For many years I have wondered why people ever accepted (and continue to accept) the idea of “royalty” and respected other people who claimed to be royal. Could they not see that these rulers were just humans like themselves? I thought it must be a case that rulers were able muster human and technological resources to physically dominate their societies, and that this went hand-in-hand with deluding the populace with a propagandistic ideology. As I have discovered through reading Sacred Kingship in World History: Between Immanence and Transcendence, however, the ideology of kingship is as, if not more, important than the physical strength of a “big man” and his retinue.
Based on a conference held at Oxford University in 2019, the book attempts to explain how and why the human role of kingship is suffused with an aura of sacrality. Edited by A. Azfar Moin, a religious studies scholar, and Alan Strathern, a historian, this interdisciplinary anthology takes a world-historical, long-term, and comparative view of the concept of sacred kingship. To that end it includes chapters by scholars examining multiple time periods and regions, from the contemporary Islamic world (including the recent ISIS caliphate) to ancient Mesopotamia. Two additional chapters focus on the founder of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, and the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen. The individual chapters are bracketed by the editors’ first chapter, which was initially circulated to conference participants to explain the conceptual and theoretical lens through which they should analyze their own regional examples of sacred kingship, and their last chapter, which reflects on the findings of the essays.
In their first chapter Moin and Strathern define kingship as “a form of politics in which a venerated leader is set apart from and above the group and imbued with extraordinary power (a power over life and death)” (1). They explain that this “has been for much of history the default form of organisation in societies large enough to sustain a state” (1). This sacred aspect of kingship needs to be analyzed through two modes of religion that essentially oppose one another and have been evident throughout history: immanence and transcendence. Immanence, the older mode, is characterized by an enchanted universe populated by ancestors, spirits and deities, termed here “metapersons”, and its primary goal is to sustain the flourishing of life. This requires ritual interaction between humans and metapersons, the enactment of which has historically been the role of chiefs and kings.
In this immanentist mode of sacred kingship the ruler is sacralized through divinization: they are treated as metapersons, perceived as being “close to the ancestors, spirits, and gods, or descended from them, or share in their power, or incarnate them at times” (14). In contrast, transcendentalism, which arose in the first millennium BCE and was probably closely tied to the democratization of writing, treats kings as subordinate to a peerless deity. Characterized by the importance of sacred texts, transcendentalist religions are salvific, and the central figure is a prophet or philosopher. Religion resided within books rather than in physical rituals and therefore kings needed to uphold and propagate the ideas canonized in scripture.
This examination of sacred kingship goes far beyond the early days of anthropology and religious studies exemplified by James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (Macmillan and Co., 1890), which proposed the idea that sacred kingship could be understood in association with a simplistic understanding of aspects of Near Eastern religion such as the dying and rising god, sacred marriage, and the scapegoat. As can be seen in the chapter by Nicole Brisch, “Gods and Kings in Mesopotamia,” kings were not the only form of government in the 3000-year history of the ancient Near East, nor did kingship manifest in the same ways over that time. We know a lot more about Mesopotamian kings than Frazer did, but despite the plethora of ancient textual sources from Mesopotamia that depict how kings saw themselves, it is not entirely clear how other elites, scholars, or non-elite people perceived them; the presence of rebellions and conspiracies demonstrate that the king’s divine right to rule was not universally accepted. What is certain though is that kingship came down from heaven and the gods, rather than from past kings or other human rulers. Kings were thus understood as supreme powers that affected the world.
Jan Assmann’s chapter, “Pharaonic Kingship and Its Biblical Destruction,” explains how throughout ancient Egyptian history ideas about the sun god and the state god were combined, with the pharaoh serving as the earthly representation of solar power and cosmogonic energy. Initially the pharaoh was conceived as the earthly incarnation of the sun god, but was later re-conceptualized as his son. His role on earth was to create Ma’at (order) and repel Isfet (chaos) through enforcing justice and dispelling injustice. Assmann contrasts pharaonic kingship with the Israelite form, according to which the king is not the sacred intermediary between the world of gods and the world of humans. Instead, in the Israelite example, the relationship is between God and the people. Assmann demonstrates how the biblical, transcendentalist conception of kingship was in direct opposition to the immanentist Egyptian pharaonic institution of sacred kingship. The Egyptian pharaoh was the intermediary between the populace and the gods, but in the transcendentalist mode, the Israelite king is subordinate to the text of the Torah and his job is simply to realize scripture.
Not all the authors in this book accepted the model of immanentism and transcendentalism exactly as proposed by Moin and Strathern, and yet the reader can easily see how—looking from a world history perspective over the long duration—kingship during different chronological periods and regional civilizations is, in varying degrees, typified by such a model. The thorough explanation of immanence and transcendence, and the Axial Age which separates them, in the first chapter is valuable in itself, particularly for understanding ideological structures of supernatural and human hierarchies within the formation of ancient (and more recent) states.
Caroline Tully is an honorary fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
Caroline Tully
Date Of Review:
September 4, 2024
