Chapter 137. From God-King to Divine Right: The Sacral Theology of Rule

Every religious system examined in this book also answers a political question: who may command, and why must others obey? The earliest states placed the ruler inside the sacred order itself, as a god incarnate, a god’s son or the chosen servant of the supreme deity. Later traditions made the link conditional (a mandate that Heaven may withdraw) or juridical (a right held from God alone). This chapter follows that line from the pharaoh to the divine right of kings, and it sets out the frame for Part 14. Mainstream historians, a specialist in biblical monotheism, the Traditionalist Julius Evola, the alternative historians Hancock and Bauval, and two unorthodox thinkers, Keshe and Heisman, are set side by side, each attributed.

Egypt: Horus and the son of Amon-Re

Roberts and Westad link royal theology to political unification: “there was something of a consolidation of cults under the god Amon-Re which reflected political consolidation”. In this process “the cult of Horus was consolidated with that of Amon-Re, the sun god, of whom the Pharaoh came to be regarded as the incarnation”. They add that “it was only under the New Kingdom that the title ‘pharaoh’ came to be applied personally to the king. Before that it indicated the king’s residence and his court.” Royal authority was nonetheless old, as the “exaggerated size” of kings on the earliest monuments shows [Roberts & Westad, The Penguin History of the World, #69765, ch. 3].

Hancock and Bauval open chapter 10 of their book, “The Quest of the Horus-King”, with a quotation that states their position: “Pharaoh was not mortal but a god. This was the fundamental concept of Egyptian kingship, that Pharaoh was of divine essence, a god incarnated … It is wrong to speak of the deification of Pharaoh. His divinity was not proclaimed at a certain moment” [Hancock & Bauval, The Message of the Sphinx, #87178, ch. 10]. For them divinity is essence, not promotion, and the idea feeds their alternative chronology of Giza. For Roberts and Westad it is the outcome of a historical merger of cults.

Evola: sacral kingship as the Traditional norm

Julius Evola treats sacred kingship as the norm of all “Traditional” civilisation and modernity as a fall from it. “According to a Far Eastern tradition, the king, as a ‘son of heaven’ who is believed to have nonhuman origins, enjoys the ‘mandate of heaven’ (tien ming), which implies the idea of a real and supernatural force” that “acts without acting (wei wu wei)” [Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, #67630, ch. 2]. In “Initiation and Consecration” he describes the Egyptian rite as an initiation “aimed at arousing the dimension of transcendence in the man who was destined to be king”, a “definitive consecration that sanctified this new immortalizing birth and his divine nature and by virtue of which the Egyptian king appeared as the ‘son’ of the same god”. Wherever royal dignity depends on a separate priestly act, he says, “the regal idea occurs in an already weakened form” [Evola, #67630, ch. 10]. This is Evola’s metaphysical thesis. Hancock and Bauval see divinity as innate; Evola sees it as a rebirth achieved through initiation.

Achaemenid Iran: by the grace of Auramazda

The Persian evidence links this chapter to the Zoroastrian chapters at the start of the study. Moulton’s 1912 lectures take the Old Persian royal inscriptions as the main evidence for “the religion of the early Achaemenian kings”. He calls Darius “a man for whom religion was obviously a very real experience” and judges that “if the religion of Darius suggests the Gathas of Zarathushtra, that of his son has its affinities in the ‘Seven-chapter'” Yasna. Auramazda is “greatest of bagas” (gods). Later kings add other deities: Artaxerxes III prays “may A[uramazda] and the baga Mithra protect me”, and Artaxerxes II at Susa says: “By the grace of Auramazda, Anahita, and Mithra I built this palace” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, pp. 52, 78]. Moulton also reports the objections. Casartelli compared the absence of Zarathushtra’s name from the royal inscriptions to “the entire omission of the name of Buddha in Asoka’s Inscriptions”, and Gray cited an Egyptian inscription “in which Darius calls himself son of the goddess Neit” [Moulton, #55011]. The Persian king ruled as Ahura Mazda’s client at home and could present himself as an Egyptian goddess’s son in Egypt.

Ugarit and Israel: the divine household

Mark S. Smith reads West Semitic myth as political ideology. At Ugarit “the divine family is modeled on the royal household in particular. The monarchy represents a royal version of the patriarchal household.” Royal ancestor cult extended this status beyond death: “CAT 1.161 invokes blessing in a ritual context involving the deceased heroes and kings, also called ‘god’ or ‘divine’ (‘il) in 1.113” [Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, #64008, ch. 3]. Smith cites Guthrie’s view that “in Israel holiness attaches to the elite and the monarch … Holiness here is ideology, and designed to serve a particular social system”. He qualifies the point, noting that the same mythology could “express political or communal weakness, even desperation”, as in Psalm 74 [Smith, #64008].

The Mandate of Heaven: legitimacy that can be lost

In the Chinese doctrine, Heaven “bestows its mandate on a virtuous ruler, called the Son of Heaven”. An overthrow showed that the dynasty “had lost the Mandate”, and floods and famines were read as signs of Heaven’s displeasure. The doctrine did not require noble birth: the Han and Ming were founded by commoners. Its corollary was “the right of rebellion against an unjust ruler”, whose classical statement in the Mencius “was often edited out”. It was first used to justify the Zhou conquest of the Shang [Wikipedia: Mandate of Heaven]. Evola reads tien ming as a supernatural force; the historical account describes a conditional grant that success confirms and disaster revokes.

Divine right and absolutism

Medieval kings ruled within the Res publica Christiana, where the Church judged whether a king kept natural law and excommunication could void a reign. The Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War “demoted the Church leadership from ultimate political authority and developed the idea of kings as rulers under the authority of God alone” [Wikipedia: Divine right of kings]. James VI wrote the Scottish textbooks of the doctrine in 1597-1598 (The True Law of Free Monarchies, Basilikon Doron), resting it on the father-child metaphor. As James I he told Parliament in 1610 that “kings are not only God’s lieutenants upon earth and sit upon God’s throne, but even by God himself, they are called gods”. Bossuet preached before Louis XIV that kings reign by Eternal Wisdom (“Per me reges regnant“) and that the choice of the king’s person “is an effect of its providence” [Wikipedia: Divine right of kings]. Filmer’s Patriarcha (published 1680) became the target of Locke’s Two Treatises [Wikipedia: Robert Filmer].

The International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences notes that “the term ‘absolutism’ first came into use in the nineteenth century”. It names “a specific type of monarchy” of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, “the reality of which, however, is only conditionally” matched by the word, and one that dominated Central and Western Europe “(though not England)” [International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Vol. A-B, #61165, “Absolutism, History of”]. Pels separates the theorists. Bossuet “went much further than Bodin or the Politiques in affirming the immediate divine investiture of absolute royal authority”, yet civil law still limited royal discretion. Filmer defended divine right as “a most reasonable and safe theory of property”, deriving rule and ownership from one divine right of primogeniture. Hobbes was “another champion of unconditional sovereignty—though not of divine right”. Pels sets these against theories granting a “right of resistance and even deposition of the ruling sovereign” [Pels, Property and Power in Social Theory, #5212, ch. 5].

Heisman and Keshe: the end of the sacred sovereign

Mitchell Heisman sees the secular state as a new technology performing the old function. “The genealogy of the English-speaking world’s political cyborg can be traced to Thomas Hobbes,” a materialist “who concluded that life is nothing but motion of limbs” and so became “the architect of one of the earliest designs of a sociobiological cyborg: the Leviathan (1651)”. Heisman notes that it appeared as the English Civil War ended [Heisman, suicide note, #38252, “part 945”]. He rejects the Hobbesian individual as a description of human nature: “Eleanor Searle’s study of predatory Norman nepotism before 1066 helps demonstrate why Hobbesian theory, if taken as a description of human nature, is wrong” [Heisman, #38252, “part 545”]. The liberal subject, he writes, is “‘free’ … when he or she is too scared to question obedience to the authority of the fear of death” [Heisman, #38252].

Mehran Keshe calls for the abolition of kingship as such. In KSW 380 he states: “End of kingship. End of one thinking he is higher than the other as we are all equal in the D of creation”, because “the STM [Soul of the Man] is the same in all the dominions” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 380, #378092]. In KSW 198 he claims that “the end of a kingdom is a push from the soul of the man”, that once people see “there are no kings, then many become the king of their own souls”, and that “with the stroke of the pen I can change kingship … but in a few weeks time you’ll find another king” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 198, #377841]. In KSW 428 he announces “the end of the battles of the religions, within one religion” and the “end of kingship … the end of anybody being higher than other”, and he calls the British Privy Council an “instigator of many wars” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 428, #378140]. These are his claims as recorded in the workshop transcripts.

Key points

• Roberts and Westad link the pharaoh’s status as solar incarnation to a merger of the Horus and Amon-Re cults that followed political consolidation, and note that “pharaoh” meant the palace before the New Kingdom [#69765].
• Hancock and Bauval hold that pharaoh was divine by essence and was never deified [#87178]. Evola holds that he was consecrated into divine sonship, and treats sacral kingship as the norm from which modernity fell [#67630].
• In Moulton’s reading of the Achaemenid inscriptions, kings rule and build “by the grace of” Auramazda, later joined by Mithra and Anahita [#55011].
• Smith shows Ugaritic royal ideology modelling the divine household on the royal one, with dead kings called ‘il (“divine”) [#64008].
• The Chinese Mandate of Heaven was revocable and carried a right of rebellion. Stuart and Bourbon divine right placed the king beyond every earthly judge [Wikipedia].
• Pels separates the divine right of Bossuet and Filmer from Hobbes’s secular unconditional sovereignty. The encyclopedia calls “absolutism” a nineteenth-century label [#5212, #61165].
• Heisman reads Leviathan as the first secular “political cyborg” [#38252]. Keshe claims that all kingship, political and religious, must end because all souls are equal [#378092, #377841, #378140].