ESCAPE FROM EVIL
40
but he himself harbors an “enemy within.” Brown put the problem
very well :
We are here at one of the ultimate crossroads in social theory. ... If
the cause of the trouble were force, to “expropriate the expropriators”
would be enough. But if force did not establish the domination of the
master, then perhaps the slave is somehow in love with his own chains
... a deeper psychological malady. . . . 4
Let us review what we know about this “deeper malady.” It is a
fascinating chapter of psychology in the history of the origins of
our inequality.
Curiously, Rousseau himself gave one of the very first psycho-
logical explanations in his famous essay. In the famous words which
stirred revolutionaries for two centuries he said:
The first person who, having fenced off a plot of ground, took it into
his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe
him, was the true founder of civil society . 5
In other words, primitive equality was ended by private property,
which led to the differential personal ownership of wealth. But the
point is that Rousseau doesn’t say that the person took the land by
force, but rather because of something in the minds of those around
him. As he outlines his theory of the origin of inequality, he places
wealth at the last stage and “personal qualities” at the first stage:
it is personal qualities that give rise to distinctions of rank and
power, and "wealth is the last to which they are reduced in the
end .” 6 Personal qualities are “the only ones which could attract
consideration”:
The one who sang or danced the best, the handsomest, the strongest,
the most adroit, or the most eloquent became the most highly considered;
and that was the first step toward inequality. . . . 7
It is perhaps an irony of history that one of the very first and
most influential tracts of modern revolutionaries, a tract that gave
the antistatists their clarion call to end the abuses of expropriation
and inequality, itself rests on the personal, psychological reasons
The Origin of Inequality 41
for the very first step in the origin of inequality. Social imbalances
occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition
of that merit by others. Shortly after Rousseau wrote, Adam Fergu-
son came out with his famous work on social history where he too
argued that social inequality was relatively absent on primitive
levels because property was comparatively absent. 8 In the most
egalitarian primitive societies, those whose economy is based on
hunting and gathering, there is no distinction of rank, little or no
authority of one individual over another. Possessions are simple
and there is no real difference in wealth; property is distributed
equally. Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized
and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little
or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence,
and influence always stems from personal qualities: extra skill in
hunting and warfare, in dealing with the spirits in the invisible
world, or simply physical strength and endurance. Old age itself
can often have influence. If a person has outlived others, especially
when so many die prematurely, he is often thought to have special
powers.
Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special
powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit.
The scalps of the slain enemies and the teeth, feathers, and other
ornaments were often loaded with magical power and served as
protection. If a man wore a large number of trophies and badges
showing how much power he had and how great were his exploits,
he became a great mana figure who literally struck terror into the
hearts of his enemies. 9 The elaborate decorations of the warrior
and hunter were not aimed to make him beautiful, but to show
off his skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. This
gave him automatic social distinction; by wearing the tokens of his
achievements, the visible memories of his bravery and excellence,
he could flaunt his superiority in the eyes of everyone who couldn’t
make similar displays. The Sioux could announce by certain decora-
tions on his moccassins how many horses he had captured, enemies
killed, whether the warrior himself had been wounded, etc.; similar
things were conveyed by the feathers he wore and the color they
were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior
to mark himself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each war-
42
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
rior was literally a walking record of his military campaigns: the
“fruit salad” on the chest of today’s military men is a direct de-
scendant of this public announcement of “see who I am because
of where I have been and what I have done; look how accom-
plished I am as a death dealer and death defier.” It is of course
less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or
the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. But
it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social
honor and the typical question that the primitive warrior asks:
“Who are you that you should talk? Where are your tattoo marks?
Whom have you killed that you should speak to me?” 10
These people, then, are honored and respected or feared, and
this is what gives them influence and power. Not only that, it also
gives them actual benefits and privileges. Remember that as chil-
dren we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neigh-
borhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives
who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing
that grown men want most — wives. They got them more easily than
did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they
took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would
claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was
common property of the tribe. 11 And so on.
I don’t intend to even try to sum up the theoretical details from
the vast literature on the growth of hereditary privilege and private
accumulation. Besides, there is little agreement on how exactly
class society came into existence. There is general agreement on
what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is
shrouded in mystery. Many different factors contributed, and it is
impossible to pull them apart and give them their proper weight.
Also, the process would not have been uniform or unilinear — the
same for all societies in all areas. If we add psychological factors
to materialist ones, we must also now add ecological and demo-
graphic factors such as population density and scarcity of re-
sources. 12 I don’t want to pop my head into the argument among
authorities lest it get neatly sliced off. So I would like to sidestep
the argument while still remaining focused on what is essential,
which, I think must lie in human nature and motives. The most
sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and
43
The Origin of Inequality
stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing;
it just “happened,” gradually and ineluctably. The vital question,
then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it
was allowed to happen, what there was in human nature that went
along so willingly with the process.
The answer to this question seems to me remarkably straight-
forward. I have said that primitive man recognized differences in
talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat, granted
them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities
helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. Ex-
ploits in the danger of hunting and war were especially crucial.
Why? Because in these activities certain individuals could single
themselves out as adept at defying death; the tokens and trophies
that they displayed were indications of immortality power or dura-
bility power, which is the same thing. If you identified with these
persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they
had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history; he
is the one who gambles with his very life and successfully defies
death, and men follow him and eventually worship his memory
because he embodies the triumph over what they fear most, ex-
tinction and death. He becomes the focus of the peculiarly human
passion play of the victory over death.
To go back to Rousseau for a moment, we can now see how
fanciful the idea is that in the “state of nature” man is free and
only becomes unfree later on. Man never was free and cannot be
free from his own nature. He carries within him the bondage that
he needs in order to continue to live. As Rank so well taught us,
Rousseau simply did not understand human nature in the round:
he “was not able to see that every human being is also equally
unfree, that is, we are bom in need of authority and we even
create out of freedom, a prison. . . ,” 13 This insight is the fruit of
the outcome of modem psychoanalysis, and there is no going back
behind it to the dreams of Rousseau or the utopian revolution-
aries. It penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to
the principal dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality. We
have to say, with Rank, that primitive religion “starts the first class
distinction .” 14 That is, the individual gives over the aegis of his
own life and death to the spirit world; he is already a second-class
44
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
citizen. The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and
immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman
beings.
Once things started off on this footing, it was only natural that
class distinctions should continue to develop from this first im-
petus: those individuals who embodied supernatural powers, or
could somehow plug into them or otherwise use them when the
occasion demanded, came to have the same ability to dominate
others that was associated with the spirits themselves. The anthro-
pologist Robert Lowie was a specialist on those most egalitarian
of all primitive peoples, the Plains Indian tribes. Even these fiercely
independent Indians, he tells us, gave up their equalitarian attitudes
of everyday life on raiding parties. A Crow Indian would organize
a raid only when prompted by his supernatural guardian spirit, and
so all those who followed him deferred to him and to his spirit.
Again, the overlordship of the invisible world as embodied in cer-
tain human personages made temporary slaves of their fellows.
No one was more cautious than Lowie about making general state-
ments on primitives, yet when it came to speculating about social
evolution he made a very straightforward choice:
I suggest that the awe which surrounded the protege of supernatural
powers formed the psychological basis for more complex political de-
velopments. . . . The very same men who flout the pretensions of a
fellow-brave grovel before a darling of the gods, render him “implicit
obedience and respect .” 15
Power Figures and Power Sources
Primitives were frank about power, and in a spiritual cosmology
power is relatively undisguised: it comes from the pool of ancestors
and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we
live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thought-
lessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power — until, as
said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator,
a telephone line. Then you see our “religious” anxiety come out.
45
The Origin of Inequality
Power is the life pulse that sustains man in every epoch, and
unless the student understands power figures and power sources he
can understand nothing vital about social history.
The history of man’s "fall” into stratified society can be traced
around the figures of his heroes, to whom he is beholden for the
power he wants most — to persevere as an organism, to continue
experiencing. Again we pick up the thread from the very begin-
ning of our argument and see how intricately it is interwoven in
man’s career on this planet. If primitive man was not in bondage
to the authority of living persons, he at least had some “heroes”
somewhere, and these — as said — were the spirit powers, usually of
the departed dead, the ancestors. The idea seems very strange to
most of us today, but for the primitive it was often the dead who
had the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic
passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a
helper of life. For many primitives death is the final promotion to
the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible world of
the spirits and the ability to use and manipulate the visible world
from their new abode.* Many people — and Hocart was one of the
foremost of these — have argued that primitives do not fear death
as much as we do; but we know that this equanimity is due to the
fact that the primitive was usually securely immersed in his par-
ticular cultural ideology, which was in essence an ideology of life,
of how to continue on and to triumph over death.
It is easy to see the significance of power for the human animal;
it is really the basic category of his existence, as the organism’s
whole world is structured in terms of power. No wonder that
Thomas Hobbes could say that man was characterized by “a general
inclination, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power,
that ceaseth only in death .” 16
One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power
• This is not universal among primitives by any means. Some tribes fear
the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then they are
thought to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits who repre-
sent unfinished and unfulfilled life, spirits of persons whodied prematurely
and would be envious of the living, and so on. Radin offers a frankly inter-
actionist point of view by saying that the dead are feared because they can-
not be controlled as well as when they were alive. P. Radin, The World of
rimitive Man New York: Grove Press 1960), .143.
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
46
he has and how much exists in others and in the world. Only if he
learns this can he be sure of surviving; he has to learn very
minutely what powers he can count on to facilitate his life and
what powers he has to fear and avoid in order to protect it. So
power becomes the basic category of being for which he has, so to
speak, a natural respect: if you are wrong about power, you don’t
get a chance to be right about anything else; and the things that
happen when the organism loses its powers are a decrease of
vitality and death. Little wonder, then, that primitive man had right
away to conceptualize and live according to hierarchies of power
and give them his most intense respect. Anthropology discovered
that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana
and taboo, which we can translate simply as “power” and “danger”
or “watch out” (because of power). The study of life, people, and
the world, then, broke down into an alertness for distributions of
power. The more mana you could find to tap, the more taboo you
could avoid, the better.
But power is an invisible mystery. It erupts out of nature in
storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and
it returns into nature in ashes, winter, and death. The only way we
know it is there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or
special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the
supernatural, can only be spotted in the unusual, the surpassing,
the excellent, that which transcends what is necessary or expected.
From the very beginning, the child experiences the awesomeness
of life and his problems of survival and well-being in other people;
and so persons come to be the most intimate place where one looks
to be delighted by the specialness of mysterious life, or where one
fears to be overwhelmed by powers that he cannot understand or
cope with. It is natural, then, that the most immediate place to
look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and
qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra
skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away
marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power
or mana. They earned respect and special privileges and had to be
handled gently because they were both an asset and a danger: in
their very persons they were an open fount between two worlds,
ilia inn'klo nr»/1 tVin imnciVtlo onrl r»ntHPr nOCCPrl fVimilCrVt tllPTTl fl*!
47
The Origin of Inequality
The most unashamed pretender to supernatural powers was, on
the primitive level, the medicine man, or shaman. He invented the
specialty of entering into the world of the dead and coming back
from it unharmed; he went on these supernatural trips and per-
sonally carried out whatever business the tribe or members of it
had in the powerful world of the spirits; he went to see a dead
soul safely to the other side, to harangue the invisible spirits and
make them let go of a sick person, etc. The shaman was the hero
who "died” and was reborn unfailingly, who thus regularly acted
out man’s triumph over death and evil, and who established man’s
link with the invisible power world. It was an agonizing role to play,
and it was played best by those individuals who actually were
“seized by spirits” and “killed” by them — the epileptics . 17 Nothing
strikes greater terror into man’s heart than to witness an eruption of
power from the deptlis of nature that he cannot understand or con-
trol — whether it is lava erupting from a volcano or the foam and
convulsions of an epileptic. And so for all these reasons primitive
man saw the epileptic shaman as a natural hero, a source of fear
and respect.® The shaman was the mystifier par excellence, and it
was only logical that he should often be more powerful than chiefs,
more feared, and get greater rewards. Sometimes he allied himself
with the chief of a tribe, and the resulting exploitation was what
Radin called “clearly a form of gangsterism .” 18
Radin’s writings on the origins of inequality .are the most sen-
sitively probing and ruthless that I know. In his view primitive
society was from the very beginning a struggle by individuals and
groups for special privileges — who would get the best meat, the
easiest access to women, some leisure and security. The elders
always tried to arrange these for their own benefit, and so did the
shamans. On the simplest levels of culture they were already or-
ganizing themselves into an exclusive fraternity so as to get and
keep maximum power. How does one get maximum power in a
cosmology where ritual is the technics that manufactures life? Ob-
* He was also the first natural systematizer of religion because he actually
had experiences of rebirth, reincarnation, and eternal life in the dream state
following a convulsive seizure. These experiences are more or less characteristic
for all epileptics. This is how we understand the birth of these basic religious
notions, verified “objectively” by many individuals. Cf. W. Bromberg and P.
religion
eternal
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
48
viously by getting control of the formulas for the technics. Very
early the elders and the religious personages tried to get control
of the ritual. In his brilliant chapter “The Crises of Life and Their
Rituals ” 19 Radin argues that the religious systematizer built his
symbolic interpretations around the crises of life, those passages
where one’s identity was in doubt, where he was moving from one
state to another, where everything had to go smoothly in order
for a flowering out or birth into a new status to take place. And so
the puberty and the death rituals came to be surrounded by the
greatest importance, wherein lay the greatest possibilities of bun-
gling. Radin makes the fascinating point that over and beyond the
frankly religious and psychological nature of these passages, there
is a social-economic purpose to them — or rather to the control of
them by certain groups. Talking about puberty rites of the Austral-
ian aborigines he says:
. . . over and above all other reasons is the somewhat cynically expressed
purpose of the old men of having novices supply them, for many years,
with regular presents in the form of animal food, of reserving the choice
dishes for themselves by the utilization of the numerous food taboos
imposed on the younger people, and, finally, of keeping the young
women for themselves.
And again, with another tribe, Radin observes that “the fundamental
and immediate objective was to maintain power in the hands of
the older people and to keep the women in proper subjection.”
Those who systematized the puberty, he concludes, weren’t obeying
some mystical, myth-making urge in the unconscious.
Rather . . . specific individuals banded together formally or informally,
individuals who possess a marked capacity for articulating their ideas
and for organizing them into coherent systems, which, naturally, would
be of profit to them and to those with whom they are allied . 20
I linger on Radin’s views for a good reason. They put closure on
the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of in-
equality. Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive world had
to break up because of man’s burning ambition to improve himself,
to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection . 21
The Origin of Inequality 49
Ferguson’s was a very straightforward and unburdened view of
man. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change
his position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one
of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the over-
whelming world to one of absolute control and mastery of nature.
Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand
and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate
way to do this is in one’s immediate social situation — vis 4 -vis
others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that
evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on in-
equality, and his whole intent was to show that this isn’t true, that
the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and
unintentional ways. But this is just what Hobbes was driving at,
that the organism expands itself in the ways open to it and that
this has destructive consequences for the world around it. Rousseau
and Hobbes were right, evil is “neutral” in origin, it derives from
organismic robustness — but its consequences are real and painful.
What Radin did was to bring all this up to date with an acute
understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and
a frankly materialistic perspective on society. This is already the
makings of a union of Marx and Freud. Seen in this way, social life
is the saga of the working out of one’s problems and ambitions on
others. What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I
think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psycho-
logical dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history;
it would be based on power, but it would include individual
deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a
“social contract” forged in desire and fear. The central question of
such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be. Who
has the power to mystify, how did he get it, and how does he keep
it? We can see how naive the traditional Marxist view of simple
coercion is: it doesn’t begin to take into account what we must now
call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate
way-to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power
is, as Brown says, sacred power, because it begins in the hunger
for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people
and things which represent immortality power.
And so Brown could offer his own biting criticism of Rousseau:
5 »
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
If the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall
took place not in the transition from “primitive communism” to “private
property” but in the transition from ape to man . 22
That is, from a type of animal that had no notion of the sacred to
one that did. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they
dominate by a psychological spell, not by physical coercion. As
Brown puts it, “Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental
nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and en-
chantment .” 2 '' 1 Thus Brown could conclude — in the epigraph we
have borrowed for this chapter — that the chains that bind men are
self-imposed.
If we left this idea unadorned, it would still need explaining:
why are men so eager to be mystified, so willing to be bound in
chains? The bind is explained by one idea, the truly great idea that
emerged from psychoanalysis and that goes right to the heart of
the human condition: the phenomenon of transference .°
People take the overwhelmingness of creation and their own fears
and desires and project them in the form of intense mana onto cer-
tain figures to which they then defer. They follow these figures
with passion and with a trembling heart. When one thinks of his
own eager fascinations, he can feel revolted by himself and by the
obedient throngs who look with such timidity and satisfaction on
the “leader.” Look how the girls blush, how hands reach out
tremblingly, how eyes lower and dart to one side, how quickly a
few choke up, ready for tearful and grateful submission, how
smugly those nearest to the leader smile, how puffed up they walk —
how the Devil himself seems to have contrived an instant, mass
puppet show with real live creatures. But there is no way of avoid-
ing the fatality of it: the thousands of hearts palpitating, the
gallons of adrenalin, of blood rushing to the cheeks — it is all lived
truth, an animal’s reaction to the majesty of creation. If anything is
false about it, it is the fact that thousands of human forms feel
inferior and beholden to an identical, single human form.
In all this I am not negating the pure Marxian side of historical
* For a more detailed examination of the nature of transference please see
my extensive summary in chap. 7 of The Denial of Death (New York: The
Free Press, 1973).
The Origin of Inequality 51
domination; that is real enough and we know it. But there can
never be a way of relieving or eliminating the domination of struc-
tures of power without coming to grips with the spell of power, a
spell that explains voluntary self-alienation whether it deals with
spirits or with Soviets. Men are literally hypnotized by life and by
those who represent life to them, which explains the passion of
submission that Melville summed up so brilliantly in Moby Dick, in
the quarterdeck scene when Ahab consecrates the harpoons. In
other words, Marxism has to come to grips with the conservative
argument: that there is something in human nature that invites
inequality no matter what we do. One recent writer calls this
“functional inequality,” and sees it as a completely neutral and
unavoidable factor in social life. 24 Or, as I would say with Rank,
men are “fate-creating” agents: they coerce by simply existing; they
do not even necessarily, like Ahab, try to project electric mana;
they are already a natural vortex of the problems of life. We can
sum all this up in one sentence that presents to narrow Marxism
the most fundamental challenge it has faced: men fashion un-
ffreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation. What is the shape of a
revolutionary philosophy of history that would begin to take full
account of that?
CHAPTER FOUR
The Evolution of Inequality
Radin’s view of how shamans and elders gained control of ritual
is full of volition, scheming, competitiveness; the more shrewd, in-
troverted, selfish members of the tribe outwitted and outplayed the
more plodding and guileless, the ones who carried the burden of the
tribe’s work.’ At the level of equalitarian society — simple hunting
and gathering tribes — Radin’s scheme of the growth of privilege
through the deliberate creation of mystique is compelling. But what
I like about Hocart’s view of the growth of privilege at a later stage
of social evolution is that it accents the other side: the common
accord with which men reach for their own subjection.
In Radin’s equalitarian society organismic well-being is achieved
by an economy of reciprocal exchange; goods are freely traded
among the tribe. In Hocart’s rank society there is a new economic
process: the flow of goods funnels to a center of power — an
authoritarian figure — who receives the fruits of everyone’s labor
and redistributes those fruits; he can order people to work on his
behalf or on someone else’s, and he takes the surplus, pools it, and
then gives it out as needed . 2
Immediately the question arises. Why did people go from an
economy of simple sharing among equals to one of pooling via an
authority figure who has a high rank and absolute power? The
answer is that man wanted a visible god ahvays present to receive
his offerings, and for this he was willing to pay the price of his
own subjection. In Hocart’s words:
The Fijians had invisible gods, sometimes present in the priest or in an
animal; they preferred a god always present, one they could see and
speak to, and the chief was such a god. That is the true reason for a
Fijian chief’s existence: he receives the offerings of his people, and in
consequence they prosper . 3
52
The Evolution of Inequality 53
That is, they prosper because there is a god right on the spot that
visibly accepts their offerings; thus there is no doubt about their
favor in his eyes.
So great was the belief that a visible god meant prosperity that
chiefless tribes were eager to get a chief “as soon as they could find
a nobleman whose high rank or age gave hopes that he would be
acceptable to the spirits.” 4 Prosperity and chiefs were associated
because the tribes with great chiefs were actually more prosperous.
Hocart explains this as a circular process; the wealthier tribes were
more energetic, and so they rose among their neighbors. But part of
the reason that they were more energetic was that “there is no
doubt that present divinity evoked an enthusiasm which acted as a
tonic, and braced men to greater efforts.” “A Fijian will put his
back into his work when striving to shine in the eyes of the great
man.” 5 Imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts
today if we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits
of our labors. Again we come back to the natural genius of primi-
tive man, who provided himself with what man needs most; to
know daily that he is living right in the eyes of God, that his worka-
day action has cosmic value — no, even that it enhances God Him-
self!
Men lean on increase and creation ritual especially when times
are bad; it is then that their spiritual technology has to work. So if
they got along without a king in good times, they would want one
when times got bad. Besides, says Hocart, if you are without a
king you are in a position of inferiority in relation to your neigh-
bors; when others parade their visible god, and their favor in his
eyes, how can you stand being shown up as having no god of
your own? The Jews were mocked in the ancient world because
they had no image of their god, he seemed like a mere figment of
their imagination; next to the visible splendor of the Pharaoh, the
God of Israel seemed like a phantom of a deluded mind. Most of
all, one always knew how one stood with the visible god, but the
Israelis were never sure how they stood with their invisible one —
the whole thing must have seemed sick.
To speak of the Pharaoh is to sum up the whole process: once
you have a visible ritual principal in the form of a chief or a king,
54
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
a visible god, by definition you already have divine kingship — the
great emergent tyranny of the ancient world. And we can see in one
swoop why ancient man so willingly embraced his new alienated
status under divine kingships, as tbe chiefless tribes of Fiji eagerly
chose a chief with all the troubles this meant. It all goes back to
our discussion in Chapter One about macro- and microcosmization,
processes whereby man entwined his own destiny with that of the
cosmos by bringing the heavens into human affairs and by blowing
himself up as the center of concern of the universe. We also saw
that ritual was an enactment of the struggle between the forces of
light and life and those of darkness and death. With the technique
of ritual offerings man sought to bring the invisible powers of
nature to bear on his visible well-being. Well, the divine king sums
up this whole cosmology all in himself. He is the god who receives
offerings, the protagonist of light against dark, and the embodi-
ment of the invisible forces of nature — specifically, the sun. In
Hocart’s happy phrase, he is the “Sun-Man.” Divine kingship sums
up the double process of macro- and microcosmization: it represents
a “solarization of man, and a humanizing of the sun .” 6
For early man the emanations of light and heat from the sun were
the archetypes of all miraculous power: the sun shines from afar and
by its invisible touch causes life to unfold and expand . 7 We can’t
say much more about this mystery even today. Hocart asks whether
ancient man was altogether wrong in his main conception “that
animal or vegetable energy on this earth is after all little else than
bottled sunshine?” And once man made the equation king equals
sun, was he altogether wrong to believe that “this bottled sunshine
manifests itself again in other forms of action at a distance by look
and by voice? After all, man does act at a distance by means of the
light and sound waves that emanate from him .” 8 The point is, con-
cludes Hocart, that once you admit that a man can become one with
the sun, it follows that the actions of the one are the actions of the
other, that the king himself in his person, will vivify the earth.
When the Pharaoh’s name was mentioned, it was followed by the
words “life,” “prosperity,” “health ”! 9 In these three words are
summed up the timeless and universal hunger of men. And when
they had made that most wonderful invention of all, a living em-
The Evolution of Inequality 55
bodiment of prosperity, a Sun-Man, how expect them not to fall
into eager thralldom? I use the word “invention” advisedly: the
individual Sun-Man was the focus of a cosmology of invisible
energy, like the modern computer and atomic reactor, and he
aroused the same hopes and yearning they arouse for the perfectly
ordered, plentifully supplied life. Like the reactor, too, he reflected
back energy-power on those around him: just the right amount and
they prospered; too much and they withered into decay and death.
At this point we might be tempted to get up on our high horse
and proclaim that the simple fact is that the atomic theory of power
is true, and the Sun-Man theory false. But we have to remind our-
selves, soberly, that we haven’t quite abandoned the earlier theory; it
still holds a fascination for us and we still live in large measure by its
compellingness. We know about the genuine mana that surrounds
presidents and prime ministers: look at Churchill and the whole
Kennedy family; in true primitive style each member of the family
is interchangeable because each partakes of the same kin pool of
power. And in those “least superstitious” and “most humanistic and
scientific” states of Russia and China, witness the aura of mana that
surrounds their chairmen. Caesar could not have hoped for more.
The political leader only becomes suspect when it is thought that he
has no special powers, or has lost them. Then, after the manner of
the ancient chiefs and kings, he is quickly “done away with” by a
vote or a coup in favor of a new power symbol. As the ancients
believed that the kingdom would perish if the king’s mana ebbed,
so do we feel uncomfortable and anxious if the figure “at the top”
doesn’t show real excellence, some kind of “magic.”
The identification of the mana figure with one’s own well-being
still influences too the democratic voting process: just as in tradi-
tional society, we tend to vote for the person who already represents
health, wealth, and success so that some of it will rub off on us.
Whence the old adage “Nothing succeeds like success.” This attrac-
tion is also especially strong in certain religious cults of the Father
Divine type: the followers want to see wealth flaunted in the per-
son of their leader, hoping that some of it will radiate back to them.
This is a direct continuation of the tradition of weighing the Aga
Khan in diamonds. 10
56
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
The Centralization of Ritual
Once men consented to live by the redistribution of life’s goods
through a god figure who represented life, they had sealed their
fate. There was no stopping the process of the monopolization of
life in the king’s hands. It went like this: The king of ritual principal
was in charge of the sacred objects of the group and had to hold
the prescribed ceremonies by a strict observance of the customs of
the ancestors. This made him a repository of custom, an authority
on custom. “Custom” is a weak word in English to convey some-
thing really momentous, as we saw; custom is the abstruse technical
lore that runs the machinery for the renewal of nature. It is the
physics, medicine, and mechanics of primitive society. Imagine
our trying to fight a plague with faulty chemicals, and you can under-
stand that custom equals life. The authority on custom, then, is the
supreme regulator of certain departments of nature. But this regula-
tion is so useful to the tribe — in fact it is life itself — that it
naturally comes to be extended to all departments. Again, I think
an analogy to modern life may convey some of the flavor: what
first began as the miraculous harnessing of electric power in the
electric bulb now extends to toothbrushes, razors, garden tools,
typewriters, etc. What was at first limited to ritual and to the seat
of ritual gradually spread “to the whole of the king’s realm and
the whole life of his subjects .” 11 After all, if you are going to be
supreme regulator of the world, it is only logical that you should
gradually encompass the whole world. If your invisible mechanics
works in one area, there is no reason why it should not work in
another, you have only to try it. And you try it by extending your
ritual prerogative to cover the case: you extend the veil of your
mana power over wider and wider jurisdictions. It seems like a
benign and harmless enough process, one you might never even
notice and in fact might want to happen — but what is happening
is the complete entrenchment of social inequality. Hocart sums it up
in a nutshell:
Fijian chiefs were great sticklers for etiquette. They were quick to
resent offences against their dignity and unseemly behaviour in their
The Evolution of Inequality 57
precincts. . . . These may seem petty matters; but they are fraught with
great possibilities. The Fijian chief has only to extend his precincts and
interpret widely the traditional rules of ceremonial behaviour in order
to acquire a criminal jurisdiction, and increase his interference with the
life of his subjects. ... By sanctifying anything they [the chiefs in
Polynesia] brought it within the sphere of ritual, that is their own sphere.
This was certainly not done suddenly, but by persistently extending the
applications of taboo [sacred powerj, as we shall see our English kings
extend their peace. 12
You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall
behind the king to protect his definitions of social custom and his
ritual prerogatives; otherwise the tribe would lose well-being and
life. We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny
because of the need for the king’s power. The more successful a
king, the more prerogatives he could enjoy: he was judged by
results. “If the harvests were good the people were prepared to put
up with a moderate amount of tyranny.” 13
Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so
naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centraliza-
tion also came to mean control of the power to punish. Another
large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed
up here. To us a police force is a part of life, as inevitable, it seems,
as death and taxes; we rely on the police to punish those who
hurt us. But it hasn’t always been so. In simple egalitarian societies
there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so
yourself, family against family. But if there is no police force to
enforce the law, there is also none to coerce you for any reason. You
have to stay alert, but you are also freer. A police force is usually
drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded.
Among the Plains Indians, for example, these special occasions were
the buffalo hunt, mass migrations, war parties, and major festivals;
it was then that the police had to maintain order and harmonize
and synchronize activities so as to ensure a maximum buffalo kill,
etc. At these times the police force enjoyed absolute authority, even
the power of life and death; and yet among the Plains Indians this
foundation for autocracy never hardened into permanent form.
Theorists of social evolution have given much attention to the
police function in egalitarian societies and have speculated on why
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
58
it didn’t develop into a permanent coercive structure, a stratified
state of the modern type . 14 The answer seems to be that the en-
trenchment of a police force or even a military organization is not
all by itself the road to institutionalized inequality. Offhand you
might think that blatant power would exercise its own fascination
and its own irresistible coercion, but in the affairs of men things
don’t seem to work that way: men will not give in to power unless
it is accompanied by mystification, as in the service of something
that has a grander aura of legitimacy, of symbolic compellingness.
So Lowie concluded that the religious figures command more
respect than the military ones, and Fried thinks that the emergence
of the economics of redistribution is much more significant than
military organizations . 15 In other words, men seem first to have
allowed or even welcomed the ascendancy over them of visible
gods; after that, to accept punishment from the agents of these
gods is a natural and logical step.
But the result, alas, is not as innocent as it must have seemed
to people living during these transitions. What they were doing was
bartering away social equality and a measure of personal indepen-
dence for prosperity and order. There was now nothing to stop the
state from taking more and more functions and prerogatives into
itself, from developing a class of special beings at the center and
inferior ones around it, or from beginning to give these special
beings a larger share of the good things of the earth.® Not only of
the earth, but also of afterlife: evidently the common people of
Tonga had no souls, and Hocart believes that the lower classes of
society did not get souls until they imitated the ceremonies of the
king.
Once you went from an economy of simple sharing to one of
redistribution, goods gradually ceased to be your natural right.
Again a logical, almost forced development. How this actually came
about is shrouded in the depths of prehistory, and it must have
been a long and varied development; we can’t trace it except for
hints here and there, but we can empirically compare tribal life
® This is one of Hocart’s major arguments throughout all his studies, that
the whole of archaic society set itself up to imitate the divine cosmos of the
king, and that we can still see vestiges of this organization. His exploration
is a fascinating one and opens up a whole new vista to the student, whether
Hocart proves to be describing a universally true phenomenon or not (cf. K,
pp. 235, 156).
The Evolution of Inequality 59
with later stages of social evolution. What we see is that private
interests became more and more separated from public interests —
until today we hardly know what a public interest is.
Students who look for the point at which economic activity and
social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch:
it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving
gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures
got more and more ascendancy vis-a-vis the group, they could take
a fixed portion of the surplus with less involvement in the life of the
people. The classic potlatch, as practiced, say, among the Kwakiutl,
was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. It embraced the
twin urges talked about in Chapter Two, heroism and expiation.
The more goods one could amass and give away, the greater a coup
of oneupmanship one pulled off, the more power one could generate,
the bigger the personal victory. The object was to humiliate rivals,
to stand out as tall as possible as a big man, a hero. At the same
time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the
gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to
maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served.
But this classic social ceremonial had to change with the gradual
development of hereditary privilege, so that the chiefs became the
principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this way a feudal struc-
ture could naturally develop. 16
Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see i
as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the
invisible world of the gods to a flaunting of the visible world of
things. Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible
in the person of the king, his powers became those of this world —
visible, temporal powers in place of invisible, eternal ones. He
would come to measure his power by the piles of things he actually
possessed, by the glory of his person, and not, as before, by the
efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature.
This represents a basic change in man’s whole stance toward the
world, from a partnership with animal spirits, a sharer in nature’s
bounty, to a big boss, a darling of the gods. Hocart calls it the
“growing conceit” of man, and we know that this hubris comes
directly from a belief that one’s own powers are more important
than anything else. In the old totemic world picture individuals
did not stand out as much. There was belief in the fusion of human
6o
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
and animal spirits, a kind of spiritual unification of the life of the
tribe with a sector of nature. Out of the invisible world of spirits
life tumbled in an endless cycle of embodiments and returns. The
individual got his sense of self-expansion and protection by sharing
in the collectivity of social and animal souls, in the clan and its
totems. I don’t want to get tied up in an argument with modern
anthropology about what exactly totemism is or isn’t, or even, as
Levi-Strauss questioned, whether it existed or not. What is certain
is that spirit beliefs permeated primitive society and with them the
sense of some kind of mystical participation with animals and nature,
a participation for the purposes of the control and renewal of life.
The individual got a sense of organismic durability by identifying
with the fund of ancestral spirits.' What also seems certain is that
the entire community functioned as a kind of regenerative priest-
hood, as each member had a share in the ritual.®
The shared communal ritual recedes before the chief or king as
he comes to control and centralize it in his person. The “conceit”
comes in when he himself becomes the guarantee of life and it is
no longer the group as a whole. We might put it this way: in the
classic potlatch the accumulation of visible power was certainly
there in the piles of goods, and it was very compelling and meant to
be so, but it had not yet taken the ascendancy over the group, had
not yet upset the shared dependence, the reliance on gods and
spirits, animals and ancestors. But with the historical detachment
* This step in social evolution raises some fascinating questions about the
basic nature of man and his attitudes toward the world around him. Often
these days we tend to romanticize about how primitives “naturally” respected
nature and animal life and handled them gently and reverently. Certainly
this was often true, but we also know that primitives could be very casual and
even cruel with animals. Hocart throws an interesting light on this by point-
ing out that once man got enough power over the world to forgo the old
totemic ritual identifications, he became more and more eager to disclaim any
relationship with animals. Hence the eclipse of animal identification historically.
We know that primitives used animals in the ritual technics, but Hocart says
this doesn’t mean that they always revered them or that respect was the
primary thing: the primary thing was identification for use. This would ex-
plain why, once man got more secure control over the visible world, he found
it easy to dissociate himself entirely from animals. Otto Rank has discussed
brilliantly the change from Egyptian to Greek art as the gradual defeat of
the animal by the spiritual principle, the climax of a long struggle by man
to liberate himself from his animal nature. See Hocart, K, p. 146, KC, pp.
53-54, SO, p. 35; and Rank, Art and Artist (New York: Knopf, 1932), pp.
356 If.
The Evolution of Inequality 61
of power figures into feudal structures, the generation of wealth as
moral power for the community became a caricature. Nowhere is
this better seen than in the ancient world: the “potlatch” practiced
bv the Romans was a perfect example of the degeneration of the
primitive gift complex. The emperors “gave” huge public entertain-
ments in the arenas, public buildings, and monuments, whose walls
were duly inscribed, as is the Pantheon in Rome, with the name
of the giver. But we know that these givers amassed and passed
on more than they gave; their gifts were only a sop to the com-
munity, more public relations than expiation; they gave to the eyes
of men and not to the gods. We see the final evolution of this empty
potlatch practiced in the western world, our cities, parks, and
universities carrying buildings with the names Carnegie, Rockefel-
ler, Hearst, Macmillan-Bloedel — men who grabbed millions from the
labor and lands of others and offered back to the public a pittance.
It was good public relations for alienated masses who understood
nothing, but it was hardly expiation for public guilt; it was almost
all proud heroism, the flaunting of power with very little mixture of
repentance.
Conclusion: The Eclipse of Communal Ritual
Most people would agree that the word “alienation” applies to
modern man, that something happened in history which gradually
despoiled the average man, transformed him from an active, crea-
tive being into the pathetic consumer who smiles proudly from our
billboards that his armpits are odor-free around the clock. The
main task of historical Marxism was to loudly proclaim this “down-
fall” of man; and thinkers as diverse as Whitehead, Kierkegaard,
and Trotsky agreed. This is still the truth at the heart of the myth of
the "noble savage,” and part of the reason that Rousseau’s thought is
still not dead. Historical man lost something that early man had. It
would take volumes to talk about the many dimensions of historical
alienation, and the subject has been covered in the most complex
ways. But there is a suggestive way of looking at the problem that
cuts right to the heart of it, and that is from the two angles we have
been using here: first, to say that man changed from a privileged
62
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
sharer of goods to someone who was dependent on the redistribu-
tion of.goods; and second, to say that he was gradually dispossessed
of the most intimate creative role he had ever invented, that of a
practitioner of ritual.
The family or clan is a ritual unit, which makes each person a
member of a priesthood. Often each clan has a specific function in
the regeneration of nature, its own ceremonial lodge, sacred fire,
ritual songs, and ceremonies which belong to it alone. It is easy
enough for us to talk about a household that has its own cult and
sacred fire, but can we imagine what it means to step into a hut
that has a sacred fire, a hut filled with technologists who know the
secret ways of rejuvenating earthly life? I have already talked
about what this did for the individual as a cosmic hero, but it bears
repeating again and again because I don’t think we can easily get
the feel of the thing or understand what is missing when it is lost.
And historically, precisely what happened is that it was lost. Family
ritual was absorbed into state ritual. Hocart sums this whole
development up in a few trenchant lines:
The great difference between our society and most non-European
societies is that the national ritual, of which the Pope or the sovereign
[president, chairman, prime minister, etc.] is the head, has swallowed up
all others. Hence the clan and all other ritual organizations have disap-
peared. . . . The disappearance of the intermediate groupings has left
the married couple face to face with the state . 17
But now a married couple, completely shorn of sacred status, does
not live in a sacred house, belong to a holy clan, or possess the
secret technology for the renewal of nature. Which means that it is
face to face with the state but with no real powers of its own. As
the modern married couple does not understand the high estate
from which it has fallen historically, it can be quite content to
regenerate nature in the person of a child and to renovate prosperity
by working in a factory. Needless to say, these are activities for the
promotion of life which have quite different qualities and intensities,
and one of the great lessons historical psychology can teach is what
new ways man has had to invent for the pursuit of life after the
disappearance of the primitive world picture.
CHAP1ER FIVE
The New Historical Forms of
Immortality Power
History in itself is nothing but applied psychology.
Hence we must look to theoretical psychology to
give us the clew to its true interpretation.
Karl Lamprecht 1
We can now take a step that we prepared for in the Introduction.
There, remember, we saw that man wants what all organisms want:
continuing experience, self-perpetuation as a living being. But we
also saw that man — alone among all other organisms — had a con-
sciousness that his life came to an end here on earth; and so he had
to devise another way to continue his self-perpetuation, a way of
transcending the world of flesh and blood, which was a perishable
one. This he did by fixing on a world which was not perishable, by
devising an “invisible-project" that would assure his immortality in
a spiritual rather than physical way.
This way of looking at the doings of men gives a direct key to
the unlocking of history. We can see that what people want in any
epoch is a way of transcending their physical fate, they want to
guarantee some kind of indefinite duration, and culture provides
them with the necessary immortality symbols or ideologies; societies
can be seen as structures of immortality power.
Two of the most brilliant and economical orderings of history
from this point of view, to my mind, are those of Otto Rank and
Norman O. Brown. Their work gave us a grip on the manifold of
historical fact from an intimate psychological point of view — some-
thing scholars had been seeking since the nineteenth century with-
out success. In this chapter I want to take up Rank's work, which in
fact came a full generation before the work of Brown. Brown; he
63
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
64
swept over the whole panorama of social-evolutionaiy thought and
the mass of scholarly monographs on the primitive world and early
history; this was a mountain of scholarly insight from several disci-
plines that was so sprawling and technical that little general sense
could be made out of it. Rank pulled it all together with a single
principle, what we might call the principle of immortality striving. It
was a universal principle firmly anchored in each individual person,
no matter who he was; it was present in each culture, no matter how
varied its beliefs might seem, or how much mankind itself seemed
to change from epoch to epoch. Beliefs were not fixed and final
realities; thev varied from period to period, from one social form to
another. What was fixed was the principle of a “dominant im-
mortality-ideology.” In each historical period or social group, man
thought that he lived absolute truth because his social life gave
expression to his deepest innate hunger. And so Rank could say,
“Every conflict over truth is in the last analysis just the same old
struggle over . . . immortality .” 2 If anyone doubts this, let him try
to explain in any other wav the life-and-death viciousness of all
ideological disputes. Each person nourishes his immortality in the
ideology of self-perpetuation to which he gives his allegiance; this
gives his life the only abiding significance it can have. No wonder
men go into a rage over fine points of belief: if your adversary wins
the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has
been shown to be fallible, your life becomes fallible. History, then,
can be understood as the succession of ideologies that console for
death. Or, more momentously, all cultural forms are in essence
sacred because they seek the perpetuation and redemption of the
individual life. This is the breathtaking import of Rank’s attempt
to see history as stages or successions of immortality ideologies.
Culture means that which is super natural; all culture has the basic
mandate to transcend the physical, to permanently transcend it. All
human ideologies, then, are affairs that deal directly with the sacred-
ness of the individual or the group life, whether it seems that way or
not, whether they admit it or not, whether the person knows it him-
self or not.
What does history look like viewed from this angle? We already
have seen what the primitive world looked like. As both Rank
and Brown saw it, what characterized “archaic” man was that he
The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power 65
attained immortality “by assimilation into the fund of ancestral
souls, out of which comes each generation and into which they
return.” 3 This eternal cycle of rebirth was self -renewing if helped
with the proper communal rituals. The group, then, guaranteed its
own self-perpetuation. Its duty was to strengthen the life force by
fulfilling ritual obligations. The group alone conferred immortality
— which is why the individual immersed himself so completely in
its ideology, and why duty took precedence over everything else.
Only in this way can we understand the willing self-denials of
man in society; he accepts the social limitations on his appetites
because the group gives expression to the most important appetite
of all, the hunger for the continuation of life. Why would human
beings put infants through the torture of lip plugs, subject them-
selves to circumcisions and repeated subincisions, perforated nasal
septums, neck rings, holes in the tongue, tom flesh, joints, muscles —
why would they even willingly die — if not for the ultimate stake:
immortality, the triumph over the extinction of the body and its
insignificance.
And so Rank and Brown could argue that from the beginning of
society and prehistory man has repressed himself, tamed himself,
in a barter for greater power and durability. And the record of
the taming of man is found in the “immortality symbols” that men
have used and discarded across the face of history. Unlike Freud,
Rank argued that all taboos, morals, customs, and laws represent a
self-limitation of man so that he could transcend his condition, get
more life by denying life. As he paradoxically put it, men seek to
preserve their immortality rather than their lives. This way of look-
ing at society represents a fundamental revision of Freud in the
very central pillar of Freud’s system: the theory of sex, the idea that
the primary aim of man is pleasure, the gratification of erotic drives.
Freud said that man gives these drives up only grudgingly to
society, and then only because he is forced to bv superior authority
and power. Rank, on the other hand, said that sexual restrictions
“from the first” were “voluntary, spontaneous” acts, not the result
of external authority. 4 And the reason was that man was from the
first willing to. barter his body for higher spiritual values, for more
life; or, as we would put it technically, the body was the first thing
that one abandoned for the project of cultural immortality, and it
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
was abandoned, not because of fear of the fathers, but ironically
because of love of life. Besides, if the individual is willing to re-
nounce life, to shrink back from it in order to persevere, then he
would also need society to map out safe sexuality for him. Rank
makes the same quasi-cynical observation on this as Durkheim had:
primitive social organization did not so much restrict the individual
sexually as actually make it possible for him to have the sexual
life that “he had always been neurotically ready to sacrifice for the
sake of his personal immortality . 5
We already have seen, with Hocart, how willingly primitive man
embraced the institution of kingship because it was equated with
prosperity; from the beginning men renounced some dimensions of
life in order to open up others, and this is what made it easy for
monolithic historical structures of power to take shape and to
choke out life still more. All that these new structures had to do
was to promise the same immortality, only now in different forms.
The Family and the State, or the “Sexual Era”
With the discovery of agriculture began the breakup of the
primitive world, the rise of the early states; and now social organiza-
tion came to be focused in the patriarchal family under the state’s
legal protection. It was at this time that biological fatherhood be-
came of dominant importance because it became the universal way
of assuring personal immortality . 6 Rank called this the “sexual era”
because physical paternity was fully recognized as the royal road to
self-perpetuation via one’s children — in fact, it was one’s bounden
duty. The institution of marriage extended from the king to his
people, and every father became a kind of king in his own right,
and his home a castle. Under Roman law the father had tyrannical
rights over his family; he ruled over it legally; as Rank was quick
to observe, famulus equals servant, slave . 7 In the primitive world,
we might say, the child had been the bearer of the collective im-
mortality, since it was through him that the souls of the ancestors
reentered the world. This is one reason why many primitives
handled their children so gently: the child was actually in the
process of giving birth to himself with the help of the ancestral
The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power 67
spirit; if one was mean to him, the spirit might be upset and with-
draw from this world.
Under the ideology of the patriarchal family, the child becomes
th.e individual successor to his father — actually, then, merely the son
ol a father, and is no longer the independent mediator of spirits
from the ancestral world. But this is now the only spiritual lineage
ixii which the son can perpetuate himself in turn." This is why, too,
fathers could be despotic with their children: they were merely
objects to whom one had oneself given life. Today we are shocked
when we read of the ancient Greek who blinded his sons for dis-
obeying him and going off to war — but their lives were literally
his personal property, and he had this authority and used it.
What is of great interest in this development is the intimate
unnity of patriarchal family ideology with that of kingship. The
king represented the new fountainhead of spiritual power in which
thie subjects were nourished. In primitive society the entire group
hiad created magical power by means of the jointly celebrated ritual.
B'ut with the gradual development of specialized ritualists and priests,
the power to create power often fell to a special class and was no
hunger the possession of the whole collectivity. Where this happened
it helped to turn the average man into an impotent subject. In many
agrarian societies the priests went on to develop astronomy, calen-
dars, and rituals of power for the control of nature via magic,
whereas previously each person had helped exercise such control
via the communal rituals. Without the priests’ calendar, how would
the farmer know the auspicious days for planting? With their
astronomy the priests accrued the tremendous prestige of predicting
eclipses; and then they exercised the fantastic power of bringing
back the sun out of the clutches of darkness. Not only did they
save the world from chaos in such ways, but in some places (e.g.,
India) they possessed the secret ritual for the creation of the king's
power. Often the kings and priests were solidly allied in a structure
of domination that monopolized all sacred power; this completed
the development from the tribal level where the shaman would
sometimes ally with the chief. All the poor subject could do in
these societies was to grovel to the king and bring food to the
priests in order to get a mite of magical protective power. The
fathers imitated the kings so as to reenact the divine plan in their
own homes; in this way they got a reflection of the kings powers.
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ESCAPE FROM EVIL
As Confucian thought had it, if the gentlemen observed proper
ritual behavior, the kingdom would flourish. So long as everyone
in the kingdom copied the king, fathered sons, married off daugh-
ters, kept order in the family, and observed the household rituals,
the balance of nature would not be upset in the “divine house-
hold.”
All this took place in the divine cities, which themselves were
eternal, connected to heaven (Babylon equals Gate of the Gods),
and protected and regenerated by the priestly rituals. Each city
with its pyramidal temples and towers rose like a spire to penetrate
the sky, the dimensions of invisible power, and to bathe itself in it.
We can still feel this in the Gothic cathedral which penetrated
heaven and was bathed in the light and powers of heaven. Rome
is called “the eternal city” not because today tourists can always go
back and find her as she was when they first visited her a few
decades ago, but because she was regenerated in ancient times by
centennial rituals, and was thought to have so much power sustain-
ing her that she would never falter. One of the strong impetuses to
the triumph of Christianity was the increasing sackings of Rome
by the barbarians, which showed everyone that something was
wrong with the old powers and some new magical sources had to be
tapped.
The divine king in the sacred city bathing the holy empire —
these were a power tool in which the fathers nourished themselves
while they assured their own perpetuation in the person of their
sons. We can see that this represents a new kind of unification
experience, with a focal point of power, that in its own way tries
to recapture the intense unity of primitive society, with its focus of
power in the clan and the ancestral spirits. The emperors and kings
who proclaimed themselves divine did not do so out of mere mega-
lomania, but out of a real need for a unification of experience, a
simplification of it, and a rooting of it in a secure source of power.
The leader, like the people, senses a need for a strongly focused
moral unity of the sprawling and now senseless diversity of the
kingdom, and he tries to embody it in his own person:
By proclaiming themselves gods of empire, Sargon and Rameses wished
to realize in their own persons that mystic or religious unity which once
The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power 69
constituted the strength of the clan, which still maintained the unity of
the kingdom, and which could alone form the tie between all the peoples
of an empire. Alexander the Great, the Ptolemies, and the Caesars, will,
in their turn, impose upon their subjects the worship of the sovereign,
not so much out of vanity as to consolidate moral unity. . . . And so
through its mystic principle the clan has survived in the empire. 9
We see this in Hindu, Confucian, and Japanese thought as well as
Near Eastern and Mediterranean thought. 10
The New Promise of the “Era of the Son”
Christianity actually entered the confusion of the Roman world in
order to simplify it and to lighten the terrible burdens of the mis-
carried “sexual era,” as Rank so well understood. He saw Chris-
tianity as the “era of the son” in revolt against the oppressions and
inequalities of the era of the family. Under Christianity the spiritual
fatherhood of Christ took the place of biological fatherhood of the
family. Christ posed a totally new and radical question: “Who are
my mother and my brothers?” The son was now completely indepen-
dent; he could freely choose his own spiritual father and was no
longer bound by the fatalities of heredity. The individual could
fashion his own salvation, independent of any earthly authority.
Christianity was a great democratization that put spiritual power
right back into the hands of the single individual and in one blow
wiped away the inequalities of the disposessed and the slaves that
had gradually and inexorably developed since the breakup of the
primitive world and that had assumed such grotesque proportions in
the mad drivenness of the Mediterranean world. As many historical
scholars have pointed out, Christianity in this sense dipped back
into paganism, into primitive communalism, and extended it beyond
the tribe. Rank understood this too — Christianity as a new form of
democratic, universal, magical self -renewal. 11 The person recaptured
some of the spiritual integrity that the primitive had enjoyed.
But as in all things human, the whole picture is ambiguous and
confused, far different from the ideal promise. Actually Christianity
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ESCAPE FROM EVIL
was harnessed by the state, and its power was infused into the
institution of kingship to keep its authority; the attack on the
fatality of biology, the accidents of heredity, was put into the
service of the ideology of the family, and it reinforced patriarchy.
We still see this in Roman Catholic countries today. In other words,
Christianity failed to establish the universal democratic equality
that it had promised historically — the reinstitution of the sacred
primitive community plus a valuation of the individual person that
had not existed before. Such a revolution in thought and in social
forms would have kept everything that was best in the primitive
world view, and at the same time it would have liberated the per-
son from the dead weight of communal constraint and conser-
vatism that choked off individual initiative and development. Ob-
viously, this failure of Christianity was intimately tied up with the
general problem of class, slavery, real economic inequality. These
were simply too massive and ingrained in the whole fabric of
ancient society to be abolished by a new ideology. This had been
the tragedy that Rome herself was unable to resolve. As Rank under-
stood, Rome created a new type of citizen but failed to carry
through and create the necessary economic equality of the families,
which was the only thing that could guarantee the new structure.
After all, if each man was a king in his own family, he had to be an
equal king with all others; otherwise the designation lost all mean-
ing. Theoretically, the state was dedicated to this kind of democracy
because it arrogated to itself the power to hold everything in
balance, to checkmate competing powers and to protect the citizens
against each other. In the earlier chiefdoms, the kin groups still
kept their power, and there was no one to keep them from feuding
among themselves. The chief’s kin group was usually the strongest,
and he could punish those who attacked him, but he did not
monopolize force as the later state did; he could not, for example,
compel the people to go to war. The crucial characteristic of the
state, and the hallmark of its genuine power and tyranny, was that
it could compel its subjects to go to war. And this was because the
power of each family was given over to the state; the idea was that
this would prevent the social misuse of power. This made the state
a kind of “power-bank,” as Rank put it 12 but the state never used
this power to abolish economic inequalities; as a result it actually
The New Historical Forms of Immortality Power 71
misused the social power entrusted to it by the families and held
them in unequal bondage. 1 ®
Christianity, too, perpetuated this economic inequality and
slavishness of the would-be free, democratic citizen; and there
never has been, historically, any fundamental change in the massive
structure of domination and exploitation represented by the state
after the decline of primitive society. The Reformation was a late
attempt to reassert the promise of early Christianity — true individ-
ual power and equality — but it too failed by being absorbed in the
unequal state scramble. It was not until World War I that the
whole structure finally crumbled, after the rumbling blow given
by the French Revolution: the patriarchal family, divine monarchy,
the dominance of the Church, the credibility of the democratic state
in its promise of true equality. The Soviets alone pushed several
of these down a mine shaft along with the czar. We are struggling
today in the mire of this very discredit of all overlapping traditional
immortality symbols. As Rank understood, the struggle actually be-
gan at the time of the Roman Empire, and we have still not resolved
it. 14 We consult astrology charts like the Babylonians, try to make
our children into our own image with a firm hand like the Romans,
elbow others to get a breath-quickening glimpse of the queen in
her ritual procession, and confess to the priests and attend church.
And we wonder why, with all this power capital drawn from so
many sources, we are deeply anxious about th6 meaning of our
lives. The reason is plain enough: none of these, nor all of them
taken together, represents an integrated world conception into
which we fit ourselves with pure belief and trust.
Not that the promise of the ancient world and of Christianity
failed completely. Something potentially great did emerge out of
them: what Rank called the “era of psychological man.” We can
look at it as a development out of the “era of the son.” It took the
form of a new kind of scientific individualism that burst out of the
Renaissance and the Reformation. It represented a new power
candidate for replacing all the previous ideologies of immortality,
but now an almost completely and unashamedly secular one. This
was a new Faustian pursuit of immortality through one’s own acts,
his own works, his own discovery of truth. This was a kind of
secular-humanist immortality based on the gifts of the individual.
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ESCAPE FROM EVIL
Instead of having one hero chieftain leading a tribe or a kingdom
or one hero savior leading all of mankind, society would now be-
come the breeding ground for the development of as many heroes
as possible, individual geniuses in great number who would enrich
mankind. This was the explicit program of Enlightenment thinkers
and of the ideology of modern Jeffersonian democracy.
But alas it has been our sad experience that the new scientific
Faustian man too has failed — in two resounding ways, just as Rank
understood. These two ways almost all by themselves sum up the
crisis of the end of our century. For one thing, modern democratic
ideology simply repeated the failure of Rome and of Christianity: it
did not eliminate economic inequality . 15 And so it was caught in
the same fundamental and tragic contradictions as its predecessors.
Second, the hope of Faustian man was that he would discover
Truth, obtain the secret to the workings of nature, and so assure the
complete triumph of man over nature, his apotheosis on earth. Not
only has Faustian man failed to do this, but he is actually ruining
the very theater of his own immortality with his own poisonous
and madly driven works; once he had eclipsed the sacred dimension,
he had only the earth left to testify to the value of his life. This is
why, I think, even one-dimensional politicians and bureaucrats, in
both capitalist and communist countries, are becoming anxious
about environmental collapse; the earth is the only area of self-
perpetuation in the new ideology of Faustian man.®
® Thus Rank’s view of succession of “immortality-ideologies” in history. I
don’t want to get into a scholarly evaluation of Rank here, but only to cau-
tion the reader not to be too critical of Rank’s "stages” of the evolution of
consciousness. His work today gives the impression of an amateurish precision,
of the kind of global judgments on history that early psychoanalysts liked to
make. But this would not be fair to Rank. He was trying to put order into
an immense mass of historical-psychological fact, and he forced a sharp con-
ceptualization of it in order to "get it out” so that we could possess it and
hopefully use it. I agree with Progoff’s judgment that Rank was too sophis-
ticated a scholar to hold to a rigid theory of historical stages. Cf. I. Progoff,
The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: Dell, 1964), pp. 209, 215.
I think Rank’s “eras” should be taken for the suggestivevalue they have, and
as a basis for a really to-be-worked-out historical psychology; what they do is
to bring out most forcefully the problem of immortality as a connecting
thread throughout the historical forms of human arrangements. As we shall see
in the next chapter. Brown brought out that other thread that cut through
the "eras” and helped to blur them: the continuing immortality ideology
of money.
CHAPTER SIX
Money: The New Universal
Immortality Ideology
The adult flight from death — the immortality
promised in all religions, the immortality of
familial corporations, the immortality of cultural
achievements — perpetuates the Oedipal project
of becoming father of oneself: adult sublimation
continues the Oedipal project. . . . Thus man
acquires a soul distinct from his body, and a
superorganic culture which perpetuates the revolt
against organic dependence on the mother. The
soul and the superorganic culture perpetuate both
the Oedipal causa sui project and that horror of
biological fact which is the essence of the
castration complex.
Norman O. Brown 1
At the beginning of the last chapter I said that there were two
recent epoch-making orderings of history, and now we are ready
to take up the second — the work of Norman O. Brown. I think that
Rank and Brown taken together represent a massive double ex-
posure of the basic motives of the human condition; I don’t believe
that previous modes of thought about man in society can long
remain unaffected by their work. For his sweep over history Brown
used the identical unifying principle of Rank: the universal urge
to immortality. And so he could arrive at exactly the conclusion of
Rank: if immortality is the unchangeable motive, then all social
custom is essentially sacred . 2 One of the main contributions of
Brown’s Life against Death was to pull together the basic ideas for
a sacred theory of money power. It is all contained in his astonish-
ing and regaling chapter titled “Filthy Lucre.” As a condensed
73
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ESCAPE FROM EVIL
synthesis of significant ideas it is one of the great essays in the
history of thought. Let me just give a sketch of Brown’s thesis on
money, to see how it supports and confirms Rank’s and how it adds
its own vital insight into the evolution of new structures of power.
We saw that with the decline of the primitive world and with
the rise of kingship men came to imitate kings in order to get
power. Now what did kings pursue besides immortality in the royal
family? Why of course: silks, courtesans, fine swords, horses and mon-
uments, city palaces and country estates — all the things that can be
bought with gold. If you gained immortality by leaving behind earthly
sons, why not equally gain it by leaving behind vast accumulations
of other physical mementos to your image? And so the pursuit of
money was also opened up to the average man; gold became the
new immortality symbol. In the temple buildings, palaces, and
monuments of the new cities we see a new kind of power being
generated. No longer the power of the totemic communion of
persons, but the power of the testimonial of piles of stone and gold.
As Brown so succinctly put it:
In monumental form, as money or as the city itself, each generation
inherits the ascetic achievements of its ancestors ... as a debt to be
paid by further accumulation of monuments. Through the city the sins
of the fathers are visited upon the children, every city has a history and
a rate of interest . 3
In other words, the new patriarchy passes not only family im-
mortality to the son, but also accumulated gold, property, and
interest — and the duty to accumulate these in tum. The son assures
his own self-perpetuation by being “greater” than the father: by
leaving behind a larger mark. Immortality comes to reside no longer
in the invisible world of power, but in the very visible one, and
“death is overcome by accumulating time-defying monuments. These
accumulations of stone and gold make possible the discovery of
the immortal soul. . . . Death is overcome on condition that the
real actuality of life pass into these immortal and dead things;
money is the man; the immortality of the estate or a corporation
resides in the dead things which alone endure .” 4 The pyramid
directed its hope of immortality to the sky which it tried to pene-
Money: The New Universal Immortality Ideology 75
trate, but it displayed itself before men and laid its heavy burden
on their backs.
Brown gave us a more incisive picture than Rank, then, by fixing
firmly on the mechanism of the corruption of the primitive. To
carry through with our metaphor, if Rank showed the heartbeat of
history, Brown exposed the material that flowed in the veins, and
that material was gold. Man now took the sacred and tried to give
it monumental, enduring form; it was natural, then, that in the city
he finally settled upon the most durable precious metals. If the
new dramatization of immortality was to be in the power and
glitter of the visible rather than the invocation of the invisible,
then that drama had to be transferred from the group to the new
magic object, money. Money is the new “totemic” possession. 5
This equation of money and totemic spirits is not meant to be
frivolous. With the decline of tribal society, rituals were also dis-
credited. Yet man needed new rituals because they gave order and
form to society and magically tied the whole world of experience
together. And this is probably the fundamental reason that money
entered the picture in the ancient world with such ineluctable
force: it filled the vacuum left by ritual and itself became the new
ritual focus. Mary Douglas makes just this equation of money and
ritual in a very powerful way:
Money provides a fixed, external, recognizable sign for what would be
confused, contradictable operations: ritual makes visible external signs
of internal states. Money mediates transactions; ritual mediates ex-
perience, including social experience. Money provides a standard for
measuring worth; ritual standardizes situations, and so helps to evalu-
ate them. Money makes a link between the present and the future, so
does ritual. The more we reflect on the richness of the metaphor, the
more it becomes clear that this is no metaphor. Money is only an extreme
and specialized type of ritual. 6
Let us see how the ritual fascination of money began in the
ancient world, and how it took over as an immortality focus in
itself. One of the fascinating chapters in history is the evolution of
money — all the more so since it has yet to be written, as Brown
says. 7 One of the reasons it isn’t written is that the origin of money
is shrouded in prehistory; another is that its development must have
