Cataloguer/content/books/against-his-story-against-leviathan.md

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title: Against His-story, Against Leviathan!
date: 2024-05-12
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The Ensi knows of a work gang whose supervisor was murdered by zek conspiritors. The murdered man was replaced bya man with a different outlook and altogether different interests. Yet once he was supervisor, the new man did the very same things as the murdered supervisor, and in almost the same manner.
Strange thoughts come to the Ensi’s mind. Could it be, he wonders, that the only man in Ur who is his own man is the Lugal? Now he wonders if even this is true. He has heard of a town whose Lugal was killed along with most of his Ensis in an uprising of zeks. When the Ensi first heard the story, he wasn’t surprised that there was an uproar, that many of the activities which emanated from the Lugal’s will came to a standstill. But now he remembers that very few activities came to a complete halt, even during the interregnum between Lugals. He even remembers that no council of elders replaced the dead Lugal; the elders stayed in the Temple and locked its gates. Many of the town’s activities, important ones and that, went on as before, like the clockwork of the Ensi’s descendants.
Yet stranger thoughts come to the Ensi. It seems to him that the town has a will of its own. But he knows it doesn’t. The only one in town with a will is the Lugal. The Ensis only execute the Lugal’s will. And if the zeks have a will at all, it is a will to break out. The Ensi concludes that it is pointless to think. Thinking is the job of priests and oracles.
One of the Ensi’s distant descendants in a much later Ur, a scribe called Thomas Hobbes, will know that the Ensi is trying to understand Civilization with ideas that come from the state of nature. This Hobbes will know that Ur is no longer in the state of nature, it is no longer a community of self-determined human beings.
* * *
Hobbes will know that Ur is no mere city. Ur is a State, maybe even the first State. And a state, Hobbes will say, is an “artificial animal.” It is something brand new, something neither Man nor Nature dreamt of. It is “that great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State, in Latin Civitas, which is but an artificial man.”
Like the thinking Ensi, Hobbes will know that this artificial man has no life of its own, and he will ask, “may we not say, that all automata (engines that move by themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life?”
--- pp 28--29

The surplus product makes its appearance together with the vessels that hold it. Human communities have long had baskets and vases, although rarely more than they could carry from winter to spring camps. They did not need them. With the rise of the first Leviathan there is a virtual technological revolution in vessel production. Turner, and Mumford before him, mention the proliferation of bins, storage jars and clay vats that now makes its appearance.
In fact Ur, enclosed by walls and stocked with grain, is itself a large vat, a town-sized storage bin.
---p 32

A single view of the hoards gives rise to a new human quality. This quality becomes so widespread that we will not believe it did not always exist: Greed.
You can see that over half the grain in the storage bins rots every year, unused. And you know that in the Zagros Mountains and in the Levant there are camps of foreigners who rarely store enough food to tide them through a hard winter. Those in the Zagros Mountains wear beautiful fur garments, and those in the Levant derive a purple dye from shells.
You, a Priest’s brother and an Ensi’s cousin, set out toward the Zagros Mountains with forty zek-drawn cartloads of grain, a years output of forty zeks. You go at the end of a long, hard winter. You get ten fur robes for every cartload. They claim not to have so many furs. Perhaps it has dawned on them that they are being plundered, that the relation they’ve established with you is not a relation between their furs and your grain, but between themselves and the zeks who harvest the grain, and that you are a thief who is stealing from both.
So you rush back to Ur with your grain and return to the foreigners’ camp with you cousin the Ensi and a band of well-armed men. The Ensi’s men remove the robes from the foreigners’ backs. There still are not enough robes, so the Ensi’s men return to Ur with several of the foreigners’ sons and daughters.
Ur has progressed to the stage of engaging in foreign commerce.
---p 33

Physical removal, namely fleeing or as we will say, dropping out, effectively removes one from the monster’s reach. But ultimately none flee for good, since Leviathan will shrink the size of the world and turn all places of refuge into cleared fields.
And not all communities want to flee. Their valleys, groves and oases, the places where their ancestors are buried, are filled with familiar and often friendly spirits. Such a place is sacred. It is the center of the world. The landmarks of the place are the orienting principles of an individual’s psyche. Life has no meaning without them. For such a community, leaving its place is equivalent to committing communal suicide.
So they stay where they are. And they are kissed by the monster’s grotesque lips.
---p 35

Pre-state communities were gatherings of living but mortal individuals. All their secrets and all their ways were passed on directly, by word of mouth. If the keeper of important uncommunicated secrets died, her secrets died with her. Enmities and grudges died with their holders. The visions and the ways were as varied as the individuals who experienced and practiced them; that’s why there was such a richness. But the visions and ways were as mortal as the people. Mortality is an inseparable part of Life: it is Life’s end.
We will keep projecting modern institutions into the state of nature. There were no institutions in the state of nature.
Institutions are impersonal and immortal. They share this immortality with no living beings under the sun. Of course they are not living beings. They are segments of a carcass. Institutions are not a part of Life but a part of Death. And Death cannot die.
Ensis die and zeks die, but the labor gang “lives” on. Generals and soldiers die, but Ur’s army “lives” on and in fact grows larger and deadlier. Death’s realm grows but the living die. This creates problems that resisters have not, so far, been able to deal with.
---p 36

It is not enough to say that people are constrained. The first captured zeks may do it only because they are physically constrained, but physical constraint no longer explains why the children of zeks stick to their levers. It’s not that constraint vanishes. It doesn’t. Labor is always forced labor. But something else happens, something that supplements the physical constraint.
At first the imposed task is taken on as a burden. The newly captured zek knows that he is not a ditch-repairman, he knows that he is a free Canaanite filled to the brim with ecstatic life, for he still feels the spirits of the Levantine mountains and forests throbbing inside him. The ditch-fixing is something he takes on to keep from being slaughtered; it is something he merely wears, like a heavy armor or an ugly mask. He knows he will throw off the armor as soon as the Ensi’s back is turned.
But the tragedy of it is that the longer he wears the armor, the less able he is to remove it. The armor sticks to his body. The mask becomes glued to his face. Attempts to remove the mask become increasingly painful, for the skin tends to come off with it. There’s still a human face below the mask, just as there’s still a potentially free body below the armor, but merely airing them takes almost superhuman effort.
And as if all this weren’t bad enough, something starts to happen to the individual’s inner life, his ecstasy. This starts to dry up. Just as the former community’s living spirits shriveled and died when they were confined to the Temple, so the individual’s spirit shrivels and dies inside the armor. His spirit can breathe in a closed jar no better than the god could. It suffocates. And as the Life inside him shrivels it leaves a growing vacuum. The yawning abyss is filled as quickly as it empties, but not by ecstasy, not by living spirits. The empty space is filled with springs and wheels, with dead things, with Leviathan’s substance.
---p 41

But soon Ramses’ Leviathan decomposed as surely as his foe’s. A palace conspiracy almost did the Pharaoh in. Zeks in labor gangs refused, simply refused to perform their assigned tasks. This was an early recorded instance of a strike. The concern expressed by the scribes suggest it might even have been a general strike.
---p 57

Moses is neither a modernizer nor a primitivist. It is clear that he is an armored man who is unable to remove his armor. He is like Lenin. He seeks within, but finds no destination there; all he finds in himself is bits of Leviathanic armor. He hates Ur and Ashur, and his contemporary Tukulti Ninurta makes him shake with rage. But the only voice inside him is the voice of Lugalzaggizi, the voice of the Almighty, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Male of Males. Lenin will hear the voice of Electrification. Yet Moses hates every specific King of Kings, just as Lenin will hate capitalists. Moses abstracts the King, makes him a god, just as Lenin will abstract Electrification and make it Communism.
By this act Moses projects his inner emptiness, his armor, his own dead spirit, into the very Cosmos.
If any in that group think of Eden as a Lugal’s garden, it is Moses. The gods are all dead for this upper class Egyptian. For him there is no Eden, there is only Leviathan.
---p 58

Moses dies, but the Leviathan he sets in motion is immortal, and if in time it, too, will be swallowed, its Concept will one day light the way of monstrosities undreamt by Lugalzaggizi or Moses.
> And thou shalt consume all the peoples that the Lord thy God shall deliver unto thee; thine eye shall not pity them...
As Turner will observe, this is a description of things to come; this already foresees the “dark clouds over Africa, the Americas, the Far East, until finally even the remotest islands and jungle enclaves are struck by fire and sword and by the subtler weapon of conversion by ridicule.” This is already the discovery of the New World.
---p 62

King David’s son inherits the crown and reduces yet more people in the god’s name, and powerful subservient men fill their houses with good things, also in the god’s name, exactly as Babylonians do in Marduk’s name, Assyrians in Ashur’s and Phoenicians in Baal’s. The god’s origins and traits are different, but nothing else is, even after the unified Leviathan splits into two bickering Leviathans called Israel and Judah. The stories are Sumero-Akkadian, the Law is Babylonian, the proverbs are Egyptian, the psalms are Phoenician.
---p 64

The immortals do die, after all, and not only when they’re swallowed by larger Leviathans. The immortals also die when their human contents withdraw and let the carcasses rot. The artificial worms have no life of their own.
Dancers form circles around Cybele, the Earth goddess, and celebrate their recovered freedom. They will still be dancing ten or fifteen generations later when visiting Athenians will describe them as peoples ruled by queens, which is how the later Athenians will understand people who are ruled neither by archons nor by kings.
It would be an exaggeration to say that nothing remains in Anatolia of the Hittite worm. Former conscripts, the iron-armed Mycenean and Ionian bands of male adventurers and killers whose exploits Homer will celebrate, are unhealing wounds left on Cybele’s Anatolian Earth by the late Leviathan. The segments continue to operate. But these segments remain nothing but pests on the outskirts of peaceful villages until the Phoenician octopus fills them out with its purple ooze.
---p 65

Hesiod’s remembrance of things past gives him a power Moses had lacked: the power to remove his Leviathanic mask while still enmeshed in a Leviathanic web. We will call such a power “critical theory,” an insipid name for it. This power will later be shaped into a dagger with two edges, but not by the Greeks to whom Hesiod gives it.
---p 71

The Phoenician octopus and its later Greek, Venetian and other offspring will come to be seen as something altogether different from the Assyrian worm. There will even be those who will see the octopus as a form of human freedom. I intend to show that this is an optical illusion.
There is no doubt that the two Leviathans differ. The artificial worm’s claws and fangs, its armies, are usually attached to the body, whereas the tentacles of the artificial octopus detach themselves from the body and can be said to move about freely, especially if the tentacles are ships. The worm is largely landborne whereas the octopus tends to be seaborne.
There is no doubt that two different types are in question. The point is that these are not types of human community but types of Leviathan. Both are what Hobbes will call “artificial men.” Each of them is an automaton, a machine, and like other machines it can sometimes be converted or adapted to do what the other does.
The main difference between them does not lie in the way the tentacles move nor in the medium through which they move nor in the size of the head, but rather in the way the two automata use the already-mentioned surplus. Both live off the surplus product of zeks’ labor. But the worm uses most of its surplus to enlarge its head and body, its officials and armies, whereas the octopus keeps most of its surplus continually circulating between sources and destinations.
This different treatment of the surplus gives each a specific advantage over the other. The one tends to have greater wealth, the other greater power. An efficient and flexible octopus—and the Phoenician cities seem to have been both—can suck an ever greater part of Mother Earth into its tentacles. The Phoenicians not only could but apparently did carry a vast proportion of plundered and denatured Biosphere in the holds of their ships. But with all this wealth, the Phoenician octopus was still at a disadvantage to the Assyrian worm in terms of power, as a single campaign led by the third Tiglathpileser revealed.
---p 72

When the third Tiglathpileser’s war engines knock down Phoenicia’s gates, the Assyrians do not inherit a world empire of floating tentacles. The Assyrian militarists do not need to deport Phoenicia’s merchants, and they may not even want the floating empire to end. But the moment their hungry armies plunder the ships’ holds, the Phoenician octopus collapses. All that’s left of it are the pieces of tentacles beyond Assyria’s reach, the outposts on both shores of the Mediterranean and on the Atlantic. The parent of all these outposts rots like the empty ships in its harbors. The ships, whose holds now contain only what’s left of a once lush Levantine forest, will eventually sink. The trees in the ships’ holds will have no heirs because the soil on which they grew has been washing into the sea since the day it lost its cover. This soil, still rich with living organisms, will join the sunken ships in the bottom of the Mediterranean, where both will gradually turn into offshore oil.
---p 73

Phoenician seaborne octopus was initially nothing but a tentacle or outgrowth of Sumerian and Egyptian landborne worms, and one might wonder how the octopus managed to stay loose for as long as it did, especially in view of its unavoidable military inferiority vis-a-vis the Assyrian monster.
We will have to keep reminding ourselves that the landed worm is a coherent and efficient entity only in the wishful thinking of a Hobbes. Continual decomposition is the normal state of artificial worms in the field. The human beings reduced to springs and wheels never cease to resist this reduction. The beast’s military campaigns against external as well as internal resisters, namely its attempts to halt the decomposition, are in fact the stuff of His-story.
---ibid

The final destruction of Carthage has no precedent in the SUmerian, Akkadian or even Assyrian past. The last independent Phoenician city is isolated, besieged, attacked, totally destroyed and then burned. Its inhabitants are scattered to the world’s four corners as slaves. Still not satisfied, the Romans flatten what buildings and walls remain standing, plow the ground and sow it with salt, so that neither a house nor a crop will ever rise where Carthage once stood, so that the very memory of the city’s existence will be erased.
The rest of the story is equally revolting. North Africa, Iberia, Gaul, Macedonia, Thrace, Anatolia, the Levant, all become Rome. The inhabitants are either killed or enslaved or transformed into killing machines. Small Leviathans as well as free communities are shattered. Ancient traditions are broken and forgotten. Human beings are killed or maimed.
Yet how many pages will be devoted to the greatness of Rome! And how many pages to the technological ingenuity of Rome’s war engines! Why not praise death itself? Death is an even greater killer than Rome. Is it the ornamented Greek palaces and monuments in the capital that make the brutality so reputable? If so, then to win such praie, Death need only hire Greek artists.
---pp 97--98

Rome’s greatness will be posthumous. Among those in Rome’s entrails, only the few in the worm’s head love it; all others hate it, and many try daily to destroy it.
Those in the head are few; they are the nobility, including generals and politicians, the Latifundia owners, and those the Romans call Equites.
These Equites are confidence men on horseback. They are the hustlers and contractors who get things done. They command slave gangs in olive groves and vineyards. They do the importing, the exporting and the arranging. They are tax farmers and they are pirates. They place themselves at every interstice and bottleneck of the unwieldy empire. In a future Rome across the great water, such confidence men will be called Businessmen.
All these people love Rome.
The growing number of dehumanized hangers-on for whom the circuses and games are performed also love Rome. But these lovers no longer think of the brutality or the pluder as offerings to the gods. They love the plunder and brutality as such. They are becoming what we will call Sadists.
The beloved of Sadists are Masochists, but the majority of people have not yet sunk to that level. The vast majority of the Res Publica’s population consists of zeks, internal and external zeks: slaves and provincials. In the capital city alone there are a quarter of a million slaves. The internal zeks rebel continually despite the intimidating omnipresence of the world’s strongest garrisons. Some slave revolts become insurrections embracing whole regions, and in three known cases, during a period of two generations, insurgent slaves hold their own against Roman armies for as long as three years.
The provincials resist as fiercely as the slaves. Hardly a year passes without expeditions to massacre and repress rebels.
And the enormous legions themselves give rise to ever greater rebellions. The armies have to be fed. Tax farmers squeeze provincials who have already been plundered by the passing legions. And then retired soldiers return to the provinces as propiretors of the provincials’ lands, rewarded for the years of loyal service. The rebellions and uprisings against this regime last years, even decades, and are too numerous to list.
The ongoing repression of so many rebels on all fronts is what gives rise to the hardened organizers of mass murders who officiate over the graduation of the Res Publica to a yet higher stage. Caesar is the killer who reduces the west, Pompey the killer who reduces the east, Crassus the killer who lines the roads of Italy itself with six thousand crucified slaves.
Three mass murderers cannot share a single crown, and Caesar, to be translated as Tsar and Kaiser, becomes the face of what Hobbes will call the Artificial Man.
The world-embracing Res Publica becomes a single man’s plaything, an Empire.
After swallowing Egypt and suppressing the noblemen who preferred the former Public Thing, another mass murderer, Octavian, becomes the Sun, Pontifex Maximus, earthly incarnation of the abstraction called Optimus Maximus, the Latin version of the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.
---pp 98--99

The Roman Empire continues to decompose rapidly-but not rapidly enough for the resisters. Every year brings new surprises; every season more springs pop, more wheels get jammed. But the artificial worm lingers on, and it keeps on lingering far too long for any resistance movement to remain what it was.
It must be remembered that machines have the perverse ability to do the same thing the same way for as long as they operate. The ability is built into machines. But people do not have this ability. They change, they die, they are replaced by others who perceive and behave differently.
The early resisters have some clear and powerful conceptions; the generations that follow them eventually invert every one of these conceptions and turn the initial commitment on its head.
In retrospect we can see that the paths of betrayal are already paved before anyone has recourse to them, but this tells why the betrayal follows these paths, not why the betrayal takes place.
I think the explanation is to be sought in the Leviathan first, and only secondly in the baggage inherited by the initial resisters.
---p 111

Mani does no reconcile himself to the dark Leviathanic world. He’s convinced that light will prevail, even if fourteen hundred years of unceasing fire are needed to burn the monster down. King Shapur’s successor Vahram imprisons the aging rebel, and established Zarathustrian priests have him murdered in prison.
---p 115

The inner putrefaction of the Roman Leviathan is so advanced that none can grasp why this monster still stands. There are no longer poets or architects who ornament the brutality. The only thoughts expressed are the thoughts of resisters. The only thoughts about Rome are speculations about the agency that will at long last topple the lingering carcass.
---ibid

The attempt to eliminate human diversity fails. As soon as all non-Christian beliefs and ceremonies are eliminated, the same diversity of beliefs and ceremonies reappears among the Christians themselves, and the war against outsiders continues as a war against schismatics and heretics among the insiders.
---p 121

Arabia becomes increasingly Leviathanized.
For untold ages Arabia has been encircled by abominable places where the rich gouge the poor, where kin and friends cheat each other, where permanent overmen lord it over hereditary underlings. And now there are Arabs who consider such places Paradise and want to turn Arabia into such a place.
The camel driver and his friends are saddened, perhaps incensed by this. They know that the Roman and Persian worlds are not the merciful god’s Paradise but the devil’s. The visionary Muhammad knows that Paradise is like the place the Jews call Eden, a real place located somewhere in Yemen or in Abyssinia before the days of big armies and gouging merchants. He knows that Arabia is no longer Paradise, but it is not yet its opposite. People still treat their kin as kin. Few neglect the poor, the widows and the orphans. Some are indecently rich, but even they don’t lord it over anyone, for they know their good fortune may not last.
Muhammad and his friends cannot do anything about the Romans and the Persians. But they can raid the caravans of the Quraysh and distribute the supplies among the poor.
---p 128

**Leviathan, that unintended excrescene that grows out of human communities and then liquidates them**, once again wears the mantle of yet another liquidated community.
---p 131

Abbasid islam is the heir of some of the world’s main landworms, but also of the Phoenician octopus.
---ibid

The first Muslims as well as their prophet were caravan drivers, and they put the ambience, the precepts as well as the experience of caravan drivers into the Book that serves as pretext and guide for the whole Islamic Empire, the Quran.
The Abbasid Caliphs and their network of governors and armies are only a part of the Islamic Leviathan. This part consists of a landowning oligarchy with all the Sassanid Persian traditions except the official language (and even the language reverts to Persian in certain regions). The monarch is an absolute autocrat who rules through a vizier, a police, spies and armies. The entire establishment is supported by traditional methods of plunder and extortion, imposed externally on foreigners who are expropriated and enslaved, internally on women who are enslaved and on peasants who are reduced to agricultural zeks.
In all this, the Islamic Leviathan does not differ from Assyria.
But this is not the part of Islam that spreads the Quran as far south as central Africa and as far east as Indonesia. The initial fervor of armies of egalitarians embarking on holy wars against oligarchic monsters disappears when the armies are led by oligarchs. The size of this Leviathan would be small if the agents of it spread were viziers and generals.
After the initial military success, Islam spread by its other part, a part that consists of the heirs of the Arabian camel nomads. It is the caravan drivers, not the viziers, who cherish the Quran; it is they who are the Imams (teachers) and Ulama (learned men); it is they who carry Islam to realms not reached by the Caliph’s armies. And it is they who persecute and liquidate nature-lovers, Manicheans and all other “idolaters and heretics” who refuse to be reduced to dependent factors in a network of circulating commodities.
---pp 132--133

People to the north of Gaul, free people who had gone where pleased when they pleased, pause before they enter Roman Gaul, for they enter at the risk of their lives. When they return to Gaul in a different season, then find that a yet larger portion of the world’s land has turned lethal to freedom and life. It is as if the known world were sinking into the sea.
The loss is tragic. We well be able to imagine how those northerners felt about the warmth and beauty of the Mediterranean’s shores because we will know how later northerners will feel.
Some few people may be inhospitable and warlike, but no people can make a portion of the world off limits to a single bird, animal or person. The very notion is repugnant to free people. Not even gods have the power to keep people from going where they please.
The northerners enrage the Roman border guards in skirmishes, but the northerners invariably lose; they are massacred. Those Roman fight like unreal things; they walk directly into ambushes; they don’t flee even when half their own men fall; they just keep on advancing and killing; there fear on the faces of individual men but the column has no fear; it isn’t human.
We will know absolutely nothing about this part of the story because the people who live it take their knowledge to their graves. But it does not take much imagination to suppose that before long most northerners know that the world’s south is off limits to them, that half the world is occupied by something murderous and inhuman.
We will know from Roman writers that the skirmishes become more frequent, that several federated bands gang up against Roman strongholds. When Franks are first mentioned by name, they arrive with Turkic-speaking Alans who originate near China. **The two groups may not know each other’s language, but they understand each other perfectly. They understand that the entire lower half of the world is occupied by something violent beyond description; they understand that if that thing continues to spread, it means the end of freedom and the end of life.**
---p 138

Western Eurasia will be treated like a single entity with a continuous story because trained falsifiers will have a monopoly on the West’s record keeping.
The Roman Catholic chroniclers of the heavenly and earthly Leviathan are schooled to see unity and continuity where there is none, to see what they’re looking for, not what they’re looking at. They tell of the Earthly City even when cities disappear from the West, when there is no Leviathanic unity nor continuity but only dismemberment and decomposition.
---p 153

**Increasingly enmeshed by Leviathanic relations of their own making, unwittingly losing what they’re intending to defend**, the Moravians succeed in repulsing at least two major armies of Frankish invaders and in expanding their defensive league over regions later called Slovakia, Bohemia, northern Hungary and southern Poland.
---p 159

The Moravian Leviathan, with its population of cultivators who share a common language and traditions, its centralized military organization and its bureaucracy of ecclesiastical clerks, may have affinities with the early Roman Res-Publica. It has no affinities at all with the Roman or Frankish Empires. It is a precursor of what we will call a “nation state,” an early gravedigger of everything Frankish, Roman, Catholic and Imperial…
It is true that the communities of Moravian cultivators gain nothing from the Catholic bureaucrats who administer their initially defensive league. However, Moravians happen to be among the few who actually read the Book of the Catholic clerks and call the lies of the Catholic establishment.
It is true that the Moravian State lasts for only a generation before it is ruined by angry Magyar Huns. But this State is immediately followed by a long line of successors. It is already the prototype of the Leviathanic form that will sweep liege-lords and manors from the field.
---p 160

**The Roman worm which the Church tried to revive during a millenium is replaced by a plethora of landborne and seaborne octopus-shaped Leviathans, by Meccas, Medinas and miniature Baghdads, by a network of Venices, each devoted to monopolizing the whole field, each considering itself an Athens.**
---p 169

Like all the Westerners’ later religious, political and commercial propaganda, the Holy War against Infidels is a tissue of lies which has something for everyone, and what it offers to each is incompatible with what it offers all others. It offers some the prospect of becoming what they no longer are, others the prospect of becoming what they never were.
Under the banner of the big lie, people whose free communities are repressed beyond retrieval nevertheless retrieve lost communities, lost kinship and lost freedom, but only during the instant when they slaughter imagined enemies of all they lost.
Fields of corpses are the confirmation of the Westerners’ regeneration. The lost humanity is regained by means of a sacrificial act. The humanity of others is the offering.
The massacre of Jews at home is only a preparation, a mere rehearsal for the first act of the holy war. Turner will say,
> It is the Crusades that truly commence the pattern of large-scale, international Christian violence against all unbelievers that at last bear arms its cindered fruit in the ruins of Tenochtitlan.
---p 170

The so-called productive forces do not give rise to Leviathanic social relations in Western Europe any more than elsewhere. The technology is nothing but the Leviathan’s armory, and both arrive in the West together. The fangs and claws originate in China, Persia, Arabia and elsewhere; they come to the West from Islam, directly or by way of Viking carriers. The vaunted technological ingenuity of the Burghers will be another Western lie. The purpose of this lie will not be primarily to make people proud of the West, but to make zeks proud of the claws and fangs that reduce them to zeks.
* * *
Something else now begins in Western Europe, something we will call “population growth”: a steady increase in human numbers as continuous and persistent as the Leviathan itself. This phenomenon seems to exist only among Leviathanized human beings. Animals as well as human communities in the state of nature do not proliferate their own kind to the point of pushing all others off the field.
We don’t know how animals, wolves for example, limit their numbers, but we know that they do. We also know that some animals, for example locusts, do not do this very well. But locusts periodically end up pushing themselves off the field, so that not even locusts experience ongoing population growth.
Of human communities we know, from their mythologies, that they exist in a cosmic context where every living being and every member of the community has a special meaning. Such communities reproduce their part of the meaningful context, just as Earth reproduces their part of the other varied parts. They venture into meaninglessness only when they are disrupted or threatened with extinction, and even then they do not automatically have recourse to “population growth.”
The zeks of the increasingly Leviathanized West, both urban and rural, no longer exist in a context. Mythologies that filled them with meaning are beyond memory’s reach.
The increasingly numerous urban zeks concentrated in factories are, in fact, despoiled of every last trace of community, and in this sense they are more like domesticated cattle or sheep than like human beings in the state of nature. Zeks do not reproduce a meaningful context. They simply reproduce. No part of the context is up to them, because they are part of no natural context. So-called working communities, namely labor gangs, are as artificial as the Leviathan. They are, in fact, the Leviathan’s springs and wheels, its entrails, in the Crusading West as in the first Sumerian Ur. The concentrated weavers are the first zeks in Europe since the demise of the Roman Leviathan.
Serfs are nevertheless fleeing from manors in order to breathe the free air of town zeks because the serfs themselves are being reduced to agricultural zeks. Later worshippers of a son of Optimus Maximus called Progress will deliberately obscure the despoliation of planters and cultivators; they will describe a steady ascent from a hellish Dark Age to an electrically illuminated Heaven.
We will have to burrow through libraries of lies to learn that the cultivators maimed by Roman Civilization reconstituted some form of community after the Leviathan’s demise. Armored Frankish Knights with their networks of vassals and their code of martial honor seriously infringed on the integrity and freedom of the communities of cultivators, but the Knight’s coat of mail and tree-length spear were ill-adapted to serious Leviathanic ventures. The Knightly domain was a coherent Leviathan only in the dreams of Catholic Churchmen. Progress-worshippers will call the period a Dark Age precisely because it lacked any coherent His-story, any Leviathanic development. After the Knights’ initial disruption of the agrarian communities, manorial relations and dues were regulated by Custom, which means that they remained what they were from one generation to the next.
The agrarian communities are not only disrupted, they are destroyed beyond repair, when Custom is replaced by Market and Force. The cultivators suddenly lose their world. The land, which had always been common to all living beings, is now invaded by foremen and labor gangs intent on making Eart produce for the town market. The forests which provided game and timber as well as forage for domesticated animals are suddenly as out of bounds to serfs as the Roman Empire was to northerners. All of Earth’s free gifts start to be called “waste,” and the opposite of “waste” is the despoliation of Earth, animals and people for the sake of products saleable in town markets.
---pp 173-174

A frivolous ranter, in other words one who does not take His-story seriously, one who refers to authority as “It” and not as “We,” will see an altogether different picture while looking at the same resistance.
---p 178

Cohn’s peers, professors who will massacre Vietnamese peasants from desks at a State University will pretend to be appalled by atrocities of Calleys who turn the professors’ words into deeds, but the professors’ real rage will be against the resisters who turn their weapons against the Calleys. The serious professors will heap all the deflected violence, Authority’s own violence, on the heads of the rebels resisting Authority’s violence.
**The resistance is the only human component of the entire His-story. All the rest is Leviathanic progress.**
---ibid

Many of the resisters are convinced that by their own efforts they can evade the transformations invading Europe, transformations which in their eyes can only immiserate and maim human beings.
Much of the inspiration and insight come from abroad, but it is not mere contact with Zarathustrian, Manichean and other doctrines that turns people into active and often militant resisters.
An individual intimately familiar with the daily rapacity may remain unmoved by critics of the rapacity. She or he must make a choice, she must decide to turn against the authorities and to join the circle of resisters. Sucha a decision disrupts a person’s whole life, and it needs to be motivated by very good reasons. The good reasons are expressed in the language of the time, not in the language of some future time. A revelation or a visitation is a very good reason. The revelation might come in a dream, or in a vision, or in what we will call a complete mental breakdown. Before this experience, everything was noise and nothing had meaning. After the experience, everything is clear. Now the individual wonders why others are so blind. She might become impatient with the others and leave them to their blindness, or she might decide to return to the others to help them see.
All this is very understandable, very human, and it has been taking place in human communities for a long time. But such sudden disruptions of individual lives are also disruptions of Leviathanic existence. After such experiences, an individual abandons the sequence of meaningless intervals of Leviathanic Time and recovers some of the rhythms of communities in the state of nature.
This is why Leviathanic His-storians will discount, malign and try to exorcise such experiences. Contempt and ridicule will be favorite weapons of the serious scholars who will pretend to give unbiased accounts.
---p 181

The first act is to sponsor a certain Giovanni de Bernardone, nicknamed Francesco, who would have been a resister similar to many of the others if he had not let himself be turned into a tool of the Church.
This Francis has a visions, abandons his former life as well as his wealth, and goes among the poor and dispossessed. At a time when lands are becoming private property, when rapacity is rewarded with wealth and power, this man extolls poverty, community and generosity. At a time when Earth and all its living beings are becoming objects of mercantile plunder, he speaks of kinship with animals, with Earth, with the Sun.
At any earlier moment during its first millennium, the Church would have condemned the nature-worshipping Francis as a heretic and or unbeliever.
At the time of Cathars and Humiliati, the Church resorts to the ancient Persian trick of repressing Zarathustrians by wearing the mantle of Ahura Mazda. A Pontifex shrewdly named Innocent, the third of that name, invites the nature-worshipper and sponsors him. Francis allows himself to be thus used, perhaps deluded into thinking that he has converted the Pope.
By this recuperation, the Church pretends to be everything its enemies are. Individuals inclined to resist are drawn into the Franciscan Order, which looks and acts just like other groups of resisters.
Once in the Order, most of the former partisans of universal kinship will be molded into a heresy police while a small minority is allowed to go on displaying the mantle of the founder.
Francis himself becomes aware of the ruse at the end. He dies marked by the stigmata of an earlier resister, thereby trying to communicate with his last act that his whole life has been as deflected and betrayed as the life of his Judaean forerunner.
Of course the Church, which already a millenium earlier reduced the stigmata of Jesse or Jesus to decorations on its mantle, promptly adds another set of scarlet ornaments to its cloaks. Francis is turned into a saint, the Franciscan Order into a cudgel against resisters. This abominable recuperation will be remarkable until our time, when the metamorphosis of partisans of universal liberation into policemen and jailers will be so frequent that it will no longer seem remarkable.
---p 182

Up to this point, wormlike and octopuslike Leviathans could be distinguished from one another, although the distinctions began to blur already in the Islamic world. In the West, the two forms of Leviathan become so intertwined that it becomes impossible to characterize the Western Leviathan as either one beast or the other. The beast is something the world has never seen before.
---p 187

The Westerners are Franks to Ottomans and Mongols too, and although the Turks do not make common cause with their fellow-topplers of Leviathans, the Mongols do consider the Westerners allies, at least potential allies.
Khan Qubilai welcomes Italian Catholic emissaries to the Mongol court, and the Catholics accompany the Shamanists who invade the far-eastern Leviathan and topple the Sung Dynasty. The Western Catholics do not only witness the Mongol transvaluation of Chinese values but also participate in it. The Catholics are part of an administration that raises former barbarians to bosses while reducing Sung Chinese to barbarians with no rights.
The famous Marco Polo is one of the Westerners who returns to tell the tale. Others stay in China; among them are Papal envoys who devote themselves to the holy work of converting to Catholic Christianity those Chinese who are already Nestorian Christians.
Far Western and far Eastern Eurasians are reminded of each other’s existence. The Westerners henceforth know that a dazzling Leviathan sprawls in the east, whereas the Easterners have no reason to modify their opinion that barbarism is a function of distance from China’s wall.
---p 191

For a millennium Westerners saw a Roman Empire where there was none. Now that they are at last becoming Leviathanized — but in unacceptably Infidel ways — the Westerners see no Leviathan where there is one. This habit of denying what they are will keep Western Europeans running frantically from themselves to the furthest corners of Earth.
Western Europeans are not the first Leviathanized human beings who think themselves what they no longer are or never were. We’ve seen that the first Leviathanized human beings, the Ur-beings, were pioneers in this as in so much else. The Sumerians turned their former world into a wilderness, but they took care to carry parts of the disrupted world into their Temple garden. Inside the garden they could think they had never left the state of nature, or at least that they hadn’t gone very far They were as close to their forgotten community as Death is to Life.
The Western Europeans know that they left the state of nature, but they do not yet want to know they’ve entered the entrails of Leviathan. Human beings who unabashedly affirm themselves as segments of an artificial worm, as springs and wheels, will not appear in the West until several generations later, when contemporaries of the English scribe Hobbes will institute the worship of Leviathan itself, raw and unadorned.
---p 192

Up to this point, ths story is still a myth, one among many origin myths. But at this point the Church transforms the origin myth into a cudgel, an instrument of blackmail. Just as the CHurchmen’s own dirt could be washed off and give to Eve, so the sins of all the fallen can be purged and given to Satan. Fallen, sinful humans can be washed clean, they can be saved. Jesus and his Apostles descended to Earth to save the fallen. The Pope is the Savior’s Vicar and his sole surviving Apostle. The Church is the door to Paradise. In order to be saved, a sinner need only serve the Church faithfully, give tithes unstintingly, pay large bribes for the remissions of major crimes, and will all his properties to the Church.
Those who devote their very lives to serving the Church as monks and nuns are rewarded with earthly Edens called monasteries and convents, enclosed and lifeless replicas of the state of nature, Christian versions of Sumerian Temple gardens. These elect even recover some of the ways of the lost kinship community by sharing all things in common and by considering each other brothers and sisters.
But the conscientious among these elect devote many of their Edenic days and nights to guilty musings about their undeserved grace, since as Eve’s progeny they are as sinful as the greatest emperor or the smallest thief. Guilt leads the elect to serve the Church yet more devotedly.
As for the non-elect, they can neither lie nor stand nor sit in the Christian world, they have to keep moving, and if they run fast enough they might reach Paradise, but only in the Afterlife.
---p 194

And among the radicals, as among other Westerners, everyone thinks himself another and is thought to be a third.
---p 196

Europeans who do not see Marguerite Porete’s light have less reason to exult than the persecuted radicals. Life outside the Temple is a vale of tears, a wilderness traversed by greedy armies of sinful men tearing each other to shreds. And the Temple itself gives no shelter, offers no salvation; the Temple is nothing but a chamber of grizzly instruments of torture.
Europeans fleefrom the Church, from Europe, from themselves, in ever greater numbers. Former crusaders against Muslim infidels establish themselves in Muslim mercantile webs on the Mediterranean’s islands, on the Maghreb’s shore’s, on the Levant. Europeans rush to become what their hated enemies were. They rush to be anything other than what they are. Meaning, freedom and community are elsewhere, and henceforth Europeans will keep reaching elsewhere for them.
Europeans are already looking for America, long before they “discover” or name the world across the Ocean. They are fleeing because Europe is an empty pit, it is the Inquisition’s dungeon.
Later apologists will speak of Europeans being eager to spread their Culture, their Way of Life. If by culture we mean the ways and wisdom of communities of free human beings, Europe is no culture and has no culture. The last Europeans who have culture are radicals burned by the Inquisition. What’s left is Civilization, something very different from culture. Civilization is a humanly meaningless web of unnatural constraints, it is the organization of repression within the entrails of Leviathan. Civilization is the “culture” of a Leviathan’s springs and wheels. And Europeans know that their states are not communities, their laws for the maintenance of civility are not a culture, and their imposed tasks are not ways of free human beings, even if they name the tasks “callings.” They seek Culture by learning Greek and Latin and reading works from far away and long ago.
The frenzied rush away from one’s self is the exact opposite of what happened in communities of free human beings. In such communities, the goal was to realize one’s self, to become everything one could be, and to insert the fully-developed self into a meaningful cosmic context. Communities which gave individuals such meaningful context had, or were, cultures.
The de-populated Europe of the later Crusades, already turning into a spring or a wheel, rushes headlong from where and and from what he is to something completely different, to something new, to America. The unnamed goal is still nothing more than a mythical place in a Scandinavian saga and a closely guarded secret of Basque cod fishermen. But the European is already discovering little Americas in Muslim silver, in Senegalese gold, in Indian spices and in Chinese silks and porcelains. Wealth from trade enables him to buy what he no longer is. We’ve seen that even a serf who turns merchant and amasses enough wealth can make himself as free a Frank as his ancestors, at least in name.
---p 200

We heard someone ask: Who would ever want to leave the amenities of Civilization and return to a Primitive state of nature? We can now see that the questioner is Leviathan itself, simulating a human voice. Human beings, even those encased in the most formidable Civilizer among Leviathans, try with all their might to burrow, run and even fly out of the accumulating rubble of amenities burying them alive. And not just the radicals among them. All of them.
The radicals are merely more explicit than others about their desire to leave. And the radicals survive both plagues. Decimated by domestic Inquisitors and by rats from abroad, the insurgency actually picks up momentum.
---p 203

This Lollard warns,
>Good folk, things cannot go well in England nor shall until all things are in common and there is neither villein nor noble, but all of us are of one condition.
Readers would do well to re-read his this warning, for it does not announce a Utopia in which all are villeins or workers.
The nightmarish will to universalize labor camps, which will later pass for radicalism, is what the English rebels are against. The English insurgents announce the end of the Leviathanic world, not its completion. The condition the insurgents want is not a universal villeinage but universal freedom; it is the condition of communities of free human beings in the state of nature, unencumbered by Leviathanic separations and usurpations.
---pp 205-206

Uprisings repeatedly shake Richard’s England until the monarch and many of his dignitaries are forced out. **The usurping successor fares no better; the insurgents are not up in arms to replace a Plantagenet with a Lancaster.** In fact, during the first Lancaster’s reign, many of the gentler people accomplish the feat of burning off masks and armors; landed Lords as well as wealthy townsmen cast their lot with the rebels.
---p 206

These radicals, probably former weavers who recognize their own desires and dreams in the Moravian communities, settle among the Taborites and introduce elements which further deepen the witdrawal from Leviathanic social life. They reject not only authority in all its forms, whether religious or secular, but also repression in all forms, particularly in the form of dehumanizing labor. If cloth-making requires the concentration of human beings in sunless prisons, then free spirits can dispense with clothing as readily as they can dispense with priests and nobles.
---p 210

There seem to be two movements which pull in diametrically opposed directions. The first movement is a withdrawal from the entrails of Leviathan, the second is a self-defense agaisnt the monster’s attacks.
The withdrawal movement is a time of self-abandon, of mask and armor removal. Daring radicals and visionaries are embraced as kin, every new sect has its day, all are heard and absorbed, and everyone ventures into undiscovered realms.
All this abruptly ends when the self-defense begins. Self-abandon gives way to a new rigidity, masks and armors are put on, exotic visionaries are distrusted, then ostracized, finally eliminated.
---p 213

The extermination of radicals is followed by the extirpation of radicalism. The initial heterodoxy of the “five cities” is replaced by an increasingly narrow and conservative orthodoxy. Defense remains the priority, and for its sake, Taborite priests keep narrowing even their religious differences from Hussite barons, merchants and Prague theologians whose religion differs from Catholicism only in the meaning given to the rite of drinking wine and eating bread.
The final confrontation is not between Taborites and Catholic Crusaders, but between Taborites who merge with the conservative Hussites and Taborites who only now decide that the compromises have gone far enough. It is too late for such a decision. The resisters have nothing to stand on but the previous day’s compromises.
---p 216

The wandering artists and scholars who initiate the Italian Quatrocentro are as mobile as Beguines and Beghards, but they are not seeking self-realization in a human community. They are seeking self-annihilation in the service of a ruler, any ruler. The self-dehumanization of the scribe becomes the ideal of a social movement in Western Europe.
The artists and scholars are not altogether innovative. Self-instrumentalization for the sake of economic gain is already normal practice of Burghers, and enforced instrumentalization for the sake of another’s gain has always been the lot of zeks. The peculiarity of renascent artists and scholars is that they instrumentalize themselves for anther’s gain, like zeks, and they shape themselves to degrees of instrumental perfection unmatched by any previous living beings. These human tools, individuals like Bramante, Machiavelli and the renowned Da Vinci, are the forerunners of the Genius as well as the Expert.
Even though their peculiarities are not altogether new, these animate instruments have no real predecessors.
---pp 218-219

What makes Humanists of misanthropists is the illusion, slightly later spelled out by Hobbes, that the beast has a human head.
But these Humanists are a priesthood that sacrifices humanity as well as nature on the altar of a hideous idol whose human face is a sham as old as Ur. The Leviathan is a thing, and from its standpoint, humanity as well as nature are also things, objects, either obstacles or potential instruments. The beast travels through Time by eliminating the obstacles and appropriating the instruments. The great men of the Quatrocento are the beast’s scouts, they are the first avowed trail-blazers of Leviathan.
---p 223

The innovators and decorators no longer even pretend to make offerings to a Temple with its lifeless relics from a lost community and its dead gods. For the first time, the offerings are openly and even ostentatiously placed on the altar of Leviathan.
* * *
The Renaissance is something new, but it is not a rebirth. The Rebirth is as bogus as the Humanism, Rationalism and Naturalism.
Europe’s consummate word-jugglers depict themselves as reborn Athenians, something they are not and never were, so as to avoid seeing themselves as what they are, so as to avoid seeing themselves as stunted Muslims.
The Renaissance is not a birth but debut. It is Leviathan’s coming-out party. It is the beast’s first public appearance in its own clothes, namely with nothing on but its fangs and claws. The Renaissance is Leviathan’s naming ceremony. It is a feast celebrating Leviathan in its own name and for its own sake.
---p 224

The Church as well as the peasants are the victims of the expropriators who call their property-grab a Reformation. The Church loses its material as well as its spiritual power in vast domains earlier converted to Catholicism over the dead bodies of countless sacrifical victims. The peasants and radicals lose their lives as well as a good part of their hopes.
Peasants bore little love for the Lords, and none whatever for commercializing Lords who enclosed woods and pastures while simultaneously squeezing ever-greater dues out of the peasants. But before the advent of Luther, peasants had shared one thing with their Lords, namely an undying hatred of the Catholic Church and its tithe-gatherers. If only the Lords would turn their weapons against the Churchmen, the old community would be restored, since the Lords would not maintain the hierarchy without the Catholic hierarchs at their backs and in their offices.
Luther burns down the single communality between Lords and peasants, a commonality that had tied conservative Hussites to radical Taborites, and invites the Lords to accomplish the feat of retaining the Roman hierarchy while exproprietating Rome. Both can be accomplished by the slashing , burning and hanging of peasants.
Protestant hierarchs replace the Catholics at the Prince’s back, and the readily available bureaucrats-for-hire replace the clerics in the offices.
Anabaptists and other radical successors to the Taborites are hunted and exterminated by Protestant national armies which kill more viciously and effiently than the last Holy Roman Cursaders.
European geography starts to become the congeries of seemingly-independent repressive nation-states invisibly but indissolubly interlocked by the tentacles of bankers and merchants.
The Church is no longer needed as universal trainer of bureaucrats since each State begins to operate its own factories for the production and licensing of power-servers.
---p 228

…Leviathan’s gameroom, its Museum of Natural Science
---p 230

Europe’s Civilized head-hunters, witch-burners and world-eaters are already face-to-face with vast new fields in which to exercise their Leviathanic powers because, while merchants and bureaucrats were consolidating their initial monopolies, Spanish seamen “discovered” Europe’s long-sought America.
This discovery is obviously not a human discovery, since human inhabitants of the world across the Ocean have always known of their world. Nor is the discovery a European discovery, since Viking adventurers as well as Basque fishermen already knew of the land across the water.
The discovery is a Leviathanic Dis-covery. The European Leviathan, recently fortified by Scientists, Bankers and Doctors, is the entity that dis-covers a new world. The notorious Columbus and his murderous successors do not cross the water as free human beings but as Leviathan’s claws and fangs, as armored beastly tentacles.
By another one of those ironies that makes Europe freakish even among Leviathans, the beast is initially sent across the great water by those Leviathanic entities that are vanishing from Europe, not by those that are emerging. The first Pioneers are Inquisitorial Catholics of the last Holy Roman Empire; the initiation of the dis-covery is their last act.
---ibid

Why does a Da Vinci gleam for us among the beast’s innumerable cowbells? Is it because, after all the stunting and spirit-breaking that makes us Civilized, we still want to be what she was, but can no longer become even what he was, can only applaud what Leviathan becomes instead of us?
---p 237

The story I’ve been telling is not from the heyday but from the decline, yet I’II go on singing it because at least some of its cadences disrupt and even wreak havoc on the stupefying, passively-accepted official tunes.
I’ve been telling a story about human resistance to a beast that originated in Ur, a beast whose artificial progeny would eventually swallow all human communities and, by our time, begin to eat the Biosphere.
I’ve come to some of the last human communities swallowed by Leviathan, and I find them resisting the beast already before it reaches them. How do these people already know what they are up against? Is it possible that the beast is not one but many, that Ur is not in Sumer but wherever people gather, that Leviathan is as natural to human beings as hives to bees? Anything is possible, but the admission of such a possibility is cynically misanthropic and it precludes envisioning any exit from the trap. Such a possibility cannot be admitted into a song of freedom, because its admission is a prognostication of Earth’s doom.
---ibid

“Central Africa,” “Australia,” “America” are not the names of places where free human beings ever lived. They are names of unprecedented holocausts, of gigantic colonies, of monstrous Leviathanic trophies. They are Leviathan’s “empty continents.”
From the vantage point of Death, all Life is an aberration. The languages of the two protagonists are mutually unintelligible. The very vocabularies are untranslatable. Leviathan’s world is a Wilderness to free living beings. The freedom of living beings is a Wilderness to Leviathan.
Free human beings were able to encompass Leviathan in their horizon and still remain free.
The Leviathanized cannot encompass free beings in their horizon and still remain Leviathanized. Once they grasp freedom they become Renegades. And the stiff-necked spokesmen of Leviathan know it. The questions: Who would abandon the amenities of Civilization? and Who would go back to the digging stick? are rhetorical questions practiced in front of a looking glass.
The Renegades from Civilization are notorious. They shed masks. They shed whole armors. They separate from previously indispensable amenities and experience a shedding of an insupportable burden. Mere contact with a community of free human beings gives them insights no Leviathanic education can provide. Nurturing contact stimulates dreams and ultimately even visions. The Renegade is possessed, transformed, humanized. Psyche-manipulators aware of Civilization’s discontents will try to induce such transformations within Leviathan’s entrails, but their most vaunted successes will be miserable failures. Civilization does not nurture humanity.
Communities were able to possess the Leviathanized.
But Leviathan cannot possess communities, it cannot possess living subjects. Leviathan can only possess things, dead things, objects.
Communities could remove masks and armors. Leviathan removes the scalp, the skin and the flesh.
Communities could help the repressed recover their humanity. Leviathan dis-covers unrepressed humanity and consumes it. Dis-covery, the removal of Earth’s cover, the liquidation of free beings, is in fact Leviathan’s central project, and communities that nurture free beings are its greatest enemy.
---p 245

One of the invaders of the Andean Altiplano and the jungles beyond it, a man named Lope de Aguirre, knows that the killers from Europe are not mere men. The armored Aguirre knows himself to be a higher being, a scourge of god, a deity, for life recedes in the face of his advance. Aguirre knows that the Plague is a minor deity, a scout that opens the paths and empties the fields. He knows that Leviathan is the greater deity, for Leviathan finishes off what the Plague initiated, and Leviathan omnipotently disposes of the remains.
---p 252

Before venturing inland, the pirates, all respectable merchants, stuff their outposts with refugees who are either excessively or insufficiently Protestant for England’s official Reformers.
---p 253

The survivors are not able to challenge the apologists’ tall tales. The recurrent outbreaks of plague do more than kill numerous members of the communities. The plagues destroy the communities.
Of four hundred, twenty survive. Of forty, two survive. Two may remember the names of the vanished Totem, but they cannot regenerate the music. If one of the survivors is a storyteller, the other is not a youth to whom the teller can transmit his tales, and the tales die untold. If one is an herbal healer, the other is not necessarily inclined to absorb the herbal lore. One may remember the songs or the preparations for some of the great enactments, but two or even four or six are not enough to dance the dances or to feast or celebrate.
Some go off on their own, embittered because they sense that something, perhaps even their own guiding spirit, has betrayed them.
Others flee toward the sunset, toward the endless Plains beyond the Mississippi, even toward the great mountains.
Many join villages of equally displaced and disoriented survivors, gatherings of fragments of communities.
The united fragments do not constitute a whole. The gatherings are refugee camps, melting pots, not communities. The beat of the drum is arhythmic. The music is discordant. Continuities preserved since the Beginning are broken off, and the few remembered myths no longer speak of any shared beginning because the gathered fragments are not a Totem and share no common Beginning.
The myths of displaced persons are mere stories and the great enactments are mere ceremonies. Ways of living become ways to spend time. Time that can be spent without being lived is Plague time, Leviathanic time, His-storic time. The His-story of the Potawatomi and of all their cousins and neighbors begins with the plague, and this story is its story.
The countless ages that preceded the Plague are henceforth inaccessible to memory. The communities who remembered their entire trajectory since the Beginning are irretrievably gone. Their time is henceforth Dream time, unreal time, imaginary time.
Even the words we will use to describe what was lost, words like music, myth, ceremony and community, will be as empty as the continent becomes, because they will refer to no lived experiences accessible to any human being trapped in His-story. What is lost is of much greater human import than the things Economists will include on their ledgers.
---p 254

By carrying Leviathan acrss the Ocean, Europeans stretch the beastly integument over the expanse of the entire globe. In the brief span of a few generations, all of Earth falls into the entrails of a single artificial beast. But by encasing all of Earth within one Leviathan, the Europeans do Civilization a disfavor, for they put a term on its further existence.
We’ve seen that earlier Leviathans were always in a state of decomposition. When one decompsed, others swallowed its remains. But when there are no others, when Leviathan is One, the tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing, is almost at an end.
Civilization, synonym of Capital, Technology and The Modern World, called Leviathan by Hobbes and Western Spirit by Turner, is as racked by decomposition as any earlier Leviathan. But Civilization is not one Leviathan among many. It is The One. Its final decomposition is Leviathan’s end. After twenty centuries of stony sleep vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the sleeper is about to wake to the cadences of a long-forgtten music or to the eternal silence of death without a morrow.
---p 257

His bitterest passion is reserved for the decimated communities in which the Renegades find refuge. The beings in those communities are not human to him. They are Cannibals. They will also be called Savages, Primitives, Natives, always with the same meaning. The pioneering zek spends his living days doing god’s calling, sweating and laboring, frustrated by stubborn Earth, beset by lenders. Yet the good-for-nothings, the Cannibals, pretend that food simply offers itself to them on its own, they hunt and fish like Nabobs or ancient noblemen, they spend their days as well as their nights howling and jumping like demented wolves.
Were the pioneer to admit their humanity, however briefly, however grudgingly, his innards would explode, his armor melt, his mask fall, for he would in that flash of light see himself as a zek, his freedom as self-enslavement, his market-Civilization as a forced-labor camp. The devil would try to tempt him to become a Renegade and, irony of ironies, he would fall, unlike Eve, out of blessed labor into cursed Eden.
---p 259

The French see large communities shrink before their very eyes, and still their annalists make no sound; they tiptoe through the depopulated villages as if they were walking on eggs. The annalists even invent European-style wars between fictitious “tribes” to explain away the large empty villages.
The French cannot without embarrassment broadcast the sources of their windfall, for the greatness of their accomplishment would diminish.
The seemingly inexhaustible fur coats come from three generations of Plague-victims.
---p 261

What is almost unprecedented in these escapes to the pre-American world is that the refugees or Renegades actually become members of functioning communities. Those communities are fragmented remnants compared to what they once were, in Dream Time. But even in their decimated condition they give the adopted invaders a wealth of freedom, kinship and community not available to Europeans for a very long time. Descendants of French Renegades will turn up later as storytellers, healers, keepers of songs and arrangers of ceremonies, as upholders and defenders of their hosts’ cultures.
The initial French Renegades are not closet-Adamites, Eden-seeking radicals. On the contrary, they are scions of French colonial Civilization, some are even sons of aristocrats. Their ability to compare the relative attractiveness of the two modes of existence comes to them as an unintended consequence of the organization of the fur trade. The Company dispatches travelers, voyageurs, to gather the fur coats of all villages accessible by water, for large quantities of fur cannot easily be transported overland. The voyagueurs travel singly or at most in twos, since the point is to return with a boatful of furs, not riders.
A single individual — sometimes even two — is free of the censorious pressure that represses a member of a group, the pressure to keep the armor tight and the mask from falling. Consequently the individual is able to respond to offered hospitality, friendship and love. And as soon as he responds, his stiffness starts to dissolve. He arrived as a scavenger. If his hosts offer to turn him into a kinsman, he will, slowly or quickly, realize that he can be more than a zek in a labor-camp.
---p 262

The English-speaking invaders who eventually swallow the entire northland do not allow themselves to fall into kinship relations with the continent’s former inhabitants. They, too, are scandalized by Renegades who walk out of their labor camps and never return to the life-style of zeks. But they are not merely scandalized. They raise impassable fences between themselves and the continent’s surviving inhabitants, fences which are forerunners of the electric barbed wire fences of our time.
These English Christians guide themselves with a terminology that comes to them, not from their Christianity, but from their practices of breeding sheep, horses and dogs. Terms like Mescegenation, Hybridization and Mongrelization become the guidelines for dehumanizations that have no precedent. Human beings are permanently branded, stigmatized, classified, in terms of their heredity, their so-called blood. No religious conversion, no services rendered, no dues paid can ever remove the stigma. The branded and all their progeny are marked for all eternity.
---p 263

David is out of the picture altogether. Goliath is the Puritan himself, and Goliath’s god is none other than Optimus Maximus, who will receive His final incarnation in America as the Dollar.
---p 269

While people with money who consider themselves God’s Elect remove the King and Archbishop in order to install themselves in the offices of English power, the radicals, who constitute the army that does the overthrowing, aim to remove the power of Aristocracy, Church as well as Money, and reconstitute on earth the Adamite Eden. People called Familists, Diggers, Ranters and the first Quakers are among the radicals who try to topple hierarchy, law and privilege.
The Protestant gentry establish what they, prevaricating like practiced Catholics, call their Commonwealth, and they promptly silence the “peasants, clowns and base people” who would “follow our example” by overthrowing the Protestant gentry as well as the Protestant Church.
Quakers who survive the repression, but emaciated and spiritless. They still long for an earthly Eden, but they become extremely patient. They renounce armed resistance, recognizing that the victory of the radical army led to a tyranny by its generals. They continue to reject the Leviathanic hierarchies of wealth and power, but in practice they limit their radicalism to denouncing the dishonesty and hypocrisy of the hierarchs.
---pp 270-271

After eating the French, the victorious English declare a war against themselves and, under the guise of fratricide, set out to kill and expropriate the continent’s remaining original inhabitants.
The ostentatious Declaration of Independence, like the proclamation of the First Crusade, is a maneuver in a confidence game, a banner designed to align zeks alongside their keepers. The freedom it offers to zeks is not freedom from labor-camp zekdom, but freedom to kill with no holds barred. Happiness comes, like Salvation to the Crusaders, from the bloody sacrifice of victims. Devotion to such freedom becomes a synonym of Patriotism. The active Patriot is a mass murderer, the passive Patriot an enthusiastic voyeur of his team’s killings.
The beast behind the banner is not concerned with life, liberty or happiness, is in fact their greatest enemy. Hobbes has already published his Leviathan, thanks to which the beast does not only know itself by name, but also possesses a self-consciousness unavailable to Churchmen or to Lope de Aguirre. The beast knows that it cannot speak in its own name without losing the confidence of its human entrails. It knows that it must speak in terms of Life, Liberty and Happiness, and it acquires unprecedented eloquence in the use of such terms.
---p 275

The land pimps get their Savings from the sale of the expropriated lands, and from the sale of the produce of the expropriated lands. Their life, liberty and happiness comes from the expropriation of more lands, and from the prospect of expropriating yet more. They’ll take the land, even if they have to wage war against the fur pimps who have the ear of the King. Their intent is not to eliminate the Savings that come from the fur trade; they’ll let John Jacob Astor get the furs from the French Canadians.
The two feuding Interests are not persons but personifications; they will eventually call themselves Corporations. These are not human beings who feud because they are personally touched, insulted or harmed. It is the Savings that are threatened or harmed.
---p 276

These Plains, this vast refuge teeming with living beings, this pastureland for herds of numberless buffalo, limitless to the human eye, is nevertheless bounded, protected, isolated from the monster beyond. It is separated from the east by mountains, thick forests and the Long River, from the south by an impassable desert, from the west by impenetrable mountains, from the north by perpetual ice. Here refugees from decimated communities recover their interrupted rhythms, resume their dances, reenact their myths, reconstitute their music. They avail themselves of a European import that is not a synthetic, not a product of industry, but a living being and a friend, even a cousin, namely the horse. People who formerly paddled canoes, planted corn and sheltered in bark lodges arrive on horseback at councilfires surrounded by circles of buffalo-skin lodges. They are the world’s last free human beings.
---p 282

Armed resistance coordinated by a military strongman and a general staff is a last resort as old as the Guti federation against expanding Sumerians.
Contrary to the Goliath fable, this continent’s strongmen, called Chiefs by the invaders, tend to be average or small in stature, large in vision; their strength is not in their limbs but in their speech.
Unlike the Guti and the Taborites, this continent’s resisters do not end up being encased by their own proto-Leviathanic military organizations. The various federations and alliances are temporary and they remain temporary; their continuity depends on their renewal at every council. If victory depends on the resisters’ becoming like the invaders, the resisters renounce victory and they disband, undefeated.
The armed resistance undertaken by the continent’s free human beings ties up Progress at every step of its March. The first Englishmen who plant a Virginia on the continent’s outer banks and thing their extremely friendly hosts would love to serve the English permanently are quickly disabused of their great expectations.
---p 282

The federated warriors destroy all but two of the numerous British forts and military posts west of the mountains. The warriors fail at the Famous Fort Pitt because the fort’s commander, under orders from the British general, poisons the besiegers with Smallpox. And the warriors fail at the famous Fort Detroit because its siege would involve a loss of life perfectly acceptable to European militarists but totally unacceptable to this continent’s “warlike tribes,” as the English will persist in calling them.
---pp 284-285

The last communities do a ghost dance, and the ghosts of the last communities will continue to dance within the entrails of the artificial beast. The council-fires of the never-defeated communities are not extinguished by the genocidal invaders, just as the light of Ahura Mazda was not extinguished by rulers who claimed it shone on them. The fire is eclipsed by something dark, but it continues to burn, and its flames shoot out where they are least expected.
Just as Ahura Mazda’s flame was carried to Albi in southern France by Bogomils and their western successors, the flames kept alive by this continent’s communities are carried to the darkest corners of Europe and America.
A Montaigne experiences a revelation when he sees that the people Europeans call Savages possess realms Europeans have lost. A Rousseau experiences a vision when he pushes obfuscating facts aside and sees that the process called Civilization has not been the boon his Enlightened contemporaries claim it to be but rather the bane that explains the Europeans’ loss. Blake, Melville and Thoreau sing these revelations to their school-stunted contemporaries, and despite an increasingly total schooling apparatus and an ever more ubiquitous press, the grandchildren of irredeemably Leviathanized zeks begin to stir with rhythms that come from outside their synthetic environment.
The fire that was to burn down the last beast of the Apocalypse, a fire kept alive by Free Spirits, Adamites, Ranters and rebelling zeks and serfs, is forgotten but not extinguished. Its flames are relit with kindling that comes from council fires of Cheyenne, Dakota, Potawatomi communities.
But the Leviathanic inversion of this fire by the next Church is already announced.
---pp 287-288

A farcical replay of the Roman Church’s expropriation and inversion of the anti-Roman crisis cult, the Revolutionary Church nevertheless succeeds in channeling numerous potential rebels into neo-Franciscan Orders, Leviathanic dead ends which, like the earlier Orders, become the vanguard of the repression. It becomes the main project of the stunted rebels to succeed where Businessmen failed, to destroy what human communities still remain, to eradicate the last traces of what Marx called Primitive Communism, so as to send all humanity scurrying up the escalator, past His-story’s concentration camps, the one ruled by the General Secretary of the Paradisial Party, a ruler who calls himself The Proletariat.
Revolutionary archons compete with Enlightenment archons in rending the Biosphere, turning the world into a place where free human beings can neither stand nor lie nor sit.
The last relics of the world’s communities are safely lodged in trophy cases which, their guards insist, contain all there is to know about communities.
The beast now turns on the zeks in its entrails, for they too, however stunted they may be, still posses what Quakers call an “inner light,” and any such light is anathema to Leviathan, whose element is the dark, the synthetic. Having eliminated the communities of outsiders, the Technological Wonder proceeds to generate outsiders inside its own entrails, to expunge human zeks and replace them with machines, with things made of its own substance.…
The new outsiders are not radicals. They are people who happened to animate springs and gears which can now be automated, namely artificialized. The outsider may be scions od the most royalist zeks or managers, like the French Canadians who actually found kinship and community although they, unlike many of their contemporaries, didn’t know they wanted these gifts.
The displaced zeks languish, and it is not yet known if the Quakers are right, if the new outsiders do indeed still have an “inner light,” namely an ability to reconstitute lost rhythms, to recover music, to regenerate human cultures.
It is also not known if the technological detritus that crowds and poisons the world leaves human beings any room to dance.
What is known is that Leviathan, the great artifice, single and world-embracing for the first time in His-story, is decomposing.
---p 288

From the day when battery-run voices began broadcasting old speeches to battery-run listeners, the beast has been talking to itself. Having swallowed everyone and everything outside itself, the beast becomes its own sole frame of reference. It entertains itself, exploits itself and wars on itself. It has reached the end of its Progress, for there is nothing left for it to progress against except itself. Being above all else a war engine, the beast is most likely to perish once and for all in a cataclysmic suicidal war, in which cas Ahriman would permanently extinguish the light of Ahura Mazda.
People waste their lives when they plead with Ahriman to desist from extinguishing the light, for such a deed would be Ahriman’s final triumph over Ahura Mazda, and the pleaders might learn too late that they are the ones who put the idea into the monster’s head.
---p 290
S
An-archic and pantheistic dancers no longer sense the artifice and its His-story as All but as merely one cycle, one long night, a stormy night that left Earth wounded, but a night that ends, as all nights end, when the sun rises.
---ibid