Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- About the Cover
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Prologue: The Prehistory of Power: Souls Spirits, Deities
- Part One Kings and Emperors
- 1 Divine Kingship in Mesopotamia
- 2 Pharaohs among the Indestructibles
- 3 Kingship among the Hebrews
- 4 The Deification of Roman Emperors
- 5 The Deva-Rajas in India and Southeast Asia
- 6 The Chinese Mandate from Heaven
- 7 The Japanese Imperial Cult
- Part Two Empires before the Common Era
- 8 The Legendary Empire of the Sumerians
- 9 Legendary Empires of Preclassical Greece
- 10 Patriarchs, Exodus, and the Epic of Israel
- 11 Legendary Empires of Ancient India
- 12 The Legendary Founding of Rome
- Part Three Founders
- 13 Moses: The Israelite Lawgiver
- 14 Buddha and Legends of Previous Buddhas
- 15 The Savior Narratives
- 16 Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Islam
- 17 The Virgin Mary through the Centuries
- 18 Tonantzin and Our Lady of Guadalupe
- Part Four Empires of the Common Era
- 19 Narrative Inventions of the Holy Roman Empire
- 20 The Epic of Kings, Alexander the Great, and the Malacca Sultinate
- 21 The Franks, Charlemagne, and the Chansons de Geste
- 22 The Legendary Kingdom of King Arthur
- 23 Ethiopian Kings and the Ark of the Covenant
- 24 Narratives of the Virgin Queen
- Part Five Ideologies
- 25 Discovery: The European Narrative of Power
- 26 Epics of the Portuguese Seaborne Empire
- 27 Dekanawida and the Iroquois League
- 28 The New England Canaan of the Puritans
- 29 The Marxist Classless Society
- 30 Adolph Hitler: Narratives of Aryans and Jews
- Epilogue: A Clash of Narratives
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
Epilogue: A Clash of Narratives
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- About the Cover
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- Prologue: The Prehistory of Power: Souls Spirits, Deities
- Part One Kings and Emperors
- 1 Divine Kingship in Mesopotamia
- 2 Pharaohs among the Indestructibles
- 3 Kingship among the Hebrews
- 4 The Deification of Roman Emperors
- 5 The Deva-Rajas in India and Southeast Asia
- 6 The Chinese Mandate from Heaven
- 7 The Japanese Imperial Cult
- Part Two Empires before the Common Era
- 8 The Legendary Empire of the Sumerians
- 9 Legendary Empires of Preclassical Greece
- 10 Patriarchs, Exodus, and the Epic of Israel
- 11 Legendary Empires of Ancient India
- 12 The Legendary Founding of Rome
- Part Three Founders
- 13 Moses: The Israelite Lawgiver
- 14 Buddha and Legends of Previous Buddhas
- 15 The Savior Narratives
- 16 Muhammad, the Qur’an, and Islam
- 17 The Virgin Mary through the Centuries
- 18 Tonantzin and Our Lady of Guadalupe
- Part Four Empires of the Common Era
- 19 Narrative Inventions of the Holy Roman Empire
- 20 The Epic of Kings, Alexander the Great, and the Malacca Sultinate
- 21 The Franks, Charlemagne, and the Chansons de Geste
- 22 The Legendary Kingdom of King Arthur
- 23 Ethiopian Kings and the Ark of the Covenant
- 24 Narratives of the Virgin Queen
- Part Five Ideologies
- 25 Discovery: The European Narrative of Power
- 26 Epics of the Portuguese Seaborne Empire
- 27 Dekanawida and the Iroquois League
- 28 The New England Canaan of the Puritans
- 29 The Marxist Classless Society
- 30 Adolph Hitler: Narratives of Aryans and Jews
- Epilogue: A Clash of Narratives
- Bibliography
- Index
- About the Author
Summary
The divine power of kings and fictional histories of empires thrived until these kingships and empires weakened or were conquered. The deification of Sumerian kings and consecration of Roman Emperors ended with the breakdown of their supporting cultures. Divinity attached to Egyptian pharaohs came to an end with the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. Verifiable historical information concerning the spiritual status of ancient kings of the Greeks and Hebrews is minimal or missing. The Japanese Kojiki, Persian Shahnameh, Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, and Malay Annals begin their accounts of rulers with myth and legend, with subsequent events so decorated that historical fact is difficult to discern beneath the literary coloring. Spirituality has now faded from royalty, leaving it unprotected by myths of divine origins. Imperial rule ended in China in 1912 when the last emperor, Hsian-T’ung, was forced to abdicate at the end of Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution. Imperial rule in Russia came to an end when Nicholas II, the Romanov Tsar, and members of his family were executed in 1918. Both brought to an end monarchic narratives established centuries earlier. Religious founders are an exception; they transcend the erosion of time and history. Their affective appeal typically subverts factual investigation because their spirituality is assumed by believers to be reliably historical.
More recent narratives have tended to fade or have been overturned. In the past few centuries, three societal narratives have been overcome and rendered obsolete by a historical change. The American Puritan presentation of themselves as the new Chosen People and the New World as the Promised Land ran aground during the Enlightenment, a victim of the astronomy of Galileo and Herschel, the geology of Hutton and Lyell, and the sidelining of religion in the American Bill of Rights and related democratic formulations. The nineteenth-century predictive narrative of Marx and Engels never achieved its promise of a classless society and was overwhelmed in the twentieth century by the capitalist economic system it opposed. The dictatorial lust for power of Adolf Hitler and the anti-Semitic narratives of Nazism and Fascism were defeated by a worldwide military coalition and the triumph of industrial warfare.
While monarchy as a spiritually inspired system is effectively dead, purely symbolic monarchies have remained, though the two most long-lasting are now under a shadow of controversy.
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- Invented History, Fabricated PowerThe Narratives Shaping Civilization and Culture, pp. 347 - 354Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020