sacred kingshipreligious and political concept by which a ruler is seen as an incarnation, manifestation, mediator, or agent of the sacred or holy (the transcendent or supernatural realm). The concept originated in prehistoric times, but it continues to exert a recognizable influence in the modern world. At one time, when religion was totally connected with the whole existence of the individual as well as that of the community and when kingdoms were in varying degrees connected with religious powers or religious institutions, there could be no kingdom that was not in some sense sacral.

Among the many possible kinds of sacral kingdoms, there was a special type in which the king was regarded and revered as a god—the god-kingdom, a polity of which there were three forms: preliminary, primary, and secondary. The preliminary form exists in cultures in which the chieftain is regarded as divine. The primary form was the god-kingdom of the large empires of the ancient Middle East and East Asia, of ancient Iran, and of pre-Columbian Meso-America Mesoamerica and South America. The secondary form occurred in the Persian, Hellenistic (Greco-Roman cultural), and European empires. Between these three forms there are many transitional types.

Principal schools of interpretation

The phenomenon of sacred kingship was known and described in ancient times by various travelers, including Aristotle in the 4th century BC and the 1st-century-BC Greek geographers and historians Strabo and Diodorus Siculus. The study of sacred kingship, however, was introduced when the British anthropologist Sir James Frazer published The Golden Bough (1890–1915). Taking his comprehensive material from ethnological reports and studies, Frazer concentrated on the preliminary stage. With the discovery of texts in cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, a new stage of research began. Called Pan-Babylonism by some scholars, the theories based on the results of these discoveries placed the god-kingdom of the ancient Middle East in the foreground.

Building on the thesis of Pan-Babylonism that a homogeneous Middle Eastern culture existed and on the theories of cult as a ritual drama, the so-called British and Scandinavian cult-historical schools maintained that the king, as the personified god, played the main role in the overall cultural pattern. The English branch of this school (the “myth and ritual school”) concentrated on anthropological and folklore studies. The Scandinavian branch (the “Uppsala school”) concentrated on Semitic philological, cultural, and history-of-religions studies. It was represented in the latter part of the 20th century by Swedish historians of religion who theorized that, for the entire ancient Middle East, certain cult patterns existed and that behind those cult patterns lay the sacred-king ideology.

Rejecting the cult-historical school theory of an unchanging cult pattern and an unchanging sacred-king ideology, many scholars in the latter part of the 20th century tended to emphasize individual research of case histories. The fundamental differences between the kingdom ideology in Egypt and that in Mesopotamia have been investigated by historians, and questions concerning sacred kingship in the Old Testament have been explored by Old Testament scholars. One result of such scholarly research is the realization that the theory and practice of sacred kingship—in a history extending over thousands of years—has undergone immense changes and, thus, because of these widespread and extensive differences, all generalizations and categorizations are difficult to maintain. Though there may be an amazing correspondence among numerous individual phenomena, each individual sacral form of government can be explained only in its own historical, social, and religious context.

Status and functions
The sacred status of kings, leaders, and chieftains

Basic to an understanding of sacred kingship is a recognition that the exercise of power of one person over other persons or over a community (local, regional, or imperial) in early times was general and not divided. Power could be exercised by only one person—one who simultaneously had the necessary physical (individual and corporate) and spiritual (psychic) strength and influence—over both people and objects. Because he was ruler over a community, the king’s power extended to everything pertaining to the life of the community. Only gradually did a division of these powers develop.

The sacral status of the ruler differs in form and origins. Three main forms can be distinguished: (1) the possessor of supernatural power, (2) the divine or semidivine king, and (3) the agent of the sacred.

The possessor of supernatural power

The ruler may be viewed as the possessor of supernatural power—both beneficial and malevolent—needed to maintain the welfare and order of the community and to avert danger and damage. In preliterate societies he represents the life force of the tribe, in which worldly and spiritual or political and religious spheres are not distinguished. Concentrated in the chief is the common inheritance of the magical power of the community, and his authority is based solely on the possession and exercise of this supernatural power. The impact and comprehensiveness of such power wielded by a chief, for example, reaches into all areas of life of the tribe: provision of food, fertility, weather, all forms of communal life, and protection against enemies and misfortune. Because the supernatural (magical) power of the chief is identical with his own life force, the chief (or king) of such a society is not allowed to have any physical defects. With the dwindling of his own physical powers (illness, graying of hair, and loss of teeth), his own power to maintain and secure the common welfare and his own ability to rule are believed to be correspondingly diminished.

This form of sacral status is found mainly among rulers over one tribe (or several)—he may be a chief, medicine man, shaman, or king (as, for example, a rainmaker-king in Africa)—in which a fixed definition or limitation of such functions is not possible.

The divine or semidivine king

In some societies, especially in ancient kingdoms or empires, the king was regarded as a god or identified with some god. In early Egypt he was identified with the sky god (Horus) and with the sun god (Re, Amon, or Aton). Similar identifications were made in early China and early Erech in Mesopotamia. In the Turin Papyrus (a list of kings written c. 13th–12th centuries BC), the sun god Re is viewed as the first king of Egypt and the prototype of the pharaoh (the god-king). The symbol of the sun circle, one of the most prevalent artistic representations of the sacred king, and the practice of addressing the king as “my sun” are well depicted in rock reliefs and inscriptions in areas ruled by the Hittite kings. The Persian king was regarded as the incarnation of the sun god or of the moon god. In addition to sky or sun deities, the sacred king also has been identified with other gods: the town god (Mesopotamia), the gods of the country, the god of the storm, and the weather god. Generally, however, the king was not identified with a specific god but rather was regarded as himself a god. As the incarnation of all that is divine, the Egyptian pharaoh was addressed simultaneously in inscriptions as Aton, Horus, and Re. Significant for Egyptian royal theology was the doctrine of the god-kingdom spanning two generations; each king ruled as King Horus and became Osiris (the father of Horus, a fertility god and later god of the dead) after his death.

A broader foundation for the divinity of the king is the view of the king as the son of a god, which can take on different forms. The first king has been regarded as a god and his successors as sons of the god in a number of societies—in Africa, Polynesia, Japan (where the emperor, until the end of World War II, was revered as a descendant of the sun goddess), Peru (where the inca, or ruler, was believed to be a descendant of the sun god), Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan. Because he personifies the divine national hero (as among the Shilluk in Africa), the king can demand divine status, a practice that was taken up in the Greco-Roman world by Alexander the Great and by the Roman emperors. When a king who has been sired by a god or when a god who takes on the external form of the living king approaches his queen, he begets the future king—the queen is thus called the mother of God. An essentially different foundation is the king’s divine sonship through adoption, as, for example, in the legend of King Sargon of Akkad in ancient Mesopotamia. The adoption of the crown prince by a god is often part of the coronation ritual, especially in Mesopotamia: the god declares the king as his son when he ascends the throne.

An especially frequent expression of the relationship of the king to divinity in Egypt and Mesopotamia was that of the king as a god’s image. In Egypt the king—addressed by the god as “my living image on earth”—is shown in the likeness of Re, Aton, Amon, or Horus. In Mesopotamia this kind of description was rare.

The myth of divine ancestry, such as that of Romulus, one of the legendary founders of Rome, in many places served to legitimatize the claims of the king. Unusual natural phenomena, such as an especially bright star, are sometimes connected with the birth of a divine king.

The conception and practice of making a king divine after his death are very old and widespread. Probably connected with ancestor worship, deification is practiced most often when the living king, although connected with gods, is not regarded as a god in the fullest sense. Only after his death does he become god. Among the Hittites, for example, the expression “the king becomes a god” meant that the king had died.

The king as the principal agent of the sacred

In addition to the conception of a king as the incarnation of supernatural power and the possible equality of the king with the divinity, there is also a widespread belief that the king is the executive agent of a god. As the servant of a god, he carries out the work of the god on earth. The divine character of this form of sacred kingship is connected not so much with the individual king as with the institution of kingship. In this emphasis on the institution of kingship lies the difference between kingship in Mesopotamia and Egypt and in India and China. The institution was emphasized in Mesopotamia and China. Sharp distinctions cannot be drawn between the different conceptions of the relationship of a god to kingship. Despite all the different expressions of kingship in the history of Mesopotamia (especially among the empires of Sumer, Babylon, and Assyria), there nevertheless was a continuous theme: the real lord of the city, the country, or the state remains the god, and the king remains in a subservient relationship to him. Even when the king possessed or disposed divine power and had sacral character and sacral duties, he remained subordinate to the god who selected him and put him into his regal position. The king had a mediating position between the gods and man, especially in his significance for the cult (thus, Sargon of Akkad is first described in inscriptions as deputy of Ishtar). The king also had a similar status as agent in Mongolia, where it was believed that the king came from heaven and was enthroned by God to carry out his will.

The king as bringer of blessed power




The king as shepherd


The king as judge


The king as warlord


The king as priest and seer

Religious duties quite often are connected with the office of chieftain, who is also priest or seer and rainmaker—all in one. Correspondingly, in nontribal societies, cultic functions belong to the office of the king. In the 3rd dynasty of Uruk, Lugalzaggisi is described as king of the country, priest of the god Anu (the god of the heavens), and prophet of Nisaba (goddess of grasses and writing).

When a division of functions evolved, the intrinsically royal priestly and other cultic functions were transferred to priests, seers, and other servants of the cult; the old concept of the king as priest, however, survived in some fashion for thousands of years. The Egyptian king was the chief priest of the land and the superior of all priests and other cult functionaries. In many images he is portrayed as presiding over the great festivals and bringing offerings to the gods. Later priests carried out their functions as his representative. In Mesopotamia the king was viewed as the cultic mediator between god and man. As head of all of the priests of the country, he had important cultic functions at the New Year’s festival. In critical situations, the king might issue an oracle of blessing; through him the land would be promised salvation, which was often accompanied by the words, “Fear not!” The Persian king performed the sacrifice at the horse offering and was also the “guardian of the fire.” In all questions of religion he was the highest authority; he was also the most cultivated of the magicians. The king in Ugarit (in Canaan) also carried out priestly functions and as prophet was the receiver of revelations. Like other ancient Middle Eastern monarchs, the Hittite king was the chief priest.

The relationship between sacred kingship and priestly cultic functions has extended over widespread geographic areas and historical eras: East Asia, China, Japan, India, Europe (among the Germanic and Scandinavian kings), Africa (in the great empires), and Madagascar. Sometimes the division of functions brought about a transfer of the royal title to those who carried out cultic functions. In Africa from the earliest times there was a type of king who was called lord of the earth; he originally combined political and cultic functions but, with changing times, retained only the cultic ones. The strict separation of the priestly office from that of the king, as in India, where king and priest belong to different castes—Kshatriya and Brahman, respectively—is an unusual exception, however.

The king may be the recipient of a direct revelation of the will of a god. Thus, in Egypt the pharaoh received a divine oracle through dreams in the temple (a practice known as incubation). In Mesopotamia the duty of the king to ascertain the will of the gods was more strongly emphasized; a directive of the gods could result from omens, dreams, or reading the entrails of offerings. All major undertakings of the king were dependent on directives of the god, who was to be consulted in advance. A direct divine revelation to a king is related in the Hebrew Bible in I Kings, chapter 3, which tells of a dream of the 10th-century-BC Israelite Solomon in which he received the promise of the gift of wisdom. Likewise in Genesis, chapter 41, Yahweh, god of the Hebrews, gives the pharaoh a directive in a dream.

The king as the centre of ruler cults

Although a pharaonic cult occasionally existed in Egypt, the ruler cult differs entirely from sacred kingship because the former came into being from political impulses. The ruler cult, generally developed in a country or empire with many peoples and many religions, was one of the ruler’s means of power. Syncretism, the fusing of various beliefs and practices, often succeeded in bringing together completely different religious and nonreligious motives. Alexander the Great (who established an empire of many peoples and religions), for example, revealed a conscious effort at continuity with the Egyptian kingdom, inasmuch as the oracle of the Egyptian god Amon at Sīwah designated him as the son of Amon and thus the successor of the pharaohs. Among the diadochoi (successors to Alexander) of the first generation, the ruler cult remained limited, but, under Ptolemy II Philadelphus of Egypt (reigned 285–246 BC), it became an established institution that was connected with the deified Alexander. When the ruler cult was carried over to Rome, the emperor Augustus (reigned 27 BCAD 14) allowed it to be practiced only in the east in connection with the worship of the goddess Roma—though he allowed it to be pursued with fewer restrictions in the newly conquered western provinces; the adaptation of honouring the divine Caesar (or emperor of Rome) soon became, however, an important expression of the unity of the empire. Serious resistance to the imperial cult was encountered only among the two radical monotheistic religions: Judaism (e.g., against Antiochus IV Epiphanes of Syria in the mid-2nd century BC) and Christianity. The Hellenistic and Roman ruler cults never generated a strong religious movement. The sacrifices brought to the king (emperor) date to the ancient custom of bringing tribute to the king (or chief). From this practice, the custom of bringing offerings to the deceased king developed.

Regal ceremonies
Modes of selection and succession

In the beginning, succession to rulership was not necessarily connected with the sacral kingship; the sacral king also could be elected or, through a power struggle, also could receive a divine, magical, or supernatural anointment. If the firstborn son of the king was not stipulated to succeed him or if the king left no children, severe struggles for the succession often occurred, generally resulting in a change of dynasty. The death of a king often was kept secret until the succession was assured, because of potential danger to the people and country. To counteract problems of succession, there were rituals to secure the continuity of the sacral power. In ancient cultures the successor of the dead chief was brought into physical connection with his predecessor, his utensils, or his clothing—he had to stay, for example, in the home of the dead chief and use his utensils. The funeral of the dead king took place after the new king was established in his office or just before his coronation (as in Egypt). Efforts to secure the succession show high regulatory standards; in Egypt a complicated succession theology linked the new and old king as Osiris and Horus. During the lifetime of his father, the crown prince could be designated as coregent. The designation of the successor often came through an oracle, a sign, or some other manifestation of the word of the god; Thutmose III of Egypt (reigned 1504–1450 BC), for example, reported how he was designated to the succession through the oracle of the god Amon. In ancient Iran, after an interregnum, the election of the king took place through an omen. The king was chosen by the god; sometimes he was described as divinely predestined in the womb of his mother as the ruler.

Forms and types of sacred legitimation of kings




Ritual roles prescribed for kings in public or state functions





Private ritual forms peculiar to kings and their families

The special status of the sacral king necessarily also influences his private life. In order to keep the supernatural force dwelling within him, the king had to observe a number of regulations and taboos in the details of his daily life. To this belongs temporary separation—in some cases, the king lived completely separated (e.g., in Africa). The king often appeared only for audiences, on great festivals or special occasions—sometimes veiled (as in Iran) or with a mask. There also have been special food taboos: he was not allowed to eat certain foods or may have had to drink only from a certain well. The custom of the king taking his meals alone is widespread. The isolation-separation theme in sacred kingship also appears in court ceremonials: the king must be addressed only from a certain measured distance; a person approaching the king must kneel; if the king is encountered, the head of the subject must be covered with the hands (as in Iran); the king must not be touched; and he must not touch the ground. Inasmuch as the king is filled with supernatural power, everything he touches can take on some of that power (as in Tahiti). Such proscriptions and taboos for the private life of the king are especially evident in Africa but also occur in Polynesia and Micronesia, East Asia, and the ancient Middle East. The divine or superhuman character pertained not only to the king but also, in lesser measure, to his family. The king’s consecration could involve ritual incest. The participation of the family in the sacral status of the king was evidenced in several places (e.g., Egypt) where, upon the death of the king or queen, members of the royal family and the court were killed or buried with them. Brother-sister marriages in some areas give evidence to this kind of royal ideology.

When a king began to grow old, it was said in Africa: “The grass is fading.” To preserve the growth and well-being of the land, it was necessary to kill the aging king so that his power could be transferred to a successor. The compulsory killing of the king was widespread among many of the non-Semitic peoples in northern Africa; and among some peoples the killing of the king occurred after a specified period of time and was integrated into the cosmic ritualistic rhythm. The real meaning of the killing of the king showed itself in rituals in which the blood of the murdered king is mixed with the seed corn, which then became especially fertile.