Stoics in The City: Resisting The System

amma birago cosmopolitan is the new indigenous, and the call to mourning
At the root of urban(ist) celebration and pastoral lament is the crime of fratricide, which myth tells us is the origin of the city and politic. Shulman
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imagine theres no country.
stoics in the city

the cosmopolitan and sacrifice in the city.
on freedom and anarchy; resisting the system of sacrifice: of kings and king-priests, stoics, nomads and maroons: of politics, civic life and the city, the system of sacrifice, sovereignty, ownership and dispossession.
amma birago
cosmopolitan is the new indigenous, and the call to mourning. as above so it is below like kingship, the city was "lowered down from heaven and cut to a heavenly patte rn;
"Have you ever heard anything about God, Topsy?" The child looked bewildered, but grinned as usual. "Do you know who made you?" "Nobody, as I knows on," said the child, with a short laugh. The idea appeared to amuse her considerably; for her eyes twinkled, and she added, "I spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me." Life among the lowly, Harriet Beecher Stowe.
. The constructions of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-to-sacrifice as it shifts from personal liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract, juridical, imagined tie that nevertheless calls forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.
"The world is as it were the common home of the gods and humans, the city that belongs to both."
What is originally Greek is the concept of political freedom.
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Freedom is never about purity - ethnic or otherwise but about contacts, contaminations, and border crossings. The history of freedom is what Anthony Kwame Appiah calls the case for contamination. Freedom is never about purityethnic or otherwisebut about contacts, contaminations, and border crossings. And so is what I would call fascinating unfreedom, which takes different shapes but shares an eros of power and paranoic antimodern or post-postmodern ideology.
Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine In the city, the good life was achieved only by mystical participation in the god's life and that of his fellow deities, and by vicarious achievement through the person of the king. There lay the original compensation for giving up the petty democratic ways of the village. To inhabit the same city as a god was to be a member of a super-community: a community in which every subject had a place, a function, a duty, a goal, as part of a hierarchic structure representing the cosmos itself. The city, then, as it emerged from more primitive urban forms, was not just a larger heap of buildings and public ways, of markets and workshops: it was primarily a symbolic representation of the universe itself. In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money, Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine
States and governments were primarily instituted with a view to the preservation of private property. For although it was under Natures guidance that human beings clustered together, they sought the protection of cities with the hope of preserving their property. The content of this passage is Ciceros postulate that the first duty of government is to see that each individual shall have what belongs to him and suffer no loss of property at the hand of the state. Ciceros thought here corresponds strikingly with Locke, who writes: The great and chief end of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Pre servation of their Property. (This correspondence is hardly coincidental, because Locke must have been familiar with Tullys Offices.) Ciceros linkage of good government to protection of peoples property is a constant theme in this work, as it is elsewhere in his Writings. But what has it to do with Stoicism? Stoic philosophers on persons, property-ownership and community A. A. Long Aristotle and after
The human nature of freedom and identity. Douglas W. Kmiec Government is, indeed, highly necessary . . . to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of Paradise. The Founders believed man had not continued innocent and so shaped American government to meet his shortcomings.
Introducing Daoism. Cosmos, Gods, and Governance. Livia Kohn Creating order in the universe accordingly meant matching the cosmic phases and pacifying the various gods and demons, aligning self and society in a larger context that included everything from the stars through the gods to the lowly creatures of Earth. The vision of ultimate harmony, then, was described in terms of Great Peace, a state of complete openness and pervasion of all. as above so it is below Page | 3 Like kingship, the city was "lowered down from heaven and cut to a heavenly patte rn;
Similarly the Stoic Balbus, in the dialogue On the Nature of the Gods: "The world is as it were the common home of the gods and humans, the city that belongs to both." Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal Thomas L. Pangle Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money,
the shift from the world of the polis to the new world of the cosmopolis. . Big questions such as what is the good life, what is the best form of government and what is virtue loomed large . One of the most important developments in association with this process of Hellenization, was the shift from the world of the polis to the new world of the cosmopolis. Such a shift was decisive in creating the Hellenistic world as a world of conflicting identities, and when identities are challenged or changed, intense internal conflicts are the result. Classical Greek philosophy, the philosophy of the Sophists and of Socrates in the 5 th century, was concerned with the citizen's intimate relationship with the polis or city-state. You can see this clearly in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Big questions such as what is the good life, what is the best form of government and what is virtue loomed large in their thinking. The history Guide, Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History. From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C. by Steven Kreis
What is originally Greek is the concept of political freedom. Yet from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, debates on freedom, both spiritual and political, and on the preservation of the Greek philosophical heritage, became a cross-cultural affair. Freedom is never about purity - ethnic or otherwise but about contacts, contaminations, and border crossings.
Another Freedom, The Alternative History of an Idea Svetlana Boym Many historians have noted that the ancient Greek polis offered a limited space of self-realization that was available only to male citizens, but the polis gave shape to an aspiration, an ideal of freedom that spread beyond its walls. An understanding of spiritual freedom delineated by Epictetus reveals cross-cultural connections between East and
West, between Indian, Persian, Hellenic, and Hebrew cultures. What is originally Greek is the concept of political freedom. Yet from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, debates on freedom, both spiritual and political, and on the preservation of the Greek philosophical heritage, became a cross-cultural affair. The history of freedom is what Anthony Kwame Appiah calls the case for contamination. Worldliness is not the same as cosmopolis, but the two notions overlap. There are many vernacular cosmopolitans coming from different localities (with memories of inequality, but not entirely defined by a colonial or postcommunist or any other particular history) but sharing the preoccupation with worldly architecture. Freedom is never about purity ethnic or Page | 4 otherwise - but about contacts, contaminations, and border crossings. And so is what I would call fascinating unfreedom, which takes different shapes but shares an eros of power and paranoic antimodern or post -postmodern ideology. The human nature of freedom and identity. Douglas W. Kmiec Government is, indeed, highly necessary . . . to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of Paradise.35 The Founders believed man had not continued innocent and so shaped American government to meet his shortcomings. Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism can be freed from the dubious joys of imperial shock and awe and returned rightfully to utopia, even freed from modern-day cosmopolitical Free Thinkers, from its contemporary champions, who have turned into a rather dull institutional blueprint Jean Bethke Elshtain. On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? The nation-state is a phenomenon that cannot be imagined or legislated out of existence. Needing others to define ourselves, we will remain inside a state/nation-centered discourse of war and politics, for better and for worse, so long as states remain the best way we have devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common. But we can try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty; we can, perhaps, move toward what I am tempted to call a post-sovereign politics. A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? "It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man." Identification with a national "imagined community" is a complex, manysided construction. It taps particularism and universalism. Indeed, one might argue it requires such, being composed of normatively vital aspects of both ethnicity and universal values, organic integration and voluntarism. Human beings require concrete reference groups in order to attain individuality and identity but too complete immersion in such groups limits the boundaries of identity and of identification to fixed familial, tribal, or territorial lines. Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice Jean Bethke Elshtain Johan van der Walt on Sovereignty and sacrifice. Reflections on sovereignty and sacrifice in the thought of Derrida, Nancy and Agamben. According to Agamben, homo sacer is the one who can be killed, but he cannot be sacrificed. And for him sovereignty relates to or is constituted by this non-sacrificial killing. When sacrificial destruction is seen as the expression of a particular politics, in which whole groups are categorized as expendable while others are designated as beneficiaries, the more generous aspects of the rite begin to disappear. No matter how fully camouflaged it is by a bureaucratized role in a modern system of exchange, regardless of the context in which it appears, sacrificial thinking invariably reduces at some points to its fundamental identification with ritual violence. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory Susan L. Mizruchi
Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty. Thomas W. Pogge Thus, if we accept a purely institutional conception of human rights, then we need some additional moral conception if we wish to deny that all is permitted in a very disorganized state of nature. Second, the cosmopolitanism of the institutional approach is contingent as well, in that the global moral force of human rights is activated only through the emergence of a global scheme of social institutions, which triggers obligations to promote any feasible reforms Page | 5 of this scheme that would enhance the fulfillment of human rights. So long as there is a plurality of self-contained cultures, the responsibility for such violations does not extend beyond their boundaries.7 It is only because all human beings are now participants in a single, global institutional scheme-involving such institutions as the territorial state and a system of international law and diplomacy as well as a world market for capital, goods, and services-that all human rights violations have come to be, at least potentially, everyone's concern.8 These two limitations do not violate generality. I have a duty toward every other person not to cooperate in imposing an unjust institutional scheme upon her, even while this duty triggers human- rights-based obligations only to fellow participants in the same institutional scheme. This is analogous to how the duty to keep one's promises is general even while it triggers obligations only vis-a-vis persons to whom one has actually made a promise.
The human nature of freedom and identity. Douglas W. Kmiec Of course, man is not assured of happiness merely by public acknowledgment of his created nature. When man enacts laws or undertakes personal action in defiance of that created nature, he is acting in a way that is contrary to a state of happiness. For this reason, if a government of law is to be successful, it must be formed to meet the reality of mans nature: a reality which recognizes both mans created nobility and rebelling imperfection. Hence, Wilson insightfully comments: [G]overnment is the scaffolding of society: and if society could be built and kept entire without government, the scaffolding might be thrown down, without the least inconvenience or cause of regret. Government is, indeed, highly necessary . . . to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of Paradise.35 The Founders believed man had not continued innocent and so shaped American gover nment to meet his shortcomings. Introducing Daoism. Cosmos, Gods, and Governance. Livia Kohn Creating order in the universe accordingly meant matching the cosmic phases and pacifying the various gods and demons, aligning self and society in a larger context that included everything from the stars through the gods to the lowly creatures of Earth. The vision of ultimate harmony, then, was described in terms of Great Peace, a state of complete openness and pervasion of all.
stoics in the city

on freedom and anarchy; resisting the system of sacrifice: cosmopolitans, resisting the system. the new anarchists.
Human sacrifice at Tenochtitlan. John M. lngham The community and the cosmos itself depended upon the assimilation of the weak by the strong. Gods and nobles alike consumed the labor, production, and even the bodies of the common people. Sacrifice to the gods was a metaphor for tribute to the state, and the anthropophagic meal symbolized the ties between gods and
nobles, the elite core of the community. The sacrifice of slaves and war captives ensured the social production and reproduction of internal and external relations of domination. In these respects, Aztec society and culture were not altogether unique. Classic anthropological monographs on sacrifice show that tribute to and communion with the gods and the ritual slaying of a person or animal associated with the corn spirit are recurrent themes in the religions of early civilizations. Ethnographic examples might even be adduced to suggest that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced in chiefdoms and early states with some regularity. Nonetheless, the scale of Aztec sacrifice was certainly unusual. I have suggested that a combination of urban growth and diminishing economic returns to imperial expansion was a primary impetus for this phenomenon. Human sacrifice at Tenochtitlan. John M. lngham
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Survival and prosperity both hinge on how much sunlight energy is under your control, whether it be channeled from horsepower, human power, or fossil fuels. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight Hartmann points out, the end of slavery in the U.S. suspiciously coincided with the discovery of oil, and its relevance to industrial production with machines. Survival and prosperity both hinge on how much sunlight energy is under your control, whether it be channeled from horsepower, human power, or fossil fuels. the curtain of slavery and the will to power. Hartmann points to Professor Jack Forbes adoption o f the Native American term wetiko, which means cannibal, arguing that the worldview of modern cultures is essentially one of consumption - and not just in terms of contemporary ideas of consumerism. We actually approach the world with an appetite to consume others: We eat (consume) other humans by destroying them, destroying their lands, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically. And this kind of exploitation is attributed not to an evil inherent in human beings, but to wetiko, a particular and infectious way of thinking that has contaminated modern populations: to pursue domination and expansion at any cost. A value system of this breed invariably leads to competition, which, Hartmann believes, is not a natural blemish of the human condition, but an invented product of modern culture: From Caesar plundering the Celts, to Pizarro robbing the Incas, to Columbus enslaving the Taino, to the tobacco industry executives addicting children in Third World countries, its all the same wetiko mind-set: take over another persons life for your own purposes. In accordance with how deeply you want to understand this disease, then, you will start to see the symptoms everywhere. And in this sense, our conception of slavery can be expanded to apply not only to the obvious problem of the literal enslavement of millions, even in the golden and sometimes sentimental age of human rights, to also include all of us who are subjects of this kingdom of stories stories that Hartmann likens to captors: The slave-holders use the chains of the mortgage owed the bank, the loan on the car, the unpaid credit card bills, the requirement to pay property taxes if you own your own home, and the many other subtle and not-so-subtle forms of economic and cultural pressure to extract the majority of your lifes time and use it to their ends. As a result, almost everybody in modern society knows somebody whos on tranquilizers or has lost control to alcohol. Addiction to television is so rampant it is causing the disintegration of traditional social groups and clubs, and our children are lost in a sea of pain and confusion that has led to a doubling of the rate of teenage suicide in the past three decades. Slaves know when they are slaves, regardless of the words used to describe their slavery. And theyll escape from the slavery, be it in increasingly powerful drugs, increasingly intense entertainment, or psychopathic or violent behavior. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight
stoics in the city

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Eric Brown. Cosmopolitanism Ancient Stoics claim that the world as a whole (the cosmos) is like a city (a polis) and that one should live as a citizen of the cosmos.
Political Freedom and Organic Theories of States. Phillip Goggans The Stoics believed that all human beings belong to a universal political entity or cosmopolis. It was a short step to the Christian idea of a city of God of which all states are members. Otto Gierke describes the conception thus: ince the World is One Organism, animated by One Spirit, fashioned by One Ordinance, the self-same principles that appear in the structure of the World will appear once more in the structure of its every Part. Therefore every particular Being, in so far as it is a Whole, is a diminished copy of the World; it is a Microcosmus or Minor Mundus in which the Macrocosmus is mirrored. In the fullest measure this is true of every human individual; but it holds good also of every human community and of human society in general.4 R alph Wood. Lectures and Essays. An introduction to stoicism Stoicism was Greek before it became Roman. although only fragments from the earlier Stoics have survived. Their name comes from Zeno (336263 B.C.) who taught in the Painted Porch (or Stoa) at Athens. Other important Greek Stoics were Cleanthes, Chrysippus (who was apparently the most voluminous of all the Stoic writers) and Posidonius (who did much to fuse Stoic and Platonic philosophy, regarding the Timaeus almost as holy writ). Though Stoicism is thoroughly materialist in its philosophical outlook, is also deeply moral and religious. In fact, the speculative physics of the early Stoics largely disappears, among the Romans, in favor of deeply ethical concern with human behavior. Stoicism was a cosmopolitan far more than a communal philosophy. Plato and Aristotle both work with the Greek city-states in mind as examples of communities built on shared values and assumptions. Stoicism coincides, almost exactly, with the collapse of such communal existence. The individual begins to feel much lonelier and the cosmos looms much larger. (The early Christians shared this deep sense of cosmic homelessness, seeing themselves and strangers and exiles in the world, in search of a better country.) The Stoics seek to answer this new question: Where can one find a home in so vast a space? They answer, with considerable bravery, that man has no home either here or there, in this place or that, but only in the world itself. We are citizens not of one city or another, but of the worldcity: the cosmopolis.
The history Guide, Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History. From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C. by Steven Kreis Plato described Diogenes as "Socrates gone mad." He called himself " citizen of the world and when asked what the finest thing in the world might be, replied "freedom of speech." It is said that one day Alexander the Great approached Diogenes, who was near death, and asked if there was anything that he could do for him. Diogenes is said to have replied, "would you mind moving you are blocking the sun." Plato described Diogenes as "Socrates gone mad." He called himself "citizen of the world and when asked what the finest thing in the world might be, replied "freedom of speech." Diogenes was a serious teacher who, disillusioned with a corrupt society and hostile world, protested by advocating happiness as self-mastery of an inner spiritual freedom from all wants except the barest minimum.
The Cynics rejected all material possessions and luxuries and lived simple lives totally divorced from the hustle and bustle of the Hellenistic world-city. The most famous of the Cynics was Diogenes the Dog (412-323 B.C.). Diogenes lived in a bath tub. He carried a lantern in daylight, proclaiming to all that he was looking for a "virtuous man." In his crusade against the corrupting influence of money, power, fame, pleasure and luxury, Diogenes extolled the painful effort involved in the mental and physical training required for self-sufficiency. The Stoics believed that all people belong to the single family of mankind and so one should not withdraw from the world, but try to make something of the world. The Stoics believed that the universe contained a principle of order, called the Divine Fire, God or Divine Reason (Logos). This was the principle that formed the basis for reality -- it permeated all things. Because men was part of the universe, he too shared in the Logos. Since reason was common to all, human beings were essentially brothers -- it made no difference whether one were Greek, barbarian, free man or slave since all mankind were fellow citizens of a world community. It was the Stoics who took the essentials of Socratic thought -- a morality of self-mastery based on knowledge -- and applied it beyond the Athenian polis to the world community. By teaching that there was a single divine plan (Logos), and that the world constituted a single society, it was Zeno who gave perfect expression to the cosmopolitan nature of the post-Alexandrine world. Stoicism, then, offered an answer to the problem of alienation and fragmentation created by the decline of the polis. Surrounded by a world of uncertainty, Stoicism promised individual happiness. The history Guide, Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History. From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C. Steven Kreis
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Look at me, I am without a home, without a city, without property, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have neither wife nor children, no miserable governors mansion, but only earth and sky, and one rough cloak. Yet what do I lack? Am I not free from pain and fear, am I not free? But Diogenes fancied himself "citiless, homeless, deprived of a fatherland, and it is not easy to see where his commitment to world-citizenship goes beyond this rejection of more local citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles nothing so much as the worldliness of a nomad. The stoic invention of cosmopolitan Politics, Erica Brown.
Jacqueline Loss. Cosmos: Making Up Worlds Worldly Conjunctions and Disjunctions: On Cosmopolitanism and Nomadism in Diamela Eltits Por La Patria (1986) and el Padre Mo (1989) A hasty review of cosmopolitanism might begin with Diogenes of Sinope's misanthropy (for an in-depth study of cosmopolitanism that focuses on the Enlightenment, but also touches on the Ancient Greeks, see Schlereth). Living in a barrel on the streets and in exile, this anticonventionialist responded to Alexander Great's inquiry into his origins with the following: kosmopolites.
The human nature of freedom and identity. Douglas W. Kmiec It is within the will of man to have positive law either advance human nature or undermine it. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the constructed, positive law of society can disregard the law of nature without consequence. We can construct governments and other social structures beyond our individual natures, but these perform well only if natures truths are observed. What we must never forget is that Nature never ceases to govern; and that, if men wish to govern, they must govern under Natures Laws, or they will be doomed to failure.11
There is much speculation as to why America in the late Eighteenth Century was the locus of natural law rediscovery. Possibly, it was the wide sweep of land, and nature, itself, that the colonists daily inhabited and sought to harness. Perhaps it was the extraordinary discoveries of the era in natural science. Or it may simply have been that no people so distant from their country of origin could rationally continue to think of themselves as subjects. American colonists were persons enjoying natural liberty. However it was, [t]he American colonists came upon this idea in their own way . . . . It was the result of their own experience in self government, coupled with their faith that their human nature had a Divine origin and involved a moral responsibility of which freedom was a necessary correlate. What Epictetus calls self-ownership was the Stoics most far-reaching contribution to their reflections on society, justice and personal freedom. The second reason for rejecting the Stoics total indifference to property or owners hip in principle is that Epictetus actually relies on the concept of possession in order to make his point about what is ultimately mine or yours. Far from rejecting the concept in principle, he insists that we are all owners of one supremely valuable thing - our minds or moral purposes or autonomy. This is not, of course, property in the material sense of the word, but it is fundamental to the way Epictetus conceptualizes the self. As he sees it, all human beings are alike in their natural ownership of the one thing that makes each of them essentially human - an autonomous mind and power of moral choice or assent.22 What Epictetus calls self-ownership was the Stoics most far-reaching contribution to their reflections on society, justice and personal freedom. Recall also Hegels observation about freedom and taking possession of oneself (T 2). But I want to set self-ownership aside for now in order to follow up the Stoics ideas concerning ownership of material property. My ultimate aim is to see how well their theory about property ownership in this sense coheres with self-ownership, the autonomy of the person. Hellenistic Ethics and Philosophical Power Hellenistic History and Culture. Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Green
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stoics in the city

amma birago
cosmopolitan is the new indigenous, and the call to mourning. as above so it is below like kingship, the city was "lowered down from heaven and cut to a heavenly patte rn;
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Quilombos. Where Slaves Ruled
But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Escaped slaves in Brazil created thousands of hidden societies, or quilombos, in the heart of the country. Charles C. Mann and Susanna Hecht Imagine flying, impossibly, over the Earth in the 17th centuryduring the time described in American history books as the colonial period, when Europeans swarmed into the New World to dominate an almost empty wilderness. Instead, you would see tens of millions of native people already living in the Americas, joined by an extraordinary flow not of European colonists but of African slaves. Up until the early 19th century, almost four times as many Africans as Europeans came to the Americas. Looking down from above, you woul dnt know that the tiny numbers of Europeans were supposed to be the stars of the story. Rather, your attention would focus on the two majority populations: Africans and Indians. Youd have a lot to watch. By the tens of thousands, African slaves escaped t he harsh conditions of the European plantations and mining operations and headed for the interior, into lands controlled by Indians. Up and down the Americas, ex-slaves and indigenous peoples fashioned hybrid settlements known as maroon communities, after the Spanish cimarrn, or runaway. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between black and red is a hidden drama that historians and archaeologists have only recently begun to unravel. Nowhere is the presence of this lost chapter more in evidence than in Brazil, where thousands of maroon communities are emerging from the shadows, reaffirming their mixed culture and pressing for legal title to the land they have occupied since the era of slavery. The stakes are high: New laws are giving Brazils maroon communities, called quilombos (the word for settlement in the Angolan language of Kimbundu), a key role in determining the future of the great Amazon forest. The founder of this maroon nation was said to be Aqualtune, an Angolan princess and general enslaved in a Congolese war in about 1605. Soon after arriving in Brazil, the pregnant Aqualtune escaped with some of her soldiers and fled to the Serra da Barriga, a series of abrupt basaltic extrusions that dominate the coastal plain like a line of watchtowers. On one high crest was a pool of water sheltered by trees, with an indigenous community living around it. Here, according to legend, Aqualtune built Palmares.
stoics in the city


on freedom and anarchy; resisting the system of sacrifice: cosmopolitans, resisting the system. the new anarchists. In the city, the good life was achieved only by mystical participation in the god's life and that of his fellow deities, and by vicarious achievement through the person of the king. There lay the original compensation for giving up the petty democratic ways of the village. To inhabit the same city as a god was to be a member of a super-community: a community in which every subject had a place, a function, a duty, a goal, as part of a hierarchic structure representing the cosmos itself. Utopia, the City and the Machine L Mumford the archetype of sacrifice and the sum of human experience remain in the collective unconscious to emerge again at any time. The challenge for individual citizens in a global society is to hold the several versions of sacrifice that may be operating simultaneously within current events or as cultures clash. Martha Blake. Psychotherapist and Jungian Analyst. This evokes a conception of sovereignty not merely as a state of exception to the normal order, but also as a creative, foundational force, a constituent power.3" Sacrifice in relations with political authorities might be seen as on a continuum with other forms of offering like first fruits, taxes, and tribute. 31 These are all given "up" to the political authorities and non-human powers. This dimension of sacrifice suggests a link to traditions of governmental sovereignty-in which the state is an alien entity, not derivative of "the People." But it also reaffirms that sacrifice composes part of the sovereign's dependence on the local people.
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Outsourcing Sacrifice: The Labor of Private Military Contractors M Taussig-Rubbo

On Sacrifice, Robert Kastenbaum Human sacrifice was considered so crucial a measure that it persisted for some time even in societies that had become more complex and sophisticated. For example, the practice of sacrificing the eldest son was a salient feature of Mediterranean cults 5,000 years ago and still a powerful theme in Judaism and early Christianity. Sacrifice would be tamed slowly as societies developed more effective ways to manage their needs and cope with their environments.
What then is a god? Gods had superhuman strength and supernatural powers, dined on nectar and ambrosia, were immortal, had ichor in their veins;
Some notes on sacrifice, shamanism, and the artifact Francesco Peluzzi That sacrifice itself is the god. That is, by giving itself the Victim becomes the Godhead; or, reciprocally, the Divine is manifested in the offering, when the offering is accepted. It is made sacred by the rite of sacrifice a specific sequence of gestures that separates the sacrifice from all other killing, and all other giving.
. Another theory, current at the time, reduced sacrifice, whether human or animal, to the status of a bribe to the gods. This view of the human victim as a mere commodity, immolated in exchange for tangible benefits, takes little account of the complex links that bound him both to the priest who took his life and to the community for which he died. La violence et le sacr. Ren Girard
Survival and prosperity both hinge on how much sunlight energy is under your control, whether it be channeled from horsepower, human power, or fossil fuels. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight . Author and progressive radio host Thom Hartmann offers an interesting theory in this bookthat until very recently the world and all thats in it subsisted on what Hartmann dubs current sunlight, the limited amount of sunlight that falls on the earth within a year. However, with the discovery of fossil fuels like coal and oil, we have essentially tapped into an underground savings account of stored up energy from the sun. This has allowed us to produce exponentially expanding food supplies, which has in turn grown a global population that is sustained by ancient sunlight rather than current sunlight. Its a population that cannot be sustained once the savings are depleted. This presents a problem that is not only about resource availability, which is merely a side effect. The problem is at the heart of modern culture itself (so-called civilization)a culture that is predicated on the values of domination, growth, and control. With this view of civilized culture, slavery comes as a given, a tool of civilization that usually accompanies progress. Some of the most monumental projects in historyones that we now call wonders, would not have been possible without slave labor. Slavery, Hartmann writes, is another way of taking the sunlight stored in somebody elses body and harnessing it for the benefit of the exploiter.
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Survival and prosperity both hinge on how much sunlight energy is under your control, whether it be channeled from horsepower, human power, or fossil fuels. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight
the curtain of slavery and the will to power. Hartmann points to Professor Jack Forbes adoption of the Native American term wetiko, which means cannibal, arguing that the worldview of modern cultures is essentially one of consumptionand not just in terms of contemporary ideas of consumerism. We actually approach the world with an appetite to consume others: We eat (consume) other humans by destroying them, destroying their lands, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically. And this kind of exploitation is attributed not to an evil inherent in human beings, but to wetiko, a particular and infectious way of thinking that has contaminated modern populations: to pursue domination and expansion at any cost. A value system of this breed invariably leads to competition, which, Hartmann believes, is not a natural blemish of the human condition, but an invented product of modern culture: From Caesar plundering the Celts, to Pizarro robbing the Incas, to Columbus enslaving the Taino, to the tobacco industry executives addicting children in Third World countries, its all the s ame wetiko mind-set: take over another persons life for your own purposes. In accordance with how deeply you want to understand this disease, then, you will start to see the symptoms everywhere. And in this sense, our conception of slavery can be expanded to apply not only to the obvious problem of the literal enslavement of millions, even in the golden and sometimes sentimental age of human rights, to also include all of us who are subjects of this kingdom of stories stories that Hartmann likens to captors: The slave-holders use the chains of the mortgage owed the bank, the loan on the car, the unpaid credit card bills, the requirement to pay property taxes if you own your own home, and the many other subtle and not-so-subtle forms of economic and cultural pressure to extract the majority of your lifes time and use it to their ends. As a result, almost everybody in modern society knows somebody whos on tranquilizers or has lost control to alcohol. Addiction to television is so rampant it is causing the disintegration of traditional social groups and clubs, and our children are lost in a sea of pain and confusion that has led to a doubling of the rate of teenage suicide in the past three decades. Slaves know when they are slaves, regardless of the words used to describe their slavery. And theyll escape from the slavery, be it in increasingly powerful drugs, increasingly intense entertainment, or psychopathic or violent behavior. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight
. Sovereignty is silence and secrecy: it says and means nothing; in Bataille's language, it is nothing. Still, sovereignty quite literally makes everything else possible. Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty. Tim Deines
This evokes a conception of sovereignty not merely as a state of exception to the normal order, but also as a creative, Page | 13 foundational force, a constituent power.3" Sacrifice in relations with political authorities might be seen as on a continuum with other forms of offering like first fruits, taxes, and tribute. 31 These are all given "up" to the political authorities and non-human powers. This dimension of sacrifice suggests a link to traditions of governmental sovereignty-in which the state is an alien entity, not derivative of "the People." But it also reaffirms that sacrifice composes part of the sovereign's dependence on the local people.

Jean Bethke Elshtain. On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? The nation-state is a phenomenon that cannot be imagined or legislated out of existence. Needing others to define ourselves, we will remain inside a state/nation-centered discourse of war and politics, for better and for worse, so long as states remain the best way we have devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common. But we can try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty; we can, perhaps, move toward what I am tempted to call a post-sovereign politics. A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? "It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man." Identification with a national "imagined community" is a complex, many sided construction. It taps particularism and universalism. Indeed, one might argue it requires such, being composed of normatively vital aspects of both ethnicity and universal values, organic integration and voluntarism. Human beings require concrete reference groups in order to attain individuality and identity but too complete immersion in such groups limits the boundaries of identity and of identification to fixed familial, tribal, or territorial lines. Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice Jean Bethke Elshtain
The Cross and the Begging Bowl: Deconstructing the Cosmology of Violence James L. Fredericks Girard looks on myths as irremediably ideological. Societies use their sacred narratives to legitimate the status quo. The myths associated with sacrificial rituals serve not only to justify violence against the scapegoat, but also as mystifications that obscure the foundations of social hierarchies in violence. Thus, by establishing and maintaining social order in the redirecting of violence, mythologies also construct what might be called a "cosmology of violence" (the phrase is not Girard's) in which sacred narrative, social structure, and sacrificial systems are intimately related to the phenomenon of scapegoating.
Modern cosmopolitanism, with its background of materially-based human freedom, must allow for humans to be whatever they wish to be, and then deal with the fact that material circumstances curtail that freedom, possibly relegating some to a status of being less-than-human, because of a lack of freedom. Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism Doug Al-Maini
Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism

Cosmopolitanism can be freed from the dubious joys of imperial shock and awe and returned rightfully to utopia, even freed from modern-day cosmopolitical Free Thinkers, from its contemporary champions, who have turned into a rather dull institutional blueprint Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism
the cosmopolitanism of Diogenes of Sinopi, the anarchism and cosmopolitanism homeless and city-less philosopher (an apt exemplar, in our modern era, of the liminal, border-crosser) who told the visiting Alexander to move, as he was blocking the sun or in Zenos Republic, a treatise written by a metic, an outcast, a Cypriote of Phoenician or Semitic background, whose city in the sky enveloped the entire world, not the bounded polis, and did away with laws and compulsion, with temples, court houses and gymnasia, and which has found a new iteration in the discourses and practices of post-anarchist cosmopolitanism in the early 21st century.79 Cosmopolitanism can be freed from the dubious joys of imperial shock and awe and returned rightfully to utopia, even freed from modernday cosmopolitical Free Thinkers, from its contemporary champions, who have turned into a rather dull institutional blueprint.80 And in Zenos injunction to make your own city, with your own friends, now, wherever you happen to live,81 we see an early anticipation of Landauers existential communitarian anarchism. Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism
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Carolyn Marvin. David Ingle. Which God is it? Our god - our nation - must be inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But this god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice. When the god commands it, we must perform the ritual sacrifice - war - that sustains the group.
Human sacrifice at Tenochtitlan. John M. lngham The community and the cosmos itself depended upon the assimilation of the weak by the strong. Gods and nobles alike consumed the labor, production, and even the bodies of the common people. Sacrifice to the gods was a metaphor for tribute to the state, and the anthropophagic meal symbolized the ties between gods and nobles, the elite core of the community. The sacrifice of slaves and war captives ensured the social production and reproduction of internal and external relations of domination. In these respects, Aztec society and culture were not altogether unique. Classic anthropological monographs on sacrifice show that tribute to and communion with the gods and the ritual slaying of a person or animal associated with the corn spirit are recurrent themes in the religions of early civilizations. Ethnographic examples might even be adduced to suggest that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced in chiefdoms and early states with some regularity. Nonetheless, the scale of Aztec sacrifice was certainly unusual. I have suggested that a combination of urban growth and diminishing economic returns to imperial expansion was a primary impetus for this phenomenon. Human sacrifice at Tenochtitlan. John M. lngham
How cruel are the planets that stay there and conspire evil in their rage . . . the planets conspire in rage against us. A Mandaean text. Sacrifice and Sacramant. E O James Sacrifice involves the destruction of a victim for the purpose of maintaining or restoring a right relationship of man to the sacred order. Charles Tilly (1975), Michael Howard (1991), and other historians concur in the opinion that
war and the military machine are principal determinants in the shaping of nation states. . In The Nation-State and Violence, Anthony Giddens defines nationalism as "the cultural sensibility of sovereignty" (note the fusion of culture and politics) that unleashes administrative power within a clearly demarcated territory, "the bounded nationstate" (1985, 219). Although it is allegedly becoming obsolete under the pressure of globalization (for qualifications, see Sassen (1998), the nation-state is considered by "legal modernists" (Berman 1995) as the prime source of violence against citizens and entire peoples.
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Carolyn Marvin. David Ingle. Which God is it? Our god - our nation - must be inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But this god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice. When the god commands it, we must perform the ritual sacrifice - war - that sustains the group.
Robert Kastenbaum. On sacrifice. Sacrificial companions to the next life. Sacrificial companions to the next life. Many societies have considered their lea ders as representative of their people both in this life and the next. It was important, then, to make sure that the ruler of the land (be it a king or otherwise) was accompanied to the afterlife with a retinue of loyal attendants. Rulers often had their concubines and servants (as well as household animals) entombed with them. Even distinguished ministers might be among the companions who were either entombed or immolated in order to serve their ruler after death. Examples include major archaeological finds in Egypt and China where the bodies of numerous attendants were discovered in chambers adjoining the royal coffin. There is evidence that elaborate ceremonies were conducted to honor the chosen companions prior to their deaths. It appears that the sacrificial victims often were given libations that provided a drug-induced insensitivity prior to their deaths. The practice of burying the living with the dead encountered increasing criticism through the centuries. Eventually many societies shifted to symbolic sacrifices; for example, the later Egyptian practice of placing figurines (Shabti ) in the royal tombs. China, Japan, the Greek states, and other ancient civilizations also moved toward symbolic rather than actual sacrifice of companions upon the death of their rulers. Furthermore, with the development of Christianity and Islam, a life after death appeared more likely to be within reach of individuals other than royalty, therefore making voluntary sacrifice a less attractive proposition.
The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde of the many parochial Stoics Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal Thomas Pangle.
Ciceros character on Cato. Roman Cosmopolitanism. The Stoics and Cicero. Thomas L. Pangle. The Stoics whom he follows, Cicero's character Cato says, "hold that the world is ruled by the spirit of the gods, and that it is, as it were, a common city and state of human beings and gods, and that each of us is a part of this world;
stoics in the city

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Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism It is tempting to assert that this difference between the two cosmopolitanisms indicates that the moderns have little to learn from the Stoics, so long as the agenda remains the kind of emancipation mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this essay.36 Modern cosmopolitanism, with its background of materially-based human freedom, must allow for humans to be whatever they wish to be, and then deal with the fact that material circumstances curtail that freedom, possibly relegating some to a status of being less-than-human, because of a lack of freedom. Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism Doug Al-Maini In the city, the good life was achieved only by mystical participation in the god's life and that of his fellow deities, and by vicarious achievement through the person of the king. There lay the original compensation for giving up the petty democratic ways of the village. To inhabit the same city as a god was to be a member of a super-community: a community in which every subject had a place, a function, a duty, a goal, as part of a hierarchic structure representing the cosmos itself. Utopia, the City and the Machine L Mumford
... from the bodies of group members. Blood sacrifice, is the holiest ritual of the nation-state. Warfare is the institution that enacts this holy ritual. What constitutes the nation at any moment is the memory of the last successful blood sacrifice that counts for living group members.
A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. .. A nation is therefore a large-scale solidarity, constituted by the feeling of the sacrifices that one has made in the past and of those that one is prepared to make in the future. What is a Nation? Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? Ernest Renan Some Scandinavian Sacrifices Jacqueline Simpson To turn now to English folklore - is there anything in our customs that might be derived from similar old modes of sacrifice, and so might justify us in claiming that they were known in England too? There has long been argument whether placenames such as Swinehead, Gateshead, Hindhead and the like could refer to Anglo-Saxon cult-centres where animal heads were offered in sacrifice.
On Religious Sacrifice. A ceremonious act linking mortals to their gods. The blood is a required 'food' for the gods.
the importance of blood in sacrifice. It seems the purpose of a religious sacrifice is to sanctify the taking of a life, usually marked by the spilling of the victim's blood, as is the case with animals and humans. It is a ceremonious act linking mortals to their gods. The blood is a required 'food' for the gods. Being not of human flesh, they require the very life-force of humans to nourish and appease them. Sacrificial blood has divine powers which can sanctify mortals and nourish deities. But aside from the material on sacrifice within established religions, other bloodsacrifices need to be considered as well. For instance, hundreds of thousands of soldiers have died on the battlefield in the name of nationalism. Is this sacrifice? If one considers the religious implications of nationalism and warfare, it Page | 17 is. http://classprojects.kenyon.edu/wmns Coincident with transformation from nomadic to settled life was the passage from the tribe to the more stable and compact national organization with the king at the head of the state. In this situation the god took on himself the character of supreme authority, and the worshiper became his subject, paying that tribute which his lord demanded, doing homage to his heavenly ruler as the condition of standing well with him. The Biblical World - Volume 17 William Rainey Harper, Ernest DeWitt Burton, Shailer Mathews - 1901
Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty Tim Deines . One would want to press Nancy on this point, why exactly does the confusion surrounding the origins of "early" sacrifice "finish" the history of Western sacrifice? Might we not think the "completion" of Western ontotheology, instead, from a more materialist point of view? Do we recognize, for example, that the violence of imperialism can never satiate its need for (Western) sacrifice, can never close its own figure by neo-liberal and democratic means? Nancy is perhaps suggesting that the fictitiousness of origins, on the one hand, combined with the historical collapse of sacrifice (in the name of Western "progress" and the end[ing] of the political), on the other hand, signal the (re) emergence of the inappropriable figure of finitude. Tim Deines on Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty
Sacrifice reduces violence. It may seem peculiar to suggest that sacrifice reduces violence, but some anthropologists and historians have drawn this inference. Aggressive tensions within a society can lead toward violence against fellow members. Ritual sacrifices provide a relatively safe framework to keep violence within bounds while at the same time offering emotional release through killing substitute victims. This theory suggests that, at least in some circumstances, ritual killing of a designated victim can restrain the larger group from tearing itself apart. The outcome of wars, crop harvests, and the weather were all determined by the whims of the gods, whims which required appeasement on the part of mortal humans. Sacrifice was incorporated as a way of 'feeding' these ever-hungry gods.
Sacrifice keeps the world going. The most sweeping theory is based on an interpretation of history that pictures the human condition as fearful and perilous, beset with threats to survival from starvation, attack, and events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods that were taken to be the work of angry gods. Possessing limited knowledge and technology, societies tried to find a way of negotiating with rival, demanding, and frequently unpredictable gods if the world and their own lives were to continue. Sacrifice soon became a significant form of exchange with the gods, a sort of currency in an age before the establishment of a monetary system. In modern parlance, sacrifice was a way of doing business.
Robert Kastenbaum. On sacrifice. Sacrifice is a form of communication with a deity for similar purposes. The word itself means "to make holy." ., sacrificial offerings include objects of value and symbolic significance that are given to the gods to earn their favor. The gifts can take many forms, becoming sacred themselves through ritual consecration. The gods might be offered the most desirable foods or provided with the finest vessels, carvings, tools, and weapons. Historians, however, have often regarded blood sacrifice as the most powerful way to appease the gods. It was not unusual for societies to engage in both animal and human sacrifice, although the historical trend has been toward a sharp reduction in the latter. Participants in blood sacrifice rituals experience a sense of awe, danger, or exaltation because they are daring to approach the gods who create, sustain, and destroy life. The buildup of tension prior to the blood sacrifice gives way to a festive sense of triumph and relief. Morale is strengthened by the ritual killing because the group has itself performed the godlike act of destruction and is now capable of renewing its own existence. The underlying philosophical assumption is that life must pass through death.
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state formation and the implication for sacrifice on pastoral peoples, cattle herders & the shepherd kings. Rituals of Sacrifice and the role of violence in organizing and maintaining enduring groups. The purpose of ritual is to sustain the group by repeating (at various levels of intensity) the act of group creation. A successful ritual stops time at the perfect creation moment. It repeats and freezes the retrospectively golden moment when the group was created out of sacrifice. In this moment the debt to the bloodthirsty god was paid. The group was pristine. This was the moment when sacrifice was truly enough, when we were delivered from time and death. Rituals may be contrived or opportunistic. The most powerful rituals of nation-group solidarity are opportunistic responses, such as war, to group threat. But opportunistic rituals are unpredictable in their occurrence and expensive in their prosecution. Their magic is great precisely because they are risky and costly. Contrived or pre-planned seasonal rituals fill in the intervals between opportunistic group-forging rituals by rehearsing the drama of sacrifice and regeneration. 3. Rituals have two major dynamics. They create the world by transforming chaos into cosmos, to use Mircea Eliade's terms, or they remodel and recall the transformation of chaos into cosmos. All rituals model and transform to one degree or another, but rituals may be classified by whether they are primarily transforming commemorative. George S. Goodspeed Atonement in Non-Christian Religions. The Atonement of Fear Professor W. Robertson Smith. Substances in Semitic sacrifices. [They] "are drawn from edible substances, and indeed from such substances as form the ordinary staple of human food." 10 He adds: "All sacrifices were taken by the ancients as being literally the food of the gods."", These gifts might therefore be either vegetable or animal, grain or flesh. The latter were most common, because flesh, regarded as the most desirable human food, would naturally be most agreeable to the higher powers. Indeed, Professor Simon goes so far as to derive the custom of animal sacrifice from this root when he says: "The primary occasion of animal sacrifices, and others rooted in them, was probably the desire to gratify the gods with the best that man himself enjoys.'" George S. Goodspeed on Professor W. Robertson Smith. Substances in Semitic sacrifices.
Justifying the Ultimate Sacrifice. Civil and Military Religion in Frontline Blogs Morten Brnder. The central point of Girards La violence et le sacr is that violence is the sacred (Girard 1979: 19). Violence is the contingent force which at one time is a power of potential destruction and a source from which social life itself is shaped. Man is fundamentally violent. Not because he is ruled by a Freudian death drive or Thanatos (generally, Girard pays little heed to classical notions of desire, fuelled by want). No, man is violent because violence is a Page | 19 fundamental condition in all social relations (ibid: 174-175). Engaging in the social is engaging in a struggle for dominance, which may not be articulated physically, but nevertheless characterises as a profoundly violent relation. And, if violence is allowed to prevail indiscriminately, society will perish (ibid: 144-145). Therefore, all lasting social relations are based on the discrimination of violence: Society is founded on the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate violence. Illegitimate violence is random violence. Legitimate violence is violence that takes place within certain boundaries (ibid: 15). Thus, for society to exist, the fundamental violence of sociality must be canalised. The religious sacrifice is undertaken with the purpose of canalising violence, of allowing violence to take place on legal terms. Violence is all-devouring. Ultimately it will consume society. Therefore, it is necessary to canalise violence by sacrificing a victim in lieu of society. However, that canalisation can only take place if we pretend that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence is not arbitrary: If we consider the victim as the legitimate object of the violence that is bestowed on it. This is the reason why Girard emphasises time and again that the victim is not a substitute for society, but a surrogate.
On Sacrifice, Robert Kastenbaum Human sacrifice is sometimes regarded as a bizarre practice carried out by a few scattered societies who either were uncivilized or exceptionally cruel and violent. However, there is persuasive evidence that the sacrificial impulse has been common throughout history and has played an important role in society. The origins of blood sacrifice are lost in the mist of prehistory. Nevertheless, inferences can be drawn from archaeological research and from the practices and beliefs of people whose rituals continued into the historical period. The same societies usually performed other types of sacrifices as well, but these examples demonstrate the widespread use of ritual murder as an approved component of social policy. Human sacrifice was considered so crucial a measure that it persisted for some time even in societies that had become more complex and sophisticated. For example, the practice of sacrificing the eldest son was a salient feature of Mediterranean cults 5,000 years ago and still a powerful theme in Judaism and early Christianity. Sacrifice would be tamed slowly as societies developed more effective ways to manage their needs and cope with their environments.
Spilling blood continues the contact with ancestors who protect the clan against invisible forces. Self sacrifice for community as an act of war.
In earlier periods of antiquity, communal feasting on sacrificial meat had proclaimed and reinforced the community's solidarity. To reject sacrificial meat was to reject full participation in the community.46 In the religiously "mixed" communities of the fourth century, communal feasting on sacrificial meat could hardly reinforce solidarity, it could only create division. The bonds of family, class, and culture mattered more to such people than religious controversy. Moreover, the use of sacrifice as an instrument of discrimination, if not persecution, could invite reprisals if the regime did not last. Consequently, prudent people appear to have adopted a "wait-and-see" attitude, a policy whose wisdom was confirmed when the news of Julian's sudden death arrived from the Eastern front. Other developments in civic life also made it difficult to revive large-scale sacrifices, for the decline in sacrifice in the fourth century was not due solely to Christian hostility or pagan desire to avoid religiously
divisive customs. It resulted in part from a shift in patterns of euergetism and a decline in the ability and willingness of civic notables to fund the traditional festivals as they had done in earlier periods.
It was the religion that exacted a bloody sacrifice that made the Romans of pagan times strong and that invested them with their character of conquerors and rulers. "When I meditated on the reason why people were more in love with freedom in those ancient times than they are Page | 20 now, I saw it was because they have grown weaker now than formerly, which is a result of the difference in education, this again being based on the difference of their religion from ours... This may be seen from many of their institutions, counting first among them the magnificence of their sacrifices as compared with ours. There is more delicacy than splendour in our display, and no ferocious or jubilant action whatsoever. There was no lack of display then, nor lack of magnificence in their ceremonies, but added to it was the action of the sacrifice full of blood and ferocity, where a multitude of animals were slaughtered; which sight, being so terrible, made man behave likewise."' Niccol Machiavelli
Blood Sacrifice and the Nation: Review Essay of Marvin and Ingle The continued existence of any societal group, according to the authors, depends at least partly on the willingness of its members to sacrifice themselves for it. Yet, the creation of national sentiment requires that members remain unaware of the mechanism that maintains the group. The knowledge that the underlying cost of society is the violent death of some portion of its members must remain secret. In order to endure as a sacred object, the nation requires that people kill and die in its name. However, for the ritual of war to remain effective, societies must remain unconscious of the relationship between the institution of warfare and the maintenance of the idea of the nation. Our deepest secret, the authors claim the collective group taboois the knowledge that society depends for its existence on violent, sacrificial death at the hands of the group itself. In order to avoid knowing that killingsacrificial deathlies at the core of the ideology of nationalism, we treat violence as if primitive and morally suspect: a failure of social structure rather than an elemental component. When violence occurs it is presented as a last resort, a challenge to civilized modernity. We prefer not to say that violence is inherent in the nature of the nation-state. The profound point of Marvin and Ingles work is that what keeps the group together and makes us feel unified is not the death of the enemy, but the sacrifice of our own. If the ritual purpose of war were merely to kill the enemy, the deaths of some 40,000+ Iraqis during the first Persian Gulf War (1990-1991) would have made a lasting contribution to American unity.
Marvin and Ingle state that their analysis is not a brief in favor of violence or against it. Rather, they seek to illuminate the structural role of violence in organizing and maintaining enduring groups. In shortwithin the framework of the religion of nationalismits not a question of fighting this or that war or of defeating this or that enemy. Rather, violent acts performed by society are inherent to the nature of the nation-state. The authors conclude that cohesion in enduring groups requires violence as a structural rather than contingent social force. Contained within each nation is a sacred idea or ideal. The truth of this sacred ideal is established when members of society die (or are maimed) for it. Warfare constitutes a representation of society to itself. Sacred truth comes into being through a blood sacrifice ritual performed on the bodies of supplicants.
Should we expect weakly bound pluralistic nations, like the United States, to rely on nearly constant engagement in warfare to bind the population that is otherwise fragmented and, at times, deeply and violently at odds with itself? Would you suspect that this reasoning is most helpful for explaining why military service is used as a quick path to citizenship for foreign nationals? Blood sacrifice and the nation, A review of Marvin & Ingle Richard Koenigsberg
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stoics in the city

on freedom and anarchy; resisting the system of sacrifice: cosmopolitans, resisting the system. the new anarchists. Look at me, I am without a home, without a city, without property, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have neither wife nor children, no miserable governors mansion, but only earth and sky, and one rough cloak. Yet what do I lack? Am I not free from pain and fear, am I not free? When sacrificial destruction is seen as the expression of a particular politics, in which whole groups are categorized as expendable while others are designated as beneficiaries, the more generous aspects of the rite begin to disappear. No matter how fully camouflaged it is by a bureaucratized role in a modern system of exchange, regardless of the context in which it appears, sacrificial thinking invariably reduces at some points to its fundamental identification with ritual violence. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory Susan L. Mizruchi
Johan van der Walt on Sovereignty and sacrifice. Reflections on sovereignty and sacrifice in the thought of Derrida, Nancy and Agamben. According to Agamben, homo sacer is the one who can be killed, but he cannot be sacrificed. And for him sovereignty relates to or is constituted by this non-sacrificial killing. Sovereignty concerns the power to determine or simply manage, manage merely technically what is to be done with life that has no or no longer has meaning in excess of mere life. Sovereignty would be managing merely technically the ultimately uninteresting managerial decision, or non-decision rather, to continue or discontinue an instance of bare life. Agamben relates the technical reign of sovereignty to the camp, the death camps and the increasingly ubiquitous realm of the exceptional managerial crossing between bare life and death in contemporary medical practices.
Hence the greater plausibility of Jean Luc Nancys assertion that sovereignty is always a matter of sacrifice. Nancy writes: Sacrifice can easily be understood to be a much broader phenomenon than just immolation.
A religious construction of identity and otherness can turn the different into a scapegoat, whose disappearance or annihilation is considered the solution to the problem. In strongly identitarian religions, such as the civic or national Page | 22 ones, we find institutionalized rites of expulsion that consolidate (by means of rendering "other" and de-identifying a member, human or animal) a social consensus through the use of collective violence. Theoretical Reflections on Violence and Religion: Identity, Power, Privilege and Difference Francisco Diez de Velasco Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution. Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart Is it possible that the human species emerged, that it separated itself from the larger animal community, not on the basis of its propensity for violence (which is, with few exceptions, shared throughout the higher primates) but on the basis of its coordination of that violence against one member of the community uniquely? the archetype of sacrifice and the sum of human experience remain in the collective unconscious to emerge again at any time. The challenge for individual citizens in a global society is to hold the several versions of sacrifice that may be operating simultaneously within current events or as cultures clash. Martha Blake. Psychotherapist and Jungian Analyst. This evokes a conception of sovereignty not merely as a state of exception to the normal order, but also as a creative, foundational force, a constituent power.3" Sacrifice in relations with political authorities might be seen as on a continuum with other forms of offering like first fruits, taxes, and tribute. 31 These are all given "up" to the political authorities and non-human powers. This dimension of sacrifice suggests a link to traditions of governmental sovereignty-in which the state is an alien entity, not derivative of "the People." But it also reaffirms that sacrifice composes part of the sovereign's dependence on the local people. Outsourcing Sacrifice: The Labor of Private Military Contractors M Taussig-Rubbo
On Sacrifice, Robert Kastenbaum Human sacrifice is sometimes regarded as a bizarre practice carried out by a few scattered societies who either were uncivilized or exceptionally cruel and violent. However, there is persuasive evidence that the sacrificial impulse has been common throughout history and has played an important role in society. The origins of blood sacrifice are lost in the mist of prehistory. Nevertheless, inferences can be drawn from archaeological research and from the practices and beliefs of people whose rituals continued into the historical period. The same societies usually performed other types of sacrifices as well, but these examples demonstrate the widespread use of ritual murder as an approved component of social policy. Human sacrifice was considered so crucial a measure that it persisted for some time even in societies that had become more complex and sophisticated. For example, the practice of sacrificing the eldest son was a salient feature of Mediterranean cults 5,000 years ago and still a powerful theme in Judaism and early Christianity. Sacrifice would be tamed slowly as societies developed more effective ways to manage their needs and cope with their environments.
The Myth of Cain: Fratricide, City Building, and Politics. George Shulman. Although suggesting at the least the insufficiency of unequivocal urban celebration, such concerns also may betray what I have called elsewhere a tendency to pastoralism, an inclination to purify self and community of aspects of life that are necessary or valuable, an impulse that may present, in turn, its own threat to autonomy and politics.' The Myth of Cain: Fratricide, City Building, and Politics. George Shulman.
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Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution. Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart Is it possible that the human species emerged, that it separated itself from the larger animal community, not on the basis of its propensity for violence (which is, with few exceptions, shared throughout the higher primates) but on the basis of its coordination of that violence against one member of the community uniquely? Is it possible that what is distinctive about the human is its channeling of that violence upon a victim arbitrarily chos en, one who, in that relative indifference to the motivating trigger of his or her isolation and removal, resolved conflict as a consequence? Could hominization itself be the product of coordinated, unidirectional shepherding of otherwise disruptive communal energy against a substitute or surrogate victim, a one that may stand alone for many? Sacrifice, Scripture, and Substitution. Ann W. Astell and Sandor Goodhart
Power and Violence The interdependence of religion and power is another of the aspects that can provide some clues to the comprehension of the subject at hand. Power in stratified societies (those that arise with the economic, social and ideological complexities produced together with the development of agriculture) requires violence for its subsistencea nd mechanisms to justify it use. Religion has been a key in the legitimization of power: in the acceptance of inequalities, in how leadership was established and endured, and in maintaining a social consensus in spite of the unequal distribution of privileges.
sacrifice, the origin of the city and politics At the root of urban(ist) celebration and pastoral lament is the crime of fratricide, which myth tells us is the origin of the city and politics.
Some Scandinavian Sacrifices Jacqueline Simpson To turn now to English folklore - is there anything in our customs that might be derived from similar old modes of sacrifice, and so might justify us in claiming that they were known in England too? There has long been argument whether placenames such as Swinehead, Gateshead, Hindhead and the like could refer to Anglo-Saxon cult-centres where animal heads were offered in sacrifice.
Macmillan Encyclopedia of Death and dying Robert Kastenbaum Foundation and passage sacrifices. There is abundant archaeological evidence that many societies practiced both animal and human sacrifice to persuade the gods to protect their buildings and ensure safe passage through dangerous areas where their own gods might lack jurisdiction. Burials suggestive of sacrifice have been found in the sites of ancient bridges and buildings throughout Asia, Europe, and North Africa. It was widely believed that territories were under the control of local gods who might be angered by intrusions. Blood sacrifice at border crossings (often marked by rivers) and within buildings were thought to be prudent offerings. Sacrificial victims were also interred beneath city gates.
Children were often selected as the sacrificial offerings. Excavation of the Bridge Gate in Bremen, Germany, and several ancient fortresses in Wales are among the many examples of this practice. According to the Book of Kings, when Joshua destroyed Jericho he prophesized that the man who rebuilds Jericho "shall lay the foundation stones thereof upon the body of his first born and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates thereof." In rebuilding the city, Hiel later sacrificed his oldest and youngest sons in precisely this manner. The historian Nigel Davies observes that biblical accounts of foundation sacrifices have been supported by archaeological investigations: In the sanctuary in Gezer were found two burnt skeletons of six-year-old children and the skulls of two adolescents that had been Page | 24 sawn in two. At Meggido a girl of fifteen had been killed and buried in the foundations of a large structure. Excavations show that the practice of interring children under new buildings was widespread and some were evidently buried alive. (Davies 1981, p. 61) Foundation sacrifices dedicated to fertility (as, for example, in storage buildings) often involved infant and child victims. Captives, slaves, and criminals have also been selected as sacrificial victims on many occasions. That foundation sacrifices belong only to the remote past could be an erroneous assumption. In early twentieth-century Borneo an eyewitness testified that a criminal was buried alive in every posthole for a new building so that he might become a guardian spirit.
No one attempt to explain blood sacrifice seems adequate for the variety of forms and purposes associated with this practice in many societies over many years. Nevertheless, it is useful to consider the following accounts as informed attempts to explain the relationship between blood sacrifice and society. On Sacrifice, Robert Kastenbaum
the blood spilled from a victim's body was truly a holy substance, To ensure the gods received their ration, the blood was sometimes smeared on stone images of gods, collected on bark paper strips and burnt so the smoke could ascend into the heavens, or consumed by the ruler, the representative of the deities. http://classprojects.kenyon.edu/wmns
Scott Bradbury Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice. III. The funding of public cults: Euergetism and pagan priesthoods Every town and city was to have a priest, over whom there stood a provincial high-priest to be selected from those who were "most distinguished in public life and conspicuous in performing every kind of public service" (Euseb. HE 8.14.9). Like an imperial governor, the high-priest was granted a bodyguard of soldiers. Lactantius corroborates Eusebius' account, while providing us with further details: [Maximin] went on to adopt the novel practice (novo more) of appointing highpriests (sacerdotes maximos), one for each city from among its leading citizens. As Ramsay MacMullen has written of philotimia: "No word, understood to its depth, goes farther to explain the Greco-Roman achievement."47 The gods were among the most conspicuous beneficiaries of philotimia, particularly of the heavy spending of the priests themselves. Traditionally, festivals of the gods in Greek cities had been funded from three different sources: sacred funds, civic funds, and providing of festivals (including the sacrifices) and the payment of the temple personnel. Civic magistrates were charged with overseeing the proper use of the gods' revenues. Rents from temple lands and revenue from the authorized sale of temple property were insufficient, however, to cover upkeep of the sanctuary and the funding of festivals. Thus, it was conventional for cities to allocate part of their own civic funds to defray part of the cost of festivals (including the sacrifices) and to pay temple personnel.
A. H. M. Jones judged that the majority of sacrifices at the festivals were paid for out of public funds. This combination of civic and sacred funds, however, still fell short of the sums necessary to stage the elaborate festivals often connected with the most prominent shrines and cities. The religious life of the cities relied heavily on private benefaction, particularly on the euergetism of the priests themselves. By the Hellenistic and Roman periods, priesthoods in Greek cities, as at Rome, had become assimilated to civic magistracies. Social prestige and an ability to shoulder the considerable financial burdens were the most important criteria in the selection of pagan priests, who usually served for a year, sometimes for a fixed number of Page | 25 years. Priesthoods "for life" were not uncommon, and a few were hereditary, either by ancient custom or because the same family held the priesthood through successive generations. As we noted above, among the sources of civic revenue, sacred funds were unusual for their stability and reliability. In theory these funds were the property of the god, but cities frequently found creative ways to tap them. No practice reveals more clearly the economic aspects of priestly appointments than the outright sale of priesthoods, attested in Asia Minor (particularly Ionia) from the fourth century B.C. to the second century A.D. By selling a priesthood and then awarding the priest's salary from a combination of civic and sacred funds, cities might effectively tap sacred funds for secular purposes. Epigraphical evidence from the Hellenistic period through the third century A.D. records the wide variety and stupendous scale of benefaction in which priests might engage: the construction or repair of public and sacred monuments; the funding of festivals, including grants to the citizens of money, oil, wine, grain, perfumes, and unguents; the funding of sacrifices by remitting to the city or private worshippers the hides, animal parts, taxes, and fees rightfully owed to the priest; the feasting of the magistrates or, in some cases, the whole citizenry; the provision of entertainment, such as singers, actors, horse races, and gladiatorial combats. Priests and priestesses derived conspicuous benefit from the possession of priesthoods, since lavish expenditure on the gods was traditional, it built up the religious and social life of the community, and, as Peter Brown has pointed out, it was well suited to deflect the envy of one's peers. Moreover, the priest as sacrificer had a conspicuous role in the religious life of the early empire. Numerous reliefs of the period depict the Roman emperor engaged in a conventional sacrificial ritual. As Richard Gordon has argued, the focus of the reliefs is not the act of sacrificial killing, but the emperor himself dressed as a priest and engaged in the ceremony of sacrifice. The focus is thus on the emperor in a ceremonial role as sacrificer and benefactor. The sacrifices depicted on these reliefs, argues Gordon, become "paradigms or exemplars of public sacrifice throughout the empire .... 56 In this ideology of benefaction, the emperor's act of sacrifice is the act of benefaction par excellence, in imitation of which provincial elites make their own sacrifices and benefactions. If social prestige had been the only benefit to accrue to civic notables, priesthoods might nonetheless have been less attractive since they could involve huge expenditures. Accordingly, cities made considerable efforts to make these posts desirable by providing them with an income to help defray costs. Priests were often awarded stipends from civic funds and/or sacred funds. They received exemption from a variety of other liturgies and were awarded fees and taxes from sacrifices or mystery initiations. The system of funding public festivals through a combination of sacred funds, civic funds, and private benefaction lasted well into the third century, despite the rise of serious competitors for the largesse of civic benefactors, particularly the festivals of the imperial cult and agonistic festivals. The imperial cult quickly became one of the most dynamic cults in Asia Minor (and elsewhere), if we measure dynamism by a capacity to attract competitive zeal and financial resources.60 The similarities among these festivals imperial, agonistic, and divine-were greater than their differences: they all employed the processions, sacrifices, banquets, distributions, and contests that had come to be a central feature of Greek culture and sustained a characteristically Greek style of civic life. These various festivals would continue so long as civic finances permitted and, in particular, so long as the "sheer willingness" (MacMullen's phrase) of the notables to fund them held firm. Pagan priesthoods declined not only because civic notables were less willing and able to spend, but also because civic and sacred funds were no longer available to help defray the cost of private benefaction. Constantine confiscated temple funds to help finance his own building projects, particularly in Constantinople, and to obtain bullion for minting a stable currency. He was primarily interested in hoards of gold and silver, but he also confiscated temple landholdings. He and his successors confiscated the wealth, both landholdings and movable goods, of municipalities as well, which consequently suffered chronic financial problems in the fourth century.68 Thus, all three sources of funds for the orchestration of traditional festivals sacred funds, civic funds, and private
benefaction-were severely reduced in the fourth century. Julian's Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice Scott Bradbury
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When sacrificial destruction is seen as the expression of a particular politics, in which whole groups are categorized as expendable while others are designated as beneficiaries, the more generous aspects of the rite begin to disappear. No matter how fully camouflaged it is by a bureaucratized role in a modern system of exchange, regardless of the context in which it appears, sacrificial thinking invariably reduces at some points to its fundamental identification with ritual violence. The Science of Sacrifice: American Literature and Modern Social Theory Susan L. Mizruchi
A religious construction of identity and otherness can turn the different into a scapegoat, whose disappearance or annihilation is considered the solution to the problem. In strongly identitarian religions, such as the civic or national ones, we find institutionalized rites of expulsion that consolidate (by means of rendering "other" and de-identifying a member, human or animal) a social consensus through the use of collective violence. Theoretical Reflections on Violence and Religion: Identity, Power, Privilege and Difference Francisco Diez de Velasco
Similarly the Stoic Balbus, in the dialogue On the Nature of the Gods: "The world is as it were the common home of the gods and humans, the city that belongs to both." Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal Thomas L. Pangle
Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, an d money, Honorary shares of sacrificial meat in attic vase painting. Visual signs of distinction and civic identity. The Significance of Meat in the polis Victoria Tsoukala
Meat consumption was closely linked to animal sacrifice in ancient Greece. On linguistic grounds it is the scholarly opinio communis that every time an animal was slaughtered for food in ancient Greece, there was a ritual acknowledgment of the gods. On a symbolic level, the butchering of the sacrificial animal and the distribution of its meat affirmed the cosmic order, the division between gods and men.30 Members of the polis of Athens were entitled to take part in collective activities, such as sacrifices, and to receive a portion of the sacrificial meat of the polis. Participating in the sacrifices of the polis was also a performance of ones civic identity, an activity that strengthened ones feeling of belonging to the polis.31 On a practical level, the system of sacrifices in the Athenian polis has correctly been
identified as a redistributive mechanism, whereby state resources were spent in order to secure food for the population.32
The only available quantitative information comes from 4th-century Athens, where on the basis of the epigraphic record it has been calculated that a citizen had the opportunity to acquire meat from public sacrifices at least once every eight or nine daysroughly 40 to 45 times a year.20 Meat consumption was closely linked to animal sacrifice in ancient Greece. On linguistic grounds it is the scholarly opinio communis that every time an animal was slaughtered for food in ancient Greece, there was a ritual acknowledgment of the gods.21 While it is unlikely that we can ever be certain whether ritual animal slaughtering was systematically practiced in private life, it is clear that at the level of state religion, animals were ritually slaughtered on a daily basis. The complex system of animal sacrifices in the Athenian state during the 5th and 4th centuries is documented in an extensive epigraphic record.22 Meat from sacrifices during large polis festivals or local deme festivals was distributed to the population for consumption at the sanctuary or elsewhere.23 The sacrificed animal was butchered according to specific rules and was divided among the gods, the priests and other functionaries, and the worshippers.24 The gods were given the sacrum and tail ( ) and the femur, which were burned on the altar, and possibly other parts that were deposited for the gods on a table.25 The viscera () were consumed by the core group of participants who sponsored the sacrifice.26 The priests received some of the best parts of the animal as honorary shares, as did city officials and victorious athletes. The remaining meat was cut into pieces of more or less the same size and distributed to the population. Among the personnel associated with the killing and butchering of the animal was the , the culinary specialist during the Classical and Hellenistic periods. He was a butcher, a meat seller, and also a cook serving at private or public occasions.27 Literary and epigraphic sources reveal that during the Classical and Hellenistic periods, sanctuaries employed mageiroi to perform sacrifices or butcher animals. On a symbolic level, the butchering of the sacrificial animal and the distribution of its meat affirmed the cosmic order, the division between gods and men.30 Members of the polis of Athens were entitled to take part in collective activities, such as sacrifices, and to receive a portion of the sacrificial meat of the polis. Participating in the sacrifices of the polis was also a performance of ones civic identity, an activity that strengthened ones feeling of belonging to the polis.31 On a practical level, the system of sacrifices in the Athenian polis has correctly been identified as a redistributive mechanism, whereby state resources were spent in order to secure food for the population.32 . Priestly Prerogatives Honorary Shares and meat distribution at sacrifices in classical Athens What principles governed the distribution of sacrificial meat () to the members of the polis? Attic inscriptions of the 5th and 4th centuries are a rich source of information on the honorary shares of meat distributed to priests, victorious athletes and musicians, and city officials, as well as the equal shares distributed to the people at large. In addition, Attic vase paintings depicting sacrifice and butchering suggest that leg joints represented the portions of meat that were the end product of the sacrificial process. In the following sections I summarize the evidence for the shares of meat granted to various categories of people.33 Athenian priests and priestesses received as their prerogatives or 34parts of the sacrificed animal (usually along with the hide), as well as other comestibles such as bread, or in some cases they received money.35 According to the inscriptions, priestly portions from sacrificial animals were determined on the basis of the private or public nature of each sacrifice, the significance of the cult, the divinity and its sex, the kind of animal sacrificed, and whether the animal was skinned. The leg joint was the most common priestly prerogative from the edible parts of the sacrificed animal in Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries.36 The leg is obtained by cutting along the shoulder or hip joint and is a recognizable body part, unlike the small cuts of meat that were distributed to the population at large. The leg joint is a sizeable piece of high-quality meat, an attractive reward obtained early in the process of animal butchering.37 Inscriptions refer to it as the or . It is unclear from the epigraphic record how these two terms differed or whether they were interchangeable.38 A reference in Athenaeus (9.368f), however, suggests that both terms signified the same thing.
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The thematic association of leg joints with the sacrificial process is vividly illustrated on several Attic vases that depict the butchering of animals.39 A late-6th-century cup in the Villa Giulia displays a few stages in the sacrificial ritual (Fig. 1).40 On one side of the cup, two youths are shown carrying an animal toward a bearded man. The man, only partly preserved, is clad in a long sleeveless tunic with embroidered decoration and holds a knife in one hand. On the basis of similar representations, he can be identified as the officiant at the sacrifice, most likely the priest.41 To sum up, the epigraphic record of distributions of sacrificial meat in Athens during the 5th and 4th centuries attests that among the edible parts of the sacrificed animal, the leg joint was the principal priestly prerogative. Literary and later epigraphic evidence outside of Athens suggests that leg joints were also distributed as awards to victorious athletes. Honorary shares from sacrificial victims, usually in the form of multiple portions of meat, were also awarded to city officials as well as to individuals who played significant roles in the sacrificial ritual. The remaining members of the polis obtained shares of meat that were more or less equal in weight. Thus, the system of public sacrifices brought people together by creating a community that shared the sacrificial meat.70 This community was not limited to the citizens of the state of Athens but included women and occasionally metics. Meat distributions benefited the wider community while maintaining social, religious, and other hierarchies. The system of sacrifices in Athens honored the gods, glorified the state, reinforced the political and social status of certain individuals, and ultimately benefited all the members of the community. Honorary shares of sacrificial meat in attic vase painting. Visual signs of distinction and civic identity. The Significance of Meat in the polis Victoria Tsoukala
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George S. Goodspeed Atonement in Non-Christian Religions. The Atonement of Fear " An exceptional emergency demanded a human victim," because such a one was the best mankind could offer. "The ancient Germans laid it down," says Brinton,22 "that in time of famine beasts should first be slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no relief, then men must be slaughtered; and if still there was no aid from on high, then the chieftain of the tribe himself must mount the altar; for the nobler and dearer the victim, the more pleased were the gods! " The striking example of this given in the Assyrian epic'4 is familiar. When the sacrifice was offered by Tsitnapishtim, who had escaped the deluge, "the gods inhaled the sweet odor, the gods gathered like flies about the sacrificer." The Phoenicians and Carthaginians gave up their children because these were their dearest treasures, and hence the devoting of them was most likely to secure divine favor." Similar explanations of the same rite by Greek and Roman writers make it clear that such was the notion held in classical antiquity.
George S. Goodspeed Atonement in Non-Christian Religions. The Atonement of Fear Professor W. Robertson Smith. Substances in Semitic sacrifices. [They] "are drawn from edible substances, and indeed from such substances as form the ordinary staple of human food." 10 He adds: "All sacrifices were taken by the ancients as being literally the food of the gods."", These gifts might therefore be either vegetable or animal, grain or flesh. The latter were most common, because flesh, regarded as the most desirable human food, would naturally be most agreeable to the higher powers. Indeed, Professor Simon goes so far as to derive the custom of animal sacrifice from this root when he says: "The primary occasion of animal sacrifices, and others rooted in them, was probably the desire to gratify the gods with the best that man himself enjoys.'" George S. Goodspeed on Professor W. Robertson Smith. Substances in Semitic sacrifices.
In the one case he may be said objectively to take into consideration the higher powers only, their attributes, character, requirements; in the other he looks primarily within himself, contemplates his own character, and acts upon his sense of obligation. While it is not always easy to separate these two motives-the distinction is largely one of emphasis-it is possible roughly to arrange the great mass of gifts under the one or the other of them.
The striking example of this given in the Assyrian epic'4 is familiar. When the sacrifice Page | 29 was offered by Tsitnapishtim, who had escaped the deluge, "the gods inhaled the sweet odor, the gods gathered like flies about the sacrificer."
6. In the first instance, the worshiper sought most commonly to give the gods what they liked to eat. This appears evident when the materials of sacrifice all the world over are analyzed. What Professor W. Robertson Smith says of Semitic sacrifices is true of many others: [They] "are drawn from edible substances, and indeed from such substances as form the ordinary staple of human food." 10 He adds: "All sacrifices. were taken by the ancients as being literally the food of the gods."", These gifts might therefore be either vegetable or animal, grain or flesh. The latter were most common, because flesh, regarded as the most desirable human food, would naturally be most agreeable to the higher powers. Indeed, Professor Simon goes so far as to derive the custom of animal sacrifice from this root when he says: "The primary occasion of animal sacrifices, and others rooted in them, was probably the desire to gratify the gods with the best that man himself enjoys.'" Where other foods are more highly relished, these are with the like motive given to the deity.'3 A natural variation of this conception, and possibly derived from it, was the view that the gods needed this food and that the worshiper was providing for their wants in his offering. The striking example of this given in the Assyrian epic'4 is familiar. When the sacrifice was offered by Tsitnapishtim, who had escaped the deluge, "the gods inhaled the sweet odor, the gods gathered like flies about the sacrificer." The Phoenicians and Carthaginians gave up their children because these were their dearest treasures, and hence the devoting of them was most likely to secure divine favor." Similar explanations of the same rite by Greek and Roman writers make it clear that such was the notion held in classical antiquity. " An exceptional emergency demanded a human victim," because such a one was the best mankind could offer. "The ancient Germans laid it down," says Brinton,22 "that in time of famine beasts should first be slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no relief, then men must be slaughtered; and if still there was no aid from on high, then the chieftain of the tribe himself must mount the altar; for the nobler and dearer the victim, the more pleased were the gods! " And accordingly we are told that when in Carthage slave boys were substituted for the children of the nobles in the offerings to the gods, the deities were angry and brought greater woe upon the state. 10. The transfer of emphasis from what God wants to what man owes to God, which had its part in the fostering of human sacrifice as the fulfilment of the supremest obligation, was connected in most cases with exceptional experiences of misfortune, indeed was occasioned by these. In ordinary times it was enough to keep "at one" with deity by satisfying his desires. Suffering was the sign that something was wrong; it was instantly given religious significance; it denoted the displeasure of the powers above with the sufferer, and called upon him to examine himself and take measures to restore the broken harmony. The doctrine that suffering was the sign of and punishment for " sin" was a commonplace of ancient religion.23 I I. But a striking turn was given to this doctrine when that which was the penalty came also to be regarded as the means of atonement. Deity is appeased by the endurance or exhibition of suffering on the part of the worshiper or a substitute for him. How this point of view was arrived at-whether by arguing that what God inflicted upon man he was pleased with; or by concluding that to give oneself to suffer under divine punishment was to give one's best-may not be clear. But the position once taken that suffering not merely implies divine displeasure, but also possesses propitiatory power, a great body of atoning praxis sprang up under its influence. We are introduced by it to that broad field of the manifestations of pain in religious ritual. Grant atoning efficacy to pain, and it is but a step to regard self-inflicted suffering as parallel in its reconciling force to that divinely inflicted. The habit of the Friendly Islanders, "when afflicted with any dangerous disorder, to cut off their little finger as an offering to the deity," 24 the gashes made upon their bodies by the priests of Baal when summoning their god to Mt. Carmel, and all the other self-mutilations and lacerations in the service of religion, examples of which are furnished in all parts of the world--testify to this
strange and remarkable belief. Similarly, the subjection of victims to torture before 12. Another aspect of the same principle is observable in the efficacy attributed to practices in which the worshiper deprived himself of something on behalf of the god.28 The atoning power is in the ratio of the degree of deprivation. Acceptable offerings must be the offerer's own property and the best of it. The loss of it is thereby felt,29 and there is a distinct religious value in this feeling. "Hence, too . . . . the prodigality in sacrifice which startles us at times: the hecatombs of victims, the rivers of oil, the cattle from a thousand hills," 30 and the holocaust in which the victim Page | 30 was conveyed entirely to the deity; yes, the human sacrifice, if of a child or one beloved, appears with added propitiatory significance in the light of its involving the worshiper in grief and loss.3' The most extreme case of this sort would be the giving of the offerer's own life to the god; and this, too, is not without its examples. Self-immolation, to be sure, is usually found as a substitutionary practice, and as such will receive treatment later. Man and god got on well together in a definite arrangement of mutual obligation and privilege. The fundamental weakness of it all was that it was dominated by ideas of property.33 The tendency was to conceive of the reconciliation as formal and to be estimated in material terms. This element hindered all spiritual expansion. It minimized fear before the deity's sudden wrath, and secured peace at the expense of fervor and inspiration. The panic terror of primitive ages was preferable to this lifeless calm without fruitful germ of moral or religious growth. 14. Happily it was always possible to shake the religious comfort of this easy atonement by recurring spasms of that earlier fear. Human and divine relations, even when what might be called this contract theory of religion just mentioned was prevalent, were not so well established as not to give sufficient occasion for unrest. The blessed ministry of uncertainty kept men alive to the need of a better and more thorough understanding with the powers above and about them, and thus, as we have seen, drove them from time to time to regard atonement more in the light of their own obligation than in that of the divine pleasure. The value and reach of this latter form of reconciliation was far beyond what the other could attain. Yet, in some way, the sacrificial expense is also meant to be offered as a total loss. While it may aim to obtain the favor of the gods, it does not do so in the form of a barter, but in the notoriously more problematic one of a gift: Not an altogether innocuous form of giving, sacrifice is at root an ambivalent gesture. The invisible powers that are the designated recipients of the sacrifice whose reach is unfathomable, whose existence cannot be perceived, except as an epiphany? are incommensurable with the human will that is offering it. George S. Goodspeed Atonement in Non-Christian Religions. The Atonement of Fear
stoics in the city

In the city, the good life was achieved only by mystical participation in the god's life and that of his fellow deities, and by vicarious achievement through the person of the king. There lay the original compensation for giving up the petty democratic ways of the village. To inhabit the same city as a god was to be a member of a super-community: a community in which every subject had a place, a function, a duty, a goal, as part of a hierarchic structure representing the cosmos itself. Utopia, the City and the Machine L Mumford
Like kingship, the city was "lowered down from heaven and cut to a heavenly pattern; The city, then, as it emerged from more primitive urban forms, was not just a larger heap of buildings and public ways, of markets and workshops: it was primarily a symbolic representation of the uni verse itself. Like kingship, the city was "lowered down from heaven" and cut to a heavenly pattern; for even in the relatively late Etruscan and Roman cultures, when a new city was founded, a priest held the plow that traced the outline of the walls, while the main streets were strictly oriented to the points of the compass. In that sense, the archetypal city was what Campanella called his own utopia: a City of the Sun. Such an embodiment of esthetic magnificence, quantitative power, and divine order captivated the mind of even distant villagers who would make pilgrimages to the city on days of religious festival. Not only did the lowliest subject have a direct glimpse of heaven in the setting of the temple and the palace, but with this went a secure supply of food, garnered from the nearby fields, stored under guard in the granary of the citadel, distributed by the temple. The land itself belonged to the god or the king, as it still does ultimately in legal theory to their abstract counterpart, the sovereign state; and the city forecast its literary successor in treating the land and its agricultural produce as a common possession: fair shares, if not equal shares, for all. In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine On Sacrifice, Robert Kastenbaum Human sacrifice was considered so crucial a measure that it persisted for some time even in societies that had become more complex and sophisticated. For example, the practice of sacrificing the eldest son was a salient feature of Mediterranean cults 5,000 years ago and still a powerful theme in Judaism and early Christianity. Sacrifice would be tamed slowly as societies developed more effective ways to manage their needs and cope with their environments.
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Semitic Religion. Lectures on the Religion of the Semites by W. Robertson Smith Review by: Henry Preserved Smith Hebraica Philip A. Nordell. The new book of Prof. W. Robertson Smith is one of the series of Burnett lectures. Three series are contemplated on the same subject, to-wit: The Primitive Religions of the Semitic Peoples viewed in relation to other ancient religions and to the spiritual religion of the Old Testament and of Christianity. The inquiry is a proper one. For the revelation of the Old Testament was built upon some sort of foundation already in existence, and it is quite certain that the first stones of this foundation were already laid when the Semites [why not Shemites ?] existed as one people. With the sixth lecture we enter upon the consideration of sacrifice and this fills the remainder of the book-something over half the body of the book. . The author's theory may be said to be that totemism is the earliest form of Semitic religion. The origin of sacrifice must be sought here. Not as though it were impossible for a rude nation to feast its god on animal food. This is recognized as a probable origin for the lower order of sacrifices as well as for the vegetable offerings found in the Hebrew liturgy. But the mere bringing of a present or providing the god with food will not account for the more solemn (as the author calls them piacular) sacrifices, which in the Law really overshadow the others. These must be explained in another way. In totemism now we find the idea of the kinship of the god [an animal] with his worshippers. Equally we find the individual animals represented as akin to both god and worshippers. A pastoral tribe is likely to worship the ox and to hold every individual ox or cow to be an embodiment of the divinity. Henry Preserved Smith, Lane Seminary.
It was the religion that exacted a bloody sacrifice that made the Romans of pagan times strong and that invested them with their character of conquerors and rulers. "When I meditated on the reason why people were more in love with freedom in those ancient times than they are now, I saw it was because they have grown weaker now than formerly, which is a result of the difference in education, this again being based on the difference of their religion from ours... This may be seen from many of their institutions, counting first among them the magnificence of their sacrifices as compared with ours. There is more delicacy than splendour in our display, and no ferocious or jubilant action whatsoever. There was no lack of display Page | 32 then, nor lack of magnificence in their ceremonies, but added to it was the action of the sacrifice full of blood and ferocity, where a multitude of animals were slaughtered; which sight, being so terrible, made man behave likewise."' Niccol Machiavelli
Of stoics, cynics and world citizens. utopia is a call to mourning. What then does it mean to be cosmopolitan? it is to be a cynic, world citizen and a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money,
The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde of the many parochial Stoics Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal Thomas Pangle Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine Before the mid-eighteenth century, approximately, the practice of utopists, following Plato, was to present their imaginary societies like Athena, sprung fully formed from the brow of their creator, perfected in every detail. But the city was, from the beginning, related to the newly perceived cosmic order: the sun, the moon, the planets, the lightning, the storm wind. In short, as Fustel de Coulanges and Bachofen pointed out a century ago, the city was primarily a religious phenomenon: it was the home of a god, and even the city wall points to this super-human origin; This cosmic orientation, these mythic-religious claims, this royal preemption of the powers and functions of the community are what transformed the mere village or town into a city: something "out of this world," the home of a god. the city itself was transmogrified into an ideal form a glimpse of eternal order, a visible heaven on earth, a seat of the life abundant in other words, utopia. Lewis Mumford. Utopia, The City and The Machine The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde of the many parochial Stoics
Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal Thomas Pangle. The Stoics whom he follows, Cicero's character Cato says, "hold that the world is ruled by the spirit of the gods, and that it is, as it were, a common city and state of human beings and gods, and that each of us is a part of this world;
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In contrast, the life of the wise, because it is a life centred on devotion to moral virtue as the end in itself, is a life spent chiefly in performance of the "perfect duties." By thus living in obedience to the law of nature or reason, the wise man becomes the true friend of the gods, and their only true priest, the knower of the proper sacrifices, to whom the gods communicate divinations of the future through dreams and scientific auguries, and whose soul they may preserve after death, at least until the next cosmic conflagration. The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde of the many parochial Stoics
Jean Bethke Elshtain. On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? The nation-state is a phenomenon that cannot be imagined or legislated out of existence. Needing others to define ourselves, we will remain inside a state/nation-centered discourse of war and politics, for better and for worse, so long as states remain the best way we have devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common. But we can try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty; we can, perhaps, move toward what I am tempted to call a post-sovereign politics. A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? "It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man." Identification with a national "imagined community" is a complex, manysided construction. It taps particularism and universalism. Indeed, one might argue it requires such, being composed of normatively vital aspects of both ethnicity and universal values, organic integration and voluntarism. Human beings require concrete reference groups in order to attain individuality and identity but too complete immersion in such groups limits the boundaries of identity and of identification to fixed familial, tribal, or territorial lines. Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice Jean Bethke Elshtain
Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty Tim Deines . One would want to press Nancy on this point, why exactly does the confu sion surrounding the origins of "early" sacrifice "finish" the history of Western sacrifice? Might we not think the "completion" of Western ontotheology, instead, from a more materialist point of view? Do we recognize, for example, that the violence of imperialism can never satiate its need for (Western) sacrifice, can never close its own figure by neo-liberal and democratic means? Nancy is perhaps suggesting that the fictitiousness of origins, on the one hand, combined with the historical collapse of sacrifice (in the name of Western "progress" and the end[ing] of the political), on the other hand, signal the (re) emergence of the inappropriable figure of finitude. Tim Deines on Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty
Johan van der Walt on Sovereignty and sacrifice. Reflections on sovereignty and sacrifice in the thought of Derrida, Nancy and Agamben. According to Agamben, homo sacer is the one who can be killed, but he cannot be sacrificed. And for him sovereignty relates to or is constituted by this non-sacrificial killing. Sovereignty concerns the power to determine or simply manage, manage merely technically what is to be done with life that has no or no longer has meaning in excess of mere life. Sovereignty would be managing merely technically the ultimately uninteresting managerial decision, or non-decision rather, to continue or discontinue an instance of bare life. Agamben relates the technical reign of sovereignty to the camp, the death camps and th e increasingly ubiquitous realm of the exceptional managerial crossing between bare life and death in contemporary medical practices. Hence the greater plausibility of Jean Luc Nancys assertion that sovereignty is always a matter of sacrifice. Nancy writes: Sacrifice can easily be understood to be a much broader phenomenon than just immolation.
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Sacrifice and Sacramant. E O James Sacrifice involves the destruction of a victim for the purpose of maintaining or restoring a right relationship of man to the sacred order. Charles Tilly (1975), Michael Howard (1991), and other historians concur in the opinion that war and the military machine are principal determinants in the shaping of nation states. . In The Nation-State and Violence, Anthony Giddens defines nationalism as "the cultural sensibility of sovereignty" (note the fusion of culture and politics) that unleashes administrative power within a clearly demarcated territory, "the bounded nationstate" (1985, 219). Although it is allegedly becoming obsolete under the pressure of globalization (for qualifications, see Sassen (1998), the nation-state is considered by "legal modernists" (Berman 1995) as the prime source of violence against citizens and entire peoples.
Empire of Sacrifice: The Religious Origins of American Violence. Unexamined Sacrifices and Unexplored Opportunities: 9/11. The Crisis in the American Civil Religion . Now, linking these many symbols, holidays, and sacred sites is a system of sacrifice a series of discourses, practices, and institutions that depend upon substitutions or exchanges to produce favor or blessing, which is what every sacrifice boils down to. In Empire of Sacrifice I call the American form of this sacrificial system innocent domination, or (sometimes) blessed brutalities. That is, in the American civil religion the nation is an imagined community of largely innocent citizens (the good guys) who through their willingness to give of themselves and to work hard (to sacrifice) win victories that allow Americans to dominate enemies (the bad guys). Americans win, so the logic goes, because we have a moral or religious right to do so, and because in our domination we bear no malice toward those dominated. Succinctly put, the doctrine at the core of innocent domination is: right makes might, or, perhaps, piety produces power. This mentalit was once dubbed Manifest Destiny; it now often bears the name American Exceptionalism.
Some notes on sacrifice, shamanism, and the artifact Francesco Peluzzi That sacrifice itself is the god. That is, by giving itself the Victim becomes the Godhead; or, reciprocally, the Divine is manifested in the offering, when the offering is accepted. It is made sacred by the rite of sacrifice a specific sequence of gestures that separates the sacrifice from all other killing, and all other giving.
Girard looks on myths as irremediably ideological. Societies use their sacred narratives to legitimate the status quo. The myths associated with sacrificial rituals serve not only to justify violence against the scapegoat, but also as mystifications that obscure the foundations of social hierarchies in violence. Thus, by establishing and maintaining social order in the redirecting of violence, mythologies also construct what might be called a "cosmology of violence" (the phrase is not Girard's) in which sacred narrative, social structure, and sacrificial systems are intimately related to the phenomenon of scapegoating.
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A religious construction of identity and otherness can turn the different into a scapegoat, whose disappearance or annihilation is considered the solution to the problem. In strongly identitarian religions, such as the civic or national ones, we find institutionalized rites of expulsion that consolidate (by means of rendering "other" and de-identifying a member, human or animal) a social consensus through the use of collective violence. Theoretical Reflections on Violence and Religion: Identity, Power, Privilege and Difference Francisco Diez de Velasco No one attempt to explain blood sacrifice seems adequate for the variety of forms and purposes associated with this practice in many societies over many years. Nevertheless, it is useful to consider the following accounts as informed attempts to explain the relationship between blood sacrifice and society. On Sacrifice, Robert Kastenbaum
the blood spilled from a victim's body was truly a holy substance, To ensure the gods received their ration, the blood was sometimes smeared on stone images of gods, collected on bark paper strips and burnt so the smoke could ascend into the heavens, or consumed by the ruler, the representative of the deities. http://classprojects.kenyon.edu/wmns
stoics in the city

Johan van der Walt on Sovereignty and sacrifice. Reflections on sovereignty and sacrifice in the thought of Derrida, Nancy and Agamben. According to Agamben, homo sacer is the one who can be killed, but he cannot be sacrificed. And for him sovereignty relates to or is constituted by this non-sacrificial killing. Page | 36 Sovereignty concerns the power to determine or simply manage, manage merely technically what is to be done with life that has no or no longer has meaning in excess of mere life. Sovereignty would be managing merely technically the ultimately uninteresting managerial decision, or non-decision rather, to continue or discontinue an instance of bare life. Agamben relates the technical reign of sovereignty to the camp, the death camps and the increasingly ubiquitous realm of the exceptional managerial crossing between bare life and death in contemporary medical practices. Hence the greater plausibility of Jean Luc Nancys assertion that sovereignty is always a matter of sacrifice. Nancy writes: Sacrifice can easily be understood to be a much broader phenomenon than just immolation.
According to Agamben, homo sacer is the one who can be killed, but he cannot be sacrificed. And for him sovereignty relates to or is constituted by this non-sacrificial killing.
Carolyn Marvin. David Ingle. Which God is it? Our god - our nation - must be inexpressible, unsayable, unknowable, beyond language. But this god may not be refused when it calls for sacrifice. When the god commands it, we must perform the ritual sacrifice - war - that sustains the group. On Religious Sacrifice. A ceremonious act linking mortals to their gods. The blood is a required 'food' for the gods. the importance of blood in sacrifice. It seems the purpose of a religious sacrifice is to sanctify the taking of a life, usually marked by the spilling of the victim's blood, as is the case with animals and humans. It is a ceremonious act linking mortals to their gods. The blood is a required 'food' for the gods. Being not of human flesh, they require the very life-force of humans to nourish and appease them. Sacrificial blood has divine powers which can sanctify mortals and nourish deities. But aside from the material on sacrifice within established religions, other bloodsacrifices need to be considered as well. For instance, hundreds of thousands of soldiers have died on the battlefield in the name of nationalism. Is this sacrifice? If one considers the religious implications of nationalism and warfare, it is. http://classprojects.kenyon.edu/wmns
Coincident with transformation from nomadic to settled life was the passage from the tribe to the more stable and compact national organization with the king at the head of the state. In this situation the god took on himself the character of supreme authority, and the worshiper became his subject, paying that tribute which his lord demanded, doing homage to his heavenly ruler as the condition of standing well with him. The Biblical World - Volume 17 William Rainey Harper, Ernest DeWitt Burton, Shailer Mathews - 1901 Page | 37
. Sovereignty is silence and secrecy: it says and means nothing; in Bataille's language, it is nothing. Still, sovereignty quite literally makes everything else possible. Hawthorne, Sacrifice, Sovereignty. Tim Deines
This evokes a conception of sovereignty not merely as a state of exception to the normal order, but also as a creative, foundational force, a constituent power.3" Sacrifice in relations with political authorities might be seen as on a continuum with other forms of offering like first fruits, taxes, and tribute. 31 These are all given "up" to the political authorities and non-human powers. This dimension of sacrifice suggests a link to traditions of governmental sovereignty-in which the state is an alien entity, not derivative of "the People." But it also reaffirms that sacrifice composes part of the sovereign's dependence on the local people.
Justifying the Ultimate Sacrifice. Civil and Military Religion in Frontline Blogs Morten Brnder. The central point of Girards La violence et le sacr is that violence is the sacred (Girard 1979: 19). Violence is the contingent force which at one time is a power of potential destruction and a source from which social life itself is shaped. Man is fundamentally violent. Not because he is ruled by a Freudian death drive or Thanatos (generally, Girard pays little heed to classical notions of desire, fuelled by want). No, man is violent because violence is a fundamental condition in all social relations (ibid: 174-175). Engaging in the social is engaging in a struggle for dominance, which may not be articulated physically, but nevertheless characterises as a profoundly violent relation. And, if violence is allowed to prevail indiscriminately, society will perish (ibid: 144-145). Therefore, all lasting social relations are based on the discrimination of violence: Society is founded on the distinction between illegitimate and legitimate violence. Illegitimate violence is random violence. Legitimate violence is violence that takes place within certain boundaries (ibid: 15). Thus, for society to exist, the fundamental violence of sociality must be canalised. The religious sacrifice is undertaken with the purpose of canalising violence, of allowing violence to take place on legal terms. Violence is all-devouring. Ultimately it will consume society. Therefore, it is necessary to canalise violence by sacrificing a victim in lieu of society. However, that canalisation can only take place if we pretend that the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate violence is not arbitrary: If we consider the victim as the legitimate object of the violence that is bestowed on it. This is the reason why Girard emphasises time and again that the victim is not a substitute for society, but a surrogate.
Human sacrifice at Tenochtitlan. John M. lngham The community and the cosmos itself depended upon the assimilation of the weak by the strong. Gods and nobles alike consumed the labor, production, and even the bodies of the common people. Sacrifice to the gods was a metaphor for tribute to the state, and the anthropophagic meal symbolized the ties between gods and
nobles, the elite core of the community. The sacrifice of slaves and war captives ensured the social production and reproduction of internal and external relations of domination. In these respects, Aztec society and culture were not altogether unique. Classic anthropological monographs on sacrifice show that tribute to and communion with the gods and the ritual slaying of a person or animal associated with the corn spirit are recurrent themes in the religions of early civilizations. Ethnographic examples might even be adduced to suggest that human sacrifice and cannibalism were practiced in chiefdoms and early states with some regularity. Nonetheless, the scale of Aztec sacrifice was certainly unusual. I have suggested that a combination of urban growth and diminishing economic returns to imperial expansion was a primary impetus for this phenomenon. Human sacrifice at Tenochtitlan. John M. lngham
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Survival and prosperity both hinge on how much sunlight energy is under your control, whether it be channeled from horsepower, human power, or fossil fuels. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight Hartmann points out, the end of slavery in the U.S. suspiciously coincided with the discovery of oil, and its relevance to industrial production with machines. Survival and prosperity both hinge on how much sunlight energy is under your control, whether it be channeled from horsepower, human power, or fossil fuels. the curtain of slavery and the will to power. Hartmann points to Professor Jack Forbes adoption o f the Native American term wetiko, which means cannibal, arguing that the worldview of modern cultures is essentially one of consumptionand not just in terms of contemporary ideas of consumerism. We actually approach the world with an appetite to consume others: We eat (consume) other humans by destroying them, destroying their lands, and consuming their life-force by enslaving them either physically or economically. And this kind of exploitation is attributed not to an evil inherent in human beings, but to wetiko, a particular and infectious way of thinking that has contaminated modern populations: to pursue domination and expansion at any cost. A value system of this breed invariably leads to competition, which, Hartmann believes, is not a natural blemish of the human condition, but an invented product of modern culture: From Caesar plundering the Celts, to Pizarro robbing the Incas, to Columbus enslaving the Taino, to the tobacco industry executives addicting children in Third World countries, i ts all the same wetiko mind-set: take over another persons life for your own purposes. In accordance with how deeply you want to understand this disease, then, you will start to see the symptoms everywhere. And in this sense, our conception of slavery can be expanded to apply not only to the obvious problem of the literal enslavement of millions, even in the golden and sometimes sentimental age of human rights, to also include all of us who are subjects of this kingdom of stories stories that Hartmann likens to captors: The slave-holders use the chains of the mortgage owed the bank, the loan on the car, the unpaid credit card bills, the requirement to pay property taxes if you own your own home, and the many other subtle and not-so-subtle forms of economic and cultural pressure to extract the majority of your lifes time and use it to their ends. As a result, almost everybody in modern society knows somebody whos on tranquilizers or has lost control to alcohol. Addiction to television is so rampant it is causing the disintegration of traditional social groups and clubs, and our children are lost in a sea of pain and confusion that has led to a doubling of the rate of teenage suicide in the past three decades. Slaves know when they are slaves, regardless of the words used to describe their slavery. And theyll escape from the slavery, be it in increasingly powerful drugs, increasingly intense entertainment, or psychopathic or violent behavior. Christa Hillstrom on Thom Hartmanns The Last Hours of Sunlight
Girard, who locates the origins of religion, and of civilisation generally, in sacrifice, which originally Girard notes that scapegoats are typically marked by marginalising features such as foreignness and accused of society. The constructions of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-to-sacrifice as it shifts from personal liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract, juridical, imagined tie that nevertheless calls forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.
destroying crimes such as incest; 139 it is perhaps unsurprising that kings sometimes fall into the category. In practice, of course, a ruler commanded to suffer such a fate may easily deflect it onto a more vulnerable target: perhaps an animal, perhaps a lowlier fellow marginal whose liminal status lends him some sacral potency and who may temporarily be treated like a king, but who is ultimately unimportant and expendable.14o The first is the fact that in order to define the term divine king, as distinct from other monarchs believed to have sacred attributes, Seligman defined this type of ruler even mor e closely. I list his criteria because I propose to use them here. A divine king, he postulated, is one a) who 'has power over nature, exercised voluntarily or involuntarily'; Page | 39 b) who is believed to be 'the dynamical centre of the universe', whose action and the course of whose life affects the well-being of this universe so that they must be care- fully regulated; c) who is killed when his powers fade so as 'to secure that the world would not fall into decay with the decay of the Man-God' (Seligman 1933: 4).
The outcome of wars, crop harvests, and the weather were all determined by the whims of the gods, whims which required appeasement on the part of mortal humans. Sacrifice was incorporated as a way of 'feeding' these ever-hungry gods.
Sacrifice keeps the world going. The most sweeping theory is based on an interpretation of history that pictures the human condition as fearful and perilous, beset with threats to survival from starvation, attack, and events such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and floods that were taken to be the work of angry gods. Possessing limited knowledge and technology, societies tried to find a way of negotiating with rival, demanding, and frequently unpredictable gods if the world and their own lives were to continue. Sacrifice soon became a significant form of exchange with the gods, a sort of currency in an age before the establishment of a monetary system. In modern parlance, sacrifice was a way of doing business.
In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money, Technics and the Nature of Man Lewis Mumford Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism can be freed from the dubious joys of imperial shock and awe and returned rightfully to utopia, even freed from modern-day cosmopolitical Free Thinkers, from its contemporary champions, who have turned into a rather dull institutional blueprint
The wise philosopher becomes a citizen in a cosmic city or world-state ruled by the gods; he thereby transcends in an important measure the tawdry demi-monde of the many parochial Stoics Socratic Cosmopolitanism: Cicero's Critique and Transformation of the Stoic Ideal Thomas Pangle.
sacrifice, the origin of the city and politics At the root of urban(ist) celebration and pastoral lament is the crime of fratricide, which myth tells us is the origin of the city and politics.
In return, every member of the community was obliged to perform sacrifices Page | 40 and to devote at least part of the year to laboring for the city's god. By substituting conscription and communism for the later institutions of the market, wage labor, private property, and money, Technics and the Nature of Man Lewis Mumford
Henri Frankfort's penetrating exposition of the role of kingship in early civilizations provides a clue to the Utopian nature of the city. Without this strong religious underpinning, the king's magic powers would have been lacking and his military prowess would have crumbled. In this new constitution, the king gathers to himself all the powers and functions that were once diffused in many local communities; and the king himself becomes the godlike incarnation of collective power and communal responsibility. Henri Frankfort's penetrating exposition of the role of kingship in early civilizations provides a clue to the Utopian nature of the city: for, if it was through the king that the functions of the community were concentrated, unified, magnified, and given a sacred status, it was only in the city that the power and glory of this new institution could be fully manifested in monumental works of art. If the king represents or, as in Egypt, incarnates divine power and communal life, the city visibly incorporates them: its esthetic form and conscious order testify to an immense concentration of energy no longer needed exclusively for the functions of nutrition and reproduction. The only limits to what might be accomplished in such an organization, while the myth of divine kingship remained in working order, were those of the human imagination.
How cruel are the planets that stay there and conspire evil in their rage . . . the planets conspire in rage against us. A Mandaean text.
Marvin and Ingle state that their analysis is not a brief in favor of violence or against it. Rather, they seek to illuminate the structural role of violence in organizing and maintaining enduring groups. In shortwithin the framework of the religion of nationalismits not a question of fighting this or that war or of defeating this or that enemy. Rather, violent acts performed by society are inherent to the nature of the nation-state. The authors conclude that cohesion in enduring groups requires violence as a structural rather than contingent social force. Contained within each nation is a sacred idea or ideal. The truth of this sacred ideal is established when members of society die (or are maimed) for it. Warfare constitutes a representation of society to itself. Sacred truth comes into being through a blood sacrifice ritual performed on the bodies of supplicants.
Should we expect weakly bound pluralistic nations, like the United States, to rely on nearly constant engagement in warfare to bind the population that is otherwise fragmented and, at times, deeply and violently at odds with itself? Would you suspect that this reasoning is most helpful for explaining why military service is used as a quick path to citizenship for foreign nationals? Blood sacrifice and the nation, A review of Marvin & Ingle Richard Koenigsberg
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All religions organize "killing energy," they tell us, and nationalism is no exception Marvin's and Ingles psychological perspective echoes the older theological insights of Herbert Richardson, who called war a "civil ritual" and identified "human sacrifice in warfare" as the "basic cultic rite of civil religion." "Today we no longer sacrifice our children to nature," Richardson wrote, "but we feed them to the state" (174). But the Marvin-Ingle reflection on these themes inflects them in terms of the violent secret that Rene Girard has classically explored And the Marvin-Ingle reflection also subverts the us-and-them of academic "primitive civilized" discourse in the announcement of collective sin or secret. Through a system of group-forming rituals, a myth of blood sacrifice organizes the meaning of violent events after the fact. This retrospective creation- sacrifice story is the totem myth. Myth transforms disordered violence into ordered violence that engenders the group. Key elements include the transformative violence that creates a border, the flag that signifies this transformation, and the border so engendered. Group -forming episodes include the sacrificial crisis that sets in motion a quest for boundaries, the ritual journey to deaths border, the crossing where insiders and outsiders exchange identities, and the resolution of the crisis. The success of these episodes depends on a willing sacrifice who keeps the secret that the totem eats its own to live. Endlessly re -enacted, the totem myth confers a quality of radiance on all the players in its drama, including the flag, which thus acquires a distinctive aura for celebrants. It becomes potent, saturated with being, in Mircea Eliades phrase. 2 The transformed flag sets in motion further actings-out of the totem myth. These confer more radiance on the flag, which creates more occasions for mythic transformation. These may be commemorative or mission-oriented. What holds society together? Blood sacrifice Violence is the generative heart of the totem myth, its fuel. Robert Ardrey compares it to a layer of m olten magma buried beneath all human topography, forever seeking expression. To deny its incidence in all human groupsmale, female, old, young, the immatureis the most flagrant of discriminatory attitudes. Violence is discriminatory. It sorts group members by transforming them. It classifies Us and Them. Since it carries risks as well as rewards for those it defines, it must be monitored. This is one of the chief functions of patriotism. . What we call primitive is that violence from which we seek to distance ourselves.7 Defined by violence, classified as primitive, the Other is not us. Calling others primitive, the labelers purify themselves. War and National Renewal: Civil Religion and Blood Sacrifice in American Culture. Wars are often associated with a rhetoric of renewal or new beginnings. This essay explores this claim through the lens of civil religion and a recent book by Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation, which combines Emile Durkheim with Rn Girard in proposing that modern national cohesion depends on blood sacrifice. I unpack some of the paradoxes raised by this theory of national renewal in the context of 9/11, with a special focus on the sacred status of the flag and the special attention given to uniformed serviceman in the American body politic Wars are often associated with a rhetoric of renewal or new beginnings. Putting aside for a moment the possibility that this is only rhetoric, I would like to examine the conditions which allow war sometimes to function as an occasion for a new purchase on a shared sense of national identity and common purpose. One critical frame that brings such a proposition into focus is the sociology of religion and group identity founded by Emile Durkheim and developed in America since the 1960s in terms of the notion of civil religion. Specifically, I will consider a recent book which combines Durkheims insights with Rn Girards claims about the social function of ritualized sacrifice into a troubling argument about modern national cohesion as dependent on blood sacrifice. Even if many modern
nation states define themselves as quintessentially secular and legal entities, inspiring healthy patriotism rather than overly emotional nationalism, they share with explicitly descent-based nationalisms a substratum of more mystical ideals and rituals.1 The most important, complex, and seemingly irrational of these is self-sacrifice for the common good or the group. This willingness, closely associated with military valor and patriotic heroism, is in fact essential to the cohesiveness and endurance of any group, argue Carolyn Marvin and David Ingle in their book, Blood Sacrifice and the Nation. Without it, a nation will not be able to defend itself and will not even want to. A nation that cannot inspire its members to lay down their life for it will inevitably fragment into clashing groups and lose its Page | 42 sovereignty.
We still live in the third crisis. The Revolution birthed a civil religion of rights and a God who grants them. The Civil War added a God who demands sacrifice for our national sins.
stoics in the city

In the city, the good life was achieved only by mystical participation in the god's life and that of his fellow deities, and by vicarious achievement through the person of the king. There lay the original compensation for giving up the petty democratic ways of the village. To inhabit the same city as a god was to be a member of a super-community: a community in which every subject had a place, a function, a duty, a goal, as part of a hierarchic structure representing the cosmos itself. Utopia, the City and the Machine L Mumford
at the root of urbanist celebration and pastoral lament is the crime of fratricide, which myth tells us is the origin of the city and politics. the myth of cain: fratricide, city building, and politics George M. Shulman
Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism can be freed from the dubious joys of imperial shock and awe and returned rightfully to utopia, even freed from modern-day cosmopolitical Free Thinkers, from its contemporary champions, who have turned into a rather dull institutional blueprint
It is within the will of man to have positive law either advance human nature or undermine it. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the constructed, positive law of society can disregard the law of nature without consequence. We can construct governments and other social structures beyond our individual natures, but these perform well only if natures truths are observed. What we must never forget is that Nature never ceases to govern;
and that, if men wish to govern, they must govern under Natures Laws, or they will be doomed to failure.11 The human nature of freedom and identity We hold more than random thoughts Douglas W. Kmiec
The Maroons are descendants of Africans who fled the colonial Dutch forced labour plantations in Suriname and established independent communities in the interior rainforests. They have retained a distinctive identity based on their West African origins. The two treaties signed by the Maroons and their British antagonists in 1739 gave legal recognition to de facto ethnic groups that already differed culturally (despite significant areas of overlap) from the rest of the Jamaican population. The treaties of 1739 reinforced and institutionalized preexisting cultural differences between the Maroons and the coastal slave population by legally sanctioning the Maroons' existence as semi-autonomous free peoples within a slave colony, and by providing them with bounded territories that came to symbolize their corporate identities as communities of common landowners.
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Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism It is tempting to assert that this difference between the two cosmopolitanisms indicates that the moderns have little to learn from the Stoics, so long as the agenda remains the kind of emancipation mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this essay.36 Modern cosmopolitanism, with its background of materially-based human freedom, must allow for humans to be whatever they wish to be, and then deal with the fact that material circumstances curtail that freedom, possibly relegating some to a status of being less-than-human, because of a lack of freedom. Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism Doug Al-Maini
Maroon Identity in the New Millennium: Cultural Commodification and Ownership of the Past This critical question is as fraught with ambiguities as any of the other questions raised by the Maroons' continuing insistence on their right to self-determination. Their refusal to pay tax on their treaty lands has remained a point of contention since the first post-independence government took power in 1962. Yet no Jamaican government since then has been willing to resort to force in the face of Maroon resistance. Nor has any Jamaican government taken a hard line on the question of whether the Maroon treaties, including the provisions they make for separate Maroon lands, remain legally binding.
Maroonage and Flight: Unshackled Spaces: Fugitives from Slavery and Maroon Communities in the Americas Yale University, 6 December 2002 Loren Schweninger Beginning in the early years of South Carolina slavery, outlying slaves established settlements in the lowland swamps and backcountry. While their numbers fluctuated over time, pockets of outlying slaves were always a part of the regions landscape. During the 1730s, some fugitives fled to Spanish Florida, especially to a community populated by free blacks called Garcia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose.iii In 1765, some forty runaways, including women and children, lived in a settlement with four substantial buildings in the swamp north of the Savannah River. They subsisted by hunting and fishing and trading with plantation slaves. They possessed blankets, pots, pails, axes, tools, shoes, and fifteen bushels of rough Rice.iv One group of African -born slaves ran away to the mountainous backcountry and lowland swamps. There, according to several scholars, men, women and children attempted to recreate an African society on the frontier. In 1729, another band of a dozen slaves absconded from a James River plantation taking tools, clothing, provisions, and arms; they later established a farming community near Lexington. However, such endeavors were rare and by the late eighteenth century, with the decline of Africans in the slave population, these resurrected African enclaves became virtually nonexistent.
What Epictetus calls self-ownership was the Stoics most far-reaching contribution to their reflections on society, justice and personal freedom. The second reason for rejecting the Stoics total indifference to propert y or ownership in principle is that Epictetus Page | 44 actually relies on the concept of possession in order to make his point about what is ultimately mine or yours. Far from rejecting the concept in principle, he insists that we are all owners of one supremely valuable thing - our minds or moral purposes or autonomy. This is not, of course, property in the material sense of the word, but it is fundamental to the way Epictetus conceptualizes the self. As he sees it, all human beings are alike in their natural ownership of the one thing that makes each of them essentially human - an autonomous mind and power of moral choice or assent.22 What Epictetus calls self-ownership was the Stoics most far-reaching contribution to their reflections on society, justice and personal freedom. Recall also Hegels observation about freedom and taking possession of oneself (T 2). But I want to set self-ownership aside for now in order to follow up the Stoics ideas concerning ownership of material property. My ultimate aim is to see how well their theory about property ownership in this sense coheres with self-ownership, the autonomy of the person. Hellenistic Ethics and Philosophical Power Hellenistic History and Culture. Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Green
Quilombos. Where Slaves Ruled Escaped slaves in Brazil created thousands of hidden societies, or quilombos, in the heart of the country. By Charles C. Mann and Susanna Hecht Imagine flying, impossibly, over the Earth in the 17th centuryduring the time described in American history books as the colonial period, when Europeans swarmed into the New World to dominate an almost empty wilderness. Instead, you would see tens of millions of native people already living in the Americas, joined by an extraordinary flow not of European colonists but of African slaves. Up until the early 19th century, almost four times as many Africans as Europeans came to the Americas. Looking down from above, you wouldnt know that the tiny numbers of Europeans were supposed to be the stars of the story. Rather, your attention would focus on the two majority populations: Africans and Indians. Youd have a lot to watch. By the tens of thousands, African slaves escaped the harsh conditions of the European plantations and mining operations and headed for the interior, into lands controlled by Indians. Up and down the Americas, ex-slaves and indigenous peoples fashioned hybrid settlements known as maroon communities, after the Spanish cimarrn, or runaway. Largely conducted out of sight of Europeans, the complex interplay between black and red is a hidden drama that historians and archaeologists have only recently begun to unravel. Nowhere is the presence of this lost chapter more in evidence than in Brazil, where thousands of maroon communities are emerging from the shadows, reaffirming their mixed culture and pressing for legal title to the land they have occupied since the era of slavery. The stakes are high: New laws are giving Brazils maroon communities, called quilombos (the word for settlement in the Angolan language of Kimbundu), a key role in determining the future of the great Amazon forest.
the most renowned quilombo of all: Palmares, which at its height in the mid-17th century held sway over 10,000 square miles in the north coastal mountains.
The founder of this maroon nation was said to be Aqualtune, an Angolan princess and general enslaved in a Congolese war in about 1605. Soon after arriving in Brazil, the pregnant Aqualtune escaped with some of her soldiers and fled to the Serra da Barriga, a series of abrupt basaltic extrusions that dominate the coastal plain like a line of watchtowers. On one high crest was a pool of water sheltered by trees, with an indigenous community living around it. Here, according to legend, Aqualtune built Palmares. What researchers do know is that the quilombos dozen villages became a haven for as many as 30,000 Africans and Indians, as well as a few renegade Europeans. It had roughly as many inhabitants at the time as all of British North America. By the 1630s, Aqualtunes son, Gan ga Zumba, ruled Palmares from a palace with rich decorations, lavish feasts, and cringing minions. Some notes on sacrifice, shamanism, and the artifact Francesco Peluzzi That sacrifice itself is the god. That is, by giving itself the Victim becomes the Godhead; or, reciprocally, the Divine is manifested in the offering, when the offering is accepted. It is made sacred by the rite of sacrifice a specific sequence of gestures that separates the sacrifice from all other killing, and all other giving. Robert Kastenbaum. On sacrifice. Sacrificial companions to the next life. Sacrificial companions to the next life. Many societies have considered their leaders as represent ative of their people both in this life and the next. It was important, then, to make sure that the ruler of the land (be it a king or otherwise) was accompanied to the afterlife with a retinue of loyal attendants. Rulers often had their concubines and servants (as well as household animals) entombed with them. Even distinguished ministers might be among the companions who were either entombed or immolated in order to serve their ruler after death. Examples include major archaeological finds in Egypt and China where the bodies of numerous attendants were discovered in chambers adjoining the royal coffin. There is evidence that elaborate ceremonies were conducted to honor the chosen companions prior to their deaths. It appears that the sacrificial victims often were given libations that provided a drug-induced insensitivity prior to their deaths. The practice of burying the living with the dead encountered increasing criticism through the centuries. Eventually many societies shifted to symbolic sacrifices; for example, the later Egyptian practice of placing figurines ( Shabti ) in the royal tombs. China, Japan, the Greek states, and other ancient civilizations also moved toward symbolic rather than actual sacrifice of companions upon the death of their rulers. Furthermore, with the development of Christianity and Islam, a life after death appeared more likely to be within reach of individuals other than royalty, therefore making voluntary sacrifice a less attractive proposition.
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on freedom and anarchy; resisting the system of sacrifice: cosmopolitans, resisting the system. the new anarchists. Look at me, I am without a home, without a city, without property, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have neither wife nor children, no miserable governors mansion, but only earth and sky, and one rough cloak. Yet what do I lack? Am I not free from pain and fear, am I not free?
What Epictetus calls self-ownership was the Stoics most far-reaching contribution to their reflections on society, justice and personal freedom.
The second reason for rejecting the Stoics total indifference to property or ownership in principle is that Epictetus actually relies on the concept of possession in order to make his point about what is ultimately mine or yours. Far from rejecting the concept in principle, he insists that we are all owners of one supremely valuable thing - our minds or moral purposes or autonomy. This is not, of course, property in the material sense of the word, but it is fundamental to the way Epictetus conceptualizes the self. As he sees it, all human beings are alike in their natural ownership of the one thing that makes each of them essentially human - an autonomous mind and power of moral choice or assent.22 Page | 46 What Epictetus calls self-ownership was the Stoics most far-reaching contribution to their reflections on society, justice and personal freedom. Recall also Hegels observation about freedom and taking possession of oneself (T 2). But I want to set self-ownership aside for now in order to follow up the Stoics ideas concerning ownership of material property. My ultimate aim is to see how well their theory about property ownership in this sense coheres with self-ownership, the autonomy of the person. Hellenistic Ethics and Philosophical Power Hellenistic History and Culture. Edited and with an Introduction by Peter Green The history Guide, Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History. From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C. Steven Kreis The Zeno taught that a single, divine plan governed the universe. To find happiness, one must act in harmony with this divine plan. By cultivating a sense of duty and self-discipline, one can learn to accept their fate they will then achieve some kind of inner peace, freedom and tranquility. The Stoics believed that all people belong to the single family of mankind and so one should not withdraw from the world, but try to make something of the world. The Stoics believed that the universe contained a principle of order, called the Divine Fire, God or Divine Reason (Logos). This was the principle that formed the basis for reality -- it permeated all things. Because men was part of the universe, he too shared in the Logos. Since reason was common to all, human beings were essentially brothers -it made no difference whether one were Greek, barbarian, free man or slave since all mankind were fellow citizens of a world community. It was the Stoics who took the essentials of Socratic thought -- a morality of self-mastery based on knowledge -- and applied it beyond the Athenian polis to the world community. By teaching that there was a single divine plan (Logos), and that the world constituted a single society, it was Zeno who gave perfect expression to the cosmopolitan nature of the post-Alexandrine world. Stoicism, then, offered an answer to the problem of alienation and fragmentation created by the decline of the polis. Surrounded by a world of uncertainty, Stoicism promised individual happiness. Both Epicureanism and Stoicism are therapies which reflected the change in man's social and political life during the Hellenistic Age. On the one hand, both therapies suggest a disenchantment with the overtly political world of a Pericles or Thucydides, Athenian or Spartan. So, they can be seen as direct reactions to the philosophy of both Plato and Aristotle. On the other hand, the Stoics and Epicureans also reflect profound social changes within Greece itself. Greek society had become more complex and more urban as a result of Alexander's conquests. Politics fell into the hands of the wealthy few and the citizens were left with nothing. And Hellenistic politics became little more than an affair of aristocrats and their bureaucratic lackeys and experts. Look at me, I am without a home, without a city, without property, without a slave; I sleep on the ground; I have neither wife nor children, no miserable governors mansion, but only earth and sky, and one rough cloak. Yet what do I lack? Am I not free from pain and fear, am I not free? But Diogenes fancied himself "citiless, homeless, deprived of a fatherland, and it is not easy to see where his commitment to world-citizenship goes beyond this rejection of more local citizenship. Diogenes does purport to help people wherever he goes, but his cosmopolitanism resembles nothing so much as the worldliness of a nomad. The stoic invention of cosmopolitan Politics, Erica Brown.
Jacqueline Loss. Cosmos: Making Up Worlds Worldly Conjunctions and Disjunctions: On Cosmopolitanism and Nomadism in Diamela Eltits Por La Patria (1986) and el Padre Mo (1989) A hasty review of cosmopolitanism might begin with Diogenes of Sinope's misanthropy (for an in-depth study of cosmopolitanism that focuses on the Enlightenment, but also touches on the Ancient Greeks, see Schlereth). Living in a barrel on the streets and in exile, this anticonventionialist responded to Alexander Great's inquiry into his origins with the following: kosmopolites. The history Guide, Lectures on Ancient and Medieval European History. From Polis to Cosmopolis: Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic World, 323-30 B.C. by Steven Kreis The Cynics rejected all material possessions and luxuries and lived simple lives totally divorced from the hustle and bustle of the Hellenistic world-city. The most famous of the Cynics was Diogenes the Dog (412-323 B.C.). Diogenes lived in a bath tub. He carried a lantern in daylight, proclaiming to all that he was looking for a "virtuous man." It is said that one day Alexander the Great approached Diogenes, who was near death, and asked if there was anything that he could do for him. Diogenes is said to have replied, "would you mind moving you are blocking the sun." Plato described Diogenes as "Socrates gone mad." He called himself "citizen of the world and when asked what the finest thing in the world might be, replied "freedom of speech." Diogenes was a serious teacher who, disillusioned with a corrupt society and hostile world, protested by advocating happiness as self-mastery of an inner spiritual freedom from all wants except the barest minimum. In his crusade against the corrupting influence of money, power, fame, pleasure and luxury, Diogenes extolled the painful effort involved in the mental and physical training required for self-sufficiency.
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stoics in the city

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism It is tempting to assert that this difference between the two cosmopolitanisms indicates that the moderns have little to learn from the Stoics, so long as the agenda remains the kind of emancipation mentioned in the opening paragraphs of this essay.36 Modern cosmopolitanism, with its background of materially-based human freedom, must allow for humans to be whatever they wish to be, and then deal with the fact that material circumstances curtail that freedom, possibly relegating some to a status of being less-than-human, because of a lack of freedom. Cosmopolitanism, stoicism, and liberalism Doug Al-Maini
The human nature of freedom and identity. Douglas W. Kmiec Of course, man is not assured of happiness merely by public acknowledgment of his created nature. When man enacts laws or undertakes personal action in defiance of that created nature, he is acting in a way that is contrary to a state of happiness. For this reason, if a government of law is to be successful, it must be formed to meet the reality of mans nature: a reality which recognizes both mans created nobility and rebelling imperfection. Page | 48 Hence, Wilson insightfully comments: [G]overnment is the scaffolding of society: and if society could be built and kept entire without government, the scaffolding might be thrown down, without the least inconvenience or cause of regret. Government is, indeed, highly necessary . . . to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of Paradise.35 The Founders believed man had not continued innocent and so shaped American government to meet his shortcomings. It is within the will of man to have positive law either advance human nature or undermine it. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that the constructed, positive law of society can disregard the law of nature without consequence. We can construct governments and other social structures beyond our individual natures, but these perform well only if natures truths are observed. What we must never forget is that Nature never ceases to govern; and that, if men wish to govern, they must govern under Natures Laws, or they will be doomed to failure.11 There is much speculation as to why America in the late Eighteenth Century was the locus of natural law rediscovery. Possibly, it was the wide sweep of land, and nature, itself, that the colonists daily inhabited and sought to harness. Perhaps it was the extraordinary discoveries of the era in natural science. Or it may simply have been that no people so distant from their country of origin could rationally continue to think of themselves as subjects. American colonists were persons enjoying natural liberty. However it was, [t]he American colonists came upon this idea in their own way . . . . It was the result of their own experience in self government, coupled with their faith that their human nature had a Divine origin and involved a moral responsibility of which freedom was a necessary correlate. 15 Of course, man is not assured of happiness merely by public acknowledgment of his created nature. When man enacts laws or undertakes personal action in defiance of that created nature, he is acting in a way that is contrary to a state of happiness. For this reason, if a government of law is to be successful, it must be formed to meet the reality of mans nature: a reality which recognizes both mans created nobility and re belling imperfection. Hence, Wilson insightfully comments: [G]overnment is the scaffolding of society: and if society could be built and kept entire without government, the scaffolding might be thrown down, without the least inconvenience or cause of regret. Government is, indeed, highly necessary . . . to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of Paradise.35 The Founders believed man had not continued innocent and so shaped American government to meet his shortcomings. Jean Bethke Elshtain. On Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? The nation-state is a phenomenon that cannot be imagined or legislated out of existence. Needing others to define ourselves, we will remain inside a state/nation-centered discourse of war and politics, for better and for worse, so long as states remain the best way we have devised for protecting and sustaining a way of life in common. But we can try to tame and limit the demands of sovereignty; we can, perhaps, move toward what I am tempted to call a post-sovereign politics. A politics sans sovereignty: is it possible? "It seems to me that if the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man." Identification with a national "imagined community" is a complex, manysided construction. It taps particularism and universalism. Indeed, one might argue it requires such, being composed of normatively vital aspects of both ethnicity and universal values, organic integration and voluntarism. Human
beings require concrete reference groups in order to attain individuality and identity but too complete immersion in such groups limits the boundaries of identity and of identification to fixed familial, tribal, or territorial lines. Sovereignty, Identity, Sacrifice Jean Bethke Elshtain Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty. Thomas W. Pogge Page | 49 Thus, if we accept a purely institutional conception of human rights, then we need some additional moral conception if we wish to deny that all is permitted in a very disorganized state of nature. Second, the cosmopolitanism of the institutional approach is contingent as well, in that the global moral force of human rights is activated only through the emergence of a global scheme of social institutions, which triggers obligations to promote any feasible reforms of this scheme that would enhance the fulfillment of human rights. So long as there is a plurality of self-contained cultures, the responsibility for such violations does not extend beyond their boundaries.7 It is only because all human beings are now participants in a single, global institutional scheme-involving such institutions as the territorial state and a system of international law and diplomacy as well as a world market for capital, goods, and services-that all human rights violations have come to be, at least potentially, everyone's concern.8 These two limitations do not violate generality. I have a duty toward every other person not to cooperate in imposing an unjust institutional scheme upon her, even while this duty triggers human- rights-based obligations only to fellow participants in the same institutional scheme. This is analogous to how the duty to keep one's promises is general even while it triggers obligations only vis-a-vis persons to whom one has actually made a promise. Consider a human right not to be enslaved. On an interactional view, this right would constrain persons, who must not enslave one another. On an institutional view, the right would constrain legal and economic institutions: slavery must not be permitted or enforced. This leads to an important difference regarding the moral role of those who are neither slaves nor slaveholders. On the interactional view, such third parties have no responsibility vis-A-vis existing slaves, unless the human right in question involved, besides the negative duty not to enslave, also a positive duty to protect or rescue others from enslavement. Such positive duties have been notoriously controversial. On the institutional view, by contrast, some third parties may be implicated far more directly in the human rights violation. If they are not making reasonable efforts toward institutional reform, the more privileged participants in an institutional scheme in which slavery is permitted or even enforced-even those who own no slaves themselves-are here seen as cooperating in the enslavement, in violation of a negative duty.
Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty. Thomas W. Pogge So long as there is a plurality of self-contained cultures, the responsibility for such violations does not extend beyond their boundaries.7 It is only because all human beings are now participants in a single, global institutional scheme-involving such institutions as the territorial state and a system of international law and diplomacy as well as a world market for capital, goods, and services-that all human rights violations have come to be, at least potentially, everyone's concern.8
Cosmopolitanism and Sovereignty. Thomas W. Pogge The institutional view thus broadens the circle of those who share responsibility for certain deprivations and abuses beyond what a simple libertarianism would justify, and it does so without having to affirm positive duties. To be
sure, working for institutional reform is doing something (positive). But, in the context of practices, this-as even libertarians recognize-does not entail that the duty in question is therefore a positive one: the negative duty not to abuse just practices may also generate positive obligations, as when one must act to keep a promise or contract one has made. Once one is a participant in social practices, it may no longer be true that one's negative duties require merely forbearance. The move from an interactional to an institutional approach thus blocks one way in which the rich and mighty in today's developed countries like to see themselves as morally disconnected from the fate of the less fortunate denizens of the Third World. It overcomes the claim that one need only refrain from violating human rights directly, that one cannot reasonably be required to become a soldier in the global struggle against human rights violators and a comforter of their victims worldwide. This claim is not refuted but shown to be irrelevant. We are asked to be concerned about human rights violations not simply insofar as they exist at all, but only insofar as they are produced by social institutions in which we are significant participants. Our negative duty not to cooperate in the imposition of unjust practices, together with our continuing participation in an unjust institutional scheme, triggers obligations to promote feasible reforms of this scheme that would enhance the fulfillment of human rights. One may think that a shared responsibility for the justice of the social institutions in which we participate cannot plausibly extend beyond our national institutional scheme, in which we participate as citizens, and which we can most immediately affect. But such a limitation is untenable because it treats as natural or God-given the existing global institutional framework, which is in fact imposed by human beings who are collectively quite capable of changing it. Therefore at least we-privileged citizens of powerful and approximately democratic countries-share a collective responsibility for the justice of the existing global order and hence also for any contribution it may make to the incidence of human rights violations.' The practical importance of this conclusion evidently hinges on the extent to which our global institutional scheme is causally responsible for current deprivations. Consider this challenge: "Human rights violations and their distribution have local explanations. In some countries torture is rampant, while it is virtually nonexistent in others.
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The human nature of freedom and identity. Douglas W. Kmiec Government is, indeed, highly necessary . . . to a fallen state. Had man continued innocent, society, without the aids of government, would have shed its benign influence even over the bowers of Paradise.35 The Founders believed man had not continued innocent and so shaped American government to meet his shortcomings. Carl Levy. Anarchism and cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism can be freed from the dubious joys of imperial shock and awe and returned rightfully to utopia, even freed from modern-day cosmopolitical Free Thinkers, from its contemporary champions, who have turned into a rather dull institutional blueprint
stoics in the city

amma birago
cosmopolitan is the new indigenous, and the call to mourning. as above so it is below like kingship, the city was "lowered down from heaven and cut to a heavenly pattern; . The constructions of sovereignty allow us to make more sense of the will-to-sacrifice as it shifts from personal liege loyalty to a feudal lord to an abstract, juridical, imagined tie that nevertheless calls forth sacrifice in its/his (the sovereign's) name.

Stoics in The City: Resisting The System

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Stoics in The City: Resisting The System

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amma birago cosmopolitan is the new indigenous, and the call to mourning

imagine theres no country.