BREAK THE CHAIN

You can change your self-perceptions and free yourself of old, binding notions decreed by supposed authorities, influences, or forces you think you’re powerless against.

- Noelle Sterne

The metaphysical-physical concept of the Great Chain of Being (GCB) began with the ancient Greeks and gained widespread acceptance, especially during the Middle Ages and into the eighteenth century. The GCB describes the supposedly inviolate hierarchy of nature, in which all life and material objects, organic and inorganic, originate from the Creator in unquestioned order. All is arranged in perfect design: first God, then the angels and demons, then the physical universe, then royalty representing the Divine, and then ordinary humans, down to animals, plant life, stones, metals, even minerals.

In the Great Chain of Being, one’s place in the hierarchy is set, fixed, immovable. Any deviation, it was believed, would go against the Creator’s plan. These convictions and rationale were widely held to, especially in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and extended also to degrees of difference (supposedly) in humans.

For example, the king, divinely ordained, depended on the unquestioned loyalty and devotion, as the hierarchy demanded, of his lords for allegiance and military strength. The lords of the manor depended on the same from those who enabled them to remain lords—their servants and serfs. No advance beyond one’s designated and predetermined place in the Chain was tolerated or imagined. Going “outside” one’s place was nothing short of blasphemy, an attempt to oppose the divine Order of all.