consent is most important, then food, and only then, weapons. ‘You are there to rule, not to slay.’ This does not imply that there should be no army. Universal sovereignty actually made victory mandatory should war occur. As Mencius puts it (ii, ii, 1: 5, 1930: 562), ‘a true ruler will prefer not to fight; but if he does fight, he must overcome’. The benevolence

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of imperial rule also operates in wartime, because a benign ruler will be able to ward off stronger states whose rulers plunder their people (i, i, 5: 3–4, 1930: 444–5). On the eve of the Qin empire, Heguanzi (2008: 44) likewise replied to the question, ‘What is the most important of human activities?’ with: ‘War’, specifying that ‘even if one does not use military force a single time in a century, one cannot neglect it for even a day’ (ibid.: 46). Yet he too (ibid.: 65) held that a great emperor would be ‘peaceful even in his military operations’.

The military doctrine of guarding the frontier by adopting nomad tactics was famously articulated in The Art of War by Sun Zi (originally Sun Wu), dated 512 bc. Sun, born into a noble warrior family, is an early ‘Clausewitzian’, a military technician solely concerned with victory. If Confucius and Mencius fall within a discussion about myth and religion as borderline cases, Sun falls entirely outside it. I only mention him to indicate how the frontier interaction with the nomads places a premium on practical thinking. Honesty and moral virtue have no place in the mind of the military strategist, and neither is politics a matter of ‘benign rule’. ‘By politics is meant that the people share the wishes of their sovereign so that they readily fight and die for him without disobedience’, Sun Zi dryly notes (1995: 82), and one page later he observes that ‘war is a deceitful game’. For Sun as a secular thinker, ‘heaven’ has lost all supernatural connotations; it merely denotes the weather, just as the earth signifies ‘terrain’ (Xie Guoliang in Sun Zi 1995: 30).

Sun Zi originally came from Qi but rose to fame in Wu to its south. Whether his advice contributed to its military successes, we do not know. But although he does not yet discuss mounted warriors but speaks only of chariots, his entire argument is constructed around considerations of speed and flexibility (1995: 147):

Fast running water can carry away stones because of the momentum: a falcon can seize its prey at a swoop because of the suddenness. So a good strategist can create a dangerous momentum like a crossbow being drawn to the full, and a great suddenness like the release of the trigger.

Swift surprise attacks and quick campaigns are the high road to victory. Heguanzi’s account of warfare (2008: 101–2) closely resembles Sun Zi’s and he even directly comments on the passage cited above. But in another passage (ibid.: 48), Heguanzi also reminds General Pang that ‘war means sending thousands and thousands of innocents to their death’. Best of all, then, is to get hold of and thwart the enemy’s plans; if that doesn’t work, to bribe his soldiers; and only

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as a last resort, defeat him militarily. ‘To vanquish without waging battle, that is the ultimate aim’ (ibid.: 131).

Protracted war saps the energies of any state. Here Sun Zi’s recom-mendations blend with Imperial Confucianism. The collapse of the Qin dynasty was seen as an example of just that. Shih Huang Di’s thousands-strong terracotta army, discovered a few decades ago not far from his funeral hill in Xian, stands as a monument to both the splendour and the ultimate collapse of his reign. A Han era document (81 bc, as in Meyer and Allen 1970: 22–3) warns that heavy taxes to finance military campaigns are self-defeating in the end. ‘Such worship of profit and the slight of what is right, such exaltation of power and achievement, led, it is true, to expansion of land and acquisition of territory’, it states. ‘[The emperor] opened the way to imperial rule for the Qin ... but he also opened for the Qin the road to ruin!’ This was part of the Han verdict on Legalism and the return to a civil imperial ethics.

In the final codification of Imperial Confucianism under the Song, Sun Zi’s doctrine became the official textbook to be studied by all military officers (Xie Guoliang in Sun Zi 1995: 4–6). It still resonates in twentieth-century military doctrine (e.g. Mao 1966); but in the epoch when China was at the mercy of Western imperialists, the people in their despair might turn again to the mythical war gods of old. In the second Opium War with Britain and France in 1856, Christie records (1968: 108), it was widely believed that the war deity Guan Di had appeared in the sky to encourage the imperial forces.

Exchange. Prior to the Silk Route, the idea that distant lands might hold riches worth getting hold of was not very well developed. Hydraulic agriculture along the main rivers fostered autarky, and the Four Seas supposedly surrounding the empire were shrouded in mystery. Even the Eastern Sea was an imagined reality; the ancient capital cities of China were deep in the interior. Only in the Han period did overseas foreigners became part of the Chinese world-view, with the myth of the ‘Islands of the Blessed’. These were five wondrous islands in the Eastern Sea, perched over an abyss in the ocean (in the agricultural perspective, this abyss was interpreted as a drain protecting the land from floods; Christie 1968: 64). The islands were inhabited by the Immortals, bedecked with feathers and wings. A giant from Lung-po, fishing for the tortoises in which these islands (on the instruction of the Emperor of Heaven) had been anchored, cut two islands loose, sinking them near the North Pole. These details, with their echoes of Hindu and Egyptian myth, were provided by

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Lizi, an allegedly Daoist writer (his rendition of the myth however was probably a Han forgery; Mackenzie 1994: 110–11). Shih Huang Di, the same author records (ibid.: 118), dispatched a sage to the islands to get hold of the immortality fungus; but the emissary never returned. Japan of course comes to mind as the obvious reference for the Islands of the Blessed (just as the immortality fungus may have been Korean ginseng).

It has been argued (among others by Levathes 1994: 33) that Confucius considered trade an activity that interferes with familial obligations. Yet compared to the Qin Legalists, who considered merchants subversives, the Confucian tradition took a benign view of commerce (Duyvendak 1948: 64). One will not find much on trade in the Analects, but Mencius explicitly discusses it. True, he thought that chasing private profit disqualifies one as a gentleman; a merchant should not take part in government. Yet Mencius did advocate that the government create favourable conditions for trade (Meskill 1973: 27). If a ruler rewards talent, does not impose excessive taxes, and does not impose tariffs either (‘taxes on goods at the frontier’), he argues (ii, i, 5: 6, 1930: 547), ‘the people of neighbouring kingdoms will look up to him as a parent’. This was written in the context of the Warring States, but in the same passage it is said that ‘such a rule will not have an enemy in the empire, and the one who has no enemy in the empire is the minister of Heaven’ (i.e. can claim the title of actual emperor).

The reference to taxes on foods at the frontier takes us to tribute, the imperial form of exchange with barbarians. If internal trade might be looked on with suspicion as undermining unity, tribute was the confirmation of imperial status. Heguanzi highlights how hegemony and the integrity of the empire combine to ensure that tribute (that is, reasonably priced imports) keeps coming in. When the ruler acts in conformity with heavenly law, he writes (2008: 75, emphasis added),

the barbarians … and all the nations of the universe come to the court to pay homage, they bring the tribute without daring to overprice it and even less, to take from it. The most distant peoples, too, come pouring in, attracted by the ruler’s reputation of equitability, escorted by a flock of interpreters, without anyone dreaming of influencing the habits of the [empire’s] subjects or of changing its teachings.

Foreign traders with their exotic creeds in other words should enjoy the rights of access and incorporation and not be hindered

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by imperial decrees concerning religion (Giles 1915: 224), but they should not think of proselytising.

Now tribute could also be turned around, with the Chinese making net payments to the barbarians. This of course is anathema in imperial doctrine. Should such a situation occur, Mencius advised (i, ii, 15: 1–3, 1930: 507–9), one must either give up one’s land and resettle elsewhere, or fight to the death. This also explains the ambivalence concerning foreign trade. When as part of the codification of Imperial Confucianism, ‘Song philosophers reviewed the classical texts of the sages and began to discuss the merits of profit as a way of encouraging men to work for the good of the state’ (Levathes 1994: 41), this did not necessarily pertain to overseas trade. As Westerners began to make their appearance, often cheating and harassing the Chinese, the appetite for participating in seaborne trade diminished, just as pressures on the Inner Asian frontier increased. In 1597, a fictional account of the Treasure Fleet and admiral Zheng He, by Luo Maodeng (still according to Levathes 1994: 189–90), painted a dark image of taking to the ocean. Although warned that ‘nothing lay beyond the Western Sea’ (they are near Mecca), the fleet sails on for months and one of Zheng’s officers disembarks on a strange shore, where he encounters his deceased wife. Realising they have reached the underworld, they go on to discover heaven, mountains for the damned, and separate hells – a Dantesque, concentric inferno similarly inspired by the idea of a self-enclosed land empire.

It took until the revolution of 1949 for China to wrest itself free from imperialism. Confucianism went to the scrapheap, or so it seemed. In the Maoist Cultural Revolution, a ferocious campaign against it bears witness to its tenacity. This was confirmed when soon afterwards, China’s effort as a contender to Western hegemony switched to capitalist practices as the high road to modernisation. A new, pop version of Confucianism has emerged along with it. Fingleton (2008: 143) traces it to 1994,

when the People’s Daily called for a Confucian renaissance to fill the moral vacuum caused by ‘money worship.’ The regime has gone on to restore the Confucian classics to the secondary-school teaching curriculum. Abroad, it has been promoting Confucianism via branches of its recently established Confucius Institute.

Drawing on deep-seated cultural attitudes reproduced over millennia, neo-Confucianism thus complements a contender role combining the steady build-up of a rival power apparatus with a

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carefully calibrated approach that avoids head-on confrontation with the West.

Contending Buddhisms on China’s Frontier

Of the religions that percolated along China’s frontiers, Islam arrived through Central Asia, reaching as far as Indonesia. Yet it did not specifically develop as a counterpoint to Chinese imperial doctrine. Buddhism on the other hand, predating Islam by almost a millennium, did precisely that. Throughout its history it has displayed the versatility and adaptability characteristic of the frontier. ‘With its practical approach to the authority of scripture’, Eckel writes (2005: 151), ‘the Buddhist tradition has been remarkably flexible about developing new scriptures to respond to new cultural situations.’

Buddhism emerged in a Himalayan frontier formation, in the slipstream of Indo-European conquest. Gautama Buddha’s own clan of Kshatriya warriors, the Sakya, may have had Scythian origins (Saca is Iranian for Scythian; Grant 2001: 306). As a non-sacrificial, non-ethnic religion of renunciation and concentration, and having an egalitarian tendency (Senghaas 2002: 49), it resonated all along the Inner Asian frontier. The frontier tribes’ own religions often proved a fertile ground for it, and the Macedonian invasion of India in 327–326 bc was a catalyst in its spread. In the last chapter I mentioned how Ashoka, the grandson of Chandragupta Maurya (who seized power when Alexander withdrew), converted to Buddhism. In the subsequent dissemination of a synthetic Greco-Buddhism in the Hellenised states of Central Asia, a key role was played by the Kushan (Yuezhi in Chinese).

The Kushan, an Indo-European-speaking ethnos driven from Xingjian by Xiongnu nomads, in the first century bc established themselves further west on the Inner Asian frontier, in the Gandhara kingdom. Its capital was Bagram, today an American airbase in occupied Afghanistan. As noted in Volume I (2007: 72, 94), the Kushan rejected the offer of an alliance with the Han emperor, Wu Di, who then defeated the Xiongnu on his own. This victory cleared the way for a flourishing long-distance trade route through Central Asia, the Silk Road, and Buddhism, too, entered China along this route (Chakrabarti 2008: 64). In the first century ad, when the Kushan/Yuezhi ruler, Kanishka, threw his weight behind the Mahayana version of Buddhism (after the ‘large vessel’ for crossing the water to the land of salvation), this gave a mighty push to its spread. Whether

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Kanishka was actually a Buddhist himself is uncertain, but Kushan support for the religion is not in doubt (May 2003: 142–3). The imposing Greco-Buddhist statues at Bamyan (blown up by Islamist hardliners in 2001) were built by the Kushan in the sixth century.

In typical frontier fashion, Mahayana Buddhism is ‘almost infinitely open to what is at first sight foreign and new’, Jaspers writes (1964: 125). It worships bodhisattvas, holy persons who by their good works acquire divine status, not just their own salvation from rebirth (Eckel 2005: 134–5). The result has been a pantheon of deities and quasi-deities such as Avalokiteshvara (‘The Lord Who Looks Down’). Today Mahayana accounts for the majority of the estimated 350 to 380 million Buddhists, some 56 per cent of the total (Haynes 2007: 13). The southern, minority branch, Hinayana, ‘small vessel’, is more sectarian; in Sri Lanka and South-East Asia it has mutated into the politicised Theravada (‘old school’) Buddhism. It also retains the original Buddhist language, Pali; Mahayana switched to (the closely related) Sanskrit.

In China, Buddhism advanced into the empire, typically under dynasties of frontier origin, such as the Tang (618–907), and again under Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, in the late thirteenth century. In 1662, on the other hand, a Manchu emperor outlawed it entirely (Beal 1884: 94–6). This has not eradicated the religion; on the contrary. But both historically and in the contemporary context, Buddhism remains a frontier phenomenon. Let us look at three instances of how, on the perimeter of the empire, foreign societies – Japan, Tibet, and the Theravada belt that runs from Sri Lanka to South-East Asia – adopted a nationalised version of Buddhism.

Japan emerged as a tributary frontier formation of the Chinese empire. It had its own indigenous nature/ancestor religion, Shinto. The Sun goddess, Amaterasu, is its central deity; the Tenno (‘emperor’) is her avatar. In the late fourth century ad, Buddhism came to Korea, and two centuries later, via the Korean kingdom of Paekche (which sought good relations with Japan to offset dominant Silla; May 2003: 66), it reached the land of the Rising Sun. With it came Chinese art, philosophy, and science, putting the austere Shinto creed (which had no moral code, iconography, or any notion of reward or punishment in an afterlife) on the back foot. Only the deified emperor was left. A decree of the year 646 (as in Frazer 2000: 168) proclaimed the Tenno ‘the incarnate god who governs the universe’, but some form of accommodation between the indigenous and the foreign had to be achieved. Two Buddhist priests, Dengyo Daishi and Kobo Daishi, took

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up this task. Early in the ninth century they won the hearts of many Japanese by their beneficial works. Kobo Daishi among other things developed the kana phonetic alphabet from the Sanskrit scheme of sounds (Ostler 2006: 210–11), making Chinese character script easier to use for Japanese speakers. As Piggott writes (1969: 42–3), ‘double-aspect Shinto’ allowed Buddhist priests to take services in Shinto temples; Amaterasu was identified with Buddha, and so on. The fusion progressed further in the turbulent Kamakura period (the ‘long’ thirteenth century), when a bodhisattva, Amithaba (‘Infinite Light’), called Amida in Japan, won great popularity.

Zen, the Japanese version of a Chinese meditation technique, at the same juncture gave Buddhism a martial inflection, exemplified in the samurai warrior code. Zen, we read in Suzuki (one of the protagonists of the nationalist Buddhist school), encourages one to pursue a chosen course with the utmost concentration and without hesitation (1938: 4); it treats life and death indifferently. Jaspers (1964: 129) in this connection speaks of ‘heroic resignation’. Fighting on against all odds is one area in which this applies (although Zen equally inspires that most peaceful of rituals, the tea ceremony). As one Zen master of the Kamakura period put it in song (as in Suzuki 1938: 93),

The bow is broken,Arrows are all gone – This critical moment:No fainting heart cherish, Shoot, with might and main.

Throughout the nineteenth century, conservative Japanese nationalism militated against ‘foreign’ creeds; but only with the revolution from above in 1868 (the Meiji Restoration) was Shinto truly resurrected. With it, Piggott writes (1969: 43–4), ‘came a revival of the early Shinto precepts – the divine ancestry of the Emperor being paramount – and so “pure” Shinto was revived and became once more the national religion’. Buddhism was removed from temples and pagodas, but not suppressed; the two religions ‘merely separated’. However, the militarist infusion of Zen into the resurrected Shinto was highlighted when a prominent Japanese Buddhist rebuffed a proposal by Tolstoy jointly to condemn the Russo-Japanese War (May 2003: 75) – just as the Buddhist notion of sacrificing one’s small self for the larger self was revealed in the kamikaze ideology of the closing stages of the Second World War. Today around half the

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Japanese population are counted as Buddhists (Haynes 2007: 13). Yet the trajectory of its adoption may have left Japan, in the words of David Loy (as in May 2003: 79), ‘in a position where it cannot engage with the outside world through a transcendent universalism, a common globalised culture that includes a “bridge” of internalized universalistic principles’. Only time will tell whether this closure is a definitive one.

Tibet, an originally nomad society and one of the foreign enclaves within mainland China, is still part of the country’s inner frontier. Tibetan Buddhism goes back to the seventh century ad, when the Chinese wife of a Tibetan king brought images of the Buddha to the court in Lhasa (Richard 1908: 547). A century later, King Thrisong Detsen, working with Buddhists from India, seriously set about introducing the religion. It was not until the tenth century that Buddhism began to gain ground; in the process it branched out into at least four sects. The old shamanistic sorceries of the Tibetans were turned into Buddhist rituals, whilst the communities of monks were turned into an organised church with worldly authority (Jaspers 1964: 128). The title of Dalai Lama (‘ocean teacher’) was first bestowed on a Tibetan monk by a Mongol chief in the mid sixteenth century. The Dalai Lama’s remit was expanded under the fifth holder of the office a century later to include full religious and secular authority, in what was now a full-blown theocracy. The bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Chenrezig in Tibetan) is credited with the protection of the Tibetan nation; the Dalai Lama is his avatar (Eckel 2005: 136). In Senghaas’ view (2002: 51), Lamaism is therefore a departure from the original frontier equality and universalism, as it becomes attached to a single ethnos in a fusion of state and sangha, the community of believers.

The Chinese central government all along took a dim view of the proliferation of bodhisattvas. Once recognised, they would officiate as Grand Lamas, but the empire sought to limit their number. It kept an official register in the Li fan yuan, or Colonial Office, in Beijing, which in Frazer’s day (2000: 102–3) held 160 names of registered living gods. Tibet had 30; Northern Mongolia, 19; Southern Mongolia, 57; and so on. Tibet had a special dispensation for allowing the miracle births of Grand Lamas; the Mongols no longer had this privilege because (still according to Frazer),

the birth of a god in Mongolia [could] have serious political consequences by stirring the dormant patriotism and warlike spirit of the Mongols, who might

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rally round an ambitious native deity … and seek to win for him, at the point of the sword, a temporal as well as a spiritual kingdom.

When the Manchu authorities tightened their hold on Tibet in response to British attempts to gain control around the turn of the twentieth century, they ensured primacy for the Chinese resident in Lhasa by abducting and killing every Dalai Lama when he reached the age of around 18 (officially called ‘exile’; Richard 1908: 548). The actual king of Tibet, who was also a Lama (of which there were several hundred thousand, a huge drain on the province’s resources) was not important enough to pose such a threat.

After the 1949 revolution, as a youth of 15, the current Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, was forced to accept Communist rule. In 1959 a revolt was put down and the Dalai Lama was forced into exile in India. Resuming imperial practice, the Chinese government even produced its own toddler as his divine successor. As numbers have grown to an estimated 100 million, Buddhists all along the internal frontier of China are being carefully watched, but the Dalai Lama in India may no longer be the main threat. As Caryl highlights (2008: 22–4), the activities of itinerant spiritual instructors (who are not monks in the government-controlled temples) make Buddhism more difficult to control. As mouthpieces of the critique of corruption and environmental degradation, they have the potential for becoming an outright challenge to the government in Beijing. This has not been lost on the West. Between 1989, when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and 2007, when he accepted the Freedom Medal from US President George Bush, jun., Tibet has remained a focus of Western interest and a potential lever for destabilising the Chinese contender state.

Theravada Buddhism, finally, developed in Sri Lanka in the aftermath of Ashoka’s conversion. It spread across South-East Asia in the ensuing centuries (Vietnam got its Mahayana Buddhism from China) and was well established when admiral Zheng He made Sri Lanka a tributary of the Chinese empire in the early 1400s. By then the influence of Indian monasteries had declined, to the point where the tradition that accords worldly power its own sacral domain had vanished. In Theravada Buddhism, May explains (2003: 88), ‘the king was both chakravartin and bodhisattva, a quasi-divine being whose power was ennobled by his links with the sangha, the Buddhist monastic community’ (a chakravartin is the ‘wheel-turner’ who like the Buddha both conquers and renounces the world). ‘The ideal

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Buddhist king thus saw it as his duty to intervene and reform the sangha if he deemed it necessary.’

Meanwhile, the nationalist Jathika Hela Urumaya (JHU) party has given Sinhalese Buddhism a violent edge; Senghaas (2002: 45) even calls their programme racist. It is under the influence of the JHU that any reconciliation with (Hindu) Tamil separatists in Sri Lanka was ruled out. As Almond, Appleby, and Sivan note (2003: 163–8), there is a particular ambivalence in Theravada Buddhism which allows its militant adherents to define, in this case, Tamils as evil. It does not help that the mythical origin of Buddhism on the island is associated with an uprising against a Tamil king.

Further along the Theravada belt, politicised Buddhism in Thailand was suppressed by military rule. Yet its violent militancy is revealed in the conflict with Islamic rebels in the south (Caryl 2008: 22–4). A special case of militant Theravada Buddhism, however, is Burma. Buddhism, like Christianity and Islam, can be interpreted in socialist terms, as May explains (2003: 96), and the leadership of the Burmese independence movement sought inspiration from it for a left strategy. Its leader Aung San was assassinated in 1947, and U Nu, who led the country after independence in 1948, was ousted by a military coup in 1962 (he retired to a Buddhist monastery). Aung San’s daughter and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi today is the symbol of passive resistance to the dictatorship. Placed under perennial house arrest, the specifically Burmese Buddhist legacy shines through in her call for a spiritual revolution and a rejection of Western liberalism and capitalism. ‘It is not enough merely to call for freedom, democracy and human rights’, she has written (as in Eckel 2005: 210). ‘There has to be a united determination … to make sacrifices in the name of enduring truths, to resist the corrupting influence of desire, ill will, ignorance and fear.’

FRONTIER ORIGINS AND IMPERIAL TRANSFORMATION OF ROMAN CHRISTIANITY

Christianity, like Judaism a millennium earlier, was born in a frontier synthesis of imperial and nomadic elements. However, it broke radically with Judaic tribal exclusivity. Christianity emerged from the frontier before it was enthroned in one of the great land empires of history; just as it released itself from it within a century, to project a universe boundless in space and time. The universalism of Western Christianity is different from all other imperial cosmologies,

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including its Greek orthodox counterpart. The others are immanent universalisms; Christianity is a transcendent universalism (May 2003: 13).

After the crucifixion of Jesus at Golgotha, the Christian doctrine of love and forgiveness was spread abroad by Saul (c.5–67), a Jew from Tarsus on the Anatolian south coast. On account of his organi-sational talent and his tireless drive to turn a revolutionary idea into an enduring project, Gramsci (1971: 382) qualifies Paul (the Latin name Saul adopted upon his conversion) as the Lenin of Christianity. It was through him that the message of Jesus’ sacrifice to expiate humanity’s sins travelled along the frontier of the Roman empire and eventually into its very heart. Paul’s letters to the early Christian congregations constitute a key part of the New Testament, in which they follow the four gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.

There is little in the way of mythical content in the New Testament, although there have been attempts to interpret the gospel in terms of myth. Freud argues (1967: 111) that the crucifixion of Christ conforms to the archetypical myth of the social contract (discussed in Chapter 1), except that this time, not the father, but the son is killed, in the very act of repentance. Girard on the other hand has claimed (1996: 2) that the New Testament inverts history and mythical representation by providing a clue, from the viewpoint of mass psychology, to mythology generally. The key is the uniting of a crowd against a single victim. The crucifixion and John the Baptist’s death are examples. The mythical twist consists of ‘the voice of communities that unanimously surrender to the mimetic contagion of victimisation’. Here the pseudo-speciation prevalent in mythologised foreign relations plays out. It is inherent in the foreign encounter that the unusual appearance or behaviour of a stranger generates discomfort and mistrust; in a crowd this may turn lethal. In this sense the New Testament, Girard argues, provides insight into a general aspect of mythical foreignness.

Christian Universalism and the Apostolic–Hierarchical Divide

Christ’s innocence, the image of the (sacrificial) ‘lamb’, is no doubt at the core of the gospel. But Christianity also articulated a new individualised concern with good and evil that had its origins in the centres of commerce and learning of the resurgent, Hellenised East – cities like Antioch in what is now Turkey, or Alexandria in Egypt. The New Testament, written in Greek, spoke to this human type. As Vroon notes (1994: 405), the word ‘conscience’, absent from the (Hebrew)

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Old Testament, here features 31 times. The aspect of a personal calling is paramount; the text is full of calls to forgo solidarities of family, clan, and society, ‘and be part of the Kingdom’ (Taylor 2007: 155).

As it spread across the frontier systems of the empire, Christianity blended with other currents articulating the same shift. In the process, it was grafted onto older layers of Eastern mythology, just as it incorporated rival imaginaries. Of the mythological substratum, Frazer (2000: 293) mentions the practice of the Semites of Western Asia, in which a king in times of great peril to the community would surrender his son to be ritually killed. He also refers (ibid.: 345) to the Adonis myth (about the seasonal return of new life) and its many equivalents. If the crucifixion-cum-resurrection (Easter) for this reason was celebrated in the spring, the date of Christmas, 25 December, was borrowed from the cult of Zoroastrian Mithra, the Indo-Iranian deity of war referred to in the last chapter. Mithraism became popular among the Roman frontier legions as a martial doctrine of defeating evil, although de Menasce (1973: 193) points out that ‘in this context arms maintain order and discipline, not war’. The Manicheism incorporated into Christianity, the struggle between good and evil that still resonates today, thus goes back to an Indo-European imaginary alien to the gospel of love and forgiveness.

Pauline frontier Christianity also assimilated the spirit of Stoicism. The Stoic concept of the universality of human reason developed from the need to transcend the foreign in the formation of empire; first in the transition of the Greek world of the polis into the realm of Alexander ‘the Great’, and again when the Roman republic went through its imperial transformation. In the words of Kauppi and Viotti (1992: 96), ‘The size and anonymity of empire required a subject to develop a philosophy that was self-sustaining at the level of the individual, but also allowed that individual to relate to the polyglot world of empire’. The Stoa, the school of Zeno, a Phoenician Cypriot, at the close of the third century bc, took issue with Plato’s notion of an ideal state. For Zeno, only universal citizenship and a single system of law based on reason, would bring about a just society (Wagenvoort, in Seneca 1963: 7). When Paul, during his sojourn in Athens, was challenged by a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers, he claimed that the ‘unknown god’ to whom the Greeks had dedicated an altar as a precautionary measure was in fact the God he had come to speak about. Appealing to the Stoic understanding of universalism, Paul expounds how God ‘hath made of one blood all nations of men to dwell on all the face of the earth’ (Acts 17: 26).

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In the same breath, however, recognising the contradictory unity of humanity and community, he credits God with determining ‘the boundaries of their living areas’. For the Chinese, as noted above, this is just what violates the sacred order.

Roman Stoics included Cicero, a senator under the republic, who defined natural law (as in Kauppi and Viotti 1992: 102) as ‘right reason in agreement with nature’, and Seneca. A native of Spain during the early empire (he was Nero’s teacher), Seneca argued the identity of nature and the divine. He advocates universal equality, even between free men and slaves (letters 41, 47; 1963: 108–21). ‘We are born into a kingdom’, he wrote (as in Taylor 2007: 115); ‘to obey God is to be free.’ Augustine (v: 8, 1984: 189) makes much of Seneca’s reference to a ‘Father supreme, thou sovereign of the heavens’, and also quotes Cicero’s remarks about Jupiter as the supreme God. Much more important (as it was also for Augustine’s own political theology) was their cosmopolitanism. Paul’s ambition was to turn Christianity into a non-ethnic, universal religion, for which he was willing to drop the Jewish idea of a chosen people. Freud (1967: 112) sees Paul’s decision to abandon the practice of circumcision (Romans 2 and 3) in this light.

The frontier advance of Christianity culminated in Carthage, in today’s Tunisia. Once the Phoenician rival to Roman pre-eminence and by then one of the empire’s African possessions, Carthage preceded the imperial capital as a centre of Christianity in the West. Tertullian, the elder (presbyter) of the city’s Christian community at the close of the second century, was the most important theologian of his age (Augustine too was a North African). Carthaginian Christianity, however, like radical Protestantism later, was based on apostolic communion: believers revered each other as incarnations of the divine (Frazer 2000: 361). This limited the admission of new adherents, and, in the early third century, the rival idea gained ground that sinners, even cardinal sinners, could repent and be admitted again. Rome was the centre of this mutation. In the capital, converts in the early centuries were overwhelmingly recruited from the lower strata, often slaves from the eastern provinces. The Christian community in Rome, in Haller’s words (1965: 24), was ‘a Great Oriental island in Latin Italy’. From this netherworld sprang the idea of readmitting sinners – and for good reason. Wasn’t its key exponent, Kallistos (Callistus), a slave from the dockyards who had at one point been banished to Sardinia for embezzlement? That such

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a man could become bishop of Rome (from 217 to 222) sums up the capital’s original Christian milieu.

Paradoxically, the Carthaginian Christians supported Kallistos in one key respect. This concerned his claim that the bishop of Rome derives his authority from Jesus’ disciple, Peter. The theory of apostolic succession from Peter had in fact been developed in Carthage; it was Tertullian who argued (as in Barraclough 1968: 15) that the succession went back to Jesus’ proclaiming Peter as ‘the rock on which the Church would be built’. Yet this statement (Matthew 16: 18; no other gospel mentions this crucial investiture) can only be fiction. It dates, Haller surmises (1965: 12), from ad 70 at the earliest. The other reason why Carthage’s Christians supported Rome’s claims to primacy was that the capital was home to the only apostolic church in the West, whereas there were several in the East. To contain sectarian division in (Western) Christianity, still in its infancy and subject to highly divergent influences, centralisation under Rome was mandatory.

The issue of apostolic communion versus hierarchical church came to a head when the last of the Severian emperors was brought down in 235. As easterners, the Severians had been tolerant in religious matters; but the new emperor, Decius, ordered a return to the old Roman religion. Facing persecution and harassment, many Christians caved in and made the required sacrifices. They had not developed a practice of resistance except for the martyrdom that had confused and impressed the Romans. The irenic doctrine of early Christianity played out here, and as Engelhardt explains (1980: 73), there wouldn’t have been any point in fighting, given Christ’s imminent return. When the repression subsided, however, the Christian communion faced a dilemma: could those who had failed to stand up for their religion as martyrs (literally, ‘witnesses’) be admitted into the Church again, or not? From Portugal to Anatolia, Haller records (1965: 33–4), the fracture pitted Christian communities again each other. At stake was whether Christianity would be an imperial, hierarchical church, or a restricted communion of the ‘pure’ (Greek, kathar; the German word for heretic, Ketzer, is derived from it). Roman primacy and apostolic succession came together naturally in the introduction of an enhanced role for the priesthood. Priests after all were entitled to absolve sin and, as representatives of God on earth, to readmit perpetrators into the church.

The imperial perspective prevailed when Bishop Stephan of Rome decreed that the kathars should be allowed back into the Church without a new baptism, since they were not really heretics, only

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schismatics. Political imperatives played their own role in the triumph of the imperial view and Edward Gibbon (as in Taylor 2007: 240–1) is no doubt correct that by then the authorities were completely cynical about religion. In the words of Barraclough (1968: 22), ‘The emperors were ready to resort to any authority which might serve as a unifying force, and among these the church of Rome, with the prestige it derived from St Peter, was eminent.’ However, as the empire vacillated between tolerance and suppression (the final attempt to root out the Christians was abandoned in 313), its ability to withstand the pressure of the Germanic frontier tribes was steadily diminishing. Christianity’s fate would somehow have to be dissociated from it, or the Church would go down with the (Western) empire. This was an explosive question, because the world-view current at the time suggested that the Roman empire was the fourth and last empire of world history. Were it to end, Kleinschmidt writes (2000: 22–4), it was believed – in line with the prophecy in the Book of Daniel – that the world would end too.

Salvaging Christianity from Roman Imperial Decline

Augustine (Aurelius Augustinus, 354–430), of Hippo near Carthage, converted to Christianity in his thirties, briefly before Emperor Theodosius in 394 made it the official religion of the empire. Christianity’s insertion into the structure of empire swelled the ranks of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, as the upper classes were keen to assume the dignity and advantages it bestowed. ‘The preceding decades had shown that the dissolving empire was in need of new and more powerful glue than could be provided by the exhausted traditions of the past. It offered itself in the Christian church’, Haller concludes (1965: 44).

However, as noted, centrifugal forces as well as population pressures on the frontier heralded the demise of the empire. The Goths, prominent among the frontier peoples advancing into the imperial heartland, had followed some of the early Christianised Roman emperors in adopting Arian Christianity. Arianism holds that Jesus as the Son of God is not equal to God the Father (Kishlansky, Geary, and O’Brien 1993: 173–7). It was condemned as heresy by the Council of Nicaea in 325 in a session presided over by Emperor Constantine, but the Goths saw no reason to comply. Constantine, in classical imperial fashion, wanted to be head of the Church himself and was averse to the claims of the papacy. He also transferred his capital to Byzantium, which further diminished the status of Rome

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and the popes. It certainly did not suggest much of an ability to call in God’s help when the Goths under Alaric in 410 sacked the city. Emperor Valentinian III three decades later even suppressed the papacy altogether in favour of councils (Barraclough 1968: 22–3). Not long afterwards, however, the pope restored his battered reputation when, in a private conversation with the Hun conqueror, Attila, right under the gates of Rome, he succeeded in making him turn around and leave Italy, never to return.

It was the Goths’ raid on Rome that prompted Augustine to begin work on The City of God. Because the attackers were Christians, many in the imperial capital asked whether the humiliating experience was not punishment for the Romans’ abandonment of their long-estab-lished religion. Augustine took up the challenge. First and foremost, by distinguishing the Civitas Dei (‘The City [better, Polity] of God’) from the worldly empire. Earthly existence is only a temporary approximation of a transcendent sphere, eternity. Yet there exists a dialectical relation between human history and the realisation of this transcendent universe. From the fact that imperial unification culminated in the birth of Jesus (‘When the [Roman] emperor’s rule had established a worldwide peace, Christ was born’, xviii: 46, 1984: 827), Augustine deduces that the process was intended to bring a different empire into view (v: 16, 1984: 205). ‘The Heavenly City outshines Rome, beyond comparison. There, instead of victory, is truth; instead of high rank, holiness; instead of peace, felicity; instead of life, eternity’ (ii: 29, 1984: 87).

Hence, as O’Meara writes (in Augustine 1984: xxvi):

The City of God is not an attack on the Romans or the Roman Empire. On the contrary it sees Rome as a vehicle ordained by Providence for the benefit of Christianity in relation to which she would have a new and enduring future.

Yet the most important constellation is henceforth the universality of eternity. The worldly empire may wither, but it will not take Christianity down with it. This also allowed Augustine to acknowledge the diversity of human communities, in the spirit of Paul in Athens, without too much concern. ‘The society of mortal men spread everywhere over the earth’, he writes (xviii: 2, 1984: 762),

and amid all the varieties of geographical situation it still was linked together by a kind of fellowship based on a common nature, although each group pursued its own advantages and sought the gratification of its own desires … Hence

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human society is generally divided against itself, and one part of it oppresses another, when it finds itself the stronger.

There is no doubt, in other words, about their common humanity. Yet ‘when men cannot communicate their thoughts to each other, simply because of difference of language, all the similarity of their common human nature is of no avail to unite them in fellowship’ (xix: 7, 1984: 861). True, the Pax Romana had established dominion over many foreign peoples. But even disregarding the terrible price paid for it, the peace thus imposed only engendered ‘wars of a worse kind, namely, social and civil wars’. For Augustine, the ultimate pacification of internecine strife can only be provided in the hereafter. Again the contrast with the Chinese solution to the contradiction between community and humanity (an affirmation of self-sufficient empire) stands out starkly.

Augustine also devotes many pages to mocking the Roman gods. They apparently cannot handle even the most minute task; to open a door, the dedicated god (Janus) must be lent a hand by the god of the hinges, and so on. Would such deities have protected Rome from the Goths? The Christian God is of a different order. The divine here is pure transcendence, something that beckons in the distance, a beyond that cannot be equated or reduced to a worldly imperial structure. This idealistic turn owed much to Plato, Augustine’s key philosophical inspiration. In the Augustinian scheme, intelligibil-ity is superior to sensibility, ‘life’ to ‘matter’ (viii: 6, 1984: 308). Since, Augustine argues (viii: 6, 1984: 308), the idea of something cannot be reduced to somebody having that idea (given that the idea develops, and people differ in their understanding), the idea must exist separately. Hence the notion of God as a transcendent, spiritual reality towering high over humanity and its internal fissures, holding out ultimate redemption. Platonism prescribes, as Taylor puts it (2007: 275–6), that we ‘reach our highest state in a condition beyond the body; being incarnate is a hindrance’. This tends towards disembodiment, towards a timeless condition beyond history.

The idealistic, Platonic turn of Christianity also allowed Augustine to take the notion of ‘just war’ developed by the Stoics a step closer to ‘holy war’. Thus it would function in the Crusades. Ambrose of Milan had already moved in this direction by arguing that against the pagans, all means of warfare are permitted. Augustine (who converted to Christianity after having met Ambrose) declares war ‘just’ if it is waged for the ‘City on high’ (xv: 4, 1984: 599–600). Without really

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elaborating an integral Christian doctrine of just war, Augustine sanctions punitive war waged on moral grounds, ‘humanitarian intervention’ as we would call it today (Engelhardt 1980: 77). We are not far removed from the idea that against ‘terrorists’, everything is allowed. ‘It is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging wars’, Augustine writes (xix: 7, 1984: 862). Only in the Heavenly City may we expect ‘everlasting peace which no adversary can disturb’ (xix: 10, 1984: 864; a ‘perpetual Sabbath’, xxii: 30, 1984: 1087). Certainly Augustine was conscious of the horrors of war, Engelhardt maintains (1980: 78), but ultimately he condoned the extreme violence applied, in the name of Christianity, by the North African bishop Donatus. Thus came into being the ‘political Augustinianism’ that would earn Augustine the title of ‘father of the Inquisition’.

The fall of Rome inadvertently raised the imperial aspirations of the papacy. But there was still an empire surviving in the East. In a first reaction to events, Pope Gelasius I sent a letter to the emperor in Constantinople explaining that their offices were distinct, yet part of an interrelated whole. The Augustinian mutation however implied that whatever happened in the East would not affect the enduring sovereignty of the Christian creed. The political ascent of the papacy was expressed in the new concept of hierarchy, sacred rule, a stratified heavenly order to be replicated on earth. The notion was coined in the second half of the fifth century by a Syrian, Denys the Areopagite, or ‘Pseudo-Denys’, because he claimed to be the Dionysios who was a companion of Paul in the Acts of the Apostles (17: 33–4; Ullmann 1965: 31). At the close of the sixth century Pope Gregory I built on the concept, casting his domain as the societas reipublicae christianae, the Society of the Christian Commonwealth. Various forgeries, notably the ‘Donation of Constantine’, were adduced in support of the claim that ultimate sovereignty resided with the papacy.

In the West, however, Germanic frontier spirit imbued Roman institutions with what Ullmann (1965: 51) characterises as a ‘virile, assertive, and forward-looking’ culture. In combination with the persistent tendency of worldly rulers to reclaim the lost ground, forcing the popes to trump them in matters of sovereignty, this lent Western Christianity the expansionist thrust that culminated in the Crusades. Charlemagne had The City of God read to him and concluded that the Heavenly City was his own empire (although his court theologian, Alcuin, cautioned against such a view; Engelhardt 1980: 79–80). Crowned by the pope in 800, Charlemagne got away

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with the title of ‘Roman Emperor’ only because Byzantium was at the time embroiled in a succession crisis; in 812 the title had to be returned to Constantinople, and Charlemagne was left with just ‘emperor’ (Kleinschmidt 2000: 40–1). Towards the end of the millennium, however, the East had lost much of its clout. It certainly could no longer contest the designation ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’, established in 962, with papal blessing, by Otto of Saxony. The emperor in Byzantium henceforth was seen from Rome as a mere Greek ruler, who might be called whatever he liked, king or even emperor, but who lacked the Roman insignia and the connection to the apostolic succession from Peter.

Paradoxically, as a real empire and not a transcendent one, Byzantium was both stronger and more limited than Western Christianity. ‘Universal territorial claims, as the successor of the Imperium Romanum, were the permanent principle of its foreign policy’, Anderson writes (1996: 276). But precisely because it retained the immanent, self-sufficient universalism of classical empire, Byzantine aspirations stopped at the frontier. Neither did the Greek Orthodox church, facing a powerful imperial administrative machine, stand a chance of becoming a quasi-imperial power like its Western counterpart. Its bishops were often divided over doctrinal matters, and sacred power had to be shared with monks and itinerant holy men (Kishlansky, Geary, and O’Brien 1993: 178). In addition, the empire was more urban, but towns did not enjoy Western-style freedoms; it was wealthier, but had an effective tax regime imposed on it. Indeed Byzantium in many respects was closer to a territorial state than any political unit of Western Christianity. But this precisely made it weak in the transcendent domain.

In 1054, when the Patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius, attempted to change this by claiming to represent all of Christianity, he was excommunicated by Rome. After letters from Pope Leo IX failed to rein in his ambition, an inspection by Roman dignitaries concluded (as in Hallam 1997: 33) that the patriarch had strayed from Latin ritual by allowing priests to marry, refusing communion ‘to those who shave and cut their hair’, and committing various other doctrinal and liturgical errors. There was no doubt, however, about the real motive behind the excommunication, which also strengthened papal autonomy from worldly power in the West. In 1059, the Church decreed that popes could only by appointed by a college of cardinals – a direct challenge to the Holy Roman Emperors. Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) finally ensured that the hierocratic

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ideology emerged victorious in the investiture conflict with the German emperor. Neither did the excommunication episode suspend the papacy’s enduring claim to sovereignty over Byzantium. Pope Victor III, in a letter to Empress Anna of Byzantium dated 1087 (as in Hallam 1997: 32) in which he complained about taxes levied on pilgrims, expressed his desire ‘that your Excellency enjoy perpetual might and that you remember, as you should, the Roman Church, your first and rightful mother’. Two years later, Pope Urban II, lifting the excommunication, asked for the reopening of the Latin churches in the East. After another five years, relations had so much improved that Emperor Alexius could invoke the aid of Western Christianity for help against the advancing Seljuk Turks – the response was the First Crusade.

The pope’s aspirations and the military prowess of his Norman auxiliaries, in combination with Venetian aspirations to acquire control over the eastern Mediterranean, soon turned against Byzantine interests again. The Fourth Crusade was even diverted to Constanti-nople, when the Crusaders ran into difficulty over remunerating the Venetians for naval transport. As related by Villehardouin, one of the Christian knights (1908: 16), they then paid off their debts by fighting for Venice – capturing Constantinople for the Venetians in 1204. A furious letter from Pope Innocent III, speaking (as in Hallam 1989: 211) of ‘pointless diversions and feigned commitments’, threatened them with excommunication; but it arrived too late. Not that the popes were averse to reducing the influence of Orthodox Christianity and peripheral Byzantine; this was one reason behind papal support for the German colonisation programme along the Baltic coast and into Russia. But that did not mean they were not brothers in Christ.

In the end, Byzantium held out until the closing decades of the Middle Ages. Anderson (1996: 275–6n.) is right, however, to highlight Gibbon’s conclusion that compared to the world-historic collapse of Rome in 476, that of Byzantium in 1453 was merely ‘passively connected’ to revolutionary developments elsewhere.

CRUSADERS AND MUSLIMS

The Crusades even today represent a powerful reference, both to Western imperialists dressing in the colours of Christianity, and in the Muslim world suffering from invasion and oppression. The original Crusades were frontier campaigns of Western Christianity, an outward thrust that also included the Norman conquest of Sicily and

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England, the colonisation of the Baltic lands, and the Reconquista. But whereas the Atlantic frontier of Western Christianity lay open to exploration and expansion, in the Mediterranean and the Middle East, Islam had established itself as the one frontier phenomenon Christianity could not accommodate, the quintessential outsider for the West (Said 1995: 70–1; Rich 1999). However close Islam may be to Christianity on account of their shared Judaic lineage, the fact that the two religions developed across an imperial frontier left a deep cleavage which still in our own time retards mutual incorporation and understanding.

Let us go over the different aspects of the frontier encounter as they were elaborated ideologically in the epoch of the Crusades. First, sovereignty and protection.

Religious Sovereignty and Doctrines of Warfare

The crusading turn of Western Christianity would unfold the full potential of imperial universalism and the frontier spirit contained within it, even vis-à-vis the East. The office of the papacy would in the process be cast, in Ullmann’s words (1965: 61), as ‘a veritable copy of the Eastern king and priest; he became a papal emperor’. The basis for this concept goes back to Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux (1090–1153). A member of the militant Cistercian order, Bernard was successful in preaching for a second Crusade, by speaking (as in Hallam 1989: 124–5) of the enemies of Christianity as ‘dogs’ and ‘swine’. This entailed, among other things, pogroms of Jews in the Rhineland when his call was heeded.

Bernard’s ‘two swords’ theory was based on Luke 22: 38. The gospel quotes an apostle saying to Jesus, ‘Behold, here are two swords’, to which Jesus replies, ‘That is enough’ – perhaps no more than an ‘OK’ in modern parlance. Yet Bernard deduced from this passage that the pope possessed both swords, one signifying spiritual, the other, worldly sovereignty. In the coronation, one sword was entrusted to a worldly ruler, who thus ruled ‘by the grace of God’. It was this doctrine that inspired Pope Innocent III, during whose term of office (1198–1216) papal imperial pretensions reached their pinnacle (Ullmann 1965: 110); one more reason why, as noted above, he did not want the Crusaders to turn against Byzantium.

Such an imperial hierarchy has no purchase in Islam. Islam is an egalitarian religion which, true to its tribal origins, sits uneasily with fixed authority. The closest Arab equivalent to the Western concept of ‘state’, dawla, does not have the ‘static’ connotation but has its

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root in a notion of ‘taking turns’, ‘revolving’ (al-Barghouti 2008: 56). Certainly the successors of the Prophet, the caliphs, were supposed to combine supreme political and religious sovereignty (they were also to hold the imamate, supreme guide of the Umma, the community of believers). But the centrifugal forces inherent in the tribal way of life soon reasserted themselves. The Prophet himself expected (as in Ibn Khaldun 1967: 281) that ‘the caliphate after me will last thirty years; then it will revert to being tyrannical authority’. There also exists a saying (hadith, as in Al-Islam 2009: 2) in which Mohammed predicts that the Umma ‘will shortly break up into seventy-three sects, all of which shall be condemned except one’. The major split occurred with the designation of the first caliph – the orthodox majority (Sunni), followed Abu Bakr; the Shia minority sided with the Prophet’s son-in-law and cousin, Ali Ibn Abi Talib as imam and caliph.

Conflicts within Islam, to quote al-Barghouti (2008: 7), from the beginning ‘revolved around purely political questions concerning the form of government, [that is,] the rights, responsibilities and powers of the ruler and the ruled’. Initially this was hardly a major issue; it is uncertain whether Mohammed even considered Islam a political religion, although it was later claimed that he dispatched embassies to the emperor of Byzantium and the king of Persia (Rajewsky 1980: 26–8). But as Islam spread, opportunities for political operators multiplied too. In 750, the Abbasid revolt against the Ummayads of Damascus established the eponymous caliphate, with Baghdad the capital (its unrivalled splendour as a centre of civilisation prompted Charlemagne to seek diplomatic relations; Kleinschmidt 2000: 40). In the tenth century, the heterodox Fatimids in Egypt and Palestine established their own caliphate, and the caliphate of Cordoba was set up in El-Andalus (Spain). Under the umbrella of these caliphates, many more separate kingdoms (sultanates and emirates) sprang up.

The theological and political differences between the sects running through Islam have both class and ethnic aspects. The twelfth imam of the Shia, Mohammed al-Mahdi (twelfth in line from Ali) disappeared in 873–4. He is believed to live in the occult and is expected to return as the Mahdi (‘the divinely guided’) to re-establish the rule of Ali and apply Islamic law. This messianic belief, Rajewsky writes (1980: 19), has always had a powerful effect on the downtrodden; it also helped the Shiites to survive the worst Abbasid persecutions. Not unlike Christian martyrs in Rome, they suffered in the belief that the return of their saviour was imminent. When the Iranians

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seceded to embrace Shiism, they adopted the Shia of the Twelve. It became the state religion under Shah Ismail in the early sixteenth century and again in 1979 with the Iranian revolution. It remains the most widespread form of Shia Islam, accounting for about a tenth of all Muslims.

The Ismailists of Egypt and Palestine (from whom descend the Druses of Syria and Lebanon) were also Shiites, although Rodinson (1972: 118–19) defines them primarily by reference to their Hellenistic rationalism. Several other sects have persisted over the centuries. But just as in the Western, imperial perspective the bond with other Christians remained intact, the Umma too was never completely split. Around the turn of the millennium, a Sunni thinker, Mawardi, already insisted (as in al-Barghouti 2008: 49) that, whilst there could only be a single imam, the followers of a false imam could count on a leniency that was not available to the infidel, because their fault was not apostasy but baghy, transgression. ‘The purpose of fighting them is to deter rather than destroy them.’ This takes us to the subject of protection.

Doctrines of warfare. The Crusades germinated in the apocalyptic atmosphere of the eleventh century, when visions of the end of the world were rife. The papacy sought to channel the new religious fervour of the age into campaigns to enhance not only their own primacy, but also Western Christianity’s sway over Byzantium and Islam. Early reports on the persecution of Christians and Jews in Palestine by the mad Caliph Al-Hakim provided a focus. To prepare for military adventures, Pope Gregory VII gave an important twist to the Augustinian doctrine of just war when he spoke (as in Hallam 1989: 34) of ‘the warfare of Christ’. This made war as much an act of piety as withdrawing into a monastery. In 1085, Anselm of Lucca (as in Engelhardt 1980: 81) formulated the right of the Church to use violence against ‘heretics, excommunicated, enemies of the peace and unbelievers’. ‘Power over infidels’, Ullmann sums up the doctrinal consensus (1965: 125), ‘belonged to the Christians, and above all to the pope’.

Norman frontier warriors were the executors of this mandate. Indeed, the concept of Christian holy war and its implication of genocide ‘during these years owed a great deal to the Normans’, Douglas writes (2002: 97). ‘It … imparted a unifying principle to most of the enterprises they undertook. No explanation of what the Normans accomplished between 1015 and 1100 can thus afford to ignore their close association with the development of this idea.’

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The justification of aggression took a further step on the eve of the Second Crusade of 1147. The Decretum of Gratian, a papal jurist, addresses the issue of whether war is sinful. Gratian argued (as in Engelhardt 1980: 83) that ‘the requirement of patience is not so much to be observed in the action of the body as in the inclination of the heart’ – in other words, the physical act of violence does not suspend Christian love. Whether the right to wage war for the faith accrues to the empire of Western Christianity (pope or emperor) or to lesser princes was not settled by the Decretum; but that non-Western, even Christian powers did not enjoy this right was beyond dispute. When the Crusaders were exposed to ‘Greek fire’, a burning oil distillate launched from bronze tubes in naval combat, developed by the Byzantines and copied by the Arabs, the Second Lateran Council of 1139 outlawed the use of this type of projectile as constituting a mortal sin (Goudsblom 2001: 168–9). Even today, nuclear weapons remain proscribed for others, while the West’s own arsenals are being upgraded and modernised (Rotblat 2003).

In actual warfare with desert Arabs, the ironclad Normans with their massive horses were easily outmanoeuvred. A Latin commentary on Richard the Lionheart’s exploits in the Third Crusade (as in Hallam 1989: 189) notes that ‘the Turks, unlike our men, are not weighed down with armour, so they are able to advance more rapidly … When forcibly driven off they flee on very swift horses, the fastest in the world, like swallows for speed.’ As soon as the pursuit was abandoned, however, they would return to harass the Crusaders again. Ibn Khaldun, the fourteenth-century historian, describes (1967: 227) how the Arabs in the early Islamic conquests still fought in closed formation. Their enemies fought in fixed battle lines, and the Muslims wanted to show their fearlessness and religious zeal by forgoing their normal way of warfare. They only regained the advantage of mobile warfare when they shifted to a combined form of light cavalry for fast attack and withdrawal, with lines of troops in the rear to steady the battle order. The rulers of the Maghreb to that end employed European Christians as mercenaries, leaving the cavalry role to the Arabs. Surprise and deception are crucial to the mobile warfare of nomads; as Ibn Khaldun quotes the Prophet (1967: 229), ‘war is trickery’. But Mohammed apparently also observed (as in ibid.: 224) that a closed formation prevents the risk of withdrawal turning into a rout.

Ibn Khaldun relates the different forms of warfare directly to the mode of foreign relations (1967: 97). Tribal protection involves

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defence ‘by a tribal militia composed of noble youths of the tribe who are known for their courage’; a sedentary formation such as a city on the other hand is exposed to surprise attack and must rely on walls or the deployment ‘of government auxiliary troops’. To Said’s ironic question (1995: 304), ‘Is one to assume that there is an Islamic mode of war different, say, from Christian warfare?’, the answer therefore must be, yes – not because of the religions per se, but because of the type of foreign relations in which they are projected.

The sea early on proved a natural element for the Arabs even though initially they had little feel for it. One of their warriors described it as an element on which weak creatures ride – like ‘worms in wood’. But this ‘Bedouin attitude’ soon changed, and the Arabs began to develop great nautical skills:

The non-Arab nations became servants of the Arabs and were under their control. Every craftsman offered them his best services. They employed seagoing nations for their maritime needs. Their own experience of the sea and of navigation grew, and they turned out to be very expert. They wished to wage the holy war by sea. (Ibn Khaldun 1967: 208–9)

The ultimate advantage, again according to Ibn Khaldun (1987: 131), is a religious one (here he differs from ‘technicians’ of war such as Sun Zi in China). ‘Dominion can only be secured by victory, and victory goes to the side which shows most solidarity and unity of purpose.’ Religious fervour in this respect is superior even to the nomad asabya, Ibn Khaldun’s key concept, to which we return later. So when the Zenata (a Berber ethnos) were subjugated by the Islamic Musamida, ‘the Zenata were more savage and nomadic … yet [the Musamida], by following the Mahdi, acquired a religious fervour which redoubled their strength and enabled them to overthrow and subjugate the Zenata, in spite of the Zenata’s being more cohesive and nomadic’ (Ibn Khaldun 1987: 132–3).

Crusading knights such as Joinville, the thirteenth-century chronicler of the Crusade of the French king Louis IX, also recognised the fury of true believers. Referring apparently to Shiites (Bedouins who are not Muslim but believe in ‘the uncle’ – actually cousin and son-in-law – of the Prophet, Ali), Joinville (1908: 197–8) explains their courage by the fatalistic belief that the date of a man’s death has been set in advance. He may also have encountered Ghazis or Murabits (‘mounted frontiersmen’), volunteers for jihad who fought in the most exposed positions and who overcame fear by religious ecstasy. As Gibb notes (in Ibn Battuta 2001: 33), they often drifted

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into brigandage and were later superseded by Sufis (mystics who took the concept of jihad into the spiritual realm and would be more similar to Christian monks), who likewise had precursors among the crusading orders. From Arab aristocrats, and especially from the successful Kurdish commander Saladin (Salah al-Din, who recaptured the Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem for the Seljuks in 1187), the Crusaders on the other hand learned ‘chivalry’, in the sense of a combination of courteousness and generosity towards the vanquished. The Arabs in turn, although superior in medical matters, were not averse to adopting from the Franks treatments they found useful (Ibn Munqidh 1986: 161–2). This takes us to the subject of exchange.

Intellectual and Cultural Exchange in the Epoch of the Crusades

The mediaeval Mediterranean frontier typically functioned as a dense system of interfaces and switches by means of which achievements from both sides offered themselves for adoption or rejection. In the end, the struggle between Western Christianity and Islam ended in a stalemate that lasted until the twentieth century, when the offensive was resumed. The West, however, held an overwhelming advantage in this second round – a fact that can be traced back to its having been the net beneficiary of the original encounter.

There is an entire complex of conditions which determined this outcome. Hegel’s famous argument, that the West became civilised only in the process of expansion, is one. In the later stages, endogenous developments, such as urbanisation and the growth of commerce, were important too. The corporative organisation of mediaeval society, for which Roman law provided the rules, in combination with the rivalries between worldly and religious office holders, from the pope and the emperor down, in addition allowed separate branches of activity to profit from an internal balance of forces and develop at arm’s length from each other. In Islam, which lacks the hierarchical chains of command and the separation of religion from politics, such spaces could not easily open up; orthodoxy and the fear of heresy were always just around the corner. Neither does Muslim law recognise the concept of legal personality as in Roman law. As a result of this, Lal highlights (2001: 63), the corporative organisation of society sustaining relatively autonomous fields of activity did not come about in Islamic society.

The caliphs in Islam early on had to cede matters of religious orthodoxy and Islamic law to the ulama, the religious scholars. As a

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result the courts of caliphs, sultans, and emirs often became centres of philosophical speculation. ‘Precisely because the ruler at Baghdad or Cordóba was a theocrat manqué‚ whose religious claims were always overshadowed by the truly devout of the religious schools’, Collins writes (1998: 394), ‘court circles could tend toward the opposite pole of speculation or occasionally downright secularism.’ Avicenna (the bastardised form of Ibn Sina, 980–1037) provides an example of such a court philosopher. Hailing from the region of the Aral Sea in today’s Uzbekistan, Avicenna taught himself philosophy and medicine in the library of the Sultan of Bokhara. He took the distinction between essence and existence from Aristotle, to which he added a distinction (within existence) between necessary and non-necessary being. Thus he arrived at an understanding of aspects of existence which are not necessary but not impossible either, opening the way to understanding the contingent (Collins 1998: 419) – a crucial category in creating social space and legitimate diversity.

Avicenna’s insights found little resonance in the Islamic heartland. Here a reactionary trend in matters of learning set in by the turn of the millennium. This took the form of a conformist Sunni movement against the free-thinking spirit of the Ismailists and other schismatics, mixed with a desire to go back to the pure religion of the Prophet’s lifetime. Rodinson sees this (1972: 118–20) as arising from a popular movement in response to economic decline as the age of Abbasid prosperity drew to a close. Discontent was easily mobilised against blasphemous courtiers who philosophised whilst the people suffered. This was not a matter of limitations inherent in Islam, but ‘of ideology which adapts itself to the necessities of a society mired in stagnation’. Yet with the return to orthodoxy and the emphasis on God’s all-powerful presence, the space to speculate about voluntarism or determinism, cause and consequence, was closed again, confiscated by theology (Lal 2001: 57). It is a sign of the depth of the conformist Sunni movement that in 1095 al-Ghazali, a critic of Avicenna and the spokesman of conservative reaction against doctrines of free will and causality (stressing instead that God is the cause of everything), had to flee Baghdad himself (Collins 1998: 421–2; Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ‘Ghazali’). Ibn Khaldun (1967: 352) calls al-Ghazali the first of the ‘school of recent scholars’ who ‘considered the (philosophers) enemies of the articles of faith’.

Coming out of its own dark ages and starved of knowledge, the Christian side of the frontier with Islam on the other hand was eager to learn. When the Normans conquered Sicily there was a

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considerable exodus of Arabic scholars to Morocco and Spain, but the new ruler, Roger I, was keen to recruit the expertise of his remaining Muslim subjects. Douglas records (2002: 223) how Roger employed Muslim administrators and soldiers, whilst Arabic letters continued to flourish. Roger II (1129–54) had a study of geography written for him by al-Idrisi (F. Rosenthal in Ibn Khaldun 1967: 50n.). It was completed in 1154 ‘for the comfort of those who wish to go round the earth’ (as in Douglas 2002: 408). Apparently Roger took a very active interest in this project. It is a reminder of the extent to which outward-looking Christian spiritual leaders at this point were eager to test their own views against those of Islam that the abbot of Cluny, Pierre ‘the Venerable’, proposed engaging in an intellectual contest with Islam. Given that Cluny had been a key centre from which the original impulse for the Crusades had emanated, this was a most significant proposal. As Le Goff relates (2000: 20), Abbé Pierre in 1142 conceived the idea of a translation of the Koran during a tour of Cluniac convents established in newly conquered Spain. Bernard of Clairvaux, invited by letter to read the translation, chose not to reply; as we saw, he took a dim view of non-Christians and favoured military solutions.

Spain – Muslim el-Andalus, reduced in size by the Reconquista between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries – was by far the most productive sector of the frontier between Western Christianity and Islam (with Jewish thinkers like Maimonides prominently involved too). ‘It was here that the scientific and mathematical texts of the Greeks and the Hindu–Arab algebra and number system were transmitted north’, Collins writes (1998: 429). ‘It was here too that Aristotle was revived.’ The rationalist materialism of Averroes, a native of el-Andalus (bastardised form of Ibn Rushd, 1126–98), holds pride of place in this revival. Its importance can hardly be overrated, because all three Abrahamic monotheisms, given that they see reality as emanating from God, prescribe an idealist mindset (philosophi-cally speaking) for their believers. Augustine codified this idealism for Christianity by providing it with a neo-Platonic basis. Aristotle however had criticised Plato by stressing that forms (including ideas) never exist apart from matter, and his materialism thus could easily become the basis for a challenge to religion.

This was precisely what al-Ghazali reproached Avicenna for. Yet al-Ghazali’s Tahafut al-Falasifa (‘The Incoherence of the Philosophers’), according to Averroes, was beside the point, because Avicenna had misinterpreted Aristotle to begin with. In Tahafut

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al-Tahafut (‘The Incoherence of the Incoherence’, Ibn Rushd 2009) and his commentaries on Aristotle, Averroes develops his own inter-pretation. As the author himself acknowledges (as in Tornay 1943: 276), this goes well beyond the original, but nevertheless must be accepted as ‘truthful’. Averroes was the first to argue the materiality of the spirit; Spinoza and Hegel, indeed historical materialism, would be unthinkable without his seminal intervention.

For Averroes, the apparently contingent in thought and existence is not to be explained by the distinction between necessary and non-necessary being as developed by Avicenna. Instead he argues that all forms of being emanate from elementary matter, which has no form of its own. Its essence is potential, it can acquire any form; but to do so it must first become three-dimensional (in the Middle Ages this was attributed to God’s light, which ‘actualises matter and takes part in every form it adopts’; Park 1989: 131). This principle also applies to the thinking subject, which only through embodied perception can connect its own materiality with (‘conjugate’) external material reality. ‘If a being were free from matter’, Averroes argues in De Anima, iii (as in Tornay 1943: 283), ‘its intellect would be identical with the intelligible object altogether’, i.e. the possibility of contradiction would be excluded. Thinking is thus made truly subjective, although it rests on the same elementary material basis as the world outside the subject. Again unlike Avicenna (who held that thought emanates from the individual intellect; Ivry 1966: 78n.), Averroes sees thinking therefore as the individuation of a transcendent mind.

On the Islamic side, the rejection of Averroes was a foregone conclusion. His philosophy is still today seen as a heresy (Tibi 1979: 139). ‘After its initial flirtation with the Greeks’, Lal writes (2001: 64), ‘the defeat of Islam’s rationalist school by the traditionalist ulema meant that only heretics could explore the Greek notion of immutable laws of nature.’ Even an Islamic version of Thomism, reconciling religion with Aristotelian logic, was out of the question; so much was made clear by Ibn Taymiyah (1263–1328) of Damascus. One of the precursors of contemporary Islamism, Ibn Taymiyah gives religion an absolutist inflection. As al-Barghouti (2008: 48n.) summarises his position: ‘The right to mutiny against a Muslim ruler was forbidden just as acquiescence under a non-Muslim ruler was forbidden.’ Ibn Battuta (2001: 67), who met him, considered Taymiyah ‘a man of great ability and learning, but with some kink in his brain’. Battuta was present at a sermon in which the preacher explained that God descended from heaven just as physically as he himself came down

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the steps from the pulpit. Taymiyah was promptly thrown into prison by the sultan for blasphemy. Yet he believed in the sternest religious authority in everything. ‘Sixty years with a tyrannical imam’, he held (as in Steinberg 2005: 17), ‘are better than one night without him.’ It was this line of thought that filtered through to Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the eighteenth-century founder of the eponymous strand of Sunni Islam in Saudi Arabia, to which I return in Chapter 5.

On the Christian side, Averroes’ writings, translated into Latin 30 years after his death, created a shock wave. Of course he had synthesised Christian authors too (Ivry 1966: 77), but that is inherent in the frontier encounter. Unlike the scholastic reception of Aristotle by Albert ‘the Great’ and Thomas Aquinas, whose prime concern had been to reconcile Aristotle with the Bible and who started from the individual soul, Averroes’ rationalistic materialism represents a break with religious precepts. So influential did his views become that in the early sixteenth century Leo X (Giovanni de Medici, pope at the time of Luther’s church protest) still felt compelled to condemn them (Collins 1998: 445; Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ‘Averrhoës’). Out of the combination of Averroism and Protestant empiricism would arise modern science – a development of the productive forces of critical importance for the rise of the West.

Back in the closing decades of the Crusades, Averroism informed a new critique of the papal imperial project. Based on a materialist understanding of the relations between (Christian) communities in terms of sovereign equality, it accorded religion and politics their own separate domains. It is a major irony of history and foreign relations that this separation, whose absence from Islamic states is so often held against Islam these days, was in fact first theorised on the Arab side of the mediaeval frontier. Only by its reception in Western Christianity through the scholastic philosopher Sigurd of Brabant (1240–84) did it reach what Le Goff calls (2000: 162) the Dubois–Nogaret clan at the court of king Philip ‘the Fair’ of France, and Marsilio of Padua.

Pierre Dubois (1250–1321) held that the tension between community and humanity in which foreign relations develop cannot be overcome by spiritual empire. It must be accommodated in its own proper sphere, as material political relations. In The Reconquest of the Holy Land of 1306, Dubois proposes that the states of Western Christianity, under the leadership of the French king, establish peace among themselves before resuming the Crusades. Marsilio went even further in Defensor Pacis of 1324. In his view (as in Le

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Goff 2000: 163–4), ‘it would be preferable that each of the particular communities, in their diverse regions, separated by geographic, linguistic, and moral boundaries, gives itself such government as suits it best’. This also turns foreign relations into a means of containing the unlimited growth of humankind: ‘One might consider, in fact, that nature has intended to moderate this propagation by triggering wars and epidemics and thus sowing difficulties on the path of men.’

The materialist understanding of foreign relations theoretically articulated the new era of sovereign equality – at least for Christian states. It was part and parcel of epoch-making advances in the ability of society to exploit its relationship with nature. ‘Right before and after the time of Copernicus’ great discovery of the true solar system’, wrote Marx (MEW, i: 103),

the law of gravitation of the state was discovered simultaneously; its weight was discovered within itself, and whilst the different European governments tried, with the initial superficiality of practice, to apply this result through the system of the balance of states, Machiavelli, Campanella, and later, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hugo Grotius, and still further down, Rousseau, Fichte, and Hegel, began to view the state with human eyes and to develop its natural laws from reason and experience, and not from theology.

The importance of this revolution in the understanding of the world can hardly be overrated. But then, the exploration of new intellectual and geographical frontiers engendered breakthroughs in a range of areas, from astronomy to art. Even as the Crusades were running out of steam, the revival of urban life and flourishing commerce stimulated the adoption of techniques from across the frontier. One of these was the turn to realism in painting, another the development of Gothic architecture. In both cases, it would appear that the West gained far more from the encounter, both with Byzantium and with Islam, than did the other side.

Since painting began as religious art, but pictorial representa-tion of God or the prophets is outlawed in Islam (this dates back to Mohammed’s aim of suppressing tribal idols), its revolution in north Italy developed in interaction with Byzantine icon painting. Still around 1280, Cimabue painted his ‘Madonna Enthroned’ in the Byzantine style. But as Florence and other cities grew wealthier, the pace of social change soon outstripped the quiet stride of the imperial East. A generation after Cimabue, Giotto’s church frescoes left the Byzantine icon behind (only elements such as the golden halo persist; Adams 1994: 214–15). In Giotto’s painting, three-dimensionality, the

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real-life folds of Mary’s dress showing body shape, and the throne planted firmly on the floor in accordance with gravity, all testify to a new, materialist immediacy of the religious aesthetic.

The most comprehensive expression of frontier exchange, however, was the Gothic. Here Western Christianity reaches true transcendence, expressing its universal cosmology in a chain of towering monuments all along the Viking–Norman frontier system – from northern France and England to Sicily. As Boorstin writes (1992: 251):

The Norman and Romanesque styles had been marked by massive piers and columns, heavy walls, rounded arches, barrel vaults and a few windows, with sharply defined interior space. That was an architecture of rotundity, solidity, and containment, for the fortress–church ... The new luminous skeleton of stone proclaimed a Church no longer on the defensive, but reaching prayerfully up to God and triumphantly to the world in an architecture of light.

Gothic cathedrals, Adams concurs (1994: 208), ‘express the strivings of Christianity to embrace the entire universe, and to reveal the Christian message to as many people as possible through works of art’.

Both technically and aesthetically, Gothic architecture was the result of creative interpenetration across the empire/nomad divide. Adelard of Bath’s crucial contribution to the technique of constructing high pointed vaults and external flying buttresses to balance loss of wall support was based on his interest in Greek mathematics and Arab architecture. In Sicily, Norman cathedrals and chapels were still Romanesque, with mosaics from Byzantium. In addition, Douglas (2002: 225) sees Arab influence in ‘the cloisters with their pointed Saracenic arches, their Islamic fountain, and their coloured columns with Romanesque capitals’. The spacious structures and the light filtering through the rows of columns in the later cathedrals in turn are reminiscent of Arab palaces in el-Andalus (van der Meer 1953: 53).

Ruskin, in his classic analysis of the Gothic, considers ‘savageness’ or ‘rudeness’ to be its main characteristics, followed by ‘love of change’. It emerged not so much from anything actual ‘Goths’ might have been responsible for, but as ‘a perpetual reflection of the contrast between the Goth and the Roman in their first encounter’ (Ruskin 2001: 134). It is inherent in frontier interaction that workmanship is understood as ‘capable of perpetual novelty’ (ibid.: 140). The Gothic style, then, is the source of Western modernism. Not only did it initiate ‘a continuous architectural development … eclectic in its inspiration and individual in its products’ (Douglas 2002: 227); the

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creative impulse of the foreign encounter spread across all the arts and sciences.

The extension to the St Denis monastery north of Paris by its abbot, Suger (regent of France when King Louis VII was away on the Second Crusade of 1147) is usually seen as the beginning of the Gothic. It was intended to symbolise ‘the divine nature of the king’s authority to rule and enhance the spirituality of the church’ (Adams 1994: 189). Indeed, there are powerful allusions to overseas campaigns in the Gothic style. The ‘naval’ aspect is enhanced by the cathedral’s external flying buttresses, which, like a ship’s rigging, connect the buttress piers to the interior walls. ‘The vaults of a Gothic cathedral are an inverted ship’, Rosenstock-Huessy (1993: 544–5) observes.

The house of stone in the Gothic style is not a local house, fixed in space, but a symbol of pilgrimage, suspended in time. The regions from which the first Crusaders came were the first to develop the new style ... The Gothic minster is a ship in a fleet that sails the sea of the spirit. All souls seek the Holy Sepulchre and therefore embark in this navy. In the fleet of the Gothic cathedrals the Papal Revolution of the Church majestically moves on.

The Crusades ended in failure, to be resumed as commercial expeditions from the Atlantic seaboard. The expression of Western Christian universalism became ever more abstract as the Gothic style escaped from its stone confinement, ultimately evolving into the Romanticism of the late nineteenth century. Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony (its Adagio written as a lament over Wagner’s death) may be taken as an example – it rises like a glass cathedral over all that is earthly and limited. Thus the aspiration to enclose the universe within transcendent Christianity reached its ultimate expression just at the moment when imperialist rivalry and resistance were bringing its limits into full view.

Mediterranean Stalemate – Dante and Ibn Khaldun

The failure of the Crusades left northern Italy isolated. Genoan seafarers drifted off to offer their services to Iberian princes looking out across the ocean; Venetian bankers mingled with Hanseatic merchants in port cities all over north-west Europe. After the Reformation, this produced a new synthesis, to which we return in the next chapter. In the Mediterranean, the Crusades resulted in stalemate. Let me, by way of concluding this chapter, briefly contrast the antinomous positions in which this was expressed: the

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imperial fantasy of Dante’s Divina Commedia, and the tribal, nomadic sociology, a generation later, of Ibn Khaldun.

Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) laid down his idealised vision of a sedentary empire in his epic poem. Antonetti (1988: 63) surmises that it may have been begun in Latin (the language of learning, along with Provençal), but Dante eventually wrote it in a new Italian composed out of several dialects from the Florentine region. In that respect it was an instance of early modernity. But in other respects, Dante looked backward, just as he occupied a contradictory middle position in the struggles in Florence. In between the modernising Guelphs (associated with the Angevin kings of France and the papacy) and the imperial, conservative Ghibellines, Dante was a moderate ‘White Guelph’ – Florence was already unwilling to bow either to the popes or the emperor. In the Divina Commedia, however, Dante reserves his special wrath for Pope Boniface VIII, writing that Boniface is soon expected to arrive in hell, accused of simony (sale of religious offices; Inferno xix: 52–8, 1947: 138–40; Paradiso xxvii: 22–7, 1947: 202–3).

When Henry VII of Luxemburg, elected German Emperor in 1308, decided to have himself crowned in Rome, both White Guelphs and Ghibellines rejoiced. The adventure ended dismally however with Henry’s death on his way back to Luxemburg in 1313 (Antonetti 1988: 12–13). His seat in the highest heaven is already reserved in Dante’s poem (Paradiso xxx: 136, 1947: 230) – an indication of the extent to which the poet tenaciously clung to the defunct notion of the Holy Roman Empire, in spite of this setback. The imperial perspective also can also be seen in De Monarchia of 1309, a scholarly tract written in Latin. Here Dante explicitly makes the case for placing supreme worldly authority in the hands of the emperor. This is not the immanent universalism of classical empire, however, but the transcendent one of Augustine. For Dante, the case for empire rested on the Roman example. ‘The Roman people’, he argues (as in Ullmann 1965: 191), ‘was ordained by nature to command’, and ‘nature has ordained in the world a place and a people for universal command’. Now it was the turn of Western Christianity to take up the mantle of universal sovereignty. Writing one year after Henry of Luxemburg’s election, Dante claims (1967: 170) that the temporal world, like the eternal one, requires rule by ‘a single government extending over all people in time, that is, over all things that are measured by time’. This is the task of the emperor – so what if he fails to act? Here the Divina Commedia is left lamenting about ‘German

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Albertus’ (the emperor prior to Henry) ‘abandoning Italy to conflict’ (Purgatorio vi: 76–7 and 97–9, 1947: 50–1).

In De Monarchia, we find a more positive imperial programme. ‘The proper function of the human race, taken in the aggregate, is to actualize continually the entire capacity of the possible intellect, primarily in speculation, [and] then, through its extension and for its sake, in action’, Dante writes (1967: 171–2). The establishment of peace was essential for achieving this aim, and since this peace could not be forced upon other peoples in the name of Christendom by the pope (as the Crusades had shown, 1967: 176), only a worldly ruler, the emperor, whose task would be to arbitrate the conflicts between separate princes, could establish it.

Any naval aspirations meanwhile should be abandoned. The seafaring enterprise that would bring global hegemony to the West is anathema for Dante. In the Inferno (xxvi: 115–18, 1947: 195) we hear Ulysses relate his shipwreck after he and his men sailed through Gibraltar, ‘to explore the world, where no humans live’. The idea, familiar from China, that there was something illicit about foreign exploration, resonates in this passage (Gollwitzer 1972: 55). Neither did Dante take lightly towards the Muslim conquerors of the Mediterranean. Said (1995: 68–9) reminds us that of the main Islamic personalities in the Divina Commedia, the Prophet himself resides in hell, subject to gruelling torture, as does Ali; Avicenna, Averroes, and Saladin on the other hand reside only in the first circle of hell, along with Aristotle and others born in the West before Christ. That Averroism was the recognised source of insight in Western Christianity is apparent from the seating of Sigurd of Brabant in heaven next to Thomas Aquinas.

Abdurrahman ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), cited several times already in this book, in his eulogy of the enduring virtues of the original nomadism also went back to the roots of his side in the frontier encounter. A court intellectual, first in his native North Africa, later in Seville, Ibn Khaldun like Dante served as an ambassador: in 1362, he went to Granada to participate in the peace negotiations with Pedro ‘the Terrible’ of Castile. Upon his return to North Africa, he held high office again before withdrawing from public life to write a study of history, of which the Muqaddima is the preface. Towards the end of his life, he took part in the campaign against Timur Lenk (Tamerlane), who was besieging Damascus. Such was Ibn Khaldun’s reputation as a scholar that Timur invited him to come to Samarkand;

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but as Schimmel relates (in Ibn Khaldun 1951: xiii–xv), he declined the offer and went to Cairo where he was to die.

Ibn Khaldun solved the dilemma of how to advance theoretical logic in a stationary religious context by throwing out philosophy and replacing it by what we might call historical sociology, based on induction. Was it to cover his back that he concurs with Taymiyah in rejecting Aristotelian philosophy? He even singles out Averroes for criticism (1967: 103), albeit from a sociological angle – claiming that because he grew up in a city, where the tribal spirit had been extinguished, Averroes fell for Aristotle’s urban bias (Ibn Khaldun 1951: 45). The sovereign virtue of Islam towers high over these human endeavours: ‘One should also consider the evidence that lies in the superiority of Mohammed’s rank over that of the other prophets and in the exaltedness of his position’ (1967: 74). Ibn Khaldun’s economic doctrine (Chapter 5 of the Muqaddima in the Rosenthal translation) also conforms to Islamic orthodoxy concerning trade and profit, although he considers those engaging in trade as unmanly (1967: 312). Equally true to his tribal, nomadic spirit, he considers agriculture as a way of life for the weak, a last resort for Bedouins.

Islam was not originally averse to sedentary life. It merely places, as we have seen in Chapter 2, a distinct value on movement. Ibn Khaldun returned to this vantage point to develop a cyclical theory of political history that (assuming the ultimate sovereignty of Islam) takes the nomad spirit as its point of departure. It is the root of true character that can only wither in a sedentary, urban context. The empire that the Christian side projected in heaven, legitimating unrestrained violence against its enemies anywhere, is the incubator of decay in the perspective of Ibn Khaldun.

To Ibn Khaldun, the nomad tribe is a source of unadulterated power and will. This springs from its warrior organisation, the organisation of the adult males of the tribe for war. As Lattimore notes in this respect (1951: 522), a pure nomad is a poor nomad, who can survive under the harsh conditions of the steppe or the desert – or the ocean, for that matter. ‘The toughness of desert life precedes the softness of sedentary life’ (Ibn Khaldun 1967: 93). To capture the collective will of the Bedouin tribe, Ibn Khaldun uses the term asabya (from the Arab asaba, ‘a man’s male relatives’). Issawi translates asabya as ‘social solidarity’ (in Ibn Khaldun 1987: 10). Rosenthal translates it as ‘group feeling’ (in Ibn Khaldun 1967: 96). Al-Barghouti (2008: 62, 62n.) explains that it goes back to the Bedouin notion that one cannot conspire with another tribe against one’s own and that asabya

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developed ‘because of the nomadic forms of production and social organization, and that it enabled nomads to invade settled societies’. The same author claims (ibid.: 1–3) that organisations like Hezbollah and Hamas, which build on a tribal principle of transforming the community into a fighting organisation in an emergency, have done better against the Israeli occupation of Palestine than the Arab states, which are ill-fitted to lead the Umma as dawlas.

Ibn Khaldun does not employ asabya as an abstract concept (it is always a particular tribal spirit). Its vitality derives from the tribal blood ties; if these become confused or lost in intermarriage or intermingling with other ethnic groups in city life, the spirit evaporates too (1967: 100). For all his references to Islam, Ibn Khaldun’s understanding of the notion resides in its relative autonomy from religion (cf. Pasha 1997: 65). In fact he rejects (1951: 7) the notion of the divine nature of authority, the cornerstone of all imperial and early-modern-state thought. Rule, too, must be investigated sociologically. Just rule cannot follow from religion alone, he writes (1951: 21); the followers of the Prophet are a minority in the world, and there can be well-ordered states abroad, too.

The cyclical theory that Ibn Khaldun develops must be understood as a conclusion drawn from the experience of the Reconquista, the withdrawal from the Iberian peninsula, as well as from the defeats against the Mongols, who sacked Baghdad in 1258. It argues, in essence, that the Islamic world has rejuvenated itself only as a result of mobilising a new source of tribal spirit, asabya; the cycle begins from this starting point. The second phase consists of the establishment of royal power; the third, of peaceful sedentary life. It is at this point that ‘the sword’ as a principle of rule is replaced by ‘the pen’ (Ibn Khaldun 1967: 213). Here the historian also gives an explanation of the multiplicity of human societies: a new ruler will always mix his own tribal habits with those he finds in the society he conquers (1951: 7). Ibn Khaldun also explains how the empire/nomad divide becomes an internal distinction within the social formation, which, as Rodinson (1970: 151) explains, concerns distinctions such as that between urban dwellers and Bedouin, along with ethnic and class divisions. Yet precisely because of this inner diversity, a composite society carries the germs of decay. A ruler may build a splendid army, but by relying on foreign auxiliaries (an aspect of imperial protection), he alienates his own tribe and the tribal spirit he shares with it. The foreigners however are the worst friends one can have, writes Ibn Khaldun (1967: 146). ‘In order to prevent [his

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own people] from seizing power, and in order to keep them away from participating in it, the ruler needs other friends, not of his own kin, whom he can use against (them)’. But these precisely have no tribal obligations to him. This was how the Umayyad dynasty, trusting non-Arabs for protection, went under.

Stagnation comes with the corruptions of sedentary, urban life. As Gibb highlights (1962: 173), the decay of settled empire in this perspective is also connected to the decline of religion, the departure from the sharia. Religious laws alone can regulate the passions of men – anger, violence, injustice – hence the caliphs were entrusted with their execution (Ibn Khaldun 1951: 108–9). In the hour of collapse, the last stage of the cycle, it then depends on whether a new tribal spirit, infused with authentic religious virtue, is available to begin the cycle anew.

Ibn Khaldun was a lone voice amidst a stagnant society. ‘Without significant structural ties of his own, Ibn Khaldun’s critique was without consequences for Islamic philosophy’ (Collins 1998: 428). After the brilliance of the Andalus epoch, writes Stetkevych (1973: 217), Arab writing would never be the same again. After the loss of Granada, the last stronghold in Spain, in 1492 (also the year of Columbus), it was not until the seventeenth century that a Moroccan scholar, al-Maqqari, wrote an encyclopaedia of Muslim Spain. This work, too, was lost on the Muslim world; it only surfaced in the West in the nineteenth century, as part of a romantic Orientalist cult of Spain. Ibn Khaldun suffered the same fate. His work too, with which Europeans became acquainted via the Turks, was only discovered in the nineteenth century when its author was hailed as an ‘Arab Montesquieu’ (Lewis 1975: 73–4, 78; Schimmel in Ibn Khaldun 1951: xvi). By that time, however, Western expansion, having conquered the world’s oceans, was turning again to the energy-rich Middle East. After an interval of 700 years, a new, ferocious imperialism, reinforced by the Zionist colonisation drive on the eastern Mediterranean frontier, resumed its attack on the Islamic world.

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5Rival Fundamentalisms on the Imperial Frontier

Today’s world politics is primarily experienced and theorised ‘with human eyes’. As cited in the last chapter, its ‘natural laws’ are therefore developed, in Marx’s phrase (MEW, i: 103), ‘from reason and experience’. Yet powerful religious imaginaries still run through modern international relations, just as mythical pseudo-speciation continues to operate in the perception of foreign communities. In the closing decades of the last millennium, militant religious revivalisms were even on the ascendant around the world. In their foreign relations aspect, they articulate the transnationalisation of ‘sacral landscapes’ (Schüler 2008: 145) accompanying the mutual exposure, on an unprecedented scale, of communities considering each other as outsiders.

These foreigners occupy not just separate spaces. They also inhabit separate ‘eternities’ in the eyes of those who see their own world, in both its temporal and extra-temporal aspects, under threat. Globalising, neoliberal capitalism renders life chances increasingly precarious as it exhausts both the natural and the social substratum on which it rests. As confidence in the possibility of a better society evaporates, one line of defence is to see oneself as divinely elected, a member of an ‘imagined global community’ in a world that appears doomed.

The establishment of the state of Israel and its continuing colonisation of Arab lands, in combination with the increasingly aggressive quest for control of the Middle East’s fossil energy reserves, have mobilised fundamentalist reincarnations of the three religions that have their origin in this region. The Hindu and Buddhist religions, too, are subject to politicised radicalisation, as we saw in Chapters 3 and 4. But the three ‘Abrahamic’ fundamentalisms, in their Anglophone Calvinist, religious Zionist, and Islamist varieties, are contesting each other’s claims most directly. Hierarchically centralised, imperial religions such as Roman Catholicism or Greek and Russian Orthodoxy, whilst not escaping the revivalist trend, are less susceptible to radical departures than decentralised ones.

178

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Rival Fundamentalisms on the Imperial Frontier 179

Fundamentalism, Phillips writes (2004: 212), ‘bred most easily within religions that allowed congregations autonomy: Protestantism, Islam, and Judaism’. It is with these three strands, which confront each other in the contemporary Middle East, that we will be concerned in the present chapter. Their ability to respond to changing circumstances, of course, also implies that they may recover, from within their religious consciousness, aspects of a more benign perception of the ‘infidel’ again. There is nothing inherently xenophobic about religious devotion. Habermas’s analysis (1971) of ‘ideology’ as a phase in which an apparently traditional belief in fact serves to leave the domain of tradition in order to deal with contemporary challenges is one way of theorising such a turn.

MILITANT CALVINISM AND WESTERN HEGEMONY

As Rosenstock-Huessy has argued (1993: 267), liberalism can be traced back to the prerogative of self-regulation, the ‘English birthright’ that Anglo-Saxons preserved after the Norman conquest. The medium through which this birthright was transformed into modern liberalism was the Christian religion, Protestantism in particular. The successive stages of the rise of the West – from the Tudor breakaway from the empire of Western Christianity in 1534 and settlement in North America to the English Civil War in the seventeenth century – were all articulated in terms of religion. Yet the English-speaking mindset at the same time developed a characteristic agnosticism which allowed it to make great strides in science. Trevelyan (1961: 289–90) quotes Thomas Sprat, the bishop of Rochester at the time of the Glorious Revolution, as saying that the goal of a ‘liberation of humanity from the clusters of misconceptions’ was permissible as long as God and the soul were not subjected to such an inquiry. The church, Sprat held (as in Taylor 2007: 226) ‘can never be prejudiced in the light of reason, not by the improvements of knowledge, not by the advancements of the works of men’s hands’.

This has allowed religion to remain operative alongside the spectacular development of the productive forces in the English-speaking West. As Mead observes (2007: 199), ‘the countries which are in most respects the most thoroughly modernized by any definition that rests on economic and technological progress – Britain of the nineteenth century, the United States today – are significantly more religious than most’. Let us see how this has accompanied Western expansion and Anglophone hegemony.

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The Anglophone Puritan Legacy

In Milton’s Paradise Lost, of 1667, the Divina Commedia of the English-speaking Calvinists, Adam is given a dual mission. One is the inward turn, the quest for purity and chastity, so that he will find within himself something far more enthralling than Paradise (Weber 1920a: 80). The other is the conquest of the globe – here we can see Milton’s interest in the outside world (he was Cromwell’s foreign secretary).

The Dutch, too, had sung the praises of overseas commerce through their national poet, Joost van den Vondel, in his Lof der Zee-vaert (‘In Praise of Seafaring’) of 1623. The English Calvinists however saw it in terms of a transcendent Christian universalism. God, Milton writes (xi: 336–41, 1909: 241), does not just reside in Eden, but inhabits every corner of the planet.

His omnipresence fillsLand, sea, and air, and every kind that lives,Fomented by his virtual power and warmed.All the Earth he gave thee to possess and rule, No despicable gift; surmise not, then, His presence to these narrow bounds confinedOf Paradise and Eden.

Is it a colonial empire that is promised to Adam when he is taken to a hilltop to survey ‘all Earth’s kingdoms and their glory’? The connection with South American riches would certainly suggest it (xi: 405–11, 1909: 243):

In spirit perhaps he also sawRich Mexico, the seat of Montezume,And Cusco in Peru, the richer seat Of Atabalipa, and yet unspoiled Guiana, whose great city Geryon’s sons1

Call El Dorado.

The answer comes in the poem’s closing lines (xii: 646–7, 1909: 270; cf. Rosenstock-Huessy 1993: 297) as Adam and Eve leave Paradise:

The world was all before them, where to chooseTheir place of rest, and Providence their guide.

Protestantism in many respects is a return to the apostolic communion of original Christianity, which in the Roman empire

1. Geryon was the Titan who fled to Spain after defeat at the hands of the Olympians.

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mutated into priestly hierarchy. On the British Isles it was given an English-speaking inflection right from the Anglican secession of 1534. In Barbara Tuchman’s view (as in Nederveen Pieterse 1992c: 199–200), ‘Israel’ and Anglophone Christianity were conflated into a single narrative at the time of the Act of Supremacy. The religion had supposedly been brought to the British Isles by Joseph of Arimathea, the man who made a crypt available to bury Jesus (in second-dimen-sion time, spatial distances too can be radically shortened). ‘In the person of Joseph, England’s desire to bypass Rome and to trace the sources of its faith directly to … the Holy Land could be satisfied.’

In the extension of the Anglophone world across the Atlantic, we see how this narrative makes various cross-references and extrapola-tions possible. The Anglophone bond itself was perceived as being anchored in a divine pact; the pure, unadulterated faith of the Puritans was linked to biblical Israel (extending, as we shall see, to support for the post-1948 state of modern Israel); the Abrahamic covenant also applied to the English-speaking world, and so on. The Puritan settlement in New England thus was a quest for a ‘New Jerusalem’. The Calvinist settlers, one preacher claimed (as in Slezkine 2004: 56), were born-again Jews, because they reverted ‘to biblical precedents for the regulation of daily life’, just as ‘the Hebrew Commonwealth’ was held up as a guide for how to organise the New World. Indeed under Cromwell, Nederveen Pieterse writes (1992c: 201), England itself was defined as ‘Zion’, a ‘British Israel’. This was not a vision confined to the First Commonwealth either. ‘I will not cease from Mental Fight, / Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand’, wrote William Blake at the time of the French Revolution (as in Slezkine 2004: 44), ‘Till we have built Jerusalem / In England’s green & pleasant Land.’ Below we return to how this imaginary spawned the Christian Zionism that underpins the connection between the Anglophone West and Israel.

Calvinism, as Weber famously argued, connects the mental complex of individualised Christianity with the universe of capital. The liberalism on which capitalism is premised goes back to Calvin’s central theorem of predestination, which demarcates a ‘free’ space around every individual. Lutheranism in Weber’s view (1920a: 65–77) clings to a pre-modern understanding of social station and ‘calling’ (Beruf), but Calvinism generates an existential uncertainty in this respect. Paradoxically it also stimulates initiative, because whilst predestination itself may be unfathomable, material success can be an indication of divine election. It is this aspect of the Calvinist mindset that allows development towards fully commodified,

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capitalist social relations (Tawney 1952: 92). Capital as self-expand-ing value requires that the pores of society widen, so that it can circulate without the drag of traditional, ascriptive bonds. It surely helped that fanatical Calvinists sought to remove ‘the indolence and disorder of monks, beggars, vagabonds and idle gentlemen’, in the words of a Puritan preacher quoted by Taylor (2007: 106). There are other determinants contributing to the enlargement of the free space around the individual, but this is the religious aspect. Of course Calvinism itself must simultaneously be understood as an expression of social pressures in this direction; it cannot spread in a society in which traditional bonds are not already dissolving.

The original Puritanism that inspired the North American settlers blended into a pervasive missionary spirit guiding the expansion of the Anglosphere. ‘A time shall come when the human race shall become as one family’, a secretary of the treasury in the Polk admin-istration claimed on the basis of biblical prophecy (as in Mead 2007: 53), ‘and the predominance of our Anglo-Celt-Sax-Norman stock shall guide the nations to that result.’ Half a century later, in 1900, the head of the American Board for Foreign Missions stated (as in Taylor 2007: 736) that ‘Christianity is the religion of the dominant nations of the earth. Nor is it rash to prophesy that in due time it will be the only religion in the world.’ This always entailed violent back-up. US gunboats were often called in to sail up the rivers of China in order to enforce Western access because missionaries had landed in trouble across the Pacific.

In the 1920s, American Protestant fundamentalists raised the call for holy war under the slogan, ‘wage a Battle Royal for the fundamentals’ (as in Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 48). As concerns about an impending Armageddon proliferated, the expectation gained ground of an imminent messianic redemption, a ‘rapture’ by Christ from a worldwide catastrophe. The notion of rapture was inspired by Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians (5: 16–17). ‘The Lord himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout’, we read there. Those deceased in Christ and those alive will reunite ‘in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air’. The image of an impending rapture was popularised and brought to North America by John N. Darby, who founded the ‘Plymouth Brethren’ in 1830 (Nederveen Pieterse 1992c: 210; Chambers Biographical Dictionary, ‘Darby’). Darby’s ‘dispensational-ism’ would gain widespread resonance again in the Reagan years. It evokes an epoch of increasing global turbulence heralding Christ’s Second Coming. The return of the Jews to Palestine was interpreted

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in this perspective. As Mearsheimer and Walt write (2007: 133), the notion may have influenced Arthur Balfour’s decision to promise Palestine to the Jews in 1917.

At this point, however, liberal Christianity still occupied the commanding heights. As the West faced the combined challenges of fascism and state socialism, its sights were set on preserving the Lockean ground rules that held it together. This was expressed in a Christian interpretation of English-speaking unity by Lionel Curtis, a colonial official in South Africa. Curtis was a key figure in the Rhodes–Milner group referred to in Chapter 3. He had been centrally involved in the creation, on the margins of the Versailles Peace Conference, of the elite planning bodies of the Anglophone West (the Council on Foreign Relations in the United States and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain; see my 1984: 39–40). Between 1934 and 1937 Curtis published a three-volume work entitled, after Augustine, Civitas Dei. In this book he expounded the idea that a world-embracing federation should be built around the English-speaking core.

Curtis, we learn from Quigley (1981: 282), advocated that the League of Nations be demolished by a collective walkout of Britain and like-minded liberal democracies. Instead, an international Christian commonwealth should be created on the model of the United States. Only those states which had a ‘commonwealth’ constitution themselves (a restriction on League membership which Curtis had already insisted on in The Round Table, the mouthpiece of the Milner Group, in late 1918) could become members of the new international constellation. To bring about the universal commonwealth of God, the churches and the universities should be enlisted as channels for its propagation. Curtis certainly did not speak for the Milner Group, Quigley notes (1981: 283–4), but key members of the group, such as Lord Lothian (Philip Kerr), the UK ambassador to Washington, agreed with his proposals.

From a comparable perspective but in a more liberal spirit, J.D. Rockefeller, Jr. in the 1930s began to finance ecumenical Protestantism through the Interchurch World Movement, which later became the World Council of Churches. During the Second World War these networks became avenues of transnational mobilisation against communism. W.A. Visser ’t Hooft, future Secretary-General of the World Council, who spent the war in Geneva, reported on his discussions with Christian advocates of European integration to Allen Dulles of the OSS, the wartime precursor of the CIA. Allen Dulles’s

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brother, John Foster Dulles, was himself active in the ecumenical movement in addition to his investment banking and political roles (see my 1984: 82). In the Cold War, however, ecumenical Protestantism was increasingly seen as too placid and secularised, soft on communism. The Moral Re-Armament movement (MRA), founded during the Red Scare following the Russian Revolution, appeared better suited to launching a crusade against godless communism.

The concept of a ‘crusade’ (as in Woodrow Wilson’s ‘Crusade for Democracy’) is a familiar fixture in US foreign involvement. The Revd Frank Buchman, the founder of MRA, envisaged the movement as the equivalent of a crusading order, a revolutionary force that would establish a ‘dictatorship of the spirit of God’ (I follow Nederveen Pieterse 1992b). McCarthyism provided the backdrop to the resurgence of MRA after the Second World War. True, it had lost some of its shine by embracing the Nazis in the 1930s (Buchman spoke of Hitler as the man who ‘built a front line of defence against the Antichrist of communism’), but it still expanded to Europe in the 1950s. From the fact that Henry Ford in the United States, and Anton Philips, founder of the Dutch electronics concern and an early business associate of Ford’s, both supported MRA, one might conclude that mass production and social standardisation were somehow congenial to the military metaphors of Buchman’s Christianity.

Protestant evangelism, too, was mobilised against communism early on. By the late 1950s, it had sidelined MRA completely. Billy Graham’s ‘tent crusade’ in Los Angeles won the support of the Hearst newspaper chain and, with additional funding from the Pew Memorial Trust and the Marriott Foundation of the eponymous hotel chain, Graham was built up into a national figure. Pentecostal–charismatic and other evangelical currents, too, now began to encroach on mainstream churches both at home and abroad (Schüler 2008: 151). Roland Barthes could still mock Graham’s tour of France in his Mythologies of 1957, writing (as in Nederveen Pieterse 1992b: 7) that it was ‘a pity that there was no Papua medicine man present to describe the ceremony’. Twenty years later, however, the phenomenal rise of Protestant fundamentalism left such disdain far behind. Penetrating the Republican Party in the United States to the point of near-capture, evangelical Christians were to play a defining role in two crusades – the final assault on socialism and national liberation (‘terrorism’), and the resumption of the mediaeval Crusades against Islam.

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The New Crusades

The new, ‘theocratic’, Protestant fundamentalism that we know today has been estimated to count somewhere around half a billion adherents worldwide (Schüler 2008: 146). In the United States, the movement built a mass base on the waves of a cultural backlash against the social ferment of the 1960s (Berlet and Quigley 1995: 24–5). A critical threshold was passed when television preacher Jerry Falwell joined forces with far right direct mail experts to build the Moral Majority, mobilising conservative Christians in both parties against homosexuality, abortion, and the theory of evolution. Backed by powerful financiers such as the beer magnate, Joseph Coors, and others (Bellant 1991: 50), it attacked the hedonistic consumerism and sexual permissiveness spreading in Western society. Certainly, as Phillips, himself one of the organic intellectuals of the Christian right at the time, notes (2004: 216–24), it was largely a movement within Christianity. The Southern Baptist Convention grew from 10 to 17 million members between 1960 and 2000, and Pentecostal churches from 2 to 12 million, whilst mainstream churches declined; but the non-religious US population share tripled from 11 per cent in 1972 to one-third in 2000.

The crusading spirit of Protestant fundamentalism surfaced again in Reagan’s roll-back campaign against the heterogeneous array of anti-Western forces that had taken shape in the 1970s. Ranging from movements fighting actual wars of liberation (as in Vietnam, Portuguese Africa, or Central America), to the Third World coalition clamouring for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), and the Soviet bloc, this constellation forced the Anglophone West and its client regimes onto the defensive. Christianity itself was part of the reform drive. ‘Liberation theology’, prominent among Roman Catholics in Latin America and articulated by the Peruvian Jesuit Gustavo Gutiérrez, rephrased the mission of the Roman Catholic Church as a struggle to overcome exploitation and oppression. Liberation theology propagates, in the words of one of its representa-tives (Hinkelammert 1986: 269), ‘a theology of life which affirms God as the guarantor of the possibility to realise the human utopia beyond the limits of human possibilities for realisation, and hope beyond human hope’. The alternative is a ‘theology of death’ that postpones any liberation to the afterlife, and which is anti-utopian as far as society goes.

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The Protestant fundamentalist movement in the United States drew on the fears generated by the global challenges posed to the West. It responded by reaffirming the white Anglophone bond, as well as the bond with Israel (itself a target of the Third World coalition’s wrath). Arguments about an impending punishment meted out on the English-speaking peoples because they had neglected their religious duties fitted into spreading dispensationalist beliefs about Christ’s imminent Second Coming. Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth elaborates on this prospect in detail. It was the best-selling non-fiction book in the United States for an entire decade, selling tens of millions of copies (Gifford 1988: 22). The enemies of Reagan’s America were identified with labels from the Apocalypse: Russia was Gog, the diabolical kingdom of the north; Libya was Magog, the evil kingdom of the south, and so on.

In this climate, a book originally written in 1942, The United States and Britain in Prophecy, became a bestseller as well. Its eighth, 1980 edition had a print run of 2.9 million copies within five years, bringing the total since the first edition to 4.1 million. The author and founder of The Plain Truth magazine, Herbert W. Armstrong, in this work expands on the Puritan claim that the North American settlers were the dispersed northern half of biblical Israel. ‘The peoples of the United States, the British Commonwealth nations, and the nations of north-western Europe’, Armstrong argues (1985: 142), ‘are, in fact, the peoples of the TEN TRIBES of the HOUSE OF ISRAEL. The Jewish people are the house of JUDAH.’ In the 1980s, millions of Americans once again imbibed the assertion that God’s promise to Abraham, ‘I will make nations of thee and [also in the plural] kings shall come out of thee’ (Genesis 17: 6, as in Armstrong 1985: 19), was really meant to refer to the English-speaking West. The Jews on their own are too few; Christianity as such is not divided into ‘nations’. The descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham by Hagar, Sarah’s handmaid, are the Arabs of today; the angel says to Hagar, ‘he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him; and he shall dwell to the east of all his brethren’ (Genesis 16: 12; the King James translation says ‘in the presence of all his brethren’ but Armstrong insists ‘to the east’ is the correct translation). The beneficiaries of the birthright bestowed by God on Abraham and again on Jacob (who gains the title ‘Israel’ following his struggle with God), on the other hand inhabit ‘the isles afar off’ (Jeremiah 31: 9–10); they are ‘the chief of the nations’ (31: 7). So, according to Armstrong (1985: 95), they must be ‘the white, English-

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speaking peoples today – Britain and America’. Since the Hebrew word for covenant is beriyth or berith, whilst ish means man, ‘British’, phonetically translated back into Hebrew, really means ‘covenant people’. Jeremiah actually travelled to the British Isles, as did the tribe of Dan, in an attempt to escape Assyrian rule over Israel. And since the settlers who landed in Ireland about this time were the ‘Tuatha de Danaans’, i.e. the tribe of Dan (ibid.: 97), the circle is closed.

Helped by such historical–theological excursions and drawing on profound roots in the Anglo-Calvinist mindset, Protestant funda-mentalists were instrumental in whipping up the holy war fervour by which the United States and the West were able to reclaim control of contested areas in Central America (Diamond 1992) and sub-Saharan Africa (Gifford 1988, 1992), and eventually launch the assault on the Soviet bulwark itself. Peace was not an option in this struggle. In The New World Order: It Will Change the Way You Live, televangelist preacher Pat Robertson argued (as in Berlet and Quigley 1995: 35) that ‘there will never be world peace until God’s house and God’s people are given their rightful place of leadership at the top of the world’.

Fundamentalist preachers not only won new adherents among the terrorised populations in the global South. They also sustained the morale of death squads and of those who did the handwork in the torture chambers. An evangelical pastor and co-religionist of Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt defended the killing of indigenous Amerindian peasants (as in Nederveen Pieterse 1992b: 15), as ‘massacres [of] demons’. No doubt the Roman Catholic church under Pope John Paul II provided indispensable assistance to the Reagan offensive, both in Poland and in Latin America. On his first trip to Latin America, the pope declared that ‘liberation’ could only mean freedom from sin, emphatically rejecting (as in Bernstein and Politi 1997: 237) ‘this notion of a political Jesus, a revolutionary’ as ‘not in harmony with the Church’s teaching’. We should not forget though that throughout the Reagan era, other Catholics were involved in popular mobilisation against the threat of nuclear war; just as individual churches and convents continued to support progressive forces in Latin America and elsewhere.

Israel too provided critical support for counter-revolutionary violence in Central America (see my 2006: 205–6). US Protestant fundamentalists by then were actively involved in supporting the Zionist colony in return. As Mead concludes (2007: 400), ‘The importance of Israel in evangelical theology generally and also for various schools of interpretation of biblical prophecy should … not

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be underestimated’. Statements by Falwell (that ‘God deals with nations in relation to how nations deal with Israel’, as in Nederveen Pieterse 1992c: 191), and Jimmy Swaggart (that God’s covenant with Abraham ‘also included America’), helped to neutralise residual anti-Semitism among Protestant sects and align them on the positions of ‘Christian Zionism’.

The pedigree of Christian Zionism, as we saw, goes back to the Anglican secession and the Puritan settlement in North America. The Israeli capture of the West Bank and Jerusalem in the Six-Day War of 1967 worked to activate this heritage. These were signs that the Second Coming was imminent, and indeed from 1977, the right-wing Likud government of Israel and US fundamentalists entered into actual collaboration. Falwell in 1979 received a private jet from Prime Minister Menachem Begin; a year later, uniquely for a non-Jew, he was awarded the prestigious Jabotinsky Medal, named after the right-wing Zionist to whom we return in the next section. When Israel bombed Iraq’s nuclear reactor in 1981, Mearsheimer and Walt record (2007: 136), Begin called Falwell before he notified Reagan.

The ‘War on Terror’ of the Bush II years was not just a political strategy to outlaw and pre-empt resistance to the West’s global hegemony. It also represented a high point of Israeli influence on Western policy. This can be traced back, as I have argued elsewhere (2006: 203, 235), to a series of conferences, the first one held in Jerusalem in 1979, intended to convince key US policy makers, including George Bush, sen., that national liberation struggles should be rebranded as ‘terrorism’, and that this terrorism was directed from Moscow – an idea picked up by Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig. Both pro-Israel neoconservatives and Christian Zionists were actively involved in this turnabout. Protestant funda-mentalists in the United States supported the ongoing colonisation of Palestine by funding the building of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories; according to Phillips (2004: 231), one-third were funded by American evangelicals. The California-based Jerusalem Temple Foundation, which supports the geophysical research for the rebuilding of the Jewish temple, provided legal aid to the Israelis who were caught trying to blow up the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1983 (in order to clear the ground for a rebuilding of the Hebrew temple).

The events of 9/11 initially worked to broaden the mass base of the Christian Zionist and pro-Israel lobbies. In the wake of the attacks on the Twin Towers, on 14 September, George W. Bush called for ‘a crusade against a new kind of evil’. Responsive in his presidential

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bid to Protestant fundamentalist opinion to a much greater degree than his father had been, and openly subscribing to it once in the White House (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 51), the president led his country into the war in Afghanistan, in which it remains stuck today. The subsequent invasion of Iraq drew on intelligence provided by the same group of Zionist neoconservatives who earlier had sabotaged Kissinger’s détente policies, opening the floodgates for the final test of wills with the USSR (see my 2006: 232–3, 358, 365; Mearsheimer and Walt 2007: ch. 8). These adventures also mobilised the long-standing anti-Islamic reflexes of Protestant fundamental-ism. In an overview of such sentiment, Phillips (2004: 230) quotes Jerry Falwell calling the Prophet Mohammed a terrorist (Falwell later apologised); Pat Robertson speaking of Mohammed as a ‘wild-eyed fanatic’; and Billy Graham’s son Franklin qualifying Islam as such as ‘evil’. To leave nothing to chance, Falwell issued his followers with ‘crusader passports’ (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 48). This takes us to the actual Middle East.

ZIONISM AND JEWISH FUNDAMENTALISM IN ISRAEL

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 initiated an experiment that has now lasted 60-plus years. Ever since the foundational expulsion of the Arab inhabitants, Israel’s existence has aroused intense animosity among the populations of the neighbouring countries, today more than ever. Twenty-six resolutions of the United Nations by 2009 (three passed by the General Assembly, the remainder by the Security Council) have not prevented successive Israeli governments from continuing with colonising new land taken from Palestinians. The only regimes in the region that still maintain diplomatic relations with Israel, Egypt and Jordan, are paid to do so by the United States (they are the second- and third-highest recipients of US aid after Israel; Mearsheimer and Walt 2007: 31).

Certainly after the murderous campaigns against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 and against Hamas in Gaza over the Christmas break of 2008/9, in which Israeli military might was used to massacre civilians defended only by militias, it is difficult to draw any other conclusion than that the Zionist experiment has run its course. No state exists for ever, as a fact of nature; each must prove its viability. In the case of Israel, this viability was always problematic, but it passed a point of no return when it held on to the territories occupied in the Six-Day War of 1967. That fatal decision not only drew it

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into an enduring, unsolvable conflict with the Palestinians and the wider Arab and Islamic worlds. It also allowed Israeli society to solve a foreign conflict within its own body – the relation between the European Jews, the Ashkenazim, from which the country’s ruling class emanates, and the Sephardim, non-European Jews brought in from North Africa and elsewhere to maintain preponderance in the demographic balance with the remaining Palestinians. By letting the economically disadvantaged Sephardim settle in the occupied territories, the Israeli state gave free rein to a pervasive belief that the conquest of the West Bank (‘Judea and Samaria’) and East Jerusalem was the fulfilment of a biblical promise – a belief which, as we have seen, chimes with the views of Zionist sympathisers in the United States. It also enabled a reconciliation between a right-wing, ‘Revisionist’ Zionism (which claims title to the entire biblical Palestine) and a neo-orthodox, ‘national’ Judaism.

Today this right–religious bloc is leading the country deeper into the morass from which a retreat is increasingly difficult to imagine. However, since it possesses the fourth-most-powerful military machine in the world and an illegal nuclear arsenal of an estimated 200 warheads (Kapeliouk 1999), the demise of Israel in its present form and political make-up is a frightening prospect in itself. Yet here precisely we must recognise that the state of Israel is a frontier formation of Western imperialism, indeed the spearhead of the West’s penetration into the Middle East. As we saw in the previous section, Protestant fundamentalists labelled this penetration a ‘crusade’ long before Bin Laden ever used the term to denounce the West. Since this new crusade has even less chance of succeeding than the mediaeval campaigns, the saga of Israel can only end in tragedy. However, no account of this saga can be complete without situating it in the long history of suffering of the Jewish ethnos that gave rise to Zionism in the first place.

Anti-Semitism and the Zionist Project

The accusation of anti-Semitism has been abused to neutralise criticism of Israel to such an extent that today it sometimes has the perverse effect of obscuring the plight of the Jews across the centuries. In fact the ethnic connection between the Jewish state and the people whom the Nazis massacred by the million is highly problematic, to say the least.

Anti-Semitism in the sense of anti-Jewish feeling is a variety of anti-chrematism, the distrust in agrarian societies of ‘living money’,

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perceived as rootless and untrustworthy. The prejudice in Christian Europe against Jews was rooted in superstitious fear of infection and contagion, especially through food or blood. They were always suspected, writes Slezkine (2004: 21), of ‘casting spells to destroy the harvest, using the blood of infants to prepare ritual meals’, and so on. Lebanese, Chinese, and other diasporas performing the role of ‘living money’ in other parts of the world have been subject to comparable prejudices. The Jews in addition were suspect from the vantage point of Christian theology, as the ‘murderers of Jesus’. This Christian anti-Semitic lineage was elevated into militant doctrine by the Spanish Inquisition. The ‘Statutes Concerning the Purity of Blood’ issued by the Inquisition placed relations between Christians and Jews on a new footing. From the late fifteenth century the Inquisition specifically targeted the (forcibly converted) Iberian Jews or marranos, suspected of being natural heretics. True, as Gross writes (2000: 145–51), the Inquisition was abolished when Napoleon conquered Spain. Yet by that time the conservative reaction to the French Revolution had also renewed the Catholic anti-Jewish stance. Through the French émigré Joseph de Maistre, the Inquisition experience was explicitly bequeathed to nineteenth-century France.

Here anti-Semitism culminated in the Dreyfus affair, the trial for treason against an army captain of Jewish background that threw France into a crisis in the mid 1890s. The Dreyfus trial, born out of chauvinist frustration over the lost war with Prussia–Germany, mobilised democratic, anticlerical feeling to the point at which a formal separation between state and church was passed into law in 1905. The trial also convinced Theodor Herzl, the Paris correspondent of a Viennese liberal newspaper, that assimilation, by which European Jews had sought integration into mainstream society, had failed. In 1896 he published a short tract, The Jewish State, which claimed that without a state, and given the depth of mediaeval prejudice against them, Europe’s Jews were in danger of destruction. Herzl based his argument on an entirely secular analysis of the concept of nationality; indeed as Urofsky concludes (1976: 20), ‘Except for his analysis of anti-Semitism, there is very little “Jewish” in The Jewish State.’

The mass of European Jewry at the dawn of the twentieth century (5.2 out of 8.7 million) lived in the Russian empire. As mentioned in Chapter 2, this has been traced to mass conversion to the Judaic faith in the Khazar kingdom in the eighth century ad (Sand 2008: 3). Indeed from the time of the Babylonian exile, the people designated as Jews have constituted themselves into an ethnos primarily on the

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grounds of religion. Endogamy, which by rule of thumb reproduces an ethnos by intermarriage at an average rate of 90 per cent over time (cf. vol. i, 2007: 4), then takes care of its continued existence as a community occupying a separate social space – particularly if, on the aforementioned grounds, the surrounding communities keep it isolated by superstitious prejudice. But the economic grounds were shifting fast after the emancipation of the serfs of Russia in 1860. The decline of the manorial economy and the growth of banks reduced the Jews’ role as ‘living money’ and forced them into artisanal production or even wage labour. As petty traders and financiers, Jews now competed with Greeks and other diaspora groups; as workers, with Russians and Ukrainians. An embattled Tsarist autocracy fearing the rise of socialism encouraged anti-Semitism among all of them, and ferocious pogroms were the result (Slezkine 2004: 159). Odessa was the scene of some of the worst outrages in the 1870s and 1880s.

The anti-Semitic policies of the Russian state were based on the conviction of the mentor of Tsar Alexander III, C.P. Pobedonostsev, that one-third of the Jews should emigrate, one-third be converted to the Russian Orthodox faith, and the remaining third should ‘disappear’ (Shaheen 1956: 8). That there was a girl of Jewish background among the assassins of his father, Alexander II, was enough for the new Tsar to brand it a Jewish plot. In this climate, Leo Pinsker (1821–91), a Russian physician of Jewish extraction, abandoned his earlier belief in assimilation, claiming (as in Urofsky 1976: 14) that ‘against superstition even the gods fight in vain’. Without a common land, language, and customs, he argued in his 1882 pamphlet Auto-Emancipation (as in ibid.), ‘the Jewish people has no fatherland of its own, though many motherlands … It is everywhere a guest, and nowhere at home.’ Pinsker’s idea of seeking to obtain a ‘homeland’ (he spoke not of a state, but of ‘a community of colonists’) resonated among Jewish intellectuals. For the Jewish masses, however, escaping from the Russian countryside was their most urgent need. As Slezkine documents (2004: 115–17), 1.28 million Jews emigrated between 1897 and 1915, 80 per cent of them to the United States. In the same period, around 1 million moved to the cities, bringing the urban population of Jews in the Russian empire to 3.5 million.

As a proliferating system of restrictions robbed more and more Jewish people of their livelihoods, many Russian Jews joined revolutionary socialist cells committed to overthrowing the autocracy. In 1897, these merged into the General Jewish Labour League of

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Lithuania, Poland, and Russia – the ‘Bund’ for short. The pogroms of 1903–06 also triggered the formation of a Zionist youth culture rivalling socialism in its radicalism. ‘The landlessness of the Jewish people is the source of its malady and tragedy’, the Marxist Zionist Ber Borochov wrote in the early twentieth century (1972: 72). ‘We have no territory of our own, hence we are by necessity divorced from nature.’ Yet, as Urofsky notes (1976: 31), even if many Jews by then were aware of Zionism, by 1900 the actual adherents of the idea represented less than 1 per cent of all European Jews. ‘In western Europe it is generally believed that the large majority of Jewish youth in Russia is in the Zionist camp’, Chaim Weizmann wrote to Herzl in 1903 (as in Slezkine 2004: 149). ‘Unfortunately, the opposite is true. The larger part of the contemporary younger generation is anti-Zionist, not from a desire to assimilate as in Western Europe, but through revolutionary conviction.’

Orthodox religious Jews meanwhile rejected both socialism and Zionism. An orthodox political Judaism emerged in 1912 in the form of Agudat Yisrael. This brought together yeshivot (religious seminaries), the Hasidic courts (orthodox communities in Eastern Europe), and other nodes of Judaism to consolidate the ethnos in the wake of mass emigration and urbanisation (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 108). The orthodox Jews all saw Zionism as a dangerous attempt to force the Messiah’s return, although in special cases they assisted individual settlers in Palestine. If ultimately many of them were willing to condone the establishment of a national homeland there, Urofsky argues (1976: 37), it was because the redemption of the people of Israel by the Messiah was of a totally different order from finding a territory of their own (for the same reason they had earlier consented to planned resettlement in Uganda). The real antagonism was with the secular orientation of the Zionists around Weizmann and Martin Buber.

The rumblings of the Russian Revolution during the First World War provided the impetus for synchronising Western imperialism and Zionism. The fear that Russia would collapse and give up the fight with Germany prompted the British ruling class to use an endorsement of Zionist aspirations as a way of wooing the Russian Jews from socialism. Lord Rothschild (the banker and a member of the Milner Group’s inner circle, the ‘Society of the Elect’) had long supported Zionist aspirations to return to Palestine. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 (made in a letter to Rothschild) was actually drafted by Milner himself. Yet the attitude of the Milner Group

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towards a Jewish state was ambivalent; in general British policy was pro-Arab, and in India it was pro-Moslem. Jan Smuts, the South African general and politician, another prominent member of the Milner Group, in 1919 complained about the Jews (as in Quigley 1981: 171) that they lacked ‘the Arabs’ attractive manners’ and ‘do not warm the heart by graceful subjection. They make demands. They are a bitter, recalcitrant little people … They see God in the shape of an Oriental potentate.’

The Milner Group interpreted Jewish immigration into Palestine in the context of Arab federation. Given that the Jews were ‘cousins’ of the Arabs, they saw in the Balfour Declaration the promise of the Jews bringing capital and labour, hence economic dynamism, into Palestine, which in turn would merge into that wider federation (this explains the apparent confusion about whom Palestine was actually promised to by the British, noted by Easterly 2006: 258–61). ‘I am not speaking of the policy which is advocated by the extreme Zionists, which is a totally different thing’, Milner stated in the House of Lords in 1923 (as in Quigley 1981: 172). With 700,000 inhabitants, Palestine in his view had space for millions, and Jewish immigration would provide at least some of that. But Palestine would remain a British mandate and ‘never become a Jewish state’.

All this changed when the Soviet Union rose to become the prime contender to Western hegemony after the Second World War. Jews for obvious reasons had rallied to the Russian Revolution in great number, and were still prominent as party activists in the Stalinist ‘revolution from above’. Among the leading cadres of the NKVD (secret police) at the height of the terror, Jews outnumbered Russians (Slezkine 2004: 221, 254); Solzhenitsyn (1975, ii: 76–80) documents their role in the establishment of the labour camp system, although the camps devoured their victims irrespective of ethnicity and many inmates were Jewish too. The war also gave Soviet Jews the weapons to fight the Nazi invaders. However, in the German-occupied Ukraine, the Baltic republics, and Southern Russia, their perceived association with the Soviet state contributed to a revived anti-Semitism on the part of locals resentful over the terror, collectivisation, or annexation. This further ratcheted up the death toll of the genocide. Goebbels, speaking in March 1945 (as in Eksteins 1990: 320), claimed that, whoever might emerge victorious from the war, ‘there can be no doubt that the Jews will be the losers’. The unspeakable fate that befell those of Jewish ethnicity, religion, or ancestry was indeed the one enduring certainty to emerge from the war. This may explain

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a half century of widespread goodwill in the West towards the new state of Israel, which only today is unravelling.

Colonising the Holy Land

Foreign relations evolve through the contradiction between community and humanity. In the case of Israel, this contradiction has been and continues to be reproduced through three more concrete antagonisms. First and foremost, the conflict with the Arabs, within the larger Semitic-speaking world; secondly, the conflict between different ethnic categories of Jews; and finally, the religious–secular divide between the original Zionist pioneers, both the Labour Zionists and the right-wing Revisionists, and the orthodox Jews, which after 1967–73 was gradually transcended into a hybrid between right-wing Zionism and Jewish fundamentalism.

There is no need to discuss at any length the conflict with the Arab world concerning the legitimate title to the land of Palestine. The Jewish notion of being the ‘chosen people’, according to Goldziher (1876: 325–6) was the result of the Hebrew people’s ethnogenesis in acute conflict with the neighbouring peoples in Canaan; little has changed in this respect. Goudsblom (2001: 113) highlights that already in Deuteronomy, the pervasive message is that the non-Jewish population of Palestine had to be exterminated, since God designated this land for the Israelites. Of course today, the conflict is determined by a century of imperialist rivalries and the struggles over the control of the planet’s energy reserves. But there is still a biblical element in the specific form of the occupation of space, that of pioneer communities developing the barren land, steadily pushing the frontier deeper into Arab territory and killing or expelling the inhabitants. At independence, Israel’s 650,000 Jews faced a Palestinian population three times as large, and owning 93 per cent of the land. In the foundational war 700,000 Palestinians were driven out of the country and by 1962 the ratio of land ownership had been exactly reversed (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007: 92, 96).

From 1948, Jewish settlements were established in the farthest corners of the country (in the Negev desert and along the borders with Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan), or in areas where large concen-trations of Palestinians remained behind, such as Galilee. As Selby documents (2003: 68), these settlements were then connected by a dense complex of water ducts tapping into the Jordan river at its northernmost point within Israel; even the occupied West Bank’s groundwater resources are mostly used by Israel too (85 per cent),

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leaving virtually none for the Palestinians (ibid.: 30). Thus space is claimed in a way that literally eliminates the life chances of others. The often-made comparison with apartheid in South Africa is apposite in that Israel does not recognise any claim to sovereign equality on the part of the dispossessed. Even the so-called ‘Palestinian state’, to which Israeli politicians will pay occasional lip-service when either Palestinian resistance or criticism from the West demands it, cannot be anything more than the Bantustans in which South Africa tried to lock up part of its black population under the guise of independence. The open-air prison camp of Gaza is testimony to what this can imply.

Zionists recognised all along that taking possession of Palestine would mean violence and war. As David Ben-Gurion, the embodiment of secular Zionism and future prime minister for the Labour Party (Mapai), put it in 1922 (as in Slezkine 2004: 212), ‘We are not yeshiva students debating the finer points of self-improvement, we are conquerors of the land.’ Or in the words of an associate (as in Mearsheimer and Walt 2007: 96), ‘the Zionist enterprise is an enterprise of conquest’. The leader of the Revisionist Zionists, Vladimir ‘Zeev’ Jabotinsky, argued in his ‘Iron Wall’ article of 1923 (as in Crooke 2009: 13) that ‘only when [the Arabs] have given up hope to get rid of us … will they desert their extremist leaders’. With the ‘moderates’ who would take their place, some form of accommodation could then be reached. Not a state of their own: ‘There can be only one purpose in colonization … For the country’s Arabs that purpose is essentially unacceptable.’

Unlike the Revisionists, Ben-Gurion had little time for ‘Holy Land’ metaphors. Israel to him was a European settlement planted in the region only by geographical accident. Hence his emphatic rejection of the idea that there was any cultural affinity with the Arabs. Disappointed when the Eisenhower administration turned out to be unwilling to view Israel as a strategic asset for the West, Crooke recalls (2009: 1), Ben-Gurion set about developing an anti-Arab regional balance-of-power system with Iran, Turkey, and Ethiopia. He even ventured the idea that Arabs were in fact not a majority in the Middle East – Persians, Turks, Jews, Kurds, Druze, Christian Maronites in Lebanon, and so on, all ethnically non-Arab, in his view should therefore draw together.

The ‘iron wall’ separating Jews from Arabs was itself the result of a class compromise dating from the early-twentieth-century colonisation movement. This is another similarity with apartheid, one that highlights the way in which racism crystallises in a capitalist

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class context. Just as the racial laws of South Africa served to shield the white working class from black competition, Zionists in Palestine sought to avoid intra-ethnic class conflict by excluding Palestinians from the labour market and the land. By recognising the ‘ethnic rights’ of Jewish workers (rather than employing cheap Arab labour), there emerged what Gershon Shafir calls (as in Selby 2003: 65) ‘a practical alliance between a settlement movement without settlers and a workers’ movement without work’. It was this class compromise that also entailed the cooperative form of property and colonisation (the kibbutz) and various instances of social protection that gave the Zionist colony, and eventually the Israeli state, its initial ‘socialist’, activist profile. ‘Israeli society – even only the Jewish portion of Israeli society – was extremely heterogeneous’, writes Migdal (1988: 143). ‘Yet the state [was able] through social policies to change its population’s daily habits and to pre-empt and delegitimize contending social organisations from exercising autonomous social control.’

There was another vein of foreignness running through class conflict in Israel – the divide between European and non-European Jews. This is the second of the contradictions that we look at here. Zionism as conceived by Herzl was a project for the European Jews, the Ashkenazim (descendants of Japheth, one of Noah’s sons, in Genesis 10: 3, and later the epithet for Jews in or from Germany). Already in the early twentieth century, however, Jewish leaders in Palestine realised that in order to build a viable Jewish community there, non-Ashkenazic Jews might have to be brought in. The Nazi genocide then dealt the fatal blow to the envisaged Ashkenazic formation. ‘Hitler destroyed the substance, the chief and significant constructive force of the state’, Ben-Gurion reflected afterwards (as in Kamil 2004: 216). ‘The state emerged but did not find the nation which had been waiting for it.’ Thus the contours of a different ethnic constellation emerged, ruled by an Ashkenazic elite but recruiting others to attain the necessary demographic mass. The Jewish Agency, the immigration body, early on selected Yemeni Jews as being suitable to replace Arab peasants in Palestine because they still lived a ‘barbaric and savage’ way of life and were expected to accept a meagre existence. Ben-Gurion (as in Nitzan and Bichler 2002: 101) compared them explicitly to the African slaves who had been brought to the Americas. The horse-trading language by which a mission to Yemen identified one community as desirables on account of their health and strong legs, another (as in Kamil 2004: 216) as useless because of ‘shrunken faces and thin hands’, is a reminder of the racist crudity with which

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supposedly fellow Jews were being recruited. Ben-Gurion actually used the term race, geza, in this connection (ibid.: 220).

The idea of an Arab Jew was an anomaly to leading Zionists. Hence they applied other terms, such as ‘the sons of the oriental communities’ (bnei edot haMizrach), ‘Orientals’ (Mizrachim), or Sephardim. These were not terms of self-identification, but labels pasted on them by Ashkenazic Jews. When the oriental Jews gradually accepted the label ‘Sephardim’ in the 1950s, the fact that they chose the term associated with the Iberian peninsula (Sepharad) although more often they came from North Africa or the Middle East was testimony to the status associated with being ‘European’ (Kamil 2004: 211–12). To weld the Sephardim into Israeli citizens, however, war with the Arabs was seen as a necessary condition. Only thus would they be kept from fraternising with Arab neighbours, with whom they had lived peacefully for so long, and become part of the fighting nation. Without war, the leadership around Ben-Gurion argued (as in Nitzan and Bichler 2002: 102), the necessary moral tension would be lacking. This is how internal foreignness (Israel of course is not unique here) is translated into aggression towards an external ‘enemy’.

Ashkenazic hegemony over the Sephardim was initially maintained by class compromise through welfare-state policies; after the Six-Day War, by allowing colonisation of the Occupied Territories. Culturally the distinction is still very much alive. In the Israeli version of the ‘Big Brother’ television show aired in 2008, contestants were selected across all possible dividing lines, but the final popularity contest was between a rowdy, skirt-chasing Sephardic Jew who confirmed all the worst prejudices about his community and a young woman whom Kraft (2008) characterises as the ‘stereotype of the Ashkenazic elite, living in Tel Aviv in a bubble of left-wing politics and liberalism, detached from the rest of Israel’. The class dimension of this cultural divide, initially dissimulated by the pioneer ideology and socialist veneer, emerged more clearly when Israel began to industrialise in the late 1950s. Control of the vast majority of companies (166 out of 194 in 1965; Kamil 2004: 222) remained in Ashkenazic hands, whereas the workers would typically be Sephardim, reproducing the inner colonialism juxtaposing ‘first Israelis’ and ‘second Israelis’. Nitzan and Bichler (2002: 111–13) point at how some of the endogenous Palestinian Sephardic gentry were co-opted into the Israeli ruling class by elite intermarriage, without entirely overcoming old resentments.

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By the 1970s, however, a new format for handling internal foreignness was in the making.

This takes us to the third contradiction, the one between religious orthodoxy and secular Zionism. It was overcome after the war of 1967, which brought the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and the Golan Heights under Israeli occupation. Opening the Occupied Territories to colonisation was and remains the project of the right-wing Likud party, today led by Benjamin Netanyahu, the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary. Because the Revisionists never agreed to the Mapai’s acceptance of a smaller Israel than the biblical Holy Land (they left the World Zionist Organisation in 1935 over the planned creation of a separate state of Jordan; Lustick 1988: 38), their fortunes revived when new territories were brought under Israeli control. But the Revisionist bloc that later merged into the Likud had already done well in the 1965 elections. Rooted in maverick armed groups (the Irgun established by Jabotinsky, and the Lehi terrorist network, or Stern gang) who contested the mainstream Zionists’ handling of the protection of Jewish settlers in the interwar years (Migdal 1988: 169), the Revisionists now became the architects of the new class compromise. The concept of the West Bank as biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’ combined their territorial aspirations with the imaginary of the religious Jews; it turned the continuing occupation into the linchpin of legitimacy.

Granting orthodox Jews the right of religious education had been one of the compromises on which the hegemony of Ben-Gurion’s Mapai party rested. As early as 1948, Agudat Yisrael (the network set up in Tsarist Russia, as noted above, to organise orthodox Ashkenazic Jews) and the Mizrahi movement (the religious Sephardic Jews who would later found the National Religious Party) agreed with the Labour Zionists to postpone a constitution settling the issue of the state religion. Their only condition was that orthodox rabbis would be in charge of family law issues and that the state would observe holy days and customs (Lustick 1988: 28). Beyond this agreement, the orthodox maintained their rejection of Zionism. However, in line with its European self-image, Israeli society was fast moving in a secular direction, and in the 1950s this provoked bomb attacks by revisionist hardliners and yeshiva students on shops and restaurants not observing the Sabbath (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 67). The mass base for a religious resurgence was meanwhile being created by the state-supported religious school system, in which 25–30 per cent of all Jewish Israeli children are being taught. This gave the

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National Religious Party, backed by the Ministries of the Interior and Religious Affairs, effective control over the enforcement of the religious status quo (Lustick 1988: 54).

The ideological basis for the religious Zionism of the National Religious Party (or Mafdal) was the activist messianism of the British-appointed Askhenazi rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. In the 1920s Kook took the line (as in Urofsky 1976: 38) that there was no conflict between Judaism and establishing a Jewish state. ‘The national sentiment is holy and exalted in itself’, indeed it is ‘the very foundation of Judaism and essential to it’. After 1967, his son, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, carried the neo-orthodox, ‘national religious’ wing of the Zionist movement further. Stressing the importance of settling the Occupied Territories in order to claim the entire land of Israel for the Jews, Kook the younger (as in Lustick 1988: 35) claimed that

the State of Israel was created and established by the council of nations by order of the Sovereign Lord of the Universe so that the clear commandment in the Torah ‘that they shall inherit and settle the Land’ would be fulfilled.

Here the national religious current took its distance from the ultra-orthodox haredim (literally ‘fearful, God-fearing’), for whom there is no point in enforcing the observance of halacha, the sacred way of life (the Jewish equivalent of the sharia of Islam), on society. They believe that the Jews must suffer and wait for the Messiah, in Israel or elsewhere. ‘The pessimistic messianism of the haredim accounts for their denial of any theological significance for the state of Israel’, Almond, Appleby, and Sivan observe (2003: 67). Kook on the other hand ‘sought to integrate relatively strict observance of the halacha with full participation in a modern, Zionist society’, writes Lustick (1988: 7). Whereas the haredim are exempt from military service, Kook’s followers combine religious study with arms drill in the yeshivot hesder, religious field seminaries (Algazy 1988: 15). In combination with the Bnei Akiva, which emerged from the religious kibbutz movement and runs religious and educational institutions, this led to Gush Emunim (‘Bloc of the Faithful’).

The first nuclei of Gush Emunim date from the 1967 war. The key event was the spring 1968 Passover, which was observed by a number of orthodox scholars in an Arab hotel in Hebron. When they decided to take up permanent residence there, this became the spearhead of the wider settler movement of the occupied West Bank (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 141). Rabbi Moshe Levinger, who established the first Jewish settlement in Hebron, has since been the

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recognised ideological guide of Gush Emunim. Even so, the mood immediately after the Six-Day War was not religious but Zionist, ultra-nationalist even. The signatories of a manifesto of the Movement for the Whole Land of Israel declared themselves (as in Lustick 1988: 43)

bound to be loyal to the entirety of the country – for the sake of the people’s past as well as its future, and no government in Israel is entitled to give up this entirety, which represents the inherent and inalienable right of our people from the beginnings of its history.

The combined effect of new economic opportunities, resurgent Zionist fervour, and US pressure on the Soviet Union to facilitate emigration (as a price for arms control agreements) resulted in a sharp upturn of Jews leaving the USSR after 1967. Between 1968 and 1994, around 1.2 million Jews left the USSR and its successor states, although after the first wave of militant Zionists the vast majority used their exit visas to settle in the United States (Slezkine 2004: 358). This special treatment did not fail to activate the anti-Semitic reflexes that had such a long history in Russia and Eastern Europe; the close bond between Jews and the USSR had been unravelling ever since the creation of Israel.

However, with oil becoming more important, Israel faced growing challenges to maintain its privileged if precarious position as the spearhead of the Western thrust into the Middle East. The October War of 1973 added to its woes. It was nothing like the triumph of 1967, and the United States and the USSR came close to becoming involved themselves to save their respective client states in the region. For the orthodox haredim, this was only a reminder of the ‘idolatry’ of military might and the loss of pure religiousness; a position resonating among orthodox Sephardic Jews dissatisfied with Ashkenazic dominance of Agudat Yisrael (they split from it in 1984 to form the Shas party, which rejects further colonisation except for East Jerusalem; Algazy 1998: 15). For the activists of Gush Emunim and the Mafdal on the other hand, the difficulties in fighting Israel’s neighbours in 1973 revealed ‘the insufficient effort made toward the settlement of the recently “liberated” parts of the Holy Land’ (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 63). Their activist messianism sees the integral colonisation of all occupied land as the way of bringing the ultimate redemption of the ‘chosen people’ closer. The return of any land to the Palestinians or other Arabs is defined as sacrilege (Haynes 2007: 214). Still, until 1977 their settlement

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activities on the West Bank were pursued as ‘civic’ initiatives, without government support.

It was only in that year, following the election victory of Likud under Menachem Begin, that the tide turned. Begin, the one-time Irgun terrorist chief, upon his victory promptly asked for an audience with Tzvi Yehuda Kook. To the latter’s religious students this was proof that the Rabbi’s prophesies had come true (he died in 1982) (Lustick 1988: 37). In coalition with the National Religious Party (Mafdal), Begin then set about securing the support of the Protestant funda-mentalists in the United States referred to earlier in this chapter. This was another defining moment; it established the continuity between Protestant fundamentalist conceptions of imminent ‘rapture’ and the activist messianism of the Mafdal, very soon to be complemented by the alliance of the Likud with the Reagan Republicans. Israeli support for US foreign policy goals in cases where Congress judged those immoral was part of the agreement.

The US connection until today has proved to be Israel’s best life insurance. The Jewish state may have become what Slezkine calls (2004: 365), ‘the ghetto’s mirror image – an armed camp (Masada)’; but for ‘American Jews … Jewishness and possibly Americanness seemed to depend on Israel’s continued chosenness’. Yet here we should remind ourselves that on an issue like the war in Iraq, as Mearsheimer and Walt document (2007: 243; cf. my 2006: 363–9), the majority of American Jews do not remotely agree with the ‘Israel lobby’ in the United States, led by neoconservatives such as Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz.

In Israel itself, the territorial imperative had both a theological side and also real-estate implications. Certainly Tzvi Yehuda Kook might claim (as in Lustick 1988: 83) that ‘the land was chosen even before the people’; but Ariel Sharon, the popular tough-talking general, won the confidence of Gush Emunim on practical grounds. As Likud minister of land administration, he announced (as early as 1977) a plan to settle 1 million Jews on the West Bank over the next decades. This helped to translate ‘Holy Land’ imagery into the prospect of property development opportunities and more spacious, subsidised housing. The partial realisation of this plan may explain why the Sephardic Jews, although they are not prominent in Gush Emunim (which typically attracts well-educated Ashkenazic Jews who are drawn to a life of tense antagonism with the displaced Palestinians), are part of the religious right’s constituency in elections. Since many Jewish fundamentalists, on the authority of the relevant biblical

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texts, see the promised land as stretching from the Nile Delta to the Euphrates, there is obviously still a lot of settlement ahead.

Meanwhile the revelations about the attitudes and behaviour of the Israeli military during the campaign in Gaza in 2008–09 are a reminder that the post-1967 alliance between the Revisionist right and militant Judaism have set in motion a dynamic that has very much run out of control. Ethnic cleansing, which caused sufficient public consternation to mobilise support (or at least acquiescence) for NATO intervention in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, is still an accepted fact in the case of Israel. As Slezkine writes (2004: 364): ‘The rhetoric of ethnic homogeneity and ethnic deportations, tabooed elsewhere in the West, is a routine element of Israeli political life.’ Between 30 and 35 per cent of Jewish Israeli opinion is in favour of a complete expulsion of the remaining Arab population (Phillips 2004: 237). In forging this mood, militant Zionists from the United States have played a role of their own. The charismatic rabbi Meir Kahane, who through his Jewish Defense League (JDL) mobilised lower-middle-class Jewish New Yorkers against 1960s black militancy, moved to Israel in 1971 to evade an FBI investigation into his activities (Lustick 1988: 67; Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, hails from the JDL). By the end of the decade Kahane had built a constituency among poor Sephardic Israelis in the cities and the settlements, who ‘found in him a leader who articulated their tribalistic notions of Jewish ethnicity as well as their age-old suspicions of the Arabs from whose lands they had been chased in the 1950s’ (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 162). Kahane and his Kach party preached overt racism and violence against Arabs. Although support from Gush Emunim settlers was lukewarm (Kach had two settlements of its own), Kahane eventually won a seat in the Knesset.

This may now be history – Kach is officially banned. Yet the racist current, according to Algazy (1998: 15), has continued to use religious imagery in pursuit of policies of expulsion through organisations like Moledet (Motherland) and Nemanei Har Habayit (Faithful of the Temple). In the elections of 2009, the Likud and the racist party of Avigdor Lieberman easily gained a majority by stirring up such sentiment in the aftermath of the Gaza operation launched by their opponents. Hard-line support is overwhelmingly drawn from the Occupied Territories, where majorities for collective punishment of Palestinians (razing of housing blocks in refugee camps, punishing extended families) and in case of resistance, for collective deportation, are easily garnered. Still, whenever the Israeli state has been forced

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to make political compromises, the bond between Likud and the religious Zionist fundamentalists of Gush Emunim has been put to the test. Sharon himself was to find this out when he dismantled Jewish settlements in Gaza. Racism and biblical conviction may actually conflict; the ethno-demographic considerations of retaining a Jewish majority can paradoxically dictate giving up some of the Holy Land (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007: 217).

The West will at some point have to reconsider whether embedding separate Israeli statehood into some sort of federal structure with the Palestinians and neighbouring states like Jordan is not the more sustainable solution. It may be less costly to achieve consensual nuclear disarmament of the Middle East via such a route than by maintaining Israel’s 200-warhead capacity and waging war against Iran in order to deny the latter a symbolic force of one nuclear weapon. As things stand, however, the Israeli religious right holds Israel hostage, just as Israel has the West in a firm grip through the Zionist hold on the policies of the United States. Ultimately this is a self-defeating process. As Uri Avnery commented immediately after the Gaza massacre (as in Vidal 2009: 11), ‘this war in the final analysis is also a crime against the Israelis, against the state of Israel’.

ISLAM AS THE NEW NOMAD CREED?

We turn now to the question of whether the conjoined mobilisation of Protestant and Jewish fundamentalists discussed above constitutes a response to an onslaught of Islamic fundamentalists. In the Flat Earth perspective of the ‘clash of civilisations’, this is indeed the argument. ‘Population growth in Muslim countries, and particularly the expansion of the fifteen- to twenty-four-year-old age cohort, provides recruits for fundamentalism, terrorism, insurgency, and migration’, Huntington writes (1998: 103). Terrorism, he explains, is the weapon of the weak; and once the Islamic radicals get their hands on nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction, they will no longer be weak. Moving on from the notion of Moscow as the centre of global terror, an idea sponsored by the Israeli right in the late 1970s (see above), Huntington now identifies the new contender to Western pre-eminence, China, as the hub of what he calls ‘the Confucian–Islamic’ connection (1998: 188).

We may also look at this in terms of a more complex, layered structure of foreign relations. From such a perspective, quasi-tribal inner city interaction, or real tribal or clan divides as in occupied

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Palestine, Iraq, or Afghanistan, may or may not be co-opted by the foreign relations crystallising on the heartland–contender divide (whether this concerns China or, say, Iran) (see vol. i, esp. 143–4, 164; and my 2006).

If there is a basis for religious affiliation, Muslim fundamentalism may come in. This can happen either as an echo of anti-colonial Muslim thought; or through ramifications of the Iranian Shia revolution, which incorporates elements of a progressive resistance to Western imperialism; or as an extension of the Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. Because of its deeply conservative antecedents, however, the last mentioned will rather be of a nihilistic character (of the al-Qaeda type). I go through these three alternatives one by one.

Sharing Urban Space in the West

The assassination of the Dutch film-maker Theo van Gogh may serve as our point of departure (I draw on van Aartsen et al. 2005, a collection of 42 reflections on the event). In the early morning of 2 November 2004, a young Dutchman of Moroccan descent, Mohammed Bouyeri, overtook van Gogh on his bicycle, shot him, and stabbed him several times with a knife. Van Gogh, a talented provocateur wont to test the limits of convention on community relations (his distasteful jokes on the Nazi genocide of the Jews had already caused widespread offence), had recently turned his attention to the oppression of women ascribed to Islam. In his film Submission, texts from the Koran are projected onto the bare bodies of abused women in an attempt to shame Islam and assert the values of sexual liberation and freedom of expression established in the 1960s, when Amsterdam was the hub of a new world of unlimited imagination and social experimentation.

Bouyeri had grown up in the Dutch capital and had initially been fairly successful in finding his way. It was only when his aspiration to do neighbourhood social work ran aground in the face of the retreating neoliberal state, and he began to experience the humiliations of increased surveillance of youngsters of foreign background, that he was driven into the arms of militant Islamists preaching resistance to attacks on their co-religionists worldwide. Yet the way the ‘host society’ responds to immigration is obviously a key factor in determining how this resistance is expressed.

After the killing, Bouyeri left a threatening letter on the film-maker’s body addressed to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the author of the screenplay of Submission. Hirsi Ali embodies the fact that the urban divide is not

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a matter of straightforward ethnicity. An immigrant from Kenya claiming refugee status as a Somali, her good looks and ‘people skills’, as well as the patronage of key personalities in the Dutch political elite, from the Labour Party to the conservative VVD, made her a successful socialite. Hirsi Ali’s dark skin was not at all an obstacle to being embraced by Holland’s urban elites; on the contrary, it placed her militant assertion of the ‘indigenous’ values of the West against ‘foreign’ subcultures beyond the suspicion of racism. This was exactly what the neoliberal VVD leader and later EU Commissioner Frits Bolkestein and the maverick right-wing populist Pim Fortuyn (assassinated by a Dutch animal rights extremist a few years before van Gogh) had failed to achieve when they embarked on their campaigns to demand conformity to prevailing Dutch mores from communities of immigrant background. In the end, however, after her refugee status had been exposed as fraudulent, Hirsi Ali had to accept an invitation from the American Enterprise Institute to go to the United States.

If the killing of van Gogh proves anything, it is that aggressively proclaiming freedoms enjoyed by the privileged when the dispossessed share the same space in a crowded city is a dangerous experiment – especially when the dispossessed are reminded of their being ‘foreigners’ in the deeper sense of being relegated to separate social spaces and are unable or unwilling to adopt the identity of the ‘natives’. But is it the transnational extension of Middle Eastern Islamism or the ‘terrorism’ propaganda disseminated by Western neoconservatives that works to politicise such situations in religious fundamentalist terms? Across Europe, the presence of sizeable Muslim minorities as a result of immigration has no doubt activated latent xenophobia. As testified by public opinion surveys in 2005, large majorities in several countries expressed concern that Muslims were keeping aloof from mainstream society (Haynes 2007: 284–5, Tables 9.1 and 9.2). Given the absence of an articulate left, it is only a matter of launching the right type of populist agitation to mobilise this sentiment.1

1. In the Netherlands, the career of the far right populist, amateur film-maker, and dissident from the VVD, Geert Wilders, is built entirely around a crusade against Islam. It was launched in close association with the Israeli embassy in The Hague, which supplied him with parliamentary questions about the ‘terrorist’ threat in the Occupied Territories (van Houcke 2007).

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The alienated youth of immigrant background in the West meanwhile has not much responded to the siren call of Islamism. True, the July 7 bombings on the London public transport network in 2005, or the attacks in Madrid the year before, were grisly events by any standard. But they were exceptional, and so was the sorry tale of the Iranian fatwa imposed in 1989 on Salman Rushdie for sacrilege in his novel The Satanic Verses. As Kepel explains (2000: 192–6), the original decision to attack Rushdie for presumed blasphemy came from UK disciples of the founder of the Jamaat-e Islami, Maulana Maududi (to whom we return below). Alerted by their brethren in Madras, the Islamic Foundation in Leicester sent round a message to all mosques to begin a petition to obtain the interdiction of the book. Even Rajiv Gandhi in India, needing Muslim votes in a difficult election campaign, joined the chorus. The campaign initially had little success, and it was petering out when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa (mainly to shame the tame response of his Saudi rivals and to outmanoeuvre moderates at home), thus giving the Rushdie affair the political dimension it had so far lacked.

What drives much of the anger that plays out on this frontier is the continuing Western aggression against Arab and Islamic groups and states, with the United States and Israel in leading roles. This is an anger whose origins are quite independent of religious belief or ethnic origin. To the extent that there is a specific religious connection within the mindset of youngsters of immigrant descent in the West (and to the extent that that religion is Islam), their anger is best understood in the context of a quasi-tribal, nomadic exclusion from a sedentary formation. As Mandaville writes (2001: 70), the Prophet’s flight from Mecca, the hijra (migration), has here acquired a new symbolic quality. ‘For those who participated in [this] first migration’, he notes, ‘it was not the geographic move from Mecca to Medina which mattered, but rather the much more dramatic (and initially, one would imagine, disorienting) split from their tribal kin-groups.’

The first migration has become an enduring symbol and its resonance can be heard today in the names of several Islamic movements such as Takfir w’al-Hijra in Egypt or al-Muhajirun (‘the Emigrants’) in London. The hijra has taken on a significance much wider than the specific historical event itself. It has come to symbolise deliverance from oppression and jahiliya (pre-Islamic ignorance).

Someone who experiences oppression and exclusion on the grounds of foreignness (in the sense of alienated difference) may thus rethink the experience of migration using a Muslim vocabulary.

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The fundamentalist inflection then comes from the shock of seeing corruption or laxity on the part of the nominal co-religionists, so that the fight against the established religious authorities (the term takfir in the name of the Egyptian group means excommunication for apostasy, derived from kfur, impiety; Kepel 2000: 29–30) becomes as urgent as combating the infidel.

Western politicians involved in the attacks on the Islamic world meanwhile have not forgotten that the one time that the ‘Third World’ was able briefly to impact on the global balance of forces came when its (mainly Muslim) oil exporters banded together, triggering what became the movement for a New International Economic Order (see my 2006: ch. 4). The violent neoliberal counter-revolution launched in response in the 1980s obliterated the NIEO movement in its original form. It reduced segments of it to Islamist resentment that travelled along the migratory trails that today reach into the West itself. There it lingers, potentially dangerous in the longer run if the circumstances that generate discontent are exacerbated further. In 1995, Willy Claes, the Belgian politician who briefly served as NATO secretary-general and in that capacity elevated the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’ into a Western battle cry, considered Muslim funda-mentalism as dangerous because of its ‘terrorism, religious fanaticism and exploitation of social and economic injustice’ (as in Haynes 2007: 38, emphasis added). Tony Blair, in a speech advocating a more militant role for Britain in the world (Blair 2007), even claimed that Islamist radicalism was akin to ‘revolutionary communism in its early and most militant phase … Its adherents may be limited; its sympathisers are not.’

The adherents may be placed under surveillance. But what if the sympathisers are in their hundreds of millions, and already feel under attack? This takes us to the real revolutionary challenge posed by the Islamist resistance to the West.

Revolutionary Islam?

The fears articulated by the imperialist statesmen cited might be interpreted as a response to the ideas of Muslim thinkers in the anti-colonial resistance, and their contemporary echoes. From the early twentieth century, there have been various attempts across the Muslim world to rejuvenate Islam as a way of bolstering this resistance. At the core of these is the challenge to the national state form by which the West seeks to impose its preferred mode of foreign relations on the world as a whole – although the West itself moved

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into a different, transnational liberal world a long time ago. The Islamist aim to transcend the national state form has been articulated along two lines: the politicisation of the Umma as such, and the (Iranian) synthesis of revolutionary state power and transnational (Shia) Islam. I discuss each of these briefly by reference to their key protagonists.

The transnationalisation of Islam as an anti-colonial strategy was first argued by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838–97). Al-Afghani was born in Iran and travelled widely in Europe. He had access to prominent Western intellectuals, as well as to political and religious leaders in his own domain. His project was to establish the Umma as a political body, a goal which he believed was far superior to national independence (al-Barghouti 2008: 69). Given the potentially disruptive, indeed revolutionary consequences this might entail, al-Afghani was repeatedly expelled, and always on the move. He edited Muslim diaspora newspapers in France, Mandaville relates (2001: 75), and debated the merits of nationalism in Paris with leading lights such as Ernest Renan. Ultimately, his project for a pan-Islamic union did not materialise, but his ideas resonated far and wide.

Muhammad Abduh (1849–1905) met al-Afghani when the latter visited Egypt. Exasperated by the empty ritual of a stagnant religion, he became convinced that Islam would have to modernise itself if it was ever to shake off the colonial yoke. In Abduh’s thinking the return to the Koran as the sole source of truth, in the spirit of the original communion with the Prophet in Medina, was the way forward. He also embraced al-Afghani’s ideas about a political Umma, but this concept meanwhile faced competition from secular pan-Arabism. The Ottoman sultan, siding with Germany and Austria–Hungary in the First World War, in his capacity as caliph of Istanbul had appealed to the Islamic subjects of the Western colonial powers to launch a jihad against their oppressors, but this had little effect (Kepel 2000: 42). When the Ottoman empire collapsed, the Turkish military embarked on a course of secular nationalism. Atatürk abolished the caliphate in 1924 and suppressed many other aspects of Muslim culture. In Egypt and in the French and British mandates carved out of the Ottoman realm, the conservative ruling elites put in place by the imperialist overseers faced pan-Arabism and organicist, anti-liberal forms of nationalism. Islamism was marginal, even though the ulema were often able to put the lid on attempts to develop a secular concept of politics (Tibi 1979: 137–9).

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In Chapter 3, I have already referred to the disarray into which the Islamic world was thrown by the suppression of the caliphate and how Gandhi placed himself at the head of the Khilafat campaign in India. In Egypt, Hassan Banna in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood during the same period of turmoil. Banna too argued for a politicisation of the Umma (as in al-Barghouti 2008: 72n.); another prominent Brotherhood leader, Sayyid Qutb, raised the call for an Islamic state after the Second World War. Lal (2004: 93) cites the culture shock experienced by Qutb on a 1948 trip to the United States as forcing this choice on him; the same disgust at female licen-tiousness, in violation of tribal codes of honour, had already been recorded by the Syrian chronicler Ibn Munqidh (1986: 163–5) in the original encounter with the Crusaders. However, the Islamists of the Brotherhood and secular nationalists competed in Egypt for the loyalty of the urban petty bourgeoisie, and once the Egyptian military had taken power, conflict became inevitable (Kepel 2000: 26–8). In 1954, the Muslim Brotherhood was outlawed. Qutb was executed by Nasser in 1966. The Brotherhood never succeeded in winning over the large mass of the population, although Qutb did succeed in gaining the allegiance of sections of the young by his anti-imperialist reformulation of Islam and his identification of the West as the enemy.

Sayyid Qutb borrowed the idea of a religious sovereignty from his contemporary Maulana Maududi (1903–79). Maududi’s influence was greatest in his native South Asia (the Taliban belong to the lineage that can be traced back to him, and his name was mentioned in connection with the Rushdie affair). From the late 1920s Maududi resisted the notion of a lay Pakistan. Instead he favoured the imposition from above of an Islamic state in Pakistan, subsequently to be extended to the entire Indian subcontinent (still under British rule at the time). Jihad for Maududi meant the struggle against those political creations which had usurped Allah’s sole sovereignty. In 1941 he set up the Jamaat-e Islami, an avant-garde Islamist party. As with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, however, this failed to attract a mass following (Kepel 2000: 32–3, 57). Certainly the Pakistani ruling class could not afford to attack the Jamaat as Nasser had done with the Brotherhood, because Pakistan owes its existence to Islam, without which it would fall apart into separate ethnic entities – as when the Bengali East seceded in a terrible bloodbath in 1971. This defeat and the discrediting of the Westernised military then cleared

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the way for the ascendancy of an Islamist alternative, which in Egypt was kept under the lid and forced to diversify transnationally.

In terms of foreign relations, the teachings of al-Afghani and Abduh, as well as those of Maududi and Qutb, challenge the national state form, and with it international relations as codified in IR. As I argue throughout this work, sovereign equality is only one form of the relations between communities occupying different spaces and considering each other as outsiders. It is an insufficiently understood vector of Western dominance in the world, partly because Marxists have theorised that dominance one-sidedly in terms of the trans-nationalisation of capital. Yet alongside the critique of neoclassical economics and the sanctification of market economy and capital, we also need a critique of the inter-state paradigm of IR. One need not be a believer to see that the Muslim rejection of nationalism and the national state form is one expression of this critique. Qutb actually compared the adoration of nationalism, the party, socialism, and other Western concepts with the Arabic idol worship that had flourished before the Prophet put an end to it. Borrowing concepts developed by Maududi, Qutb claimed (as in Kepel 2000: 24) that in Islam, sovereignty belongs to Allah; if it is invested in an ‘idol’, such as the nation, the army, the party, or ‘the people’, and such a structure is then turned into an object of worship, Evil rules – as in pre-Islamic, now anti-Islamic jahiliya (ignorance). In the same vein, Maududi argues (as in Mandaville 2001: 78) that

Muslim countries are following the same doctrine of nationalism that they had imbibed from their Western masters … They are not even fully conscious of the revolutionary rule of Islam, because of which they are linked to each other, which can unite their Muslim populations into one Umma, [and] promote goodwill and co-operation among them.

Indeed as a contemporary Islamist author writes (Jan 2005: 96–7), it is only by ‘nationalising’ Islam into separate states that the 57 countries with Muslim majorities have been turned into colonial puppets of the West – fragments of an Umma which, if united, would never be subjected to occupation as several of these countries are today.

Throughout the history of modern imperialism, Western powers have manipulated the various Islamist movements. Most if not all have at some point been instrumentalised against nationalists when these have been the more powerful opponents. From Anglo-American support for the Iranian mullahs against Mossadeq in Iran in the

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early 1950s, and for the Afghan Islamists against the pro-Soviet nationalists, to Israel’s support for Hamas against Fatah, this has worked to reinforce the Islamist movement in the long run. When Sadat released several leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood from jail in an attempt to neutralise socialist tendencies among Egyptian workers and students, the Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung (as in Tibi 1979: 128) commented that there was ‘no better medicine against Marxist doctrine than the social doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood’. In the massive defeat suffered by Fatah at the hands of King Hussein of Jordan’s army in 1970 (the Palestinians’ ‘Black September’), the Jordanian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood supported the operation (Kepel 2000: 67–8). And so on and so forth.

Yet Western support never generated much lasting gratitude. It did however provide the Islamist movements with precisely the transnational connections and experience that their concept of a political Umma requires. Thus the ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood radiated to Palestine through the intervention of T. Nabahani, an Islamic judge under the British mandate who studied at Al-Azhar university in Egypt. In 1952 he founded the Party of Islamic Liberation (PLI), in Arabic Hizb ut-Tahrir, which today constitutes an Islamist transnational network and a radical fundamentalist alternative to Hamas (Filiu 2008: 15). Sayyid Qutb’s brother, Muhammad Qutb, was among the Egyptian and Syrian Islamists who sought refuge in Saudi Arabia after Nasser’s clampdown. There they contributed, Lacroix relates (2005: 38), to the mixture of traditional Wahhabism and the modernising ideas of the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘Sahwism’, which would gain ground in the 1970s. In Egypt itself, Sadat’s policies succeeded in neutralising the Islamist movement. They also activated the aforementioned Takfirist tendency, which, as Shahzad writes (2007: 12), was involved in the president’s assassination in 1981, to punish him for having signed the Camp David accords with Israel three years earlier. By that time the Egyptian Takfirists had gained influence by leading popular resistance to Sadat’s liberalisation of the economy (Kepel 2000: 79). Isolated by the ulema and cut off from the pious middle classes in their own country, however, the Egyptian Takfirists then drifted across the Middle East, regrouping in Afghanistan to join the fight against the Soviet army. Often well-educated professionals, many of them joined the clandestine Islamic Jihad of Ayman al-Zawahiri.

In its most extreme form, the Islamist concept of foreign relations dictates a return to the caliphate abolished in 1924 (Filiu 2008).

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However, the idealised alternative of a non-national political entity (Maududi even took integrated Europe as an explicit example; Mandaville 2001: 78) does not suspend other foreign relations. Contrasting the Umma with the Western inter-state paradigm in a lapidary way will only bring out that it, too, is riven by other forms of internal, cross-cutting ‘foreignness’ that must be accounted for. As with the internationalism of the socialist and communist movements, Islamist conceptions of a world-embracing Umma at some point run into the reality of nationality and other ethnic bonds, including sub-national tribal relations and other forms of difference. This is best brought out by the Shia revolution in Iran, which in this respect displays certain similarities with the Soviet experience in its relation to the world communist movement.

Shia Iran, established as an Islamic Republic in the revolution of 1979, from the start defined itself as an antagonist to the West, and to the United States in particular. When, with the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the USSR, it appeared as if the Marxist ideology of resistance and revolution had evaporated too, the then Iranian president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, claimed (as in Panah 2007: 151, emphasis added) that ‘now that Marxism has disintegrated, Muslim revolutionaries are the standard bearers in the struggle against imperialism and against the sovereignty and domination of capitalism … Today Islam is the only pivot which can attract justice seekers of the world around itself’. As Amineh explains (1999: 457–8), this was not just posturing. The urban middle class associated with the bazaar, threatened by capitalist competition, readily subscribed to such a position, for which the Shia clergy made itself the mouthpiece. ‘Nationalism was expressed as Islam and Islam as nationalism.’ Of course, the oil and gas income of the second-largest producer in the world plays a role of its own in underwriting this equation.

In terms of foreign relations, the revolutionary Shiite, anti-Western position combines the reliance on a strong state as a protective structure with a transnational network of allied groups (such as Hezbollah in Lebanon, formed to defend its people against Israeli aggression). On the left, this strategy was articulated by Ali Shariati; to the right of him, by Ayatollah Khomeini.

Ali Shariati (1933–77) hailed from a religious family with left–nationalist sympathies (his father was jailed by the shah). He studied at the Sorbonne in Paris in the early 1960s. Here Shariati participated in the debates triggered by the final stages of the Algerian revolt, with Sartre and Frantz Fanon (whose work he translated into Farsi). Upon

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his return to Iran in 1965, he was arrested and jailed for six months. In 1969 he took up a post as lecturer in an Islamic foundation, gaining influence through his lectures, which were disseminated by audio tape and in print. When the foundation was closed in 1972, Shariati was arrested for propagating ‘Islamic Marxism’ and was given an 18-month prison sentence. Reportedly released at the request of the Algerian government, he was allowed to emigrate to Britain; he died soon after arriving there, at the age of 43 (Benewick and Green 1992: 208–10).

Other left-leaning critics in Iran like Jalan Al-e Ahmad in the 1960s had questioned the wisdom of the shah’s catch-up industrialisation strategy. Al-e Ahmad ‘articulated a Third Worldist discourse and a pessimism regarding the achievements of industrial society’ (Panah 2007: 36). In Amineh’s view (1999: 477), both Al-e Ahmad and Shariati tended to romanticise Islam in their quests to reconnect with indigenous tradition. Shariati took this furthest by combining ideas of radical liberation with mystical Shia Islam. He develops a dialectical understanding of humanity’s fate in the universe; there is an immanent unity between God, nature, and humanity which in the course of history is achieved only through inner contradictions, such as between God and humanity, amongst humans, and so on. The principle of unity (towhid) prescribes monotheism; polytheism (sherk) is a phenomenon that belongs to the world of race and ethnic diversity, class relations, and other fractures in the social whole.

Shariati’s analysis of the global political economy is cast in terms of the conflict between Cain and Abel – the sedentary tiller who kills his pastoralist brother. In Shariati’s perspective (I follow Amineh 1999: 498–9), Cain is first of all the oppressor; Abel symbolises the oppressed masses. It is not difficult to recognise the tropes of the nomad periphery facing the sedentary core. ‘The historic struggle between the Abel-type and the Cain-type society, between races and classes, will continue until Abel has successfully vanquished Cain.’ This will only be possible under the banner of the true Islam, which according to Shariati is Alavid Shiism, not the Shia of the Safavids, which gave Islam an imperial inflection. Economically, the sedentary ‘Cain’ society is based on private property; an Abel-type society on the other hand, has a communal infrastructure in which the means of production are collective property.

Marxism, in Shariati’s view, was unacceptable on account of its materialism and atheism. Instead the culture and religion of the masses should form the backbone of the anti-imperialism of the

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Third World (Haynes 2007: 205). This was not a matter of tactics; Shariati was deeply religious. But he did feel that the lack of success in mobilising the masses in the Islamic world against imperialism had been caused by a failure to connect with the underlying culture. The Iranian revolution would confirm Shariati’s central argument. It succeeded, Kepel has argued (2000: 13, 65), because it unified the bazaar, the poor, and even the lay middle classes (who believed they would be able to handle its leader, whom they mistook for an impotent religious zealot). Here they obviously underrated Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902–89), who established a hegemony over both the ‘Red’ Shiism of Shariati and other left-leaning thinkers, and the ‘Black Shiism’ of the reactionary clergy.

Khomeini had long been part of this latter strand, but in the 1960s he joined the anti-imperialist line, comparing the subordination of Iran to the United States to the capitulations of old. There are many cross-references with the Sunni thinking discussed earlier, as when Khomeini speaks of the fear among the Western colonising powers that Islam might unite. This fear, he argued (as in Amineh 1999: 467), goes back to the epoch of the Crusades, when the conviction took hold (among Muslims too, and propagated, he claims, by Orientalists) that Islam was somehow a backward religion. In his lectures in Iraqi exile in the late 1960s Khomeini developed the notion of government by the clerics (velayat-e faqih). This concept according to Amineh was a revolutionary turn within Shia Islam, because it made the clerics the guardians of the social order, with a status comparable to the Prophet and the imam. It also unified executive and judicial power. By not living up to the doctrine of jurists’ rule, Islam had exposed itself, according to Khomeini (as in ibid.: 467), ‘to Jewish propaganda against the religion’.

Tackling a key issue in Shia Islam, Khomeini in Islamic Government of 1971 argued that there is no point waiting for the Mahdi. This could take hundreds of thousands of years, and what about social justice in the meantime? Certainly the coming of the imam is the baseline of all activism, and even a man like Khomeini could therefore only be the Mahdi’s guardian and representative. The fifth article of the Iranian constitution actually limits such investiture to the period of the twelfth imam’s absence (Almond, Appleby, and Sivan 2003: 65). Otherwise, there is no limit to clerical rule. Shariati believed that the clerics might trigger the revolution, but that rule would be the task of the intellectuals. Khomeini (as in Amineh 1999: 500) on the other hand taught that the Islamic jurists were the leaders of both

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the revolution and the state created by it. Khomeini however was also a master tactician. In 1978, with the revolution imminent, he incorporated a concept from Shariati (and Fanon), the ‘disinherited’ (moustadafines), into his discourse. This made it possible for the ‘Shiite socialist’ youth and young Islamic professionals, who hitherto had hesitated to follow him, to join the revolutionary coalition. He also dropped references to velayat-e faqih, in order not to scare off the lay middle classes (Kepel 2000: 107; Panah 2007: 38–9).

Foreign relations were crucial in defining the state structure created by the revolution. The constitution establishing the Islamic republic under the rule of the clergy was legitimated by the fact that the country was facing an emergency created by a ‘satanic enemy’, the United States. The creation of an Office of Liberation Movements under the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, Pasdaran, aimed (as in Panah 2007: 70) to establish ‘a strong global Islamic force [and] to raise the consciousness of the meek people and nations across the world’. In the war with Iraq, Khomeini developed a particular form of war populism, seeking to counter war-weariness and resistance to the continued fighting. He defended his ambition to take the war into Iraq by claiming that ‘the Koran says war until sedition is removed from the world, therefore it would be wrong for anybody to think that the Koran has not said war, war until victory’ (as in Panah 2007: 105–6). Massive losses on the battlefield, overwhelmingly borne by the poor, haemorrhaged Iranian society instead. They also changed the balance of forces within Iran at the expense of any remaining ‘Red Shiism’.

Iran propagated and supported Shia Islam in countries like Lebanon, Bahrain, and Iraq, just as it has sought to link up with radical Sunni Muslims in Africa. The fact that the Shia tend to be found among the disadvantaged adds to the potential transnationalisation of the Iranian concepts. Even so, the export of the revolution did not really materialise. In countries such as Sudan and Nigeria, there were fears that the religious peace might be disturbed by Iranian influence (Haynes 2007: 147); and in many places Sunni orthodoxy has been propped up in efforts to resist attempts at Shia proselytising and political destabilisation. Of course the Anglo-American dispossession of the Sunni state class of Iraq in 2003 was more than even the boldest Shia revolutionary internationalist could have hoped for.

Compared to the Takfirists and other radical Islamist advocates of a return to the caliphate, the Shia version of revolutionary Islam has a greater ability to adjust to local circumstances. ‘What it meant

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for each organisation to be “Islamic” differed from place to place, counteracting the centripetal forces that the Islamic Republic’s calls for unity attempted to animate’, writes Panah (2007: 93-4). ‘The organisation and leadership structure of various movements – often transposed onto traditional structures of local politics that incorporated patronage networks and the like – stood in the way of unifying them under one leadership.’ By the mid 1990s, though, the Iranian revolution had lost much of its shine. According to Kepel (2000: 253), during the war with Iraq, power had been confiscated by the bazaar and business groups linked to the religious state class; as noted, the poor died in their hundreds of thousands. Strict Islamic dress code imposed on the members of all classes was the consolation prize for the religious fanaticism of the fallen heroes. As with the USSR, the internal nationality issues were not resolved either.

This takes us to the version of radical Islam found in Saudi Arabia, the main rival of Iran both in the sphere of transnational religious activism and in global energy markets.

Wahhabi Conservatism and Al-Qaeda

The instrumentalisation of Islamic fundamentalism by the West finds its epitome in the Saudi monarchy and the Wahhabite Sunni sect that originates in the kingdom. Propped up by oil income and using the proceeds to arm itself whilst proselytising its particular branch of Islam abroad, Saudi Arabia is simultaneously the Muslim homeland and the prize colony of the Anglophone West in the Middle East. Let me elucidate this by way of concluding this chapter.

The relationship between the Saudi rulers and the Wahhabi sect has always been one of tension. The term Wahhabite is avoided both by its Saudi wing and by its offshoots in South and Central Asia and the Caucasus; the preferred label is Salafist. The Salafiyya (‘the pious forefathers’) maintain that true religion has been blurred by later interpretation (al-Barghouti 2008: 71); hence Salafism is a real fundamentalism in the sense of a quest for the original textual basis of the religion. At the time of the death in 1792 of Mohammed ibn Abd al-Wahhab, Wahhabism’s founding cleric, the sect had lived for decades in a symbiotic relationship with the tribal Ibn Saud family. When the latter gained the upper hand, the sect had to adjust, and as a result, Steinberg writes (2005: 13–14),

the history of the Wahhabiyya has been marked by a continuous struggle between radical religious elements demanding an uncompromising enforcement

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of the original Wahhabi code of conduct as established during the eighteenth century, and the ‘official’ ulama, i.e. scholars with political functions or other influential positions close to the government, who acted according to the wishes of the ruling family.

The original compact was based on a purist Islam that denounced all non-Wahhabi Muslims as infidels and hence liable to excommuni-cation. It initially pitted the Saudi emir, whose power was confined to a small town and the adjacent date gardens on the outskirts of today’s Riyadh, against the Ottoman empire. In 1811, Sultan Muhammad Ali Pasha therefore sent troops to subdue the Hijaz and destroy the emirate. In the ensuing scholarly debates, it was established that political power was indispensable to secure the Wahhabi faith – although, as Steinberg notes (2005: 16–19), a comprehensive political theory was never developed. The relevance of Wahhab’s injunctions against smoking, singing, and laughing was obviously limited to periods of extreme separatism; only Takfirism, the policy of excommu-nication of apostates, has remained as an enduring legacy. However, in the latter part of the nineteenth century a fratricidal war erupted among the family of the imam, prompting the Wahhabi scholars to introduce the notion of jamaa (strong community). When one of the warring brothers sought assistance from the Ottoman governor of Baghdad (non-Wahhabi, so an apostate), the clergy sided with his rival; and under another Ibn Saud, who established his authority in 1902, the concept of strict obedience (taa) then reinforced the authoritarian legacy of Ibn Taymiyah and Ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

In the 1920s, the Saudis conquered the Hijaz and the holy cities of Mecca and Medina with the help of a military force recruited from recently settled Bedouin. These fanatical fighters, who defined themselves as radical Wahhabites (the Ikhwan movement) thus assisted in the creation of modern Saudi Arabia. They also became a source of problems for the monarchy when it tried to adjust to more normal conditions; and it is here that we must look for the roots of the radicalism that is associated today with al-Qaeda. Resistance to Western influence goes back to 1941, when US oil companies moved into Saudi Arabia and radical Wahhabis led by Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz contested their presence in what can only be called a nationalist response in the name of religion. The fact that American prospectors were given land ‘as if it was not the Muslims’ territory’ (as in Steinberg 2005: 25) infuriated the young Arab radicals. First Ibn Saud threw Ibn Baz into jail, but he then invited him for a private audience and

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convinced him of the need to allow US experts to unlock Saudi’s oil riches. Even so, Ibn Baz set an example of standing up for Wahhabi tenets that would resonate long after the event.

The oil boom that began in 1973 triggered massive labour migration from non-oil-producing Islamic states into Saudi Arabia as well as into the smaller Gulf states. Some 1.2 million foreign workers were resident on the Arabian peninsula by 1975. Their stay in the Wahhabite homeland was both economically and culturally evident upon their return; for instance, in addition to prosperity, having your wife wear the hijab became a status symbol too. By the end of the decade, Kepel writes (2000: 71–2), the signs of Saudi religious culture were visible across the Sunni Islamic world. This enthusiasm proved to be highly volatile once the West moved into the region in force – first, by supporting Saddam Hussein against Iran, and then by challenging the Iraqi dictator’s decision to annex Kuwait. Tensions mounted when, to prepare for the first war with Iraq, US troops were given access to Saudi Arabia. Discontent at home now blended with transnational religious activism. In the mid 1980s, elite Saudis made the ritual tour of Soviet-occupied Afghanistan from summer camps in Peshawar on the Pakistani side of the border, often mingling with local representatives of European NGOs, for whom they developed a profound antipathy (Kepel 2000: 147). Later, this sort of jihad tourism also brought young Pakistanis living in England and other migrants to the region (many of whom, if they were unlucky enough to be there when the Americans invaded, would end up in Guantánamo Bay as ‘foreign fighters’).

On account of his standing with the Saudi royals, Osama bin Laden effectively acted in the capacity of a representative of Saudi Arabia for the mujahedeen fighting Soviet and Afghan government forces (Nonneman 2005: 341). As Steinberg notes (2005: 32), the careers of Osama and other militants reflected ‘a tendency towards transnationalisation’, but the foreign Islamists who travelled to Afghanistan were not all of the same stripe. If we follow Shahzad (2007: 12), there were two main strands, the ‘Egyptians’ of Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad, and the ‘Yemenis’. The ‘Yemenis’ were those who joined the anti-communist struggle at the prodding of their religious leaders. Their role in the fighting was born rather out of a sense of duty and they returned home or settled among the local population in Afghanistan or Pakistan once the anti-Soviet struggle neared its conclusion. Until 1989, the Saudi, Pakistani, and

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US intelligence services believed they could control the ‘Yemenis’, but they were concerned about the ‘Egyptians’.

The ‘Egyptians’ (not all from Egypt) were Takfirists, militant advocates of a struggle not only against the United States and the West (including Israel), but also against the Arab vassals of the United States. As Kepel relates (2000: 147), they in fact took little part in the actual fighting with the Soviet troops; their military activities were stepped up only after Gorbachev withdrew. Amongst other incidents, a month after the withdrawal an Arab unit cut a group of ‘infidel’ Afghan prisoners to pieces, creating consternation among Afghan mujahedeen. When the ‘Egyptians’ returned to their various homelands by 1989, this coincided with a mounting Islamist wave. In the Palestinian uprising, the first Intifada, Fatah hegemony passed to Hamas; in Sudan, a military coup gave power to the Islamic ideologue Hassan el Tourabi; whilst the Algerian regime found itself confronted by the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) (Kepel 2000: 14). Takfirist Algerian fighters on their return from Afghanistan found a government of Arab nationalist antecedents which had become mired in corruption. As Haynes writes (2007: 209), Egyptian school teachers working in Algeria, many under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and often Takfirists, also contributed to a radicalisation among Algerian youth. In 1992, the government responded to the growing appeal of the Islamists by staging a military coup to avoid an election victory of the FIS, triggering a civil war that cost an estimated 120,000 lives. Thus the coming of Afghan veterans to Bosnia, Algeria, and Egypt gave a global inflexion to a phenomenon hitherto concentrated between Peshawar and Kabul. Whether the various transnational networks of jihadists involved can really be grouped together under the single heading of al-Qaeda is a different matter. But there is no doubt about the core node operating under this name.

One of the sources of al-Qaeda was the Maktab Al-Khadamat (bureau of services) created by Dr Abdullah Azzam in 1980 to support the Afghan jihad. When he was assassinated in 1989, Osama bin Laden succeeded him. In the 1990s, al-Qaeda aimed primarily at ousting the ‘Crusaders and Jews’ from Islamic countries. Thus the mythical geopolitical imagery of Christian Zionism was reversed (America + Israel = ‘Satan’; Pohly and Durán 2001: 23, 51). In 1996 Bin Laden travelled from Sudan, where he had found refuge, to join the ‘Egyptians’, who had stayed behind in Afghanistan. Under their influence, Shahzad writes (2007: 12), he enlarged his strategy to embrace a comprehensive Takfirism – to the annoyance of the

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Taliban rulers, who were all too aware that this might force them onto a radical course, potentially undermining their control over the country’s ethnically diverse population. Bin Laden also attacked the Saudi royal family, whom he accused of tyranny and failure to implement the sharia. In addition he called for the expulsion of the United States from Saudi soil (as in Meijer 2005: 278). ‘It is the duty of every tribe in the Arab peninsula to fight the jihad and cleanse the land from these occupiers.’ There were demonstrations in support of Bin Laden in Pakistan in 1998, and generally such messages resonated among the urban poor in several Islamic countries.

Yet, as Kepel emphasises (2000: 315), the absence of real connections with the social forces which a revolutionary movement must turn into its basis if it is to gain power, lent a dangerous mercenary quality to the al-Qaeda network: ‘The absence of important international relays, the decoupling from any social movement, have fostered the descent of Bin Laden and his acolytes into an activism of which it is no longer obvious which interests it serves or really threatens.’

This is especially relevant because, as the same author has argued (ibid.: 351–2), by this time militant Islamism was in decline across the globe. In the closing days of 1999, the Sunni Arab daily al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem) published in London, by then the pivot of Islamic radicalism outside the Muslim world, concluded that Sudan’s and Malaysia’s experiments had failed; Afghanistan, its greatest success, had turned sour too. Wasn’t all this a clear sign of a drift to moderation in the Islamic world, a looming era of new compromises between tradition and a modern way of life?

The attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, ascribed to al-Qaeda, intervened just at this point. From the start the attacks were interpreted in the apocalyptic terminology of the ‘clash of civilisations’. There is no need here to go into lingering questions as to what exactly happened that day and who had advance knowledge, or to revisit the Axis of Evil imaginary by which George W. Bush responded to the event (Henshall and Morgan 2005; cf. my 2006, ch.10). It is enough to recognise that the attacks that triggered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq came at a moment when key observers like Kepel felt that the Islamist trend was subsiding, and self-consciously so; that al-Qaeda is the least rooted of all such networks socially or ethnically; and that both Bush and Blair, the architects of the Afghan and Iraqi adventures, eagerly embraced the idea of a global revolutionary conspiracy. Blair has been quoted already; Bush in a speech of 2006 raised the spectre of a global terrorist network,

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evoking what Filiu calls (2008: 15) ‘an Islamic Comintern’, or ‘an Islamic Evil Empire’, and referring to the threat of a new caliphate as a totalitarian Islamic empire of global proportions.

There are indeed indications of tendencies within Islam which are seeking to transcend the Sunni–Shia divide and unite behind a critique of the Western way of life. Phillips refers (2004: 243) to a joint resistance to the commodification of everyday life by capitalist globalisation. Mandaville (2001, 2008) emphasises that the Islamist movement is in the process of bifurcating into a right-wing and a left-wing radicalism and that the left tendency is seeking common ground with the secular left, something which in the context of crisis can only gain in relevance. But this again feeds the long-standing Western policy of playing off different strands against each other. In the collapsing states and societies that form an ‘arc of chaos’ – from the Waziristan area of Pakistan bordering on Afghanistan via Iraq and Palestine to Somalia and Sudan’s Darfur region – Islamist movements and militias struggle over who will lead the fight against the West, providing fertile ground for active balancing. In the West’s war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, NATO strategists clearly ignore the fact that the Afghan Taliban have long resisted Takfirist Arab interference with their policies, both civil and military. In Iraq, revelations by Seymour Hersh and others in March 2007, cited by Shahzad (2007: 12–13), make it clear that the United States has again allied itself with radical Salafists against Shiites. The ‘loss’ of Iraq to its Shia majority, the growing power of Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the threat of an attack on Iran by Israel, all lend this reversal of alliances a certain plausibility, but also raise questions of principle. More generally, as with communism in the past, disciplining mainstream Islam by highlighting its terrorist fringe is again proving a highly successful strategy; just as the fringe groups, whose connection with the mainstream ideology is often tenuous, happily adopt any label (communist or Islamic) which lends them the aura of being the vanguard of a much larger social body.

The world in the twenty-first century is in the process of breaking out of the national state form imposed on it by the West. Patterns of difference which have lain dormant for centuries are resurfacing. As I have sought to demonstrate in this volume, the legacy of myth and religion continues to weigh on contemporary foreign relations. What remains to be investigated is secular Western ideas about the political organisation of the global arena and the possibilities for challenging them.

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Abduh, Muhammad, 209, 211Abe, Masao, 14Abu Bakr, 161Adam of Bremen, 128Adelard of Bath, 171Advani, L.K., 98Aeschylus, 120, 121Agudat Yisrael, 193, 199, 201Al-Zawahiri, A., 219, 222Al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din, 209Alaric, 155Al-Barghouti, Tamim, viii, 161, 168,

175Alcuin, 157Al-e Ahmad, Jalan, 214 Alexander ‘the Great’, 96, 144, 151 Alexander II, Tsar, 192Alexander III, Tsar, 192Algazy, Joseph, 203Al-Ghazali, 166–7Al-Hakim, Caliph, 162Ali Ibn Ali Talib, 161, 164, 174Alienation, 7, 207Allan, Tony, 125Al-Maqqari, 177Almond, Gabriel, 149, 200Al-Qaeda, 205, 218, 220, 221Amazons, 109, 111, 114, 115Ambedkar, B.R., 101Ambrose of Milan, 156Amineh, Mehdi P., 213, 214, 215Anderson, Perry, 158, 159Anna, Empress, 159Anselm of Lucca, 162Appleby, R.S., 149, 200Apter, David, 26Aquinas, Thomas, 136, 169, 174Archetype, 9–10, 16, 18, 66, 150Aristotle, 166, 167, 168, 169, 174,

175Armstrong, Herbert W., 186Ashkenazim, 79, 190, 197, 198, 199,

201, 202

Ashoka, 96, 144, 148Atatürk, Mustapha Kemal, 209Atilla the Hun, 155Atonement (for killing), 25, 26,

112–15Augustine, Aurelius, of Hippo, xii,

12, 71, 76, 79, 104, 133, 152, 154–7, 167, 173, 183

Aung San Suu Kyi, 149Avatars, 33, 86, 90, 95, 97, 145, 147Averroes (Ibn Rushd), xii, 167–9,

174, 175Avicenna (Ibn Sina), 166–8, 174Avnery, Uri, 204Axis of Evil , 98, 221Azzam, Abdullah, 220

Bachelard, Gaston, 21Balfour Declaration, 183, 193, 194Banna, Hassan, 210Barraclough, Geoffrey, 154Barthes, Roland, 184Bastide, R., 9, 15, 17, 18–22, 27, 30,

31, 36Begin, Menachem, 188, 202Ben-Gurion, David, 196–9Bennett, J.G., 11–13Bernard of Clairvaux, 160, 167Bhagavad-Gita, 90, 95Bharata Janata Party (BJP), 89, 98Bible, authorship of the, 49, 62–3,

64–5 Bichler, Shimshon, 198Bin Laden, Osama, 190, 219, 220,

221Blair, Tony, xv, 208, 221Blake, William, 181Bloch, Ernst, x, 131Blok, Alexander, 122 Bloom, Allan, 107Bolkestein, Frits, 206Boniface VIII, Pope, 173Boorstin, Daniel, 171

236

Index

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Index 237

Borochov, Ber, 193Bousquet, A.C., 85Bouyeri, Mohammed, 205Bruckner, Anton, 172Buber, Martin, 193Buchman, Revd. Frank, 184 Bull motif, 45, 46, 57, 62, 87, 109,

110Bush, George W., ix, xv, 148, 188,

221

Cacquot, A., 43, 58, 59, 61, 62, 71Cain–Abel myth, 69–70, 71, 80, 82,

115, 214Calvin, John, 181Calvinism, 83, 103, 178, 180–2, 187

compared to Lutheranism, 181Cargo cults, 22Carroll, M.P., 65, 70, 80, 81Caryl , C., 102, 148Caste, 27, 30, 88–92, 95–6, 98–101Centaurs, 111–12Chandragupta Maurya, 96, 144Charlemagne, 157–8, 161Chosen People metaphor, 64–5, 71,

79, 81, 82, 152, 195, 201, 202 Tribal origin, 1Cicero, 152Cimabue, 170Civilisation/barbarity dichotomy,

21, 34, 37, 40, 42, 44, 5, 61, 71, 85, 107, 111

Civilisations, Clash of, 204, 208, 221

Claes, Willy, 208Class, 2, 30, 38, 50, 92, 98–101,

103, 116, 117, 123, 130, 134, 138, 154, 161, 176, 190, 193, 196–9, 203, 210, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 217

Collins, Randall, 135, 139, 166, 167Colonisation, 93, 106, 109, 159–60,

177–8, 188–9, 192, 196–9, 210, 215

Confucianism, vii, xii, 133, 135, 138, 141, 143, 204

Confucius (Kong Fuzi), 135, 136, 139, 140, 142

Constantine, Emperor, 154, 157

Contradiction between community and humanity, vi, 5, 10, 22, 23, 42, 79, 118, 138, 152, 156, 195

Coors, Joseph, 185Cosmogony, 11, 15, 16, 17, 18, 29,

30, 36, 37, 49, 67Cromwell, Oliver, 180, 181Crusade(s), xii, 102, 133, 135, 156,

157, 159, 160, 162–5, 167, 169, 170, 172, 174, 184, 185, 188, 189, 190, 206n, 210, 215, 220

Culture hero, 20, 40, 104, 137Culture, 4, 8, 10, 21, 39, 80, 96,

103, 111, 116, 121, 134, 138, 147, 157, 206, 209, 210, 214–15, 219

Curtis, Lionel, 183

Dalai Lama, 147–8Dante Alighieri, xii, 143, 173–4Darby, John N., 182Davie, John N., 10, 112De Maistre, Joseph, 191De Menasce, J., 151Decius, Emperor, 153Deluge, see FloodDenys the Areopagite, 157Desai, Radhika, 98Diaspora, vii, 133, 191, 192, 209Donald, Merlin, 15Douglas, David C., 162, 167, 171Dreyfus Affair, 191Druses, 162, 196Dubois, Pierre, 169Dulles, Allen W., 183–4Dulles, John Foster, 184Dumézil, Georges, 46, 85, 88, 106,

113, 115, 119, 124

Eckel, M.D., 144Edda, 123, 131Einstein, Albert, 10Eisenhower, Dwight D., 196Eksteins, Modris, 117, 122, 123El Tourabi, Hassan, 220Eliade, Mircea, 11, 28Emmanuel, Rahm, 203Engelhardt, P., 153, 157

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Epic myth, 34, 38, 40, 43, 48, 49, 56, 58, 59, 66, 89, 90, 94, 97, 105, 106, 111, 122, 173

Cross-referenced to accommodate changing community boundaries, x, 112–13, 181, 215

Ethnogenesis, 1, 2, 5, 22, 49, 55, 67, 195

Ethnogenetic myth, x, 1, 2, 8, 11, 34, 40, 64, 6, 67, 79, 106

Ethno-transformation, 4, 28, 85, 99, 121

Exogamy (intermarriage), 7, 16, 28, 31–4, 36, 80–2, 100, 107, 115–16, 121, 124 , 176, 192, 196

Exogamy reading of Rank myth, 33–5, 57, 110, 114

Exploitation of nature, vi, 1, 29

Falwell, Jerry, 185, 188–9Fanon, Frantz, 213, 216Fatah, 212, 220Fertility (Fecundity), 18, 27, 31, 38,

47, 50, 52, 58, 59, 60, 63, 80, 85, 87, 89, 114, 115, 119, 122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129

Feud, 24, 77, 105, 126Figes, Orlando, 121, 122Filiu, Jean-Pierre, 222Fingleton, Eamonn, 143Fiske, Henry, 23, 105Flood (Deluge), 18–9, 41–2, 46–8,

58, 71, 81, 91, 129, 137Ford, Henry, 184Fortuyn, Pim, 206Frazer, James, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 34,

38, 47, 50, 51, 58, 59, 61, 63, 84, 104, 111, 114, 118, 127, 147, 151

Freud, Sigmund, 6, 7, 9, 16, 26, 32–4, 43, 49, 53, 55, 56, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, 82, 100, 114, 122, 150, 152

Friedman, Richard E., 64, 72Frontier warriors (auxiliaries), vii,

45, 74, 76, 78, 133, 136, 159, 162, 164, 176

Frontier, imperial, vii, xi, xii, 37, 46, 49, 52, 55, 56, 63, 64, 74, 76, 78, 88, 92, 107, 109, 111, 119, 122, 133, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148, 149, 150-2, 154, 157, 158 159, 160, 162, 165 166, 167, 169, 170, 171, 174, 179, 190, 195, 207

Frontier, Inner Asian, xii, 119, 133, 143, 144

Gandhi, Indira, 98Gandhi, M.K. ‘Mahatma’, 89, 92,

93, 100, 102, 210Gandhi, Rajiv, 98, 207Gautama Buddha, 92, 101, 144,

146, 147, 148Geertz, Clifford, 4Gelasius I, Pope, 157Gibb, H.A.R., 164, 177Gibbon, Edward, 154, 159Giles, Herbert A., 134Giotto, 170Girard, René, 99, 150Glubb, J.B., 69Gobind, 97Goebbels, Joseph, 131Gogol, Nikolai, 121Gold: as symbol of wealth and

prosperity, 26, 39, 47, 52, 57, 62, 82, 87, 99, 112, 119–20, 127; as source of evil, 85, 118, 123, 128–9

Goldziher, Ignaz, 24, 74, 87, 115, 195

Gorbachev, Mikhail S., 220Gorenberg, Gershom, xiiiGoudsblom, Joop, 62, 75, 195Graham, Billy, 184, 189Graham, Franklin, 189Gramsci, Antonio, 93, 150Grappin, P., 123, 124, 125, 127, 129Gratian, 163 Graves, Robert, 103, 104, 107, 100,

114 Gregory I, Pope, 157Gregory VII, Pope, 158, 162Grönbech, V., 86Gross, Raphael, 191Gush Emunim, 200–4Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 185

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Index 239

Habermas, Jürgen, 179Hackett, J.A., 73, 75Haig, Alexander, 188Haller, Johannes, 152, 153, 154Hamas, 176, 189, 212, 220Hanfeizi, 135–6Haynes, Jeffrey, 220Heartland: Canaanite, 55, Lockean-

Anglophone, vii, viii, 205, Roman imperial, 154, Islamic, 166

Hegel, G.W.F., 23, 165, 168, 170Heguanzi, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142Henry VII, Emperor, 173Herbert, J. 91, 94Heretics (Ketzer), 24, 153, 162, 168,

191Hero myth (aka Average myth, O.

Rank) 32–4, 56, 57, 107–9, 114Herodotus, 50, 51, 54, 64, 86, 91,

103, 106, 107, 108, 113, 114, 119, 120

Hersh, Seymour, 222Herzl, Theodor, 191, 193, 197Hesiod, 103, 104Hezbollah, 176, 189, 213, 222Hierarchy, 16, 20, 27, 34, 35, 91,

100, 133, 135, 153–4, 157, 160, 165, 178, 181

Hijra, 68, 207Hinayana Buddhism, 145Hindutva nationalism, 88, 89, 92,

93, 98, 101, 102Hirsi Ali, Ayaan, 205–6Hitler, Adolf, 131–2, 184, 197Hobbes, Thomas, 22-3, 170Hoffmann, Ernst, 107, 109Homer, 103, 105, 106Huntington, Samuel P., 204Hussein, King of Jordan, 212Hydraulic agriculture, 38, 41, 48,

91, 136–7, 141Hyparxis, 13–14, 131

Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, 169, 217–18Ibn Battuta, 168Ibn Baz, Abd al-Aziz, 218–19Ibn Khaldun, xii, 46, 163–4, 166,

174-7Ibn Munqidh, Usama, 210

Ibn Saud, 218Ibn Taymiyah, 168–9, 175, 218Iliad, 96, 105, 106Imperialism, xiii, 44, 49, 85, 102,

103, 116, 141, 143, 159, 172, 177, 190, 193, 195, 205, 208, 209, 211, 213, 215

Incest taboo, 7–9, 35, 81, 130Indo-European triad (Dumézil), xi,

88, 89, 119, 124Indus Valley civilisation, 41, 86, 88,

90, 91, 96Innocent III, Pope, 159, 160Islamic Liberation Front (FIS), 220Islamic Revolutionary Guard

(Pasdaran), 216Issawi, Charles, 175

Jabotinsky, Vladimir ‘Zeev’, 188, 196, 199

Jaspers, Karl, 92, 145, 146Jesus Christ, 102, 150, 153, 154,

155, 160, 162, 181, 182, 186, 187, 191

Jihad, 78, 164, 165, 209, 210, 220, 221

Islamic Jihad, 212, 219 Jihad tourism, 219John Paul II, Pope, 187Joinville, 164Jung, Carl G., 6, 7, 9, 10, 16

Kach, 203 Kahane, Meir, 203Kalelkar, D.B., 93Kallistos, 152–3Kandinsky, Vasily, 121Kanishka, 144–5Kauppi, M.V., 106n, 151Kautilya, ix, 96Kepel, Gilles, 207, 215, 217, 219,

220, 221Kerr, Philip (Lord Lothian), 183Khilafat campaign, 88, 93, 210Khomeini, Ayatollah Ruhollah, 207,

213, 215–16Kirk, G.S., 35, 39, 40, 42, 86, 106,

111, 112, 114Kissinger, Henry A., 189Kleinschmidt, Harald, 154

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Knafo, Samuel, 5, 22Kobo Daishi, 145–6Kook, Abraham Isaac, 200Kook, Tzvi Yehuda, 200, 202Kraft, Dina, 198Kublai Khan, 145Kubrick, Stanley, 3

Lacroix, Stéphane, 212Lal, Deepak, 69, 71, 80, 91 165, 168,

210Language, 1–4, 7, 14, 19, 22, 40, 41,

55, 63, 72, 79, 86, 88, 119, 127, 138, 145, 156, 173, 192

Laozi, 135Lattimore, Owen, 68, 135, 175 Laurasian mythology (Witzel), 18,

19, 30Law, vii, xv, 50, 62, 69, 94, 95, 96,

114, 115, 116, 117, 126, 127, 142, 151, 152, 161, 165, 177, 191, 197, 199

Le Bon, Gustave, 5, 9Le Goff, Jacques, 70, 167, 169Lenin, V.I., 121, 150Leo IX, Pope, 159Leo X, Pope, 169Levathes, Louise, 142, 143Lévi, J., 136 Levinger, Rabbi Moshe, 200Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 2, 8–9, 23,

29–32, 80Li Si, 136Lieberman, Avigdor, 203Likud, 188, 199, 202–4Lindsey, Hal, 186Louis VII, King, 172Louis IX, King, 164Loy, David, 147Luo Maodeng, 143Lustick, Ian S., 200

Mackenzie, Donald A., 137Mahabharata, 18, 90, 95, 97, 100,

105Mahavira, 92Mahayana Buddhism, 144–5, 148Mahendra, 96Malkin, I., 108Mandaville, Peter, 207, 209, 222

Mangan, J.A., 103Manicheism, 151Marsilio of Padua, 169Marx, Karl, vi, 170, 178Marxist economic explanation of

Western expansion, 211Mason, Richard, 103Maududi, Maulana, 207, 210, 211,

213Mauss, Marcel, 28Mawardi, 162May, John D’Arcy, x, 15, 22, 96,

148, 149Mead, Walter Russell, 179, 187Mearsheimer, J.J., 183, 188, 202Mencius (Mengzi), 135, 136, 138,

139, 140, 142, 143Meyers, Carol, 65, 72, 82, 83Michael Cerularius, Patriarch, 158Migdal, Joel, 197Milner Group, 116, 183, 193, 194Milton, John, 180Mishra, B., 98Mode of production, vi, 50, 131Modes of foreign relations, vi, vii,

viii, x, xi, 163, 208 Tribal, vii, 1, 34 Empire/Nomad, vii, x, 133, 171,

176 Sovereign equality, vi, vii, 169,

170, 196, 211Modi, 135, 139Mohammed al-Mahdi, 161Mohammed, Prophet, 68–72, 76–8,

81, 83, 84, 161, 163, 164, 166, 170, 174, 175, 176, 189, 207, 209, 211, 215

Monotheism, 37, 49–50, 53–5, 61, 63, 69, 72, 84, 85, 87, 88, 96, 167, 214

Moral Re-Armament Movement (MRA) 184

Mossadeq, M., 211Mounin, Georges, 8Moye, R.H. 66, 71, 79, 80Muhammad Ali Pasha, Sultan, 218Munshi, K.M., 93, 97Muslim Brotherhood, 210, 212, 220

Nabahani, T., 212Nandy, Ashis, vii, 12, 93

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Index 241

Narayanan, V., 90, 91, 92Nasser, G.A., 210, 212Nationality, 26, 43, 64, 66, 67, 68,

69, 71, 72, 77, 79, 86, 88, 89, 92–4, 98, 102, 116, 118, 121, 145–6, 147, 149, 151, 158, 164, 182, 186, 188, 190, 191, 197, 200, 208–9, 211, 213, 217, 218, 220, 222

Nederveen Pieterse, Jan, 181, 184Neoliberal capitalism, 98, 101, 102,

178, 205, 206, 208 Netanyahu, B., 199New International Economic Order

(NIEO), 185, 208Nieburg , H.L., 6Nitzan, Jonathan, 198Nomadic motifs, 44, 49, 57, 59, 60,

62, 65, 68, 70, 72, 75, 88, 89, 95, 133, 149, 164, 173, 175–6, 207

Nordmann, Charles, 123

O’Meara, J. 155Obama, Barack, 203Occupation (of space), vi, vii, viii, 1,

16, 21, 23, 66, 68, 70, 89, 104, 133, 136, 176, 178, 188–90, 192, 194, 195, 198, 199–201, 203, 204, 206n, 211, 219, 221

Odyssey, 105, 106 Oikos-polis transition, 104–7Opium War, 141Orientalism, 177, 215Otto of Saxony, 158

Panah, Maryam, 217Panoff, A.M., 8, 15, 17, 20, 25, 30,

32Paradise, 34, 38, 39, 42, 67, 70, 80,

180Pastoralists, 18, 24, 29, 30, 31, 44,

49, 55, 57, 59, 60, 61, 68, 69, 80, 81, 85, 86, 89, 90, 93, 97, 104, 107, 115, 120, 214

Paul (Saul), 69, 150–2, 155, 157, 182

Pauli, Wolfgang, 10Pedro of Castile, ‘the Terrible’, 174Pericles, 115, 117

Peter, Apostle, 153–4, 158Petrov, M.K., vii, xiv, 3, 29, 105–7Philip ‘the Fair’, King, 169Philips, Anton, 184Phillips, Kevin, 179, 185, 222Piaget, Jean, 4, 11–13Pierre, Abbé, ‘the Venerable’, 167Piggott, Juliet, 146Pinsker Leo, 192Pitard, Wayne T., 45, 55, 60Plato(-nism), 7, 103, 104, 133, 151,

156, 167Pobedonostsev, C.P., 192Polk, James K., 182Polytheism, 39, 62, 73, 214Protection, vii, x, xi, xiii, 23, 27, 34,

38, 66, 70, 72, 73, 87, 89, 93, 94, 110, 113, 133, 137, 139, 147, 160, 162, 163, 176, 177, 197, 199

Pseudo-speciation, x, 1, 15, 17, 34, 41, 44, 107, 111, 120, 134, 150, 178

Quigley, Carroll, 116, 117, 183Qutb, Muhammad, 212Qutb, Sayyid, 210–12

Rafsanjani, H., 213Rajewsky, Christiane, 78, 83, 161Ramayana, 90, 97, 98Rank, Otto, 32–3, see also ‘Hero

Myth’,Reagan, Ronald, 182, 185, 186, 187,

188, 202Redmount, Carol A., 52, 55, 56Renan, Ernest, 209Renfrew, Colin, 5, 10Rhodes, Cecil, 116, 183Ríoss Mont, Efrain, 187Ritual, 1, 6–8, 11, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28,

29, 30, 32, 34, 59, 67, 91, 101, 112, 113, 117, 121, 127, 134, 135, 138, 146, 147, 158, 191, 209

Robertson, Pat, 187, 189Rockefeller, John D., Jun., 183Rodinson, Maxime, 66, 83, 162,

166, 176Roerich, N., 122

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Rolland, Romain, 93, 100Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen, 117,

172, 179Rosenthal, F., 175Rothschild, Lord, 193Roy, M.N., 93Rushdie, Salman, 207, 210Ruskin, John, 116, 171

Sacral landscapes, ix, xiii, 178Sadat, Anwar, 212Said, Edward, 164, 174Saladin, 165Salafism, 217, 222Sand, Shlomo, 67Sanskrit, 92, 94, 96, 145, 146Schüler, Sebastian, ixSelby, Jan, 195Sen, K.M., 90, 95Seneca, 152Senghaas, Dieter, 147, 149Sephardim, 79, 190, 198, 199, 201,

202, 203Sexuality, 7, 8, 11, 32, 44, 58, 80,

82, 83, 114, 115, 117–18, 185, 205, 210

Shafir, Gershon, 197Shahzad, S.S., 212, 219, 220, 222Shamanism, 17–18, 20, 39, 120,

121, 147Shariati, Ali, 213–16Sharon, Ariel, 202, 204Shia versus Sunni Islam, 161, 162,

164, 222 Alavid, 214 association with revolution, 213,

215, 216 Ismailists, 162, 166Shih Huang Di, Emperor, 136–7,

141, 142Shirokogorov, S.M, 3, 4, 100Sigurd of Brabant, 169, 174Silk Route/Road, 141, 144Sivan, E., 149, 200Slezkine, Yuri, 191, 192, 202, 203Smail, Daniel L., 4, 5, 7, 9, 10, 16, 19Smuts, Jan, 194Snorri Sturluson, 123–30Social contract myth (Freud), 16,

43, 150

Socialisation, spiritual, ix, xiii, 4, 7, 27–8

Soloviev, Vladimir, 118Solzhenitsyn, Alexandr I., 194Sovereign equality, vi, vii, 169, 170,

196, 211Sovereignty, 23, 26, 30, 37, 46, 51,

66–8, 85, 86, 88, 89, 94, 107–9, 112, 113, 119, 123–5, 126, 133, 136–7, 139, 140, 152, 157, 159, 160-1, 169, 170, 173, 175, 196, 200, 210, 211, 213

Spinoza, Benedict de, 49, 168, 170Sprat, Bishop Thomas, 179Stager, Lawrence E., 54, 60, 63, 74,

75, 83State, vi, vii, viii, xi, xii, xiii, 2, 49,

65, 78, 96, 101, 116, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 147, 148, 151, 158, 160, 170, 176, 178, 183, 189, 191, 192, 196, 197, 204, 205, 208–11, 213, 216, 222

Arab concept of (dawla), 160–1, 176

Steinberg, G., 217, 218, 219Stetkevych, Jaroslav, 66, 76, 177Stewart, Andrew, 111, 115Stravinsky, Igor, 118, 121Suger, Abbé, 172Sun Zi , ix, 140–1, 164Suzuki, D.T., 146Swaggart, Jimmy, 188Szent-György, A., 3

Taboo, 7, 24, 26, 29, 203Takfirism, 207–8, 212, 216, 218,

220, 222Taliban, 210, 221, 222Taylor, Charles, 12, 20, 24, 73, 156,

182Territoriality, 23, 65, 68, 69, 72, 74,

86, 89, 119, 138, 141, 158, 193, 199, 202, 218

Terrorism, 157, 184, 187, 188, 189, 202, 204, 206, 206n, 208, 221, 222

Islamist compared to Communist, 208, 222

Tertullian, 152–3

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Index 243

Thapar, Romilla, 91, 99Theodosius, Emperor, 154Theogony, 18, 19, 30, 40, 103Theravada Buddhism, xii, 96, 145,

148–9Thrisong Detsen, 147Time, multidimensionality of, vi, x,

xi, 2, 11–15, 85, 97, 110, 113, 122, 131, 181

Timur Lenk (Tamerlane), 174Tolstoy, Lev, 146Totemism, 11, 16, 17, 23, 27, 28,

35, 50, 86, 97Trevelyan, G.M., 179Tribute, 39, 58, 76, 82, 83, 106, 110,

136, 142–3Trickster figure, 16, 18, 19, 20, 30,

125, 129Tuchman, Barbara, 181Turner, Victor, 8, 27

U Nu, 149Ullmann, Walter, 157, 160, 162Umma, 66, 67, 68, 77, 161, 162,

176, 209, 210–13 United Nations, 189 Universalism, 64, 147, 151 transcendent Christian, xii–xiii,

133, 134, 149-50, 158, 160, 172–3, 180

Urban II, Pope, 159Urban life, 37, 39, 40, 42, 43, 50,

60, 61, 62, 70, 72, 98, 115, 130, 131, 158, 165, 170, 175, 176, 177, 192, 193, 205, 210

Urofsky, Melvin I., 191, 193

Valentinian III, Emperor, 155Van Baaren, Theo, 6, 8, 17, 18, 24,

27, 28, 29, 32, 35Van Binsbergen , Wim, 11, 12,

15–19, 26, 28, 58Van den Vondel, Joost, 180Van der Veer, P., 97, 102Van Gogh, Theo, 205–6

Van Groningen, B.A., 104Varagnac, A., 25Victor III, Pope, 159Villehardouin, 159Viotti, P.R., 106n, 151Visser ‘t Hooft, W.A., 183Vroon, Piet, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 65, 106,

150

Wagner, Richard, 108, 123, 129–32Waley, Arthur, 135Walt, Stephen M., 183, 188, 202Warlords , 55, 65, 74, 75, 95Weber, Max, ix, 21, 181Weizmann, Chaim, 193West, the, vii, viii, xii, 37, 98, 102,

108, 123, 130, 144, 148, 159, 160, 162, 163, 165, 169, 170, 74, 179, 183, 185, 186, 187, 188, 190, 196, 201, 208, 211, 217, 222, see also Heartland

Wilders, Geert, 206nWilson, Woodrow, 184Witzel , Michael, 10, 11, 18, 19, 30World axis (world tree), 18, 39, 124,

130World Council of Churches, 183Wu Di, 144

Xunzi, 135–6

Zarathustra, 88Zeno, 151Zhang, Yongzhin, 136Zheng He, Admiral, 143, 148Zhuangzi, 135Zhuzi, 136Zimmern, Alfred, 102, 116Zionism, xiii, 68, 177, 187, 189,

190, 193–9, 201, 203, 204 Christian, 181, 188, 220 orthodox religious, 178, 200, 204 Revisionist, 190, 196, 199Zoroastrianism, 88, 89, 101, 151Zürcher, E., 135

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