Defining Bureaucracy: Marx and Weber in the Heavens

If all definitions of bureaucracy have their shortcomings, one has achieved a greater prominence than the others. Max Weber defined bureaucracy as a system in which:

1. 1) given offices carry authority

2. 2) the offices exist independently of their holders

3. 3) the offices are increasingly specialized to treat different issues.^{Footnote 6}

Relevant to our purposes, Weber’s definition was fruitfully applied in a 1994 book by Lowell K. Handy on the mythologies of the Ancient Near East. In his reading, gods divided particular duties amongst themselves in a Weberian manner: Baʿal looked after the city of Ugarit, Môt presided over the underworld, and Yam ruled the sea, while all three were answerable to the over-deity, ʾEl.^{Footnote 7} The angels ran a sort of postal service, which obeyed the orders of any god of sufficient power who entrusted a message to them.^{Footnote 8} Moreover, the gods had hierarchic offices —at least one of which could potentially be vacated and filled anew. According to Handy, the figure of haśśaṭan (הַשָּׂטָן) in the Hebrew Bible was not always one specific deity, but a role that different deities anonymously adopted when the Canaanite gods met in their celestial council.^{Footnote 9} Indeed, Job 1:6 (KJV) is suggested as a dim remembering of such divine councils:^{Footnote 10} “Now there was a day when the sons of God [בְּנֵי הָאֱלֹהִים beney ha’elohim] came to present themselves before the Lord, and Satan came also among them.”^{Footnote 11} In the view of Handy and others, these “sons” were originally the other members of the Canaanite pantheon, sons of ʾEl, one of whom had contingently donned the mask of “the adversary” (haśśaṭan).^{Footnote 12}

As Handy’s reading shows, Weber’s focus on offices makes his definition of bureaucracy easily applicable to mythology. However, his definition had a second strand, which received less explication but is arguably more important: “the principle of sine ira ac studio.”^{Footnote 13} This is the observation that in an ideal bureaucracy offices are discharged with as little feeling of personal involvement on the officer’s part as possible. As I have suggested elsewhere, Weber’s point can be clarified by analogy with Karl Marx’s theory of the alienation of labor.^{Footnote 14} The breakthrough provided by Marx is that once a worker is alienated from their labor, they begin to perform it as though their essential human qualities—their Gattungswesen (species-being) in Marxist cant—were absent.^{Footnote 15} While the worker-bureaucrat becomes automaton-like, those non-bureaucrats who are governed by bureaucracy start to see the world through the bureaucratic gaze: documents and rules take on a life of their own. In Marx’s words, we see “the conversion of things into persons and persons into things.”^{Footnote 16}

Denmark, 900s: Alli the Pale in his Pre-bureaucratic Eden

In a copse on the Danish island of Fyn, a group of rocks has been arranged in two sixty-metre-long lines to form the outline of a ship. At the prow there is a lump of granite, nearly two meters tall, on which one will find the longest runic inscription in Denmark. It is known either by the name “the Glavendrup stone” or its signum, DR 209. The complex was constructed in the late tenth century—perhaps four hundred years after the mosaics from Ravenna. Like most epigraphy in the runic script, the Glavendrup stone tolerates different readings,^{Footnote 17} but for our purposes we can offer the following transcription and translation:

One thing that every reading agrees upon is that Alli is called both a goði and a þegn. We do not know precisely what these titles entailed during Alli’s lifetime. There is variance both in time and space. Þegn in particular is a word much contested by historians and philologists.^{Footnote 19} By the High Middle Ages in Norway a þegn was a feudal rank in service to a king.^{Footnote 20} A similar notion of vassalage in the case of Alli and his contemporaries has been proposed by Svend Aakjær and Birgit Sawyer, amongst others.^{Footnote 21} However, on the basis of linguistic comparison with Old English ðegn and the relative amorphousness of Danish royal power in Alli’s time, his ‘thanehood’ is now supposed to be the opposite: an independent magnate, possibly the leader of a warband as per Alli’s lið (troop).^{Footnote 22}

While Alli’s role as a þegn signified his worldly power, his status as a goði was a source of religious authority.^{Footnote 23} Comparison with early medieval Iceland suggests that a goði was a local ‘big man’ figure whose responsibilities included presiding over religious worship in some manner.^{Footnote 24} Doubtless, the Icelandic system had its peculiarities compared to the Danish, but the lack of an allusion to Alli having any sort of liege makes it likely that Alli won and exercised power in a manner not dissimilar to the contemporaneous Icelandic goði Hrafnkell Hallfreðarson, here from a thirteenth-century narrative:

Alli does not appear to have derived power from his offices, but rather to have attracted offices as a result of his power. We cannot know for certain whether becoming a war-leader (a þegn commanding a lið) gave him the opportunity to become a religious leader (a goði presiding over a vé) or vice versa, although one suspects that he was a þegn first, as a commander is a role which tolerates incompetence rather less than a religious office: a mistake made while performing a religious rite may be embarrassing, but a mistake on the battlefield easily costs one’s life. The same dynamic operates in the case of Hrafnkell. Such people became local magnates because they were charismatic, wealthy, or just good at killing people. They then assumed the religious role of goði to boot.

This is not to say that Alli was not pious (or, at least, interested in being remembered as pious). The dedication Þórr vígi þessar rúnar (May Þórr bless these runes) is not often used in runic inscriptions, far less than Christians used intercessory formulae in their inscriptions.^{Footnote 26} The rarity of the formula indicates that its use was deliberate. It is therefore reasonable to deduce that carvers such as Sóti and commissioners such as Ragnhildr sincerely believed in what they were writing or ordering to be written. But Alli’s piety is not in doubt. Rather, I am concerned with the way that he related his power to the gods. There is no Marxian alienation on the part of Alli according to the Glavendrup stone,^{Footnote 27} no reason to believe that wages, loyalty to a higher lord, or vocation called to him to be a goði and a þegn. Indeed, the ostentatious setting of the monument leads one to suspect that personal status and enjoyment were his motivation. There is also no sign of Weberian hierarchy or specialization of expertise. Alli apparently owed no fealty to any social superior, and there is no indication that spiritual competence rather than social capital won him his recognition as a goði.

Just as Hrafnkell supposedly believed that he had a special relationship with the god Freyr, Alli’s family believed that Þórr would intervene to protect his deceased servant’s memorial. Again in stark opposition to the Marxist-Weberian bureaucratic ideal of automatic obedience to larger institutions, power here is vested in a discrete arrangement between two individuals, one human and one divine, in which both are personally invested. This is obviously an anti-bureaucratic situation. Did Alli believe that his gods exercised their powers in the same non-bureaucratic manner as their priests? We can point back to the Ancient Near Eastern situation where the opposite principle is at work, i.e. bureaucrat-priests depict bureaucrat-gods.^{Footnote 28} Handy and others have suggested that in Canaanite mythology the bureaucratic world-view of Syro-Palestinian scribes shaped their view of the heavens.^{Footnote 29}

Reconstructing how Alli imagined the heavens is harder than doing the same for an Ancient Near Eastern bureaucrat, because we have no tenth-century Scandinavian equivalent of the Flood Tablet or the Barton Cylinder, i.e., documents which can be reliably dated to a time when their writers believed there was a degree of literal truth in the myths they recorded. However, Eddic poems such as Vǫluspá or Grímnismál contain mythic tropes which were probably current in Alli’s days (although the manuscript which now contains most of these poems, Codex Regius, was written in the 1270s, and counter-Christian innovation and Christian influence permeate the Eddic corpus).^{Footnote 30} In general, the gods as they appear in Eddic poetry do not appear to be particularly bureaucratic. Again, a contrast with Ancient Near Eastern tradition brings this into relief. There is a parallel to Job 1:6–7 in Lokasenna. In the Hebrew story, God sits with His council, when the Adversary (haśśaṭan) makes an apparently unexpected appearance. God seems almost taken aback when He asks, “Whence comest thou?”. In the Norse story, the gods sit at a feast, and in comes Loki, spoiling for a fight:

Loki is not a normally harmless god who is only occupying an office: he is a constant threat to the other gods, personally invested in their downfall. The Norse pantheon meet in a celestial council at several points in Vǫluspá (stanzas 6, 7, 9, 23, 25, 48), but they seem to be discussing problems that directly affect them without any sense of Marxian alienation or Weberian office-holding, e.g.:

That the decisions reached in these councils may sometimes be poor, as Christopher Abram has observed, does not alone make them bureaucratic.^{Footnote 34} There are fixtures in the Eddic corpus which might have evolved into something like “offices,” although they are not quite so in their presently attested form. In particular, there are certain seats, and sitting in these seats either gives the gods special abilities or facilitates their discharge of official functions. In the example given above, there is the word rǫkstóll (throne [lit. seat] of fate). The gods only sit in these when they deliberate important matters at council.^{Footnote 35} There is also a seat called Hliðskjálf, in which Óðinn sits.^{Footnote 36} This grants the power to see anywhere in the world. The similarity between a “chair” and an “office” is that (1) they may grant special powers, and (2) they may theoretically be vacated and refilled by another sitter, granting those powers to the newcomer without prejudice or alteration.

The later prose incipit to the Eddic poem Skírnismál demonstrates this principle, when Freyr (illicitly?) occupies Hliðskjálf: “Freyr, son of Njǫrðr, had sat down in Hliðskjálf and saw around all the worlds” (Freyr, sonr Niarðar, hafði sezc í Hliðsciálf oc sá um heima alla).^{Footnote 37} Anne Holtsmark pointed out that the Christian mythographer Snorri Sturluson (d. 1241) converted the rǫkstólar into dómstólar (“seats of the court” or “seats of judgement”).^{Footnote 38} This makes the gods sound more bureaucratic, and thereby more intelligible to the language of power in thirteenth-century Norway. In contrast, Catharina Raudvere has suggested that chieftains in Alli’s time saw the chairs of the gods as more like the thrones they occupied themselves on the mortal plane: symbols of their authority in particular, not necessarily authority in general.^{Footnote 39} For the people who attended whatever long-lost ritual consecrated Alli’s stone ship on Fyn, it seems that the gods were effectively individuals with personal power, unalienated and uncomplicated. In this regard, their gods resembled their rulers.

Sweden, ca. 1040–1070s: The First and Last Pagan Bureaucrats?

Christianity brought a strong sense of belonging, of social order, and of structured dogma. Scandinavian paganism, it would seem, offered none of these assets when Christian missionaries began to arrive in the Nordic region in the ninth century. The general story of the conversion to Christianity in Scandinavia is that of rulers realizing that Christianity provided a superior set of tools for encouraging loyalty and dispensing power.^{Footnote 40} But there were a few examples of Scandinavians who, instead of adopting the new religion, attempted to reform paganism from an unreflected folk tradition into something more codified—closer to an Abrahamic faith in its use of texts and offices. The classic example of this reactionary paganism is that of Hákon Jarl, a northern magnate who extended his rule over Norway between 975 and 995. He made efforts to transform paganism into something like a “state religion” for Norway, sponsoring poets to create mythologically-inflected verse glorifying his men in battle, and himself claiming to be descended from Óðinn.^{Footnote 41}

Our next case study dates from this period where pagan rulers, although governing through a doomed religion, were using Christianity as a model to make last-ditch reforms. By the year 1000, Iceland, Norway, and Denmark had accepted Christianity, but in Sweden paganism would hold on throughout the eleventh century, and isolated pockets of pagan belief and not-quite-Christian-enough practice would hold on as late as the 1100s.^{Footnote 42}Gesta Hammaburgensis was composed in Latin by the German churchman, Adam of Bremen, probably during the early 1070s. It contains a description of a pagan temple at Uppsala in Eastern Sweden. Adam claims that his informant was a Swedish Christian, who had seen the temple for himself:

The veracity of this account has been much debated, and we cannot rehearse the wrangling here.^{Footnote 44}Interpretatio christiana on Adam’s part is certain. When he says that the temple “is decorated entirely with gold” (totum ex auro paratum est), or indeed the scholion writer says that “a gold chain goes all around it, hanging over the roof and glimmering at those who approach” (catena aurea templum circumdat pendens supra domus fastigia lateque rutilans advenientibus),^{Footnote 45} there is obvious influence from 1 Kings 6:21: “So Solomon overlaid the house within with pure gold; and he made a partition by the chains of gold before the oracle; and he overlaid it with gold” (Domum quoque ante oraculum operuit auro purissimo, et affixit laminas clavis aureis).^{Footnote 46}

For our purposes, it is noteworthy that the way the priests (sacerdotes) are described is not what one would expect from Eddic verse and runic inscriptions. Alli the Pale from the Glavendrup stone does not seem much like the priests from Uppsala. He presided over a small sanctuary (vé) and appears to have been a local authority, collecting offices in proportion to his prestige, rather than through his technical ability. The priests of Uppsala, on the other hand, serve an institution bigger than themselves. They are expected not to serve their own ends, but to serve the people (qui sacrificia populi offerant). They provide services using expertise which ordinary people are not expected to possess. Their knowledge is not only specialized in relation to the rest of society, but also specialized amongst their own ranks: some specialize in the worship of Þórr, some in Óðinn, and some in Freyr. This is unlike the cosmology of Alli or Hrafnkell Freysgoði, where the human-divine relationship is framed in terms of mutual favoritism between one individual human and one individual god. The Uppsala priests occupy something more like an office. Perhaps they do feel particular spiritual attachments to particular gods, but if so, it is irrelevant. The important thing is that in times of plague, priests who know the correct way to worship Þórr do so for the good of their community, etc.

If Adam’s pagan priests are verging on bureaucratic territory, it is striking that according to his depiction the gods themselves are also moving in that direction. Adam of Bremen is the earliest source which explicitly states that Scandinavian gods have domains of expertise—in Handy’s language, “spheres of authority.”^{Footnote 47} Sundqvist argues that this idea is also witnessed by Snorri Sturluson’s mythographic Ynglinga saga.^{Footnote 48} However, as Ynglinga saga dates from the 1200s, Snorri could have come up with the same idea either by comparison with Greco-Roman myth or by reflecting the bureaucratic conditions of his own age.

It is conceivable that the notion that specific deities could help with specific areas of human concern is something which Scandinavians first discovered during the reactionary turn in the last days of paganism (we shall return to this problem later). In Eddic poetry there is little indication that humans should turn to the gods for anything at all; the stories told are instead mostly about the problems that occur amongst the pantheon. In stanza 25 of Vǫluspá, humanity would surely appreciate some divine intervention as it succumbs to the bloodlust and sexual mania of Ragnarǫk. Yet there is no suggestion that humans should seek assistance from the celestial powers, nor that the gods have failed humanity (or vice versa). Indeed, in runic inscriptions, the gods are called upon surprisingly rarely, DR 209 being one of just 20 inscriptions in a corpus of 3,726 Viking Age inscriptions which explicitly invoke or even mention any pagan god. It is from the reactionary phase, then, that one first encounters a view of Old Norse myth that has the potential to be comparable to Lowell Handy’s view of the Ancient Near Eastern pantheon as a bureaucracy. However, it must quickly be cautioned that Adam’s account lacks the sophistication of the Canaanite material. Perhaps some thirty deities, each with their own specialization, can be found in Ancient Near Eastern sources. The division between war, weather, and fertility found in the Uppsala temple looks primitive by comparison.

Before moving on to our final Old Norse example, I wish to stress that what we have in Adam’s depiction is an image of a mythological system, not necessarily a mythological system itself, in which pre-Christian Scandinavians actually believed. For my own part, I think that the account has the ring of truth: Adam presents a variety of paganism that has adopted some of the institutionalization that made Christianity so successful. In the last days of paganism, it would make sense if a few hold-outs attempted to copy the ideological weapons which their own religious culture had lacked. On the other hand, it is possible that Adam was imposing his experience of being an eleventh-century Christian priest. Weber notes that the Latin church was one of the most ornate bureaucracies in history.^{Footnote 49} Just as our Ravennese and Ancient Near Eastern bureaucrats imagined their own gods as fellow bureaucrats, we cannot discount the possibility that Adam imagined other people’s gods as bureaucrats. However, even if Adam was a complete fantasist, we can comfort ourselves with the thought that “Pagan” myth as imagined by Christians is still myth, insofar as it constitutes an assemblage of narratives and thought-patterns, genuinely believed or not.^{Footnote 50} Indeed, pagan myth in Christian hands is a serviceable description of the example below.

1220s, Norway/Iceland: The Counter-Bureaucratic Dreams of Snorri Sturluson

The priests of Uppsala may be the last historically plausible image of sincere Germanic pagans (their only possible competition is the last heathen king, Blót-Sveinn of Sweden, r. ca. 1080s, but this is from a thirteenth-century Icelandic account, of suspiciously antiquarian bent).^{Footnote 51} If the ruling elite at Uppsala thought that adopting a semblance of bureaucracy would save them, they were misguided. But while the pre-Christian Scandinavian religion was moribund by ca. 1100, its myths lived on. It is ironic that the fullest and liveliest image of Old Norse myth comes from a time when people had long since ceased to believe in the reality of the gods, and in fact had been Christians for two centuries.

Snorri Sturluson was an Icelandic statesman and author, born in 1179 at Hvammur, and assassinated at his farmstead at Reykholt in 1241. In the 1220s, he wrote a mythological compendium which we now call the Prose Edda (not to be confused with Eddic verse, which far predates Snorri). He probably authored this work while at the court of the Norwegian king, Hákon Hákonarson (r. 1217–1263). The mythological world of Snorri’s Edda is not a rigorous attempt to reconstruct pagan mythology with as much scientific accuracy as possible. We might think of Snorri’s account of Old Norse myth as a Tolkien-esque act of “subcreation.” His Edda is a work of literature, an eclectic fusion of stories which may be pagan in origin, in addition to thinly veiled episodes borrowed from Christian learning, folklore, and Snorri’s own imagination.

The gods in the Prose Edda are not as bureacratized as some of the previous non-Norse examples, but they are more self-consciously organized than the Glavendrup stone and the Gesta Hammaburgensis would suggest. Snorri maintains the notion that the gods ruled themselves via a council, in which Óðinn has a primus inter pares position. In this, there is no contradiction with the political constitution of the gods as hinted at in Eddic poetry. However, the question of the organization of the gods does seem to have animated Snorri. In fact, as I have discussed elsewhere, he provides at least four descriptions of the gods’ form of government, each slightly different.^{Footnote 52} Interestingly, he takes advantage of stanza 15 in the Eddic poem Grímnismál to stress the point that the pantheon contains one god who specializes in resolving difficult legal cases.

Forseti may well have been considered to be a god with some sort of legal function during the pagan period.^{Footnote 54} Indeed, on its own the concept of a god who supposedly once created laws or upon whom people call when they are in a difficult legal situation is not novel, e.g. Ma’at in Egyptian myth, Athena or Eunomia in Greek. However, the concept of a god who arbitrates between other gods appears to be a hallmark of a particularly bureacratized mythological world. Handy points out that in Canaanite myth the function of cosmic ombudsman was filled either by ʾEl or ʾAšerah.^{Footnote 55} Disputes between the gods could be referred to these deities. This dynamic is reflected in Psalm 82:1: “God standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.” (The same sentiment occurs again a few lines later at Psalm 82:6, with an explicit mention that God rules over the beney ha’elohim as in Job 1:6.)

In this regard Snorri’s mythology is more bureaucratically advanced from a Marxist-Weberian perspective than the Canaanite material. In Ugaritic myth ʾEl and ʾAšerah are the most powerful divine couple.^{Footnote 56} They are therefore highly imperfect ombudsmen; at least there is an accepted process for resolving disputes, but arbitration is achieved simply by appealing to the highest authority. This is a “might makes right” situation, where impartiality depends on the moral virtues of the gods in question. Forseti, on the other hand, is an ombudsman proper. In Snorri’s account, he is not a ruler, but rather an external arbitrator, not personally involved in any case and therefore situated to provide the “best place of judgement amongst gods and men” (dómstaðr beztr með guðum ok mǫnnum). This is a mirror of how the Icelandic legal system was supposed to work in Snorri’s time, where disputes between two parties would (ideally) be resolved by the arbitration of a third party without vested interests in the case. That third party would hold the title of goði—the same title held by Alli the Pale and also an office held by Snorri himself.^{Footnote 57}

Snorri also further develops the concept of “spheres of authority” in relation to what we saw at the temple of Uppsala. In the Prose Edda, the traveller Gangleri says admiringly to Óðinn: “that you should know the details of the gods and know to whom each [sort of] prayer should be prayed” (er þér skuluð kunna skyn goðanna ok vita hvert biðja skal hverrar bœnarinnar).^{Footnote 58} We then hear of the god Týr that “it is good for vigorous people to call on him” ([á] hann er gott at heita hreystimǫnnum).^{Footnote 59} This is particularly suggestive of how much Snorri was reshaping rather than recording pagan myth, given that most of the Týr-mythos is post-pagan mythopoesis.^{Footnote 60} Of the god Ullr it is said “it is good to call on him in a duel” ([á] hann er gott at heita í einvígi).^{Footnote 61} Forseti, as above, is to be invoked during a legal deadlock. But, as seen, the epigraphic record shows that exceptionally few pagan Scandinavians called on their gods for anything. Snorri must therefore have had some reason for wanting his version of Old Norse myth to have the sense of political order and predictability we saw in the cosmologies of the Ravennese mosaics, of Job, and of Beetlejuice.

Snorri returns to the problem of how society can be made to work smoothly with his enumeration of the goddesses. He discusses 14 goddesses. For 5 of them he provides little more information than a name. In 4 cases the goddesses represent sexual-romantic virtues, e.g. Hnoss is the goddess of beauty, Gefjun and Fulla are listed as goddesses of chastity (although Snorri earlier tells a story implying that Gefjun may have provided sexual favors in return for land holdings in southern Sweden). The rest are hard to classify according to their allegorical role. A completist may be more satisfied by viewing them as handmaidens who are essentially adornments of Frigg, as the narrative frame of the Prose Edda recommends. Nonetheless, it is important for our purposes that four of the goddesses represent legal virtues:^{Footnote 62}

Just as we saw with Forseti, Snorri did not invent these goddesses. In the case of Lofn, he cites a þula (a genre of Old Norse list poetry), where she is listed as a female deity. Moreover, there is some skaldic verse traditionally dated to the pagan era which uses the name “Lofn” in kennings for women.^{Footnote 64} The same is true of Vár,^{Footnote 65} Vǫr,^{Footnote 66} and Syn.^{Footnote 67} But the explanations of whence their names derive seems like Snorri’s work. There is nothing in the Eddic, skaldic, or runic corpus to corroborate the attachments Snorri gives to each deity. Nor are Snorri’s folk etymologies the only possible interpretations which might have been made. For example, Snorri derives Lofn from the noun lof and the verb lofa. He chooses to highlight the sense of lof meaning “permission,” but it also means “praise.” Conversely, for lofa he chooses the sense of “to praise” but passes over the sense of “to promise.”^{Footnote 68} If he had wanted to put a more overtly monarchist spin on his myth-making, for example, Snorri might have come up with, say, “Lofn is so noble that she is often praised by the All-Father, hence lof, just as men praise their king to whom they promise [lofa] loyalty.” But this is not what Snorri says. The latest named individual in Snorri’s family tree whom we might plausibly assume to have been pagan is his great-great-great grandfather, one Jǫrundr Þorgilsson, who was probably born in the last quarter of the tenth century.^{Footnote 69} Therefore, it seems safe to assume that Snorri did not know anything more about these deities than we do. And if he was relying on etymological deduction—which could have had any number of varying outcomes—then there is every reason to suspect that what he did and did not come up with was ideologically conditioned, whether consciously or subconsciously.

Relevant to our purposes is that Snorri’s folk etymologies are all virtues which Weber would have recognised as necessary for the smooth operation of a bureaucracy: seeking appropriate permission before acting in the case of Lofn (“the principles of ‘hierarchy of offices’ and ‘proper’ channels … means that there is a strictly organized system of government Behörde with levels of authority, where the higher ones supervise the lower ones”),^{Footnote 70} knowledge and diligence in the case of Vǫr. As Weber notes, “command of case knowledge”^{Footnote 71} and Responsenpraxis (the practice of curating reports) are bureaucratic hallmarks. In the case of Syn, she who “keeps the gates to the hall and shuts them before those who are not supposed to enter,” a cynic might point to Weber’s observation that “every bureaucratic administration has an inclination to exclude the public.”^{Footnote 72} But there is another side to this oppressive facet of bureaucracy—that eventually, there is a bureaucrat who is also what Weber called a monocrat: the one whose decision can no longer be appealed.^{Footnote 73} Syn embodies this principle: eventually, there are no more appeals, the door slams shut, and the case is closed. In the case of Vár, it is striking that Weber actually identifies oaths of loyalty and oaths of revenge as precursors to bureaucratic systems of order and personal protection—in Weberian analysis, this is the flawed system which gives way to bureaucracy, rather than bureaucracy itself.^{Footnote 74}

It stands to reason that Snorri would be interested in these sorts of virtues. Between 1215 and 1218, then again between 1222 and 1231, he was the lǫgsǫgumaðr (the lawspeaker) of Iceland’s highest assembly, the Alþingi.^{Footnote 75} In Snorri’s time, Iceland was governed by a peculiar system, consisting of a judiciary without an executive. Icelandic society was intensely litigious, but there was no king, no police force, nor indeed any of the trappings of a civil service.^{Footnote 76} Once the courts made a ruling, it was up to the community to see the enforcement of justice, which meant in practice that sentence of outlawry, violence, and rampant “strong man-ism” came to paralyze Icelandic society.^{Footnote 77} In some ways, thirteenth-century Iceland was an atavistic hold-out of the sort of governance found in Norway back in the 900s: local magnates and assemblies, with little in the way of impersonal power. One suspects that this is a scenario in which Alli the Pale would have felt at home.

With this context in mind, it is striking that the goddesses listed above embody only some principles of a bureaucracy; Snorri prioritizes those which are essentially rooted in individual self-regulation rather than top-down governance. For example, Snorri indirectly praises the idea of peaceably accepting when a case should be dropped through Syn. With Vár, he tacitly reminds the reader of the importance of sticking to one’s own oaths. As seen, Lofn does imply acceptance of hierarchy, but not necessarily through state coercion. This accords with Snorri’s mythological world-building more generally, in which his deities do not discard the idiosyncrasies of Icelandic political culture. At no point do they adopt a king to rule over them, for example.^{Footnote 78} But at the same time, Snorri’s mythology is not anti-monarchist nor anti-Norwegian (the question of Snorri’s exact political views is unclear, though it seems that he accepted, perhaps out of sober Realpolitik, that Iceland should become an earldom of Norway, ruled by a Jarl, with important Icelandic families retaining their prominence—something not unlike what, in fact, happened twenty years after Snorri’s death).^{Footnote 79} It is worth remembering that Snorri’s Edda was probably composed at the court of King Hákon Hákonarson, who had aspirations both of creating a more bureaucratic Norway and making Iceland a part of it.^{Footnote 80} It is tempting to interpret Snorri’s depiction of mythical bureaucrats as a sort of negotiation: an acceptance of the advantages of bureaucracy, but an attempt to make it a collaborative, voluntary venture rather than an oppressive structure. Snorri’s view of the heavens can be characterized as a sort of “ordered disorder”—a codified system cobbled together from selected snippets of Eddic verse, and a bit of Snorri’s own folk etymology, which he may have intended to reflect concessions that he thought ought to be made to Iceland’s unique political system when it inevitably became a part of Norway.

Conclusion: The Changing Valences of Bureaucracy

We began with general examples of bureaucracy in mythico-religious thought, and then we turned to a specific genealogy of how such thinking developed in Scandinavia. In concluding, we will reintegrate our Scandinavian examples into a corpus of instances from other times and places. Flores offered the formulation that bureaucratic societies would create bureaucratic mythologies, while non-bureaucratic societies would not. I submit that our Scandinavian examples suggest that a more productive tack might be not to characterize societies as bureaucratic versus non-bureaucratic, but instead to consider what the valences of bureaucracy are in a given social milieu. This would account for why Jesus is never a bureaucrat in modern Christianity, but He was one in sixth-century Ravenna. Nearly everybody today agrees that bureaucracy is obstructive, frustrating, and mundane.^{Footnote 81} There is no reason that a believer would project such qualities onto their God. For the Ostrogothic elite of Ravenna, on the other hand, bureaucracy must have seemed like a wonderful technology of which they had only recently taken control. The idea that people would obey unarmed men on account of their position, rather than their accomplishment in acts of violence, must have been exciting and considered worthy of propagation. The message of these mosaics is both “God is bureaucrat-like,” and also “bureaucrats are God-like, and therefore you should obey them.”

Indeed, this development in Gothic thought during the sixth century is brought into even sharper relief when one compares it with the Gothic Bible of the fourth century. Admittedly, the statements of the Gothic Bible are decided by the Greek source text, but it is still notable that in our extant Gothic literature a constant is the decrying of the “scribes” (bokarjos bokarjos), e.g. the fragmentary Luke 20:46: “Beware of the scribes, those who wish to walk in white [clothes, and love greetings in the markets, and the highest seats in the synagogues, and the chief rooms at feasts]” (Atsaiƕiþ faura bokarjam þaim wiljandam gaggan in ƕeitaim …). The frequent attacks on the bokarjos are a reflection of the Greek γραμματɛῖς. But one suspects that, like any act of translation, this was not an ideologically neutral business. Wulfila’s Gothic translation of the Bible was probably undertaken around the same time that the Goths were fleeing the Huns and were consequently attempting to settle inside the borders of the Roman Empire, sometimes as supplicants, sometimes as invaders.^{Footnote 82} Wulfila himself was part of a resettlement in Moesia in 348.^{Footnote 83} Other trans-Danubian migrations occured in the 370s. For many of the refugee Goths, the adversarial or exasperated Roman administrators whom they faced must have been the first bureaucrats they had ever seen.^{Footnote 84} Under such circumstances, religious rhetoric against the bokarjos must have had a particular appeal. Note that Wulfila’s text diverges from the Greek in Luke 20:46. In Greek, the scribes wear “long robes” (στολαῖς, the same word which gives us “stole,” as in the liturgical vestment). But in Gothic, they wear ƕeitaim [leinam?]^{Footnote 85} (white [linens?]). I am not convinced that Wulfila lacked a word meaning “robes.” Every other older Germanic language had words denoting either long clothing or clothing of rank, e.g. Old English gerela, Middle High German kittel or rôbe, Old Norse kyrtill or tignarklæði. But by making the pompous, bureaucratic γραμματɛῖς of the New Testament wear white, Wulfila provided the possibility for his audience to make a comparison with the white-with-purple-trim togas of Roman administrators. Two centuries later, the same togas would be positive symbols for divine power on the mosaics of San Apollinare Nuovo, which were commissioned under the Gothic King Theodoric the Great (r. 475–526). For the refugee Goths, bureaucrats were the people standing in the way of their migration to safety. For a Gothic ruler, the connotations of bureaucracy were self-evidently different.

The changing valences of bureaucracy—and how they govern the representation of bureaucrats in mythology—should not only be considered in terms of “good” and “bad.” In the epigraph to this study, Žižek also indicates the dichotomy between “mundane” and “mystical.” Specifically, he implies that the opacity or inscrutability of bureaucratic processes can sometimes recommend their comparison to the divine. This may well be true in the case of the temple at Uppsala, described by Adam of Bremen. Earlier, we saw how it appeared that the priests and worshippers at Uppsala were transitioning from the socially atomised strongman-ism of Alli the Pale’s time to something that more closely resembled a Weberian bureaucratic mindset. One thing that Adam’s pagan priests apparently do not do—which contemporary Christian clergy would—is to use their bureaucratic organizational techniques for the administration of secular responsibilities as well as religious duties.^{Footnote 86} At no point does Adam suggest that they are managing estates, collecting taxes, keeping records, etc. Doubtless, this is in part because they would not have been competent at some of these tasks. They would only have been literate in the runic script, which as far as we can see was not used for administrative purposes in the pagan period. But the question must then be asked, why would the pagan elite adopt bureaucratic techniques at all? What benefits did they imagine such a change would bring?

When comparing Adam’s account to the administrative culture of medieval Christianity, I am reminded somewhat of the material and ritual culture of Melanesian Cargo Cults in relation to the cultures which they emulate. As the reader will probably know, Cargo Cults are religious movements which sprung up on various Melanesian islands in the wake of occupation by foreign military forces. The planes or ships which resupplied the colonizers were viewed as wondrous by the colonized, who began to harbor millenarian hopes that the same vessels could be attracted to them instead. Scale models of aircraft and sailing ships were constructed to attract this “cargo.” In some cults, the replication of foreign material culture was meticulous, with uniforms being made in impersonation of servicemen, and huts with mock radio equipment being made to impersonate air traffic control towers.^{Footnote 87} The social forces which governed the creation of these cults are multifaceted,^{Footnote 88} but it seems to me that at least part of the reasoning behind such projects is the unease that a foreign civilization has materially and organizationally developed to the point that it now threatens one’s own—only by becoming more like that civilization can one hope to defeat it.

Obviously the Melanesians who built these airfields could only copy what they could see: they could go as far as replicating the inside of a radio control room, but no further. If Cargo-ists could see the inner workings of a modern military administrative office, would they also seek to make mockups of Excel spreadsheets, photocopiers, or other bureaucratic paraphernalia? I suspect so. They would only have achieved a portion of the bureaucratic sophistication they copied, because their efforts necessarily focus more on appearances than organizational techniques. Cargo cults often do import a degree of organizational culture, of course—their soldiers sometimes practice western-style military drills, which implies they also have a chain of command^{Footnote 89}—but they cannot perfectly constitute bureaucracy without (1) intimate study of the systems they wish to emulate and (2) a suitable degree of pre-existing bureaucratic complexity in the rest of the society in which the cult develops. Is the same true of the Uppsala priests? Perhaps from observing the cult of saints in their Christian peers, the idea that cultic labor should become specialized arose, both for the gods and for their priests. The Uppsala pagans cannot have been unaware that Christianity was a religion which covered far more territory than their own, and they might well have made the same calculation as the later Melanesians that reorganizing themselves to be more like their competitor would be the only way to survive. If so, the valence that bureaucracy must have carried in the minds of the pagan elite would not just be positive, but also mysterious: a source of strength which could only be partially recreated for themselves.

Similarly, Snorri’s mythical bureaucrats (such as they are) reflect an accommodation of the undeniable appeal of bureaucracy on the part of a person who had been raised in a relatively non-bureaucratic society. Snorri’s hope for a bureaucracy which works by the willing adoption of personal virtues rather than the imposition of alienated administrators chimes with the modern experience. We want to be free of the absurdity and coercion of bureaucracy, but at the same time, as David Graeber notes:

For Snorri, the deliberate establishment of bureaucracy was a recent development. No Norwegian king had ever sought to expand bureaucratic culture, nor bring it to Iceland, to the extent that Hákon had. The nuanced valences which bureaucracy had in his eyes must have seemed like a matter worth discussing through mythography. He would not have been completely deluded to imagine that a political-theoretical discussion could have been ignited and, who knows, perhaps tangible political change might occur as a result. In our own days, bureaucracy is more of an immanent reality than a recent development. Its permanence has become reflected in our own myth-making: contemporary Christian iconography offers the faithful an escape, by asserting that non-bureaucratic power still exists, albeit in the heavens rather than on earth. Visions such as Beetlejuice are a less comforting response to the same conditions: the fear that even in death, we might not escape the alienated absurdity of the bureaucratic age.