Is é an rí aisling na ndaoine. Is iad na daoine aisling na talún.
The king is the dream of the people. The people are the dream of the land.
Any real understanding of sovereignty, in its oldest and truest sense, has to be grounded in this truth.
There has been a resurgence in recent years of the memory of the fact that for ancient people, sovereignty arose from wedding the spirit of the land. Unfortunately, much of what is being written and said about that fact treats this wedding as a private and metaphorical act performed by an individual to gain personal power and liberation. This reflects a profound misunderstanding.
In Irish culture, the rite by which the rí (“king”) wedded the land was not a solitary act, nor was it purely symbolic.
The rite occurred in the presence of the entire tuath (“tribe”) – and in many communities it was held at Samhain, the festival that marked the beginning of the dark half of the year, with the understanding that the dead, too, were witnessing and consecrating the marriage. The rí took on responsibilities on behalf of the community – not to rule in a modern sense, but to unite the will of the people, and, embodying that will, enter into a union with the sovereignty goddess as real and as erotic as any human marriage.
That sovereignty goddess was not an abstraction or an archetype, she was and is the living spirit of the land itself. And she alone had the right to bestow or revoke sovereignty from her bridegroom.
Ultimately, a rí requires a tuath and the tuath requires a rí. And the wedding vows require dedication in every moment and in every way to the land and the people. Sacral sovereignty is not a pretty description of secular modern ideas of sovereignty as autonomy and self-direction. It is a concept that fundamentally contradicts the cultural logics that uplift the human individual, accountable only to him/her/themself. It is a rite of devotion to communities, human and wild. It is a reorientation of identification.
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This devotion requires uprooting ourselves from the story of who we think we are, and what we think makes us who we are.
Our modern culture speaks of the virtues of being a “self-made” person. The idea is that we each exist as individuals, responsible for our own lives, protagonists of our own stories. The corollary is that we can each “be whoever we want to be” and “live the lives we want to live.”
The truth is that we were never the sole authors of the stories of who we have believed ourselves to be. Who we imagine ourselves to be is shaped by who others imagine us to be, which in turn is shaped by what others believe the nature and purpose of a person is.
All of this occurs within the realm of ideology, which the Marxist scholar Louis Althusser defined as the set of imaginary relationships between a person and the material world in which they are situated. (See https://my.vanderbilt.edu/f2015/files/2015/12/Ideology-and-Ideological-State-Apparatuses-by-Louis-Althusser-1969-70.pdf) Those relationships take on a material reality as they shape and influence our actions. And taking action requires that we view ourselves as subjects capable of acting. Hence, at its most basic level, “all ideology has the function
(which defines it) of ‘constituting ‘ concrete individuals as subjects,” as Althusser wrote. The subject is shaped by the process of “interpellation,” the process of being spoken to, of being named, of being summoned forth by those with whom we imagine ourselves to be in relation.
While, being an atheist, Althusser would bristle at the thought, interpellation is a magical process of invocation. And who is called forth by an invocation depends on the nature and the meaning and the resonances of the name by which a being is called – which is why each god or spirit has many different epithets in very old cultures. In such cultures, a person may have different epithets as well. Because capitalist culture seeks to summon a person forward into a singular role for a singular purpose, in capitalist cultures we are used to having one name, and believing that we are that name.
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(It is worth pausing here to note that the Irish language has at least three ways in which a person might give their name, each of which conveys a different sense of identity. Many contemporary speakers, especially those whose first language is English, will say “Is mise Seán.” “I am Seán.” When I say this I identify myself with my name. Most formal programs if instruction will teach someone to say “Seán is ainm dom.” “Seán is (the) name (of) me.” When I say this I identify the name is mine. But in some regions it is traditional to day “Seán atá orm.” “Seán is upon me.” When I say this, the name becomes a garment that I wear. All the more so when you know that in the first two examples the verb being used suggests a fixed and permanent identification between the subject and the object of the sentence. In the third example, the verb suggests a more temporary identification. Try saying each aloud, substituting your own name for mine. Feel the difference that the syntactic shifts bring. You will begin to get a sense of how fluid our sense of identification really is, and how much the way in which we are taught to tell someone our name shifts the experience of who we feel ourselves to be.)
So who are we allowing to interpellate us, and how? What is the web of relations we are allowing ourselves to be summoned into? How does that web of relations view and define our subjectivity? All of this shapes the ways in which we understand what it is possible for us to do and what course of action we choose to take.
If we allow ourselves to be interpellated only by people and institutions whose own sense of subjectivity has been shaped by capitalist culture, then we end up being summoned only as individual subjects – who believe ourselves to be autonomous individuals oriented toward individual success – an individual success which is defined in terms of a game that rewards us for reproducing the existing systems of material and cultural production.
Under late capitalism, with the emergence of the virtual realm, we seek to escape the limits of our material reality by crafting images of ourselves that we offer up for public consumption, and try to shape to answer what is being called for and called forth by consumers of images. We become identified with those images, those avatars, those brands, and this redefines our sense of subjectivity in ways that change how we materially shaped by the world.
If we want to live and act in ways that are different from those of the culture around us, we have to slip out of the imaginary map of material relationships in which we exist, and change who and what we allow ourselves to be interpellated by.
Or, to shift from Althusser’s academic Marxist language, to the poetic language of John Moriarty, we have to change who it is that we consent to be dreamed by. Changing who we are dreamed by changes who we think we are, and what we think we can do.
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If we seek to revive and reclaim sovereignty, we need to allow ourselves to become dreamed by people who in turn have been dreamed by the spirit of the land we seek to wed. This requires weaving a different web of relation.
It means slipping off our names and our stories like suits of clothes that no longer suit us, and calling out to be renamed and restoryed by minds whose dreaming takes place outside the fevered nightmares of our current culture. Those old garments can be slipped back on when necessary, but will never again be mistaken for second skins -- at least by we who have learned to slip them off.
It means going to the Raven, going to the Oak, going to the river, going to the stones, and making our own relationships with them. It means going to the ancestors who learned their own names from wind and water and earth and stars, and the descendants who will learn their names from forest and desert and the ocean and asking them “Who am I to you? What do you call me?”
Then, and only then, and only if we allow ourselves to be transformed completely, will we hear the words that Moriarty said that She Who is the Land spoke to He Who Would Be Her Bridegroom:
“You have become the dream of a people. Walk naked to Tara and inherit your royalty.”
re-reading this this morning. such a great pool to splash around in. thank you!