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In a series of publications, beginning with my ethnographic monograph The Tibetan Symbolic World (1982) and most recently in my book Moses and Civilization (1996), I have put forward the view that in our own civilization, as well as in a number of other social systems, political power and religion are linked not only to each other, but to a schematic narrative that, as I have argued and will show again presently, is Oedipal in nature. This narrative schema is remarkably consistent over centuries and indeed millenia, insofar as analysis reveals its presence behind Athenian tragedies no less than in the scenarios of such recent works as Star Wars, The Godfather, and The Lion King. The schema has a small set of very clear axioms and rules, but with it, it is possible to analyze, organize, and generate a vast array of narrative cultural productions from a wide range of places and eras.
I will not attempt, in this short compass, to give you a convincing reason why things are as I describe them; I will limit myself to describing how they appear to be. I begin with the observation that the matters I describe concern men, for the simple reason that in the relevant societies the public sphere and its associated domains of religion and political authority are predominantly if not exclusively male. Among the men, there are, it seems, two kinds, to whom I refer as senior men and junior men. Senior men are defined as having at least one of two perquisites that junior men do not: on the one hand, legitimate sexual rights to a woman or women, and on the other, recognized political power. Relative age is not as important as the presence or absence of these factors. I deliberately choose to say “senior men” and “junior men” rather than “fathers” and “sons” for two reasons: the former opposition is both more encompassing and more precise. The term “father” is, indeed, a very imprecise one, having a number of different components that may or may not appear together in one person: there