New College Independent Alumni/ae Association

I was reading Jenny Cashman’s essay The Revolution of Akhenaten and couldn’t help thinking of the cult of Gabel at my alma mater. While the iconography of power at New College is admittedly less monumental, the thematic depictions legitimizing the rulers of the school are no less commemorative in constructing an elite identity there than they were in the temples of ancient Egypt. The annals of its holy mission may be described online rather than inscribed on stelae, but the descriptive narrative functions as a similar literary device. The only thing missing at the campus are murals of dream motifs displaying scenes of Gabel communing with god.

Evoking memories of the recent rebellions at New College, Cashman writes “Akhenaten’s religion and his royal city of Amarna represent the social construction of a ‘community of believers’ that parallels how social movements of resistance create identity through religious fundamentalism in today’s global society.” While not a religion per se, Gabel’s Institute for Spirituality Law and Politics as well as the school’s just, sacred and sustainable motto do suggest that the trustees inhabit a higher plane.

Cashman goes on to say, “This type of identity-building, Castells suggests, is an expression of ‘the exclusion of the excluders by the excluded’, a defensive identity that ‘leads to the formation of communes or communities’.” The legitimizing literature of New College is replete with explicit community themes, but unlike genuine communes, the rulers of the school try to exclude both state institutions as well as the students who attend there. It’s hard to be more exclusive than that.