Imagined Empires
The Hidden Psychic Drama of Empire
Empires first take root in our imagination, projecting a framework that orders the world through historical narratives. These narratives are continuously written and rewritten, often framing history as a series of necessary inevitabilities. In this process, the chaotic events of history—filled with uncertainty, possibilities, and complexities—are distilled into simplistic accounts. History is recounted from a perspective imbued with foreknowledge, privileging the eventual outcomes and presenting them as inevitable. This sanitised version of events aligns with imperial interests, conforming to a narrative template that serves to reinforce the empire's legitimacy.
So your accepted present is the result of sequential inevitabilities leading to a coherent narrative of your present YOU. Each inevitability has to be comprehensively colonised by the imperial narrative. YOU become an inevitability emerging out of the matrix of imperial history. This is now the matrix that gave birth to you. YOU are born of the empire's actions. This is revealing because matrix is Latin for womb or source, derived from the Latin – mater meaning mother. Empire by this colonisation is an act of mythological conquest of your imagination. The Empire becomes your mother! Then because you, in your inevitable present, are here because of Empire’s serial protection of you in the series of events that resulted in the coherent identity of YOU within empire. Empire serves as your shield against chaos, in inevitable repetition of the past. This serves to bludgeon populations into mass identities with the required acceptance of the force of absolute order, civilisation, and power, hardwired into your collective imagination. The future, then, becomes a mere repetition of the past—because Mother Imperia has decreed it so.
This psychic organisation of imagination and hence memory, serves to pattern you and your world into the timeless dimension of imperial imagination. We see it in the Roman Empire when Marcus Aurelius becomes the Emperor Augustus commissioned the Aeneid by Virgil, rewriting epic Roman mythology to fit the new Imperial narrative of Rome. Gibbons wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, connecting the British Empire to the Roman one, constructing a mythological imperial history. In our time this is done by mass media employing journalism, movies and the media of popular culture.
Empire needs chaos! What we see is that to maintain the Imperial order, all that stands against empire, must be vanquished, but not so thoroughly as to eliminate the ever-looming power of chaos, for chaos has surprising utility.
The Chaos Mythology of Empire: Seth and Horus
The Ancient Egyptians had Seth, the god of chaos, deserts, foreigners and storms, who murders and dismembers his brother Osiris – the god of the dead, fertility, and agriculture, who symbolises eternal life and regeneration. This act of murdering Osiris unleashes the perpetual cycle with Horus who is born as a consequence of this act of fratricide. Osiris’ son Horus brings civilisation, cultivation and imperial order and the principle of the new rebirth, which perpetuates the mythology of renewal to protect the continuity of the principle of the ancient sacred right. Horus is now the location of the principle of the rightful king.
Horus’ purpose is defined as necessary because of the need to battle Seth. Without Seth, Horus becomes meaningless. Empire justifies itself as the bulwark against Sethian chaos, for without Horus, civilisation, life generation, order and renewal will all fall, the foreigners will invade and utterly destroy the ancient order of the world of Osiris, for whom Horus is your present protector. Horusian mythology claims its legitimacy in the ancient right of the order of Osiris.
Empire must simultaneously define itself as the human and the allowable range and limits of humanity, whilst it defines its opposite the anti-human or subhuman who is the embodiment of chaos, death and danger. Alterity is hardwired into the imperial, but not as an act of primary schizogenesis – the psychic process of shaping and contrasting ourselves in contrast to another and at extreme in opposition to another. This schizogenesis in which empire must define itself with respect to an actual other and the other’s actual reality. The imperial psychology of schizogenesis is essentially narcissistic, it casts its shadow self as fragments onto the vital screen of the other, projecting its Osiris vs Seth mythological cycle as a primal drama with itself cast as Horus, which gives it legitimacy from beyond itself but within its projection of itself onto an Osirian substitute. The imperial always symbolically castrates itself. For though its power is its own, in order to wield it with psychic legitimacy it must project power from a schizophrenic self. This fulfils its dramatic need to commit necropolitical barbarity, with the justification of protecting itself from its self projected other. The monster is in reality itself. In simple terms Empire must see itself in the terms of generation, civilisation and protective order and so it must create an alter-self projected upon another, in order to commit the monstrous and continue to see itself as Horus. It must cast the other as subhuman, as a monster, whilst it commits the monstrous acts. The imperial is a primal insanity. This is the pact through which Empire maintains sovereignty.
Thus it justifies its biopolitics – its policy, policing and management of the human (this management is defined as protection), and its necessary necropolitics – its policy, policing and management of the subhuman who must die, be culled and controlled. Empire protects itself from its projected self. Without Seth the entire drama collapses but Seth is necessary for the perpetual battle and so necropolitics is the zone for the Imperial expression of its Thanatos – Death Drive.
This mythology reveals its pattern. In Rome, the British Empire and today with the continuation of the War on Terror. For Rome the other was the Barbarian (non-Roman). In the European colonial empires, the other were the conquered lesser races arranged into a human pantheon of races arranged in a spectrum between Horus and Seth. Colour and cultural similarity brought peoples closer to the Horusian standard and dissimilarity distanced peoples to Seth. This is still present in the American Empire now the foundational mythological pillar of ‘White’ imperial identity.
The further you are from the Horusian the more you must be managed by necropolitics and the closer you are to the Horusian the more you must be managed by biopolitics. The imperial needs Seth to justify its perpetual service of protection as imperial subjugation. This underlies the Xenophobia of immigration, the war on terror of which the Gaza and Lebanese genocides are extensions and it justifies unfettered exploitation in Africa and Latin America. We further saw this pattern in the COVID-19 pandemic as the pharmaceutical industry in collaboration with the state declared war on the coronavirus as Seth, for Seth could only be defeated by Horus and so only the vaccine developed by the forces of Pharmaceutical Horus could return regeneration and civilisation to our world.
Are you surprised at how often modernity echoes the past?
The Bourgeois Time Bomb: Neo-liberalism and Empire
Today the immigrant is brought into the modern European states under the governance of Horus to balance the effects of what I term the Bourgeouis Time Bomb in which development is understood to require a middle class who restrict the number of their children to create stable savings, education and relative wealth, but which causes reproductive and population decline, which then becomes the desired standard of the society. The immigrant is imported to balance the effect of these policies introduced with cultish unquestionable logic of Neoliberalism as the Horusian Will tries to preserve the forces of civilisation, but they are the foreigners and so under the aegis of Seth, and the population responds vigorously against the presence of a Sethian Will to destroy civilisation and order amongst them. They are now caught in the cycle of the perpetual mythic battle between Seth and Horus in which Horus protects an order older and more sacred than himself, ‘for we are a civilisation derived from the ancient Athenian democracy as the true inheritors of the Greeks’ (well this is the narrative).
This sets the state administrators of state policy who recognise the demographic dynamics which requires regular infusions of energetic populations, against the politicians who must appeal to the populations and the inherent psychic dynamic of the population. The narcissistic schizogenesis inevitably occurs and the imported foreign body’s Sethian essential projected nature emerges and the xenophobic anti-immigrant dynamic emerges. The state is trapped in a paradoxical cycle for the Horusian logic is that without the cyclical infusion of new blood the imperial population loses not only its required numbers for Horusian stability, but also its creative dynamism but that is an exploration for another essay.
Modern Empires and the Mythic Cycle of Violence
For Empire to control the forces of Seth it must employ bloody war and armageddon grade weaponry. It must plant outposts and colonies within Sethian lands to order their chaos, with the principles of Horus. Empire requires this mythological cycle and cannot live without it. It requires a psychic pantheon, it requires its idols and it must have blood sacrifice lest the Sethian destroy its pure Horusian will.
This week they assassinated Syed Nasrullah the Lebanese leader of Hezbollah, projected as the child of Seth himself, a leader of the forces of Seth, the purging of which requires blood sacrifice. Boots were placed upon Lebanese soil and this I have repeatedly claimed is the beginning of a regional war. But China is also Sethian! Russia is Sethian! Iran is Sethian! Students protesting are Sethian. And you would only speak against this if you are already overcome by Seth, the god of chaos, deserts, foreigners and storms and if we are not vigilant Seth will destroy our very civilisation and dismember the body of our Osirian ancient freedoms.
What I have described is a psychic landscaper which is governed by what the Psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan described as the Symbolic order which imagines the institutions, technology and patterns of action which will bring this order into the world, so that we should know that what we are seeing in front of us is pure imagination of a mythic, psychic order into which Empire must initiate us and bind us, so that it becomes our Imaginary Reality. In reality empire is imaginary! Once the Real events emerge stressing the contradictory foundations of empire and sending the entire edifice into collapse. This is our age!Â
The Collapse of Freedom:
The Horusian Death Cult at Home
When Marcellus William, the African-American death row inmate, for whom DNA evidence seemed to exonerate, was executed whilst the state refused to review his case. According the state authorities no jury nor court had ever found merit in William’s assertions of his innocence, despite African Americans being 7 times more likely to be exonerated of murder convictions than their white peers, and in cases where DNA evidence is reviewed, 53% of those exonerated are African Americans. The point is that the Horusian death cult which slaughters the forces of Seth isn’t only active in Lebanon, Gaza and Congo, its psychic dynamic is active at home as well.
The Perils of Empire: Blood Sacrifice and Collapse
Rome’s slow decline began with the conquest of the Phoenicians, for it was then compelled to march in search of stable Sethian others, the cost of maintaining its psychic drama led to its internal Horusian collapse, until it trusted its Sethian German Praetorian guard more than it trusted Horusian Romans. The drama collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions and so when the German guard tired of the drama turned upon the Empire and murdered the Emperor the Horusian substitute of Osiris themselves and joined the Osiris–Sethian drama.
In our times from what I can see, the empire of which we are part, is driving hard to create and maintain its Sethian others. It is driving hard to kinetic armageddon grade weaponry show downs. The imaginary monsters of science fiction are now projected onto our world as real embodied mechanised monsters, of actualised technological imaginaries. The spirit of Horus has revealed itself as Seth.
This is why overgrowing is of such importance, for revolution against empire is one of the means by which you join the cycle. If you wish to be free you must turn away and connect to the profound generosity and compassionate mercy manifested throughout the creation.
 All praise be to Allah in every situation!!!
-- Last Words, Marcellus Khalifah Williams
Thank you for this. The theme is one that is sorely needed for inquiring minds and deconstructing artificial reality.
Welcome back to writing! Thank you so much for this empowering and incisive piece. I love how you've woven mythology and psychology into it, and so really bringing home that empire is imaginary. I feel a large, energetic surge to create and resist. Alhamdulillah!