The Pyramid as a Transhistorical Metaphor of Power in Greece and India

By Vivek Gupta and Denis Maksimov

7 August 2020

This essay presents pyramidal power structures from Ancient Greek and Indian cultures that have persisted and transformed throughout history. These cases offer counterpoints to modern nationalist political and economic categories of the so-called Global East or South that are at odds with a longer durée of humanistic thought.

The Theogony, one of the earliest ancient Greek epics, is a pivotal work of literature for understanding political imaginaries. It was written around 700 BC by Hesiod, who is among the earliest personalities in Classical literature. The Theogony outlines the origins of the world, the gods and, most importantly – the political order. It was read, copied, altered, and translated for millennia after it was written. 

The Theogony narrates a story familiar to many of us. Over a period of time, after overcoming some obstacles, the patriarch attains eternal power and establishes perpetual peace on his own terms. Hesiod transforms a mythology, a collection of loosely connected stories, into a “mythography” – a vertically, pyramidally organised hierarchy of the sacred. 

According to the Theogony, before anything existed, there was a primordial and genderless Chasm. Then, the female Earth appeared, followed by genderless Hell and Desire. Chasm gave birth to Darkness and Night, and these two gave birth to the Day and Bright Air. Earth made a male equal to herself called Heaven. This whole array of melded deities/concepts followed further in a dry catalogue – something for which Hesiod earned his reputation alongside the more theatrical Homeric Odyssey and Iliad. The Theogony’s story continues with male contestations involving several acts of castration and cannibalism. It concludes with Zeus becoming the dominant figure and distributor of honours among the other deities – perpetually pacifying them. Zeus establishes the ideals of an everlasting, vertical, and pyramidal empire. 

Everyone and everything else in Zeus’s (Διός in Greek) cosmos derives its meaning and role in the order from the central figure. This was further adapted by Christians as God. In his characterisation of Zeus, Hesiod self-fashions himself as Zeus and as a chosen prophet of the ideal political order led by the wise God settled in heavens after several intergenerational wars. Zeus, a male sky-god, subdues the female Earth who preceded his existence. His power reaches the pinnacle as he is the provider of meaning and definitions, such as “justice,” “freedom,” “love,” and so on. Since then, the core concepts of politics, ethics and morality were taught to the wise man as the derivatives of the male-dominated, imperial mythography. 

The narrative of the Theogony laid the foundation for theological texts in the so-called West which followed in the twilight of ancient Greek culture’s efflorescence. Zeus became God, and Dionysus (literally meaning “the son of the god,” the god of life and wine) transformed into Jesus. The pantheon of Greek gods transformed into an array of Saints. In the Post-Renaissance and Industrial Age, the constitutional orders and secularised regimes of power re-translated the Christian essence in a new aesthetic form among which are prophetic political ideologies and a variety of nationalist imperialisms.

Turning to our contemporary world, God is the Market (the powerful invisible hand) and Jesus evolved into the concept of technological innovation. The rosary, which replaced earlier the pagan altars, has become an iPhone. 

In the meantime, despite these aesthetic transformations, the essential structure of power has not changed. The market produces the actual definition of everything from marriage to justice, just like Zeus did for the ancient Greeks in the polytheistic pantheon. Akin to the Christian God, it is meant to be an ideal pacifier of conflicts as well as the source of goodness and positive transformations. The idea of salvation through technology (which leads to happiness and stability for all) is approached with sacred piety as corporations promise to boost the perpetual growth and infinite accumulation within the modern theological regime (i.e. a belief in the invisible hand). The normalising power of the contemporary logic of neoliberal free marketisation created the definitions of life and existence in accordance with the necessity to keep this system’s values non-negotiable. It has become natural and therefore invisible. 

In the Theogony, the primordial female Earth is the source of all the stratagems employed by men contending for power, including Zeus and his father Kronos. The two queer children of Zeus, asexual Athena and polysexual Dionysus, have a myriad of vernacular storylines concatenated around them in which they are capable of overthrowing an everlasting patriarchy and becoming the harbingers of the new world to come. Does this not provide an entertaining possibility for intergenerational juncture to challenge the natural status of the present theological system of values led by the market? 

Denis Maksimov

The Venice Biennale with which PiraMMMida coincides is largely the product of Western modernity and nationalism. With money ruling the game and advertisers, promoters, and gallerists its players, the Biennale itself is a pyramid of the art world. PiraMMMida purports to be devoted to the Politics and Aesthetics of the Global East. But, where and when is the Global East? The Global South—an equally objectionable term—again defines itself in relation to an unsaid centre. When we speak directionally, we must ask ourselves, East of what? And, South of what? Where is the centre of power and our cosmos? Finally, if terms like Global East and South are frameworks that result from a post-Cold War nationalism, how do we understand the world before nationalism?

For this reason, the two comparative examples from Greece and India before modernity and nationalism allow us to loosely historicize the world’s pyramids as we understand them today. They both put pressure on the artificial cultural boundaries established by the national identities that the Venice pavilions stage and perform.

As one dominant narrative relates, there was Greece, then Rome, then Europe. Yet, Greek thought, as it is contained in the Theogony, is not only Western knowledge and modern Europe is not its only heir. From the ancient, late antique, and medieval periods, Greek knowledge was selectively adapted into Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian. Like Greek, these were cosmopolitan idioms and language practices that spread over much of Eurasia. At some point in the fourth century, for instance, it was because of the adaptation of personified planetary deities from Hellenistic sciences in Sanskrit knowledge systems that the seven-day week evolved in India. According to the research of Daud Ali, the central Indian king Bhoja (ca. 1000-55) adapted a Greek text on mechanical automata into Sanskrit. Similar Greek texts on techne were also transcreated into Arabic from at least the ninth century and into Persian during the early modern period. 

One model of political power in classical Indian thought was the notion of the mandala. Like the pyramid, the mandala has a geometrical denotation, namely of a circle. Richard Eaton writes that according to these classical norms, “territory was imagined as something like a large chess-board on which kings manoeuvred with political allies and against rivals with a view to creating an idealized political space called the Circle of States, or mandala.” Mandalas served as microcosms of the universe that manifested in architecture, city plans, landscape, and diagrams. The rajamandala or Circle of States was formed of concentric circles with the king and capital at the centre surrounded by circles of allies, enemies, and enemies’ enemies. These ethics were codified in Arthashastra works of statecraft, of which Kautilya’s second-century Sanskrit text is primary.

An early-modern illustrated encyclopaedia produced in the Central Indian court of Bijapur and written by Sultan ‘Ali ‘Adil Shah (r. 1558-79) codifies a range of emblems of political power, some of which take pyramidal form. Dated 1570, this Persian manuscript is known as the Stars of Sciences or Nujum al-‘Ulum and its significance and authorship have been thoroughly re-evaluated by historian Emma Flatt. My own research has situated this manuscript within the genre of the Islamicate cosmography—a popular encyclopaedia of the cosmos. The Stars of the Sciences is a massive didactic work that synthesised multiple knowledge systems from Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, and vernacular Indic languages. It showed how a sultan sought to explain how supernatural forces controlled the world and his sovereign responsibility to master the powers of the planets and the earth’s guardians.

Following two long chapters on the heavens and cosmos, the manuscript commences a section on chakrams, a word that literally means wheel and, here, suggests specific emblems of kingship. For, the idealized king is referred to as the chakravartin (literally, ‘he whose wheels are moving’). This chapter on chakrams contains numerous schematized examples of a ruler’s auspicious accoutrements including royal parasols (chatr, fig. 2), the flywhisk, royal fan, and palanquin.

One of these chakrams are a hierarchical four-sided throne (sihnhasan, literally, ‘lion throne’) and another stylized throne. These thrones, made to look as pyramids, are the idealized seats for kings (padshahs) (fig. 2). The various stories of this throne imply the startified levels of society that the king sits above.

The painting of the Lion Throne Chakram (fig. 4) is the pinnacle of these emblems of kingship. Although the chakravartin sits at the top of the page in a lotus framed by gold illumination and throne finials, his seat is at the centre flanked by peacocks. The painter innovates an abstract mandala with various circles of peoples and royal emblems, such as rows of leogryphs surrounding the central lotus. We imagine the pyramidality of his power at the top with each story emanating both outwards and below him. While this painting has been reproduced countless times, the diagrams that anticipate it earlier in the chapter have not been. Both the other thrones as well as the Matrika Chakram suggest this pyramidical structure. 

All of this demonstrates how that the vocabulary of the chakrams amplifies the ideology of the mandala and its pyramidical nature.

Vivek Gupta

Both the Theogony and Stars of the Sciences contain transhistorical metaphors. For the Theogony, the power behind these metaphors, such as Athena and Dionysus, is their potential to break down the repetitive cycle of pyramidal reproduction of the patriarchal hierarchy. The Stars of the Sciences contains an entire vocabulary of kingship that can be appropriated to endow one with a central position of power. The power mandala is not necessarily geographically bound. In light of these deeply mythologised long histories of power, the so-called Global South, North, East, and West are in fact are nothing new. And, what makes them deeply disturbing is that these terms are used without any clear definition (1) of what makes the centre and how that central position of power is performed. 

(1) Editorial note: See, however, the working definition of Global East employed by PPV.

Vivek Gupta + Denis Maksimov