Historians have always claimed that the myths of celestial kings were nothing more than images of local kings and kingship rites projected onto the sky. But comparative analysis will demonstrate that the reverse is true. The memory of the creator-king came first, and it was this remarkable memory which provided the mythical aura supporting and legitimizing kings the world over.[1]

Killing the king became a secret act in modernity. Historians didn't convince the revolutionary that the king isn't divine. The murder of kings isn't public but something of a court intrigue. The leaders of a mob kill a man to get rid of a king. What's the point in talking about them? Nowadays it doesn't take a hero to kill a hero. Bullets equalize the strong and the wicked. A child with a gun could be David. He has no memory. Period.

Of course, we know that according to universal tradition, every king was, in a magical way, the Universal Monarch reborn. But this is an academic issue. What is King if God is dead? What is a king? Another human. Countries without kings are the leaders.

The original concept may appear as self-flattery, but it actually has more to do with the *burden* of kings: the requirement that the king live up to the mythical aura of kings. Never was there a king in early times who did not wear the dress of a mythical god--the model of the good ruler. Whatever the celestial, founding king had achieved, it was the duty of the present king, pharaoh, or emperor to duplicate, at least through symbolic repetition. For such was the first test of a *good* king. [2]

O King's Rights are King's Duties!

TRIPLE TASK OF ADAM[3]

On a level of comfort our modern commoner lives like a king. Do you expect him to be a servant of the society (Friderix's principle)? Well, he is not in a position of superiority to others: a welfare recipient is provided with living -- the same with a king. He has all the benefits of a king without king's responsibilities. In fact, today's society, and not religion as before, guards against anybody's superiority. Paid policeman or soldier, they are in the field of special authority (a "man with the gun," but a part of the big machine = state of power) and we PAID them to have firm control over them. This expension of the model of noble living on all citizens came together with the opposite principle, when we require all to work.

"Military communism" in Russia (1918) removed the economy of labor relations. There was an order of monk-warriors (knights of revolution). "Party of a new kind" (Lenin) -- where any job was political and was an appointment (almost as in nobility). The society was divided into the sacred members (party) and the rest. The party member had no personal divine rights (and no persona); he owned nothing but everything was in the possession of the state, based on ideology. Factually, everything belonged to the party.

That was the ideological ground for the totalitarian state, and, eventually, for uncontrolled corruption. After the sons of the Great Revolution executed their fathers (the normal mode of succession in monarchy), they had no memory of being underground, in exile, opposition. They knew nothing but power. Stalin was the last to die in 1954, when the communist clan of children and grandchildren of the revolutionaries took over. It took another generation (1985-Perestroika) to dissolve the ideology (and as a result the state became self-destructive). The same with Mao and his cultural revolution. In Ethiopia Mengistu had to complete this process in one decade.
What still is missing in Ethiopia -- technology. The best tool of providing king's living for everyone...

[King as a super-man (superior being): magic presence, the bridge between human and the divine.
Now: supreme to whom? To other people? No way!]

EMPEROR IS THE MODEL FOR A POMO MAN

Contrary to what is usually thought, it is the man of excellence, and not the common man, who lives in essential servitude. Life has no savour for him unless he makes it consist in service to something transcendental. Hence he does not look upon the necessity of serving as an oppression. When, by chance, such necessity is lacking, he grows restless and invents some new standard, more difficult, more exigent, with which to coerce himself. This is life lived as a discipline -- the noble life. Nobility is defined by the demands it makes on us -- by obligations, not by rights. Noblesse oblige. "To live as one likes is plebeian; the noble man aspires to order and law" (Goethe). The privileges of nobility are not in their origin concessions or favors; on the contrary, they are conquests. And their maintenance supposes, in principle, that the privileged individual is capable of reconquering them, at any moment, if it were necessary, and anyone were to dispute them.*(2) Private rights or privileges are not, then, passive possession and mere enjoyment, but they represent the standard attained by personal effort. On the other hand, common rights, such as those "of the man and the citizen," are passive property, pure usufruct and benefit, the generous gift of fate which every man finds before him, and which answers to no effort whatever, unless it be that of breathing and avoiding insanity. I would say, then, that an impersonal right is held, a personal one is upheld. [G VI]

Ortega E Gasset is pointing at something which could be the extreme of nobility in the case of Being the King. Absolute Monarch is the absolute limitation. Haile Sellassie was the last and ultimate emperor. He was and played the King of Kings.

...

Noble means the "well known," that is, known by everyone, famous, he who has made himself known by excelling the anonymous mass. It implies an unusual effort as the cause of his fame. Noble, then, is equivalent to effortful, excellent. The nobility or fame of the son is pure benefit. The son is known because the father made himself famous. He is known by reflection, and in fact, hereditary nobility has an indirect character, it is mirrored light, lunar nobility, something derived from the dead. The only thing left to it of living, authentic, dynamic is the impulse it stirs in the descendant to maintain the level of effort reached by the ancestor. Always, even in this altered sense, noblesse oblige. The original noble lays an obligation on himself, the noble heir receives the obligation with his inheritance. But in any case there is a certain contradiction in the passing-on of nobility from the first noble to his successors. The Chinese, more logical, invert the order of transmission; it is not the father who ennobles the son, but the son who, by acquiring noble rank, communicates it to his forbears, by his personal efforts bringing fame to his humble stock. Hence, when granting degrees of nobility, they are graduated by the number of previous generations which are honored; there are those who ennoble only their fathers, and those who stretch back their fame to the fifth or tenth grandparent. The ancestors live by reason of the actual man, whose nobility is effective, active -- in a word: is not was.* (Gasset)

How and who could outperform Haile Sellassie? He couldn't have done it himself at the end of his life. He ended where he started -- in relations with himself. He withdrew from the world.

If Chinese wisdom is right HIM famed the ancestors, his efforts were directed at the past, regardless of his reforms of the present for the future of Ethiopia. Maybe there is logic in the modern amnesia of the country. The history of nobility was over and people on the streets of Addis Ababa had no interest in this foreign culture.

What is the inside picture of the monarch?
God, king, man -- always single. The price of power, freedom, self-awareness -- solitude. HIM did not share his thought with anyone. Not even with paper. A man of silence, he was used to the position of a monk. His thoughts and personal feelings were between him and God. Tafari was a prisoner of Haile Sellassie. It was his choice and destiny.

Relations with yourself as with "others" -- performance, personal (private) and public, the conflict.

Relationships with your-selves: democratic process?

The aristocracy didn't put a fight. At the time of revolution there was only an empty shell of nobility. The inner tension on which nobility lives was gone. The Crown was ceremonial rituals, no more than the British royal house since high modernity.

King as the nearest image of Father (God).

King is alienated from life.

Humanity is not his family (in human sense): they don't (and shouldn't) understand him, they share of nothing in his experience; the division is the extreme one. He doesn't belong to heaven and doesn't belong to earth.

After the Age of Revolution loses its rage and will turn into legitimate past -- and the postmodern is an indication of this aging modernity -- we will rediscover the secrets of nobility. Not only the disappearance of the openly communist rhetoric but the reappearance of forgotten kings is an indication of cultural vacuum.

One reason constitutional monarchies appear to be exceptional in the degree of unity and stability which they enjoy may be that the monarch is a center of national loyalty above politics. A distinguished English lawyer expressed it this way: "One can be a loyal subject of the Crown while regarding the Prime Minister and his Party as a national disaster." (Austria 2000)

New logic of the benefits of royalty: "political impartiality would not apply in the case of a President who was politically selected. (However, some of those who argue in favour of a republic are reported as saying that the President, however chosen, would be above politics)." (Australia 2000)

And we thought that Machiavelli was the ultimate politician. They were philosophers next to contemporary leaders, who are the pure politicians. They are the servants -- they can't have independent minds. There is nothing there for them to think about but the politics.

King rules but does not govern: thinkers. Masses govern but can't rule. Think about it....

The (constitutional) monarchy has undergone a process of democratization of at least the same magnitude as the "monarchization" of the democracy. Kings for a year, for a day, even fifteen minutes! Rotate the power of the powerless! Rent the palace! What is our hotel industry for? Limousine service, catering, restaurants -- the last must be served! I don't need blood line, you need money. Let's rotate the role playing; one day a master, next day -- a slave. What is our idea of vacation? Did you ever heard the saying "The customer is a king"? Why not "president"? Doesn't sound right.

Too late to talk about Revolt of the Masses.

The Mob is a king, both during the revolt, and after, when it forms Revolutionary Society of Equals.

It is always violent, even when it's an organized one. Especially when it's well-organized. This soft violence is fully analyzed by Foucault. Marxism is a over century old experience to miss the points of the advanced power technology. A careful reader of American texts could notice that the laws of democracy protect "human" rights. "Human" is a historical definition, not an absolute. Communists openly rejected "abstract humanity"; they were for the rights of the "Soviet humans." "Human" is something which is a mutual feature in you and me. Our common characteristics, not our differences. Individual rights gave in to human rights. Did you notice?

Monarchization of democracy (conversion): president as a celebrity. The recent auctions of American royalty, the Camelots, and belongings of the first lady J. Who buys them? The kings. The customers. It takes a lot of money to get (buy) the mass media time and the mass itself.

Popular king, people's favorite = clown. Leadership = people's will. We elect president not for actual management but for a representation. We need the figure.
Collective conscience must be a reality since we politically act upon it.

Paradise: land of no fear. Our leaders are likable, good-to-all-guys. The principle of electability makes them into non-rulers and non-governors. Populism (love) and monarchy (fear): in the past they loved their king because he was "theirs" by God's providence. Now they like their choice. The king served his people by God's will. If the king is my true servant, paid by me, hired like a taxi driver, how can I respect him more than a mailman? If the president doesn't rule, who does? We (too many) can't. How could we govern? By faking it. Instead of God, he has to please me.
Embracing the slavery: if they don't submit themselves to one man, they have to submit themselves to the last, the lowest man. The slave. To all of them. Take it, teaches the new Saint of the Idea of Power, Foucault, the oppression will make you stronger. In resistance the suppressed forms its individuality. Some do.
They lie; democracy is the most oppressive machine. I would fight and die for it but this commitment to the best of social mass-organization can't force me to lie... Well, I crossed the border of my African Book; this thought belongs to my American Identity manuscript. Sorry.

St. Michael Ethiopian Orthodox Church

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