V. The Burden of Civilization

While the development of this “ancient power complex” led to the immense productivity of the Pyramid Age, the weight of the megamachine, Mumford claims, is also the “chief burden of civilization.” Never was the burden heavier than at the beginning, when the greatest public activity in Egypt was mainly directed to “supporting the claim of the Pharaoh to divinity and immortality.”

The Pyramids constitute an extraordinary accomplishment, but are useless from a practical point of view. Civilization begins with a project that is entirely irrational. What could cause a society to build these monumental structures? What a gigantic effort required to cut 2.3 million stones from rocks—each weighing over 5000 pounds—to transport them to a central location, and then to lift them up to create these massive structures. The mind boggles.

In Life Against Death (1959), Norman O. Brown states that the need to produce an economic surplus is constructed based--not on the psychology of possession--rather upon a deeper psychology of giving. The Ancient Egyptians needed an economic surplus in order to finance or fund the building of the Pyramids. Building Pyramids represented a form of sacrifice.

The labor of tens-of-thousands of men was devoted to creating and construction these megalithic structures--whose primary purpose was to make manifest the power of the Pharaoh; show what he was capable of. Pyramids represent a testimony to the power of the divine king. Civilization begins with a monumental act of sacrifice.

In Sagan’s view, the transition from a kinship based to a complex society required the idea of omnipotence, often projected into the person of a king. Societies were “intoxicated with the idea that some human beings could become omnipotent.” It was not simply that divine kings imposed their will. Rather, people embraced the idea that the Pharaoh was god because they needed or desired the idea of omnipotence.

Mumford draws our attention to extreme forms of obedience that characterized ancient societies in the Near East. The king’s commands were to be obeyed as if divine law. Sagan discusses the most extreme form of submission to the king: human sacrifice. So almighty were the kings of complex societies, Sagan says, that they constantly exercised a prerogative that even Yahweh was not sure belonged to any creature, human or divine—the right to “take human life in religious ritual.” Human sacrifice represented the “ultimate certification of the power of early kings.”

Sagan reports that on the island of Tahiti, ritual homicide made kingship. The heir to the throne, from birth on, was the subject of a multitude of rituals: circumcision, presentations to the various districts of the kingdom, coming of age, etc. At each occasion, one of several victims was killed for the greater glory of the prince royal.

In fact, Sagan tells us that so powerful a sanction was human sacrifice and so apparently necessary was it to chiefly authority--that some chiefs, upon being urged by Europeans to give up the practice, exclaimed, “If we do, there will be no chiefs.” In short, kingship required the “exercise of ritual homicide.”

The “extreme concentration of human potency” in a single person, Sagan says, would require “equally exceptional rituals of obeisance from ordinary people.” Like Mumford, Sagan emphasizes the relationship between belief in the omnipotence of the king and the king’s right to require submission. The king’s power to compel obedience and submission, taken to its extreme, became the right to kill.

VI. Homicidal Violence

Acts of homicidal violence testify to the fact that the king—as embodiment of society or the state—is allowed to do anything. What is being demonstrated or conveyed by virtue of acts of violence is that the king—the leader of society—is not subject to the laws or limitations that govern the behavior of other people.

Violent acts performed by or in the name of the king—such as killing and ritual sacrifice—validate his omnipotence. Insofar as the king is authorized to do anything, he becomes like a god: free of limits. The fact that he is able to do whatever he wishes to do demonstrates that the King is above and beyond ordinary human beings.

Sagan hypothesizes that kings are allowed to behave in ways that put them above or beyond the law because human beings possess the desire to imagine that some people have this kind of power. In the first states, Sagan says, omnipotent human beings walked on the earth, “not in mythic fantasy but in reality.” The kind of power these first kings wielded never before had been experienced. The institution of kingship was created--not only to oppress human beings--but also “to exalt them.”

In order to raise themselves up from the savannah—to leave their small, limited worlds—human beings needed an ideal to look up to: an embodiment of potency that suggested we might become more than small, limited human beings. The existence of great kings functioned to inspire people; encourage them to “be all that they could be.”

Sagan emphasizes the profound freedom that many kings possessed. Omnipotence, he says, is a pale word to describe fully the ideal of kingship in complex societies. It does not give enough of the poetic, dreamlike sense of living without bounds of restrictions, in a world in which there are no laws; no shadow between the wish and the need, no temperance, no measure, no “reality principle.”

For kings in complex societies, Sagan says, every woman in the world (save one) is food for his sexual appetite; and the death of every man is subject to the nod of his head. “Nothing is forbidden.” Nothing seems to matter except for the fact that “what is done is done on a scale of which mere humans are incapable.”

Kings, in short, were people who could do pretty much whatever they wanted to do. The function of kings, Sagan concludes, was to embody the idea that certain human beings “did not have to give up anything.” One thing kings didn’t have to give up was the desire to kill people. Thus, Sagan says, the childlike power wielded by kings unfortunately “brought death to others.”

Powerful anthropomorphic gods and kings both, Sagan suggests, are inventions of the human spirit. When we read of an omnipotent king, we tend to describe him as “godlike.” In advanced complex societies, it is equally accurate to describe gods as “kinglike.” People did not “invent the gods first and then monarchs in imitation of them.”

Rather, Sagan concludes, the creation of both powerful kings and powerful gods was the result of something more fundamental: the wish for the existence of this kind of power.

Both gods and divine kings are human creations articulating and fulfilling psychological desires. And there is one central desire giving rise to the idea of both powerful gods and divine kings, namely the need to project a fantasy of omnipotence into the world: to believe that some people are more than human; to imagine that some beings or entities are not subject to the laws that govern ordinary lives.

The most painful reality of human existence is the fact of death. Like all organisms, human being are born, live, and then pass into non-existence. The reality of death gives rise to the idea of beings that are capable of living eternally.

Gods are imagined to be immortal—not subject to death and decay. The Pharaoh was conceived as a divine king—united with a god—who could live forever if only the proper measures were taken. Pyramids were built as a testimony to the immortality of the Pharaoh.

Kingship represents a social institution that evolved out of the need to believe that omnipotent beings exist on the face of the earth. The institution of kingship, Sagan says, was “invented in a thousand places because there was a human need for that kind of symbolism.” If one could not be a king oneself, one could identify with the king, partake of his omnipotence and immortality. Sagan observes that even the “lowliest person on the ladder wants that kind of power to exist in the world.”