The Gods of War

Part I
The Roots of War

“…to understand war we have to get at its myths, recognize
that war is a mythical happening, …and that the love of war tells
of a love of the gods, the gods of war;…” 1.
-James Hillman

Blood sacrifice is a concept civilized people pretend to disdain, yet as a nation, as a people, we honor the blood shed by our youth upon the battlefield and elevate their sacrifices with tales of noble struggles and heroic glory in the cause of freedom. And the battlefields themselves are revered as sacred or hallowed ground. Since ancient times in the cradle of Western Civilization, blood sacrifices have been sacerdotal and made at the behest of the gods. The words ‘sacred’ and ‘sacrifice’ are derived from the same root meaning for blood. To make sacred required sacrifice of blood since the ancients believed the divinity of an offering was contained within their blood. The stories of ancient human sacrifices survive not just in myth, art and scripture but also within the genetic memory of our species – the deep collective memory. Blood rituals and sacrifice also survive in cult rituals and secrete societies and even religious traditions such as circumcision. The concept of scapegoat comes from the ancient custom of assigning one’s sins to a goat before the sacrificial act, thus avoiding the wrath of god (or bad karma). The myth of Abraham and Isaac marks a cultural turning point, at least in principle. And although not normally thought of in this manner the Christ/Redeemer mythos is a human sacrifice of the god-man who “sheds his blood for our sins”.
Today, the blood sacrifices of our youth continue on the battlefields and on the streets of our cities for we are a culture that celebrates violence, guns, gangsterism, militarism and the mythic battle between good and evil – choose your side. The question is: Why? What is the root of war?
Before we can arrive at an answer I believe we must first separate the ‘causes’ of war from the ‘roots’ of war; and to further delineate the causes of war from the ‘enablers’ of war. Erich Fromm in his thesis, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness points out that the causes of all wars can be attributed to the economic interests and ambitions of political, military and industrial leaders. This is nearly self-evident yet we seem perpetually in denial. We can add to this the expansionist goals of empire which we term ‘national interests’. Fromm disputes the fashionable notion of his time that war develops from man’s innate destructiveness, pointing out that the impulses of defensive aggression in the populace must be mobilized through the propaganda machinery which formulates lies of a foreign threat to the nation and its borders. The government and its propaganda apparatus are the ones guilty of what Fromm calls “instrumental aggression” e.g. “the wish to conquer foreign territory”. Fromm further indicates support for Prof. Morris Ginsberg’s statement in a 1934 symposium on the psychology of peace and war that “the riddle of war lies…deep in the unconscious”.2.
This, in fact, is the premise of this essay: That the roots of all war can be found within the deep collective unconscious – the collective psyche – of a people, a nation and ultimately of a civilization itself. And these deep vectors of our collective psyche stem from the matrix of archetypal symbols which in turn become the foundations of all myth. I believe the anti-war movement for far too long has ignored this spiritual aspect of the struggle against war in favor of either Marxian analysis or a purely reactive approach to building a progressive movement for peace and justice. 
As for the enabling factors for any war to be prosecuted, Fromm points to emotional motivations on the part of enlistees, including the deeply ingrained respect for and awe of authority and the possibility of adventure in contrast to the boring and monotonous civilian life. To quote Fromm:
“War, to some extent, reverses all values. War encourages deep seated human impulses, such as altruism and solidarity to be expressed – impulses that are stunted by the principles of egotism and competition that peacetime life engenders in modern man. …war is an indirect rebellion against the injustice, inequality and boredom governing social life in peacetime.”3.
He then offers a prescription:
 “If civilian life provided the elements of adventurousness, solidarity, equality and idealism that can be found in war, it may be very difficult… to get people to fight a war.”4
  I believe the cultural movement of the 1960’s bears out the truth of this speculation. Nothing less is required of us at this moment in time.
Journalist, progressive activist and former war correspondent Chris Hedges explores this theme of war’s seductive quality in a very personal way in his book, War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning:
“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for  war  is a drug, one I ingested for many years. It is peddled by myth-makers – historians, war correspondents, filmmakers, novelists and the state – all of whom endow it with qualities it often does possess: excitement, exoticism,
power, chances to rise above our small station in life, and a bizarre and fantastic universe that had a grotesque and dark beauty.”5.
And it is the mythic architecture of war that is vital to any military venture. Again from Chris Hedges’ account:
“Wars that lose their mythic stature for the public, such as Korea or Vietnam, are doomed to failure, for war is exposed for what it is, - organized murder.”6.
Enter FOX news channel. It is the military’s reliance upon mythmaking that keeps FOX news channel in business. And we can find the same formula in the Bosnian war according to Hedges:
“It took Milosevic four years of hate propaganda and lies, pumped forth daily over the airways from Belgrade before he could get one Serb to cross the border into Bosnia and begin the murderous rampage that triggered the war.”7.
And myth is always in context and in relationship, for myth is a gateway to a cosmology – man’s place within the universe and our relationship to the realm of the gods. The context is the human condition, the individual’s search for meaning and purpose; and the relationship is to the whole or to one’s conscience or code of ethics. Thus, in war, the context in relationship to god and country always becomes: “God is on our side”. (It should be noted that when speaking of myth I do not mean ‘a fiction’ although Chris Hedges use of the term does straddle dual connotations.)
With an appreciation for the power of myth, let us now look deeper into the roots of war itself. Doing this requires the use of depth-psychology concepts and terms. Archetypes are universal symbols that are found cross-culturally within the collective unconscious or human psyche. Archetypes such as the god-king, the heroic escapade, invincible warrior and the Emperor can and do animate individual drives toward conquest, dominance, imperial power, expansion and destruction. Their power comes from an ability to animate an individual upon the world’s stage. Archetypal forces conjured by symbolism and attached to myths come to order our society and sustain our cultural, political and religious institutions. Myths such as the eternal battle between good and evil, the apocalypse, manifest destiny or the social Darwinist superiority of modern man or of national superiority can and do exert enormous influence upon human events and the search for meaning. Archetypal forces identified with the people, tribe or nation and linked to a patron deity have wielded immense power throughout the ages. Archetypal forces can launch powerful social and political movements with the potency of arcane symbolism at its core – witness Nazi Germany.
Among these archetypal forces, the force of evil is particularly powerful, although in our hyper-rationalist era it is summarily dismissed as non-existent. The force of evil crosses all national boundaries, all cultures and infects all peoples throughout history because war is evil. War in fact is the genesis of all evil. In his 2001 essay, Confronting Evil [ Tikkun Nov/ Dec 2001 ] Andrew Kimbrell defines evil as, “ that dysfunctional human condition which leads us into repeated patterns of wrong-doing….a kind of ultimate illness which fatally erodes our sense of responsibility for, and ultimately connection to, all else.”8.   He adds that an evil act is one of alienation from the other. We can extrapolate from this that evil, as a force in human affairs, acts to produce alienation from self, others and the whole fabric of life. And again, I cannot stress this enough: War is evil – in fact the source of most if not all other evils. In order to defeat war we must call it what it is, we must name it Evil.
 Andrew Kimbrell goes on in his essay to discuss what he calls “the technification of evil”: ” Modern society has created a technological, institutional plane where ‘The System’ effectuates evil in circumstances where individuals and their emotions or morals play no significant role.”9,   This disembodiment and transference of responsibility for evil actions unto our technologies, in effect, allows modern men and women to see themselves as good people just doing their job. Kimbrell describes our society as atomized individuals living in our “techno-bubbles” far removed from the disastrous effects of our techno-wars. From this seat of comfort we can easily be persuaded to project our evil - the evil we deny exists in ourselves – onto the other and to call them enemy. As we have seen, it is an age old formula.

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Part II 
The Gods of War

“The Soldier of Christ kills safely, he dies the more safely.
He serves his own interests in dying and Christ’s interests in killing!
Not without cause does he bare the sword.”10.
- Saint Bernard

In this essay my intent is to discuss the human condition frankly. It is not my intent to denounce religion, belief in god or to denigrate any faith. To the contrary, I believe that the struggle for peace and justice is a spiritual struggle first and foremost. This means facing what we are up against squarely and being honest about the psychic territory upon which we are about to tread. Atheism fares no better with respect to the archetypal forces we’re discussing. Nationalists, anarchists, socialists and atheists are as zealous and hypnotized by the spell of their causes as any religious zealot, and as easily made a pawn in war’s evil game
Patron deities, of city-states, ethnic groups or entire empires, are transcendent powers of the cosmos worshiped through ritual and sacrifice throughout the history of humanity. These transcendent powers of the cosmos are in fact the gods of war or the war-gods of most if not all warrior cultures including our own. Chris Hedges matter-of-factly declares war itself to be a god: “But, war is a god, as the ancient Greeks and Romans knew, and its worship demands human sacrifice. We urge young men to war, making the slaughter they are asked to carry out a rite of passage.”11. And the sacrifice, if not of one’s life, becomes one’s humanity as Hedges explains: “War exposes the capacity for evil that lurks not far below the surface in all of us. And this is why, for many, war is so hard to discuss once it is over.”12.
James Hillman, quoted above from his book, A Terrible Love of War, explores our love for war, from our fascination with ‘the beauty of our weapons’ to the erotic and altruistic encounters on and off the battlefield. Hillman challenges us to look squarely at this paradox and points us toward the realm of the gods: “Yet, where else in human experience, except in the throes of ardor – that strange coupling of love and war – do we find ourselves transported to a mythical condition and the gods most real?”13.
In ancient Greece Ares was the god of war identified with the ram. Although the old gods lost favor to the mystery cults, they survived as metaphor to explain the dynamics of human experience. Ares was despised by the others in the Greek pantheon for his brutality and lust for battle. None-the-less, Hades honored Ares for supplying ample amounts of souls to the underworld. But it was Aphrodite, Goddess of Love and Beauty and wife to Hephaestus, crafter of armaments for the gods, who scandalized the Olympians with her brazen love affair with the bloodthirsty god; as are we scandalized by our own love affair with war.
For Hillman it is the mythic nature of war that makes it sublime, a sublimity expressed in lyric verse and memoir; and which comes from the archetypal conjunction of Ares/Mars and Aphrodite who he says brings the “aestheticizing imagination of war” “The world of war’s horror and fear is also a world of desire and attraction. We have come to another place where understanding our subject is again most baffled: war’s beautiful horror, its terrible love and exhilarating fusion called sublime.”14.
Hillman goes further by connecting war and religion, in fact stating that war is a religion and religion is war. ”Ceremonies of military service, the coercion by and obedience to a supreme command, the confrontation with death in battle as a last rite on earth, war’s promise of transcendence and its sacrificial love the test of all human virtues and the presence of all human evils, the slaughter of human blood victims, impersonally, collectively, in the name of a higher cause and blessed by ministers of several faiths – all drive home the conclusion that “War is religion”.15.
. The ancient battlefields were often proving grounds for whose god was superior. Alexander the Great, reportedly, visited the Egyptian dessert temple of Amun-Re – the primordial creator/sun god and god of war – to seek guidance before launching his campaign against Persia and eventually conquering most of the known world. Amun-Re’s symbolic representation was the ram, and Alexander is often depicted wearing rams horns and fleece on his head. Soon afterward young Alexander declared himself a god and after his death was worshiped as such at the site of his remains in Alexandria. Alexander’s Greece was also the center of the cult of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and madness. His maenads in the throes of ecstatic union with their god would run through the mountain forests and tear animals apart with their bare teeth.   
In ancient Canaan, the god Baal was known by the appellation “The Conqueror” while his sister/consort Anath did battle by his side knee deep in blood and severed body parts and wearing a girdle of skulls around her waist. And it was into Canaan that the ancient Hebrews marched carrying their most sacred object, the Arc of the Covenant – a covenant with their patron god Yahweh - into battle. The scriptures are particularly awash in blood and gore from divinely instigated slaughter. For Yahweh was a war god who promised his faithful dominion in the land of Canaan - a promise revived by the Puritan pilgrims who founded New Canaan amidst the slaughter of Indians in the New England colonies. Their descendents are the so called Dominionists who, preaching a fundamentalist dualism of good vs. evil and advocating war against the evil-does, have reached the highest circles of power within the United States government.
Dualism, the belief that the universe is divided into two opposing metaphysical systems – good vs. evil, light vs. darkness, black vs. white – is a powerfully compelling belief system whose origins can be traced to ancient Persia and the prophet Zoroaster. It is a paradox of history that the titanic battle between East and West that has pitted Greco-Roman, European empires against Asiatic-Persian civilizations in the East has often resulted in a marriage or syncretism of art, culture science and religions. So it is with Dualism. The Zoroastrian belief that the god of light, Ahura Mazda was in constant battle for humanity with the forces of darkness led by Ahriman, influenced the theology of the ancient Hebrews, Christians and Islam. The return of the Hebrew priestly caste from exile at the hand of Cyrus the Great was due, in part, to the affinity of their monotheism with the Persian belief. Later the Jewish Diaspora, which stretched throughout the Persian Empire, was impacted by the dualistic system, particularly in the realm of demons and angels. Christians inherited these teachings but the strength of the new religion’s dualism came from a more contemporary source – Mithraism. The Maji who followed the star to Bethlehem represented Persian Mazdaism. By the fourth century C.E., Mithraism, a form of Persian Mazdaism, was the dominant religion in Rome among the nobility, generals and military officers. (Women were excluded) Centered upon the god-man Mithra, son of Ahura Mazda, who was born to slay the sacred bull and to found a patriarchal, militarized mystery cult, Mithraism stressed the dualistic battle of good vs. evil. It was the Emperor Constantine, a follower of Mithra, who declared Catholicism the official state religion. Thus began a process of syncretization of the two faiths where the pagan blood sacrifices were forgone in favor of Christian dogma and the ‘sacrifice’ of the mass. The Christians, however, were forced to settle their long-standing feud over the divinity of Jesus, for if the new religion were to be accepted by the Romans, Jesus had to take the place of Mithra as the dying god-man. So the Council of Nicaea decided against those whose faith held that Jesus was a prophet and great philosopher and these so-called heretics were summarily put to the sword. This Imperial, militarized religion is what Yale Professor of Theology Cornell West calls ‘Constantinian Christianity’ to distinguish is from the Prophetic Tradition in evangelical Christianity which advocates for the poor and speaks truth to power. And it is Constantinian Christianity which has driven imperial armies from Europe to throughout the world.
A similar pattern can be seen in Islam. With its foundation in the Abrahamic monotheism and influences from fundamentalist Jewish, Mandean and Manichean sects, this strict brand of monotheism fueled the conquest of nearly one third of the known world, forming an empire that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula, across northern Africa through the Middle East into Eastern Europe and East to Afghanistan.
In fairness, Judaism took a sharp departure from its warlike roots after the second uprising was brutally crushed. The teachings and traditions developed throughout the Diaspora are in sharp contrast to the fundamentalist exegesis of the Zealots, but their fundamentalism survived among the Mandeans and other sects in southern Iraq that influenced the birth if Shia Islam and are reborn within the evangelical fundamentalist Christian movement nationally. 
Indeed, it is at Christianity that Hillman focuses most of his criticism: “The fact is clear: Western wars are backed by the Christian God, and we cannot dodge his draft because we are all Christians, regardless of the faith you profess, the church you attend, or whether you declare yourself utterly atheistic.”16.
So, it behooves us to vigorously protect and defend the establishment clause of the First Amendment, and cleanse the military leadership and chaplaincy of Christian crusaders. And certainly demand legal accountability for the crimes of this premeditated war. Yet, these measures, even if successful, are remedial and superficial in the face of war’s juggernaut and the depth of its roots – which for Hillman and Hedges is a force deep within the human soul that we recognize implicitly. In Hillman’s words: “It is as if a recognition occurs: “so this is it.” This is Hell; the kingdom of death; the ultimate truth below all else.” 17.
  The recognition by the peace-maker community that the culture of war and militarism is reliant upon and to a large degree subservient to the gods of war is, I believe an important first step in crafting an effective posture and strategy in addressing that culture and promoting an alternative one. Certainly the masters of war in the United States have known this for some time as they have consistently propped up their bellicosity on the pillars of God and County. Achieving this depth of understanding gives us the proper gravitas for an effectual struggle while at the same time placing us in the correct arena – the arena of moral and spiritual crisis and awakening - for it is a moral and ethical bankruptcy coupled with an institutionalized hypocrisy that is the root of our national malaise and decay.
 It is imperative that the peace movement deconstruct the myths of war and neutralize the myth-makers. Fictions such as the imminent threat of an enemy, of the nobility of cause and of our moral superiority or ‘exceptionalism’ need to be debunked. We must also face the shadow of our own love of war and our acquiescence to evil. And we must accept the existence and power of the gods of war.
 War is evil. War is hell. War is a god. War is a religion. And the God of the Abrahamic traditions is a war god. Not a very popular position and even a dangerous one, to say the least. Yet it is no deep insight to say we humans have turned Paradise into hell for scores of millions of innocents with the force of our arms and stridency of our madness to conquer and destroy. We have the same power to turn hell into Paradise.
What is called for is an archetypal even mystical solution - the raising of an archetypal power equal to the gods of war, yet more compelling. To do this we must first recognize our own divinity - we are the gods of peace and we are that archetypal force.  We become the gods of peace when we act from the highest place within our being – the transcendent self. As a movement, I believe we must engage the spiritual within ourselves, the Earth and the conscious struggle to evolve. We do this when we heed the 2000 message from the Hopi elders that “Everything we do now must be done in a sacred manner.” I believe the peace movement must make ceremony, prayer and chanting central to the activism of this century, as the indigenous peoples throughout South and Central America have done in their struggles against globalization, privatization and cultural dominance. We become the gods of peace when we hold mass gatherings of ten to fifty thousand people chanting and praying for peace to create vectors of peace to neutralize the culture of violence and war. Only when we recognize the spiritual nature of our struggle – a struggle within the depths of our being – can we truly say, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”

                                                                                        Elliot Tarry

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Footnotes

1. James Hillman, A Terrible Love Of War , The Penguin Press, New York, 2004
2. Glover, E. and Ginsberg, M., 1934, A Symposium on the Psychology , British Journal of Medical Psychology, 14: 274-293
3. Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973, Penguin, 2004, Pg. 214
4. Ibid, Pg. 215
5. Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Random House, Pg.3
6. Ibid, Pg.21
7. Ibid, Pg.21
8. Andrew Kimbrell, Confronting Evil, Tikkun, Nov/Dec 2001
9. Ibid
    10.  Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites – The Origins and History of the Passions of War, Metropolitan Press, Henry Holt and Co., New York 1997
From Fields, The Code of the Warrior, Pg.147
     11. Hedges, Pg.10
     12. Ibid, Pg.3
     13. Hillman, Pg. 9
     14. Ibid, Pg. 109
     15. Ibid, Pg 178
     16. Ibid, pg. 190
     17. Ibid, Pg.39