/lit/ - Literature

>Paradoxically, the monopoly of power brought about a monopoly of personality, too, for only the king was endowed with all the attributes of personality, both those incorporated in the communal group and those that, precisely at this period, it would seem, were slowly beginning to emerge in the human soul, which was now pecking through the social shell in which its embryonic existence had been spent.

>In the Sumerian deluge myth Ziusudra, the king (Noah's counterpart), is rewarded by the gods An and Enlil, not by a symbolic rainbow, but by being given eternal "life like a god." The desire for life without limits was part of the general lifting of limits which the first great assemblage of power by means of the megamachine brought about. Human weaknesses, above all the weakness of mortality, were both contested and defied.
But if the biological inevitability of death and disintegration mock the infantile fantasy of absolute power, which the human machine promised to actualize, life mocks at it even more. The notion of 'eternal life,' with neither conception, growth, fruition, nor decay-an existence as fixed, as sterilized, as loveless, as purposeless, as unchanging as that of a royal mummy-is only death in another form. What is this but a return to the state of arrest and fixation exhibited by the stable chemical elements that have not yet combined in sufficiently complex molecules to promote novelty and creativity? From the standpoint of human life, indeed of all organic existence, this assertion of absolute power was a confession of psychological immaturity-a radical failure to understand the natural processes of birth and growth, of maturation and death.

>Etana, in the Sumerian fable, mounts an eagle to go in search of a curative herb for his sheep when they are stricken with sterility. At this early date, the dream of human flight was born, or at least was recorded, though that dream still seemed so presumptuous that Etana, like Daedalus, was hurled to death as he neared his goal. Soon, however, kings were guarded by winged bulls; and they had at their command heavenly messengers who conquered space and time in order to bring commands and warnings to their earthly subjects. Rockets and television sets were already beginning secretly to germinate within this royal myth of the machine. The Genii of the Arabian Nights are only popular later continuations of these earlier forms of power-magic.

>Though many Egyptologists cannot bring themselves to accept the implications, John Maynard Keynes' notion of 'Pyramid Building,' as a necessary device for coping with the surplus labor force in an affluent society whose rulers are averse to social justice and economic equalization, was not an inept metaphor. This was an archetypal example of simulated productivity. Rocket-building is our exact modern equivalent.