| In the following two paragraphs, extracted from Shamanism and Drug Propaganda, Dan Russell describes how these early events of kingship control came about: “The large-scale mining of lapis lazuli, turquoise, marble, alabaster, diorite, carnelian, jasper, obsidian, amber, copper, gold, silver, cinnabar, lead, tin, iron, zinc, manganese, arsenic, sulphur and salt drove the invention of chattel slavery. State monopolies of the copper trade, practices by most ancient empires, allowed control of the production of weapons. The discoveries that molten arsenic and tin would turn copper into bronze, that silver could be extracted from both lead and copper ore, and gold from quartz, only served to increase the value of slaves, so did the great municipal building projects. Slaves became as important to the state trading monopolies as the precious metals themselves.” (10) Continuing, Russel cites Cambridge Ancient History: “Hammurabi’s Code (Babylon c. 1700 BC), and the virtually identical earlier Sumerian Codes we have, are typical of the law codes of most of Babylon’s trading partners. They are largely concerned with management of the slave system and protection of governmental fiscal prerogatives. (11) Society was divided into ‘men, subjects, and slaves’ in Hammurabi’s 300 paragraph code. These were subdivided into official guilds: craft, priestly, military, farm, etc. The guilds were occupation-specific; there were architects, painters, potters, sculptors, smiths, fowlers, wainwrights and launderers. Membership in a guild was usually hereditary, an element of clan identification, and failure to fulfil a hereditary obligation could be punished by death or reduction to slavery. About 100 of the 300 paragraphs of Hammurabi’s Code refer directly to the rules governing slavery.” (12) Based on this information we can see that it would have been easy to control power and essentially all things related to human activity, if the only trades could be had by men, and passed down through their fathers. It’s also very easy to see the possibility of the horse-drawn chariot, aka “war machine” as a means of taking territory from every early matriarchal tribe and either slaughtering their families and kin or taking them as slaves. One of the recurring themes we will see in mythical lore repeated ad nauseum, is the concept that the king may not have an heir to the throne. The reason this is such an important myth of course, is because if “kinship” is lost, “kingship” is lost. One of the texts discovered at Ras Shamra concerns a King Keret, where he is bemoaning the loss of seven successive wives which has him depressed because he thinks he will have no heir. El appears to him in a dream and instructs him to invade a neighboring kingdom and take away Huray, the daughter of the king. (Another aspect of Patriarchy and kingship is rape, because this insures an heir in most cases.) King Keret sets out with a prayer and a promise to Ashera of gold and silver (several times Huray’s weight) if he is successful. El blesses him and promises him that Huray will bear him eight sons, the eldest of which |
(Yessub, Yassub, Yassib) will be suckled by Ashera and Anath. Then, over seven years, the children are born. But King Keret breaks his promise to Ashera and fails to deliver on the gold and silver, so he falls ill and cannot maintain the crops and a ceremony is held in Baal’s palace to bring rains. He then thwarts one of his son’s attempts to succeed him. (13) The storyline reveals a little understood aspect of the mythology of kingship. The king is there to insure the fertility of the land, and when he prospers everyone else does as well, but when he fails to do so, he must be sacrificed in order to insure the fertility and allow it to continue on for all life. I am of the opinion that the entire idea of the fertility of the land, came not from the rainfall and the soil making the crops grow, but instead, from spreading around the ground up mushroom and releasing its spores to insure more growths next year. The mythologies were crafted after a spiritual understanding, not one of survival. The cultivation of crops was something that came after humans had discovered their reverence for the mushroom and the god/dess. That is why, in every story, the god is cut to pieces and many times, spread over the land. That is also why some scholars and researchers up to this point, have held that there was a sacrifice of the king, a killing that occurred in ancient times which eventually yielded to something more civilized like emasculation. As well, it is also held by some, that people were sacrificed, then animals, as mankind grew more civilized. We even see a natural progression of early “King Creation myths.” Wasson cites Marco Polo’s words from an Old Italian text, discussing the Uighur, a Mongolian tribe, who believe their ancestors descended from trees: “They say of their Khan who first ruled over them that he was not of human origin, but was born of one of those excrescences on the bark of trees, and that we call esca. From him descended all the other Khans.” Wasson also mentions they have another version of the same myth where two trees played a part in procreating the royal family of the Uighurs, a birch, and an evergreen resembling a pine. Esca is the Italian word for “punk,” the Siberian Fomes fomentarius. (14) There is an old Siberian saying which the local hunters have maintained: “Man was born from a tree. There was a tree, it split in two. Two people came out. One was a man, the other a woman. Until a child was born, they were covered with hair. The first child was born without hair.” (15) (10) Shamanism and Drug propaganda, p. 72; Evans, 4:1:149 (11) Cambridge Ancient History, 2:1:187 (12) Shamanism and Drug propaganda, p. 73-4 (13) Roy Willis, World Mythology, (1993) p. 64 (14) Soma, Wasson, p. 216 (15) Shamanism and Drug Propaganda, p. 13; (Vasilevich in Karl H. Schlesier, The Wolves of Heaven, Univ. Oklahoma Press, 1987: 31) |