God king

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A god-king (sacred king) is a king who claims superhuman abilities or qualities. He is mostly regarded as an incarnation of the deity or of divine descent. As such he is a guarantor for the devotion of the gods or mediator between God and man . In addition to political rule, he also has a priestly function.

In ancient times, some very important rulers were elevated to the rank of deities. This "deification" is called apotheosis .

The sacred kingship is to be distinguished from the God-King , in the context of which sacred elements are assigned to the king, but he is not regarded as God himself.

Rituals

Sacred kings are subject to strict cultic taboos in order to exclude the loss or contamination of divinity. In some cultures, sacred kings were ritually killed when their divine effectiveness threatened to deteriorate (age, illness), in others this was done at regular intervals. According to Frazer's The Golden Bough , this is a necessary component of sacred royalty, which can be identified in all god-kings at least as a ritual substitute act. Such a substitute act was, for example, the annual public flogging of the Babylonian king in the Marduk temple.

Examples

In their royal office, the ancient Egyptian pharaohs saw themselves as rulers endowed with divine powers. The Sumerian king list begins around 2800 BC. With the god-king and hero Gilgamesh . Some later rulers of Mesopotamia, for example, Naram-Sin , claimed divine attributes ( crown of horns ) and left their names with the God determinative " DINGIR write".

Even Alexander the Great was already counted in his lifetime to the gods. After his death, Gaius Iulius Caesar was raised as Divus Iulius next to Iupiter Optimus Maximus to the highest state god; The subsequent Roman emperors also became deities ( divus ) through apotheosis .

Tennō, who was once again at the head of the Japanese state in the Meiji Restoration, was revered as divine in the sense of a Kami ( Arahitogami ) appearing as a human , as a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu until the end of the Second World War . The Shōwa-tennō Hirohito , however, had to state this status as nonexistent after the war in his public declaration on the surrender of Japan .

The emperor of China was also worshiped as a living god ("son of heaven"). However, it is mentioned in many writings, especially about the first emperor of China Qin Shihuangdi , that he gave himself the status of god-king (huangdi) , a combination of two titles reserved for the mythological ancient emperors of China .

Most monotheistic religions such as Judaism , Christianity or Islam reject god kings. Today there is no known culture in which a God-King is recognized.

See also

literature

  • Henri Frankfort : Kingship and the Gods. A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of Society and Nature. Distributed for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. Chicago 1948.
  • Sir James George Frazer : The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, London 1974.
  • Aubrey R. Johnson: Sacral Kingship in Ancient Israel. University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1955.
  • William Fagg: Divine Kingship in Africa. British Museum Publications, London 1978.