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In many historical societies, the position of kingship carries a sacral meaning, that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and of judge. The concept of theocracy is related, although a sacred king need not necessarily rule through his religious authority; rather, the temporal position has a religious significance.
The concept was identified, or invented, by Sir James George Frazer in The Golden Bough (1890–1915) whose title refers to the myth of the Rex Nemorensis. Frazer gives numerous examples, cited below, and is regarded as an exponent of the myth and ritual school. However, "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory" is disputed; many scholars now believe that myth and ritual share common paradigms, but not that one developed from the other.
According to Frazer, the notion has prehistoric roots and is found worldwide, on Java as in sub-Saharan Africa, with shaman-kings credited with rainmaking and assuring fertility and good fortune. 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 killed at the end of his term in the position, or sacrificed in times of crisis (e.g. the Blót of Domalde).
From the Bronze Age Near East, the enthronement 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 modern Catholic Pope is considered the "Vicar 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 BCE. The image of the shepherd combines the themes of leadership and the responsibility to supply food and protection as well as superiority.
- Devaraja, cult of divine kings in Southeast Asia.
- Germanic kingship
- Holy Roman Emperor
- Imperial cult
- The Omukama of Kitara ruled as a heavenly sovereign.
- The High King of Ireland, according to medieval tradition, married the sovereignty goddess.
- The Eze Nri, title of the ruler of the defunct Igbo Nri Kingdom in present-day Nigeria. He was addressed as "Igwe," meaning "heavenly one" in the Igbo language.
- The Emperor of Japan is known in Japanese as Tennō, "heavenly sovereign".
- The Kende was the sacred king of the Magyars in the 9th century.
- The Khagan (Ashina)[relevant? ]
- The Kings of Luba became deities after death.
- The temporal power of the Papacy
- Pharaoh, title of Ancient Egyptian rulers. The pharaoh adopted names symbolizing holy might.
- King of Rome
- Son of Heaven, East Asian title
- Shah, Iranian title[relevant? ]
- King of Thailand
- Tsar, Slavic title[relevant? ]
- The pre-colonial emperors and kings of the Yoruba people, the obas, and their contemporary counterparts
- Capetian Miracle
- Royal touch, supernatural powers attributed to the Kings of England and France
- The Serbian Nemanjić dynasty.
- The Hungarian House of Árpád (known during the Medieval period as the "dynasty of the Holy King"')
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.
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 upon 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.
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. 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 as kings, most notably William Rufus, were secret pagans and witches, whose deaths were the re-enactment of the human sacrifice that stood at the centre of Frazer's myth. An idea used by fantasy writer Katherine Kurtz' in her novel Lammas Night.
Many of Rosemary Sutcliff's novels are recognized as being directly influenced by Frazer, depicting individuals accepting the burden of leadership and the ultimate responsibility of personal sacrifice, including Sword at Sunset, The Mark of the Horse Lord, and Sun Horse, Moon Horse.
- Apotheosis, glorification of a subject to divine level.
- Great Catholic Monarch
- Great King
- Greek hero cult
- Jaguars in Mesoamerican cultures
- Jesus in comparative mythology
- Katechon - Eschatological-Apocalyptic King
- Dying-and-rising god
- Monarchy of Thailand – Ayutthayan period
- Mythological king
- Winged sun
- Frazer, James George, Sir (1922). The Golden Bough. Bartleby.com: New York: The Macmillan Co. http://www.bartleby.com/196/1.html.
- Segal, Robert A. (2004). Myth: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP. p. 61.
- Meletinsky, Eleazar Moiseevich (2000). The Poetics of Myth. Routledge. p. 117. ISBN 0-415-92898-2.
- Sengupta, Arputha Rani (Ed.) (2005). "God and King : The Devaraja Cult in South Asian Art & Architecture". ISBN 8189233262. Retrieved 14 September 2012.
- Gyula Kristó (1996). Hungarian History in the Ninth Century. Szegedi Középkorász Műhely. p. 136. ISBN 978-963-482-113-7.
- Даница Поповић (2006). Под окриљем светости: култ светих владара и реликвија у средњовековној Србији. Српска академија наука и уметности, Балканолошки институт. ISBN 978-86-7179-044-4.
- Sima M. Cirkovic (2008). The Serbs. John Wiley & Sons. p. 35. ISBN 978-1-4051-4291-5.
- Murray, Margaret Alice (1954). The Divine King in England: a study in anthropology. British Library: London, Faber & Faber. ISBN 9780404184285.
- Article about Rosemary Sutcliff at the Historical Novels Info website; paragraph 15
- Katherine Kurtz, The Quest for Saint Camber, ISBN 0-345-30099-8, Ballantine Books, 1986, p 360-363.
- Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles, (Blackwell, 1993): ISBN 0-631-18946-7
- William Smith, D.C.L., LL.D., A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, (London, 1875)
- J.F. del Giorgio, The Oldest Europeans, (A.J. Place, 2006)
- Claus Westermann, Encyclopædia Britannica, s.v. sacred kingship.
- James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., 12 vol. (1911–15, reprinted 1990)
- A.M. Hocart, Kingship (1927, reprint 1969)
- G. van der Leeuw, Religion in Essence and Manifestation (1933, English 1938, 1986)
- Geo Widengren, Religionsphänomenologie (1969), pp. 360–393.
- Lily Ross Taylor, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor (1931, reprint 1981).
- David Cannadine and Simon Price (eds.), Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (1987).
- Henri Frankfort, Kingship and the Gods (1948, 1978).
- Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250 (1989),
- J.H. Burns, Lordship, Kingship, and Empire: The Idea of Monarchy, 1400–1525 (1992).
- "English school"
- S.H. Hooke (ed.),The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation Between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World (1935).
- S.H. Hooke (ed.), Myth, Ritual, and Kingship: Essays on the Theory and Practice of Kingship in the Ancient Near East and in Israel (1958).
- "Scandinavian school"
- Geo Widengren, Sakrales Königtum im Alten Testament und im Judentum (1955).
- Ivan Engnell, Studies in Divine Kingship in the Ancient Near East, 2nd ed. (1967)
- Aage Bentzen, King and Messiah, 2nd ed. (1948; English 1970).
- article Rex Sacrificulus in Smith's Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities
- Sacred Kings, an ebook on sacred kingship in different cultures