The Ogregods: An Ogregore Pantheon

I’ve invented a pantheon that represents collective social agents, i.e., ogregores—the “ogregods.” 

The ogregods gradually emerged as their seeds—disconnected joint action in scattered small groups of people—merged and grew during the period of state formation.

Ag, Reg, and War

Ag, the god of collective large-scale food production, emerged during the Neolithic Revolution (c. 10,000 BCE onwards) that marked the worldwide  transition from hunting and gathering to settled farming. The collective effort to grow food required irrigation systems, storage facilities, and hierarchies to organize production and distribute surpluses, and so Ag arose.

With the emergence of Ag, centralized authority was needed to mobilize and manage resources. Reg, the god of command and rule, came into being. Ag provided the material basis for the population growth and surpluses that Reg could control.

There had always been fights between small groups, but they were localized and transient, fueled by local inter-personal struggles. As people gathered in bigger groups, however, War emerged, e.g., in Sumer and Egypt, c. 3100 BCE. It developed a mind of its own and kept conflicts going even when people became tired of fighting. It was usually the servant of Reg and Ag, which needed to protect surpluses from raids by neighboring groups—or raid them, in turn, to acquire new land or resources. War, in turn, shaped Ag and Reg by being the violent means of securing new agricultural resources or consolidating power, respectively.

Examples of Ag include cereal cultivation and sheep farming in Mesopotamia, cereal production in the Nile valley, medieval English wool production, and modern industrial agriculture. Reg stands for systems of government like feudalism, monarchies, and liberal democracies. Standing armies and navies constitute War. 

One can think of the relationships between these three ogregods as a series of feedback loops:

• Ag needed Reg to manage surpluses, irrigation, and labor;
• Reg organized and maintained the armies that constituted War;
• War’s conquests secured more arable land, and it also protected Ag from attack;
• Reg directed the large-scale projects such as irrigation and flood control that fed Ag.

In many places, Ag emerged first and was followed by Reg and War (cf. the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, and Mesoamerica). In places where Ag was less dominant, like the Scythian steppe societies, War shaped the rise of Reg.

Meanwhile, the small local gods like the Roman household gods, the lares and penates, continued doing their own thing. Gods often nest with many smaller ones inside the larger ones—just like large ogregores can contain smaller ones.

Merc, Dox, and Reckon

These gods were not alone. Several others emerged during the period when states were formed, including Merc, Dox, and Reckon.

People had always traded with each other, sometimes over very long distances, but the new scale of Reg and War drove the emergence of Merc, the ogregod of markets and commerce. A complex web of networks trading tin and copper were essential to the Bronze Age production of both agricultural and military tools. Even before the Bronze Age, obsidian was traded in a wide region from the Aegean to the Levant, fostering specialization and the emergence of hubs like Çatalhöyük, c. 7500–5700 BCE.

While authority had always had religious components, Dox—the god of religious order—emerged as a distinct force separate from Reg as formal priesthoods created parallel power structures. As Ag produced surpluses and Reg imposed order, transcendence was regimented into Dox. Dox adopted Reg’s discipline, and Reg used Dox to harness people’s passions into serving War. Since temples and religious orders controlled significant agricultural land and craft production capacity, Dox sometimes merged with Ag and Merc.

Reckon spawned when Reg needed to keep better track of War and Ag’s multifarious components. As Reg’s bean-counting bureaucracy grew, it budded off and became Reckon. (One might even see it as a split, with Reg dividing into Rule and Reckon.) Writing and record-keeping constituted a god that often persisted unchanged even as Reg’s avatars came and went. Reckon was unassuming and affected an air of humility. It often tried to hide its power, pretending to merely be the individual scribes and bureaucrats serving Reg. However, it could outlive Reg, as in the centralized Chinese bureaucracy that outlived dynasties. It provided the continuity that Reg needed and was hard to kill. That power struggle lives on in the efforts of the U.S. executive branch to scale back the federal bureaucracy.

Tech isn’t an Ogregod

My tech & myth project grew out of the feeling that technology was like a god (cf. Techno-Loki, 2018).  However, as my thinking about these meta-human powers evolved, I came to formulate them in terms of ogregores: large, bounded, richly connected groups of people that shared a common purpose along with integrated processes and technology. Ogregores are agents in their own right. 

Technology—the combination of know-how and tools—is as much a part of us as language and socialization. It predates Homo sapiens. Therefore, technology is a constituent of ogregores, not an ogregore in its own right. 

Clearly, the emergence of metallurgy, pottery production, textile manufacturing, and other specialized crafts created new social classes and technological imperatives. Specialized craftspeople became crucial in making agricultural tools, status symbols, and weapons of war. However, tech was integrated with Ag, Reg and War from the start. It continues to the present day with agritech and the military-industrial complex. It is also an important part of Merc and Reckon: companies and bureaucracies are inextricably dependent on technology.

Avatars and instances of the Ogregods

The entities I’ve named—Ag, Reg, War, etc.—are prototypical forms of the ogregods. They instantiate in different forms in different places and at different times. When they were recognized as divinities, they went by different names.

Early power-bases were often cities that were hubs where Ag, Reg, and Merc intersected. Most city states had patron gods, such as Enlil in Nippur and Girsu in Lagash, which one could see as local avatars of Reg. 

Mapping Ag, Reg and their ilk to pantheons is tricky because gods’ remits often overlap and blur, and their responsibilities and attributes can be manifold. It’s not surprising, though, because ogregores blur and overlap too, e.g., different companies incorporating social media, search, and ecommerce in different ways.

Some of the ancient Greek gods can be readily matched with ogregods: Demeter to Ag, Zeus to Reg, Ares and Athena to War, and Hermes to Merc. However, several don’t really fit. Hephaistos represents technical and strategic know-how, but since I’m not designating tech as an ogregod, Hephaistos isn’t one of them. Poseidon, Hera, Aphrodite, Apollo, Artemis, and Dionysus don’t fit either. 

Not only are not all Olympians ogregods, but not all the ogregods are in the pantheon: I can’t identify Olympian gods that map to Reckon and Dox. The closest is Hestia, who was looked upon as presiding at all sacrifices and had a share in the sacrifices in all the temples of the gods, and thus could be considered an avatar of Dox.

The Egyptians came close to having a god of bureaucracy, i.e. a Reckon, with their concept of Ma'at (truth, justice, cosmic order) as the foundation of legitimate governance. The goddess Ma'at had dedicated priests and temples, particularly during the New Kingdom period. Administrative officials were portrayed as followers of Thoth, the god of wisdom and writing, another candidate for (or component of) an Egyptian Reckon. Thoth also as a claim to being Dox, since he had specific associations with rituals, the priesthood, and maintaining the divine order. He played a key role in the judgment of souls in the afterlife, ensuring the correct performance of sacred rites, and priests invoked Thoth as the patron of their religious activities (statuette of Thoth as an ibis and a worshipping priest, MFA Boston).

Levels of Abstraction

The ogregods are archetypal forms of social organization, or categories that represent enduring structures that organize human behavior around specific functions.

The instances of one ogregod are very diverse so that they’re like biological genera (or even a higher taxonomic level) rather than species. That is, they represent not cats, dogs, horses, etc., but perhaps felines, canids, ungulates, etc. (or carnivores and herbivores; or vertebrates, tunicates, and cephalochords). 

Specific organizations are instantiations of an ogregod. Every instantiation or avatar is unique. By analogy, both tigers WG-BNP-5 and WG-BNP-8 (using the National Tiger Conservation Authority numbering system) are felines in the Bandipur National Park, but only WG-BNP-5 is a maneater.

The trouble with Linnean classification as a metaphor is that the ogregods are fuzzy categories that overlap with each other; they're not mutually exclusive like felids and canines. They're more like tags in a cloud than hierarchies. Other similar fuzzy groupings include:

• Conflicting botanical and culinary classifications, where some plants, like tomatoes and avocados, straddle both categories depending on use, and mushrooms are not plants at all but are often grouped with vegetables.

• Overlapping functional categories of furniture, like seating, surfaces, and storage, where an ottoman can be either a seat or a low table (i.e., a surface), and kitchen islands combine work surfaces and storage.

• Many works of art and literature span multiple genres or subvert conventional definitions, such as memoirs that include fictional elements blurring fiction and nonfiction, and historical fiction overlapping with romance or adventure.

We see similar overlaps with ogregods, for example Dox overlapping Reg with religious rulers like the Popes; Ag overlapping Merc in industrial agriculture; militarized trade routes combining Merc and War; and military logistics intersecting War and Reckon.

Examples of ogregod instantiations

Here are some examples

• Ag: grain farming systems in the Fertile Crescent and Egypt; serfdom in feudal Europe.
• Reg: ruling dynasties in Egypt, China, etc.; systems of rulership like European royal courts.
• War: The Roman army; the Janissaries, an elite Ottoman military corps; the Teutonic Knights; professional armies in Prussia and France.
• Dox: Priesthoods like that in Ancient Egypt; the Catholic Church; religious orders in Buddhism and Christianity.
• Reckon: Confucian scholar-officials in imperial China.
• Merc: Ancient trading networks in the Aegean; Medieval trade guilds; trading cities like Venice; merchants of the Silk Route; the Hanseatic League; the Luddites; the British East India Company; the 20th century music industry.

I will explore conflicts between ogregods in a future post.

Modern ogregods

The entities I outlined above were tailored to historical societies (or at least, my understanding of them). With the rise of modernism in recent centuries, some new ogregods have joined the party, such as

• Law: The legal system, including courts, judges, and lawyers. An off-shoot, perhaps, of the union of Reg and Reckon.
• Cop: Law enforcement organizations, spawn of Reg, with a dash (or more) of War
• Fin: Offspring of Merc, focused on making money from money
• Wis: Organized knowledge, notably instantiated as universities and disciplinary specialties

Thanks to Susan Tonkin for a helpful comments on a draft.