Priests and Governors Must Be Eunuchs

The rule that priests and governors must be eunuchs is an institutional safeguard in the Blazing-World’s account of its political and religious order: those holding the highest offices are made incapable of marrying, ostensibly to prevent domestic attachments from unsettling public government. Its rationale also reveals the gendered assumptions beneath that order, which excludes women from public employment yet regards their influence over husbands and parents as politically dangerous.

Office and rationale

The Priests and Governors are princes of the Imperial Blood, and the narrative says they are made eunuchs for that purpose. When the Empress asks why, they explain that the measure is meant to keep them from marriage, since women and children commonly cause disturbance in both Church and State. The rule therefore binds elite religious and political authority to the same discipline: officeholders are separated from marriage and the household relationships associated with it.

The explanation does not rest on women’s participation in government. The Empress points out that women and children have no employment in either Church or State. The officials concede this, but claim that women may nevertheless prevail upon their husbands and parents through importunate persuasion, producing harm in secret even without formally managing public affairs. Their answer makes the rule’s underlying anxiety explicit: exclusion from office is not considered enough to neutralize women’s influence.

Place in the political order

The eunuch rule appears alongside the regime’s principles of unified sovereignty and religion. The Statesmen defend having one governor as the natural counterpart to a single head governing one body, and connect one Emperor to worship of one God and obedience to one ruler. The Priests, in turn, describe a world with one religion and a common form of prayer, although different kinds of inhabitants have separate churches. The rule thus belongs to an order that seeks to secure institutional unity by controlling both public authority and the private ties thought capable of disrupting it.

That unity is not gender-inclusive. Women are absent from public religious congregations and are told to pray at home, while the Empress learns that they have no congregation of their own. Against that exclusion, the Empress later establishes a women’s congregation, leads it herself, and instructs its members in her religion; she converts them and wins the affection of her subjects. Her action changes women’s religious participation, but the account of the eunuch rule remains a striking example of the established order’s suspicion of women’s collective and domestic influence.

Tensions and limits

The rule is defended as protection against disturbance, yet its stated reasoning treats women’s persuasion as a hidden political force even when women hold no public office. This makes the policy more than a personal restriction on priests and governors: it reflects a governing logic that identifies family attachment as a possible rival to institutional obedience and answers that possibility by altering the bodies and marital prospects of officeholders.

The narrative also places the rule beside the Empress’s use of persuasion rather than bloodshed in religious conversion. She builds churches and uses the Fire-stone and Star-stone chapels to preach sermons of terror and comfort, presenting belief as something maintained through instruction and spectacle. Taken together, these episodes show a polity seeking cohesion through both institutional discipline and persuasive religious practice, while leaving unresolved the contradiction between its exclusion of women and the Empress’s own public authority as a woman who directs religious life.