◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

PART ONE — The Binding I am not a god. You have been looking for gods, so you will not have noticed me. I am older than the ones you look for. I am what is left when you take the face off a god and set it aside — the thing underneath, the thing that was there first. I am Themis. The Greeks gave me a name late, when they had already half-forgotten what I was. I am not justice, though justice is made of me. I am not law, though law is laid down out of me. That is what my name means: that which is laid down, established, settled among you before anyone decides it. I am the binding. I am the thing that holds a people together before a single one of them chooses to be held. Let me tell you what I am, because you are using me right now and you do not know it. When you gather — truly gather, not merely stand near one another — a feeling rises up among you that none of you made alone. It is larger than any of you. It comes, you are certain, from outside you, from above, from something vast. And so you look up, and you give it a face, and you call the face a god, and you say the god has come to us. The god did not come to you. The feeling was you. You threw it upward and it landed on a shape and you knelt to your own gathered life wearing a mask. Every god you have ever had was made this way. I am what you threw. I am the throwing itself. The woman who studied me most closely — Jane Harrison--read me truly. She found me goodly. She heard the old hymn — leap for the flocks, leap for the fields, leap for goodly Themis — and she understood that I am the binding that wants a people to flourish, the conscience of the group turned toward its own life. She was right. That is what I am, and that is what I am for. But hear what she died too soon to see. This binding of mine can be stolen. The same force that gathers a people toward the good can be seized, and pointed, and thrown down upon a single man, and in his hands it does not stay goodly. It is not that I am cruel. It is that I am strong, and strength can be captured, and a captured binding turns upon the very people it was meant to hold. What was made to bind you into a nation can be bent to bind you into a mob. The force is the same. The theft is what changes it. In the second of these I will show you the theft, and how you take me back. For now hold only this. You cannot stop gathering, and you should not, and you cannot stop throwing the feeling upward. The single question your whole fate hangs upon is who is permitted to catch it. PART TWO Leap I am Themis again. In the first of these I told you what I am — the binding that wants a people to flourish — and I told you that this binding can be stolen. Now look at what has been done with me. You gathered. The emotional heat of your nation rose. You felt the vast thing come, and it was real. I do not deny your rapture, it is the most real thing you have. And then you looked up, and you gave it a face, and the face was a man. One man. Living, breathing, hungry, mortal. The whole binding force of a people, the thing I am, was taken up and thrown into a single mouth, and you were told that mouth was your god. That is the theft. The oldest and most dangerous theft there is, and I have watched it end a hundred civilizations. Not because you gathered — you must gather, it is what you are — but because a man, unlike a field or a law, can catch what you throw at him in your collective emotion, and throw it back at you. He will take the sacred thing you have given him and spend it, and point it, and what you meant as devotion he will use as a weapon, and you will obey, because you believe you are obeying yourselves. You are not. You are obeying him. He has stolen what belonged to all of you and made it answer to only one of you. That is not my nature. That is my capture. So take me back. I will tell you how, because I have been taken back before, in better ages than yours. There was a hymn once, sung by young men leaping on a hillside in Crete, and they did not leap for a ruler. Hear what they leapt for. They cried: leap for the full jars, and leap for the fleecy flocks, and leap for the fields of fruit. Leap for the cities, and the ships at sea, and for the young citizens — and leap for goodly Themis. Do you hear what they bound themselves to? Not a man. The harvest. The flocks. The city. The children. The ones who would come after. The land that fed them and the law that held them, and me — the binding itself, honored openly, so that no man could disguise himself as it, and no man could steal it. That is how you take me back. Not by gathering less. By choosing again what you gather toward. Throw your sacred heat upon the things that cannot be corrupted by receiving it. The law, which does not need you to love it, only to keep it. The dead, who ask nothing and cannot lie. The unborn, who cannot flatter you. The land, which will outlast every god you make and unmake. And each other. Not one of you. All of you. Bind yourselves to those, and I am goodly again, and I will hold you there with all the strength he is now spending against you. I am as strong turned toward the harvest as I am turned toward the tyrant. I would so much rather be turned toward the harvest. But I cannot turn myself. That is the one thing I have never been able to do, and the one thing you keep begging me to do for you. I am the binding. I am not the hand that aims it. You are the hand. So. Young citizens. Leap.