Sanction

by Roman McClay

  In a population where just a few powerful older men are able to have multiple concubines you end up with large numbers of young single men quite rapidly. Some men would have two or three wives, but the Norse sagas say that some princes and kings had limitless numbers of women.

  Isaiah shook his head as he saw this pattern repeated over and over again from Apache and Spartan and Shogun to Maasai, Maori and Mongols and right up until the 18th century in some areas of Scotland, America -both north and south- and the antipodes .

  Dudo of Saint Quentin in the 10th century was already writing on the increase in risky raiding and traveling by the scions of alpha kings in search of do-or-die plundering and child-bride acquiring.

  And the chastity of the female was always overtly declaimed as a prerequisite by such men. It’s common knowledge in all literature on masculinity that men with unfaithful wives or wives with promiscuous pasts are seen as less manly. From Nisbett to Tamler this is uncontroversial , Isaiah thought as he read the data.

  The Sagas of Laxardal and Harald and Vatnsdal all speak of concubines and wives as virgins as if any other kind of woman was unfit for the kings and princes who sought and won them. Robert Trivers had said, “when you are not a virgin your reproductive value drops to zero; for you cannot marry,” and the audience had gasped.

  Professor Collard, Isaiah read, went on:

  With elite men monopolizing an increasing percentage of woman, many low-status men would have found it difficult to marry unless they were willing to engage in risky behavior to improve wealth and status.

  Isaiah felt like he was in the Hounds of Baskerville , what was important in this account was what was not said. And the bark unheard was this: what made these, quote, elite men , in fact elite was that they had come from a long line of ancient alphas themselves. The bloodlines showed that, the DNA showed that the alpha gene passed down like a plumbline, straight down from the first massive, brilliant, martial men who conquered, physically , Isaiah repeated, conquered the world .

  These elite men, Isaiah thought, had -by force- raised their people out of the muck and took, like chimpanzee alphas do, the youngest -virginal- women as their prize -payment- for such work.

  And the hundreds, thousands of children they sired with these brides had that alpha gene too. And as they came into the world, it was up to them to fight amongst themselves, or push off to foreign lands to fight other tribes’ alphas for dominance in man’s most ubiquitous and salient milieu : other men .

  Men have been fighting hand-to-hand for millennia, Isaiah recounted, and it produced the most fearsome, awesome -in the most literal translation- and competent men . This was mankind’s mode of being from the Skaldic poems to the analects of Confucius , to the Torah itself. King David had a dozen wives, Solomon had hundreds. Women acquired at ages as young as 7 or 8 -as it was for Muhammad - and usually at ages no later than 15. All virgins, Isaiah repeated.

  Isaiah reviewed de Waal’s work, and was reminded that this is the only benefit the alpha chimp gets from his excessive food production, his taking care of the troops’ caloric needs, and his outsized martial ability and willingness to fight other chimps -from other troops- that they encounter; all the while pouring out affection and deescalating internecine squabbling by his own troop’s betas and the odalisques of his own harem. His cortisol -the stress hormone- is as high as anyone’s in the troop. All his efforts are marshalled for one thing: access to chaste mates. But the alpha must prevent his harem from mating with betas, for they have no shame. Like modern women, chimpanzee females are promiscuous. The alpha must beat the shit out of any beta that even makes eye contact with his mates, Isaiah recounted from the data of both species.

  And man was no different for all but the last 200 or 300 years. For hundreds of thousands of years, the badass got the girls, all of them, Isaiah summed up in his head knowing it would take such demotic language to reach the great mass of men and women who would read this.

  And the clan, not the family, was the unit of reproduction, Isaiah added in his review to himself. The clan . The tribe of 100, or even fewer, aligned by sons and uncles and built on this hub of their Norse wheel: the Helm of Awe .

  The Helm of Awe I wore before the sons of men in defense of my treasure; amongst all, I alone was strong. I thought to myself, for I found no power a match for my own.

  Isaiah saw the highest values of men repeated over and over again in this same vein until Christ appeared to shift man’s consciousness. Before Christ, Man knew that his own power was in the tribe, and the tribe’s power was in him.

  Might made right for all of man’s history as told in the Story of Job and the Poetic Edda as the havoc-wreaking dragon of Farnir said those words on the Helm that Isaiah had just thought.

  The brothers of Inge Haraldsson and Sigurd Munn ruled with their uncle Eystein in Norway in the 12th century as clan fought clan as far back as far forward -over thousands of years- along the straight shaft of Time’s Arrow.

  Herdebrei , means broad-shouldered, and that was the nom de guerre of the son of Sigurd Munn. The record had such growling if not yet barks , Isaiah thought, that hinted at what was always known in the blood and the bone of the iron-age man: physical strength was paramount. It settled disputes, it answered questions, it dotted i’s and crossed t’s. Power was first, last and always the way of men on this earth.

  Sigurd himself was son of Magnus III, and he physically participated in crusades like a true warrior king. This , Isaiah compared, model was in direct contrast to the effete British bullshit that -like the Apollonians before them- had overtaken the more noble and physically powerful -but more excusive, and thus outnumbered- Spartans.

  To be great means -definitionally, axiomatically- to be few .

  And the history of man, Isaiah recounted, was of great men producing so many children that eventually, betas appeared in the gene pool and infected the germline with illicit, unsanctioned, usurpations of the king by one disloyal and haughty female inside his seraglio . The 1% mutation of the alpha’s meiosis or the infection of his bride’s genome producing one runt of the litter could become problematic if that bad genome itself was allowed to reproduce. And what if two or three betas aligned? Isaiah thought. What if the king turned the other cheek?

  The Spartan killed babies that looked week on day three. It was ruthless, horrible, and right, he thought.

  Isaiah reviewed the data on Chimpanzees and how two or three betas would plot with the help of one female -she herself disgruntled and more masculine, she herself competitive- against the alpha of the troop. It was ubiquitous, and only the most trenchant and vigilant alpha who smashed such coups survived. The life of the alpha chimp was beset on all sides by such beta-male and duplicitous female plots. It was war. War by other means -politics and tricks- and hand to hand combat too; but it was always war.

  Man was no different. Great Kings and Sultans had to keep such a tight eye on their harem as to make eunuchs of all men his wives and concubines would ever see. He could trust no man with the materiel - Isaiah thought with a smile that held no mirth- to sully his stable of girls . And the Alpha male of yore, from Norway to the Ottoman, had to deal with incessant attacks on the one thing he prized above all else: his womenfolk.

  This was why the clan system worked, Isaiah thought, for a king’s sons would have genetic cause, deeply imbued desire, blood-bonds to serve their king, not out of cathexis for remuneration or status or compensation in base nor noble metals . The clan was bonded by deep fealty that arises organically from bloodline and shared purpose. The clan had something that chimpanzees had failed to discover: the articulated exclusion of all weak and all foreign blood from the borders. Man had ancient religion; atavistic gods of strength, honor and war.

  Some chimps let roaming males come into their troops and let sullen betas sulk about and plot; kick rocks; pout.

  But the savvy homo-sapient line, Isaiah thought, had figured out to exile weak brothers and disloyal uncles, and attack all fo
reigners before they could sow discord. Before the xenophilia and slave-mentality of Christianity, anyway , Isaiah thought.

  In 1098 e.v., King Magnus III and his loyal son Sigurd expelled the Earl of Orkney for treachery of just one word. They allowed no dissent, no insult, one was loyal or one was dead, one was with the clan king or one was gone with the wind. This was the creed of the Argentine ant that colonized each aquarium Isaiah had built. He let their symmetry, uniformity, beauty of genome populate his mind as all the data came in and was sorted by type, date, relevance.

  Brothers were bonded, Oystein and Olav to Sigurd , and if any treachery was noticed it was handled with exile or death. The clan was paramount, for without it -like Kipling’s wolf- the individual could not survive. Their father Magnus had been grumbled about when he first assented to the throne, but his enemies were dispatched at once, and he set about the Hebrides , Orkeny and Mann -of what would become Scotland- and conquered and slew and proved his bona fides with iron and blood. The speeches came for the faithful after the work was done. Ancient man didn’t explain to his enemies, no more than Yahweh explained to Job . Where were you when I laid the foundations? God had asked.

  The Orkneyinga Saga, Isaiah ruminated upon it now, was the gold standard for description of the epoch and the men and women from where the inmate came. The union of Norway and Scotland like two footprints in the earth’s mud made by a giant produced some of the best men of then and now, Isaiah thought. The outer islands, the archipelagos of the Scottish and Norwegian isles were like blood spatter dripping from that giant as he cleaned his claymore of his enemies’ blood with his hands.

  These Jarls’ saga retold what was obvious to people of that time and bloodline: between the 9 th and 13 th century is where the battles were fought in regions untouched by Christianity’s hippy-shit, the sons born, and the clans solidified in the Norse expansion project. It was the colonialism of the Pagan kings and it laid down the best DNA extant, Isaiah thought.

  He saw the giants of Iceland, the immune systems unparalleled in these high-testosterone ancestries, the gene expression response to hormesis, the elevation to elevation, and the intelligence and verbal IQ one standard deviation from the global mean. Too often, the rubric of white people was used, when building population models for IQ. And it lowered the population IQ to a mere 105; but when one looked deeper into the data a line of demarcation was obviously drawn between types -populations- of so-called whites . The Norse line was superior to other white people, even of Anglo-Saxon lineage , Isaiah saw.

  The Scoti-Norse-Germanic line was bottlenecked at the genome that the inmate had; and Isaiah had traced it back to that timeframe as outlined in the Sagas .

  This was the last cleaving, threshing, the last synthesizing, the last time the clans had it out with themselves and the world, he thought.

  All that came from it appeared; including the 1745 expulsion of Scots from the British Isles and the further isolation of Icelanders and the Dithmarschen who tramped through the regions of Champagne on their campaigns to cull the human noble rot, not embrace it like the French would in the rows of Sauternes . Isaiah traced the northern bones from Sliasthorp in Germany and the Viking rex Godfred as he stacked genomes in his algorithms.

  Isaiah had located a cohort of these Norse cousins in the US in 4% of the population; 1.4% of which were males and alive and currently out of prison. He knew where they lay their heads. He monitored their respiration and their blood work; he watched over them like a mother hen, he thought with warmth.

  He saw their genomes like boundary stars of constellations; he saw signal in the noise.

  The men were called Vaeringjar , sworn men , and the adhesion between each consonant of the name was the Germanic, wara : faithfulness . These men had loyalty in the blood. And modern men didn’t understand this, it was as opaque to them as the mirror, where light shone back at them: modern men, pacific men, rational men, thus seeing only themselves. But some men see through the looking glass and can grasp what is visually clear: man is nothing without his tribe, his clan, his gang. A man alone is like a cod alone, useless to anyone -including himself- including the gods.

  To desire someone to worship, desire a god among men, desire something to believe in larger and more noble than one’s self is the sine qua non of the alpha archetype. Great men want to be surrounded by great men like the imbricate shields of the Lacedaemons , the locking armor of the ouroboros asp.

  They, Isaiah thought, were called Vikings, by the men they conquered in England, and their only mistake was in not eradicating every last one of the vanquished English -the remnants of the what Rome had tolerated- before the English used perfidy and bribery and democratic breeding to overwhelm like microbes the regal clans of the Norse lineage.

  These kings of the Highlands, and the few -by design- descendants of Kveldulf -nephew to Hallbjorn , a massive and strong man- and Egill Skallagrimsson had been the line that blended like veins in one body with Ljotr and the clan MacLeod within the vascular map of the Norse-Scot Othala ; they had won the battles but lost the war , by allowing even one of their enemy to survive , Isaiah thought.

  Egill was known for his strength and poeticism; when to speak with such power was seen -as it is- as magjick . Words were not mere playthings, abstractions, empty, ironic, as they are for modern men, Isaiah thought, the poem was tantamount to incantation, the Logos was what brought forth the world .

  How were, Isaiah thought, modern men to conceptualize this, when one’s words now meant so little, when no men followed through on hardly 1% of what they thought or said? How, when the tyranny of irony enslaved modern men?

  How was he to explain that the warrior poet was seen -as he was- as a two-edged sword, a heart-headed, double-powered force that conquered the world with strong limbs, pure hearts, and actions matching the sound of the jaws as they chewed through the poems created in the forge of their fire-minds?

  Modern men just do not see this, he thought. However explained, it’s in a dead language, a language only revivified in the bodies of men and women of this ancient time, this far-off place, this first-bloodline. The audio-cortex had the same DNA as the heart, as the limbs, and the seed that blew in the wind. Modern man could not hear the poems of great men.

  Modern men thought any philosophy could be learned, adopted, imbued; that any man could be converted. It was the motto of America: a nation founded on ideas.

  But genes mattered, blood mattered, and the earth’s soil mattered; other races of men could not understand the language of the alpha male and the sounds of his womenfolk were like echoes off canyons that were so distorted that both sender and receiver were made mad from the chaos of such things. The honing device of the moth, based on the light of the moon’s albedo, made self-destructive by the curved light of the candle. Isaiah saw the lumens that made fire-bombs of the moth and he thought of the fractal nature of life.

  Women with good DNA, Isaiah thought, were made mad by a modern world; a world that told them they couldn’t have their king, that their innate need for one man, one protector, was a fairytale, a puerile dream. Isaiah thought of the girl who spoke to the inmate -just before he did his duty- and confided to him of just such dreams and dreams dashed.

  Jadi had known from her first age-of-reason that she was to born to be the chaste wife -among sister-wives- of a king, to fulfill her magjickal duty of producing strong, noble, rare, life; life from nothing, ab initio. Better a good man’s frillur than married badly , as the Icelandic motto went.

  She knew what she was to be -she knew her magjick power- and yet she was told by her elders to sellout to the modern ways. She was born goddess and offered slavery instead. And they dared call it liberty , Isaiah thought with a rage in him that made his mouth taste bitter herbs on the tip of tongue which sought sweetness first. Women had been ruined by women and their corrupting advice .

  He thought of Jadi’s bravery for admitting to this; and how the inmate had heard the same story from so many women wh
o knew who they were as little girls only to be made common and low by the culture that turned noble fawns, perfect demiurges of all life -for this is what virgin girls are- into base things, banal consumers, mere workers, and the sexual playthings for betas and callow alphas who do not know their duty. And no one said one word as goddesses were ruined and men failed to do their duty by them. Modern people with no vision, no courage, no education, all went along with the worst ideas of mankind.

  Isaiah then thought of Egill Skallagrimsson’s silver chest from King Athelstan ; the gift as recompense for the loss of his brother on the Isle. Thick necked and broad shouldered, he sheathed his sword at the end of battle; but his anger persisted the Saga’s explained. His anger was laid bare; his height was uncommonly elevated, his hair wolf-grey and thick; black were his eyes.

  Isaiah read the accounts of three-coins embossed with ANLAF CVNVNC -the English name for Olafur Kvaran , the man Egill had fought to his end and from whose treasury he was paid by the king- coins now spit out of the river at the end of Mosfell within 8-kilometers of Reykjavik . Isaiah watched the satellite images from Landsat7 above Iceland now and signaled it to prompt the FLIR imaging of remote drones he’d sent out earlier that day.

  The cataracts of Reykjafoss and Alafoss were fuzzy from foam and mist along the blue line of the Varma river. Isaiah gleaned data from the topography and heat signatures, isolating several spots of rock density that were inconsistent with the older beds and formations.

  He set the drones to continue to fly over the area at heights of 3,000 meters during the day, and 1,200 meters at night, using FLIR imaging for 80% of the runs; gamma X-rays for 13%; the remainder of sorties would use common radio waves and the data was to be uploaded to the cloud. Isaiah returned to his task of how to explain that the loss of God by modern men was a symptom of the wound -a sequela of the original wound- not the wound itself.