Marshall Sahlins, New Science of the Enchanted
His final word, a defence of Jacobsen’s Cosmic State, a swipe at social science..
Marshall Sahlins wrote:
Acknowledgments
… You could justifiably think of the book as the owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk. It is also something of my swan song. At least that’s two birds with one stone.
February 14, 2021
[The following note is included in the Acknowledgments]
Peter Sahlins, September 15, 2021: Marshall Sahlins died on April 5, 2021, at his home in Chicago before completing his acknowledgments. He had finished most of the book …)
Introduction
[definition of ‘metahumans’]
… Until they are transformed by the colonial transmissions of the axial ideologies, Christianity notably, peoples (that is, most of humanity) are surrounded by a host of spiritual beings—gods, ancestors, the indwelling souls of plants and animals, and others. These lesser and greater gods effectively create human culture; they are immanent in human existence, and for better or worse determined human fate, even unto life and death. Although generally called “spirits,” these beings themselves have the essential attributes of persons, a core of the same mental, temperamental, and volitional capacities. Accordingly, they are often designated in these pages as “metapersons” or “metahumans”, and when alternatively referred to as “spirits”, it is always explicitly or implicitly under quotation marks, given their quality as nonhuman persons.
Similarly the term “religion” is inappropriate where these metahuman beings and forces are intrinsic in and a precondition of all human activity, not a transcendent afterthought.
By this same quality, they interact with human persons to form one big society of cosmic dimensions—of which humans are a small and dependent part.
This dependent position in a universe of more powerful metahuman beings has been the condition of humanity for the greater part of its history and the majority of its societies. All the world before and around the axial civilizations was a zone of immanence. Here the myriad metahuman powers were not only present in people’s experience, they were the decisive agents of human weal and woe—the sources of their success, or lack thereof, in all variety of endeavors from agriculture and hunting, to sexual reproduction and political ambition.
Chapter 4
The Cosmic Polity
Hierarchy in Cosmology, Equality in Society
… [The] sense of “religion” as an imaginary epiphenomenon of real sociopolitical relations, mirroring or inverting them in ways that functionally sustain them, is our native common average normal social science, including virtually every variety thereof from classical Marxism to neoliberal economism, by way of garden varieties of anthropology, history, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. …
Anthropology itself has an interesting history with this issue, marked early on by the Scottish folklorist Andrew Lang’s objection to E. B. Tylor’s reflectionist theory of religion as society transported into the clouds. Tylor, the pioneer British evolutionary anthropologist, writes:
Among nation after nation, it is still clear how, man being the type of deity, human society and government became the model on which divine society and government were shaped. As chiefs and kings are among men, so are the great gods among the lesser spirits With little exception, wherever a savage or barbaric system of religion is thoroughly described, great gods make their appearance in the spiritual world as distinctly as chiefs in the human world. (Tylor 1871)
“Very good,” comments Lang, but “whence comes the great God among tribes which have neither chief nor king, nor any distinctions of rank, as among Fuegians, Bushmen, and Australians? … This theory … will not work where people have a great God but no king or chief; nor where they have a king but no Zeus or other supreme King- god, as among the Aztecs” (Lang 1898). Lang is on good ethnographic ground … By contrast, the radical separation of the “spiritual world” from the “human world,” of “divine society” from “human society,” or the “religious” from the “secular” in the various celestialization-of-society theories reveals their own cultural ground in a society where God has gone away. …
Yet it was wrong to say that there is no necessary relation between the structure of human society and the morphology and potency of the encompassing cosmic polity. As a general rule, the closer the human society comes to a “zero degree of social integration,” lacking chieftainship, stable settlements, corporate descent groups, and so on, the greater the disproportion between the organization and powers of human and metahumans. Hunters-and-gatherers as a general rule are far outnumbered by a multitude of spirits, which for their part are more or less systematically ordered in a hierarchy dominated by inclusive spirits on the order of gods. …
… Note that where the authority of chiefs and kings significantly affected the behavior of the population at large, it also then reached to the order of the cosmos, since it was fundamentally the other way around. The power that men had learned to exercise over their fellows was derived from and sanctioned by gods of the kind that already ruled over peoples who themselves had no rulers.
Anu, the Sky, supreme god of Sumerian and Akkadian civilizations of the third millennium BC in Mesopotamia, was the prototype of all fathers and “as the ‘pristine king and ruler,’ he was the prototype of all rulers” (Jacobsen [1946] 1977 [in Frankfort, link to SSF exhibit]).
His were the insignia in which the essence of royalty was embodied—the scepter, headband, shepherd’s staff, and crown—and from him the king acquired them. These insignia antedated the kingship; they were in heaven even before Anu. “And when the king commands and the command is unquestionably and immediately obeyed, when it ‘comes true’, it is again the essence of Anu which manifests itself It is Anu’s power that makes it immediately efficacious” [Jacobsen ibid.]. What men do, the gods are doing, even (or especially) when it is the king.
Durkheim was certainly right about this: power is a religious idea. But the point here is anti-Durkheimian … I mean so-called tribes without rulers or egalitarian societies. For all of them, it would be futile to claim a correspondence between morphology and cosmology.
There are no egalitarian societies. Yet as ruled by cosmic authorities, these societies have a deep experience of subjection to persons essentially like themselves. “We are surrounded by enemies,” the Chukchee shaman told the revolutionary Russian writer and anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras in the early twentieth century. “‘Spirits’ always walk about invisibly with gaping mouths. We are always cringing, and distributing gifts on all sides, asking protection of one, giving ransom to another, and unable to obtain anything whatsoever gratuitously”. Greed and exploitation may also be religious in origin. The spirits are generally more venal as well as more powerful than the people they sustain—for a price in deference if not also in substance.
But to the main point: even societies approaching a zero degree of integration themselves are embedded in a hierarchically organized, cosmic polity, in which they occupy a dependent, solicitous, deferential, and vulnerable position.
We need something like a Copernican revolution within anthropological perspective: from human society as the center of a universe upon which it projects its own forms—that is, the received transcendentalist wisdom—to the immanentist condition: the ethnographic realities of people’s dependence on encompassing life-giving and death-dealing powers, essentially persons like themselves, who rule earthly existence.
Something like the state, the cosmic state, is the general condition of humankind—even in the state of nature.
The Cosmic State
[In Sumerian cities and their Akkadian successors of the third millennium BCE], the Mesopotamian universe did not, like ours, show a fundamental bipartition into animate and inanimate, living and dead matter. Nor had it different levels of reality… In the Mesopotamian universe, therefore, everything, whether living being, thing, abstract concept—every stone, every tree, every notion—had a will and character of its own. World order, the regularity and system observable in the universe could accordingly be conceived of in only one fashion, as an order of wills. The universe as an organized whole was a society, a state. (Jacobsen [1946] 1977 [in Frankfort, link to SSF exhibit])
Thus the Danish historian Thorkild Jacobsen in 1946 saw the lineaments of a state in the cosmology of Mesopotamian civilizations of the third millennium BCE. He describes the human society as part of a larger, universal society, and the larger society as a political state. The description poses the question: Is there anything in this cosmology, any kind of metahuman being or spiritual hierarchy, we haven’t already seen the planet around, even among peoples without rulers and no such claim to the pretentious status of “civilization”? To compare great things with small ones: for all the differences in scale and cult, the Sumerian cosmology is not that much different in structure than the universe of Central Inuit or New Guinea Highland peoples. True that Sumerians had notably great gods, An, Enlil, and others, while notably for Central Inuit almost everything has its inua, its inner “person”. For their part, Central Inuit are ruled by powerful high gods, Sedna, Sila, and Moon, while Sumerians had their share of animism. Both have extensive and complex “rules of life” sanctioned by the gods and enforced by lesser metahuman powers. If Sumerians were encompassed in a cosmic state, so are Iglulik people. Given that cultural range, it seems safe to say that, taken in its cosmic totality, the state is a universal human institution.
What follows here is a more or less detailed description of the comparables in the Inuit and Sumerian cosmologies, with added notes from New Guinea and elsewhere.
[MGH: omitted here. Instead we skip to general or comparative points]
… Writing of Nunamiut of Northern Alaska, anthropologist Nicholas Gubser (1965) puts the matter of inua in a way that makes interesting reading in comparison with Sumerian concepts of the nature of divinity, to be presented shortly:
The Nunamiut regard “most, or possibly all, animate objects (people, mammals, birds, fish, and insects) and most inanimate objects (lakes, mountains, the moon, directions of wind, and the atmosphere as a whole)” each to have an inua “Without a spirit [inua], an object might still occupy space and have weight, but it would have no meaning, it would have no real existence. When an object is invested with an inua, it is a part of nature of which we are aware.” [Merkur 1991 quoting Gubser 1965]
Otherwise said, when an object or phenomenon makes a meaningful difference in the cultural scheme, such that we become aware of it, it has an inua. In the event, the physicality of the phenomenon—the body in the case of objects or the sensibility in case of thunder or winds—is inseparable from its interior spirit. The physicality of the thing is not its spirituality, but the two are one. (Which is also to say it is not a “thing.”) Accordingly, for Central Inuit again, “Divinity is one;” or as Boas put it, everything from stones to the moon has its inua ([1908] 1974). Note the Moon man is a god; Sila, the atmosphere, is commonly spoken of as “Sila Inua”; likewise, the sea goddess: “The inuat [pl] of the sea, the moon and the air could be considered the spiritual owners of their respective territories” (Oosten 1976). Considering, then, Sedna’s sometimes control over these divine and lesser inua, as well as demons and ghosts, in enforcing the prescribed rules of human life with penalties ranging from accident and illness to starvation and death, everything happens as if Inuit people were the subjects of a polity of cosmic dimensions—indeed, a cosmic state.
Impressed by the ubiquity of inua and the rule of the numerous demons by a single master, the early Danish geologist and explorer Henry Rink in 1875 depicted the universe of West Greenland Inuit as a “general government of the world”:
Inasmuch as we are allowed to consider almost every spot or supposed object a special dominion with its special inua ruling within certain limits, we might also be led to imagine several of those dominions as united, and made subordinate to one common ruler, by which means we would have a general government of the world under one supreme head ready organised Still, on looking at the whole religious views of the natives, they do seem to presuppose a single power by which the world is ruled. (Rink 1875)
“Government” would seem exaggerated, but the observation of a unitary power is accurate: a metaperson host under a triad of supreme authorities enforcing complex “rules of life” with rewards and punishments ranging from prosperity to death. Thomas Hobbes famously speaks of the state of nature as all that time “men live[d] without a common Power to keep them all in awe” ([1651] 1991); Knud Rasmussen reports the Netsilik people had more than enough such awesome power: “Life on earth is a constant alternation between evil and good, between mankind and the universe Mankind is held in awe through its fear of hunger and sickness” (1931). “We do not believe, we fear”, Aua the Iglulik shaman said to Rasmussen (1929), a statement often repeated in anthropology circles:
We fear the weather spirit of earth, that we must fight against to wrest our food from land and sea. We fear Sila. We fear dearth and hunger in the cold snow huts. We fear Takánakapsâluk [Sedna], the great woman down at the bottom of the sea, that rules over all the beasts of the sea. We fear the sickness that we meet with daily all around us … We fear the souls of dead human beings and of the animals we have killed.
… As I say, to juxtapose Inuit to Sumerians of the third millennium BCE and their Akkadian successors is to compare small things with great ones. Sedna is no Enlil; the angakok’s hut is no priestly temple; no Inuit god is One over as Many manifestations or in-personations as the family of An/Anu. Yet in the principles as well as the varieties of divinity, the two immanentist systems are fundamentally alike, beginning with the Vichian fact that “what men do, the gods are doing.” As the decisive agents of human achievements, the cosmic manifold of metahuman powers amounts to an all-around cultural infrastructure:
[E]verything seems to indicate that the ancient Mesopotamians viewed the functioning of the universe—its never-ending routines as well as more or less abrupt turning points, the functioning of nature as well as that of the society of human beings and of each individual—as only the continuation of creation. Once the world appeared and began to exist, everything that occurred in it, like the origin itself, was wholly due to the gods’ intervention alone, and it was the only determining cause. (Bottéro 2001)
The point is that culture itself is a divine creation … [in Mesopotamia] The great god Enki fashioned the human order, from the institution of kingship to the system of irrigation ditches and dikes on down to the standard shape of brick molds …
… For each of these things or activities, Enki placed a lesser god “in charge”; hence a great panoply of gods (dingir) was engaged in the great panoply of human social practices—here again, an all-around cultural praxis. An observation of Jacobsen’s [same source as previous citations] on temple workers indicates what being “in charge” entailed:
Since man, as the Sumerians saw him, was weak and could achieve no success in anything without divine assistance, it was fortunate that all these human workers in and outside the temple could invigorate themselves with divine power. Each group of human toilers had human overseers; but above these there were divine officials to direct the work and infuse success into human efforts.
Another Vichian principle thus follows, the rule of verum ipsum factum: since human cultural practices were made by the gods, they alone could know them; and most particularly, they knew the hidden and recondite forces that made the grain grow when the farmer planted it, the spear fly true when the warrior wielded it, or the reed flute sound when the musician played it.
All this is to say that the gods are immanent in human affairs, whether directly, by their manifest or distributed persons, or by delegation to subordinate gods—the lesser gods “in charge,” the demons, ghosts, or indwelling persons of things. Contrasting Mesopotamian immanentism with biblical transcendentalism, students of the Ancients such as Henri and H. A. Frankfort make the point in terms particularly relevant here. The Frankforts open their conclusion to the important work, The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Frankfort et al. [1946] 1977) [link to SSF exhibit] with a striking critique of biblical discourse on God’s work as totally inappropriate to ancient Near Eastern conceptions—blasphemy, even:
When we read in Psalm 19 that “the heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handiwork”, we hear a voice which mocks the beliefs of Egyptians and Babylonians. The heavens, which were to the psalmist but a witness of God’s greatness, were to the Mesopotamians the very majesty of godhead, the highest ruler, Anu … In Egypt and Mesopotamia, the divine was comprehended as immanent: the gods were in nature … The God of the psalmists and the prophets … transcended nature … The mainspring of the acts, thoughts, and feelings of early [Near Eastern] man was the conviction that the divine was immanent in nature.
Fair enough, except that as American Assyriologist Francesca Rochberg (2016) [link to SSF exhibit] documents at length, ancient Mesopotamia was “before nature”, a functioning and intelligible ontological order that existed before the Greeks’ physis and its subsequent elaborations.
Composed essentially of divine subjects, of metapersons, the cosmos for Mesopotamians was not a “natural” realm of impersonal “objects,” operating by their own laws—any more than it thus implied a transcendent category of the “supernatural”.
Because of the absence of nature as a meaningful category in the cuneiform world, the problem of “apparently irrational beliefs”, usually associated with explanation by recourse to supernatural agency, must be addressed differently. Indeed, to invoke supernatural agency presupposes a conception of the order of nature, and to base causation upon a supposed category of the supernatural distorts the evidence of cuneiform magical texts that do not operate on the basis of such ideas. (Rochberg 2016).
Hence the gods were not “in nature”, as the Frankforts put it. Nor should we accept the commonplace … alternatives, such as the gods “are nature”, “all of nature is divine”, or the world is populated by “nature spirits.” In the anthropology of most of humanity, “nature” is not natural. …
… It seems to be an academic sport among students of ancient Mesopotamia … to count the number of their “gods,” although since the number of spirits is countless, and could run into the many thousands and include such “gods” as rivers, chariots, parts of temples, demons, and date palms, the effort is fruitless. Especially since all these were being equally labeled “gods” …typically because they explicitly carried the Sumerian or Akkadian determinative for “Heaven” prefixed to their name; or because they demonstrated “godlike behavior” …
Why do modern scholars not speak of a generic term for “spirit” or “supernatural being” in the manner of the good, out-of-date anthropology of Raymond Firth? … The Sumerian dingir likewise covers a range of differentiated forms … including the four or seven high gods that “determine the fates”; the fifty great gods of a so-called divine assembly (perhaps many of whom rule kinds of things or activities); a great host of monsters, demons, and ghosts; the indwelling spirits of phenomena such as mountains, rivers, and ploughs; and individuals’ kindred spirits and guardian spirits. In the case notably of divine phenomena … if all spirits come under the same designation (dingir, “god”), it is not only because their potencies are metahuman, but they all have the same composition. Basically, the Mesopotamian cosmos is a hierarchical assemblage of similar forms; as for Inuit, it is inua all the way down.
Otherwise said, Divinity is one. In his well-regarded text on Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (2001a), Jean Bottéro moves … to the same conclusion about the universal and animistic sense of the dingir concept—especially for Sumerians. … Hence the somewhat awkward description of the “doubling” of the Sumerian universe by “supernatural personalities” on the human model, while at the same time denying that there could be any “confusion” between the objective phenomenon and the “god” who is nonetheless identified with it as its motivating force. “What is at first surprising”, Bottéro writes, “is the strange collection of beings bearing this [Heaven’s] sign who made up the pantheon” (2001). … Before writing and history, Bottéro explains, the “resolutely polytheistic and anthropomorphist” Mesopotamians, “in order to dispel the innumerable secrets behind things”, conceived of them as imaginary figures like themselves, though far more potent, each such figure responsible for certain natural phenomena like its driving force—all this based by Bottéro on the … theory of finding god (“the supernatural”) when the human enterprise is uncertain (2001).
In other words, Bottéro writes, “the ancient Mesopotamians doubled their universe with a parallel universe of supernatural personalities” (ibid.). Yet as he states in another work:
“Although a naive view could easily identify the gods with the objects of their authority and care, there was not the slightest confusion between them. The gods were concealed within them, rather like the motor inside the machine it sets in motion; each area was merely the domain they gave life to, ‘created’ and organised by them” (2001b).
… the better way to express this would be that the gods are distributed persons, such that the particular beings they gave birth to are indeed forms of them, hence treated as their persons, whatever else these things are in their individual selves. As a distributed person, the god is the class of which particular beings are instances, that is, forms or bodies of the god …
… Jacobsen ([1946] 1977) has a useful summary of the principle entailed in this concept of the god as a singular multiplicity, the one in and as the many … As in cultures of immanence the world over … practiced a form of philosophical realism, which identifies the class being as an encompassing individual. Any phenomenon that the Mesopotamian met was alive, Jacobsen notes, endowed with a personality and a will, a distinctive self-animated self. … “And as one such ‘self ’ could permeate many individual phenomena, so it might also permeate other selves and thereby give to them its specific character to add to the qualities which they had in their own right” (ibid.). …
Of course, [Inuit gods] are hardly comparable to the great Sumerian gods, except that they are essentially the same in nature … the immortal Inuit gods are original sovereigns of the universe, not merely as the rulers of their extensive worldly realms, but inhabiting and permeating them as the motivating being of them … Still, the differences are complicated by what often seem to be conflicting and overlapping perspectives in modern scholarly descriptions of the Mesopotamian high gods.
Indeed, the gods historically existed in two versions: an original Sumerian and enduring Mesopotamian system of cosmic figures, genealogically and hierarchically organized, who created, divided, and ordered the universe, notably including human society and culture; and a decentralized system involving the same high gods and others as patrons of city-states, who in that partisan capacity would usurp the position of supreme deity, even as they redundantly take on the cosmic functions of the other gods, sometimes even their body-parts, thus making a local version of the overall pantheon. It is clearly the universal Sumerian-cum- Mesopotamian cosmology that Sumerologist Samuel Noah Kramer has in mind when he speaks of a fourfold universe of heaven and earth, sea and atmosphere, each realm created by a specific deity who likewise created and controlled all the entities existing therein (1963).
Hence the ideal-typical description … of the great gods as a cosmic family … It is particularly in this pan-Mesopotamian cosmic mode that the great gods are essentially like …many others … Their cosmic powers are the same …
Consider, then, this enlightening discussion of Anu, Enlil, and Ea (Akkadian forms of the Sumerian An, Enlil, and Enki) by Francesca Rochberg [link to SSF exhibit] …
The gods, being conceived of and imagined, not observed, may be differentiated from natural (perceptual) phenomena, yet the gods seem to have been viewed as immanent and active in the world of phenomena … the character of the principal Sumerian deities, An, Enlil, and Enki, is shown as that of forces within or over various parts the world, such as the sky, the winds, the foothills, and the sweet waters. Celestial gods, such as Nanna, Utu, and Inana, similarly are made manifest in the luminaries and as the personalized powers in those natural phenomena. (2009)
… But insofar as various gods were often in lethal competition with each other, that is in the form of the city-states of which they were the rulers, the traditional Mesopotamian pantheon stood to be revised in their favor. The city’s own god could take precedence over An or Enlil as supreme and universal ruler. Indeed, various temples, kinship groups, and even individuals, in the supplications to their tutelary deities, might well exalt them over all others.
Bottéro speaks of “henotheism”, under which description he offers many examples of lesser gods usurping the titles of the ancient cosmic hegemons (2001) … presumably the favored god became something of an all-god, taking on the various functions of the great ones she or he had displaced; “it seems that in Mesopotamia … a profound tendency toward religiosity pushed the faithful in a certain way to encapsulate all sacred potential into the particular divine personality whom they were addressing at a given moment” (41–42).
All these superlative epithets and generalized powers, moreover, were not only applied interchangeably among the greatest divinities… they were accorded to many lesser popular gods too … [the Mesopotamians] required the whole menu of divine functions—each of them tended to usurp the provinces of others, perhaps under similar gods differently named, perhaps under a god of many functional parts, and notably by subsuming the other gods under its own.
… on an exponentially lesser scale, something similar is afoot among Inuit groups … judging from the shifts in dominance among Sedna, Sila, and Moon, the latter taking precedence in Alaska, Sila in Greenland.
… in Mesopotamia, for all the partisan claims of this or that god to cosmocratic supremacy, in the traditional all-Sumerian/Akkadian pantheon, An/Anu was father to them all. All the gods are anuna, “[off- spring] of An”, and in that respect, inferior to and dependent on the heavenly source of divine power. The source: once again, divinity is unity, dingir/ilu, such are the potencies of lesser gods referred from An—who is thus ultimately responsible for what happens in the human world, however remote in space, unregarded in cult, or upstaged by Enlil. “All things and forces in the polity that is the universe conform to An’s will” (Jacobsen 1976).
As noted before, this cosmic polity would have something of the following hierarchical order. Under An are the other six supreme powers, and below them the “fifty great gods” … “charged” with specific things or functions. Then the plenitude of demons, monsters, or evil spirits …
… We also know that these spirits were directly under orders of greater gods, who delegated them to inflict illness and other travails on humans who defied them, forbearing to punish such transgressions themselves, though they were ever implored to call off the evil ones. For the Mesopotamians knew what was, in effect, an extensive taboo system, whose rules, decreed by the gods and enforced by demons, included prescriptions apparently as arbitrary as any of the Inuit gods required.
[In] the catalog of the divinely inspired Mesopotamian “rules of life” … certain proscriptions are designated “taboo”, itself only one of a number of distinct technical terms referring to the act and its violation: “sin” “crime” “blasphemy” “error” etc.) As Jean Bottéro informs us: “Sin, the disobedience of divine will, of which we have lists of dozens of examples in all realms of behavior, was at the very center of the religious consciousness of the Mesopotamians beginning at the latest at the turn of the third millennium, and remained until the very end” (2001). …
… a good number of the injunctions …
apparently have nothing to do with religious, social or personal duties; they seem to be customs derived from fairly irrational representations, probably dating from time immemorial and no clearer to the ancient Mesopotamians than to us when, for example, we bless someone who has just sneezed. (Bottéro 2001)
“The gods governed all people”, Bottéro observes:
It followed that all the prescriptions that ruled human existence—as much on the strictly religious level as on the political, administrative, and “moral” ones, including those folkloric constraints inherited from a distant, forgotten past and those obscure routines that everyone respects without knowing why—were believed to emanate from the “governmental” will of the gods. (2001)
[MGH: The following is the crux of Sahlins’s argument, an endorsement of Jacobsen.]
Jacobsen [endorses] a more arresting theory of the human political relation to the gods—the one that’s in this book:
Man—in the person of the leader of the community—represents the god, literally re-presents him, for by acting the god, by presenting his external form, he becomes the god, the form fills with its content, and as the god he performs the acts that fulfill the divine will with all its beneficent results for the community. (1976)
… For Bottéro (2001), “the most astounding feature of the Shurpu catalogue” [a late second-millennium Akkadian exorcist text featuring a list of “sins”] is that these heterogeneous injunctions, from the political and moral to the seemingly irrational, are intermingled willy-nilly as having the same force and scope, any and all of them visiting illness or other evils on those who transgressed them:
Viewed from this aspect, these rules were all equally important, because it was not a matter of the gravity of their repercussions on social life, but their intrinsic dignity and their nature as expressions of divine will. Those who, by violating them, rebelled against the gods, resisted or neglected them and, in short, scorned them, deserved to be punished by those same gods. (251)
… where the Inuit relies upon the shaman (angakok) to drive off the demons or calls upon gods to do so, the ancient Mesopotamians had their exorcists whose methods for doing the like were not all that different. …
Perhaps unlike the Inuit angakok who didn’t “believe” but “feared” the spirits’ malevolence, the Sumerians did both. Or so I judge from modern scholars’ frequent invocation of the terrors. Leonard Woolley, for example: “The fact is that throughout the religion of the Sumerians is not one of love but of fear, fear whose limits are confined to this present life, fear of Beings all-powerful, capricious, unmoral. Somehow or other virtue does not appeal to the gods” (1965). …
… What can be generalized from these observations is the often capricious and amoral character of divine action, and, as noted earlier, the people’s ambivalence to gods who are the root of all evil as well as the source of their well-being.
There were not only gods, demons, and taboos in old Mesopotamia, but inua everywhere, indwelling persons, a classic animism that not only constituted a subjectivized physical world but involved many things that people ostensibly made. …
… If the animistic beings evoke scholarly surprise at the everyday things that are deemed “gods,” the Mesopotamian people’s so-called personal gods might be hard-to-believe for the opposite reason: namely, that they are characteristically significant gods, like Nidaba, or even supreme gods, like Enki. People’s familiar helping spirits are among the most powerful beings in the cosmos—even as, however, they are related to one in the most intimate way, as “father” and “mother”. …
Jacobsen is again the key source on this, and here is the key passage:
A common way of referring to the personal god is as “the god who ‘created’ or ‘engendered me’ or ‘the divine mother who gave birth to me.’” To see more precisely what these terms imply we must realize that the personal god dwelt in the man’s body. If his god “removed himself from his body,” the body was open for evil demons of disease to take over and “possess” the man. (1976)
Actually, Jacobsen writes of two gods, a male god received from the human father’s side, and a goddess from the mother.
We are already familiar with the kind of guardian spirit-powers they afforded Mesopotamian persons, as they are quite like their counterparts in other societies mentioned here, including the name souls of Inuit. Generally speaking, the god is responsible for the person’s fortunes, his or her achievements in life, “so much so that one might almost say that the god was a personification of the power for personal success in that individual” (Jacobsen 1976). As implied by the threat of demons, also stressed was the role of the father-god as protector of the person: a lot of the inscriptions concerning invocations of the god are about relieving the person from attacks coming from malevolent outside powers.
Another central intervention of the personal gods offers an irresistible clue to the kinship system of the ancient Mesopotamians. Just as the god and goddess acquired from one’s human parents engendered the person and then came to dwell in him or her, those same personal gods are “present and active in the most decisive and necessary achievement of fulfillment for the ancient Mesopotamian, that of engendering a son” (Jacobsen 1976). That is to say, a son will have the same parental god as his human father and the same goddess as his mother; but so would his son, and all the male descendants thereafter. This Jacobsen was able to confirm from dynastic genealogies: “father and son invariably had the same personal god and goddess. The god passed therefore from the body of the father into the body of the son as generation followed generation” (ibid.). Since succession is evidently patrilineal, what is here signified is a system of patrilineal lineages—or more generally, patrilineal descent groups—whose men prescriptively marry women from the same outside group, thus complementing their own divine father with the same goddess-mother bestowed by their matrilateral kin.
… So I risk: the ancient Mesopotamians were organized in ranked patrilineal groups, related to and hierarchically differentiated from each other by the normative practice of matrilateral cross- cousin marriage. …
Yet at the same time the divine polity is engaged in the kinship system of a hierarchical human society, the gods in their intimate relations to individuals are the principals of a guardian spirit complex hardly distinguishable, structurally, from some native North American hunters: an external spirit-power, complementary to the ancestral human soul, that differentially governs an individual’s life chances, as in the name-soul guardians of Central Inuit.
… Although the Inuit don’t have lineages like the Mesopotamians, they do live under organizations of that description prefigured in their cosmology. Indeed, one acquires the powers of the generations of the same name … [diagrams omitted here]
… What to make of these similarities? Leaving aside the radical differences in organization and cult, at the bare bones, the fundamental structure of the ancient Mesopotamian pantheon, including the relationships among the powers [are almost the same as] the Inuit. Both live under a hierarchical regime of high gods and their associated divine helpers, species masters, demons, ghosts, a broad animism of the phenomenal world, kindred spirits, and personal guardian spirits. Also the bare bones of the Mesopotamian universe is constituted by the same principles of cosmic order as the Inuit.
In both societies, the metahuman hosts are immanent in human affairs; the gods are doing what the people do. As the agents of human success and failure, life and death, the spirits “determine the fates”. Both peoples also know the principle of the unity of divinity, according to which the lesser spirits acted by the referred power of the original supreme gods, who thus governed the universe by their will if not by their own act.
In both cosmologies the hierarchical order is magnified and centralized by distributed personhood, the greater spirit as a singular plurality, manifest in the encompassed others of the class, in arrangements ranging from species masters to the god in and of multitudinous phenomena. The entire cosmos is a universe of interacting subjects, notably the indwelling persons of sensible things.
[more of the crux]
For all its identification with the origins of civilization, the Mesopotamian cosmology appears not to be very different from a range of immanentist cultures from great civilizations to modest hunter-gatherers.
… What to make of these striking parallels, and why, of all peoples, choose the Central Inuit for comparison to ancient Near East civilizations? It is not simply to shock the professors of conventional wisdom by the similarities in the cosmologies of peoples as radically different culturally, and especially politically, as Inuit hunters and the denizens of Sumerian city-states and Akkadian empires. It is also a conditional something else. I chose Central Inuit to make the case that, given their isolation, the cosmological correspondences cannot be written off as the influence of Christian missionaries or the pantheon of any high civilization. Too often, the received anthropological and historical wisdom writes off the presence of supreme gods in societies such as Inuit hunters as acculturation effects. Totally improbable, according to received theory, that people who would not brook others telling them what to do could be subalterns in a cosmic state ruled by gods with the power to run their lives.
Doesn’t make sense. Superstructure is totally out of joint with infrastructure.
Gods are supposed to be the celestial imitation of kingship; the cosmology in general is supposed to be ordered on the model of human society.
Among scholars of Mesopotamian antiquity, this is still the fair common average theoretical position: An, Enlil, & Co. are supernaturally hyped metaphors of Sumerian kingship, if they were not also given a boost into universal sovereignty as ideal projections of the empire of Sargon of Akkad. Like expert Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer, who … claims that there had begun also “man’s first cosmology”, in which, “on analogy with the political organization of the human state, it was natural to assume that at the head of the pantheon was a deity recognized by all the others as their king and ruler” (Kramer 1963). Or:
Before the rise of empire, the existence of autonomous city-states engendered special gods who were venerated locally as the protectors of their hometowns; whereas, with the rise of empire, certain local gods assumed a nationwide importance they had not previously enjoyed. (Bertman 2003, 115)
Or, in the third millennium, “the ruler metaphor was extended to the gods. Nature gods were transformed into city gods or heads of state” (Nemet-Nejat 1998). In the same spirit,
[German Assyriologist] W. von Soden’s authoritative introduction to ancient Mesopotamia . . . bases its account of Mesopotamian religion on the premise that “the terrestrial world was carried over to the primarily heavenly world of the gods”. [French historian] G. Roux’s handbook, Ancient Iraq (1966), still a staple of introductory courses, states simply that in early Mesopotamia, “divine society was con- ceived as a replica of human society.” (Porter 2009)
Bottéro is a big fan of this theological reflection theory, especially in connection with the supposed transition from a fourth millennium religion of disparate “nature spirits” to an ordered pantheon calqued on the Sumerian polity of the third millennium: “The innumerable gods and their initially disorganized world were transformed into a supernatural reflection of earthly political authority. Like that authority, the world of the gods had its supreme representative, a king and his ancestors” (2001).
In sum, here are so many transcendentalist moves on Mesopotamian culture, a veritable cosmic coup d’état, stripping the gods of their power by impoverishing them to the status of Idea. Thus removed from society, the quondam rulers of all become the imaginary servants of the real, human sovereigns.
Enlightened social science sucks the substance out of divinity, turning the gods literally into nonentities, phantom creatures of Thought, in the service of the human powers that be to validate their legitimacy and consecrate their authority. The masters of the universe are reduced to political servitude.
For Sumerians, as noted, it was quite the other way around. They and their successors were organized and acted on the axiom that kingship was created by the gods, and that the gods were doing what the king did. The initial caution in selecting such a remote group for comparison as Inuit, for fear of acculturation effects from some “high civilization,” was misplaced. Everything indicates that the cultural influences were running in the opposite direction: not that the “tribals” got their gods from ancient “high civilizations”, but that the civilizations inherited theirs from the tribes. A cosmic polity governed by supreme gods is commonplace in immanentist cultures, perhaps everywhere among nonliterate, non-state hunters, herders, and slash-and-burn gardeners. Given also the certain supposition that the great civilizations of the Near East, India, China, and the Americas developed out of some such peoples, it follows that their hierarchical cosmologies were already in place from their beginnings. It also follows that—as the ancient Mesopotamians said—kingship came from heaven to earth, not the gods from earth to heaven. The human polity appropriated the cosmic polity. [END]
Afterword
… Without ambitions to rule others, people submit to a world of powers that are acting among them, immanently and at all times, to determine their fate. Hence, it would be a mistake to say that the people “invented” the “spirits”, that they created the gods in their own image, or accord them some such ultimate power over the Powers. People did not create the gods out of thin air; they only hypostatized the forces that were already conditions of their existence. I repeat: humans did not imagine the gods, they only objectified, or more precisely, subjectivized, the extra-human forces by which they themselves lived and died. The forces were already there. They were not imagined. They were real, empirical, life-giving and death-dealing forces.
People only gave them substantive qualities that made them negotiable, or at least intelligible—consciousness, understanding, volition, and intention. They hypostatized these existential forces as persons, hidden souls with whom their own hidden powers or souls might communicate, but who, as the instantiation of these forces, were metapersons.
For the greater part of human history and the greater number of societies, human existence, as culturally constituted, has been heteronomous, subject to the governance of metaperson sources of life and livelihood. People are lesser, dependent beings of an enchanted universe. Accordingly, nothing is undertaken without enchantments, the initial invocations of the spirits who potentiate the human social action. These metahuman powers are the decisive agents of an all-around infrastructure of an all-around cultural praxis. Structurally compounded with the people’s practices of livelihood, reproduction, social relations, and political authority, they are the prerequisite condition of human endeavors and the arbiters of the outcome, for better or worse. One might even insist again on the “determination by the religious basis”—that is, until religion went from an immanent infrastructure to a transcendent superstructure in the first and second axial ages.
In current academic theory, power ascends from earth to heaven, divinity being a celestial representation of human real-political authority. In immanentist cultures, however, power descends from heaven to earth, human real-political authority being a terrestrial instantiation of divinity. The existence people aspire to control, their own welfare, they will have to gain from its metahuman sources; and those who are able to do so are, by virtue of such powers, elevated among their fellows. Human political power is necessarily and quintessentially hubris, the appropriation of divinity in one form or another …
… One could go on citing … ethnographic verse and text in defense of the realities of the enchanted universe shared by most of humanity, the acknowledgment of which amounts to a call that transcendentalist social science, including my own, adapt itself to, and take seriously, the cultural praxes of others … [REAL END]
The Source:
Marshall Sahlins, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe: an anthropology of most of humanity, Princeton University Press 2022
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