The first king of Tibet, founder of the long-lasting Yarlung dynasty, supposedly ruled around the 2nd century CE. Early historical literature describes him as having all the marks of a mahāpuruṣa—a great man. These, however, are no conventional features. Some of them are: having webbed hands and feet, like those of a frog; forty teeth, all of equal length; an extremely long tongue that can reach the top of the head; around three meters of height, and elongated limbs that allow touching the knees without bending down. When the Tibetans stumbled upon this remarkable figure, they asked where he came from. Unable to speak their language, the figure just pointed its finger upwards. Taking it to mean it had come from the sky, the Tibetans carried the figure on their shoulders and hailed it as their new king. Nyatri Tsenpo—the king’s name—was the first of a line of rulers who descended from the sky on a rope made of light. These kings were neither born nor did they die—their coming and going were mediated by the celestial rope, and when their term was over, they would simply climb back to the sky through the same rope by which they had descended.
This notion of an alien character holding political power over a foreign land is a surprisingly common trope across many mythologies worldwide. The phenomenon has been observed by the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins and described as the myth of “the stranger king.” In his work in the Fiji Islands, he documented several folk tales that revolved around this motif—in one, the Fijians’ lineage story of the Noikoro rulers is attributed to a crossing between “a handsome, fair-skinned stranger” and a shark. The tale directly rhymes with a Hawaiian proverb Sahlins reminds us of: “a chief is a shark who travels on land.”
The imagery of the shark is revealing. Sharks are not gentle animals—they are predators that devour humans. One point that Sahlins compellingly makes is that the “stranger king” is foreign, among other things, to the morals of the everyman. Very often, their “strangeness” is qualified by violent acts that cross the boundaries of accepted social customs—murder, incest, and other transgressions. By displaying immorality and debauchery, the stranger king does not provoke the repulsion the regular folk would if they did the same. Instead, he distinguishes himself as beyond morality and thus above it—as a supramundane agent capable of establishing a new moral order. As Sahlins eloquently describes: “to be able to put the society in order, the king must first reproduce an original disorder. Having committed his monstrous acts against society, proving he is stronger than it, the ruler proceeds to bring system out of chaos. Recapitulating the initial constitution of social life, the king’s accession is a recreation of the universe. The king makes his advent as a god.”
In colonial settings—where violence and exploitation are rooted in how societies are built—these mythologies become intertwined with the colonial forces themselves. In Hawaii, Captain Cook was said to be held as a representation of the local deity Lono and celebrated as the divine predecessor of the next ruling Hawaiian chief. In my own homeland, Brazil, the legends of Sebastianismo spoke of the miraculous return of King Sebastian of Portugal to Brazil after his disappearance in the Battle of Alcácer Quibir in the 16th century, to civilize the land and tame its savage tendencies. In what is akin to a case of Stockholm Syndrome, the colonized people begin to hail the colonizers not as exploitative parasites that bleed them to near-death, but as the very forces that are able to civilize their corrupted, spoiled nature.
In a few weeks, Brazil will hold the second round of an election between Flávio Bolsonaro and Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, the current president, in his third term. The results of the first round contradicted the polls, which suggested a slight advantage for Lula. Instead, Flávio Bolsonaro already amassed the majority of votes in the first round, and his political allies have secured an expressive majority in Congress.
Flávio is the son of Jair Bolsonaro, who now sits in house arrest after being convicted of planning a coup d’etat which included killing Lula and his vice president. The Bolsonaro family has been implicated in several scandals that have been popping up in Brazilian news for the last few years. Despite the accusations being varied, a common thread that runs through most of them is suggestions of violence. Most critical voices against Lula center their criticism on his dishonest character. Lula and his party are framed in the opposition’s imaginaire as “thieves” and “corrupted.” To the Bolsonaro bunch, another layer is added: violence and aggression. They are not accused of being mere con men but also dangerous gangsters.
Eduardo Bolsonaro, Flavio’s brother and a former police officer, has gone into self-exile in the United States in an attempt to draw American intervention into Brazilian politics. The general claim is that Brazil is “swept in crime and corruption” and needs a strong foreign force to intercede on its behalf. The fact that this foreign force happens to be the United States, which now tumbles under the whims of its own Stranger King, and whose history of violent intervention in South America is well documented, is unsurprising. To the most fervent supporters of the Bolsonaro mythology, the notion of their own country being colonized by “America” is nothing but good news. The United States’ colonizing influence is perceived as the only means to cleanse a failed nation from its decrepit and perverted ruling elites.
The construction of the Bolsonaro persona has, from the start, relied on this imagery of the “outsider.” Jair Bolsonaro himself carefully curated an identity of a rebellious newcomer in the political world, fighting alone against decadent power structures that see him as a threat to the status quo. His supporters have nicknamed him the “myth”, which is all but fitting. Fitting because what a myth often stands for is a supranatural rendition of its natural opposite. Myths of a heavenly earth of abundance sprout in wastelands and deserts—a thirsty throat dreams of infinite rivers. Instead of being true outsiders, the Bolsonaro clan stands for the most conservative, traditional, and well-established power structures in Brazilian history, sprouting, from all places, from the former colonial capital, Rio de Janeiro. The family has its tentacles enmeshed in all of Brazilian politics, upholding its most ancient and backward practices.
Myths can help assuage insecurities that feel impossible to resolve, death being the human experience most suffused with mythological thought. But the insecurities that burden Brazilians—or our world at large—are not cosmic or supernatural, neither are they unsolvable. They are materially rooted in rigid power structures of violent exploitation and endless accumulation of wealth by the few at the expense of the many. In that sense, symbolic compensations can only go so far in addressing material problems. Some of the best-faring politicians in this election have run their campaign targeting the “strangeness” of the commonfolk, which, because it is native, is rejected. The political discourse shifts from the real world and its concrete insecurities to an imagined, mythological world in which the “good”—the “stranger king”—overcomes the “evil”—the “stranger folk”: queer people, Afro-Brazilian religions, immigrants, and so on.
Amid the disconcerting news of Bolsonaro’s lead in the elections, the opposition has been trying to mobilize the electorate by portraying the family as a group of monsters, which has largely fallen on deaf ears. The Bolsonaro clan’s perceived immorality and barbarism are not only an insufficient reason to dissuade its voters, but serve instead as validation of its role as a foreign force capable of reforming a corrupt society. The violence they represent translates into an affect of power-by-proxy that intoxicates the strata of Brazilian society experiencing a slow and continuous degradation of its concrete, material security, in particular the middle class. It’s no wonder that Bolsonaro mythology is so popular among the elderly, a group increasingly rendered powerless by societies that treat human beings as disposable resources to be discarded once they can no longer work. The dangerous artifice lies in the fact that the Bolsonaro clan is shackled by neoliberal dogmas that will continue to serve the country with the same material precarity that currently overwhelms it. The compensation the clan offers is merely symbolic. And when the unfulfilled concrete needs of people start to clash with symbolic compensations—a process that can happen very quickly—a growing pressure builds for the compensation to cross the ford from the symbolic to the real. A pressure for the barbarism—promoted as a proxy for strength and power—to stop being voiced and become enacted.
When found at this crossroads, history usually goes one of two ways. In Hawaii, Captain Cook got into an altercation with the natives during his third expedition over a stolen boat. Tensions started to erupt, and Cook and his crew opened fire against the people, who rebelled, fighting back with clubs and stones. James Cook was killed, and later, as per the traditional rituals, had his corpse dismembered. Legends started to spread that the natives—like sharks—had eaten him. In Bahia, Brazil, the cult of Canudos promoted messianic ideas of the return of King Sebastian as a god-chosen monarch who would replace the newly established republic. The movement grew into armed rebellion and was brutally repressed by the republican authorities, with an estimated fifteen to thirty thousand people killed. It’s impossible to predict where this sensitive moment in Brazilian history will culminate. The bets about the future are on. It is my sincere hope that my country finds peace. If pressed to vote on one of the two, though, I’d place my bet on the ancestral Brazilian myths. I’d vote for the cannibals.