chapter 3 Not of This World …? Religious Power and Imperial Rule in Eurasia, ca. Thirteenth – ca. Eighteenth Century* Peter Rietbergen Eine politisch-religiöse Feierlichkeit hat einen unendlichen Reiz. Wir sehen die irdische Majestät vor Augen, umgeben von allen Symbolen ihrer Macht. Aber indem sie sich vor der himmlischen beugt, bringt sie uns die Gemeinschaft beider vor die Sinne. Denn auch der einzelne ver- mag seine Verwandtschaft mit der Gottheit nur dadurch zu betätigen, dass er sich unterwirft und anbetet. Or: A political-religious ceremony is hugely attractive. We watch the Majesty that rules on this earth, surrounded by all the symbols of its power. But as it bows before the heavenly Majesty, it reminds us of the relationship between the two. For everyone only can show his relationship with the Divine if he subjects himself to it and adores it. j. von goethe, Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 5— synthesizing (his) impressions of various imperial coronations in eighteenth- century Frankfurt. ∵ * I would like to thank my colleague, Prof. Dr. Wim Boot (Leiden University) for a critical reading of the second draft—of many—of this essay. I also owe thanks to Prof. Dr. Maaike van Berkel, Prof. Dr. Jeroen Duindam, and Prof. Dr. Jos Gommans, my fellow coordinators in the Eurasian Empires Project: their comments certainly helped me to better structure my text, as did the critical reading by Drs. Theo Drijvers. © peter rietbergen, 2018 | doi: 10.1163/9789004315716_004 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by-nc-nd License. Peter Rietbergen - 9789004315716 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:30:03PM via free access 130 rietbergen Introduction: On the Relationship between Religious and Secular Power Before, as I will do below, explaining the choices that have structured this contribution, I need to explain some of the, not to everyone unproblematic, concepts that I propose to use, viz. the notion of religion, the relationship between religion and (secular) power, and the various types of rulership that, over time, have sought to combine these two. Religion Increasingly, Eurasians have difficulty in understanding (or making others understand) religion(s)—certainly deistic-fideistic religion(s)—as a central element in man’s thinking and acting. Yet, back in 1912, in his Les formes élé- mentaires de la vie religieuse, Emile Durkheim reiterated the notion he had expressed earlier, viz. that religion was the prime motor of societal integration, concluding that most if not all representations of society will, on closer study, show the significance of religious culture.1 But it was, a few years later, Rudolf Otto who defined religion as the ‘mysterium tremendum et fascinans’, the mys- tery of the forces that a given society feels are beyond its understanding and control.2 It materializes in sacred places, sacred objects, and sacred acts, and in people who, by their association therewith, also become sacred. What is sacred is what a society feels it wants to remember, preserve, and transmit, including from one generation to another. Thus, the ‘sacred’, in its multifarious, mostly visualized forms, becomes the condensation of a prevail- ing, dominant societal order, showing and prescribing what people are sup- posed to know,3 to ‘believe’ as true, as normal. Therefore, religion is neither an eminently individual and, even, solitudinal state-of-mind, nor a solely collec- tive one, but a complex mixture of both. It always expresses itself in sacred, i.e. 1 Cfr. also the short summary of Durkheim’s ideas in: G. Pickel, Religionssoziologie: Eine Ein- führung in zentrale Themenbereiche (Wiesbaden, 2011) 75–87. 2 R. Otto, Das Heilige (Munich, 1917). Of course, Otto’s work then influenced the thoughts of M. Eliade as, e.g., in his: Traité dʿHistoire des Religions (Paris, 1949), and its partial re- working in: The Sacred and the Profane (New York, 1959), of which a German version had already appeared in 1957. Also: W. Paden, Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study of Religion (Boston, 1994). For an up-to-date survey of the problems involved, see: R. Rappaport, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (Cambridge, 1999). 3 E.g., T. Holert, ‘Bildfähigkeiten. Visuelle Kultur, Repräsentationskritik und Politik der Sicht- barkeit’,in: idem, ed., Imagineering.VisuelleKulturundPolitikderSichtbarkeit (Cologne, 2000) 14–33. Peter Rietbergen - 9789004315716 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:30:03PM via free access not of this world …? 131 ceremonial or ritual acts, often performed by, or with the help of, sacred men, or women, in sacred spaces and centring on sacred objects though it need not necessarily address concrete ‘gods’.4 Although ceremony and ritual are not, strictly speaking, the same, I will use the words rather indiscriminately. They both are, I feel, forms of special- ized behaviour meant to constitute—rather than only represent—hierarchical relations and thus to create power. Ritual, to be understood as the more encom- passing concept, is a mechanism, mostly in the form of dramatized cultural performance, that integrates thought—beliefs, ideas—and actions. Persons in power or seeking power will always try to use ritual to affect views within society, thus, inevitably, limiting individual autonomy.5 Ceremonies and ritu- als constantly serve to (re-) connect the (collective) emotions needed to create the permanence of a community, a society, or, even, a state by, amongst other things, taking care of and control over collective prosperity.6 Many feel that in our ‘modern’ world, non-religious, so-called rational or civic arguments—often presented as ingrained and indeed universally human— rightly and logically have replaced (older) belief systems as foundations of culture in general, and of power and politics in particular. In Europe, and, indeed, the West, this process started, slowly, in the eighteenth century, first among parts of the educated elites, and became more widespread in the second half of the twentieth century. In South and East Asia it started later, but, again, became more general in the late twentieth century. In the worlds of Islam it started, hesitatingly, in the twentieth century, but yet has not become mainstream ideology. As part of this development, in academia the majority of students now are ignorant of even the basics of the history of Eurasian religious cultures other than their own. Moreover, most of those scholars who do study religious cultures do so from a disciplinary perspective. In short, the millennial realities of religious culture have become hard to grasp: we are in the throes of a process of forgetting that religion has been the driving force in human culture since time immemorial. This is the more strange since, to explore but two poles of contemporary culture, the world’s evermore booming tourist industry insofar as it is geared towards ‘visiting the past’—the larger part of this search for alternative experiences?—often directs our gaze at what, in the widest sense, I would call ‘sacred spaces’, i.e. churches, 4 E.g. S. Benoist, When Action is Faith. The Sacrificial Rituals of the Romans (Paris, 2006). 5 I follow C. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (Oxford, 2009) especially chapter 9, though the post-modern jargon is, I feel, not always convincing. 6 J. Russ, Les theories du pouvoir (Paris, 1994). Peter Rietbergen - 9789004315716 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 08:30:03PM via free access 132 rietbergen temples, mosques, monasteries, holy mountains, pilgrim roads, or at ‘sacred objects’, either remaining in situ or exhibited in museums. Indeed, many— mostlyWestern—people want to ‘(re-) live’ the sacred, participating in all kinds of sacred rituals both from the various Christian traditions and from other (world) religions. Conversely, many of yesterday’s and today’s (re-) current wars have been and still are being waged, at least partly, under the flag of religion, thus disproving predictions about the worldwide secularizing trend in cultural and societal developments.7 Religion and Power In view of the above, I feel that, certainly scholarly speaking, we shall have to continue to try to come to grips with the role of religion as an element that structures the larger society, giving cohesion to it, and, hence, as a tool of power that could and still can be manipulated by those in power or seeking power. Separating the political or social order from the religious, cosmic order is dangerous, since it tends to obscure their essential interdependence. From the beginning, human societies somehow have sought and still seek to harness the primordial forces of nature to their needs for basic survival: food, clothing, and shelter. Consequently, rulership, the ability to control a polity and give it order and cohesion, most often has been claimed successfully by those who were able to convince their fellow men they were uniquely qualified to achieve the cosmological balance that facilitates the fulfilment of those needs—in short, men (or women) who pretend(-ed) to be able to somehow manage the ‘super-natural’, that ‘fascinating and terrifying mystery’. When people decide to follow such leaders and the alleged powers invoked by them, ‘religion’ is born, expressed in faith, in belief (systems).8 To be sure, the systemic relationship between religion and power is not a scholarly, modern construct, only.9 Indeed, according to some of Eurasia’s most eminent ‘pre-modern’ political theorists, religion is a necessary element in the wielding of, especially, political power. In the sixth century bce, Confu- cius, whose, partly alleged, teachings Chinese rulers have used for more than two thousand years, stated no leader would ever be great, successful unless 7 M. Burleigh, Earthly Powers. Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London, 2005) and: Idem, Sacred Causes. Religion and Politics from the European dictators to Al Qaeda (London, 2006).