Fredy Perlman Archive
Written: 1983.
Source: Originally published by Red and Black.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: Scanned by NobleSavage; HTML and Code by RevoltLib.com (2021); Proofreading by TheAnarchistLibrary.org
The Taborite communities that commit slow suicide are contemporaries of communities of Guanches murdered by mercantile Catholics. The Guanches are the last free inhabitants of Atlantic Ocean islands called Canaries, the first non-Europeans exterminated by seekers of Fortunate Isles.
The Guanche communities were previously visited by Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans and Muslims, yet they survived until a Norman adventurer called Bethencourt settled among them at the time when Rector Jan Hus refused to sell indulgences. By the last Hussite extinguish the unintended consequences of the Rector’s refusal, the Guanches are on their way to extinction. The hospitable Guanches, like the radical Taborites, are not allowed to live in Eden.
A millennium of Christianity has taught Europeans that fallen human beings live in Sin. The dictum is not passively accepted by Christian Europeans. It is actively implemented. Those who do not live in Sin shall not live at all.
If the Sinful European cannot reach Eden, he can at least enforce the Fall. By taking up this task the European is saved. He becomes the scourge of God. The innocent are the damned. Henceforth opportunism and greed are the inner signs of salvation, and Fortunate Isles are the fields in which the Scourge of God can expropriate and exterminate the Sinless at will.
The Canaries are not far from the continent’s shores, but they are already part of the New World in the West, they are already America.
* * *
While the last Taborites and Guanches are exterminated, Europeans experience their Renaissance, their Rebirth, their metamorphosis, into something other than Christians, other than Europeans, and other than human beings.
The wandering artists and scholars who initiate the Italian Quatrocentro are as mobile as Beguines and Beghards, but they are not seeking self-realization in a human community. They are seeking self-annihilation in the service of a ruler, any ruler. The self-dehumanization of the scribe becomes the ideal of a social movement in Western Europe.
The artists and scholars are not altogether innovative. Self-instrumentalization for the sake of economic gain is already normal practice of Burghers, and enforced instrumentalization for the sake of another’s gain has always been the lot of zeks. The peculiarity of renascent artists and scholars is that they instrumentalize themselves for anther’s gain, like zeks, and they shape themselves to degrees of instrumental perfection unmatched by any previous living beings. These human tools, individuals like Bramante, Machiavelli and the renowned Da Vinci, are the forerunners of the Genius as well as the Expert.
Even though their peculiarities are not altogether new, these animate instruments have no real predecessors.
There were artisans or craftsmen already in ancient Sumer and Egypt, but these people emerged from their apprenticeships as tool users, not acrobats of one or several crafts, and the ancient artisans served the Temple and its gods, not naked power. The difference is not as great as the terms suggest, but it is not insignificant. In practice, artisans built the ruler’s palaces and war engines. But the veil that hid their practice, the Temple and the gods, were vestiges of a lost human community, and these vestiges still exerted a certain moral force, making the pious artisan, in practice, a very limited instrument. The men of the Renaissance are not artisans. They are Artists. They are perfectly amoral, retain no vestige of human community, and there are no limits to the uses to which they can be put.
Perhaps the scribes of Pharaoh or Lugal honed themselves to a similar degree of perfection and served a usurping Pharaoh or Lugal as devotedly as they had served a predecessor. But the scribes were instruments for record-keeping and for little else, whereas the great men of the Quatrocento are equally adept in every domain a ruler may wish to enter.
Greece, Rome and China had their scribes, painters, builders and tinkerers, but most of these were artisans, not Artists. Men like Shang Yang, Plato, Aristotle and Archimedes, in their readiness to sell the secrets they uncovered to a ruler, already announced the Artists of the Quatrocento, but only Shang Yang, an early Machiavelli, and Archimedes, with his ethic of “It Works!” qualify as real forerunners. Plato and Aristotle still valued detachment more than employment, and this attitude made them blunt instruments to the rulers to whom they offered themselves.
Frankish vassals could often be made to do acrobatic feats for their liege lords, but fealty, a remnant of an ancient community, made a vassal loyal to a given lord, not to power as such. And as instruments, the hot-headed mail-armored vassals tended to be clods and bunglers compared to a Da Vinci.
Even the Church, during its millenium of dominion, contained few real forerunners of the great men of the Quatrocento. Some of the saints performed unmatched feats of self-repression, others were acrobats of self-torture who evacuated themselveds in front of Optimus Maximus as unabashedly as the genii would evacuate themselves in front of a Patron. But the saintly acrobats tended to perform their feats against themselves, whereas the Renaissance acrobats turn on the world.
So-called Alchemists, contemporaries but no necessarily friends of the saints, turned on the world already during the Catholic millennium. But people like the exceptionally famous Doctor Faustus tended to be shadowy characters. Unlike their famous successors, the Alchemists, as ready to sell their secrets as Archimedes, could find no patron except the devil.
It is precisely among the shadowy characters that the forerunners of the celebrated men of the Renaissance are to be found. Even ancient communities had their occasional Shamans who applied their secrets to killing instead of healing their own kin. In the early Leviathans, successors to such people unveiled nature’s secrets to concoct killing machines, instruments of torture and poisons. But in the Temple-States, such torturers and executioners performed rites of purification before returning to human society, and during the Catholic millennium they wore hoods.
The Church launches a murderous persecution of women healers, and calls such women Witches, precisely at the moment when practitioners of what used to be called Witch-craft remove their hoods and publicly advertise their lethal powers. The Church is itself a genius, a past master at such monstrously ironic deflections.
But the Church is not such a genius at seeing where its interests lie. It always seems to be several generations behind the times. The Church is blinded by the mad rush of its own prominent men into the treasure chests. Many of the newly prominent Alchemists and unhooded torturers are themselves Churchmen, and one of them even becomes Pope.
* * *
The new men, who will be known as Scientists, Engineers, Doctors and Professors, and will eventually be known simply as Experts or Executives, have no more use for the Church than Adamite radicals had. The formerly hooded men owe their sudden prominence, not to the Church or even to its deflection of their evil onto the perennial Eve, but to the amoral daily practice of Europe’s Burghers.
We’ve already seen that commerce or trade, what the Burghers will call Business, is the practice of treating fellow human beings as enemies. European Burghers learned Business from Islam, directly or indirectly, and by the Quatrocento they’ve absorbed Viking practitioners of the craft, expelled Jewish competitors, and are in the process of expropriating their Muslim masters.
We’ve also seen that European Burghers acquired the practice but not the code of their Islamic masters. Muslim merchants perpetrated their craft within limits imposed by a prophet who was himself a merchant, and within limits imposed by the notion of a merciful god. In practice the limits were flexible, but they were nevertheless there, like the ethical precepts that guided and limited ancient artisans.
The Europeans acquire the trade but not the Quran or the merciful Allah, and the consequences of this partial conversion to Islam will be felt by the entire Biosphere. The Gospels of the Europeans, authored by people who hated merchants, reject trade in its totality and consequently contain no specific guidelines for traders. And the European deity, Optimus Maximus, the god of armored legions, is no more merciful than the most rapacious merchant, and is as readily a god of maximal profits as a god of victorious legions.
Consequently the code of the European merchant is quite different from the code of his Islamic counterpart. The European merchant is guided by no ethical precepts whatever. There is no limit, either human or natural, to what a European will do for profit.
Rapacious and totally unrestrained plunderers and despoilers undoubtedly existed among Muslim merchants as well. But in Islam such men had to do their dirty work under cover, they had to remain shadowy, they had to wear hoods. In Europe such men can do their dirty work where everyone can see them, and they wear no hoods. Unequaled plunderers like the Welsers, the Fuggers and the Medicis become ostentatious heroes, the most prominent Europeans of the day.
It is the European Burgher’s code that enables and even encourages ingenious torturers, poiseners and executioners to emerge from under their hoods. This code is simple, but it will not be put into words until a successor of Hobbes, an Adam Smith who will be neither an Adam nor a Smith, articulates it as: Do unto others whatever brings you profit.
This so-called Adam will be silent about the corollary of this dictum, and his successors will remain silent until our near-contemporary Nietszche expresses the collorary: Dehumanize yourself in order to be exalted. The corollary does not come to re-Levianthized Europe from Islam, but from the practice of saintly Christian self-tortures called Anchorites. These forerunners of unabashed power-servers outdid themselves in ostentatiously maiming and eradicating all their human qualities so as to be exalted by Optimus Maximus, and their deity rewarded them by inspiring good Christians to depict the humanly revolting feats of the sainted Anchorites on the walls and windows of every parish church.
Until the Renaissance, Europeans considered Usery a monstrosity. They associated the practice with alien ancient Etruscans and Carthaginians or with alien contemporary Jews and Muslims, and they called its practitioners bloodsuckers. Now European Usurers who call themselves bankers and investors replace saintly Anchorites in the paintings depicting the exalted.
For profit-seekers as for power-servers, nothing human and nothing natural is sacred. Human community is as unknown as the most distant star, and nature is a treasure-house of objects for plunder. Burghers reduce people as well as land to salable commodities, and Scientists will further reduce both to atoms manipulable by power-artists.
* * *
The scribes of this movement call their nature-hatred Rationalism and their misanthropy Humanism. Naming things the opposite of what they are is a talent inherited from the Church.
Until the Renaissance, a proposition or a deed was reasonable if it was in harmony with the human and natural context. Irrational, Unnatural and Inhuman were kindred terms if not actually synonyms. Yet now that human powers of reasoning are placed at the service of the most inhuman and unnatural as well as irrational propositions and deeds, the accomplishment is hailed as Rationalism.
The later so-called Enlightenment will sever reason from every human and natural context, and the full harvest of this triumph of the irrational masked as reason will be reaped when atoms of Hiroshima living beings as well as their environment are splintered by the next-to-last invention of this irrational “reason”.
Unprecedented misanthropy is clothed as Humanism by masters of inversion schooled by a millennium of Vicars of Christ.
The Humanism of Machiavelli and his great contemporaries is the “humanism” of Plato’s Chinese counterpart, Shang Yang, minister of the Duke of Chin. The reader may remember Shang Yang as the pioneering devotee of unadorned human communities from States, and who hone his vision into a sort of alchemy of power, a technology for the systematic destruction of human freedom, kinship and community.
Shang Yang merely put into words the practice of Gulags since the beginning of Ur-time, but the putting into words was no mean feat. The Gulags themselves had not dared to put their practice into words. Gulags had covered their practice with the Temple’s words. Gulags themselves had not covered their practice with the Temple’s words, and had even in their own eyes served the gods in the Temple, namely the remnants of the human community, and not sheer power.
Shang Yang’s vision was so brazen that it had few sequels, even in China, until Italian artists of power saw what their Chinese forerunner had seen. A few Generals of Roman Legions as well as Emperor Octavian’s successors Caligula and Nero had attempted to overcome the Temple language and repress the last lingering remnants of community, but the repressed returned to Rome in such a flood that Nero’s successor Constantine was forced to swim with the tide to keep from drowning. While Machiavelli and his great contemporaries are probably Shang Yang’s first full-blown successors, it is doubtful that Marco Polo informed them of the existence of their forerunners.
The inspiration of the Renaissance power-artists comes, not from an Italian translation of Shang Yang’s works, but from a study of the practice of Europe’s own successful Burghers. Usurers are the greatest Lords and princes of the realm. Greatness comes, not to those who serve the gods, but to those who serve the devil. The exalted are not principled devotees of the human community, the radical seekers of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, for they are burned by Inquisition. The exalted are the unprincipled devotees of the fourth beast of the Book of Daniel, the servants of Leviathan.
What makes Humanists of misanthropists is the illusion, slightly later spelled out by Hobbes, that the beast has a human head.
But these Humanists are a priesthood that sacrifices humanity as well as nature on the altar of a hideous idol whose human face is a sham as old as Ur. The Leviathan is a thing, and from its standpoint, humanity as well as nature are also things, objects, either obstacles or potential instruments. The beast travels through Time by eliminating the obstacles and appropriating the instruments. The great men of the Quatrocento are the beast’s scouts, they are the first avowed trail-blazers of Leviathan.
These acrobats of Leviathanic power not only outdo themselves in the unprecedented thoroughness of their scouting, they also run to outdo each other in a trail-blazing so conscientious that it foresees future obstacles and reaches out for future instruments. Every being, every place and every object that was once infused with layer upon layer of contextual, symbolic and literal meaning, is now scrutinized as potential obstacle or instrument.
Reason, the human power to comprehend meanings, becomes degraded into an instrument for dissolving meanings. The reasoner, instead of aiming to grasp the cosmic context of seemingly isolated phenomena, now aims to isolate phenomena from any context. Meaning is replaced by definition, reasoning by analysis, mythology by science.
The artists of isolation will call themselves Natural Scientists, but their Naturalism is as bogus as their humanism. Nature is no more the reason for analytic acrobatics than human community is.
The entire undertaking is a quest for obstacles and instruments. The obstacles sought are not obstacles that threaten human communities or natural environments, obstacles like Leviathan. The search is for obstacles in the way of Leviathan. The instruments sought are potential beaks and claws as well as potential springs and wheels for Leviathan.
The inhuman and unnatural fruits of the quest are placed on the threshold of the Prince’s palace, for him to use against humanity and nature. The designers of springs and wheels compete with each other for the favor of the Prince, and each wants a patron favorable to his most inhuman and unnatural designs.
The innovators and decorators no longer even pretend to make offerings to a Temple with its lifeless relics from a lost community and its dead gods. For the first time, the offerings are openly and even ostentatiously placed on the altar of Leviathan.
* * *
The Renaissance is something new, but it is not a rebirth. The Rebirth is as bogus as the Humanism, Rationalism and Naturalism.
Europe’s consummate word-jugglers depict themselves as reborn Athenians, something they are not and never were, so as to avoid seeing themselves as what they are, so as to avoid seeing themselves as stunted Muslims.
The Renaissance is not a birth but debut. It is Leviathan’s coming-out party. It is the beast’s first public appearance in its own clothes, namely with nothing on but its fangs and claws. The Renaissance is Leviathan’s naming ceremony. It is a feast celebrating Leviathan in its own name and for its own sake.
Henceforth Leviathan is Europe’s god, and Lugalzaggizi as well as Optimus Maximus fall into the artificial beast’s shadow. Marduk is demoted from boss to troubleshooter of the earthly King of Kings. Naked power is god. The purpose of decorations and ornaments is no longer to veil the beast’s claws and fangs but to render them more visible.
Ancient Greek painters and sculptors created facades which hid the power of the Polis and the wealth of wine and olive merchants behind their lost community’s dead gods.
The bogus reborn Greeks of the Renaissance dispense with all facades. Dead gods are still the subject of the ornaments, at least initial, but the ornaments are no longer hung on facades, they are hung directly on the claws and fangs, on the fortresses and palaces of the cloth and silver merchants. And very quickly, the ancient Temple’s shrines and gods cease to be even the subjects of the ornaments. The beast itself creeps across the canvas. At first the Leviathanic patron appears only in a corner, peeking at relics of a dead mythology with pretended reverence. Soon a proud patron constitutes the foreground, the mythological subjects a mere background which becomes ever darker until at last nothing is lit up but the mug of a ruler, a temporary occupant of the beast’s head.
Da Vinci, not satisfied with the incomparable beauty of the canvasses with which he decorates the palace walls of great profiteers and murderers, runs to his patrons with sketches of submarines, flying machines and killing instruments designed to raise mass destruction to a level of perfection achieved by his paintings.
The Renaissance artist’s self-abandoned to the beast is so total, the artistry is so consummate, that it seems to reach a limit of what is humanly possibly. Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael and the other greats have no real forerunners; they will also have no real heirs.
Those capable of such total devotion to Leviathan will not be able to master the artistry, and those capable of the artistry will not be able to annihilate their humanity so totally. The devotees of Leviathanic power will eventually degenerate into the artistic morons we will know as advertizers and propagandists, the self-styled “commercial artists,” while artists will become so incapable of Leviathan-worship that they will be regarded by Leviathan’s good people as degenerates and will be called “Bohemians.”
The wall separating power-servers from “Bohemians,” like the wall separating Science from Art, will start to rise already during Quatrocento. The very apprentices of the greats will no longer be able to achieve simultaneous mastery as Leviathan’s ornamenters, scouts and instrument-makers.
The apprentices who remain consummate ornaments will tend to keep to their studios, and already by Rembrandt’s time some of them will have become so repelled by the Patron’s world they will turn their backs on Leviathanic subjects, will bypass claws, springs and wheels, in a quest for human and natural objects.
The scouts and instrument-makers, so-called Savants, soon to become Bureaucrats and Scientists, will never turn against the hand that feeds them. These power-servers, although no longer painters and sculptors, will be the true heirs of the Renaissance. They will remain carriers of the specious Humanism, Rationalism, and Naturalism of the great men of the Renaissance. The power-servers will make it increasingly difficult for their former colleagues to find human or natural subjects, for they will systematically and with consummate artistry reduce all human and natural subjects to manipulable Leviathanic objects. They will be Leviathan’s claws and fangs.
Or rather, the so-called Humanists will become Leviathan’s claws and fangs after they replace the priestly bureaucrats who have been exercising these functions for over a millennium.
The priests are inept power-servers, not because of any personal failings, but because their institution works with a self-imposed handicap. The Church has been as devoted to Leviathan as any Renaissance artist, but the Church, as we’ve seen, cannot rid itself of disfigured relics of human freedom and community, relics that have repeatedly come to life and ruined its Leviathanic ventures.
The new bureaucrats call themselves Humanists precisely because they are not similarly encumbered by any relics of human freedom or community. They drink much from the Church’s millennium-deep well of experience, but they have no fear that their institution will cause weeds of Eden to crop up in stone palaces. Their institution is Leviathan, a beast that decomposes all seeds of Eden.
The new power-server is a tabula rasa on which only the pseudo-thoughts of Leviathan are written. He is a State-made, State-licensed and State-employed psudo-man, a phenomenon Hobbes perceptively recognizes as a spring or a wheel.
The State-servers naturally hasten to appropriate for themselves the Chruch’s scribe-training centers, the universities. These centers, already factories for the production and licensing of power-servers, now begin to mass-produce Renaissance men.
Every prince, banker and merchant can now purchase clerks who are not clerics, servants who are loyal to no one but the boss who hires them, exectuives and executioners who do not try to reconcile the boss’s will with the god’s will.
* * *
Rulers have dreamed of availability of secular bureaucrats ever since Moravians resisted Franks by constituting themselves into an incomplete nation-state. The nation-state can now be completed.
Hussite priests, contemporaries of the first Renaissance artists, already offered themselves as substitutes for Catholic clerics in a reconstituted Bohemian-Moravian nation-state. The Hussites, finding no ruler with a powerful enough army to defend the projected nation-state from Holy Rome’s army of Crusaders, unwillingly allied themselves with Taborites whose army was adequate to Hussite need but whose aims went far beyond it, and they lost the army when they turned against its aims.
Marin Luther will learn from the Hussite mistake. Luther will urge rulers to war on two fronts, simultaneously attacking the Church and anti-Church peasants and radicals who think the newly-constituted nation-state is a mere passage toward a reconstituted human community.
Rulers assured that they are the be-all and end-all of the Reformation rush into Lutheranism for the same reason their ancestors rushed into Christianity, namely for the booty. Every greedy Prince with a strong enough army expropriates the Church of all its earthly wealth and lands and replaces clerics with Renaissance men.
The Lutherans themselves, considered obscurantists by their Humanist collegues, are in fact also Renaissance men, not in terms of their artistry or their learning, but in terms of their blind devotion to Leviathan, and once established in ministerial offices, they are power-servers first, Lutherans last and only on Sundays. And the Doctrine of Sin so carefully salvaged and preserved by the Reformers is so serviceable to Reformed Leviathans as it was to the Church.
The Church as well as the peasants are the victims of the expropriators who call their property-grab a Reformation. The Church loses its material as well as its spiritual power in vast domains earlier converted to Catholicism over the dead bodies of countless sacrifical victims. The peasants and radicals lose their lives as well as a good part of their hopes.
Peasants bore little love for the Lords, and none whatever for commercializing Lords who enclosed woods and pastures while simultaneously squeezing ever-greater dues out of the peasants. But before the advent of Luther, peasants had shared one thing with their Lords, namely an undying hatred of the Catholic Church and its tithe-gatherers. If only the Lords would turn their weapons against the Churchmen, the old community would be restored, since the Lords would not maintain the hierarchy without the Catholic hierarchs at their backs and in their offices.
Luther burns down the single communality between Lords and peasants, a commonality that had tied conservative Hussites to radical Taborites, and invites the Lords to accomplish the feat of retaining the Roman hierarchy while exproprietating Rome. Both can be accomplished by the slashing , burning and hanging of peasants.
Protestant hierarchs replace the Catholics at the Prince’s back, and the readily available bureaucrats-for-hire replace the clerics in the offices.
Anabaptists and other radical successors to the Taborites are hunted and exterminated by Protestant national armies which kill more viciously and effiently than the last Holy Roman Cursaders.
European geography starts to become the congeries of seemingly-independent repressive nation-states invisibly but indissolubly interlocked by the tentacles of bankers and merchants.
The Church is no longer needed as universal trainer of bureaucrats since each State begins to operate its own factories for the production and licensing of power-servers.
* * *
The State-licensed Renaissance men, already similar to merchants in their enmity toward nature and community, become even more similar in their desire for monopoly. The Reborn and Reformed scribes do not only rush to replace clerics in all posts of power. They also rush to establish themselves as the sole vendors of every conceivalbe service Leviathan might require.
In this rush, the bureaucrats complete the rape of the human populations encased in the Leviathanic segments. Lords have already appropriated all pastures and forests, merchants have appropriated every object that can be moved from its source to a market. State-licensed experts now proceed to appropriate the very talents of the unlicensed population and to render Leviathan’s “subjects” totally denuded and dependent objects.
Healers, navigators, builders, story-tellers and even visionaries are displaced and then silenced by State-licensed Masters and Doctors of Medicine, Astronomy, Architecture, Philosophy, MetaPhysics. Everything human beings did by themselves and for themselves is taken over by State-licensed monopoly.
The Church, always strong in prevarication but never in foresight, plays right into the hands of the expropriators by choosing this moment to unleash an Inquisition against women who are healers. The Church cannot openly lash out against the Humanists replacing its clerics in all centers of power, since prominent Churchmen were the first Humanists. The Church seeks scapegoats.
Witch-burner Torquemada’s fires are lit, not for Humanists, but for converted Muslims and Jews, and for healers. Neither merchants nor commercializing nobles protest the burning of their competitors, nor do doctors of Medicine protest the burning of healers.
The Doctors will later wield a machinery less spectacular than the Inquisitor’s fire to eliminate the unlicensed, but this silencing machinery is as yet no more than a distant project. And the Doctors need to remove the popular healers as urgently as merchants need to remove commercially-experienced former Muslims and Jews. The so-called witches, heiresses to the informally transmitted knowledge of herbs and illnesses, are known to be healers, whereas the Doctors, notoriously ignorant of all this lore, are intent on establishing a State-licensed monopoly over illness so as to police the sick. The Doctors will eventually appropriate some of the herbal knowledge of the exterminated witches, but the healing will always be incidental to the policing. They will persecute illnesses even if they have to turn human beings to vegetables or cut them to shreds.
Medicine is only one of the human domains over which the State-licensed Masters and Doctors establish their monopoly. In every domain, human talents and powers are transformed into powers wielded by a police. Everything people did for themselves comes to be done against them by Leviathan’s licensed agents. Human beings as well as the Biosphere fall under continual police surveillance.
Powers wielded by living beings to enhance their lives are appropriated by a dead thing, the almighty edifice, Leviathan. And Leviathan does not use its policing to enhance life but only to further enhance its policing powers, to fatten the artifice, to enlarge the realm of the dead.
Leviathan’s licensed agents even move to expropriate radical visionaries of their memory of human freedom, kinship and community. State-licensed visionaries, Masters and Doctors of Letters, Philosophy and Metaphysics, send their tentacles probing among the last traces of memory’s remembered humanity. The lettered Doctors appropriate the witches’ healing arts. The licensed scribes display the “Golden Age” in official tracts and poems. They appropriate the Age in which there were neither Doctors nor Patients, neither Lawyers nor Criminals, neither Lords nor Serfs. They display their conquest the same way a hunter displays the antlers of a murdered deer, as trophies.
The Golden Age becomes the private property of Men of Letters, and like the private domain of a Lord, its owner has dominion over its fish and over its fowl and over every living thing that moveth in it. The Golden Age becomes a piece of real estate, a literary commodity, a dead thing. The State-licensed Men of Letters who corner this commodity establish their monopoly over it the same way merchants and Medical Doctors establish their monopolies: by eliminating competitors.
When the monopolies of the Golden Age come face-to-face with communities of free human beings who have never left their Golden Age, the Savants are on the side of the merchants condemning Unbelievers and the Doctors condemning healers to death by fire. Like the preachers of Sin who turn on the sinless with instruments of torture, the licensed Savants turn on free communities with Leviathanic claws and fangs. The first Anthropologists, like the later ones, are not anti-Leviathanic radicals. They are Leviathan’s agents, its eyes and ears. Their aim is not to live in human communities but to live off them. They are headhunters. Their Calling, their specific Profession, is to shrink human communities to trophies which hang alongside deer antlers in Leviathan’s gameroom, its Museum of Natural Science.
Europe’s Civilized headhunters, witch-burners and world-eaters are already face-to-face with vast new fields in which to exercise their Leviathanic powers because, while merchants and bureaucrats were consolidating their initial monopolies, Spanish seamen “discovered” Europe’s long-sought America.
This discovery is obviously not a human discovery, since human inhabitants of the world across the Ocean have always known of their world. Nor is the discovery a European discovery, since Viking adventurers as well as Basque fishermen already knew of the land across the water.
The discovery is a Leviathanic Dis-covery. The European Leviathan, recently fortified by Scientists, Bankers and Doctors, is the entity that dis-covers a new world. The notorious Columbus and his murderous successors do not cross the water as free human beings but as Leviathan’s claws and fangs, as armored beastly tentacles.
By another one of those ironies that makes Europe freakish even among Leviathans, the beast is initially sent across the great water by those Leviathanic entities that are vanishing from Europe, not by those that are emerging. The first Pioneers are Inquisitorial Catholics of the last Holy Roman Empire; the initiation of the dis-covery is their last act.
* * *