Against His-story, Against Leviathan!

By Fredy Perlman

Against His-story, Against Leviathan! is Fredy Perlman's monumentally imaginative recounting of the origins and development of civilization, conceived as the systematic self-enslavement and self-alienation of human communities. This excerpt from his story tells of the European invasion of North America from the perspective of its uncivilized and unenslaved inhabitants. Some of the metaphorical terms used by Perlman for this story (such as his term for the Sumerian "strong man" or ruler, `Lugal') are derived from his account of the rise of civilization in Sumeria and elsewhere earlier in his book.

Potawatomi storytellers of the Great Lakes told of a certain Wiske, an ancient trickster who, long ago, almost became Archon over Nesh- nabe, over free people.

This Wiske was not altogether villainous to the Potawatomi. In ceremonies enacting his deeds, he wore the long-eared mask of the Hare totem. It was said that he helped the destitute, the trapped and the lost. His nephews said he gave the people webbed shoes so they could traverse the snow, canoes so they could float on water, as well as spears and arrows so they could feed themselves.

Wiske's nephews thought much of their uncle's gifts, and they expressed their gratitude by returning gifts of similar magnitude. They pulled Wiske over the snow, paddled him over the water, and fed him all he could eat.

Wiske was on the verge of becoming a Potawatomi Lugal. But the land around Kichigami, the lush woodlands, prairies and forest openings surrounding the Great Lakes, was not "the Fertile Crescent."

Potawatomi women and men gathered in a Council and pondered on the gifts given and received by Wiske.

The Council concluded with an unprecedented resolve. Banishment was unheard of. It was doubtful if the Council of gathered Neshnabe had the authority to banish a member of the community; each person was free to follow her own dream wherever it led. Yet the Council banished Wiske.

The free people of the lush woodlands of Kichigami were happy without an Archon. They were happy because they were free. The good uncle was told to take his gift-giving disposition to a northern land of ice or to a southern land of fire, to a place where, it was thought, he might find people who were destitute, trapped and lost.

Armored Europeans will be interested in learning if this Wiske actually existed, and when he existed.

This was not what interested the Potawatomi. Wiske existed in the present. The story was reenacted in songs and dances, at ceremonies and festivals. Wiske was always a member of the community and he was always exiled.

The paradox will be problematic to people trapped in linear, Leviathanic time. The Potawatomi knew linear time as well as rhythmic time, and they also knew that what mattered, what was humanly important, did not take place in linear time.

Wiske's gift-giving, his elevation and his banishment were rhythmic events, like the heart's beat, like the sun's rising, like vegetation's rebirth. Rhythmic events were the subjects of songs, of dances, of the frequent ceremonies and festivals.

To know that Wiske "actually existed" was both impossible and trivial. Such events will be considered `facts' and "raw data" by the Leviathanized because the linear progression of such events constitutes Leviathanic time, namely His-story. The Leviathanized will remember only fragments of the sole events they consider worth remembering because the memory of such events will not be lodged in living human beings but on stone tablets, on paper, and eventually in machines.

The Potawatomi were not data-processing machines nor computers for the storage of trivial information. They needed "raw data" about as much as they needed Wiske. They made Wiske the butt of many of their jokes. Among the Potawatomi, the almighty Archon got no further than to be the subject of funny stories.

Part-human, part-beast, and possessing the Leviathanic virtue of existing forever, Wiske the gift-giver reappeared in the jokes as the long-eared, long-membered and long-tailed Trickster, forever setting traps for animals and people and forever trapping himself.

Jokes were for laughs. Linear events, namely unexpected disruptions of life's rhythms, were usually funny. Sometimes they were tragic.

If the tragedy was repeated, then the event was not linear but rhythmic, and it was already known. Rhythms were grasped with symbols and expressed with music. Musical knowledge was knowledge of the important, the deep, the living. The music of myth expressed the symphony of rhythms that constituted the Cosmos.

                            *   *   *

How could the Potawatomi have known so much about Leviathan when even most of us will think we're free individuals encased by nothing but air? And why would they eject the bringer of so many amenities, of institutionalized social life, of law, of order? The answers are as related as the questions, but being a product of linear upbringing and therefore inept in expressing kindred thoughts with symbols, I will have to take up the questions separately. I will deal with the `why' first.

Even during the coldest winter days, when the branches of evergreens sagged from their weight of snow, the human child was born into a very warm context. The warmth did not come from the walls of the bark lodge, which failed to block all draughts, nor from the fire on the floor, but from the radiant people welcoming the newcomer.

The child was expected; she was already an important personage; her arrival completed the community. Soon after her birth, she was ceremonially named, not arbitrarily but very carefully. The Totem, namely the community of the newcomer's kin, possessed a number of names, as the sky possesses a number of stars, and the community was not quite whole, was in fact uneasy, if the names were not carried by living individuals. Everyone attended the naming ceremony because all were enhanced by the newly-named. The names did not run out. The Potawatomi were not committed to what we will know as Population Growth, and it is said that they did not experience the phenomenon.

The newcomer provided a missing rhythm. The name expressed the community's embrace of the missing rhythm and also some expecta- tions about the music that might be heard.

But the specific rhythm of the newly-named could be foretold no more than the final shape of a tree can be foretold from a seedling. The child was placed in no school to stunt her growth to the expected size and shape. On the contrary, the girl-child as well as her newborn brother were left free to emulate, or ignore, uncles and aunts, cousins among the animals, everyone and every- thing under the Sun, not excluding the Sun.

The grownups watched, not to close doors, but to open doors, to let the children wander where they would unharmed.

By the time the Potawatomi children were old enough to have expectations of their own, they were prepared to be their own guides. Dream lodges were set up in the forest, one for the girl, another for her brother. The youngsters fasted until a Totem spirit visited them. The spirit usually appeared in the form of an animal, and was usually not the same spirit whose name the child wore. The spirit promised to guide the child along a specific path, namely to give the child an individual rhythm, and the spirit offered the child certain powers with which to achieve the rhythm, powers with which to light the path.

Henceforth the children were on their own, bound neither by laws nor by the community's expectations. Their own dream spirit helped them decide whether or not to live up to the ancestor whose name they carried. If they decided not to, they would be renamed after the first act that revealed the children were determined to follow distinct paths.

The boy, carrying his guide's offerings in a beautifully adorned bag, and knowing that he could call on his guide simply by fasting, set out on his own to face a cosmos whose grandeur and mystery will be inaccessible to our imaginations. We will know something of his feats as a hunter or a warrior, as a long-distance walker, as a lover. We will know less of the depth of his friendships with kinsmen or strangers, and almost nothing of his friendships with wolves and bears whose tracks he followed, whose signals he tried to grasp, whose universe he tried to understand. And we will know nothing at all of his fasts on mountain tops or alongside green mirror-like tree-surrounded lakes, of the journeys he undertook with his guide across and through the water to the place of life's origin, of his flights on the guide's wings to the sunset land where his ancestors gathered.

We will know that he eventually returned to his Totem with meat and with numerous stories, and that he married his beloved's sister because his beloved had in the meantime married a youth who had not stayed away for so long. We will know that he spoke of his exploits and his voyages to his children and also to his sister's children, the nephew and niece whose dream lodges he built in the forest.

We will think that his strength left him when he gave up warring as well as hunting, when he became a peacemaker, storyteller and lone wanderer.

We will not know that he revisited a mountain top he had known in his youth, fasted until his guide came for him, flew to the land beyond the sunset, joined his beloved, he as youthful as on his first trip, she as beautiful as on the day he first saw her, and traveled with her alongside him across and through water to the place of Life's beginnings.

If we knew all this, we wouldn't ask why the man resisted encasing himself in our linear, visionless Order. Isn't it our longing that expresses itself in a story about a European called Faust who turns his back on respectability, on the esteem of his colleagues, on law as well as religion, so as to have access to a personal guide and personal powers available to every Potawatomi?

The man's older sister, in the meantime, created a music that will sound less `romantic' to our ears. She too followed her own dream, but she found it possible to fulfill her own guide's expectations as well as the community's. She lived up to the Totem ancestor whose name she proudly continued to carry. She threw herself into the Totem's activities, perhaps reacting against her lonesome brother; perhaps she, too, thought him excessively `romantic'.

Like her name-ancestor, she turned bark of birch trees into canoes and winter lodges and tree-sugar baskets; she turned the skins of animals into cloaks, skirts, moccasins and medicine bags. Her own spirit inspired the colorful quilled symbolism with which she finished everything she made.

Like her ancestor, she was one of the preparers of the ceremonial welcoming of spring's new shoots, and after her marriage she was also a preparer of the ceremonial expulsion of Wiske, but the words she sang and the steps she danced were inspired by her own spirit.

Like her ancestor, she gathered herbs and became familiar with their general uses, but when her son was attacked by something he ate, she had to learn from her own spirit how to combine and administer the herbs while singing him back to health.

Her son as well as her daughter later took after her lonesome younger brother, but she was neither disappointed nor surprised; she knew that the children were following their own dreams, as she herself had.

Her dream had guided her to the center of the festivals and ceremonies, to the village council and the medicine lodge. Nothing her kin did or knew was alien to her.

Yet some of us will pretend to be honest when we ask why she was so vigorous in expelling Wiske from the ceremonial circle, why she would have been repelled by the prospect of becoming a housewife in a Civilized household, even the Archon's.

Can we not recognize that in the fullness of development of universal human capacities she exposes the immiseration of the shamefully stunted products of Civilization? Can we not see that this Potawatomi matron who excells as Architect, Shoemaker, Shipbuilder, Furrier, Dramatist, Painter, Composer, Dancer, Druggist and Doctor already surpasses the many-sided Genius, the notoriously flexible Renaissance Man?

Shouldn't the question be inverted? Shouldn't we ask why we are fascinated by a Da Vinci, instead of asking why she is repelled? Is it because Da Vinci dangles from Leviathan's neck like a cowbell, whereas she stands on ordinary dirt?

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

                            *   *   *

I've been telling a story about human resistance to a beast that originated in Ur, a beast whose artificial progeny would eventually swallow all human communities and, by our time, begin to eat the Biosphere.

I've come to some of the last human communities swallowed by Leviathan, and I find them resisting the beast already before it reaches them. How do these people already know what they are up against? Is it possible that the beast is not one but many, that Ur is not in Sumer but wherever people gather, that Leviathan is as natural to human beings as hives to bees? Anything is possible, but the admission of such a possibility is cynically misanthropic and it precludes envisioning any exit from the trap. Such a possibility cannot be admitted into a song of freedom, because its admission is a prognostication of Earth's doom.

I cannot deny that human beings on all the world's great islands are able to encase themselves in Leviathan's entrails, since they've all demonstrated this ability. I can deny that such a condition is as natural to them as hives to bees, and the rest of my story will affirm that it is not.

How could the Potawatomi have had any wind of the Leviathanic currents stirring in other parts of the world? The Great Lakes were as far removed from such currents as any refuge on the globe. Stories have been told about Leviathanic currents that blew from continents called Atlantis and Mu, but the stories of sunken conti- nents raise more questions than they answer, and most of their tellers place Leviathan, not living beings, at the Origin.

The breezes need not be sought on sunken continents; they could have blown to the Great Lakes from every one of the four direc- tions. I know as little about these four winds as about Mu, but my story can soar more easily on the winds than on sunken continents.

The north wind carried news of people who wandered over the land of ice. Linguistic cousins of the Potawatomi, called Lenni Lenape, preserved a scroll which vaguely referred to their own one-time journey over the land of ice. Other linguistic cousins, called Cree, inhabited the northern river valleys and forests that separated the Potawatomi from Aleut, Athabascan and other peoples of the north. Some of the northerners are said to have come from Eurasia more recently than others, some after Lugalzaggizi launched the first Leviathan on the first imperialist venture. We've seen that people attached to their homelands tried to resist the Levia- than by confronting it head on, whereas others resisted the beast's embrace by fleeing beyond its reach. If we knew something about the waves of migration set in motion by the outward thrusts of Eurasia's Leviathans, we might know that some of the more recent migrations across the northern Strait were the fringes of an anti-Leviathanic resistance movement.

The west wind carried news of great mountains and of seafaring people beyond the mountains, people with large sturdy oceancraft who braved the currents and stormy waves to hunt ocean monsters and gigantic fish. Many of the seafarers, people called Nootka and Kwa- kiutl, Tillamook and Bella Coola, were distant linguistic cousins of the Potawatomi, and many other linguistic cousins, people called Kutenai, Spokan, Okinagan, Atsina, Arapaho, Ojibwa and Menomini, inhabited the mountains, plateaus and plains separating the Potawa- tomi from the western seafarers. The westerners are said to have maintained sporadic contacts with Chinese and Japanese carriers of Eurasia's Leviathanic ways, but we know as little about these contacts as we do about Mu. We don't even know enough to speculate if any of the Trickster lore shared by the Potawatomi with their linguistic cousins, the lore about Hare, Coyote and Raven, expressed responses to carriers of Leviathanic ways.

The east wind carried news of close cousins of the Potawatomi, people of the sunrise who would be remembered as Abenaki, Penob- scot, Massachuset, Wampanoag, Pequot, Narraganset, Mohigan, Lenni Lenape. Removed from Eurasia by an Ocean they had no reason to cross, these people, or at least some of their ancestors, are said to have had brief views of human beings who hailed from the other side. Ancient Phoenicians, Libyans and Celt-Iberians are said to have ventured across the stormy Ocean. Vikings actually left a saga describing their trip across. Biscayan, Basque and other European fishermen did not ask Ferdinand and Isabela's permission to fish for cod near shores inhabited by cousins of the Potawatomi. The easterners' contacts with Eurasians were apparently no rarities, but our knowledge of them is as poor as our knowledge of Mu.

The south wind carried more substantial news, and our knowledge of it is not so sparse. Across a narrow strait from the Potawatomi villages there were large villages of Iroquoian speaking people who lived in long rectangular lodges, people later known as Wendats or Wyandots. These longhouse people, as well as their linguistic cousins further to the east, remembered having migrated northward from a far-away land. They had fled from stone giants, flying heads and maneaters. These dreaded beings are of course mythological subjects, airy creatures of the imagination, not solid historical entities like Nero, Caligula and Constantine. The Wendats who told of these beings were not interested in His-story, but in their own cosmic context.

The cosmos of the Wendats, who were peaceful corn and bean cultivators in northern woodlands, included monsters that did not exist in the north. With poetic accuracy and succinctness, Wendat myths gave an outsider's view of beings uncannily similar to stone pyramids taller than jungle trees, to feathered serpents, to masked priests who sacrificed human beings. The Wendat cosmos included a Leviathan, most plausibly the Leviathan that stirred in Yucatan already before Frankish tribesmen stormed the walls of the Roman Leviathan in Eurasia.

It is likely that news of the southern Leviathan reached the Potawatomi already before the Wendats' ancestors fled from the stone giants of southern jungles. The Beautiful Valley just south of the lakeshores of the Potawatomi was once dotted by earthen mounds, large and small, many of them in complexes enclosed by token walls demarcating a sacred space. The tales of the earliest mound-builders have not survived, but later mound-builders remembered southern origins, and their temple-topped earthen pyramids bore affinities with the stone giants of Yucatan and Central Mexico.

The practice of raising mountains over the bones of the dead was not kept up in the northern woodlands, but one element of that practice survived among the people of the Great Lakes. This element was the Feast of the Dead. The bones of deceased kinsmen were carefully preserved. Once a year, villagers from every corner journeyed to a gatheringplace and buried all the bones in a common grave. There the bones of strangers mingled with each other, and the living descendants of those in the grave ceased to be strang- ers, for their ancestors were eternally bound to one another.

In the northern forests, the great burial ceremonies were not occasions for the introduction of Leviathanic relations, but occasions for enlarging the world of kinship. Continually pulled apart from one another by their own dreams, the free villagers were continually drawn together by ceremonies that embraced all who could reach the festival grounds. The genuine solidarity of human beings whose ancestors shared common graves would not have been enhanced by the artificial unity imposed by the force of Hobbesian Leviathanic peacekeeping institutions.

The Potawatomi who ejected Wiske from their midst probably felt Leviathanic breezes from every direction, and surely from the south, long before French Jesuits and Voyageurs reached the Great Lakes.

                            *   *   *

In Eurasia, the artificial monsters expanded with seeming inevitability. I've shown that the inevitability is an illusion created by scribes who overlook the numerous vanished Mohenjo Daros and Hittites, scribes who are trained not to see the decomposition that accompanies every functioning Leviathan.

The inevitability is an illusion, but the spread of the artifices over the length and breadth of the continent is not. All of Eurasia ends up in Leviathan's entrails.

But there is no reason to project such a fate across the water. There are, in fact, indications that the stone giants did not fare as well in the world across the water as they fared in Eurasia, indications that the Potawatomi ejection of Leviathan was more prevalent in this world than the Leviathanic encasement of free communities.

We've seen that the Eurasian monster spread very quickly. At first there was only Ur, the Beginning of something unprecedented. Soon there was Lugalzaggizi, then Sargon and a world-empire.

No comparable speed can be found across the water, where the first artificial beasts appear to have been sluggish, even moribund from the start. The monstrosities remembered by the Wendats were admittedly younger than Ur, but not young enough to explain their sluggishness.

Olmec heads and Ziggurat-like stone giants were apparently contemporaries of the first Ocean-faring Phoenicians. By coinci- dence, architectural marvels appeared in Yucatan and Central Mexico at the time when Phoenicians set out on the great Ocean. Earlier in this narrative I suggested that this may have been no coincidence. But even if it was a coincidence, even if the ancestors of Toltecs and Mayas reinvented Tyre and Byblos in Central Mexico and Yucatan, the Leviathans on this side of the great water failed to swallow the double continent's human communities and failed to confront the Biosphere as overpowering opponents.

These failures cannot be explained by the newness of this world's artificial beasts, since the beasts existed for a long time. The failures cannot be explained by quirks or weaknesses in the beasts themselves. The cruelty of Aztecs was comparable to that of Assyrians or Spaniards; the architecture of Mayas to that of Greeks; the administration of Incas to that of Chinese or Persians.

Nor can the failures be explained by the absence of so-called material conditions. Those who cling to this pseudoexplanation must first explain why the most powerful of Leviathans will subsequently flourish in the very same material conditions. The so-called material conditions are Leviathan's garments, not the ground it stands on.

In my view, the failure of this world's Leviathans can be explained by the human resistance to their spread. The Potawatomi expulsion of Wiske is only one instance of that resistance. Wendats of the north's woodlands had a low opinion of stone giants. Guarani people of the southern continent spoke with fear and loathing of The One. Hopi people of the north's canyonlands told of gods destroying human beings who turned from the ways of living beings. Winnebago people of the Great Lakes made fun of the great gift-bringer, the Trickster.

In fact, even this world's priests and militarists, namely Leviathan's own agents, spoke of Civilization as something alien. On the northern as on the southern continent, the bringer of Leviathanic powers and amenities was remembered as someone who had come from abroad, had left again, and would return from abroad to reclaim his gifts.

The first Kukulkan-Quetzalc˘atl may have been a tentacle of a Phoenician or a Libyan octopus. The feathered serpent may have been the Phoenician adventurer's headdress, or it may have been the deity on the ship's prow. The man from afar would not have spoken a language foreign to the villagers who greeted him, but a language familiar to them. He would not have spoken of terms of trade, but of the cycle of vegetation and the cycles of life, death and regeneration, of sacrificial giving, of Baal. The hospitable villagers would have outdone themselves in giving all they had to the god-like foreigner who emerged from the sea.

Like the Potawatomi, the villagers who initially showered the feathered Wiske with gifts would grow tired of the burden, but being hospitable, they could not exile the foreigner. Consequently, so they told, Quetzalc˘atl exiled himself, promising to return. And the villagers returned to their own communities, their own ceremonies, their own visions, their own ways.

But the arrival of the serpentine god was remembered. The event was important, and important events were not what they would be for us: single, isolated, linear, unrepeatable. An important event was a cosmic event, and like other cosmic events, like the rising of the sun or the eclipse of the moon or the journey of a comet, it was rhythmic, cyclical, infinitely repeatable.

The visitor left scars in the form of fawning priests and ambitious admirers. Periodically - the Mayas actually measured the exact duration of the period - the scars reopened and Quetzalc˘atl reemerged from the sea.

The subsequent man-gods were undoubtedly local priests and admirers who clothed themselves in the foreigner's fame, but they continued to insist on their foreign origin. The giftgiving resumed. Vast ceremonial centers sprang up in the jungle, stone cities with temples and palaces of incomparable beauty. And once again the beast was abandoned, the Leviathanic man was self-exiled. The stone cities reverted to jungle.

The ruins of abandoned architectural wonders will be found in our day by so-called Archeologists, who will be dazzled by the grandeur of what they find, and even more by the abandonment of places so ideally suited to being university campuses. The Arche- and Anthropologists will fill libraries explaining the abandonment in terms of every cause except human resistance. The prospect of their own academic centers reverting to what they call weeds will fog the Anthropologists' imaginations.

                            *   *   *

But across the great water, living communities were not destroyed. On the contrary, the few Leviathans that emerged here seem to have been swallowed by the communities. Leviathanic time was submerged in cyclical time. The coming and going of the beast became part of the rhythm of life. The Leviathanic excrescence, like other excrescences, remained no more than manure. Music did not give way to the March of Time. Life did not give way to His-story.

Why?

If we continue probing through seas of facts for meanings, this too can be answered. Arnold Toynbee once spoke of two types of stimuli. One stimulus overpowered and incapacitated, the other revived and strengthened the subject.

The communities of Guti who tried to resist the Sumerian Leviathan militarily were overpowered already before they set out to respond. The moment the Guti constituted themselves into a permanent military organization they ceased to be what they wanted to remain and became what they opposed. As communities they were incapacitat- ed before they took up arms against Leviathan. They gave themselves the illusion of resisting the beast even as they leapt into its entrails.

On the other side of the Ocean, the communities who hosted the first Quetzalc˘atl were not crippled by the initial stimulus, and they were able to respond in their own ways and on their own terms. They did not only curtail Leviathanic time, reducing it to rhythmic irruptions in the symphony of cyclic time. They also forced Levia- than's own agents, whether priests or administrators, to confine themselves to the enactment of community rituals, to perform fertility ceremonies, to give unsparingly to rain deities and corn deities, to celebrate the cycle of vegetation, to enhance Earth and Life.

The communities who thus reduced Leviathan to their plaything did not always emerge unscathed. Leviathan was a lethal toy. Here as there it grew fat by eating human victims. But whenever it started to get obese, its period ended and the villagers let the jungle's plants grow over it.

Communities as distant from Quetzalc˘atl's landingplace as the Potawatomi became familiar enough with Leviathan to want to expel him from their midst.

And the myriad communities between the northern woodlands and the southern jungles, each as different from another as elk from quetzals, played with the monster or avoided all contact with it as suited their sensibilities.

My brief account is deliberately idyllic. The idyl is what the Europeans came to destroy. The so-called dirty realities, the cynical compromises, the vicious betrayals were nothing new to Europeans, who allied themselves with these against the other, against the pure, the beautiful, the new.

                            *   *   *

Every meaning has been inverted.

"Central Africa," "Australia," "America" are not the names of places where free human beings ever lived. They are names of unprecedented holocausts, of gigantic colonies, of monstrous Leviathanic trophies. They are Leviathan's "empty continents."

From the vantage point of Death, all Life is an aberration. The languages of the two protagonists are mutually unintelligible. The very vocabularies are untranslatable. Leviathan's world is a Wilderness to free living beings. The freedom of living beings is a Wilderness to Leviathan.

Free human beings were able to encompass Leviathan in their horizon and still remain free.

The Leviathanized cannot encompass free beings in their horizon and still remain Leviathanized. Once they grasp freedom they become Renegades. And the stiff-necked spokesmen of Leviathan know it. The questions: Who would abandon the amenities of Civilization? and Who would go back to the digging stick? are rhetorical questions practiced in front of a looking glass.

The Renegades from Civilization are notorious. They shed masks. They shed whole armors. They separate from previously indispensable amenities and experience a shedding of an insupportable burden. Mere contact with a community of free human beings gives them insights no Leviathanic education can provide. Nurturing contact stimulates dreams and ultimately even visions. The Renegade is possessed, transformed, humanized. Psyche-manipulators aware of Civilization's discontents will try to induce such transformations within Leviathan's entrails, but their most vaunted successes will be miserable failures. Civilization does not nurture humanity.

Communities were able to possess the Leviathanized.

But Leviathan cannot possess communities, it cannot possess living subjects. Leviathan can only possess things, dead things, objects.

Communities could remove masks and armors. Leviathan removes the scalp, the skin and the flesh.

Communities could help the repressed recover their humanity. Leviathan dis-covers unrepressed humanity and consumes it. Dis-covery, the removal of Earth's cover, the liquidation of free beings, is in fact Leviathan's central project, and communities that nurture free beings are its greatest enemy.

                            *   *   *

This Col˘n, thought by some to be a Converso, namely a Christian more Catholic than the Pope, thinks himself a second Moses leading Israelites out of Egypt. As heavily armored as the first, the second Moses carries the wilderness encased in his armor, and wherever he leads his Israelites is wilderness. Were he to lower his mask, loosen his armor, be it only for an instant, he might see communities of human beings with relationships, emotions and insights far more complex than his own. But he cannot loosen the armor.

If communities nurture the freedom of their members, Leviathans nurture the repression of theirs. The Leviathanized police each other. Only the isolated can get away. Crew and captain stick together, slave sticks to master. Each forces the other to deny his own vision, to see what he expects the other to see. Thus after accomplishing the feat of traversing the impassable chasm, after crossing the unsailable Ocean, these blinded men find in the New World what is most familiar to them in the Old.

Analytical-minded precursors of Natural Scientists, Economists and Anthropologists, Christ-bearer and his accomplices find things, objects, which they automatically categorize as obstacles or as potential instruments.

Heirs of the savagery of Albigensian Crusades, Taborite Crusades, Inquisitions and Witch-hunts, they see communities of Arawaks but name them Savages.

Carriers and agents of Leviathan, synonym for Maneater, they see communities of Caribs but name them Cannibals, Maneaters.

The names are not only projections. They are also definitions. Once defined, the obiects can be manipulated. Savages are potential instruments; they can be put to work. Cannibals are obstacles; they have to be liquidated.

Thus the Blessed Isles are converted into a Leviathanic wilderness or, in the other language, the Wilderness is converted into a part of Christian Civilization.

One participant in this atrocity with few if any precedents, Bartolom‚ de Las Casas, thought by some to be another Converso, sickens during the implementation of this grizzly enterprise, shedding mask as well as armor. This supposed heir of the persecut- ed suddenly identifies with the persecuted, thus performing a feat as rare in his own as in any other age. Unable, with the Inquisi- tion at his back, to express his view of the hounding of Spain's Jews, Las Casas rails loudly and clearly against the hounding and extermination of Arawaks. The more he sees of his fellow-Chris- tians' deeds, the more victims of Christianity he embraces, until his lone voice pleads for the defense of humanity from the claws of the Leviathanic beast. What is this Conversion to Christianity if not enslavement and bestialization? he asks. What are these Christians who turn an Eden into an infernal labor camp - are they gods or demons? What is the god that calls for such bloodletting, such monstrous sacrifices? Let the victims resist, he shouts, if need be by sacrificing the sacrificers. If maneating be wrong in the eyes of some superior being, let that being condemn the greater wrongdoer.

But Las Casas no longer has faith in a superior being. He addresses his pleas to the King of Spain, to the monster's very head.

And the beastly head gives the protestor a hearing because it, too, is disturbed by the Dis-coverer's feats, but for different reasons. Leviathan is able to slaughter the New World's inhabitants, but it cannot make them work, it cannot enlarge itself by encasing them in its entrails. Soon after they are herded into the forced labor camps called Encomiendas, they perish, whole populations of them.

The King does not cry for the loss of the human beings but for the loss of what will later be called Capital and Technology.

Capital and Technology are not mere objects but relations of people to objects, not levers and drills but former human beings reduced to appendages of levers and drills. Without the human operators, the levers and drills are inert; they revert to Wilderness. And the point of the entire Leviathanic enterprise is to extirpate the Wilderness, to reduce lush tropical islands to the uniformity of plantations, to burrow through beautiful and precious places for stones, or in the beast's own language, to make the desert bloom, to turn the savage and the wild into profitable gardens.

The legendary Midas cried because everything he touched turned to gold, even his food. The King of Spain cries for the same reason. Every living being he touches shrivels up and dies, not only the obstacles but the potential instruments as well. After all his borrowing from Genoese bankers, driving his realm into fiscal ruin, he wins only half an empire. The fields strewn with corpses no longer contain obstacles, but neither do they contain instruments.

The King's ships have not only carried Conquistadores over the Ocean; they have also carried rats, viruses and bacilli. The Dis-coverers are not only carriers of Leviathan but also carriers of the Plague.

Disease, in fact, is the invader's main weapon, but it is double-edged. It gives easy victory but it mangles the fruit of the victory. That's why the King listens to Las Casas, pretends to become humane, revises the Encomienda laws. But it is all to no avail. The Blessed Isles become ever more depopulated, the labor camps remain inert, the gardens yield no profits, the empire of potential zeks is lost. To make up for the loss, the grizzly conquerors break up communities on an altogether different continent and import human beings immune to the Europeans' diseases to people the labor camps with zeks and to bury the New World's dead.

The New World is progressively emptied of its living beings. The double continent across the Ocean is on its way toward becoming the Europeans' long-sought America.

Unlike the objects that turned to gold when Midas touched them, America is an object that glistens like gold but vanishes when Europeans touch it. The Spaniards who outdo each other in greedy grabbing cannot even hold on to the metallic gold which, melted down into ingots, finds its way into underground vaults of foreign lenders.

And the real gold, the one Hesiod named an age after - the sacred places, the myths, the cultures - vanishes from the very Biosphere, irretrievably.

At this point I can pose a rhetorical question of my own. If the implements that supersede the digging stick, if the notorious ame- nities of Civilization are so attractive, so irresistible, why do the prospective beneficiaries of all those wonders have to be decimated?

Despite beautification campaigns that outdo the very Church in sustained prevarication, the story of the Rise of Civilization in America will remain ugly beyond description. No amount of talk about Empty Continents that were filled with teeming life will be able to erase the memory of the teeming life that was turned into empty continents.

There will be talk of horses, of gunpowder and of rum. There will be talk of a superior technology and of a superior culture. There will be talk of everything but Death. Yet Death is the Conquista- dor, whether mounted on the horses or streaming from the guns. Death is the unspoken name of the superior technology. Death is the only superior culture of the community-less invader. And Death is no culture at all; it is the anti-culture, the eater of culture, Leviathan.

The cultured villagers gawk at the horses, but not for long. Horses they can understand. Horses are living beings, friends, cousins. Free human beings soon outdo the armored Europeans in horsemanship, they are soon equals of the mounted Turks of Eurasia's steppes.

The gunpowder and the rum are stranger than the horses. The one serves only to kill, the other to stupefy. But even these are not strange for long to people already familiar with poisoned arrows and poisonous herbs.

What is strange beyond comprehension is the bearded entity inside the armor, an entity that looks and behaves like a human being but is clearly something else, for it takes without giving, is kin to none, exists in no community. What is strange and remains strange is the manlike limb of a dead thing, the spring and wheel of Leviathan.

The invaded are already familiar with Leviathan, but not so familiar as to have been evacuated by it. They've kept their communities intact, relegated Leviathan to the fringes, or expelled the beast from their communities' very fringes.

The communities resist every incursion, every enslavement, every rape. The story of the invasion is also the story of that intermi- nable resistance. It is interminable because it has no term, because it is not a cycle, because it is not part of the rhythm of life.

The resistance is not primarily a clash of arms, even if the spectacular battles of proto-Leviathanic Aztecs give the impression that the resistance is in the spears. The resistance is in the drums, not in the spears; it is in the music, in the rhythms lived by communities whose myths and ways continue to nurture and sustain them.

Nor is the invasion primarily a military venture, even if the successors to knightly Crusaders look like nothing but lethallimbed armors. The invasion is a silencing of music, a flattening of rhythm; it is a linearization of time, a destruction of the myths and ways that will later be called Culture, a war against communi- ties that nurture freedom, vision and life.

The invaders are not ignorant of what they destroy. They are not only successors to Crusaders against Unbelievers but also to wandering Beghards and liberated Adamites. They are distant successors to communities that once resisted with music and myth. Themselves grandchildren of victims, they've been turned, like many before them, into passionate victimizers. They destroy with passion precisely because they know what they destroy. Themselves re- pressed, or in their own language Fallen, deprived of Eden, confined to a life of Sin, they are impassioned to repress the free, to universalize the Fall, to destroy Eden as irreversibly as Romans destroyed Carthage, to make Sin catholic or all-embracing.

                            *   *   *

So-called Economists will later claim that the irresistible attractiveness of Civilization's material amenities is the force that destroys the ancient communities. The wise men will economize on words by calling this force Demand. They will also economize on the truth. European clothes are worn by people who have lost their own; no free human beings are attracted to shackles.

His-storians will of course focus on military might as the force that destroys the communities, and they will paint pictures of youthful Alexander-like heroes storming the walls of cannibalistic monsters. But His-storians will shy away from any mention of communities, and they will become knownothings or experts of other fields rather than admit that their heroes perpetrate unprecedented chemical and biological warfare against untold living beings.

The celebrated European armies finish off victims who are already dying. The so-called amenities give an empty compensation to immiserated survivors. The force that destroys the communities is an initially unsuspected but later welcome ally, the Plague.

Ever since Europeans physically adapted themselves to viruses, bacilli and bubonic rats, they have been carriers of lethal epidemics. A book titled Plagues and Peoples will vividly describe what Conquistadorial feats Smallpox and Bubonic Plague can achieve against communities not previously exposed to them. The book's author, William McNeill, will expose the great public secret behind the celebrated Conquests.

Hern n Cort‚z and his band of gold-sick marauders could not have exterminated the Aztecs, could not have destroyed their military machine, without an ally far more potent than Tlascala and other disaffected Aztec tributaries. Could not and did not. One of the Spanish marauders, Bernal Dˇaz by name, will leave an account of the famous Conquest of Mexico. He will nonchalantly mention that the Smallpox broke out in Tenochtitlan on the eve of the conquest, and he will mention the mounds of corpses and the crowds of afflicted, but he will concentrate on the Alexandrian features of his band-leader, for such concentration makes Diaz himself no worse than an ancient Greek.

The inhuman nonchalance with which Diaz mentions the Smallpox will be called Scientific Detachment by later Hisstorians. The much later McNeill, our contemporary, will broadcast news when he reveals that among human beings previously unaffected by Smallpox, three or four out of forty survive the disease. The `small' in this plague's name refers to the size of the skin irruptions, not to the power of the disease.

Armed with such a weapon, the mass murderers who depict themselves as Conquistadores and Pioneers have no forerunners. The feat is unprecedented. All of humanity's moral codes melt in the face of these deeds. Nothing comparable was achieved by Assyrians, Chinese, Greeks, Romans or Mongols. Shang Yang did not even dream of including the Plague among the weapons with which to liquidate human communities.

A moral vacuum as unprecedented as the Conquista itself will enable later apologists to blandly overlook the lever that emptied the continent and launched the reign of laws of supply and demand.

The bland overlooking of the European's great ally will begin already at the time of the second Conquista, the famous Pizarro's. This madman's cronies will concentrate so singlemindedly on the gold, they will not even mention the Midas whose touch empties Andean highlands and shorelands and turns them into lifeless gold.

After several generations, descendants of survivors will be as immune to the plagues as the Europeans themselves; only their children will be afflicted. They will then be able to repopulate their world. But by then it will be too late. By then the laws of supply and demand will have replaced the rhythms of the communi- ties. By then the marauders will have appropriated the lodges as well as the fields; they will have burrowed into the sacred places, slaughtered the forests' inhabitants and downed the trees. By then the myths and the music will be forgotten. By then Leviathan will have supplanted the spirits, razed the fields and launched His-story.

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

Aguirre also knows, as Shang Yang, Nero and Caligula already knew, that he who kills without limit or scruple, who holds kinless men with bonds of fear, who stimulates greed in potential instruments and terror in threatening obstacles, is beyond good and evil, above humanity. Aguirre concludes that such a god cannot be the underling of Scottish Mary's Spanish husband, the distant emperor Philip Habsburg.

Aguirre declares war on the Emperor. This marauder's defiant letter to Spain's second Philip is the first American Declaration of Independence. It declares that the armored plague-carrier Aguirre, not the Emperor, initiated the killings, and therefore Aguirre, not the Emperor, will finish off the survivors and dispose of the remains. Viva la libertad! Viva Aguirre!

But the defiant declaration is too explicit even for Aguirre's confederates, good Christians all, and will be relegated to His-story's unlit dungeon instead of its showcase. Aguirre fails to become "the Great" because he neglects to express the terror, the fear and the greed with terms like Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Aguirre's spiritual heirs, greater masters of language than their unpracticed forerunner, will realize Aguirre's project, not on the southern continent but on the northern, in lands once inhabited by people who had not launched any proto-Leviathanic ventures, people who had exiled the Lethal Trickster from their midst.

Communities of Potawatomi and communities of their cousins will be touched by English-speaking Aguirres who are not subjects of Philip but of his Scottish queen, Aguirres who will first of all declare themselves independent of Queen and Pope so as to appropriate the lands and wealth of the Church and the Irish.

English marauders rally behind anti-Catholic Elizabeth in order to take full advantage of the achievements of Spain's Conquistadores, for their Protestantism is initially nothing but a license to loot Spanish ships returning home with the New World's gold. The first English outposts in the New World are pirates' dens which hug the coasts.

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

                            *   *   *

The Potawatomi as well as their near and distant cousins are nevertheless aware of the existence of the English on the world's eastern shores, just as the ancestors of Franks were aware of the existence of armored Romans in Gaul. Long before seeing any of them, the Potawatomi are aware not only of the English but also of the French on the river that carries the water of the Lakes to the Ocean, and also of the Spaniards west of the Long River, the Mississippi.

Hunters and messengers bring news from all three directions, news of great deaths, inconceivable deaths, deaths not only of individu- als but of entire communities. The deaths are brought by the bearded foreigners who emerged from the Ocean, even though most of the victims have had no more contact with the strangers than the Potawatomi themselves.

Long-distance killing is no mystery to the Potawatomi, who immediately recognize the feat as Wiske's, the Trickster's. The Potawatomi do not know that the plague-infected rats who disembark from the invader's ships do not confine themselves to the invader's settlements, nor do they know that other rodents as well as elk and deer carry the invader's infections. They do know that Wiske once raped several village women from a spot on the opposite side of a pond by sending his member into the pond and across it along its bottom. They are not surprised by what they hear, and they will not be surprised when they finally see the bearded men's fire-spitting rifles.

The Potawatomi know the news is important because they recognize it. Long-eared, long-membered Wiske is back again, more mischievous than ever, and far less generous to human beings than he was said to be. And of course they know what to do about the long-membered one: expel him from their communities, exile him to lands where life is nasty, brutish and short, push him away from the lush and teeming woodlands and lakes.

Kin from several villages gather at a place that will continue to be known as The Strait. They prepare a vast expulsion ceremony to purge themselves of the Leviathanic monster as they've done since the first days.

But halfway through the ceremony, the beats of the drum become arhythmic and singing voices drown in cries of pain. The Potawatomi of The Strait are attacked by the long-distance killer. Smallpox or Bubonic Plague reach the Great Lakes long before the carriers do.

The villages of the Potawatomi become burial grounds. Survivors flee toward the bay of the Winnebagos, far to the north. When French Jesuits first reach The Strait a generation later, they will find earthen mounds, forest openings for corn fields, as well as painted rocks, but no human beings.

The survivors are few in number. Preserved memories of the events will speak of one out of twenty. McNeill will confirm that such would be the death toll of a first outbreak of Smallpox. Subsequent attacks of Smallpox - and they recur every few years - take a smaller toll, but they alternate with outbreaks of Bubonic Plague and with other maladies long known in Eurasia as children's diseases.

Apologists who will speak of the European Plague-carriers as `We' will of course deny the event. They will demand Positive Evidence. They will pretend to want to see and count the corpses. But they will actually not want to even hear that Potawatomi communities ever existed on The Strait. Writers of edifying textbooks for children, they will portray killers who emptied lush and teeming woodlands as builders who made deserts bloom. They will say `We' transformed lands where no one and nothing ever lived into thriving industrial parks, `We' turned empty lots into Disneylands.

The survivors are not able to challenge the apologists' tall tales. The recurrent outbreaks of plague do more than kill numerous members of the communities. The plagues destroy the communities.

Of four hundred, twenty survive. Of forty, two survive. Two may remember the names of the vanished Totem, but they cannot regener- ate the music. If one of the survivors is a storyteller, the other is not a youth to whom the teller can transmit his tales, and the tales die untold. If one is an herbal healer, the other is not necessarily inclined to absorb the herbal lore. One may remember the songs or the preparations for some of the great enactments, but two or even four or six are not enough to dance the dances or to feast or celebrate.

Some go off on their own, embittered because they sense that something, perhaps even their own guiding spirit, has betrayed them.

Others flee toward the sunset, toward the endless Plains beyond the Mississippi, even toward the great mountains.

Many join villages of equally displaced and disoriented survivors, gatherings of fragments of communities.

The united fragments do not constitute a whole. The gatherings are refugee camps, melting pots, not communities. The beat of the drum is arhythmic. The music is discordant. Continuities preserved since the Beginning are broken off, and the few remembered myths no longer speak of any shared beginning because the gathered fragments are not a Totem and share no common Beginning.

The myths of displaced persons are mere stories and the great enactments are mere ceremonies. Ways of living become ways to spend time. Time that can be spent without being lived is Plague time, Leviathanic time, His-storic time. The His-story of the Potawatomi and of all their cousins and neighbors begins with the plague, and this story is its story.

The countless ages that preceded the Plague are henceforth inaccessible to memory. The communities who remembered their entire trajectory since the Beginning are irretrievably gone. Their time is henceforth Dream time, unreal time, imaginary time.

Even the words we will use to describe what was lost, words like music, myth, ceremony and community, will be as empty as the continent becomes, because they will refer to no lived experiences accessible to any human being trapped in His-story. What is lost is of much greater human import than the things Economists will include on their ledgers.

The gatherings of survivors might recover some of the meanings, they might harmonize some of the music, they might reconstitute some of the vanished communities. But this could take generations, perhaps even countless generations. One of the few things we will know about Cultures will be that they were very old. And the survivors are henceforth not alone. Before they've even recovered from the Plague itself, they are already beset by invaders rushing to finish off what the Plague began.

The invaders do not break off their alliance with the Plague. On the contrary, bubonic rats continue to accompany the invaders in canoes as well as pirogues. The invaders go on dispensing the Smallpox as freely as they dispense the poisonous alcohol that dements its takers, as freely as they dispense the guns that turn disoriented Plague-victims into trigger-quick killers.

The potency of the epidemic diseases gradually diminishes, and the invaders resort to other weapons from their Leviathanic armory to finish off their victims, to liquidate the obstacles and civilize the potential instruments, to transform America into a labor camp.

Henceforth, namely after the initial landing of the invaders and their rats and bacilli, the invaders confront only Plague- survivors, fragments of communities, displaced persons.

Yet the fragments go on resisting, the Plague-survivors go on ejecting Leviathan from their midst, the displaced persons refuse to patch their wounds by covering themselves with the masks and armors of the Civilized.

The resistance persists from generation to generation, in the face of plagues, poisons and explosives. The story of that resistance has been repeatedly and powerfully told. It is a story that does not show Leviathan to be as natural to human beings as hives are to bees. It is a story that shows Leviathan to be an aberration which cannot be imposed, by wile or by force, on human beings who retain the slightest link with community, even a link as tenuous as the remembrance of a Dream Time.

Against His-story, Against Leviathan is available from the publisher, Black & Red (POB 02374, Detroit, MI. 48202), as well as from anarchist distributors like Left Bank Distribution (4142 Brooklyn NE, Seattle, WA. 98105) and A Distribution (339 Lafayette St. #202, New York, NY. 10012).

reprinted from Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #33, Summer 92 pp.34-44