Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Pagan
Hills of the Horizon: A Defense of Sacred Kingship

Hills of the Horizon: A Defense of Sacred Kingship

Last updated on: April 29, 2016 at 4:00 pm by Kiya Nicoll

Hills of the Horizon: A Defense of Sacred Kingship 2016-04-27T22:20:10+00:00 Kiya Nicoll

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Several years ago, I took a trip out into the sticks for a Beltane ritual. Some folks out there needed a May Queen, and through a sequence of coincidences I happened to be both available and qualified. It was a short-term gig in sacral rulership, with my blessing sought to help with the fertility and health of the land.

It’s one of the things that I think about when I poke my nose into debates and discussions about sacred kings.

Sacred Kings

Years ago, I read the draft of a novel that was never published. I keep the pages in a looseleaf binder and every so often go through it again, or lend it to someone. It’s one of the best works on sacral kingship I have ever encountered. The king, again, is defined by his responsibilities – and there are so many kinds of kings. There is a Green King, who can walk the wilderness safely. There is a Seed King, whose sexual prowess and fertility make his domain prosperous. There is a Sorceror-King, who secures his people’s security with the power of his magic; he is also a Founding King, a hero by definition, one who has carved out a chunk of wilderness and turned it into civilisation. There are other kinds of king that I don’t recall, and they invent one or two others along the course of the plot.

Each of the kings is defined by a territory, something they were bound to defend, something that depended upon their particular skillfulness, their particular competence, so that everyone else could do their job. The manner by which they hold their territory differs – the Green King’s wildwalking protects his people in a different way than the sheer populousness of the Seed King’s territories – and they attract different people into their lands. But in that world, there is no place to live without kings; the king defines a place that is safe enough to thrive.

My partner says, “It’s not that the king isn’t better than everyone else. It’s that the blacksmith is better than everyone else too. And that kid’s mother is better than everyone else. People miss the ‘at what’.”

So what is the ‘at what’, for a king?

These guys up top are basically the divine jury for judgement; people liked to try to impress them / KathleenPirroArts / pixabay.com

Starting around the First Intermediate Period in Egyptian history, local officials started writing biographies in their tombs, full of propaganda. The gist of the propaganda, which was basically presented to the afterlife judges as a case in court, was to express that they had been good rulers and had done the things that needed to be done. This, they would say, was how they could demonstrate their reign had divine imprimatur: look at how they upheld the divine will.

The contents of the tomb biographies varied a lot, but there are consistent themes: the needs of the people were provided for (in terms of food, in terms of clothes, in terms of oil to treat sunburn, in terms of shoes, in terms of boats); the legal system was maintained, with malefactors punished, reconciliations made, and protection from brigands attempted; infrastructure was built, the temples had offerings, the economy ran properly; truth was spoken. These people may not have been wholly truthful, but these are the things that they thought were essential to gaining a divine stamp of approval on their rulership, and thus the things that they claimed to do.

From an Egyptian perspective, then, there’s an answer: that’s what a king is for. To do that kind of thing.

There’s a scale problem there, of course, in purely practical terms. The resources required to do that work on a national scale are entirely immense – to feed, and clothe, and house, and protect, and nurture, and see to justice, and see to prosperity. That’s beyond the scope of an ordinary human, especially one who – like most of us – is not born into the role of a hereditary elite, the sort of person who assumes that they can pick up the reins of power for the asking.

It’s easy to just say, “Well, that’s not how things work anymore” and set the whole concept aside.

But as a Kemetic, I can’t.

To Egypt, the king was all these things, and one other: the raw conduit connecting the mortal and the divine worlds. There is no doing without this connection.

Fortunately, these puzzles come with their own solution.

Egyptian liturgical magic is rife with many examples of the magician stepping in and claiming the authority of a relevant power – a healing spell, for example, might involve someone claiming to be Djehuty (Thoth) or Aset (Isis), asserting the authority of the god’s office, and declaring that it is not merely the mortal human’s will being done, but that of the divine power. Temple prayers, temple liturgies, are full of adopting the rules of various gods and doing as they would do in service to the greater system.

Further, those rituals are full of places where various people would stand in for the king – the king may be portrayed as the only one empowered to perform these rituals, but in practical terms, priests did the heavy lifting. (Especially for those rituals that required multiple parts to be performed! Even if the king is present in the temple, the stuff that takes a dozen people running around and doing various things at the same time is a bit beyond him.)

In other words: the king is fundamentally a symbol of the alliance between the human and the divine, the union that brings forth creative potential and maintains the order of the cosmos. And that symbol, is a hat that other people can wear. It is a hat that other people must wear, because the work of the king is too large even for someone who has the power at will to feed the hungry, distribute healing oil to the sunburned, raise up the army, and perform any ritual.

How big is the hat?

Heru (Horus) has a hat and you can too / SuzyT / pixabay.com

Even Kemetics who don’t consider themselves priests put on some version of the hat whenever they do ritual stuff. Even an offering to the ancestors is putting on the nature of Heru (Horus): one of his duties is to tend to his divine father in the unseen world, to establish him in his place, to nurture and restore him. Putting on the Heru-hat is putting on the king’s hat, because that is Who Heru Is.

The king’s hat is inescapable. We are all, each and every one of us who approach the world this way, sacral kings, Foremost of the Living, who have received life, luck, and stability, with the absolute responsibility for the caretaking and governance of our realm. This may be most obvious stepping into holy ground and taking up the ritualist’s tools, but to say that has no effect after the doors of the shrine are closed is claiming that what we do before the gods has no meaning in the world, and I deny that most utterly. If I take up the mantle of the king to light incense and pour water, it does not just vanish: I must, somewhere inside me, continue to be the king even when I am not kindling the flames of reawakening. If I would claim to be Heru before my ancestors and before the gods, then that must matter, I have a responsibility to attempt to embody Heru in the rest of my life.

It is an often-undermined and often-compromised responsibility – there are certainly many forces and people who do not want to recognise the individual sovereignty of others because it is inconvenient to their goals, after all. But in the end, everyone is issued a life, and has to live it themselves.

It is a theology of sacral kingship that underscores my personal responsibility for my own self-care. If, as the saying goes, this body is a temple, then I am the priest-king who is responsible for its upkeep, for providing it with the offerings that sustain the spirit that dwells in its hidden places, for caring for the grounds, for supplying it with good and beautiful things.

If my home is a temple, then I am the priest-king who is responsible for its upkeep, for keeping it clean (I am really quite bad at this part in many, many ways), for seeing to its economy, for tending the health of its inhabitants. I share this responsibility with other priest-kings, with other people who share the labour, who share the work.

If the land on which I live is a temple, then I am the priest-king who is responsible….

If the town in which I live is a temple, then…

If the commonwealth in which I live is a temple…

If the nation in which I live is a temple…

If the world in which I live is a temple…

Once upon a May Day, I gave my blessing to a land on which I was a guest, as one sacral royal to another, a support in mutual holiness, each of us with the power to join the spiritual and the material in a different way. For each of us is the Living Horus, in our own lives, and as his/her/eir/our wings spread we do, in fact, have the power to change the world.

Click here to like
Patheos Pagan on Facebook.

Click here to like
the Agora on Facebook

Hills of the Horizon is published monthly on the 29th here on the Agora. You can subscribe by RSS or via e-mail.

Please use the links to the right to keep on top of activities here on the Agora as well as across the entire Patheos Pagan channel.

Columns

Hills of the Horizon

Politics

Theology, Ethics, Philosophy

Previous Post

April 28, 2016

The Blooming Staff: Under the Hill

Next Post

April 30, 2016 Dandelion Seeds: How Do We Become Indigenous?

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A Lakeside Hearth Adventures in Wortcunning Alone In Her Presence Arts, Crafts & Cooking Birthing Hereditary Witchcraft Book of Blackbirds Book Reviews Born-Again Witch Cauldron, Sword, Spear, & Stone Cermony and Liturgy Columns Community Dandelion Seeds Dear Jasmine Druid Thoughts Editor's Picks Everyday Pagan Family & Household Practice Family Traditions Full Frontal Magic Gateway Goddess Guest Articles Happily Heathen Health and Wellness Hearth of Hellenism Heathen Woman Hills of the Horizon History Holidays Horse Goddesses Interfaith Interviews Irish-American Witchcraft Jewish Witch Lamp & Labyrinth Letters from Midgard Literature, Media, Film, Music Loop of Brighid Love, Sex & Relationships Magic or Magick Making Light Naturalistic Traditions Nature News Outside The Circle Pantheisticon Politics Prayers, Poems, Blessings & Stories Queer Femme Mystic Queer of Swords Recipes Ritual and Practice Science and Research Seekers and Guides Seeking the Grail Socially Responsible Magic Spear of Athena Star Made Witch Syncretic Electric Technology The Blooming Staff The Busy Witch The Cartomancer The Crow's Nest The Dance of Pagan Recovery The Hearth of Hellenism The Lady's Quill The Other Side of the Hedge The Path of She The Rantin' Raven The Witches Next Door The Zen Pagan Theology, Ethics, Philosophy Tree City Witch Urban Earthwitch Wayfaring Woman Witch on Fire Wyrd Words

Select a Month January 2026 March 2025 December 2024 June 2024 April 2024 March 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 August 2023 July 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

What is the teaching in "Let your yes be yes and your no, no"?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Be vague Be honest and straightforward Never speak Lie if needed