Sacred Kingship

For most of recorded history the person who ruled was also, in some measure, holy — a god, a god's son, a god's chosen, or a god's hostage. The idea that political power is sacred is one of the most widespread in human history, and one of the most consequential: it built the pyramids and the Mandate of Heaven, and it left behind a haunting, half-mythical figure — the king who must be killed.

The priest who waited to be murdered

There was, in antiquity, a sacred grove beside Lake Nemi in the hills near Rome, and in it a strange and terrible office. Its priest, the Rex Nemorensis, the "King of the Wood," held his post by a single rule: he had won it by murdering the priest before him, and he would hold it only until a stronger man — traditionally a runaway slave who had plucked a golden bough from a certain tree — came to murder him in turn. The priest was a king, and a sacrifice waiting to happen. It was with this grim image that Sir James Frazer opened The Golden Bough (1890–1915), the vast twelve-volume comparative study that made "sacred kingship" a subject — and asked the question that runs through this chapter: why should a king be holy, and why, so often, must he die?

The king as god

At its strongest, sacred kingship simply identified the ruler with the divine.

• In Egypt the pharaoh was a god on earth: the living Horus, the falcon-son of the gods; the son of Ra the sun; and, in death, Osiris, lord of the dead. His reign was not merely blessed by the gods — it was the presence of the divine order, Maat, in the world, and the whole colossal machinery of pyramid and temple served this identity (ch02).
• The Inca ruler, the Sapa Inca, was the son of Inti the sun-god, the "son of the Sun." He was so charged with divinity that objects he touched were ritually burned each year, and his dead body, mummified, continued to hold court, own estates, and be consulted (ch29).
• The Japanese emperor was held, until 1945, to descend in unbroken line from the sun-goddess Amaterasu herself — a living god at the head of the state (ch25).
• Rome made gods of its dead emperors by decree: the Senate would vote an emperor's apotheosis, his elevation to divus ("the deified"), his soul seen ascending as an eagle from the funeral pyre — and the living emperor's genius received cult across the empire (ch13, ch18).

The king answerable to Heaven

Against this stands a subtler and, in the long run, more world-shaping model: the king not as a god but as Heaven's appointee, holy because chosen, and holy only so long as he is worthy. Its classic form is the Chinese Mandate of Heaven (Tianming): the emperor is the Son of Heaven (Tianzi), but his authority is a trust granted by an impersonal Heaven and conditional on just rule. Misgovernment, disaster, and revolt are read as signs that the Mandate has been withdrawn — and a successful rebel proves, precisely by succeeding, that Heaven has transferred it to him (ch09). It is divine kingship with a moral tripwire built in, and it made Chinese political theory answerable, at least in principle, to the welfare of the ruled. A related conditionality runs through Mesopotamia, where the king was the gods' chosen shepherd, installed to uphold justice (Hammurabi receives his law from the sun-god Shamash), and through Israel, where the anointed king served under the judgment of prophets who did not hesitate to condemn him (ch03, ch07).

The king who must die

The most haunting thread in Frazer's study is the dying king. He argued that in the oldest societies the ruler embodied the life-force of the land itself, so that his vigor was the fertility of the crops — and that when his powers failed he had to be killed, sometimes after a fixed term, and replaced, so that the divine life could pass undiminished into a strong new body. The evidence he assembled is uneven, but some cases are genuinely documented. Among the Shilluk of the Nile, the king (reth) embodied Nyikang, the divine founder of the nation — every reth was Nyikang — and traditions held that a reth who weakened could be ritually put to death (a claim later ethnographers, and David Graeber, have complicated but not dismissed). And in Mesopotamia we have hard evidence of a related rite: the substitute king (šar pūhi), in which, when omens threatened the king's life, a commoner was enthroned as king for a period to absorb the evil fate — and then, in at least some cases, put to death in the real king's place, the king resuming his throne. The dying king was not only a theory; sometimes it happened.

Anointed: sacred kingship in Christendom

The idea did not end with paganism. In Israel a king was made by anointing with sacred oil — and the Hebrew word for "anointed one," māshîaḥ, gives us both Messiah and, through Greek, Christ (ch07, ch16). Medieval and early-modern Europe inherited a Christianized sacred kingship: kings were anointed at their coronations like the kings of Israel, claimed to rule by the divine right of kings (answerable to God alone), and were believed to heal the disease scrofula by the royal touch — "the king's evil," cured by the laying-on of the sacred royal hand, a rite performed by English and French monarchs into the 18th century. The slow death of this idea — through the execution of Charles I, the Enlightenment, and the democratic revolutions — is one of the great secularizing turns of the modern age.

The believer's lens

For most of recorded history, subjects experienced their ruler as a point where heaven touched earth. The pharaoh was the living Horus, son of Ra; the Sapa Inca was the son of the Sun; Japan's emperors descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu; Roman emperors could become gods at death. In China the ruler held the Mandate of Heaven only while he governed justly, so kingship was sacred and conditional at once. In Christendom the king was anointed like David, ruled by divine right and was believed to heal by the royal touch. To those who lived under it, sacred kingship explained why the harvest, the flood, the peace and the calendar depended on the person on the throne, and why rebellion could be sacrilege, or, when Heaven withdrew its mandate, a duty. The king was a mediator standing between the people and the powers that governed the world, and bearing the weight of both.

The skeptical lens

The historian documents sacred kingship case by case, in two broad forms: the king as divine (Egypt, the Inca, Japan until the emperor renounced divinity in 1946, deified Roman emperors) and the king as Heaven's conditional appointee (the Mandate of Heaven, biblical and Christian anointing). There is also hard evidence for a dying-king-type rite: the Mesopotamian substitute king ritual, in which a stand-in took the king's place when omens threatened him. What modern scholarship does not accept is James Frazer's grand thesis in The Golden Bough, that all religion began with a periodically killed sacred king. His method of stringing far-flung customs into one universal scheme is regarded as overreaching, and the myth-and-ritual school he launched is disputed. How literally and how often "dying king" rituals were carried out (the Shilluk case is debated) and how far these systems influenced one another remain open. Sociologically, sacralising the ruler is also a powerful way of legitimising power.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Sacred kingship is encoded in a remarkably consistent set of objects and gestures, because the whole point is to make an ordinary mortal visibly more than mortal.

• The regalia. Crown, throne, scepter, and orb; the Shilluk king's sacred spear and stool; the Japanese imperial mirror, sword, and jewel (the gifts of Amaterasu). To be enthroned is to be invested with objects that carry the office's divinity independently of the man.
• Anointing. The pouring of sacred oil is the central encoding of the "chosen" model: it marks the king as set apart and infused with divine spirit — the same gesture, and word, that makes a messiah.
• The king's two bodies. Medieval jurists (studied by Ernst Kantorowicz) distinguished the king's mortal body natural from his undying body politic — "the king is dead, long live the king" — an idea that let sacred kingship survive the death of any particular king, and that quietly seeded the modern notion of the undying state.
• Coronation as re-creation. Enthronement rites often re-enact the creation of the world (Babylon's Akitu festival, ch46, renewed the king's rule together with the cosmos), encoding the claim that legitimate rule and cosmic order are the same thing renewed together.

Connections

This theme underlies half the archive. Its god-king is the Egypt of the pharaohs (ch02), the Inca of the sun (ch29), and imperial Rome and Japan (ch13, ch25); its Heaven-answerable king is the Mandate of Heaven of China (ch09) and the prophet-checked king of Israel (ch07); its anointed messiah runs straight into Second Temple messianism and Christianity (ch10, ch16); its dying king is the twin of the dying-and-returning god and of sacrifice (ch51) and connects to the renewal cycles of creation and flood (ch46, ch01). Where a people located the sacred in its ruler, everything else — law, war, architecture, the afterlife of the king — followed from that one decision.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch49.html · a comparative library of the sacred.