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object:1.02 - Priestly Kings
book class:The Golden Bough
author class:James George Frazer
subject class:Occultism
class:chapter



II. Priestly Kings

THE questions which we have set ourselves to answer are mainly two:
first, why had Diana's priest at Nemi, the King of the Wood, to slay
his predecessor? second, why before doing so had he to pluck the
branch of a certain tree which the public opinion of the ancients
identified with Virgil's Golden Bough?

The first point on which we fasten is the priest's title. Why was he
called the King of the Wood? Why was his office spoken of as a
kingdom?

The union of a royal title with priestly duties was common in
ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other cities of Latium
there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the Sacred
Rites, and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites. In
republican Athens the second annual magistrate of the state was
called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were
religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose
duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly, and to
have centered round the Common Hearth of the state. Some Greek
states had several of these titular kings, who held office
simultaneously. At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King
had been appointed after the abolition of the monarchy in order to
offer the sacrifices which before had been offered by the kings. A
similar view as to the origin of the priestly kings appears to have
prevailed in Greece. In itself the opinion is not improbable, and it
is borne out by the example of Sparta, almost the only purely Greek
state which retained the kingly form of government in historical
times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings
as descendants of the god. One of the two Spartan kings held the
priesthood of Zeus Lacedaemon, the other the priesthood of Heavenly
Zeus.

This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is
familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of
various great religious capitals peopled by thousands of sacred
slaves, and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and
spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such
priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pessinus. Teutonic kings, again,
in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position, and to
have exercised the powers, of high priests. The Emperors of China
offered public sacrifices, the details of which were regulated by
the ritual books. The King of Madagascar was high-priest of the
realm. At the great festival of the new year, when a bullock was
sacrificed for the good of the kingdom, the king stood over the
sacrifice to offer prayer and thanksgiving, while his attendants
slaughtered the animal. In the monarchical states which still
maintain their independence among the Gallas of Eastern Africa, the
king sacrifices on the mountain tops and regulates the immolation of
human victims; and the dim light of tradition reveals a similar
union of temporal and spiritual power, of royal and priestly duties,
in the kings of that delightful region of Central America whose
ancient capital, now buried under the rank growth of the tropical
forest, is marked by the stately and mysterious ruins of Palenque.

When we have said that the ancient kings were commonly priests also,
we are far from having exhausted the religious aspect of their
office. In those days the divinity that hedges a king was no empty
form of speech, but the expression of a sober belief. Kings were
revered, in many cases not merely as priests, that is, as
intercessors between man and god, but as themselves gods, able to
bestow upon their subjects and worshippers those blessings which are
commonly supposed to be beyond the reach of mortals, and are sought,
if at all, only by prayer and sacrifice offered to superhuman and
invisible beings. Thus kings are often expected to give rain and
sunshine in due season, to make the crops grow, and so on. Strange
as this expectation appears to us, it is quite of a piece with early
modes of thought. A savage hardly conceives the distinction commonly
drawn by more advanced peoples between the natural and the
supernatural. To him the world is to a great extent worked by
supernatural agents, that is, by personal beings acting on impulses
and motives like his own, liable like him to be moved by appeals to
their pity, their hopes, and their fears. In a world so conceived he
sees no limit to his power of influencing the course of nature to
his own advantage. Prayers, promises, or threats may secure him fine
weather and an abundant crop from the gods; and if a god should
happen, as he sometimes believes, to become incarnate in his own
person, then he need appeal to no higher being; he, the savage,
possesses in himself all the powers necessary to further his own
well-being and that of his fellow-men.

This is one way in which the idea of a man-god is reached. But there
is another. Along with the view of the world as pervaded by
spiritual forces, savage man has a different, and probably still
older, conception in which we may detect a germ of the modern notion
of natural law or the view of nature as a series of events occurring
in an invariable order without the intervention of personal agency.
The germ of which I speak is involved in that sympathetic magic, as
it may be called, which plays a large part in most systems of
superstition. In early society the king is frequently a magician as
well as a priest; indeed he appears to have often attained to power
by virtue of his supposed proficiency in the black or white art.
Hence in order to understand the evolution of the kingship and the
sacred character with which the office has commonly been invested in
the eyes of savage or barbarous peoples, it is essential to have
some acquaintance with the principles of magic and to form some
conception of the extraordinary hold which that ancient system of
superstition has had on the human mind in all ages and all
countries. Accordingly I propose to consider the subject in some
detail.





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