I. King Onuist and the Undoing of the Picts
The Vikings were able to wipe out the Pictish royal family in 839 AD, because the Picts had created the conditions for their own defeat. King Óengus I (Onuist mac Fergusa), who ruled from 729 to 761 AD, was a powerful, able monarch. One of his accomplishments was subduing the colony of Dál Riata which threatened the Pictish way of life. But in order to increase his military strength, he centralized the Pictish community and set up his own dynasty to rule it. The male supremacy of his neighbors seduced him–the Machine flatters the male sex.
Onuist brought the relics of St. Andrew to his monastery in the 740s AD, weaponizing a top-down religious hierarchy to validate a new paternalistic ledger. This would force his own sons into the line of succession. And by establishing St. Andrews as a royal administrative and religious center under his personal protection, he claimed a “divine right” that sat completely outside the traditional laws of the mothers.
External threats to the community had increased since the collapse of the Roman Empire, and perhaps he believed his time was unique. Maybe the customs of his prehistoric ancestors no longer seemed sufficient. But he succeeded in making his people a target for the next powerful enemy.
The Horizontal Baseline of Decentralized Pictish Authority
Before Onuist took the Pictish throne in the eighth century, Pictish authority existed in a fluid, horizontal, decentralized matrix. The center of Pictish social reality rested in Pictish mothers. Matrilineal bloodlines provided lineage, identity, and royal succession.
This system had an important advantage; an enemy could not wipe out the leadership of the entire society by killing a single family because power did not reside in one family. Onuist traded the horizontal sanity of the ages for a centralized, imperial ego. And a century later his centralized court was wiped out in a single afternoon.
For a century after the end of Onuist’s reign, the erasure of maternal clans was total. So, after the Viking attack, the throne stood vacant for almost four years. Then Kenneth MacAlpin, the patrilineal King of the Scots, took the controls. MacAlpin’s dynasty barred the Picts from leadership in their own territory.
II. The Seduction Script
Onuist was not the first king to take the patriarchal bait, and he would not be the last. The chiefs of Clan Chattan became embroiled in a centuries-long rivalry over leadership of the Clan and the key point of disagreement was the patriarchal claim of Clan Macpherson.
Despite the rise of feudalism, Highland Clans retained their custom of matrilineal inheritance. This was especially true of Clan Chattan. Angus Mackintosh became the Chief of Clan Chattan in 1291 when he married Eva, the last Chattan heiress. This was consistent with Clan Chattan’s Pictish customs. However, the male members of the clan objected, and their objection took the form of a rebellion against the matrilineal customs of their own clan.
The Lineage of Gillechattan
It’s true that the Macphersons’ male line of descent from Gillechattan was indisputable. According to Moncreiffe and Hicks, Gillechattan was probably the Kelehathonin who appears on record in the thirteenth century. They cite Professor Skene:
‘Diarmada, the grandfather of Gillachattan, the eponymus of the Clan Chattan, is said in the old Irish genealogy to have been called the Ferleighinnm or lector. Tradition ascribes to Gillachattan the epithet of Clerich or Ceric, and he and his descendants the Clan Vuidreach are said to have been hereditary lay parsons of Kingussie, one of whom, Duncan the son of Kenneth, appears in 1438 as Duncan parson. From him the chief of the Clan Vuireach takes his name of Macpherson.’ The Macphersons themselves believe their name-father to have been this Duncan’s great-grandfather Muredach, from whom they certainly derive their other name of Clan Mhuirich: ‘the Children of Muredach’.1
But when the Macpherson Clan’s feudal overlord wanted to divide Clan Chattan, his weapon of choice was patriarchal conceit. This was despite the fact that this man had received his own lands through an heiress.
The Setup
The Crown and the clan recognized the Cluny branch of Macphersons as the Chiefs of Clan Macpherson. They had a charter for their lands in Badenoch, where the feudal overlord was George Gordon, the 6th Earl of Huntly. Several members of the clan gave a bond of manrent to Huntly in 1591. The problem in the overlord’s opinion, was that Mackintosh, Captain of the whole Clan Chattan, was too powerful. So, Huntly invented a scheme to set Cluny Macpherson against Mackintosh. The real purpose of this scheme was not to strengthen Clan Macpherson, or to champion patriarchy. It was to divide Clan Chattan and rule over it.
Huntly suggested to Cluny Macpherson that his claim to the chiefship was more legitimate than Mackintosh’s claim. The Macpherson’s descended from Gillechattan in the male line while Clan Mackintosh traced their lineage from an heiress. He even offered the Macphersons a separate deed of manrent (a formal alliance ledger). The dispute that Huntly manufactured would go on to cause generations of strife in the Clan.
In 1672, with the encouragement of George Gordon, the 4th Marquess of Huntly, Duncan Macpherson of Cluny attempted to use the newly minted Lyon King of Arms Act to legally usurp the headship of Clan Chattan. At that time, he managed to extract a counterfeit paper title from the state, but the Privy Council reduced it and stripped it away when the Mackintoshes presented five hundred years of charter continuity.
Sadly, Clan Macpherson understood what the Machine had been doing to them by 1609 and swore allegiance to Clan Mackintosh. This is known in Highland history as the Great Clan Chattan Band of Union of 1609. But the Machine just waited for 60 years until it could provoke Duncan Macpherson to pursue the chiefship again in 1672. As stated above, the Privy Council decided the matter in favor of Clan Mackintosh.
The Dual Huntly Overlords: The Evolution of the Machine
- The 1591 Huntly (The Warlord): He operated by brute force, backroom deals, and personal intrigue. When he set the Macphersons against the Mackintoshes in 1591, he was acting as a classic, regional feudal lord trying to smash a horizontal tribal alliance to protect his own personal borders.
- The 1672 Huntly (The Bureaucrat): He was an elite, highly polished, continental administrator He was sent to France for a Catholic education, served in the French royal armies under Turenne, and was a close courtier to King Charles II. He didn’t need to burn castles or ride into battle to control the clans; he simply let the Privy Council, the Lord Lyon King of Arms, and the state’s newly minted legislation do the work of attrition for him.
III. The Transatlantic Transmission and the Bayonet Script
The Machine doesn’t need another code to conquer new continents. It uses the same one over and over, with variations. Its corporate management software was modernized by the time it was needed in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. There it appeared as the well-dressed polite greed of the Missionary Party. The Party consisted of the sons and grandsons of Anglican and Calvinist missionaries who traded in their religious vocations for sugarcane wealth. By 1887, these men were armed merchants who forced King Kalākaua to sign the ‘Bayonet Constitution’. The King signed away his sovereignty under duress, but the new constitution didn’t physically remove him from the palace; it created a fictio legis.
In legal theory, fictio legis (Latin for “fiction of law”) refers to a legal fiction — a rule or assumption adopted by law that treats a fact as true for legal purposes, even if it is not literally true. This is done in order to achieve a desired legal outcome. In Hawaiʻi’s case, the legal fiction stripped the monarchy of its executive authority and localized political power within a cabinet controlled by the merchants. The King remained in the palace, but he was merely a public relations camouflage. They changed the underlying reality to enable extraction.
The new constitution also disenfranchised the majority of native voters by tying suffrage to the ownership of large amounts of private property. Then, in 1893, Queen Lili’uokalani was physically removed from the palace.
The Machine in Hawaiʻi was the intermediate mutation of the disease, but by 1934 the sickness had become a horror. That’s when the US Congress forced North American tribes to sign corporate constitutions creating the Tribal Council. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 forced independent, matrilineal tribal societies to adopt standardized, corporate-style business constitutions, and its creators didn’t need an army to make it happen. They only had to flatter native men to sit in a boardroom and manage federal compliance grants. These native men would soon learn to see their native home the same way the corporate bosses saw it–as a dead asset.
IV. The Roman Mutation: Erasing Maternal Reality
To understand the terrifying efficiency of these tactics we have to go back to their source, the legal laboratory of ancient Rome. Patriarchy existed before Rome and it had created oppressive social hierarchies. But it was messy and inconsistent. More importantly, it was limited by local customs and maternal clans. But the Romans invented a new administrative technology. They turned male dominance into an inescapable global operating system.
Rome’s weapon was the legal fiction (fictio legis). This is an artificial administrative decree in which the state orders its courts and registries to pretend that a natural or historical fact does not exist. The state replaces reality with an institutional simulation.
Rome’s War Against the Womb
This tool was created to solve a specific imperial problem–the biological womb. The womb is a problem for an empire because it is naturally decentralized and unreadable to a centralized tax spreadsheet. So, the only way Roman jurists could build a top-down extraction empire was to rewrite humanity’s maternal reality. They accomplished this by coding two unprecedented legal overrides: Patria Potestas (Absolute Paternal Power) and Adgnatio (Agnatic Kinship). As a result, family identity and lineage no longer carried the undeniable biological fact of the mother’s blood. The source of a child’s identity was transferred to the father’s paper record. Going forward, the only way anyone could be associated with a particular family is if their father’s name was on record with the state.
Inheritance was a central concern of this Roman manipulation. The law of Manus marriage legally coded a bride as ‘the fictional daughter’ (filiae loco) of her husband. This meant that her entire independent inheritance and material assets would be absorbed into her husband’s possessions.
Rome proved that men sitting in an office far removed from human concerns could use a piece of paper to overrule biological reality and erase the structural authority of women. This is how they are able to turn all of human relationships and the earth itself into abstract, tradeable, and foreclosable assets. It is the legal foundation that defines contemporary life.
V. Restoration
There are no human solutions within a fictitious world; it is not made with humans in mind. But as bleak as this sounds, it is not hopeless. True hopelessness comes from not being able to see the Machine for what it is.
Because the modern mind is thoroughly trained, we think of liberation as the right to be numbered, work for a corporation, or win a seat in Congress. That is a delusion. Real liberation looks like a kinship community with matrilineal inheritance.
Even though that lifestyle is not attainable on a global scale, it is a clear ideal. When we compare those original societies with what we see around us, everything is revealed as a legal fiction. We may have to live in the Machine’s world, but we don’t have to believe its lies.
All the nations of the world have their indigenous populations. Furthermore, all of them are experiencing climate disasters under the rule of the Machine. But their leaders never consider returning to the indigenous lifestyle. The Machine flatters the male sex; this patriarchal world would rather compete on its terms.
- Moncreiffe and Hicks, The Highland Clans. Bramhall House, a division of Clarkson N. Potter, Inc. 1977. p. 131. [↩]