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4. The Path to the Axial Transformation of Religious Consciousness

In the process, the traditional ritual practices are transformed into state rites — that is, into forms of symbolic self-representation of bureaucratic political rule. Society as a whole is represented in the figure of the ruler.
Habermas might be right here, but, despite the widespread criticism of the Graeber and Wengrow book The Dawn of Everything, one of their core ideas is true. Not every society simply just transformed their ritual practices into state rites. Some societies did not have anything that resembled a modern state bureaucracy. Habermas is too loose here because he is doing too much and too little with the book, to me. From a philosophical perspective, this might be fine enough to appeal to. But if he is trying to counter arguments against Western philosophical exceptionalism, the looseness and quickness of these statements do not help his case.

Habermas continues:

The term 'the political' in contrast to 'politics' in the sense of institutionalized exercise of power, refers to the legitimizing alloy of politics and religion that arises in this symbolic dimension.
It is clear that Habermas is using this book to provide a genealogy of things that occur much later. We see the Schmittean, Heideggerian, and Derridian reference here to the "political". To the modern reader, when we think of politics we think of "parliamentary politics". The term "office politics" refers to this idea when it seems like there are stakeholder disagreements, backroom wheeling and dealing, etc. Left and right wing critics of parliamentary politics will refer to a vague "political", a supra-politics that has nothing to do with politics but everything to do with it. For moderns, it is hard to square this idea with any sort of meaningful way to act in "modernity", since most of our modern Western societies follow the parliamentary model of politics. That is, it is hard to translate Heidegger's idea of "the political" into any meaningful way to act. For Heidegger, his "resoluteness" made him at once become very actively involved in the Nazi party and then resigned from any sense of politics after, seemingly oscillating between two extremes of politics.

With this practice, people want and are supposed to ensure that the all-sustaining cosmic occurrences take their prescribed course; the magical idea remains prevalent that people must do something if their own destiny is not to fall prey to the irrational interventions of angry gods or the tricks of malevolent demons.
This line to me seems still too much of an outsider perspective on the internal beliefs. It might be too hard for us to try and "strongman" the epistemological perspective of magical thinking, but Habermas seems to give up at times for the sake of brevity.

Ritual human sacrifice does not seem to have existed in the early civilizations of the Near East. A curious exception is the ritual of the 'substitute king', which was occasionally practised as a response to baleful omens in ancient Babylonian times and in Hittite Asia Minor, and was again repeatedly used during a period of crisis in the Neo-Assyrian Empire in the 7th century BCE. In this ritual, 'a substitute king was generally appointed for 100 days. He was supposed to ensure the king's well-being by deflecting the calamity foretold for the real king onto himself. After 100 days, the substitute king was killed.'
Habermas thinks Girard goes too far, but at least half of the examples cited are in favor of Girard's exact thesis. Girard describes how in some societies, the way the founding murder was ritualized was in situations exactly like this. The scapegoat actually becomes more effective if it is given a role internal to the society, and actually becomes a focal point for the mimetic desires. This also shows some of the sacred origins of kings, in that, they were originally a ritual scapegoat that ended up becoming transformed into a permanent kingship.

In the Near Eastern kingdoms ... particularly in Egypt, deities likewise appeared as rulers. They ruled as imperial gods over entire states, such as Assur over Assyria, Marduk over Babylon and Amun or Amun-re over Egypt, or as civic gods over cities, such as Enlil over Nippur, Ishtar over Uruk, Re over Helopolis, Amun over Thebes, and Athena over Athens. But these gods ruled indirectly rather than directly ... On earth they were represented in their rule by the king.
This is why the role of religion, especially in Christianity, benefits from the separation of the Church and State. I think that it was not just a rebuke of paganism in the Bible, but also it was a rebuke of all earthly powers as such, and why Milton coined the term "pandaemonium", the "all-demon-place". Satan appears thus as a the ruler of these demons. Even more so why Christian nationalism is a profound perversion of Christianity and a continuation of the totalitarian streak in any Popperian "positive" value system. Talk about "the political" and parliamentary politics!

Pandaemonium

Habermas later references how the gods increasingly became constructed by political orders. We see this in examples in stories such as earlier vs older myths of gods where the pantheon changes and the major god or gods of the pantheon change with the political powers in the region. There are thus examples of syncretic gods like Serapis that seem to be merging of different gods as social orders merged as well. Serapis was literally constructed in this fashion out of Greek and Egyptian gods.

Habermas then writes that the elites and intellectuals that engaged in a revolt of magical thinking did so because this epistemological framework was "overtaxed" by the accumulated knowledge of the world. This idea is repeated from before and most of the remainder of the chapter is elaborating on this idea. He concludes:

My hypothesis aims at the conclusion that the axial worldviews transformed the sacred for the first time into a power that promises a saving justice by linking the attainment of salvation with an ethically demanding path of salvation, hence by explicitly making salvation from earthly misfortune contingent on the observance of a universalistic ethos.
This ends part II of the book. Habermas will then spend time elucidating this hypothesis in the Axial age worldviews. We can easily see this with Judaism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, that I am more familiar with. With the emphasis on the individual as an active subject, one that is not passive in the face of fate, a critical, self-conscious epistemological framework was born.