Legion of Many

About

Legion Of Many Press Pack  is available to download as a PDF- download here

My Name is Legion:

“For we are many”

It is the common understanding that we are singular, one, have one face, one aspect, that our persons are singular, that there is, inside us all, a singular identity, unchanging and static. Societies, modern and ancient, have traded on this idea of an absolute identity, matched to the one face we each possess, in often very successful attempts to “fix” people in their place, to define them, to pin them to their place in the social order, to hang upon them their inadequacies, their transgressions, their debts and burdens. The uniforms people wear to work, the routine, expected faces we present to those who know us, the questions endlessly repeated by those who don’t: “What do you do?, “Where are you from?”, “What do you like?”; the endless forms with standardized answers we are forced to fill with our “data” all represent attempts to define us as static, reidentifiable, singular, controllable. Our dress, our habits, our preferences, our answers for the sake of convenience, simplicity: we are complicit, we play the game.

But this isn’t how people really are. Beneath, within people, as David Hume pointed out, are not single selves, do not have a core that is just like this or that, that is the same from one moment to the next, that fits the forms, that suits the singular mask of our faces and costume of our clothes and behaviors that define who we are in the order of society. They are like parliaments of selves, they are gatherings, they are successions of personalities, changing, shifting, becoming, but held beneath the grate, the cookie-cutter face of the belief that persons are the same from day to day, week to week, that their personalities are fixed, non-contradictory, singular.

The Legion believes that the true nature of persons, of each person, is one of a gathering, a group like cloud of selves dancing and moving from one mode of being to the next, driven now by this color of desire, now that, into an ever changing array, a gathering, a party, each person’s face like a mask shared by many. The Legion believes that we as individuals, we as the many, must fight against the bonds of sameness, of unitary identity imposed by the requirements of rulership, government, authority. We must combat the forces seeking to reduce us to a single face, a single controllable identity. We should celebrate and show the many faces of ourselves. We should allow ourselves the freedom to display the multitude of inner faces, and in so doing realize that we mingle among and between ourselves not as single individuals, isolated by our identities from the rest of humanity, but rather as multifarious personalities, a crowd within a crowd, whose boundaries are as porous and communal as those afforded by a masked ball. We all wear masks, all the time. They are our faces.

The Lord of Misrule

Our history is a long one. The roots of our rituals, our purpose stretch down through millennia of hostile soil to the Saturnalia, and still before… The Saturnalia was a Roman festival whose very existence was continually restricted, and suppressed but which never conformed, defying emperors. Its purpose was one of role-reversal, of upheaval, of allowance of the most sacred, the most rigid, the most uniform roles in society to be subverted, liberated, removed altered. For a week, the servants, the slaves even were allowed to act as freedmen, masters even, while the masters might wait on them, or else act as they please, wearing hats of freedmen, as though they had been slaves themselves. And of course, they had been, to the roles they themselves were forced to play. The Saturnalia freed all of them from the roles which restricted and confined. Presiding over the celebrations, in each household, each party, was a figure of misauthority, a lightning rod of mischief and boundary overthrow: the Saturnalia Princeps, the Lord of Misrule. It was his or her duty to see to it that rules were broken, that boundaries breached, that ordinary social roles reversed, subverted, or overcome, that people were freed to express, to become the numerous inner selves that each had harbored.

After the decline of the Empire, in the thousand years from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, the Saturnalia morphed but survived as the Feast of Fools, the Hypodiaconorum, and the Lord of Misrule, continued his necessary and exultant work: liberating, for brief periods, the denizens of the Dark and Middle ages from the bonds of their circumstances of birth, and place in history. When the Church, in all its trans-reformational denominations, finally outlawed this festival it had long sought to suppress, in the fifteenth century, the practice of costume pageants, where social rules and rigid positions, rigid identities could be effaced and discarded for brief festivals of freedom of the selves, sprang up among in the only place it could survive the withering ire of religious repression: the courts of the Dukes and Princes of Europe. From there the fire kindled further again, through the half-public masked balls of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, where once again king and commoner, Duchess and servant could mingle in liberating anonymity, shedding and sharing, assuming and commingling identities.

And the root of that tradition is the tap root of the Legion: disguise and transformation, mask and costume to unmask the inner selves, role and status overturned, inverted, subverted, exalted! Transcend the bonds of fixed identity, of public persona, make public your universal possibility, join the Legion, become the Lord of Misrule.