Ming: Klytus, I'm bored. What plaything can you offer me today?
Klytus: An obscure body in the S-K system. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet...Earth.
Ming: How peaceful it looks...[Causes an earthquake.]
Klytus: Most effective, Your Majesty. Will you destroy this...ah...Earth?
Ming: Later. I like to play with things a while, before annihilation. - Flash Gordon (1980)
So successful has our passage been to this other shore that it is sometimes difficult to remind Americans that political theology is the primordial form of political thought. Virtually every civilization known to us began with an image of itself as set within a divine nexus of God, man, and world, and based its understanding of legitimate authority on that theological picture.