Dwilight University/Political Studies/Oolong Political System
Oolong Political System
by Ven Dhalgren
Declaration of Intent
Recently much has been debated in the university on the topic of political structure. Much of the debate has focused on the virtues and troubles of theocracy and if a religious institution should or should not direct the interests of a kingdom. While arguments were raging on the battlefields of our desks and the tips of our quills, I found myself miles away from the silent halls of a library or the sweet smell of incense of a temple's reading room. The contrast couldn't be sharper, for if I just pictured a world of ideas and intellectual arguments, clean cut with skill like in a stonemason's workshop in Vakreno Heaps, on my part I was following tribes-women in the daily hunt for termites and watching tribal warriors sewing beads their ritual head-pieces sitting in the dust. For several months during one of our mildest winters I lived with a tribe of twenty-thirty individuals in the harsh lands between Overroot and Underroot, studying their customs and social institutions, and taking part in their life as much as I could to better understand them. Although I make it sound like a methodological choice, and undoubtedly partly it was, being involved in the daily activities of these people was indeed a need, for I relied on their skills and knowledge to survive in those lands, where my untrained mind couldn't even begin to think how those dusty landscapes could breed life and nourishment. If chronologically there is a parallel between my stay with the Oolong tribe and the debate that went on in our university guildhouses, I want to take it further and use my experience to reflect on the debate and hence the nature of political systems, social structure and the meeting of different “spheres” such as religion, politics and marriage. I shall indeed stand in the borderlands between political life, religion, marriage and education to provide a glimpse of a different model. The present work then does not intend to argue with or against the different parties involved in that academic debate, but to serve as a reminder that, although political life in Dwilight has crystallised in a few models replicated throughout the islands, social and political structures still have the potential of changing and re-create themselves in a multitude of different and new ways. The way of the spirits of the Oolong could serve as a reminder that different political structures are indeed possible.
The Definition of Theocracy
Theocracy is commonly understood as a system in which a religious system, and particularly a religious institution - a church - orders political and social life. The definition is not completely apt for there are system in which religion is itself political: in which it is not a case of religion ordering a separate political domain, but the cosmological system dictates human behavior. An hypothetical example: let us imagine a theocracy, let us name it Bractea, where belief is that the cosmos is a amorphous bulk of raw metals. The religion of Bractea holds the belief that a Vascularius, a creator god, harnessed metals from the raw cosmos and built men. Not all men are the same, for the Vascularius used the all spectrum of metals found in the chaotic cosmos to build men, and some are made of gold while some of copper. As we can imagine, some metals are better than others, and, by simple logic, some men are therefore better than others. Bractean society is then a rigid caste system where gold mingles with gold and copper with copper, where gold rules and administrates and copper works the land, iron fights the war and silver composes poems and elaborate philosophies. It is clear that here the political system is already contained completely in the religious one, or, better, political and religious system are one and the same, for the structure of the cosmos dictates its ordering. We could imagine also that the potential for change is already ingrained in the cosmological system: imagine a lonely blacksmith discovering one day that leagues of metal, mixes, are stronger than pure metals themselves and becoming almost unwillingly the prophet of a rebellion against the reactionary caste system. In a way, we could say, the religious and the political are so intertwined that even rebellion, resistance and social change are already encompassed in the religious domain – in other words, even movements against the “government”, which is religious insofar as Bractea is a theocracy, are themselves religious. A more apt definition of “theocracy” is then one of a system where there is no distinction between religious and political realm. This also teaches us a lesson on religion itself – although I am weary of over-using the word “religion, as if it was a “thing” - which is that religious system tend to be both descriptive and normative. Descriptive, for Bractean cosmology describes the cosmos as a bulk of metals and men as forged from them, and normative, for this description entails a value system and consequently an appropriate social ordering.
Oolong Political System
It is time now to fly from the hypothetical Bractea to the real, but not less bizarre, Oolong tribe of the Overroot-Underroot border. The question of what the Oolong political system is has the potential of collapsing distinctions and let us see a light shining through those monolithic constructions we consider the only possible ones, such as “theocracy”, “republic” or “kingdom”. Oolongs live in the stretch of dusty land that lies on the border between the Zuma regions of Underroot and Overroot. The Oolong basic social unit is the clan, which is normally constituted by twenty or thirty individuals but can be much bigger (and indeed powerful clans can be huge, up to seventy individuals). The clans are rarely smaller than twenty individuals, for smaller clans are thought as withering away and they are normally integrated in bigger ones. Interaction between clans is rare; in normal times clans keep for themselves and do not interact with others, and the exceptions are almost only warfare and marriage. Even marriage and warfare are not a form of direct interaction, for they are in a way mediate by a third party, and this third party is the key to understand Oolong social life. “Spirits” the chief of the tribe told me “rule everything”. It is difficult to understand the nature of Oolong spirits, for they are not distant powerful entities, detached from the profane world, but a diverse collection of entities that interact daily with Oolong men and women. In the marriage ritual, which I have described elsewhere (see: Prolegomena to the Study of Religion), the spirits of the ancestors – which are described as bird-like beings, that flew down on this world in the beginning of time and lost their feathers and became humans – fly between the young men and women and choose who should marry whom. Women flow between clans, and it is the choice of the ancestor to determine who a particular woman shall marry and consequently where she will live for the rest of her life. Marriage is a very important thing among the Oolong, for if spirits do not send wives in your village you will rapidly see all of your young girls going away to other clans and your young men without a bride and a family (the Oolong do not marry within the clan). If the ancestral spirits neglect your clan for a while, it will quickly die out, with a few old unmarried man trying to keep up with all the work women normally do in the village (such as gardening at the yoom gardens, hunting termites, getting water, etc). The other occasion for inter-clan relation is warfare. Here the mediators are not ancestral spirits, but the spirits of termites' mounds - tricksters by nature but also one of the most useful spirits in the Oolong pantheon. When the ancestors started to walk the land they gathered around termite's mounds, for food there was abundant and they were easy to spot from the sky . Different groups lived at different mounds, but relations were peaceful between them and they exchanged tools and tips for gathering termites more easily. The spirit that lived in one of the mounds – every mound has in fact a spirit living in it who is the owner of the mound ad its termites – angered by the exploitation of his mound decided to take a revenge on the Oolong ancestors. When one of the ancestors walked to another group and showed a new tool he devised, the spirit blinded him during his demonstration and the tool hit another man instead of drilling a hole in the mound. His sight came back moments after, and at the sight of blood he ran away terrified. From that day the Oolong are constantly in a state of ritual debt, that tribe went back to take revenge and another revenge was then needed. A hidden market of death rules the Oolongs life, every clan one day will have someone killed in an ambush, and bad luck will loom over them until they manage to take revenge. Not knowing who carried out the deed, they will ask the termite oracle (where the motion of termites on a wooden board determines the answer to a question) to individuate the enemy, and then attempt to kill one of the young unmarried males of that clan. Again then, the spirits decide which clan loses and which clan is left alone, which will rise to power and which will wither and die. It is clear than that Oolong political system (or at least inter-clan system) is even more than a theocracy, for their spirits directly decide what happens in the political arena.
Shadow Politics
There is something very peculiar about Oolong spirits, and it is not just that they almost tangibly live with men and influence their lives, but something even stranger: they can be easily tricked, persuaded and “corrupted”. I talked elsewhere about the mountain in the middle of Oolong territories, a no man's land where no one lives, but where at its top the marriage ritual is carried out. This mountain is the only place in those lands where there is vegetation, a green tower in the middle of the red sands and cracked soil. The mountain is silent for most of the year, the only exception being marriage rituals which happen a couple of times a year (I could not determine their frequency and how they are organised without communication between clans), but something goes on at its bottom almost constantly. In the shadow of the bushes, at night young unmarried youth converges from all clans and secretly gathers, and predictably the point of those meetings is dance, inebriation and love. The Oolong have a strong respect for virginity, and a wife is virgin until the first night of marriage after which a cloth is nailed to the hut with the blood of the defloration as an offering to the spirit of the land (which also marks the entry of the woman in the clan). I was shocked to discover that rarely that happens, that “illegal” gatherings happen constantly where love is made without distinctions and the youth dances under the effect of crudely brewed root beer. Moreover, arrangements are made for the wedding ritual, on how to time fits so that a couple would be paired together. A question haunted me. How is it possible that the adults that enforce virginity and respect the spirits were the same youth that danced and made love years before? The answer is simpler than I though: there is an invisible system where Oolong people decide who to marry and therefore the future of the clans. This system runs parallel to an “orthodox” system where spirits think they are ruling the fate of mankind, when actually they are given chicken blood on a cloth and tricked into believing they are making the choices. The orthodox system is an elaborate lie to keep human and spirit business separated and therefore be free. This invisible system is all-pervasive. In fact termite mound spirits are gluttonous and greedy, and Oolong say that during the casting of the oracle it suffices to hide sweet nectar or honey behind a corner of the divination board to influence the motion of the termites and hence the answer. What appears to happen is that the invisible system is a space of freedom and choice, a secret kept tight by humans to persuade the spirits that they rule everything, when they actually don't.
Conclusion
We understand theocracy to be a system where social life is encompassed into the religious sphere. In the case I presented this is indeed the case, for “spirits rule everything”. On the other hand, in some realms human choice and freedom are used as banners for a system based on representation and choice, where religion is just one of many choices an individual takes. The case I presented encompasses both systems, and it is neither of them. The Oolong political system is indeed a theocracy, but one where the main interaction between “religion” and “politics” is resistance and deceit. However the spirits are useful, and without them they wouldn't have termites to eat and the water would run out, birds would stop offering themselves to hunters and rain would never fall. The spirits do “rule everything”, a man cannot make rain fall or persuade a bird to land on its lands. Human are free to choose but they have to choose to be ruled by the spirits. At the same time, spirits are not rulers, but slaves of a lie, the lie that humans are not free. The Oolong political system is a paradox, but it works perfectly, and for centuries (although this is only a guess for Oolongs do not have historical records) people have been living their lives in the way of the spirits. The Oolong political system shows us that politics can be way more dynamic than our heavy static systems, that freedom is a shadow of slavery and vice versa. If this is an invitation to look beyond those sluggish options we are presented with, it is also an invitation to pay attention to invisible systems, for they exist behind every political structure and they might be more influential than we expect.