The Digital God by Indick William

Author:Indick, William
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2015-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

Iconoclasm

I will destroy your high places, cut down your incense altars and pile your dead bodies on the lifeless forms of your idols, and I will abhor you.—Leviticus 26:29–31

The archaeological ruins of ancient societies as well as the historical narratives that have survived through the ages suggest that it was standard practice for invading armies to make a point of burning the temples, decapitating the sacred statues, crushing the altars, and smashing the idols of their conquered foes. A vestige of this practice can be seen today, in flag burnings, the burning of leaders in effigy, the burning of sacred books such as the Bible and Koran, etc.47 Though these acts of iconoclasm are now perceived as symbolic acts of psychological warfare and propaganda; the origin of the practice may very well be in the ancient belief that a god could actually be destroyed, if you destroy its physical embodiment on the earthly plane. One of the reasons why the voices of the gods retreated so hastily up to the Heavens during the era of the Bronze Age Collapse,48 was because so many gods were literally killed, either at the hands of bellicose men, or by the fury of Nature, during the tumultuous periods of destruction in the second millennium BC, when perpetual warfare, diasporas, massive floods, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, fires, and other calamities, not only dispossessed people of their homes, but dispossessed them of their souls as well, by killing their gods.

As a brutal method of dominating a subject people, the toppling, smashing, or beheading of the conquered peoples’ idols would be quite effective. This was more than just a blow to the enemy’s morale, more than just a symbolic stroke. Destroying the idol killed the god. Iconoclasm in the Bronze Age was deicide. In killing an enemy’s god, it snuffed out their collective spirit, vanquishing the protective and commanding deity of the community, and silencing the voice of authority through which the peoples’ will was directed.

Killing the god cut off the individual’s intra-psychic connection with his own soul, and it also cut off the people’s collective connection with the communal spirit. The invading people, after destroying the gods of their vanquished foes, would then erect their own idols, establishing their own god as the new god of the conquered people. The conquered ones may, at first, be forced to bow and worship the new gods at the point of a sword. But soon, the powerful function of spiritual perception would kick in, and the people, upon gazing at the living idol, would hear its voice as clearly as their old god. The vision and voice of the new god they beheld was all the more powerful, as it was this god who defeated their previous god, the soldiers being just pawns in the chess game of the gods. The conquering god, in all likelihood, was not loved but feared, much like the gods that came before him, and the ones to follow as well. Machiavelli’s famous dictum about princes49 is a restatement of our own archaic thoughts about gods.

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