In many historical societies, the position of kingship carries a sacral meaning; that is, it is identical with that of a high priest and judge. The concept of theocracy is related, although a sacred king does not need to necessarily rule through his religious authority; rather, the temporal position itself has a religious significance behind it.
Sir James George Frazer used the concept of the sacred king in his study The Golden Bough (1890–1915), the title of which refers to the myth of the Rex Nemorensis.[1] Frazer gives numerous examples, cited below, and was an inspiration for the myth and ritual school.[2] However, "the myth and ritual, or myth-ritualist, theory" is disputed;[3] many scholars now believe that myth and ritual share common paradigms, but not that one developed from the other.[4]
According to Frazer, the notion has prehistoric roots and occurs 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 in a human sacrifice, either killed at the end of his term in the position, or sacrificed in a time of crisis (e.g. the BlótofDomalde).
The Ashanti flogged a newly selected king (Ashantehene) before enthroning him. So that he might remember what it felt like to suffer as a man, to restrain him in his thereafter acquired god-like power, as the Auriga reminded the conquering hero returning home in his triumph, the crowd's ecstatic adulation rolling in waves across his ego, that he remained but a mortal, and must die.
Kings are styled as shepherds from earliest times, e.g., the term 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.
As the mediator between the people and the divine, the sacral king was credited with special wisdom (e.g. SolomonorGilgamesh) or vision (e.g. via oneiromancy).
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.[citation needed] 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, Dionysus, Attis and many other familiar figures from Greek mythology and classical antiquity were re-interpreted in this mold (Osiris in particular is conspicuous in this as he was a figure of Egyptian mythology). 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.
The Eze Nri, ruler of the defunct IgboNri Kingdom in present-day Nigeria. He was addressed as "Igwe," meaning "heavenly one" in the Igbo language, and has bequeathed his title to the monarch of a contemporary traditional state of the same name.
The Emperor of Japan is known in Japanese as Tennō – "heavenly sovereign", and was formerly believed to be a living kami.
The Kende was the sacred king of the Magyars in the 9th century.[8]