1

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

Where ignorant armies clash by night. (M. Arnold)

Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain... (T.S. Eliot)

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

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

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

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

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs... (W.B. Yeats)

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

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

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

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

...a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight …

Focusing on the image, Yeats asked,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?

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

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

Turner, Toynbee and others are focusing on the beast that is destroying the only known home of living beings.

Turner subtitles his book, “The Western Spirit against the Wilderness.” By Western Spirit he means the attitude or posture, the soul or spirit of Western Civilization, known nowadays as Civilization.

Turner defines Wilderness the same way the Western Spirit defines it, except that the term is positive for Turner, negative for the Western Spirit: Wilderness embraces all of Nature and all the human communities beyond Civilization’s ken.

In A Study of History, Arnold Toynbee expressed enthusiasm for history and for civilization. After seeing the rise and fall of the Nazi Third Order and all the refinements it brought in its train, Toynbee lost his enthusiasm. He expressed this loss in a book called Mankind and Mother Earth. The vision in this book is kin to Turner’s: Mankind is rending Mother Earth asunder.

Toynbee’s term Mankind embraces the Western spirit as well as the human communities beyond Civilization’s ken, and his Mother Earth embraces all life.

I’ll borrow Toynbee’s term Mother Earth. She’s the first protagonist. She’s alive, she’s life itself. She conceives and births everything that grows. Many call her Nature. Christians call her Wilderness. Toynbee’s other name for her is Biosphere. She is the dry land, the water and the earth enveloping our planet. She’s the sole habitat of living beings. Toynbee describes her as a thin, delicate skin, no higher than planes can fly and no lower than mines can be dug. Limestone, coal and oil are part of her substance, they are matter that once lived. She selectively filters radiation from the sun, precisely in such a way as to keep life from burning. Toynbee calls her an excrescence, a halo or rust on the planet’s surface, and he speculates that there may be no other Biospheres.

Toynbee says Mankind, human beings, in other words We, have grown very powerful, more powerful than any other living beings, and at last more powerful than the Biosphere. Mankind has the power to wreck the delicate crust, and is doing it.

There are many ways to speak of a trap. It can be described from the standpoint of the self-balancing environment, of the trapper, of the trapped animal. It can even be described from the standpoint of the trap itself, namely from the objective, scientific, technological standpoint.

There are as many ways to speak of the wrecking of the Biosphere. From the standpoint of a single protagonist, Earth herself, it can be said that She is committing suicide. With two protagonists, Mankind and Mother Earth, it can be said that We are murdering Her. Those of us who accept this standpoint and squirm with shame might wish we were whales. But those of us who take the standpoint of the trapped animal will look for a third protagonist.

Toynbee’s protagonist, Mankind, is too diffuse. It embraces all civilizations and also all communities beyond Civilization’s ken. Yet the communities, as Toynbee himself shows, coexisted with other beings for thousands of generations without doing the Biosphere any harm. They are not the trappers but the trapped.

Who, then, is the wrecker of the Biosphere? Turner points at the Western Spirit. This is the hero who pits himself against the Wilderness, who calls for a war of extermination by Spirit against Nature, Soul against Body, Technology against the Biosphere, Civilization against Mother Earth, god against all.

Marxists point at the Capitalist mode of production, sometimes only at the Capitalist class. Anarchists point at the State. Camatte points at Capital. New Ranters point at Technology or Civilization or both.

If Toynbee’s protagonist, Mankind, is too diffuse, many of the others are too narrow.

The Marxists see only the mote in the enemy’s eye. They supplant their villain with a hero, the Anti-capitalist mode of production, the Revolutionary Establishment. They fail to see that their hero is the very same “shape with lion body and the head of a man, a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” They fail to see that the Anti-capitalist mode of production wants only to outrun its brother in wrecking the Biosphere.

Anarchists are as varied as Mankind. There are governmental and commercial Anarchists as well as a few for hire. Some Anarchists differ from Marxists only in being less informed. They would supplant the state with a network computer centers, factories and mines coordinated “by the workers themselves” or by an Anarchist union. They would not call this arrangement a State. The name-change would exorcize the beast.

Camatte, the New Ranters and Turner treat the villains of the Marxists and Anarchists as mere attributes of the real protagonist. Camatte gives the monster a body; he names the monster Capital, borrowing the term from Marx but giving it a new content. He promises to describe the monster’s origin and trajectory but has not yet done so. The New Ranters have borrowed lights from L. Mumford, J. Ellul and others but have not, to my knowledge, gone further than Camatte.

Turner goes further. His aim is to describe only the monster’s spirit, but he knows it is the monster’s body that destroys the bodies of human communities and the body of Mother Earth. He says much about the monster’s origin and trajectory, and he speaks often of its armor. But it is beyond his aim to name the monster or describe its body.

It is my aim to speak of the beast’s body. For it does have a body, a monstrous body, a body that has become more powerful than the Biosphere. It may be a body without any life of its own. It may be a dead thing, a huge cadaver. It may move its slow thighs only when living beings inhabit it. Nevertheless, its body is what does the wrecking.

If the Biosphere is an excrescence on the planet’s surface, the beast that is wrecking her is also an excrescence. The Earthwrecker is a rust or halo on the surface of a human community. It is not excreted by every community, by Mankind. Toynbee himself puts the blame on a tiny minority, on very few communities. Perhaps the cadaverous beast was excreted by only one community among the myriads.

* * *

The cadaverous beast excreted by a human community is young, it is at most two or three hundred generations old. Before turning to it, I’ll glance at human communities, for they are much older, they are thousands of generations old.

We are told that even human communities are young, that there was an age when all was water until a muskrat dived to the seabottom and brought earth to the turtle’s back. So we’re told.

Supposedly the first walkers who benefited from the muskrat’s exertions were giants or gods who are nowadays called dinosaurs.

Modern graverobbers have been digging up these god’s bones and displaying the bones in glass cases of Positive Evidence. The graverobbers use these bone cases to bully all stories other than their own out of human memory. But the graverobber’s stories are duller than myriad other stories, and their cases of bones shed light only on the graverobbers themselves.

The stories are as varied as their tellers. In many of the stories, memory strains to reach an age when it, memory, was lodged in a grandmother who knew the swimmers, crawlers and walkers as her kin because she walked on her hind legs no more frequently than they.

In one ancient account, the first grandmother fell to earth from a hole in the sky.

In a modern account, she was a fish with a snout who, having playfully practiced breathing by sticking her snout above water, survived thanks to this trick when her pond dried up.

In another ancient account, the Biosphere swallowed several grandmothers before the general progenitor made her appearance, and is expected to swallow this progenitor’s great grandchildren. Toynbee may turn out to be wrong about the relative power of the two protagonists.

Many stories tell of miniature grandparents, midgets; a modern account calls them tree shrews.

These midgets inhabited the earth while the giants, the dinosaurs, walked about in the light of day. Prudent tree shrews climbed down to feast on insects at night, not because the giants were mean, but because of the discrepancy in size. Many of the tree shrews were satisfied with this arrangement and they remained tree shrews. Some, undoubtedly a small minority, wanted to walk about in the light of day.

Fortunately for the restless ones, the dinosaurs were among the grandmothers swallowed by the Biosphere. Former tree shrews could bask in the sun, or dance and play in broad daylight, without fear of being trampled. Minorities among these grew restless; some wanted to crawl, others to fly. The smug, conservative majorities, happy with their capacities, fulfilled by their environments, remained what they were.

* * *

The managers of Gulag’s islands tell us that the swimmers, crawlers, walkers and fliers spent their lives working in order to eat.

These managers are broadcasting their news too soon. The varied beings haven’t all been exterminated yet. You, reader, have only to mingle with them, or just watch them from a distance, to see that their waking lives are filled with dances, games and feasts. Even the hunt, the stalking and feigning and leaping, is not what we call Work, but what we call Fun. The only beings who work are the inmates of Gulag’s islands, the zeks.

The zek’s ancestors did less work than a corporation owner. They didn’t know what work was. They lived in a condition J.J. Rousseau called “the state of nature.” Rousseau’s term should be brought back into common use. It grates on the nerves of those who, in R. Vaneigem’s words, carry cadavers in their mouths. It makes the armor visible. Say “the state of nature” and you’ll see the cadavers peer out.

Insist that “freedom” and “the state of nature” are synonyms, and the cadavers will try to bite you. The tame, the domesticated, try to monopolize the word freedom; they’d like to apply it to their own condition. They apply the word “wild” to the free. But it is another public secret that the tame, the domesticated, occasionally become wild but are never free so long as they remain in their pens.

Even the common dictionary keeps this secret only half hidden. It begins by saying that free means citizen! But then it says, “Free: a) not determined by anything beyond its own nature or being; b) determined by the choice of the actor or by his wishes...”

The secret is out. Birds are free until people cage them. The Biosphere, Mother Earth herself, is free when she moistens herself, when she sprawls in the sun and lets her skin erupt with varicolored hair teeming with crawlers and fliers. She is not determined by anything beyond her own nature or being until another sphere of equal magnitude crashes into her, or until a cadaverous beast cuts into her skin and rends her bowels.

Trees, fish and insects are free as they grow from seed to maturity, each realizing its own potential, its wish — until the insect’s freedom is curtailed by the bird’s. The eaten insect has made a gift of its freedom to the bird’s freedom. The bird, in its turn, drops and manures the seed of the insect’s favorite plant, enhancing the freedom of the insect’s heirs.

The state of nature is a community of freedoms.

Such was the environment of the first human communities, and such it remained for thousands of generations.

Modern anthropologists who carry Gulag in their brains reduce such human communities to the motions that look most like work, and give the name Gatherers to people who pick and sometimes store their favorite foods. A bank clerk would call such communities Savings Banks!

The zeks on a coffee plantation in Guatemala are Gatherers, and the anthropologist is a Savings Bank. Their free ancestors had more important things to do.

The !Kung people miraculously survived as a community of free human beings into our own exterminating age. R.E. Leakey observed them in their lush African forest homeland. They cultivated nothing except themselves. They made themselves what they wished to be. They were not determined by anything beyond their own being — not by alarm clocks, not by debts, not by orders from superiors. They feasted and celebrated and played, full-time, except when they slept. They shared everything with their communities: food, experiences, visions, songs. Great personal satisfaction, deep inner joy, came from the sharing.

(In today’s world, wolves still experience the joys that come from sharing. Maybe that’s why governments pay bounties to the killers of wolves.)

S. Diamond observed other free human beings who survived into our age, also in Africa. He could see that they did no work, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to say it in English. Instead, he said they made no distinction between work and play. Does Diamond mean that the activity of the free people can be seen as work one moment, as play another, depending on how the anthropologist feels? Does he mean that they didn’t know if their activity was work or play? Does he mean we, you and I, Diamond’s armored contemporaries, cannot distinguish their work from their play?

If the !Kung visited our offices and factories, they might think we’re playing. Why else would we be there?

I think Diamond meant to say something more profound. A time-and-motion engineer watching a bear near a berry patch would not know when to punch his clock. Does the bear start working when he walks to the berry patch, when he picks the berry, when he opens his jaws? If the engineer has half a brain he might say the bear makes no distinction between work and play. If the engineer has an imagination he might say that the bear experiences joy from the moment the berries turn deep red, and that none of the bear’s motions are work.

Leakey and others suggest that the general progenitors of human beings, our earliest grandmothers, originated in lush African forests, somewhere near the homeland of the !Kung. The conservative majority, profoundly satisfied with nature’s unstinting generosity, happy in their accomplishments, at peace with themselves and the world, had no reason to leave their home. They stayed.

A restless minority went wandering. Perhaps they followed their dreams. Perhaps their favorite pond dried up. Perhaps their favorite animals wandered away. These people were very fond of animals; they knew the animals as cousins.

The wanderers are said to have walked to every woodland, plain and lakeshore of Eurasia. They walked or floated to almost every island. They walked across the land bridge near the northern land of ice to the southernmost tip of the double continent which would be called America.

The wanderers went to hot lands and cold, to lands with much rain and lands with little. Perhaps some felt nostalgia for the warm home they left. If so, the presence of their favorite animals, their cousins, compensated for their loss. We can still see the homage some of them gave to these animals on cave walls of Altamira, on rocks in Abrigo del Sol in the Amazon Valley.

Some of the women learned from birds and winds to scatter seeds. Some of the men learned from wolves and eagles to hunt.

But none of them ever worked. And everyone knows it. The armored Christians who later “discovered” these communities knew that these people did no work, and this knowledge grated on Christian nerves, it rankled, it caused cadavers to peep out. The Christians spoke of women who did “lurid dances” in their fields instead of confining themselves to chores; they said hunters did a lot of devilish “hocus pocus” before actually drawing the bowstring.

These Christians, early time-and-motion engineers, couldn’t tell when play ended and work began. Long familiar with the chores of zeks, the Christians were repelled by the lurid and devilish heathen who pretended that the Curse of Labor had not fallen on them. The Christians put a quick end to the “hocus pocus” and the dances, and saw to it that none could fail to distinguish work from play.

Our ancestors — I’ll borrow Turner’s terms and call them the Possessed — had more important things to do than to struggle to survive. They loved nature and nature reciprocated their love. Wherever they were they found affluence, as Marshall Sahlins shows in his Stone Age Economics. Pierre Clastres’ Society Against the State insists that the struggle for subsistence is not verifiable among any of the Possessed; it is verifiable among the Dispossessed in the pits and on the margins of progressive industrialization. Leslie White, after a sweeping review of reports from distant places and ages, a view of “Primitive culture as a whole,” concludes that “there’s enough to eat for a richness of life rare among the ‘civilized.’” I wouldn’t use the word Primitive to refer to a people with a richness of life. I would use the word Primitive to refer to myself and my contemporaries, with our progressive poverty of life.

* * *

The main part of our poverty is that the richness of life of the Possessed is barely accessible to us, even to those of us who have not chained our imaginations.

Our professors talk of fruits and nuts, animal skins and meat. They point to our supermarkets, full of fruits and nuts. We have an abundance our ancestors didn’t dream of, Q.E.D. These are, after all, the real things, the things that matter. And if we want more than fruits and nuts, we can go to the theater and see plays; we can even sprawl in front of the TV and consume the entire world-wide spectacle. Hallelujah! What more could we want?

Thanks to our professors, we barely have access to our dangerous, demonic, possessed ancestors who thought fruits and nuts were not the real things but trivia, who abandoned themselves to visions, myths and ceremonies. Thanks to our professors, we now know that visions are personal delusions, myths are fairy tales, and ceremonies are play-acting which we can see any time in movies.

We even know a lot about Possession. Possession is ownership. We possess houses and garages and cars and stereo equipment, and we’re constantly running to possess more; there’s no limit to what we want to possess. Surely it must be said that possession is our central aim, not theirs.

Rare is the professor who, like Mircea Eliade, frees himself of the armored vision and sees through the iron curtain of inversion and falsification. And even Eliade fogs what he sees by claiming to find analogies and vestiges in our world. The strait that separates us from the other shore has been widening for three hundred generations, and whatever was cannibalized from the other shore is no longer a vestige of their activity but an excretion of ours: it’s shit.

Reduce to blank slates by school, we cannot know what it was to grow up heirs to thousands of generations of vision, insight, experience.

We cannot know what it was to learn to hear the plants grow, and to feel the growth.

We cannot know what it was to feel the seed in the womb and learn to feel the seed in earth’s womb, to feel as Earth feels, and at last to abandon oneself and let Earth possess one, to become Earth, to become the first mother of all life. We’re truly poor. Thousands of generations of vision, insight and experience have been erased.

Instead of abandoning ourselves, instead of savoring what little we can of their powers, we define and categorize.

We speak of Matri-archy. The name is a cheap substitute for the experience. It is a bargain, and we’re always on the lookout for bargains. Once the name is on the door, the door can be closed. And we want doors to stay closed.

The name Matri-archy is on the door of an age when women knew themselves, and were known by men, as the conceivers, as the creators of life, as embodiments of the first being, as first beings.

To know the name on the door is to know nothing. Knowledge begins on the other side of the threshold. Even the name on the door is wrong. Matri refers to mother, but archy comes from an altogether different age. Archy refers to government, to artificial as opposed to natural order, to an order where the Archon is invariably a man. An-archy would be a better name for the door. The Greek prefix “an” means “without.”

On the other side of the threshold, the possessed mother returns to her body and proceeds to share her experience with her kin, just as she shares fruits and nuts.

Our tongues would be hanging out for the fruits and nuts. But her sisters, cousins, nieces and nephews are hungry for the experience.

When the mother shares the experience, she also shares the thousands of generations of vision and insight, the wisdom that helped make her experience so meaningful, so frightfully profound. She doesn’t apply chalk to a blackboard. She doesn’t write a textbook. She hops. She sings. She begins the “lurid dance,” the “orgy” that will one day terrify the Christians.

Her cousins and nieces join in the dance. They let go, they abandon themselves to her songs, her motions. They too let themselves be possessed by the spirit of earth. They too experience the greatest joy imaginable.

The nephews also abandon themselves; they too are possessed, enriched. But when the ceremony is over, they sense that they have less to look forward to than their sisters. They know they’re not creators of life, first beings. In The Flounder, Günther Grass vividly portrays the inferiority complex of these nephews, these males in the state of nature. They’re studs. They’re sexual objects. They’re the ones who preen and ornament themselves to make themselves attractive to women, like peacocks, ducks and other cousins of theirs.

The nephews take phallus-shaped spears and arrows to the woods, and they return to the village with meat. But they know that meat, if not as common as fruits and nuts, is still trivial compared to their aunt’s trips of possession and self-abandon, for such trips bring one face to face with the very springs of Being.

The nephews also seek visions. They too are heirs to thousands of generations of observation and wisdom. Their uncles saw to that. They know that the forest is not the thing it has become for us: a meat corral, a lumber factory. They know the forest as a living being who teems with living beings. They too, like their aunt, let go of themselves, let themselves be possessed by the spirit of a tree, of a place, of an animal. If they’ve learned much, and well, they even look up, above the forest. They strive for the sky. And on rare occasions the spirit of the sky possesses them. They fly. They become sky, feeling all its motions, sensing all its intentions. They become the sky who mated with earth and gave birth to life. A man who returns to his village with such news is much and has much to share, more than mere meat.

What trips those must have been! Such profound celebrations of life have no counterpart, no analogy, in what Turner calls “the narrow, unsexed, anthropocentric version that Western Civilization has become uncomfortably familiar with ...”

Just how far progress has brought us is revealed by the occasional tourist who happens on a seer. The tourist listens to the old man who somehow slipped into our age from the other shore. The tourist sits fidgeting through what he calls a “seance,” snapping photographs. At the end of it all, the tourist produces a photograph which proves that the seer didn’t fly, didn’t even rise from his seat. And the tourist leaves, happily convinced that they, not he, are dupes and morons.

Photographs show what we’re most interested in: the surfaces of things. They don’t show qualities, spirits.

Some of the people who left the human communities remembered some of the qualities. They remembered some of the joys of possession — not possession of things but possession of Being.

They remembered — but vaguely, foggily. Surrounded by things, they lost the ability to express the qualities. They knew the age they had left was more valuable, more pure, more beautiful than anything they found since. But their language had gone poor. They could speak of what they lost only by comparing it to things of their world. They called the forgotten age the Age of Gold.

* * *

2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

The so-called material conditions were nothing but aids to feasting, walking and floating. They were like canes to old men. Their variety and complexity attest to the ingenuity of human beings. But the centrality of such things to us is no proof that human beings in the state of nature revolved around fruits, nuts and canes. Little as we know of their great moments, we do know they were not industrial fairs, celebrations of new inventions, gadget displays. Things may have been useful, but they were trivia compared to the moments when one made contact with the beginning, the source of life, Being itself.

The trivia are ancient, and may have been more varied in the old days than they are now. When fruits matured on high branches, all kinds of hooked poles, ropes and ladders were devised to reach the fruits before monkeys reached them.

People knew themselves as cousins of animals. Many of their implements enabled them to copy the ways of animals. On the banks of rivers and lakes, people devised all types of rafts and canoes so as to float like ducks and swans. They stored nuts for winter use after the manner of squirrels. They scattered seeds after the manner of birds. They wove nets after the manner of spiders. They stalked deer after the manner of wolves. Wolves have strong teeth and jaws. People sharpened sticks and stones. (Our archeologists picture them chipping away, all day long, like zeks. We’re projecting again. Those people were not coerced by what Toynbee calls “impersonal institutions.” They had no reason to go on chipping after it stopped being fun.)

Modern diggers have even unearthed the remains of ancient cities at places in Anatolia and the Levant, places later named Shanidar, Jericho, Çatal Höyük, Hacilar. At Shanidar the whole community shared a cave as a winter shelter; the cave dwellers used metals. At Jericho people caved themselves in by building a wall, probably to protect themselves from hostile interlopers. These people seem to have done little or no planting. To the north of them were people who planted seeds and herded animals but did not build cities or walls. And across the world from them were the ancestors or predecessors of the Ojibwa, who practiced metallurgy on lake Superior, making beautiful copper ornaments and implements.

None of these people developed “impersonal institutions.” They remained kin. They went on sharing all they had and all they experienced. The copper users of Lake Superior did not plant seeds or herd animals. Perhaps they could have, but they had no earthly need to. They did have dogs. Dogs apparently domesticated themselves, either because of an incomprehensible love for human beings or because of a parasitic urge. But what satisfaction could come from developing strains of parasitic, doglike elk or moose?

The material objects, the canes and canoes, the digging sticks and walls, were things a single individual could make, or they were things, like a wall, that required the cooperation of many on a single occasion. I would guess that the builders of the first Jericho’s walls ceased to be wall-builders the moment they were done; they returned to more important activities. I would even guess they built the wall in order to pursue the more important activities undisturbed.

As for the surplus product, the famous Margin these implements supposedly made possible: Sahlins and others have shown that communities with many implements and communities with few, in lush environments and in harsh ones, were all surrounded by surpluses. After all the people had eaten their fill, after all the insects and birds and animals had eaten their fill, there was still a virtual bounty that fell to earth and fertilized the next spring’s new shoots. Many animals and many people stored what they expected to use during an average winter, but no one hoarded more than that; free people didn’t need to.

* * *

Most of the implements are ancient, and the surpluses have been ripe since the first dawn, but they did not give rise to impersonal institutions. People, living beings, give rise to both. And it is not Man or Mankind who is responsible, but one isolated community, a tiny minority in Toynbee’s words.

Furthermore, this tiny minority does not give rise to such institutions in the most favorable material conditions, say in the lush woodlands around the Great Lakes or the abundant forests of Africa or Eurasia. They do it in the least favorable material conditions, in a fiercely harsh environment.

Diggers will actually unearth and decipher tablets which shed light on some of the first moments of impersonal institutions.

The tablets are in Sumerian, a language that may have originate in Central Asia. The authors are the first literate men. The villages where they live are called Erech, Ur, Eridu, Lagash. The villages are located in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The place will called a Fertile Crescent ages later, to explain why donkeys have tails.

The first tablets don’t speak of the place so favorably. They describe it as a hellish place and make one wonder why those people stay there. They are set on farming in a jungle. The rivers flood yearly, fertilize the valley and turn it into a swamp.

Women plant seeds. One year the flood is so violent it carries off the crop as well as the houses. The following year there’s not enough water, and the plants dry up and die in the burning heat of the sun.

Surely the villagers must start thinking of returning to the more favorable conditions of Central Asia, where they did not have to spend so much time and energy on mere survival, where they had time for more enjoyable activities.

But they are tenacious. The grandmothers call the old men to a council. These men have been dreaming. The women urge the men to dream of a dependable water supply, neither too little nor too much.

The men are undoubtedly offended at being called away from their mental transports for the sake of such trivia. They probably have to be called to a second council and then a third, this last during a famine.

The old men sluggishly respond. They may have seen how beavers assure themselves of a dependable water supply. They dream. They see that what is needed is a dam, canals and drainage ditches. But who is to build these? Certainly not the old men. They are not beavers. They call the young men together and explain the dream.

The young men have been doing nothing at all, so they are eager to show themselves willing and generous givers.

But no one knows how to proceed. The old men may or may not dream up the plans, but they certainly do not supervise the actual doing. They choose a strong young man, a Lugal; they tell him to go look at beavers. The old men then return to their more important philosophical endeavors.

The Lugal, which means strong man in Sumerian, may or may not learn from the beavers, and he may or may not do the planning. He certainly does the supervising. Wasn’t he designated by the elders?

When the ditches and canals are dug, the Lugal returns among his peers, proud but not yet haughty. Nothing has changed yet. Such cooperative ventures were infrequent but not uncommon in communities of kin.

But this is Erech, a place where the gods obviously don’t want people to live. A single flood carries the whole works into the sea. The women call the old men to another council. This time the elders choose a yet stronger young man and urge him to study the beavers more conscientiously or dream more profoundly. And this time the banks and dikes hold, at least initially.

But Erech remains a materially wretched place, and before long the banks begin to crumble. The experienced Lugal is called to repair the banks and dikes. The Lugal and his cousins complain that they should have called a moon sooner, when the banks were still repairable; now they have to rebuild the entire works. This happens twice, at most three times, before the Lugal insists on having a seat in the council of elders, so as to have a say in choosing the time to repair dikes.

Springs pass and winters pass, filled with feasts, festivals, dances and games.

The elders of Ur, and even those of Lagash, designate Lugals to go study the irrigation works of Erech.

One elder of Erech and then another die of old age; they are replaced on the council by newcomers.

By now the Lugal is a more experienced elder than the newcomers, and he expresses himself about other things than dikes. He becomes haughty, and his cousins stand behind him. He and they, after all, are the ones who provide Erech with a dependable water supply. The Lugal even dares to tell an old grandmother where not to plant her seeds.

One day the Lugal is found dead, murdered by a deity, a deity known to be in close contact with the insulted grandmother. A new Lugal is chosen, a less haughty one, and the elders are more careful to keep him out of their council.

There is no positive evidence for any of this. The fact is that the Sumerian tablets are mysteriously silent about the deeds of the women and elders at the time of the first Lugals. And as time goes on, the tablet-scribes help people forget that Sumerian women were important, that elders once sat in council, that there was age before the first Lugal.

* * *

But I’ll return to my story.

The people of Ur and those of Lagash have completed their water works. These grow more extensive every year.

One year the drainage ditches of Lagash overflow into Ur’s canals, flooding and ruining Ur’s works.

This so infuriates the Lugal of Ur, called Urlugal, that he leads his spear-armed cousins against those of Lagash. The enraged youth of Ur destroy their neighbors’ water works and pursue fleeing Lagash people to the desert. In their rage they murder several foreigners, desert nomads whose paths they cross.

When at last the besieged Lagashians beg for an end to the violence, the victors, Urlugal at their head, impose a fiendishly heavy burden on the defeated. The man of Ur demands reparations from the Lagashians, who are to rebuild their own waterworks and those of Ur as well. Lagashians unwilling or unable to support such a burden are invited to bring large gifts to the man of Ur, at specified periods.

Urlugal is determined to keep track of all the tribute gifts owed to him, for he’s as tenacious as those ancestors of his who did not abandon the Fertile Crescent. To keep track of the gifts and givers, he sends one or two of his cousins to Erech to study the marks some of Erechlugal’s men have been making on clay tablets to keep track of the best times to repair dikes. Urlugal’s men soon make clay tablets of their own, and onto these tablets they chisel wedge-shaped marks to signify the names of those in Lagash who still owe tribute gifts, and the amounts.

All these events do not happen within a single Urlugal’s lifetime. Urlugal is only one of the names of Ur’s Lugals. The Sumerians have hundreds, perhaps thousands of Lugals, and the scribes invent yet more names of Lugals to fill the time between themselves and the first dawn. For the Sumerians, the interval between themselves and the Beginning is not as brief as it will later become for Christians. The tenacious Sumerians reckon in millions.

I latched on to Urlugal because of his telling name, so I’ll stick with him. He’s still collecting tribute from Lagash. His nephews are having a ball supervising the canal work of their neighbors instead of doing it themselves.

Now alarming news arrives. Some of Urlugal’s cousins went hunting, perhaps in the forests of Lebanon. One of them returns, with barely enough life in him to tell the tale. The hunters were attacked by spear-armed nomads; all were killed but the teller. The attackers are probably kin of the foreigners killed by Urlugal’s men during the foray against Lagash.

Urlugal immediately prepares to lead his strongest cousins against the murderous foreigners. The elders try to cool the hotheads, suggesting that the foreigners were avenging the victims of Urlugal’s initial raid, and another raid will only lead to more reprisals. But the hotheads will not be stopped.

Urlugal and his cousins, still flushed by their victory over Lagash, set out towards the Lebanon forest. They actually find a camp of foreigners. They raze it to the ground and murder most of the nomads. On their way back with the captured animal herds, the men of Ur are attacked by another band of foreigners. The forest seems to teem with foreigners.

Urlugal and many of his cousins are killed. The survivors abandon their loot and flee back to Ur in disarray.

All Ur is in a rage. Someone reminds the angry crowd of the elders’ prediction and he’s immediately killed. The survivors and their cousins clamor for the appointment of the strongest and most determined among them as Lugal. The victors over Lagash will not be bested by mere foreigners, they will not be flies to spiders who live in no cities and plant no seeds. The council of elders, beset by the entire town’s rage, hesitantly appoints the new Lugal.

The enraged warriors set out against the foreigners. They send scouts ahead so as not to be trapped in another ambush. They transport their supplies as well as Lugal himself on wheeled carriages; the Lugal can thus save his strength for the actual battle, and the men from Ur can move faster than any foreigners. They find several camps of nomads and raze every one to the ground.

They return to Ur — this time not only with captive herds but with captive foreigners as well. The returning warriors are embraced by their worried kin. For a fortnight all Ur is taken up with feasts, dances, celebrations. The elders, men and women, prepare generous offerings to the spirits and powers who made victory possible. Special offerings are made to the Lugal’s deity.

When the celebrations end, the flushed warriors, the heroes, are not about to return to repairing the canals. The stint of the Lagashians is about to end. In fact, the Lagashians are complaining that they’ve already done more for Ur than they ever agreed to do. Who’ll do the repairing now? The Lugal’s cousins had long been supervising defeated Lagashians and they’re not pleased by the prospect of replacing the defeated.

The captured foreigners are put to work on the canals. Each of the Lugal’s cousins is now a Lugal, a supervisor. The Sumerian word is Ensi. This is a sub-Lugal, an assistant to the Lugal, a boss but not the boss.

Nomads continue to harass Ur’s hunters and travelers. But news of their raids is no longer alarming. The Lugal leads frequent expeditions against the unintelligible Semitic-speaking foreigners.

The elders no longer object to these expeditions, prudently confining themselves to visionary and philosophical activities. Occasionally the Lugal consults an old man or woman about the likelihood of victory, but otherwise he keeps a respectful distance from them.

The Lugal now looks forward to these expeditions, for each new raid brings new foreigners to Ur. There are now enough foreigners in Ur to repair canals in every season. Soon the captives from the earlier expeditions are recruited to expeditions against new raiders.

Now foreigners do not only repair dikes. They also repair the houses of old men and women. They do the Lugal’s chores and soon the chores of Ensis.

Sumerian women still give birth to the plants in the field, but now they do this by maintaining close and continual contact with Earth and with the spirits responsible for nurturing the plants. The actual scattering of the seeds is done by captured foreigners.

And who are the foreigners? Surely we can recognize them as the first zeks! They are workers, proletarians, full-time laborers. The Sumerian language comes from another age. Just as it has no word like King, Ruler, Emperor, President, it has no word like Zek, Worker, Slave. Sumerians continue to call the lugal Lugal, and they continue to call the foreigners Foreigners. But in an incredibly short time, Ur abandons the exotic world of seers and visions.

* * *

I’ve been using the present tense. Ur is Now. It is not exotic at all. It is our world.

What happened?

I’ve already disposed of the Marxist explanation. Favorable material conditions did not give rise to the first Lugal of Erech. Material conditions remained what they were for generations, and the people of Erech had no access to the best of them. Material conditions begin to change only after the first Lugal, and from then on they change fast.

Pierre Clastres will say there was a revolution — not a material but a political revolution. This is a good way to put it, but it is true only in retrospect. The Sumerians obviously undergo a great change; we can call this a revolution, but they do not experience it as one.

From the standpoint of the Sumerians, nothing changes. In a sense they never leave the state of nature. This is probably what accounts for the exoticism that will continue to cling to what we will call “early civilizations.” The Sumerians haven’t become zeks. They’re still possessed. Sumerian women still give birth, not as machines for the production of soldiers and workers, but as living beings in close contact with the sources of Being. Sumerian men, especially older ones, still seek contact with the spirits of the winds, the clouds, even of the sky itself. In fact, they devote themselves to their searches more completely than they ever could before. Now all their energies are devoted to the dances, festivals and ceremonies. They no longer have to concern themselves with the trivia of material survival. The trivia are all done for them.

Furthermore, the Lugal and his men bring far more generous gifts to the spirits than could ever be given before. The Lugal’s men have even built permanent shrines to all the spirits and powers, incredibly beautiful shrines, and around the shrines they’ve placed gardens and filled them with all the creatures of the deserts and forests.

Never before have people shown such homage, such respect, to the beings responsible for life. It is true that the Lugal builds the greatest shrine to his own deity. This is obviously presumptuous on the haughty Lugal’s part, since he cannot know that the spirits accept the hierarchic arrangement into which he places them. This is a type of revolution. But the Sumerians are not now going to turn against the Lugal for his haughtiness. They’ve gotten used to it, and instead of irking them, it now makes them smile with a certain pride. It is thanks to him that they can devote themselves so completely to the wellbeing of their city.

I have to admit to my questioner that the Sumerians would not part with a single one of the new implements. They do not long to return to the timeless Golden Age. They are in the Golden Age, more so now than ever before.

But the golden Sumerians are no longer all of Sumer. In fact, in some later scholarly accounts, the golden Sumerians will not even exist. They will be dismissed with a single word. The word is Temple. The devotees of Inanna, the loving daughter of the Moon; the communicants with Anu, the spirit of the sky, are not the users of the new implements. They are not he administrators of the irrigation works, the builders of the great palaces, the heroes of the military encounters. They are what we will call Priests and Priestesses, oracles and diviners. All that is left in Sumer from the state of nature has shrunken to what we will call Religion.

Perhaps some of the women who no longer scatter seeds, perhaps some of the men who no longer hunt or herd, feel some nostalgia for the old days. But there is no evidence of a “back to the land” movement among the Sumerian clergy. The scribes who chisel the tablets are the Lugal’s hired men; they are not hired to record the nostalgia of the clergy. The only clues we have are the gardens which the Lugal’s men build and fill for the Temple’s residents.

These Temple gardens are mysteriously lush for small towns surrounded by non-urban vistas and in walking distance from forests and mountains — and the Sumerians are such good walkers. Could it be, as Turner will suggest, that the world outside the city is already becoming a wilderness?

We should look carefully. The world outside Ur is not the wilderness our word will designate. Their wilderness clearly is not the forest or desert, the plants or animals, since the nature-loving Temple residents have all these brought into the city.

Could it be that their wilderness is the wilderness created by the Lugal and his men: the battlefields surrounding all of Sumer’s towns, the setting of raids and counter-raids, the scenes of torture, slaughter and capture? A priestess who wanted to commune with the Moon by a forest pond would have to set out with an armed escort. It has become more practical to bring a shrunken pond and forest into the precincts of Ur.

If the former free community has shrunken to a Temple, an excrescence of that community has grown extremely large, for the Temple is now surrounded by a bustling city, almost modern in every way except in its religion — perhaps not altogether modern but at least perfectly intelligible to us.

There are rich and there are poor, since the families of Ensis are no kin of the foreigners and share nothing with them. There is a market, since the well-to-do no longer gather grow or hunt their own food. There are generals and their soldiers. There are record-keepers and there is even a school for scribes. And it all runs like clockwork.

Let’s look more closely. If the people in the Temple are golden, those outside are of baser metals.

The Semitic-speaking members of the labor gangs, married and with one or more children, not quite Sumerianized yet, remember better days. It might not be altogether insane to suppose that these first zeks love their Ensis no better than later zeks will love theirs. Some of the victories celebrated on the tablets are against foreigners already in Sumer; in other words, they are victories over rebelling zeks.

The foreigners are maltreated, overworked and despised. They are neither free nor whole. They are the dispossessed. Some of their children might face a brighter future, especially those who go to war and butcher other foreigners bravely enough. The Sumerians have not yet progressed to the higher stage of hereditary misery. Even so, the lot of the Sumerian zeks is in no sense golden.

Rousseau, and before him de la Boetie, will wonder about situations like these. In any given labor gang, there are many zeks and only one Ensi. What keeps the zeks from ganging up against the Ensi? Why do people reproduce a miserable daily life?

Let’s glance at the Ensis. They are materially well off. But they are beset by fears, and at least one Ensi is paranoid. He’s afraid to be murdered by the zeks in his gang. He has already executed several conspirators. He’s afraid word of his incompetence might reach the Lugal. And, the gods forbid! he suspects someone in the Temple nurses a grudge against him.

There’s something else about the Ensi. His zeks aren’t free or whole. But neither is he. Except when they rise, or gang up against an Ensi, the zeks are not determined by their own nature or being, by their own choices or wishes. The tasks they spend their days on are not their own. But those tasks are not the Ensi’s either.

The Ensi knows of a work gang whose supervisor was murdered by zek conspirators. The murdered man was replaced by a man with a different outlook and altogether different interests. Yet once he was supervisor, the new man did the very same things as the murdered supervisor, and in almost the same manner.

Strange thoughts come to the Ensi’s mind. Could it be, he wonders, that the only man in Ur who is his own man is the Lugal? Now he wonders if even this is true. He has heard of a town whose Lugal was killed along with most of his Ensis in an uprising of zeks. When the Ensi first heard the story, he wasn’t surprised that there was an uproar, that many of the activities which emanated from the Lugal’s will came to a standstill. But now he remembers that very few activities came to a complete halt, even during the interregnum between Lugals. He even remembers that no council of elders replaced the dead Lugal; the elders stayed in the Temple and locked its gates. Many of the town’s activities, important ones and that, went on as before, like the clockwork of the Ensi’s descendants.

Yet stranger thoughts come to the Ensi. It seems to him that the town has a will of its own. But he knows it doesn’t. The only one in town with a will is the Lugal. The Ensis only execute the Lugal’s will. And if the zeks have a will at all, it is a will to break out. The Ensi concludes that it is pointless to think. Thinking is the job of priests and oracles.

One of the Ensi’s distant descendants in a much later Ur, a scribe called Thomas Hobbes, will know that the Ensi is trying to understand Civilization with ideas that come from the state of nature. This Hobbes will know that Ur is no longer in the state of nature, it is no longer a community of self-determined human beings.

* * *

Hobbes will know that Ur is no mere city. Ur is a State, maybe even the first State. And a state, Hobbes will say, is an “artificial animal.” It is something brand new, something neither Man nor Nature dreamt of. It is “that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, in Latin Civitas, which is but an artificial man.”

Like the thinking Ensi, Hobbes will know that this artificial man has no life of its own, and he will ask, “may we not say, that all automata (engines that move by themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?”

The Ensi cannot yet visualize a watch. The more advance Hobbes will no longer be able to visualize nature or human beings. He will ask “what is the heart, but a spring; and the nerves, but so many strings; and the joints, but so many wheels...?” In a world of watches, the Leviathan will not appear as strange to Hobbes as it appears to the Ensi.

Hobbes will picture the Leviathan as an artificial English man: masculine, blond, with a crown on its head, a scepter in one hand and a sword in the other, its body composed of myriads of faceless human beings, zeks.

Hobbes will insist that the Leviathan has the head of a man. He might agree with the yet later poet Yeats that the beast has “a lion body and the head of a man.” But he will insist on the man’s head. He will know that the zeks are headless, that they are the springs and strings that operate the body. He will think the monster contains one free and whole man, the Lugal. Hobbes will be able to call the Lugal a King, Monarch, Ruler and other names besides, because his language will have been enriched by the intervening proliferation of Leviathans.

The philosophical Ensi already knows better than Hobbes that the beast has neither the body nor the head of a man, whether English Sumerian. The Ensi knows that even the Lugal, the freest man in Ur, cannot go hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon and dancing at night, as his own spirit moves him. He knows of a Lugal who went off hunting only twice, and the second time, while the Lugal was in the woods, his favorite Ensi replaced him as Lugal, and the former Lugal had to beg for asylum in a neighboring city. The Ensi knows that a Lugal who let himself be determined by his own spirit would quickly be overthrown by Ensis or even zeks, and that even the Temple would be in an uproar.

The Ensi, less advanced than Hobbes, is as yet more familiar with living beings than with springs and watches. He cannot envision the Leviathan with either a human head or a lion body. He might use Hobbes’s first description and think of the beast as an artificial animal, but not an animal as graceful and limber as a lion.

He might think of it as a worm, a giant worm, not a living worm but a carcass of a worm, a monstrous cadaver, its body consisting of numerous segments, its skin pimpled with spears and wheels and other technological implements. He knows from his own experience that the entire carcass is brought to artificial life by the motions of the human beings trapped inside, the zeks who operate the springs and wheels, just as he knows that the cadaverous head is operated by a mere zek, the head zek.

Among the speculations this Hobbes will give us as offerings to his Ur will be the claim that the zeks actually contracted themselves to imprisonment within the carcass, or as he will put it, that the head made an agreement with the body, if not in Hobbes’s Ur then at least in the original Ur.

The philosophical Ensi, who has by now retired to the Temple, already knows better. He knows the zeks are foreigners who were brought to Ur by force before they even understood the Lugal’s language; the zeks agreed to no contract then, and they haven’t done so since.

The Ensi even remembers that the defeated Lagashians who contracted themselves to repairing Ur’s canals made this agreement only at the point of spears.

Furthermore, no Lugal ever advanced Hobbes’s claim; he would have been laughed out of office. The Lugal knows that even the elders didn’t appoint him, since the elders no longer do any appointing; they take care of the shrines. The Lugal claims that his power comes to him from the violent spirit who lodges in the Ziggurat or artificial mountain. This sprawling man-made phallus shape is the real head of the Leviathan, and it made no contracts.

* * *

3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

There is some evidence that Sumerian traders followed their greed as far east of Ur as India, as far south as the first or second cataract of the Nile. Before speculating about their trips, I have to digress into another matter, because modern prejudices have made a mess of the little evidence there is.

Many if not most of the first archeologists will be enlightened, progressive and unabashed racists. The appearance of the murderous Leviathans will be a great moment for them, and they will claim that the Leviathan of the appropriate race was the father of all the other Leviathans.

A little later, during the Community of Nations era, the racism will have to be toned down somewhat. It will be said that the people in Egypt as well as those in Persia and India were all endowed with the genius to devise permanent war machines, that they all developed their own Leviathans independently during the same few generations by coincidence.

The feat of launching a Leviathan will be considered a sign of genius. But is this feat a sign of genius or of mental debility? Who but imbeciles would step out of the state of nature and into the entrails of an artificial worm’s carcass for no good reason? The suggestion that numerous human communities succumb to this idiocy at a given moment, each of its own initiative, is neither plausible. It takes genius to keep the monster away.

There are plenty of ways of keeping the monster away. Unfortunately for human communities, not all these ways lead to a safe refuge. For the sake of brevity, I will reduce these ways to two: the community can remove itself physically from the monster’s reach, or it can stay where it is and try to hold its own against the beast.

The earliest tablets do not record the movements of communities outside of Sumer’s sphere. It will be suggested that the last migrants to the double continent on the opposite side of Earth from Ur, the Inuit people, begin to cross from Siberia to Alaska to Greenland at about the same time when the first Leviathan is set in motion. There will be no proof that these people are being pushed by others in an early version of the now famous analogy of falling dominos. Toynbee and others will document such movements for later ages, when military exploits by Chinese generals will send people camped by China’s wall running across the length of Eurasia to Rome’s gates, pushing all others before them. We will know that a vast number of Eurasian communities will successfully keep themselves out of the monster’s reach until the Leviathan called USSR swallows the last of them in our time.

Physical removal, namely fleeing or as we will say, dropping out, effectively removes one from the monster’s reach. But ultimately none flee for good, since Leviathan will shrink the size of the world and turn all places of refuge into cleared fields.

And not all communities want to flee. Their valleys, groves and oases, the places where their ancestors are buried, are filled with familiar and often friendly spirits. Such a place is sacred. It is the center of the world. The landmarks of the place are the orienting principles of an individual’s psyche. Life has no meaning without them. For such a community, leaving its place is equivalent to committing communal suicide.

So they stay where they are. And they are kissed by the monster’s grotesque lips. Artifacts of Sumerian origin will be found in early Egyptian as well as Indian sites. We will not know who carries the artifacts, but we will know that it is easier to walk from Mesopotamia to the Nile in the age of the first Ur than in our age, even after Urlugal begins to turn the region into a “darkling plain swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night.” Compared to what modern Leviathans will make of this region, the darkling plain of Urlugal’s age is a peaceful garden, and an Ensi’s cousin would have no trouble walking in it.

As for the more distant places, we will know that when the sea and land caravans between the Fertile Crescent and India are first mentioned in records, they are mentioned not as something new but as something very old, and the first mention of the silk route to China will not be an inaugural address.

Leviathans eventually become enormous, as large as continents. But we should not project this enormity to the early days and expect these first contacts to be frequent and to involve lots of people. In some circumstances, near a source, a pebble can change a whole stream’s course. We all know of the later traveler Marco Polo, who acquired a taste for Chinese pizza, spaghetti and ravioli and carried his taste across the entire length of Eurasia, totally transforming the Italian diet. I would guess that only two visits, one by the Ensi’s mercantile cousin and the second by the Ensi and his punitive expedition, would make a strong impression on any community in the state of nature. And Sumerian merchants travel far, by land and by water, to distant places they call Dilmun, Magan and Meluhha.

I’ll let the reader speculate about the details of such encounters. I’ll only say that, after the children of the defaulters are kidnapped by the spear-armed goons, a member of the community who speaks of the positive wonders of Civilization is a moron, not only in his kin’s eyes but in ours too.

* * *

Here we reach a problem that has plagued people since the age of the first Ur, the problem of resistance. Some of us will wish, in retrospect, that the communities within Ur’s reach had destroyed the first monster in its lair, while it was isolated and not very large.

Apparently numerous communities in the Zagros mountains and in the Persian plains try to do precisely that, and they fail.

Others, less sanguine, perhaps less confident of the might of their gods in the face of armor and wheels, do the next best thing to fleeing: they wall themselves in, thus walling the monster’s claws out. The walls protect these resisters from Ur’s claws but do not keep the resisters out of Leviathan’s entrails.

Why do the resisters fail? This is an important question, the question of Life against Death. Norman O. Brown will make it the title of a very informative book.

Pre-state communities were gatherings of living but mortal individuals. All their secrets and all their ways were passed on directly, by word of mouth. If the keeper of important uncommunicated secrets died, her secrets died with her. Enmities and grudges died with their holders. The visions and the ways were as varied as the individuals who experienced and practiced them; that’s why there was such a richness. But the visions and ways were as mortal as the people. Mortality is an inseparable part of Life: it is Life’s end.

We will keep projecting modern institutions into the state of nature. There were no institutions in the state of nature.

Institutions are impersonal and immortal. They share this immortality with no living beings under the sun. Of course they are not living beings. They are segments of a carcass. Institutions are not a part of Life but a part of Death. And Death cannot die.

Ensis die and zeks die, but the labor gang “lives” on. Generals and soldiers die, but Ur’s army “lives” on and in fact grows larger and deadlier. Death’s realm grows but the living die. This creates problems that resisters have not, so far, been able to deal with.

Those who try to destroy the first Leviathan by storming its walls, the Guti and others in the Zagros mountains, the Elamites in the Persian plains, the Canaanites and other Semites of the Levant, cannot dispatch a simple war party with an informal chieftain as in the old days. A war party from a single camp won’t reach even the outskirts of Ur. They have to gang up with other camps, with as many as possible, before even contemplating a serious raid. And once they do gang up and attack, they cannot disperse and return to village life as they always could before. They may even defeat Ur’s main army, but before their victory celebration ends they get word that Ur’s undying army has already massacred more of their kin.

So, since they bothered to gang up, they stay ganged up. The young men don’t lay down their spears. This is unprecedented, but how else are they to resist the monster? They’ve committed themselves to staying and they feel constrained to accept the horrible consequences.

Their armed men do unto the foreigners what the foreigners do to them. They return with captured Sumerians, and the captives are put to work on local shrines and fortifications.

Technology progresses by leaps and bounds. Death’s real expands. Soon there are many Leviathans. There’s Elam in the Persian plains, there’s Mari and Ebla and others in the Levant, and there’s talk of a Guti Leviathan somewhere in the mountains. The brave fighters succeed in defeating only themselves.

* * *

Those who wall themselves in fall into a similar trap.

Communities built walls before, at Jericho for example. But they built a wall once. Wall-building was not an institution among them. The hostiles camped outside were not Urlugal’s undying army. They were another community who either moved to another site, or who found husbands and wives among those of Jericho, and ceased being hostiles.

This is no longer the situation faced by the builders of walls on the banks of the Nile, by those raising the walled Mohenjo Daro on the banks of the Indus, by those who would slightly later enclose themselves in fortresses in Central Anatolia.

The Leviathanic intruders are not communities of free mortals. They are emissaries from something that neither leaves nor dies. Even their memories are not human but are stones carried in pouches. Jericho’s walls will no longer do. The walls have to be high and strong, and they have to be repaired as often as the ditches of Erech.

The seasons pass and the generations pass, yet the walls must still be maintained. And maintained they are, generation after generation.

The seeress who dreamt of the need for these walls has experienced her last important vision. From that day on her kin have paid her scanty attention; they’ve been hovering around her brother, Pharaoh, who in his person combines the offices of Sumerian priest and Sumerian Lugal.

Walls cannot be permanently maintained with a temporary division of labor. At first free cultivators of the soil are invited to help build the walls, in exchange for stimulating visions as well as grain plundered by Pharaoh’s men from other cultivators. And the free peasants do build, apparently of their own accord, sublimely beautiful walls and pillars and shrines, with surfaces covered by sculptured and painted motifs rich with meaning to everyone on the Nile.

But a permanent division of labor is compulsory simply by being permanent, and compulsion is soon as common on the banks of the Nile as on those of the Tigris. What was done voluntarily by one generation is expected of the next, and is imposed. Egypt is no longer a place where people share ways; it is now a place where some impose laws on others. Ways were always living ways; laws are not ways of free people. Laws are Leviathan’s ways.

The tasks performed for Pharaoh are not freely chosen; they are imposed tasks, forced labor.

And like a living worm that reconstitutes itself from a mere segment, a complete Leviathan is excreted by the Pharaoh’s household. The builders and craftsmen are no longer invited. Pharaoh now leads armies northward to Sinai and the Levant, southward to Nubia. He returns with captives. He imposes heavy tribute on those not captured and leaves tribute collectors in distant garrisons. Like the Lugal, he now has scribes who keep track of the tribute, and he sends punitive expeditions.

Pharaoh too has an artificial memory now, a data bank as we will call it. His scribes have devised a script of their own as have scribes in distant Mohenjo Daro on the Indus. The characters and the materials are different, but the aim is the same. And Pharaoh’s scribes, like the Lugal’s, have devised an artificial year, a calendar, the earliest form of clock, to be able to foresee the days when the tribute crops turn ripe.

How sad! All this is being done to protect the old ways from the onslaught of a beast with “a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” All this is being done for the sake of the spirits of the valley, for the ancient community’s gods.

We must remember that enlightened progressives who would do all this for the sake of productive forces, for Science and Technology, for the Leviathan itself, have not been born yet. Perhaps the cities of Sumer, amazingly secular cities, already contain precursors of modern progressives, but even there the god in the Ziggurat comes first.

In Egypt there is not even a glimmer of progressive enlightenment, and there won’t be for at least a hundred generations. There the aim of all violence, of the capture of foreigners, of the rending of communities, is to preserve the old community, to defend Life against the great cadaver. All the killing of the raids, invasions and wars is sacrificial killing. It is done for the sake of Life, for the sake of the spirits of the animals, the plants, the river, the underworld and the sky.

But the world of the spirits shrinks, as it had in Sumer, and becomes confined to the Temple, which in Egypt is also the Pharaoh’s household.

Unfortunately for the Egyptians, Life cannot be preserved in a sealed jar. It atrophies, and at last it dies.

This sad, slow death can be seen in Egypt’s paintings, its sculptures, in its lore, in its shrines.

The earliest painters and sculptors clearly still breathe the air of the community Pharaoh’s household intends to preserve intact. These people are still in touch with women who leave their bodies and visit the underworld, with men who extend themselves toward the sky and fly, with people who actually speak to the Jackal and the Ibex, for the gods still mingle with the people. Pharaoh’s early craftsmen still know such seers, but not many, and the next generation knows even fewer.

There are still seers who have visions and revelations, but who knows what foreigners inspired them? Ultimately only Pharaoh’s visions can be trusted, and Pharaoh takes care to confine himself to the visions of the old ones.

The gods stop mingling with the people from the day when Pharaoh undertakes to defend and preserve the gods. And despite all Pharaoh’s efforts, the gods die. I suspect it is because of his efforts that they die. I don’t presume to know much about deities, but it seems they cannot support Leviathans any better than people support plagues; gods are among the cadaver’s first victims; the beast is deicidal.

The death of Egypt’s gods is recorded. After two or three generations of Pharaoh’s protection, the figures on the Temple walls and pillars no longer jump or fly; they no longer even breathe. They’re dead. They’re lifeless copies of the earlier, still living figures. The copyists are exact, we would say pedantic; they seem to think that faithful copying of the originals will bring life to the copies.

A similar death and decomposition must pale the songs and ceremonies as well. What was once joyful celebration, self-abandon, orgiastic communion with the beyond, shrinks to lifeless ritual, official ceremony led by the head of State and his officials. It all becomes theater, and it is all staged. It is no longer for sharing but for show. And it no longer enlarges the participant, who now becomes a mere spectator. He feels diminished, intimidated, awed by the power of Pharaoh’s household.

Our painting, music, dance, everything we call Art, will be heirs of the moribund spiritual. What we call Religion will be another dead heir, but at such a high stage of decomposition that its once-living source can no longer be divined.

* * *

While the ecstasy of the former living community languishes within the Temple and suffers a slow and painful death, the human beings outside the Temple’s precincts but inside the State’s lose their inner ecstasy. The spirit shrivels up inside them. They become nearly empty shells. We’ve seen that this happens even in Leviathans that set out, at least initially, to resist such a shrinkage.

As the generations pass, the individuals within the cadaver’s entrails, the Ensi as well as the zeks, the operators of the great worm’s segments, become increasingly like the springs and wheels they operate, so much so that sometime later they will appear as nothing but springs and wheels. They never become altogether reduced to automata; Hobbes and his successors will regret this.

People never become altogether empty shells. A glimmer of life remains in the faceless Ensis and zeks who seem more like springs and wheels than like human beings. They are potential human beings. They are, after all, the living beings responsible for the cadaver’s coming to life, they are the ones who reproduce, wean and move the Leviathan. Its life is but a borrowed life; it neither breathes nor breeds; it is not even a living parasite; it is an excretion and they are the ones who excrete it.

The compulsive and compulsory reproduction of the cadaver’s life is the subject of more than one essay. Why do people do it? This is the great mystery of civilized life.

It is not enough to say that people are constrained. The first captured zeks may do it only because they are physically constrained, but physical constraint no longer explains why the children of zeks stick to their levers. It’s not that constraint vanishes. It doesn’t. Labor is always forced labor. But something else happens, something that supplements the physical constraint.

At first the imposed task is taken on as a burden. The newly captured zek knows that he is not a ditch-repairman, he knows that he is a free Canaanite filled to the brim with ecstatic life, for he still feels the spirits of the Levantine mountains and forests throbbing inside him. The ditch-fixing is something he takes on to keep from being slaughtered; it is something he merely wears, like a heavy armor or an ugly mask. He knows he will throw off the armor as soon as the Ensi’s back is turned.

But the tragedy of it is that the longer he wears the armor, the less able he is to remove it. The armor sticks to his body. The mask becomes glued to his face. Attempts to remove the mask become increasingly painful, for the skin tends to come off with it. There’s still a human face below the mask, just as there’s still a potentially free body below the armor, but merely airing them takes almost superhuman effort.

And as if all this weren’t bad enough, something starts to happen to the individual’s inner life, his ecstasy. This starts to dry up. Just as the former community’s living spirits shriveled and died when they were confined to the Temple, so the individual’s spirit shrivels and dies inside the armor. His spirit can breathe in a closed jar no better than the god could. It suffocates. And as the Life inside him shrivels it leaves a growing vacuum. The yawning abyss is filled as quickly as it empties, but not by ecstasy, not by living spirits. The empty space is filled with springs and wheels, with dead things, with Leviathan’s substance.

* * *

The once-free human being increasingly becomes what Hobbes will think he is. The armor once worn on the outside wraps itself around the individual’s insides. The mask becomes the individual’s face. Or as we will say, the constraint is internalized. The ecstatic life, the freedom, shrinks to a mere potentiality. And potentiality, Sartre will point out, is nothing.

This reduction is most visible in the cities of Sumer, Leviathans which are amazingly modern in this respect as well. It becomes so visible that the Sumerians themselves start to notice it. It is not the increasingly stupefying ritualization of the Temple’s activities that bothers them, nor even the evermore noticeable inner emptiness of the Ensis and their families. All this seems to be accepted as a consequence that follows the need for a dependable supply of water and zeks. What bothers them is that descendants of the first Sumerians are themselves being reduced to zeks. The main instrument of this reduction is trade, or as we will call it, business. The Sumerian city, more than any other early Leviathan, is a heaven for businessmen.

A businessman is a human being whose living humanity has been thoroughly excavated. He is by definition a person who thrives in, and on, the Leviathan’s material entrails. People reduced to things are amongst the objects in the beast’s entrails and are obviously fair game to this hunter of profits. The businessman’s axiom, long before Adam Smith will publicize it, is: Every man for himself and the gods against all.

We’ve already seen how the Sumerian businessman reduced a community of foreigners to debtors, then defaulters, finally zeks. He now applies the same economic wisdom to foreigners inside Sumer, and at last he stops distinguishing between foreigners and Sumerians.

The reduction goes so far that by the time of the reign of Urukagina, even the Lugal is bothered by it. And this Lugal decides to do something about it, or at least publishes a tablet stating such an intention.

This Urukagina, who assumes the office of Lugal of Lagash at a time when his southern neighbors have already adorned the banks of the Nile with the first pyramids, may not be the first reformer. He’s the first documented reformer. He is the first of many who will put the wellbeing of the entire worm ahead of the wellbeing of a segment. He can see that the greedy profit-seekers, who are a mere section of the whole, have been distorting the cadavers coherence, its very ability to move, by eating up all its entrails. He proclaims that the vipers “shall not gather fruit in the poor man’s garden,” they shall not reduce Sumerians to zeks.

By placing the welfare of the entire worm above that of its swelled segment, this reforming Lugal, like many of his liberal successors, unleashes forces which overwhelm him. Relying on his memory of earlier stages of the worm’s existence, he presumes to know the best, or most just, arrangement of the worm’s segments.

The first Urlugal presumed to know the hierarchy of the gods and got away with his presumption because the gods were already weak and dying.

Urukagina doesn’t get away, because the segment he attacks, although by definition dead, is not weak. Retribution takes the form of an invasion from Umma. Urukagina is swept out of office by Lugalzaggizi of Umma. Urukagina is killed, so are his liberal Ensis and most of their zeks, and Lagash is razed to the ground.

The town of Umma is not known either for its power or its courage, and it doesn’t suddenly acquire these qualities. Its strongman Lugalzaggizi does not invade Lagash with Umma’s forces. The necessary forces as well as the technology needed for an invasion are in the segment Urukagina attacked. Lugalzaggizi is the instrument of the reformer’s downfall not because he champions the powerful, but also because he knows something Urukagina did not know.

Lugalzaggizi understands that the head of Leviathan is not where it was a year or a generation ago, nor where Urukagina thinks it ought to be. Just as the Lugal’s god is always the god in the phallus-shaped Ziggurat, so the Leviathan’s most powerful segment is always its head. Such is Leviathanic justice, and Lugalzaggizi, not Urukagina, is the true champion of the worm.

Lugalzaggizi’s championing of the powerful gives him allies in all of Sumer’s cities. Perhaps they are all beset by reformers nostalgic for an earlier Leviathanic order. Lugalzaggizi’s forces overrun all of them.

Before all the corpses are buried, Lugalzaggizi is Lugal of Umma, Lgash, Ur and Erech. His scribes describe him as the Man of Erech, the One and Only. The Tigris-Euphrates valley is occupied by a single Leviathan. Sumer is one for the first time. The worm has eaten all its predecessors. Lugalzaggizi’s scribes also describe him as the Lugal of Lugals, an expression which his Semitic-speaking subjects translate as King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

But the days of even this Almighty are numbered. Just as Sumerian speakers are no longer all priests and Ensis, Semitic speakers are no longer all zeks. By way of marriage, physical prowess or toadying, grandchildren of zeks are in the palace and in the Temple. Those in the Temple presume to give the names of long-forgotten Semitic deities to the Sumerian gods, give the vulgar name Ishtar to the daughter of the Moon. Sumerian-speaking priests no longer seem to care; many of them must know that the Sumerian gods are no longer anything more than names. Besides, many of the brothers of the Semitic-speaking priests are Ensis — so many, in fact, that it would be imprudent to insist that Ishtar’s real name is Inanna. Furthermore, in the outlying cities along the road from Sumer to the Levant and the Sinai, there are not only Semitic-speaking Ensis but even a few who presume to the office of Lugal. Such a one is Sargon the Akkadian.

Sargon is Sumerian in everything but his language. He apparently began his career as an Ensi to the Lugal of Ur, for whom he collected tribute from a Levantine province. When Ur fell to Lugalzaggizi, Sargon named his province Addad and assumed the post of Lugal. He has been observing Lugalzaggizi’s fat Leviathan, something we will call an Empire, for a whole generation. Suddenly he figures out something that even Lugalzaggizi doesn’t know; his scribes say Ishtar told it to him. Sargon knows that the phallus-head of the Leviathan is for all the powerful, not only Sumerian-speaking powerful.

All the powerful who have felt the least bit slighted find a champion in Sargon. Following Lugalzaggizi’s lead, he captures his mentor and sweeps through the cities that gave rise to the first Leviathans.

A single Leviathan, as long as the Nile and several times wider, now sprawls over the entire Fertile Crescent. Its entrails contain Mesopotamian Umma, Ur, Lagash and Erech as well as all the cities along the roads to the Levant.

Sargon, who started his career as tribute collector, knows as well as any Pharaoh or Lugal what the worm does best. It eats tribute, not only to feed the Lugal and his Ensis, who now have Semitic names, but above all to feed the increasingly violent gods in the Temple, gods as dead as the Leviathan itself, and just as hungry.

* * *

The feats and fates of Urukagina, Lugalzaggizi and Sargon are the subject of what we call “history.” Mary Jane Shoultz has demystified the word. When we speak of real History, of His-story, we mean His-story. It is an exclusive masculine affair. If women make their appearance in it, they do so wearing armor and wielding a phallus shape. Such women are masculine.

The whole affair revolves around phallus shapes: the spear, the arrow, the Zigguat, the Obelisk, the dagger, and of course later the bullet and the missile. All these objects are pointed, and they’re all made to penetrate and kill. The Mesopotamian Zigguat and the Egyptian Obelisk man-made mountains which point at the sky, forecast the day when males will tear the atmosphere’s ozone layer and propel themselves to airless spaces where once only gods flew.

Many, from Euripides to Bachofen, Shoultz, Grass and Turner, will ask why His-story is so exclusively masculine. They will remember the stud-like character of the human male in the state of nature and will wonder if the Leviathanic feats that constitute His-story are the male’s revenge.

With the rise of the Leviathans, women are debased, domesticated, abused and instrumentalized, and then scribes proceed to erase the memory that women were ever important. Diamond says that literacy, which Shoultz calls Maleliteracy, is ideally suited to erase the past from memory. In the old communities, what one elder forgot another was likely to remember, and traditions could hardly be lost unless the whole community met disaster.

But as soon as social memory loges on the scrolls and tablets of scribes, a single directive from Pharaoh or Lugal can erase a whole portion of the past, or even all of it. In Egypt many early cartouches, nameplates will be found with the barely-discernible name of a woman, the Matriach; on all of them, the woman’s name is erased by later scribes, who then place the name of a man in the cartouche.

The woman is the mother; she’s Earth; she gives birth to Life. But the man no longer feels inferior; he has immersed himself in the Leviathan, which is neuter and gives birth to no life, but which doesn’t need to give birth, since it is immortal. Empowered by Leviathanic armor, the males hit back.

Turner will cite one of the bedtime stories told by Sumerianized Akkadians who share power with Sargon. They still remember the primal mother, Tiamat, the first progenitor of life. But now they make her out to be as dead as Leviathan, saying that heaven and Earth herself are formed of her dismembered carcass. Marduk, Sargon’s god, is her dismemberer. In Turner’s words, Marduk “smashes her skull, splits her body like an oyster, and the obedient winds whisk her blood away.” Turner will point out that the violent Marduk will have a long line of Earth-hating successors; or contemporary Lugal Reagen will try to be the last.

His-story is a chronicle of the deeds of the men at the phallus-helm of Leviathan, and in its largest sense it is the “biography” of what Hobbes will call the Artificial Man. There are as many His-stories as there are Leviathans.

But His-story tends to become singular for the same reason that Sumer and now the whole Fertile Crescent becomes singular. The Leviathan is a cannibal. It eats its contemporaries as well as its predecessors. It loves a plurality of Leviathans as little as it loves Earth. Its enemy is everything outside of itself.

His-story is born with Ur, with the first Leviathan. Before or outside of the first Leviathan there is no His-story.

The free individuals of a community without a State did not have a His-story, by definition: they were not encompassed by the immortal carcass that is the subject of His-story. Such a community was a plurality of individuals, a gathering of freedoms. The individuals had biographies, and they were the ones who were interesting. But the community as such did not have a “biography,” a His-story.

Yet the Leviathan does have a biography, an artificial one. “The King is dead; Long Live the King!” Generations die, but Ur lives on. Within the Leviathan, an interesting biography is a privilege conferred on very few or on only one; the rest have dull biographies, as similar to each other as the Egyptian copies of once beautiful originals. What is interesting now is the Leviathan’s story, at least to His scribes and His-storians.

To others, as Macbeth will know, the Leviathan’s story, like its ruler’s, is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The ruler is killed by an invader or a usurper and his great deeds die with him. The immortal worm’s story ends when it is swallowed by another immortal. The story of the swallowings is the subject of World His-story, which by its very name already prefigures a single Leviathan which holds all Earth in its Entrails.

* * *

Withdrawals of human captives from the entrails of the