Sacred Kingship, and What the Archetype Abstracts From

The material behind the figure is one of the most heavily studied subjects in the history of religion: sacred kingship, the ruler as the point of contact between the divine and the human order. The atlas records instances across many traditions, the Egyptian king as the living Horus and the maintainer of maat, the Mesopotamian king as the shepherd chosen by the gods, the Chinese emperor holding the Mandate of Heaven which can be withdrawn, the Israelite king anointed and judged by prophets, the Japanese emperor descended from Amaterasu, the Christian coronation rite. Frazer's theory of the dying and reviving sacred king, once enormously influential, is now regarded as a construction resting on thin and misread evidence. What survives is the well-documented observation that political authority has very often been given religious grounding, which is a more modest and more defensible claim.