The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

by David Graeber

The Great Sun was a sovereign in the classical sense of the term, which is to say he embodied a principle that was seen as higher than law. Therefore no law applied to him. This is a very common bit of cosmological reasoning that we find, in some form or another, almost anywhere from Bologna to Mbanza Congo. Just as gods (or God) are not seen as bound by morality – since only a principle existing beyond good and evil could have created good and evil to begin with – so ‘divine kings’ cannot be judged in human terms; behaving in arbitrarily violent ways to anyone around them is itself proof of their transcendent status. Yet at the same time, they are expected to be creators and enforcers of systems of justice. Such with the Natchez too. The Great Sun was said to be descended from a child of the Sun who came to earth bearing a universal code of laws, among the most prominent of which were proscriptions against theft and murder. Yet the Great Sun himself ostentatiously violated those laws on a regular basis, as if to prove his identification with a principle prior to law and, therefore, able to create it.