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Sacred king
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For the office under ancient Rome, see Rex Sacrorum.
In many historical societies, the office of kingship carries a sacral meaning, that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and of judge.
notion has prehistoric roots and is found worldwide, on Java as in sub-Saharan Africa, with shaman-kings credited with rain-making and assuring fertility and good fortune. On the other hand, the king might also be designated to suffer and atone for his people, meaning that the sacral king could be the pre-ordained victim of a human sacrifice, either regularly killed at the end of his term of office, or sacrificed in times of crisis (e.g.
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Encyclopedia
For the office under ancient Rome, see Rex Sacrorum.
In many historical societies, the office of kingship carries a sacral meaning, that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and of judge.
History
The notion has prehistoric roots and is found worldwide, on Java as in sub-Saharan Africa, with shaman-kings credited with rain-making and assuring fertility and good fortune. On the other hand, the king might also be designated to suffer and atone for his people, meaning that the sacral king could be the pre-ordained victim of a human sacrifice, either regularly killed at the end of his term of office, or sacrificed in times of crisis (e.g. Domalde).
The Bible (Second Book of Kings, 3, 27), recounts how King Mehsa of Moab, faced with a strong alliance by the Kings of Israel, Judea and Edom overwhelming his land and besieging his capital, "took his eldest son that should have reigned in his stead, and offered him for a burnt offering upon the wall". This had the desired result, "there was great indignation against Israel" and the three attacking kings had to raise the siege and return to their own land. The Bible does not specify who was "indignant against Israel" but in the context it can only be God; this is remarkable since God is mentioned as having long before abolished human sacrifice, and since the Hebrews rather than the Moabites were God's "Chosen people"; even so, the passage makes clear that Hebrews like other ancient peoples took seriously the power of royal sacrifice in time of national crisis and danger.
Among the Ashanti, a new king was flogged before inthronisation.
From the Bronze Age Near East, inthronisation and anointment of a monarch is a central religious ritual, reflected in the titles Messiah or Christ which became separated from worldly kingship. Thus, Sargon of Akkad described himself as "deputy of Ishtar", just as the Christian Pope is considered the "steward of Christ".
The king is styled as a shepherd from earliest times, e.g., the term was applied to Sumerian princes such as Lugalbanda in the 3rd millennium BC. The image of the shepherd combines the themes of leadership and the responsibility to supply food and protection as well as superiority.
The title was directly transferred to Christ, as was the title of "saviour" (s?t??) of semi-divine or deified heroes and rulers, and the title of "Son of Heaven" or "Son of God". As the mediator between the people and the divine, the sacral king was credited with special wisdom (e.g. Solomon) or vision (oneiromancy).
Examples
Sacral kingship was carried into the Middle Ages by considering kings installed by the grace of god
Study
Study of the concept was introduced by Sir James George Frazer in his influential book The Golden Bough (1890–1915); sacral kingship plays a role in Romanticism and Esotericism (e.g. Julius Evola) and some currents of Neopaganism (Theodism).
The school of Pan-Babylonianism derived much of the religion described in the Hebrew Bible from cults of sacral kingship in ancient Babylonia.
The so-called British and Scandinavian cult-historical schools maintained that the king personified a god and stood at the center of the national or tribal religion. The English "myth and ritual school" concentrated on anthropology and folklore, while the Scandinavian "Uppsala school" emphasized Semitological study.
Frazer's interpretation
A sacred king, according to the systematic interpretation of mythology developed by Frazer in The Golden Bough (published 1890), was a king who represented a solar deity in a periodically re-enacted fertility rite. Frazer seized on the notion of a substitute king and made him the keystone of his theory of a universal, pan-European, and indeed worldwide fertility myth, in which a consort for the Goddess was annually replaced. According to Frazer, the sacred king represented the spirit of vegetation, a divine John Barleycorn. He came into being in the spring, reigned during the summer, and ritually died at harvest time, only to be reborn at the winter solstice to wax and rule again. The spirit of vegetation was therefore a "dying and reviving god." Osiris, Adonis, Dionysus, Attis and many other familiar figures from Greek mythology and classical antiquity were re-interpreted in this mold. The sacred king, the human embodiment of the dying and reviving vegetation god, was supposed to have originally been an individual chosen to rule for a time, but whose fate was to suffer as a sacrifice, to be offered back to the earth so that a new king could rule for a time in his stead.
In practice, the hypothesis was vague enough that almost any annual religious or folklore practice that involved fire or vegetation could be reinterpreted to fit its loose requirements; any such ritual could be presented as a surviving fragment of the hypothetical whole story. Osiris and Adonis may fit the mold loosely; it is harder to see how Triptolemus in the myth of Persephone and Demeter relates to a dying and reviving god. All manner of traditions were interpreted as representing fragments of the unitary myth of a dying and reviving god, and the human king/victim who was his earthly representative or substitute. Though Frazer's Golden Bough was centered, as a literary device, around the curious institution of the king-priest of Diana at Nemi, it is hard to see how this temporary refuge for a desperate slave represents a fertility deity.
Frazer's hypothesis is no longer accepted by most scholars of anthropology or comparative religion, although basic elements such as the fact that human sacrifices did occur within rituals connected with royalty or astronomical festivities (such as the annual Babylonian royal substitute, the sacrifices at the Golden Temple of Uppsala described by Adam of Bremen, etc.) are undisputed.
Especially in Europe during Frazer's early twentieth century heyday, it launched a cottage industry of amateurs looking for "pagan survivals" in such things as traditional fairs, maypoles, and folk arts like morris dancing. It was widely influential in literature, being alluded to by D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, among other works.
Robert Graves used Frazer's work in The Greek Myths and made it one of the foundations of his own personal mythology in The White Goddess. Most curiously of all, Margaret Murray, the principal theorist of witchcraft as a "pagan survival," used Frazer's work to propose the thesis that many Kings of England who died in office, most notably William Rufus, were secret pagans and witches, and whose deaths were the re-enactment of the human sacrifice that stood at the centre of Frazer's myth, a speculation taken up by Katherine Kurtz' in her novel Lammas Night.
See also
External links
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