2
Regality
Every traditional civilization is characterized by the presence of beings who, by virtue of their innate or acquired superiority over the human condition, embody within the temporal order the living and efficacious presence of a power that comes from above. One of these types of beings is the pontifex, according to the inner meaning of the word and according to the original value of the function that he exercised. Pontifex means “builder of bridges,” or of “paths” (pons, in ancient times, also meant “path”) connecting the natural and the supernatural dimensions. Moreover, the pontifex was traditionally identified with the king (rex). Servius, a late fourth-century commentator on Virgil’s works, reports: “The custom of our ancestors was that the king should also be pontifex and priest.” A saying of the Nordic tradition reads: “May our leader be our bridge.”[1] Thus, real monarchs were the steadfast personification of the life “beyond ordinary life.” Beneficial spiritual influences used to radiate upon the world of mortal beings from the mere presence of such men, from their “pontifical” mediation, from the power of the rites that were rendered efficacious by their power, and from the institutions of which they were the center. These influences permeated people’s thoughts, intentions, and actions, ordering every aspect of their lives and constituting a fit foundation for luminous, spiritual realizations. These influences also made propitious the general conditions for prosperity, health, and “good fortune.”
In the world of Tradition the most important foundation of the authority and of the right (ius) of kings and chiefs, and the reason why they were obeyed, feared, and venerated, was essentially their transcendent and nonhuman quality. This quality was not artificial, but a powerful reality to be feared. The more people acknowledged the ontological rank of what was prior and superior to the visible and temporal dimension, the more such beings were invested with a natural and absolute sovereign power. Traditional civilizations, unlike those of decadent and later times, completely ignored the merely political dimension of supreme authority as well as the idea that the roots of authority lay in mere strength, violence, or natural and secular qualities such as intelligence, wisdom, physical courage, and a minute concern for the collective material well-being. The roots of authority, on the contrary, always had a metaphysical character. Likewise, the idea that the power to govern is conferred on the chief by those whom he rules and that his authority is the expression of the community and therefore subject to its decrees, was foreign to Tradition. It is Zeus who bestows the θέμιστες on kings of divine origin, whereby θέμις, or “law from above,” is very different from what constitutes νόμος, which is the political law of the community. The root of every temporal power was spiritual authority, which was almost a “divine nature disguised in human form.” According to an Indo-European view, the ruler is not ”a mere mortal,” but rather “a great deity standing in the form of a man.”[2] The Egyptian pharaoh was believed to be the manifestation of Ra or of Horus. The kings of Alba and of Rome were supposed to be the incarnations of Zeus; the Assyrian kings, of Baal; the Persian shahs, of the god of light. The Nordic-Germanic princes were believed to derive from the race of Tiuz, of Odin, and of the Aesir; and the Greek kings of the Doric-Achaean cycle were called διοτρεψέες or δίογενέες in reference to their divine origin. Beyond the variety of mythical and sacred expressions, the recurrent view of kingship is expressed in terms of an “immanent transcendence” that is present and active in the. world. The king—who was believed to be a sacred being and not a man—by virtue of his “being,” was already the center and the apex of the community. In him was also the supernatural strength that made his ritual actions efficacious. In these actions people could recognize the earthly counterpart of supernatural “ruling,” as well as the supernatural support of life in the world of Tradition.[3] For this reason, kingship was the supreme form of government, and was believed to be in the natural order of things. It did not need physical strength to assert itself, and when it did, it was only sporadically. It imposed itself mainly and irresistibly through the spirit. In an ancient Indo-Aryan text it is written: ”The dignity a god enjoys on earth is splendid, but hard to achieve for the weak. Only he who sets his soul on this objective, is worthy to become a king.”[4] The ruler appears as a “follower of the discipline that is practiced by those who are gods among men.”[5]
In Tradition, kingship was often associated with the solar symbol. In the king, people saw the same “glory” and “victory” proper to the sun and to the light (the symbols of the superior nature), which every morning overcome darkness. “Everyday he rises on Horus’s throne, as king of the living, just like his father Ra [the sun].” And also: “I have decreed that you must eternally rise as king of the North and of the South on the seat of Horus, like the sun.” These sayings from the ancient Egyptian royal tradition bear a striking similarity to the sayings of the Persian tradition, in which the king is believed to be “of the same stock as the gods”: “He has the same throne of Mithras and he rises with the Sun”; he is called particeps siderum and “Lord of peace, salvation of mankind, eternal man, winner who rises in company of the sun.” In ancient Persia the consecrating formula was: “Thou art power, the force of victory, and immortal … Made of gold, thou rise, at dawn, together with Indra and with the sun.” In the Indo-Aryan tradition, in reference to Rohita, who is the “conquering force” and who personifies an aspect of the radiance of the divine fire (Agni), we find: “By coming forward, he [Agni] has created kingship in this world. He has conferred on you [Rohita] majesty and victory over your enemies.”[6] In some ancient Roman representations, the god Sol (sun) presents the emperor with a sphere, which is the symbol of universal dominion. Also, the expressions sol conservator and sol dominus romani imperii, which are employed to describe Rome’s stability and ruling power, refer to the brightness of the sun. The last Roman profession of faith was “solar,” since the last representative of the ancient Roman tradition, the emperor Julian, consecrated his dynasty, his birth, and royal condition to the brightness of the sun,[7] which he considered to be a spiritual force radiating from the “higher worlds.” A reflection of the solar symbol was preserved up to the time of Ghibelline emperors—one may still speak of a deitas solis in reference to Frederick II of Hohenstaufen.
This solar “glory” or “victory” in reference to kingship was not reduced to a mere symbol, but rather denoted a metaphysical reality. Eventually it came to be identified with a nonhuman operating force, which the king did not possess in and by himself. One of the most characteristic symbolic expressions of this idea comes from the Zoroastrian tradition, wherein the hvareno (the “glory” that the king possesses) is a supernatural fire characterizing heavenly (and especially solar) entities that allows the king to partake of immortality and that gives him witness through victory. This victory must be understood in such a way that the two meanings, the first mystical, the second military (material), are not mutually exclusive but rather complementary.[8] Among non-Persian people, this hvareno was later confused with “fate” (τύχη). With this meaning it reappeared in the Roman tradition in the form of the “royal fate” that the Caesars ritually transmitted to each other, and in which the people recognized an active, “triumphal” undertaking of the personified destiny of the city (τύχη πόλεως). determined by the ritual of their appointment. The Roman regal attribute felix must be referred to this context and to the possession of an extranormal virtus. In the Vedic tradition we find a parallel notion: Agni-Vaishvanara is conceived as a spiritual fire that leads the conquering kings to victory.
In ancient Egypt the king was not called merely “Horus,” but “fighting Horus” (Hor aha), to designate the victorious and glorious character of the solar principle present in the monarch. The Egyptian pharaoh, who was believed to descend from the gods, was “enthroned” as one of them, and later on in his life he was periodically reconfirmed in his role through rituals that reproduced the victory of the solar god Horus over Typhon-Set, a demon from the netherworld.[9] These rites were thought to have such a power as to evoke the “force” and the “life” that supernaturally encompassed the king’s person. The hieroglyphic for “force” (uas) is the scepter handled by gods and kings alike. In the oldest texts, the scepter is portrayed as the zigzag bolt of lightning. The regal “force” thus appears as a manifestation of the dazzling, heavenly force. The combination of signs represented the concept of “life-force” (anshus), form a word for “fiery milk,” which is the nourishment of the immortals. This word is not without relation to uraeus, the divine flame, at times life-giving, at other times dangerously destructive, which crowns the head of the Egyptian king in the shape of a serpent.
In this traditional formulation, the various elements converge in the idea of a nonterrestrial power or fluid (sa). This power consecrates and gives witness to the solar, triumphant nature of the king, and “gushes” forth from one king to the other, thus guaranteeing the uninterrupted and “golden” sequence in the divine lineage, which is legitimately appointed to the task of regere. Interestingly enough, the theme of “glory” as a divine attribute is found even in Christianity, and according to mystical theology the beatific vision takes place within the “glory of God.” Christian iconography used to portray this glory as a halo around the person’s head, thus visibly representing the meaning of the Egyptian uraeus and of the glowing crown of the Persian and Roman solar kings.
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. This force that comes “from heaven,” according to Lao-tzu, acts without acting (wei wu wei) through an immaterial presence, or by virtue of just being present.[10] It is as invisible as the wind, and yet its actions are as ineluctable as the forces of nature. When this power is unleashed, the forces of common men, according to Meng-tzu, bend under it as blades of grass under the wind.[11] Concerning wu wei, a text says:
By its thickness and substantiality, sincerity equals earth; and by its height and splendor it equals heaven. Its extent and duration are without limit. He who possesses this sincerity, without showing himself, he will shine forth, without moving he will renovate others; without acting, he will perfect them.[12]
Only such a man, “is able to harmonize the opposing strands of human society, to establish and to maintain moral order in the country.”[13]
Established in this force or “virtue,” the Chinese monarch (wang) performed the supreme role of a center, or of a third power between heaven and earth. The common assumption was that the fortunes and misfortunes of the kingdom, as well as the moral qualities of his subjects (it is the “virtue” in relation to the “being” of the monarch, and not his “actions,” that carries positive or negative influences on them), secretly depended on the monarch’s behavior. The central role exercised by the king presupposed that the king maintained the aforesaid “triumphal” inner way of being. In this context, the meaning of the famous saying, “Immutability in the middle,” may correspond to the doctrine according to which, “in the immutability of the middle, the virtue of heaven is manifested.”[14] If this principle was implemented as a general rule, nothing could have changed the arranged course of human events or those of the state.[15]
In general, the fact that the king’s or chief’s primary and essential function consisted in performing those ritual and sacrificial actions that constituted the center of gravity of life is a recurrent idea in a vast cycle of traditional civilizations, from pre-Columbian Peru to the Far East, and including Greek and Roman cities. This idea confirms the inseparability of royal office from priestly or pontifical office. According to Aristotle, “the kings enjoy their office by virtue of being the officiating priests at their community’s worship.”[16] The first duty of the Spartan kings was to perform sacrifices, and the same could be said about the first kings of Rome and of many rulers during the imperial period. The king, empowered with a nonterrestrial force with its roots in something that is “more than life,” naturally appeared as one who could eminently actualize the power of the rites and open the way leading to the superior world. Thus, in those traditional forms of civilization in which there was a separate priestly class, the king, because of his original dignity and function, belonged to this class and was its true leader. In addition to early Rome, this situation was found both in ancient Egypt (in order to make the rites efficacious, the pharaoh repeated daily the prayer that was believed to renew the divine force in his person) and in Iran, where, as Xenophon recalls,[17] the king, who according to his function was considered the image of the god of light on earth, belonged to the caste of Magi and was its leader. On the other hand, if among certain people there was the custom of deposing and even of killing the chief when an accident or a catastrophe occurred—for this seemed to signify a decrease in the mystical force of “good fortune” that gave one the right to be chief[18]—this custom gives witness to the same order of ideas, although in the form of a superstitious degeneration. In the Nordic racial stocks up to the time of the Goths, and notwithstanding the principle of royal sacredness (the king was considered as an Aesir and as a demigod who wins in battle thanks to the power of his “good fortune”), an inauspicious event was understood not so much as the absence of the mystical power of “fortune” abiding in the king, but rather as the consequence of something that the king, as a mortal man, had done, thus compromising the objective effectiveness of his power. It was believed, for instance, that the consequence for failing to implement the fundamental Aryan virtue of always telling the truth, and thus being stained by lies, caused the “glory,” or the mystical efficacious virtue, to abandon the ancient Iranian king, Yima.[19] All the way up to the Carolingian Middle Ages and within Christianity itself, local councils of bishops were at times summoned in order to investigate what misdeed perpetrated by a representative of the temporal or ecclesiastical authority could have caused a given calamity. These are the last echoes of the abovementioned idea.
The monarch was required to retain the symbolic and solar dignity of invictus (sol invictus, ἥλιος ανίκητος), as well as the state of inner equilibrium that corresponds to the Chinese notion of “immutability in the middle”; otherwise the force and its prerogatives would be transferred to another person who could prove worthy of it. I will mention in this context a case in which the concept of “victory” became a focal point of various meanings. There is an interesting ancient saga of Nemi’s King of the Woods, whose royal and priestly office was supposed to be conferred on the person capable of catching him by surprise and slaying him. J. G. Frazer tracked down numerous traditions of the same kind all over the world.
In this context, the physical combat aspect of the trial, if it had to occur, is only the materialistic transposition of some higher meaning, and it must be related to the general view of “divine judgments” (more on which later). Concerning the deepest meaning of the legend of Nemi’s king-priest, it must be remembered that according to Tradition, only a “fugitive slave” (esoterically speaking, a being who had become free from the bonds of his lower nature), armed with a branch tom off a sacred oak, had the right to compete with the Rex Nemorensis (King of the Woods). The oak is the equivalent of the “Tree of the World,” which in other traditions is frequently adopted as a symbol designating the primordial life-force and the power of victory.[20] This means that only a being who has succeeded in partaking of this force may aspire to take the place of the Rex Nemorensis. Concerning this office, it must be observed that the oak and the woods, of which Nemi’s priest-king was rex, were related to Diana. In turn, Diana was the “bride” of the king of the woods. In some ancient, eastern Mediterranean traditions, the great goddesses were often symbolized by sacred trees. From the Hellenic myth of the Hesperides, to the Nordic myth of the goddess Idun, and to the Gaelic myth of Magh-Mell, which was the residence of very beautiful goddesses and of the “Tree of Victory,” it is possible to notice traditional symbolic connections between women or goddesses, forces of life, immortality, wisdom, and trees.
Concerning the Rex Nemorensis, we can recognize in the symbols employed that the notion of kingship derives from having married or possessed the mystical force of “life,” of transcendent wisdom and immortality that is personified both by the goddess and by the tree.[21] Nemi’s saga, therefore, incorporates the general symbol, which is found in many other myths and traditional legends, of a winner or of a hero who possesses a woman or a goddess. The goddess appears in other traditions either as a guardian of the fruits of immortality (see the female figures in relation to the symbolical tree in the myths of Heracles, Jason, Gilgamesh, and so on), or as a personification of the occult force of the world, of life and of nonhuman knowledge, or as the embodiment of the principle of sovereignty (the knight or the unknown hero of the legend, who becomes king after taking as his bride a mysterious princess).[22]
Some of the ancient traditions about a female source of royal power[23] may also be interpreted in this fashion; their meaning, in that case, is exactly opposite to gynaecocracy, which will be discussed later. As far as the tree is concerned, interestingly enough, even in some medieval legends it is related to the imperial ideal; the last emperor, before dying, will hang the scepter, the crown, and the shield in the “Dry Tree,” which is usually located in the symbolical region of “Prester John,” just like the dying Roland hung his unbreakable sword in the tree. This is yet another convergence of symbolical contents, for Frazer has shown the relationship existing between the branch that the fugitive slave must break off Nemi’s sacred oak in order to fight with Nemi’s king and the branch Aeneas carried to descend, while alive, into the invisible dimension. One of the gifts that Emperor Frederick II received from the mysterious Prester John was a ring that renders invisible and victorious the one who wears it. Invisibility, in this context, refers to the access to the invisible realm and to the achievement of immortality; in Greek traditions the hero’s invisibility is often synonymous with his becoming immortal.
This was the case of Siegfried in the Niebelungen (6), who through the same symbolic virtue of becoming invisible, subjugates and marries the divine woman Brynhild. Brynhild, just like Siegfried in the Siegdrifumal (4–6), is the one who bestows on the heroes who “awaken” her the formulas of wisdom and of victory contained in the runes.
Remnants of traditions, in which we find the themes contained in the ancient saga of the King of the Woods, last until shortly beyond the end of the Middle Ages. They are always associated with the old idea, according to which a legitimate king is capable of manifesting in specific, concrete and almost experimental ways, the signs of his supernatural nature. The following is just one example: prior to the Hundred Years War, Venice asked Philip of Valois to demonstrate his actual right to be king in one of the following ways. The first way, victory over a contender whom Philip was expected to fight to the death in an enclosed area, reminds us of the Rex Nemorensis and of the mystical testimony inherent in every victory.[24] As far as the other examples are concerned, we read in a text dating back to those times:
If Philip of Valois is, as he affirms, the true king of France, let him prove the fact by exposing himself to hungry lions; for lions never attack a true king; or let him perform the miraculous healing of the sick, as all other true kings are wont to do. If he should fail, he would own himself to be unworthy of the kingdom.[25]
A supernatural power, manifested through a victory or through a thaumaturgical virtue, even in times like Philip’s, which are no longer primordial times, is thus inseparably connected with the traditional idea of real and legitimate kingship.[26] Aside from the factual adequacy of single individuals to the principle and to the function of kingship, what remains is the view that “what has led people to venerate so many kings were mainly the divine virtues and powers, which descended on the kings alone, and not on other men as well.” Joseph de Maistre wrote:[27]
God makes kings in the literal sense. He prepares royal races; maturing them under a cloud which conceals their origin. They appear at length crowned with glory and honor; they take their places; and this is the most certain sign of their legitimacy. The truth is that they arise as it were of themselves, without violence on their part, and without marked deliberation on the other: it is a species of magnificent tranquillity, not easy to express. Legitimate usurpation would seem to me to be the most appropriate expression (if not too bold), to characterize these kinds of origins, which time hastens to consecrate.[28]
Footnotes
1. See the Mabinogion.
2. The Laws of Manu, 7.8.
3. Conversely, in Greece and in Rome, if the king was found unworthy of the priestly office, he could no longer be king.
4. Nitisara, 4.4.
5. Ibid., 1.63.
6. Atharva Veda, 13.1.4–5.
7. Emperor Julian, Hymn to King Helios, 131b.
8. Concerning the hvareno, see Yasht(l9): “We sacrifice to the awesome kingly Glory made by Mazda; most conquering, highly working, that possesses health, wisdom and happiness, and is more powerful to destroy than all other creatures.” The Avesta Major Portions, ed. and trans. Rev. E.G. Busch (1985).
9. One phase of these rites was the “walking in circles,” reproducing the journey of the sun. Along the king’s path an animal dear to Typhon was sacrificed as a magical, ritual evocation of Horus’s victory over Typhon-Set.
10. Tao te Ching, 31.
11. Lun-yu, 12.18. In the Chung-yung it is written that the secret actions of heaven are eminently immaterial: they are “without sound or scent” and as subtle as the “lightest feather.” Ezra Pound, trans., Chung Yung: The Unwobbling Pivot (New York, 1969), 33.6.
12. Ibid., 26.5–6.
13. Ibid., 31.1.
14. Lun-yu (6.27): “The due medium is virtue. This is the highest attainment.
For a long time few people have reached it.”
15. The Chinese distinguished between the imperial function and the emperor’s person. The imperial function is believed to be divine and to transfigure the person invested with it. When the emperor is enthroned he renounces his personal name and adopts instead an imperial name. He is not so much a person as a neutral element, one of the forces of nature, or something like the sun or a polar star. A natural catastrophe or a popular rebellion signify that the individual has betrayed the principle, which nevertheless still stands. These events are a heavenly sign of the emperor’s decadence; not of the imperial function, but of the individual himself.
16. Aristotle, Politics 6.5.2.
17. Cyropaedia, 8.26.
18. In La Mentalité primitive (Paris, 1925), Lévy-Bruhl showed that “primitive peoples” believed that “a catastrophe disqualified the leader.”
19. Yasht, 19.34–38. The hvareno withdraws three times following the triple dignity of Yima as a priest, warrior, and shepherd.
20. The aśvattha tree of the Hindu tradition has its roots in heaven, or in the invisible dimension (Kaṭha Upaniṣad 6.1–2; Bhaghavadgītā, 15.1–2). In the first of these texts, the tree is related to the vital force (prāṇa) and to the “thunderbolt.” Since the tree is related to the power of victory, the aśvattha is considered the ally of Indra, the warrior god, slayer of Vṛtra.
21. In the Egyptian tradition the “name” of the pharaoh was written by the gods on the sacred tree ashed, thus becoming “perennial.” In the Persian tradition there is a relationship between Zarathustra who was, among the Parsis, the prototype of the divine king, and a heavenly tree planted on top of a mountain.
22. The Roman tradition of the gens Julia, which traced its origins to Venus victrix and to Venus genitrix, shared this perspective. In the Japanese tradition, until a few years ago, the origin of the imperial power was attributed to a solar deity (Amaterasu Omikami), and the focal point of the ceremony of enthronement (dajo-sai) represented the contact the emperor established with her through the “offering of new food.”
23. In ancient India, for instance, the essence of royalty was condensed in a divine or semidivine woman (Śrī, Lakṣmī, Padmā) who chose and “embraced” the king, thus becoming his bride, notwithstanding the king’s human wives.
24. Later on, I will expound the notion that in this context appears in a materialistic form. Traditionally the winner was believed to incarnate a nonhuman energy; in him there were two phases of the same act: he was the point of convergence of a “descent” and of an “ascent.”
25. Marc Bloch, The Royal Touch (New York, 1961), i–ii.
26. Tradition also ascribed the thaumaturgical virtue to the Roman emperors Hadrian and Vespasian (Tacitus, Historiae, 4.81). Among the Carolingians it is still possible to find a residue of the idea that the supernatural power penetrated even the royal clothes. Beginning with Robert the Pius (French dynasty) and Edward the Confessor (English dynasty) until the age of revolutions, the thaumaturgical power was transmitted from one royal generation to the other. The power at first could heal all diseases, but with the passing of time it could only heal a few. C. Agrippa (De occulta philosophia, 3.35) wrote: “Righteous kings and pontifices represent God on earth and partake of his power. If they touch the sick, they heal them from their diseases.”
27. Joseph de Maistre, Essay on the Generative Principle of Constitutions (reprint, New York, 1977), 19–20.
28. In this passage of de Maistre, we find again the mystical view of victory, since “taking their place” is considered “the most certain sign of their legitimacy.”