003. The Grammar of Power I: What Babylon Knew

There is a recurring embarrassment in the literature of political theory. Its foundational texts — Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls — present themselves as analyses of power: what it is, where it comes from, how it might be justly arranged. And yet the closer one reads them, the more one notices what they decline to discuss. They speak of consent but not of compulsion. Of contract but not of the force that makes contracts binding. Of legitimacy but not of the visceral energies that legitimate authority must harness, redirect, or suppress in order to function at all. The vocabulary is scrupulously rational. The subject matter, beneath the vocabulary, is not.

This essay proposes a descent — not into cynicism, but into depth. It suggests that the grammar of political order was articulated, with rather less embarrassment, in Mesopotamia, and that what was articulated there has never ceased to operate, even as the language used to describe it has grown steadily more refined, and steadily less accurate.

I. The Founding Act

The Enuma Elish, the Babylonian cosmogonic epic composed sometime in the second millennium BCE, opens not with creation but with conflict. Before the gods, before the heavens, before the ordered world, there is Tiamat — the primordial waters, the undifferentiated deep, that which precedes distinction — and her consort Apsu. The narrative that follows is not, at its core, a story about cosmology. It is a story about the conditions under which authority becomes possible.

Marduk, the Babylonian city-god who will become the supreme deity, does not inherit sovereignty. He earns it through a single act: the defeat and killing of Tiamat. From her divided body, he constructs the world. The heavens are made of one half; the earth of the other. Order is not the natural condition of things. It is imposed upon chaos by force, and the one who exercises that force becomes, by virtue of that exercise, the architect of everything that follows.

The political theorist Carl Schmitt, writing in 1922, defined the sovereign as he who decides on the exception — the one whose authority is demonstrated precisely in the moments when ordinary rules are suspended. He was, without knowing it, restating the Enuma Elish. Marduk is the sovereign because he alone could act where others could not. His authority over the ordered cosmos is inseparable from his capacity for a foundational violence that the cosmos itself could not contain or categorise, because it preceded categorisation.

What the Babylonian scribes understood, and what a great deal of subsequent political theory has preferred not to examine too closely, is that this structure does not disappear when the cosmogonic moment recedes into myth. It is reproduced, in various registers, wherever authority is established. The founding act — the rupture that clears space for a new order — is never purely procedural. It always contains something prior to procedure: an energy that procedure subsequently attempts to manage, and that it manages only partially, and temporarily.

II. The Undivided Goddess

The second element of the Babylonian political theology is, if anything, more discomfiting to modern sensibility than the first.

Ishtar — known in the earlier Sumerian tradition as Inanna — is simultaneously the goddess of war and the goddess of love. She presides over military victory and over erotic desire; over the field of battle and over the dynamics of attraction; over the destruction of enemies and over the generative forces that replenish what destruction depletes. In the Babylonian divine economy, these are not two portfolios held by one goddess for reasons of administrative convenience. They are understood as manifestations of a single force.

The Greeks separated them. Aphrodite governs love; Ares governs war. The division feels natural to minds formed within the Western tradition, because the tradition has spent two and a half millennia reinforcing it. But the Babylonian insistence on their unity was not a failure of analytical refinement. It was a recognition — the kind of recognition that can only be made before a concept has been domesticated — that the same compulsion underlies both.

Georges Bataille, the French philosopher and economic theorist, spent much of his career attempting to recover this recognition within a modern intellectual idiom. His central argument, developed most fully in L'Érotisme (1957), is that eroticism and death share a common structure: both involve the dissolution of individual boundaries, the temporary suspension of the self's integrity, the encounter with something that exceeds the subject's capacity for control. The ecstatic and the annihilatory are not opposites. They are expressions of the same excess, the same transgression of the limits that ordinary existence imposes.

Bataille's argument is usually received as a contribution to the philosophy of sexuality or, at most, to the theory of literature. Its political implications are rarely followed through. But Ishtar suggests that they should be. If the erotic and the martial draw on the same source — if what drives armies and what drives desire are, at some depth, continuous — then any analysis of political motivation that excludes this continuity is working with a deliberately impoverished model. It may produce elegant theories. It will not produce accurate ones.

The point is not that political actors are motivated by something crude. It is that they are motivated by something real, which the available vocabulary has been designed, with considerable sophistication, to obscure.

III. The Ritual Economy

The third element is perhaps the most legible translation into contemporary terms, and therefore the most immediately useful for understanding why political authority needs what it needs.

The hieros gamos — the sacred marriage — was a ritual practised across the ancient Near East in which the king, or his representative, underwent a ceremonial union with a high priestess embodying the goddess. The precise historical details remain contested among scholars, and the degree of literal enactment varied across time and place. What is not contested is the function: the ritual produced, through a public act of consecration, the king's claim to be something more than a man who happened to hold power. It made visible, in a register that no administrative decree could reach, the relationship between the king's body and the generative forces that sustained the community — its fertility, its continuity, its connection to something beyond the merely political.

René Girard's analysis of sacrificial ritual, developed over several decades from La Violence et le Sacré (1972) onward, offers one framework for understanding what such ceremonies accomplish. Girard argues that ritual violence — and, by extension, ritual reenactment of the founding violence — serves to channel and contain the mimetic tensions that accumulate within any community. The ceremony is not incidental to political order. It is constitutive of it. The display is the mechanism.

What the hieros gamos adds to Girard's model is the recognition that this mechanism operates not only through the register of sacrifice but also through the register of desire. The ceremony organises collective attention — focuses it on a single point, the king's body in relation to the divine — and through that organisation produces something that no rational-bureaucratic procedure can produce on its own: a felt sense that authority is not arbitrary, that the person who holds power holds it for reasons that exceed the merely contingent.

The display is, in this sense, prior to the argument. One does not first make the case for authority and then display it. The display comes first, and the case follows, or is made unnecessary. Modern political orders have not abandoned this logic. They have translated it into the ceremonial grammar of inaugurations, state funerals, electoral spectacles, and the careful choreography of executive presence — all of which perform, in secular idiom, the same function that the sacred marriage performed in Babylon: the consecration of power through a public act that exceeds the merely administrative.

IV. The Concealment and Its Costs

The three elements described above — the foundational act of sovereign violence, the erotic charge of political authority, the ritual economy of display and consecration — are not, to be clear, absent from modern political orders. They are present in every one of them. What modernity accomplished, with considerable ingenuity, was not their elimination but their renaming.

The foundational violence became security. The erotic dimension of political authority became charisma, or leadership, or vision — a vocabulary borrowed from the language of management and stripped of its more unsettling connotations. The ritual economy became protocol, ceremony, communication strategy. The translations are, in many cases, functional. They allow actors to operate within systems of legitimacy that require a certain kind of performance. They also, systematically, prevent those actors from understanding what they are actually doing.

The cost of this concealment is not primarily moral. It is analytical. An institution that cannot name the energies it depends upon cannot manage them well. It can manage them by habit, by inherited procedure, by the accumulated wisdom of predecessors who also could not name them but learned, through trial and error, which arrangements kept them in productive tension and which arrangements allowed them to become destructive. This is not nothing. But it is fragile, and it becomes more fragile as the inherited procedures are subjected to rationalisation — as each element that cannot be justified in the language of efficiency or accountability is stripped away, leaving the institution less capable of doing what institutions ultimately exist to do.

The archaeology proposed here is, in this sense, not merely historical. The Babylonian archive is not a curiosity but a diagnostic. It offers a description of political structure that is, in certain crucial respects, more accurate than the descriptions that have replaced it — not because the ancient world was wiser, but because it had not yet developed the vocabulary required to misrepresent what it saw.

V. What Remains

Understanding power in its full register — which is to say, understanding what the Babylonian scribes understood before the language of political rationality was invented to manage and partially obscure it — does not produce a prescription. It produces a more accurate perception.

Political orders that endure do so because they have found workable arrangements for the three forces described here: the violence that founds and periodically reconstitutes authority; the desire that makes authority compelling rather than merely coercive; and the display that makes authority legible, that translates raw power into something a community can orient itself around. When these arrangements come under sustained pressure — when the founding act is delegitimised, when the erotic charge of authority is extinguished, when the ritual economy collapses into empty formalism — the order becomes vulnerable in ways that no adjustment of policy or personnel can address, because the problem is structural, not tactical.

This is what transitions of power actually reveal, beneath the procedural surface: not merely a change of leadership, but a stress test of the arrangements that hold these forces in relation. The transitions that go badly are not usually the ones that fail procedurally. They are the ones that expose a prior failure — the accumulated result of years in which the deeper grammar of order was either misread or deliberately ignored.

Babylon built its understanding of that grammar into its cosmology, its liturgy, and its architecture. We have built ours into the language of rational administration. The question of which approach produces better institutional outcomes is, perhaps, the most consequential question in the comparative study of political order.

It has not been adequately asked.

REGNIS publishes occasional essays at the intersection of historical analysis and institutional intelligence. The views expressed are those of the author.