Exalted Symbolisms and Abstractions used to Cannibalize and Conquer other Cultures    

            It may be useful here to examine only one system of knowledge/power: the European and Christian system. Later it will be necessary to discuss the destructive interplay of multiple systems of knowledge and power, which I have considered briefly above, in the hopes of accustoming the reader to thinking across cultural boundaries.

            Cultural symbolisms and abstractions act as screens, or projecting mirrors to magnify social purposes.  Platonist heavens or abstract categories and archetypal symbols are themselves historical creations that serve traceable purposes. For instance, the image of Christ is a mythological, historically determined figure: the historical reality that originated the myth is largely absent, and such as can be inferred from documents like the Dead Sea Scrolls, imply yet deeper levels of mystification and obscurity. [1] In history then, the Christ image is an abstract symbol, and thus is a cultural element that illuminates and focuses epistemological political-economic realties.  The symbol of Christ in history has largely served power interests, and thus is the knowledge element in a system of knowledge/power.

            It might be useful to digress somewhat here and discuss the magnifying function of symbols and claims to plenary knowledge. One finds, in the study of religions, that the key statements of the major 'world religions' as they are sometimes called, are magnifying self-reflective statements.  For instance, in Hinduism a key statement is that "Atma is Brahma", which means that the Self is the Godhead or the universal essence. "Thou art That" or 'Tat Tvam Asi' is a similar statement. These statements mean that the individual self is reflected, and is in its essence the same thing as the Universal self. Essentially one is saying that the universe is the universe. In The Bible God identifies himself to Moses as having the name "I am that I am". This is another self-reflective sentence, which is tantamount to saying that being is being, of what is, is. Everything is reflected in nothing and vice versa. In Buddhism a similar sentence is that "Samsara is Nirvana" or vice versa. A similar, and in many respects an identical statement in Islam is the "testimony" or Shahada. which states that "there is no God but God"- La illha illa Llah. This statement is also a denial of Christianity, or of Christ as the equivalent of god. But the primary intent of the statement is to define god as everything, yet unlike anything else. In all these expressions the idea is communicated that god is the ultimate being and that anything that exists is necessarily from him, of him or is him. These statements are statements of a claim to absolute existence and total being, and as such they are statements that define total knowledge as well as total power. The idea is that ultimate knowledge is the same as ultimate identity. A hierarchy is set up, such that consciousness, or the knowing subject is to become identified with the ultimate meaning and existence of the universe. These statements are intended to insist on the necessity of the recognition of ultimate truth. They are didactic statements, as well as symbolic statements. man is supposed to be the agent through which god becomes aware of his own omniscience and omnipotence. These statements are meant to magnify the men and women to whom they are addressed to adopt an identity in accord with total knowledge and power. Man is supposed to exist in order that the universe might know itself. The universe is the mirror of god.

            When one tries to dismantle these statements into what they appear to intend one notices that they are self congratulatory statements of simple identity. A=A. The god exists in order that the universe would know him, Why does he need to be known? Because he cannot feel his total knowledge and power unless he is realized by other beings who are less than him. If the universe exists for god to know himself through man, then god is a tyrant who created creatures whose primary purpose is be make him conscious of himself through the imposition of himself on all other beings. If one were

speaking of a human being here, one would have to conclude that such a mentality is an indication of an extraordinarily selfish form of narcissism. But these statements do not describe human beings, except indirectly. They are statements which magnify the purpose and motives of the religions in question. In other words, these statements are projections of the motivations of the men in the society who were serviced by these high flown metaphysical statements. 

            These statements are not meaningless, as a logical positivist might maintain. Their self-reflective, and seemingly neutral employment of simple identity has a purpose and serves a function. The meaning of these sentences is not in their overt sense, but in their function as foils for creating an sustaining a social order and the mentality that serves it. These are statements of the god concept or of an equivalent transcendental identity. The god concept functions analogously to a magnifying mirror, expanding into grandiosity the motivations of those that believe in the abstraction and act in accord with their belief. The god concept gives the adherents of the religions a feeling of transcendent status and a promise, at least potentially, of illimitable power. Scientific or mathematical abstractions serve an analogous function.

            These statements are projections of the will to power through knowledge of the men that made and were served by them. The self-reflective mirroring that each of these statements expresses indicate that the statements are actually symbolic, in their structure, of the consciousness that was served by the sentences. In other words, these sentences are orchestrating axioms of a social order, they seeks to create, even to dictate, a consciousness. Moreover, they seek to identify consciousness itself with a particular social and epistemological framework. [2] They seek to seize on consciousness as a symbol of a social order. They are statements of supremacy, formulas and claims that are intended to justify the drive total power and total knowledge. They are hyperbolic attempts to claim universal being as an advertisement or a groundwork intended to justify the importance of a social order. This digression may help explain aspects of cvarious religious systems. One can see how this is the case in Islam, for instance, where the Koran is regularly used to justify gross violations of human rights. Many, many people have been killed in wars or in prisons due to Islamic “jihad” or laws that violate basic human rights standards. The poor treatment of women in Islamic countries also results from a system of belief being used to justify inhumane practices.[3]

            The use of notion of the ‘intellect” or consciousness used a a symbol of state supremacy also helps explain aspects of the Christ symbol. The Christ symbol seeks to forge an identity and elect those who 'submit' to it.  The symbol creates the illusion of a superior consciousness. The Christ symbol may be the most brilliant symbol ever created for the purpose of social control, because it presents the image of the victim/victimizer in the simplest possible paradox; the crucified redeemer who become the "King of the World" and the apocalyptic judge of the living and the dead.  The paradox of the victim who becomes the victimizer summarizes in a neat package the seeming paradox of knowledge/power, which provides simultaneous justifications for benefits and punishments. Christ promises to his followers immortal and absolute benefits in return for the sacrifice of their persons to his divinity. Non Christians are by definition inferior beings, deserving of punishment, death or conversion.  For the institution of the Church, as well as for groups that have opposed the Church, this symbolism is nearly inexhaustible in its applications: hence the endless proliferation of Christian sects, churches, denominations and their alliances or oppositions to nation states, political theories or sciences. The genius of Christianity  consists in the ability of the image of Christ to serve the purposes of power from both sides of the political game. For the poorer classes Christ the image of Christ as victim of injustice has been useful in orchestrating resentments and organizing revenge or redress, or more often, submissive acceptance of injustices. For the upper classes Christ has been made into and image of universal knowledge and power, an image of themselves, wearing 'royal purple', jewels or gold.. The Byzantine Christ of the Apoctostasis or Pantocrator are examples of Christ as the judge and punisher of those who oppose the state, the King and the Priests. However Christ is imaged he is a mythological metaphor for consciousness as the mediator between knowledge and power. He is the symbolic pivot around which the Western world has organized itself.

             Of course, the image is just an image, and can be dispensed with. Science, Marxism and capitalism all embody a will to power through knowledge originating out of the Christian world view, but with the anthropomorphic image of Christ largely removed. Of course, combinations of opposing knowledge systems are always a possibility, and Christianity has combined with Marxism, Darwinism and many other 'isms'. In any case,

the history of the West is largely the history of the glorification of consciousness through knowledge and power. The major atrocities of the last 500 years are the result of this glorification of consciousness. As long as consciousness or knowledge is held to be a higher value than rights and life, these atrocities will probably continue.

            The strategy that one of the most powerful institutions the world has ever known, pictured itself as a victim on a cross is a paradox that successfully stopped centuries of potential criticism. To question the knowledge of Christ or the fundamental dogma of the church was made to seem the ultimate sin, the 'sin against the holy ghost' which could not be forgiven. To question the roots of Christian knowledge was to question the victim on the Cross. The Church was able to picture itself as beneficent even in its worst acts and genocidal purposes against Indians, heathens and other social or religious systems.

             This strategy largely silenced all criticism for centuries. The cruelties and greed of the Church could always be explained away as being the result of the greed of its members and not as an indictment of the rarefied Platonic symbolism of the untouchable, otherworldly and detached Christ serenely above all earthly troubles and contradictions. Symbolism triumphed over reality and left its deadly toll on the reality that had been devalued by the symbolism.  Christian society was founded on the ideology that reality must conform to the Symbol and the Idea, and deviation from this norm required that reality be forced to conform, or punished for not conforming.

            The idea of an otherworldly 'Truth" that was beyond human fallibility became a means of orchestrating a totalistic social order.  This lesson was not forgotten as the Christian era blends into the modern era.  The supremacy of knowledge and abstract systems of representing 'truth' cease to be pictured as the man on the cross, and come to be pictured as Reason, the Cogito, or the scientific intellect or even history. The heritage of this remains with us, for instance, in the cult of mathematics and scientific technology, both of which generate abstract systems and dehumanizing and alienating practices. The highest reaches of theoretical science are intimately responsible for the worst atrocities of scientific societies. In the pursuit of intellectual power, mathematical science, through industrial and atomic technology, or  genetic and environmental threats has threatened to destroy the earth and the ordinary beings on whose existence the science depends. Abstractions dehumanize others and reduce them to products, measured entities, numbers or articles of trade or consumption. People become "human resources" in a system of abstract exchanges, like so many cattle, so much silver bullion, so many slaves, or much nuclear waste. Abstractions generate distance through hierarchies, such that those in the "in-group" who possess the knowledge, feel justified in exploiting the "out-group" who possess neither the knowledge, nor the human worth that the knowledge confers.

            The political function of systems of abstraction might be clarified further by a look at the practice of cannibalism. It is clear from various studies on actual cases of cannibalism in Papua, New Guinea and elsewhere, that the societies that practiced cannibalism were seeking to maximize their power over competing groups or 'out-groups'. The cannibalized out-group represents the 'Other', whose power is both assimilated and defeated by the act of eating. The cannibalistic ceremonies were almost never a matter of nutritional need, but a social practice that solidified the power of the in-group or the leaders within the tribe. Tribal leaders ritualized the devouring of other tribal members to demonstrate both to the other tribe and the members of their own tribe that they were powerful and that deifying and dignifying knowledge belonged to them..

            The same dynamic is at play in the central Christian rite, though in a symbolic rather than a literal way.  The Christian epistemological system, as presented in Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas and others is heavily dependent on Greek thought,  as well as having its own transcendentalist logic which despised the 'world' and sometimes despised Greek thought as well. In any case it creates a radical disjuncture between the world of mind and that of matter, with the latter, associated with the 'world', being seen as a place of sacrifice. Redemption then becomes equated with suffering, the hierarchy of the church with the machinery of salvation, and world destruction a hoped for possibility. All this is contained tacitly in the Eucharistic rite. Muri Rubin, in her book on the history of the Eucharist, observes that the Eucharist was "a receptacle of power, as well as a way of challenging such power" and that it involves a form of symbolic cannibalism which combines the "fullness of life giving" with the "utmost transgression"- that of eating human flesh. [4] The basic  desire of all life, the need to eat, is combined with the ultimate transgression, eating human flesh. The Eucharistic rite is primarily about power, and sublimates and exploits the most basic and primitive drives to achieve this power. The anthropologist Peggy Sanday argues along similar lines in her study of cannibalistic societies, Divine Hunger. [5] She concludes from her study that cannibalism is absent only in societies "where domination and control are subordinate to accommodation and integration. Cannibalism allows the group to solidify power and dominate the "social other"". In other words it creates a consciousness or a knowledge of group power and identity, and this depends on the social domination or elimination of the "other", here symbolized in the act of eating them.

            The eating of the body of Christ has a similar meaning, but in this case one is eating the transcultural god. This act symbolizes not merely local domination of a neighboring tribe, but global domination through the attempt to create a total world civilization and a drive to world conquest.  Capitalism is not literally cannibalistic. It devours the substance of those who are in the "out groups", often at the cost of their lives, in some cases resulting in genocide. Christian cannibalism is symbolic, but the results of the ideology are literal. In other words, Christian Eucharistic symbolism is a theory of knowledge which implicates and orchestrates behaviors, and the behavior that results is the effort at conquest and world 'conversion' or domination.

            The Christian rite of the Eucharist is a symbolic act of cannibalism wherein one eats the body of the dead god, and is thereby assimilated to the in-group, which in this case was originally the 'one and only' Church, Catholic and universal. This meant that all those outside the Church would be of lesser status, and must be either converted or eliminated.  This distinction between the chosen and the cast-off, the saved and the damned, is already implicit in the words attributed to Christ and central to the Catholic mass: "Except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have no life in you...for whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life and I will raise him on the last day". [6] Eating the god is supposed to give election into a superior and otherworldly knowledge, and those who lack this election through knowledge will be severely punished.

            The Eucharistic act also signifies the power of the hierarchy of the Church itself such that each time the Eucharist is eaten, the "body"  and therefore the knowledge, power, dogma and hierarchy of the Church is affirmed and strengthened. It is this aspect of the Christ symbol that generates exclusionary racism and drives toward conquest, and the subjugation of the earth. The transcendental victim becomes the transcontinental victimizer and it is this that makes the Christ-symbol a central element in a system of knowledge/power.  The Christian view of the world requires assimilation or death. Those outside Christian civilization are the "out-group", who must submit and assimilate to survive, if they do not submit to 'salvation' their substance is devoured, their land taken from them, their culture dominated or eliminated. If they do submit,  the result is largely the same, though somewhat less brutal.  The rhetoric of salvation and redemption was easily adapted or developed into a capitalist system of 'redeeming' though wealth, 'saving' through expansionist capital.

            Not only capitalism, but science arises out of Christianity, particularly after the Realist/Nominalist controversy of the 12th to 14th centuries.. The dogma of transubstantiation is pivotal in the changeover or transitional development of science out of Medieval Christianity.  The doctrine of transubstantiation, after one strips all the mystogogic accretions from the dogma, states that Christ as the intellect, dominates matter, at the same time as he comes into union with it. This essentially is the idea that is behind science, once all the anthropomorphic dressings are stripped away. Reason enters into and dominates matter, to bend it to the human will.  The Christian will to dominate the earth through knowledge, historically, developed into the scientific will to dominate the earth through knowledge.[7] Exploration, discovery, research, conquest: all become so many modes of domination: so many ways to know, control, expropriate and exploit the "other".

              Stannard points out that the New World represented the "wilderness" to the Christian invaders, and that in this "Wilderness", with all the mythological overtones of the desert and the desert Fathers, the "wild man", that is the 'old Adam' within, had to be resisted, scourged and ultimately killed or conquered. The wilderness both "within and without", had to be subdued or eliminated.  The wilderness didn't exit, since some 15-20 million Native Americans lived in North America alone, and had to be created by Europeans.  The 'savage' didn't exist either, but was a creation by Europeans of the hated 'lower nature' that is posited by Christian metaphysics. This is an important insight, I think.  It implies that the Conquest was above all an exercise whereby Christians sought their salvation in the murder of those that they saw as the image of their own darker selves.  The European belief that the wilderness had to be conquered, the Indian subjugated and the wildness of both the land and its inhabitants eliminated was a paranoid delusion. This paranoid system of belief justified the rape of Africa as well as North America, and more recently most of the world. Massacre, environmental rape, extermination and slavery were central to European 'salvation'. [8]  Europeans "purified" their souls by the sensual abnegation and elimination of those people they saw as impure and sinful, heathen, pagan, heretics, or cannibals. If cannibalism was rarely practiced among the Native Americans, if at all, the Europeans needed to invent it. They needed a myth of Native depravity and inhumanity to justify their own cruelty and will to power. 

            The history of the idea of cannibalism, as opposed to its reality,  is a history of many ironies. The Europeans accused many of their victims in the Conquest of being cannibals: the Native Americans, Africans and Jews were all so accused.  Pictures of Indians as seething man eaters, boiling Europeans in a large kettle for dinner, or Africans with bones in their noses, were useful propaganda which helped excuse genocidal motivations. The Jews were supposed to have eaten Christian babies: another widely disseminated lie, which like the lies in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion  helped justify Pograms in Russia and Auschwitz in Germany.  Columbus believed, wrongly, that the Carib Islanders were cannibals. The word cannibal itself is thought to originate from Spanish and English corruptions of the word Carib. [9] As Stannard points out, cannibals were not found by Columbus and those who followed him into the Americas, but Columbus and the other invaders of the new world "needed to believe that the charge was true". The English would later accuse the Irish of being cannibals, to justify their savage exploitation of them during the later half of the 16th century.  The terrorizing and savage treatment of the Irish by the English would later be repeated when the English came to America.  Murdering the Irish was a training ground for "felling trees and Indians" in Chomsky's phrase. Similar excuses and justifications would be used about the Africans when Europeans wished to justify the slave trade. Few or none of the accusations hold up.

             The  paranoid need of power of unjust men and institutions to blame their victims for their own crimes appears to be a regular occurrence in history.  Rather then relinquish their unjust powers men often accuse their enemies of that which they are themselves guilty and project on them their own perfidies. The psychological maneuver involved here accompanies paranoid delusions of grandeur,  but it also steps beyond the merely psychological and becomes a systematic and epistemological justification for atrocity, intellectual colonialism and cultural cannibalism.

             In the case of Africans, Jews and Native Americans there seems to be very little reality to the accusation of cannibalism, whereas the accusation of cannibalism or the fear of cannibalism expressed by many of the victims of the Europeans appears to be credible. For instance, Olaudah Equiano, an African taken by European slavers, wrote in 1792 that he "was quite overpowered with horror and anguish" because of the treatment shown him by the Europeans who were about to enslave him and he wondered "if we were not to be eaten by those white men". [10] The slaves brought to the Middle Passage were not far wrong in believing the Europeans were going to eat them. They did not literally eat them, but they devoured their labor and their lives.  At least 3 or more millions died in the Middle Passage. The Africans on the ships were considered merely cargoes of human cattle to be used, sacrificed and their freedom and their labor devoured in the pursuit of the white man's wealth. . As with the Africans, so with Native Americans and Jews:  the severity and brutality of slavery is worse in scope, numbers and longevity than what occurred in Germany in the 1940's. But suffering for those who must die brutal deaths is equal on both accounts: the miners in the Potasi mines of South America had a life expectancy about equal to the inmates at Auschwitz.

            It cannot be denied that in a sense the Europeans cannibalized these races by devouring their substance to gain wealth.  It would seem that the destruction of all these people is inversely related to the 'highest' ritual of European civilization, the Eucharistic rite.  The price of the symbolic exaltation of the Eucharistic rite is the degradation of the heathen, the slave, the Indian and the earth. The existence of cannibalism in the symbolic form of  the Christian rite implied that Europeans were chosen and superior people because they ate the body of Christ. Those who knew did not eat Christ's body and drink his blood were heathen, inferior or damned. The Europeans did not actually eat those they exploited, but they did symbolically devour them, using human life and bodies to increase their wealth and power. 

            Devouring the substance of other peoples was an integral part of the rise of the Euro-American Empire and this will to power through knowledge had as its cultural expression the seemingly neutral act of eating of the body of Christ  on Sundays. The participation in the Christian mythos by ordinary individuals was a participation in the symbolics of power which promised greater security and advantage on the one hand, while marginalizing outsiders, 'others', non-Christians and opposing cultures on the other hand. The 'Kingdom of God" belonged to the Europeans, and those who were not European could be exploited and symbolically devoured of their substance with impunity. New England towns were seen by whites as enclaves of civilization forced into the wilderness of the heathen. In the name of Christ, forests could be destroyed, pagans killed and a continent stolen.

            But one must keep in mind that knowledge systems and the practices they dictate are not static. Christianity justified slavery and the murder of Native Americans. But once slaves and natives became Christianized, the brutality did not stop. Plantation owners resisted the Christianization of slave into the 19th century, in some cases. But once slaves become Christians, Christianity was easily adapted to preserve slavery. The plantation owners could and did use the words of Christ and Paul concerning the duty of submission to Masters. "Servants, obey in all things, the Masters according to the flesh", Paul had written, parroting similar expressions spoken by Christ. [11] The slave might be free in the  mythical next world, but not in this one.  As one preacher put it, slave conversion to Christianity was good, because "they were sheep not having a shepherd and Jesus began to teach them". The value of Christianity was in teaching the slave to be indifferent to him or herself, since only the next world mattered and this world was thought a place of suffering and evil.

            Knowledge systems are malleable to nearly as many purposes as powers can design. Christianity not only helped maintain but also to end slavery.  This indicates, again, that knowledge is not something in itself, but is a screen that is adaptable to purposes, motives, needs, drives, desires and intentions.  Even in Christian resistance to racial oppression, the dialectic of power and knowledge has not been escaped. The end of slavery was not the end of the abuse of rights. It signified merely a change to new forms of knowledge, power and abuse.  Slavery ended, but economic discrimination and racism did not.

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