René Girard IX: Origin of Kings
The text below is an old draft of an excerpt from the book Catharses.
René Girard made the fascinating argument that kings originated as designated victims of human sacrifice. The claim is supported by various archeological, historical, and ethnographic evidence. There are the Celtic bog men, who lived between five and two thousand years ago on the territory of modern Ireland. Their bodies, well-preserved in bogs, bear evidence that on one hand, they held high social status, and on the other that they were ritualistically executed, often in a gruesome manner. Scholars unaffiliated with mimetic theory have concluded that the men were kings who were sacrificed by their people when things turned bad. For example, two of the bog men had their nipples sliced, and in ancient Celtic culture sucking on the king’s nipples was apparently a common act of submission. Thus, the disfiguration signified that a king was “decommissioned” prior to murder. [1]
In building up a theory around bog kings, scholars tend to imagine that a disaster that would precipitate execution of a king would be a natural disaster like a drought or a plague. A mimetic theorist would rather imagine a sacrificial crisis, that is to say, a social upheaval caused by competition among individuals and resultant accumulation of resentment among them. In primitive, non-policed societies, widespread reciprocal violence would snowball into uncontrollable social upheaval that was ascribed to wrath of a scorned god.
The concept of a sacred king, in the sacrificial sense, was developed by James Frazer in his popular book The Golden Bough, which was an early influence on Girard. Frazer collects ethnographic evidence from contemporary indigenous cultures to argue that kings were dedicated to a deity and were held responsible for ensuring good fortune to the people. If the fortune turns bad, the king may be executed. Frazer and later Girard himself list several examples of African cultures in which the ritual of enthroning a king involved maltreatments such as flogging, ostracising, feeding of prohibited food, and forcing of incest. Frazer used his evidence to develop his own theory of a primeval universal religion involving marriage of a king to an earth goddess, where the king was a disposable consort depending on how the goddess felt about producing the bounty of sustenance. To Girard, the evidence is employed in support of his theory that archaic enthronement ceremonies were dissimulated versions of instituting a type of scapegoat in the person of a king.
Both Frazer and Girard offer views at odds with the prevalent idea that the sacredness of kings was from the beginning a power play by the ruling class looking to exploit the lower classes. That could possibly happen in an advanced level of civilisation, when kings wielded awesome symbols of power, things like palaces and armies. However, in the early stages of civilisation, kings were merely village chieftains in roughly the same material position as the other villagers. In such circumstances, it seems incredibly naïve on the part of villagers to believe that one of the hut-dwellers among them is godlike simply because he is that much smarter, stronger, or better looking than other hut-dwellers. Even if the villagers were somehow naïve, what visions of transcendence could a wannabe king possibly sell to a rude assembly of primitive humans, considering that no forms of pomp and circumstance have yet been developed?
In Girardian view, historical development of kingship is envisioned as starting with collective murder of an arbitrary victim. Aggression accumulated among group members is channeled towards this single enemy, and his execution restores peace. This process is called the scapegoating mechanism. The victim is not only seen as causing the initial violence, but also as restoring peace through his death. The act of murder becomes commemorated by a society in order to retain the state of peace. Mimetic power of humans means that rivalries and aggression will always return. By remembering and recalling the original collective murder, internecine aggression can be repeatedly channeled through ritual reproduction of that murder. The ritual sacrificial victims were at first human, but later they were replaced by animals. The original murder is foundational to the social group: it was the first source of its unity, and it is regenerated through ritual commemoration. Permanent social unity then leads to all forms of social bonds and cooperation and gives birth to all aspects of culture.
It would make sense that a society would groom a designated sacrificial victim to have on the ready in case of a crisis. This would present an improvement on the original murder, which must have been haphazard. Execution of a ready victim to resolve the crisis could take place early on in the crisis. Without a ready victim, violence may go on for too long and cause too much damage before a consensus can precipitate onto a single victim.
Secondly, designation of a sacrificial victim may have been a proactive measure in preventing crises. The ritual of collective murder becomes a mediation between the community and incomprehensible sources of power that may either lead to the community’s destruction or bless it with peace. In other words, it becomes a mediation between humans and deity. The victim may have been considered a form of deity himself, or he may have been considered a sacred gift pleasing to deity. One way or another, the sacrificial victim became the main conduit for communication with the divine.
The living sacrificial victim then becomes a visible signifier of the divine within the community, and he is made to perform the roles of proactive communication with the divine done in order to prevent divine wrath. These roles involve enacting the will of God within the community. What that practically amounts to is to enforcing modes of behaviour that will prevent outbreaks of chaotic violence. To wit, the sacrificial victim becomes a judge, an arbitrator of systems of prohibitions and customs that ultimately evolved into law and every other aspect of culture.
In the earliest times, whatever role the living sacrificial victim played in society, he would still be executed in times of crisis, as seems to have been the case among ancient Celts and their bog kings. The original role of the king had not been forgotten or dissimulated through ritual. The important question then arises: How exactly did kingship evolve from the role of a delayed victim of ritual human sacrifice, to the majestic and fearsome office of historic times?
The key to the answer may be found in what occurred as a consequence of keeping the king alive. The king, as a conduit of the divine, transitioned from his purely propitiating role as a sacrificial victim to the role of proactively staving off the wrath of God, manifested as chaotic internecine conflict, through the institution of law and customs. A legal system in turn gave birth to a more rational relationship with the divine. Humanity progressed from archaic ignorance of the causes of destruction to a comprehension that submission to a system of rules can prevent chaos indefinitely, and that it can do so more efficiently than collective murder. Thus, we had a transition from the ambivalent and even malicious gods and demons of archaic societies to religions in which deity can be satisfied through obedience to a system of rules. Gradually, deity becomes marked by ethics and reason.
Yet, the sacrificial element still remained important, because society found that men cannot bring themselves about to respect the rules without fail. Their fallen nature, or their mimetic nature, remained. Sacrifice was no longer at the heart of the relationship with the divine. Rather, it became an apology to God for breaking the law, for transgressing the boundary between mortals and divinity. Sacrifice became atonement for sin.
The cultural progress became manifestly beneficial and precious in the eyes of men. Cultural order was ascribed to obedience to the divine, and as the king remained a signifier of the divine, it was also associated with obedience to the king through obedience of the laws of the land that he arbitrates. Respect for the divine, which is to say the worship and devotion to it, for each man became the signal of submission to societal rules that keep the precious peace. In the earliest monarchies, this devotion to God could be signalled only through loyalty to the king. There was no distinction between secular and divine law. Thus, obedience to the person of the king was one and the same thing as obedience to God.
The rise of obedience as the source of order had monumental impact on culture. It transformed kingship from its original sacrificial role and made it into an office of representation of divine authority. It gave birth to monarchy and, by extension, to all social ordering. Obedience gave birth to an advanced, large-scale separation of social roles, which would gradually evolve into what we today call social classes. Obedience to authority was signalled through dutiful discharge of one’s social role. It was also signalled through payment of tributes to the ruling authority of the king, who thereby accumulated power and wealth with which he could better enforce social order.
The obedience and the tributes themselves acquired a sacrificial aspect. Starting off as collective murder devoid of what we today call morals, sacrifice evolved into various mortifications or self-denial within an individuals life: denial of passions, denial of part of one’s possessions in the form of tithes and taxes, denial of ambition.
Social stratification and strict obedience to law was especially critical for maintenance of culture in places that were exposed to high pressures of the natural environment, such were the isolated valleys of the Nile and the Tigris and Euphrates. In such places, sacrificial crises could easily lead to mass starvation. Provision of food required complex cooperation to organise harvests around annual flooding of the rivers. However, in the vast temperate regions of Eurasia, the environmental pressures were not so high. Human groups could survive and perpetuate with a much lower cultural complexity. Nevertheless, if they were to move away from the most primitive forms of the scapegoating mechanism, groups in broad temperate regions also needed some kind of pressure to promote rational social ordering. They found their solution in war.
To these societies, the sacrificial victim that created unity within a society, or that destroyed it, took the form of the external enemy more often that the forms of draught and famine. War played the analogous role of the archaic collective murder of an arbitrary victim in bringing about unity and economic ordering of the collective. This is the same unifying function of the divinisation of authority in Egypt and Mesopotamia.
Eventually, as the ancient Middle Eastern civilisations mastered their harsh environmental pressures, war to them also became a major driver of social ordering and development. We learn from historians that earliest known urban civilisation, that of Sumerians, was initially based on organised agriculture in the city of Ur, and then agriculture and trade in the city of Uruk. Situated on the mouth of the river Euphrates on the Gulf Sea, Uruk was ideally located for trade by sea and river. Later, archaeological findings from Sumer show more and more stories and commemorations of war. The centre of culture shifted from Uruk to Lagash, an inland city based on warfare. Lagash famously battled against the rival city-state of Umma, as well as the surrounding bands of nomadic tribes known as the Guti. One cause of war was rivalry among developed cities, and another was envy of undeveloped tribes who beheld the glistening city states from the mountains of Zagros, and began to covet their riches. With the rise of warfare we see rise in warrior-kings who glorify gods through defeat of the enemy. The enemy becomes another type of sacrificial victim whose blood satisfied gods.
In the case of Sumer at least, concurrent with the rise of warfare we see also the appearance of large-scale slavery. It may be that the first slaves were indeed war captives. Unlike the war captives of archaic barbarians, those of city-states were not sacrificed to gods or simply executed; they found their use in the complex production systems of the city. Economic development thus not only contributed to evolution from the sacrificial victim to king as law-giver or king as warrior, but also from sacrificial victim to slave.
War and Peace faces of Standard of Ur, 2600 BC
We see a similar clash between barbarians and high-level agricultural civilisations repeated throughout history. Ancient Egypt, Hittites, Mycenaeans, and other settled nations of Eastern Mediterranean get ravaged by the Sea Peoples. In Europe, initially warlike Helens and Romans settled into civilisation, influenced ultimately by the great civilisation they found upon arrival to their Mediterranean territories. However, later they too, and especially Romans, had to constantly battle nomadic warrior tribes of non-Mediterranean Europe, their version of the Guti. Same goes for the Mongolian tribes raiding settled Chinese civilisation from the north. In all cases, whereas the settled civilisations had more emphasis on systems of law and order required for complex cultural organisation, the culture of barbarians was mostly based around war. Yet for both the barbarians and the city-dwellers, the origin of social order can be traced to the sacrificial ritual, and the origin of kings can be traced back to the sacrificial victim.
War added another dimension to the office of the king. In addition to his responsibility to staving off wrath of God through enforcement of law within a society, the king also became responsible for staving off the wrath of God in the form of destruction on the hands of an enemy nation. When Israelites ask prophet Samuel to find them a king, they say, “ Nay; but we will have a king over us; That we also may be like all the nations; and that our king may judge us, and go out before us, and fight our battles.“ Simultaneously, the enemy nation became the scapegoat: the source of evil that angers God and needs to be destroyed to appease him. There is eventually a fusion, notably in the Hebrew scriptures, of war and obedience to a civil code: victory or defeat in war become linked to disobedience to a God of civil law.
With the rise of large-scale warfare kingship itself takes a military nature. The king becomes the general. Waging war requires highly centralised authority and fast decision making. There is no time for councils, and anything short of blind obedience from soldiers would destroy unity and power of an army. In these circumstances, expedience is a sufficient reason to select one man to be the leader of the entire society. Ideally that man would be a skilled strategist. After the war ends, the leader may step down, and society could then return to its peacetime ordering. This was the practice of the Roman Republic. However, if the general doesn’t step down, or if war becomes a default state of affairs, the general becomes the king.
Military origin of kings is present in many historical narratives. Social hierarchies of pagan and medieval Europe and Ottoman Empire, to name but a few, originated as military hierarchies. At the origin of all of these hierarchies, we find societies drawn into a state of indefinite warfare.
The military origin hypothesis appears at first sight to be altogether different from the one that postulates original kings to be postponed sacrificial victims. Yet, cultures that see kings primarily as warlords are simply cultures that did not undergo complex cultural development before they engaged in war. This tends to be true of all cultures that developed in broad temperate zones, which on one hand provided easy access to food, and on the other hand provided plenty of foreigners to battle. Settlers of archaic Europe maintained a religious system that sustained civilisation on the level of tribes or small urban settlements. But it was only after they learned war that they became true nations. Village chieftains such as the bog kings may have acted as village judges, but once warfare developed, the wrath of god became less about petty squabbling within a village and more about complete annihilation at the hands of an invading tribe. Consequently, the scapegoat-king, as the precarious representative of the divine, no longer needed to arbitrate among the villagers, but to organise and lead them in the fight against enemy.
War supplied a whole new economy of sacrifice. The enemy is the scapegoat on whom a society focuses its collective and unanimous wrath. Whatever the material outcome of the war, the process of war has a powerful effect of unifying a society and giving it higher purpose. War creates culture, just like all scapegoating mechanism creates culture. It creates stories, heroes and villains, it sanctifies victims and objects that are defended, it orders a society. “War is the father and king of all”, says Heraclitus.
Whether they were held responsible for bringing rain, staving off reciprocal violence among citizenry, or fighting an enemy in war, kings of archaic and ancient times were viewed as being in some sort of a precarious position. They were carrying a load on behalf of their people, navigating forces that were violent and incomprehensible, and therefore divine. In such a role, kings were always understood intuitively as delayed human sacrifices. Archaic deities were morally ambivalent, and if they decided to withhold their divine favour from the community, it was the king who was sacrificed in propitiation. This could be done in a ritual sacrifice, or in the case of warrior-kings, at the hands of victorious enemies. A king, in short, was someone who could die any time, and do so on behalf of the people.
The origin of kings as sacrificial victims would also explain why so many of the earliest kings were either associated as descended from gods, or gods themselves. Again, our modern sensibilities are offended at such claims. We see nothing in such claims beyond outrageous boasting and clever power plays of the ruling class. Yet, if to the archaic mind, deity was closely associated to the sacrificial victim, we could see a certain truth in such claims. If first kings were indeed delayed human sacrifices, and if human sacrifices were originally worshipped as deities, then in a certain archaic interpretation, kings indeed did descend from gods.
By the era of recorded history, we already see that being a king was no longer a tough job. Kings, and by extension the ruling hierarchy around them, began to enjoy a living standard greatly above the rest of the population. They were feared and revered, and they built around them social systems consisting of classes marked by different levels of privilege. It would take a very complex study to figure out how exactly privilege of the ruling classes was understood in different societies and at different times. However, once we enter the modern era after the Age of Enlightenment, class privilege begins to be widely perceived as unjustified. Indeed, this era witnessed removal of sacred rulers all across the world, and institutions of various forms of republics. Kings, and the class system built around them, began to be resented.
My hypothesis would be that in general, class resentment developed as kings, and social hierarchies around them, ceased to be perceived as sacrificial. As long as a society was or felt threatened by overwhelming violence, be it mimetic violence within the community, the violence of the natural environment, or of external enemy, the ruling class was justified in their sacrificial roles of propitiating gods. Once fear of any such violence receded, the king and his court were no longer at the risk of violent death. They were privileged for no good reason, and they became resented. Yet, societal structures originally created to overcome violence were marked by unequal distribution of authority of power, and they could not be removed. Social stratification thus gave birth to the great drama of civilized life, with all its resentment and ambition. But that is a topic for another essay.
Read more in the book Catharses.