by Faun Rice
Might this be a more general tendency? It’s very hard to judge, because there
have been so few attempts to look at the phenomenon in any sort of broad-
er historical perspective. What evidence there is is certainly suggestive. Kajsa
Ekholm (1985a; also 1991: 167–78), for instance, made a detailed examination
of the BaKongo evidence—one of the few cases where we have good histori-
cal evidence going back more than five centuries—and concluded that Frazer
had got things precisely backward. The more extreme forms of royal ritual, she
argued—especially the killing, scapegoating, and imprisonment of monarchs—
was in no sense primordial. As Phyllis Martin (1972: 19–24, 160–64) had docu-
mented for the Loango kingdom, early rulers (called “Maloango”) might have
been seen as “quasi-divine” beings (their meals, for instance, were conducted
in secret), but it didn’t stop them from taking an active role in every aspect of
political life. It was only after the kingdom had largely collapsed under the pres-
sures of the slave trade that a rising merchant class turned the Maloango into a
sacred being effectively confined to his palace, forbidden to cross water, or touch
foreign-made goods.
Even more extreme customs emerged around the dozens of tiny potentates
who emerged from the collapse of the BaKongo kingdom. The old Kongo king
was, as we’ve seen (chapter 3), a divine king of the classic stranger-king type,
if not an especially sacred one. But the kingdom collapsed into civil war, and
before long, the great capital city of San Salvador lay sacked and abandoned,
replaced by thousands of tiny villages; the slave trade and subsequent machina-
tions of foreign traders then brought the equivalent of criminal gangs to power
in many parts of the country. In the process, Ekholm (1985a) writes, divine
kingship underwent a process of “involution.” Nineteenth-century sources un-
veil a veritable Victorian wonder-cabinet of strange and exotic political forms:
kings executed on the first day in office who then reigned as ghosts; kings exiled
to forests like the Priest of Nemi; kings regularly beaten and mutilated by their
guards and companions; kings who actually were regularly put to death at the
end of their four- or seven-year terms.
BaKongo kings had always been elected from among a host of candidates,
through the offices of the earth-priests who represented the indigenous “own-
ers of the land,” and, by extension, the whole people. But now those indigenous
authorities effectively seized, and decentralized, power (Ekholm 1991: 171–72).
“The people” had won the war, and the king was transformed into a kind of
Clastrean “anti-chief, divested of all real power and immobilized by a plethora
414
ON KINGS
of taboos” (Ekholm 1985a: 249). The most extreme form of such adverse sa-
cralization is documented from Nsundi. According to the account of one later
BaKongo catechist (Laman 1953–68, 2: 140–42; Janzen 1982: 65; MacGaffey
2000: 148–49), around 1790, the first Nsundi king of Kibunzi, whose title was
Namenta,37 was a boy kidnapped by his lineage’s wife-givers (i.e., lineage of the
indigenous priests themselves), and put through a kind of savage parody of a
typical Central African puberty ritual. Secluded in the forest by his future of-
ficials, he was whipped, starved, and generally mistreated until he came of age.
“When he was a grown man, he was castrated by the use of a feather of a fishing
eagle. Then they left him alone, but he was not yet Chief, because he was still
a prisoner” (MacGaffey 2000: 148). Finally, when it came time for him to take
office, he was, like kings of old, expected to conquer the capital (defended by
these same wife-givers) in a ritual battle—except, in this case, it was not a mock
battle but an actual battle, and if the candidate was killed in combat, the office
would lie empty until another candidate could be raised again. Offices often lay
empty for very long periods. But even if Namenta passed the ordeal, and was
duly invested in the royal leopard-skin regalia, he was treated essentially as a
magical charm, created by his people, and his main responsibility was in main-
taining various onerous taboos. (He was also ritually married to a woman of the
wife-giving clan whom his brother was expected to impregnate.)
This represents perhaps the lowest a monarch can fall. Small wonder then
that some wealthy BaKongo chiefs around this time never went outside without
weapons, for fear they might be kidnapped and forced to become king (Bastian
in Ekholm 1991: 168).
Ekholm’s conclusion is that Frazerian kingship is effectively a side-effect
of European imperialism. As the BaKongo descended from a mighty empire
to the impoverished prey of predatory merchants, gangsters, and colonialists,
cosmology itself transformed: the powers of nature were redefined as dangerous
and evil, and stranger-kings, embodying powers of the wild, became forces to be
quelled and controlled. Even the ritual scapegoating of kings, Ekholm suggests,
is a result of this dilemma. This is heady stuff. But she also appears to suggest
this is a more general pattern, and here we are on much shakier ground. Even the
37. Laman (1953: 68, 2) says he was the last of his dynasty, and Ekholm (1991: 168)
echoes this, but as MacGaffey observes, the text actually describes him as the first
of the dynasty, and names various successors (2000: 150). He concludes there likely
was no real person named Namenta; he was just the titular founder and a kind of
template for the investiture of later kings.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
415
unfortunate Namenta’s successors eventually managed to reassert themselves,
breaking out of ritual isolation to become judges, merchants, and conquerors,
and eventually suppressing the unpleasant investiture ritual (MacGaffey 2000:
150). It’s very hard to see a single direction of development.
The only other comparative historical analysis I am aware of, by the Rus-
sian anthropologists Dmitri Bondarenko and Andrey Korotayev (2003), points
in precisely the opposite direction. They suggest that, with certain significant
exceptions, kings become more sacred as their governments become stronger.
Some background would be useful. Bondarenko’s research has focused on
the West African kingdom of Benin, a classic stranger-kingship ruled by a
monarch of Yoruba descent. The king, called the Oba, was a god who never died,
who often acted in defiance even of other gods. (The royal symbol, the “bird of
disaster,” commemorated an early warrior-king who, warned that a bird spotted
on the way to battle was sent by a god to warn of impending defeat, shot and ate
the bird but nonetheless marched to victory: Okpewho 1998: 71.) At the same
time, the Oba’s day-to-day power was balanced against that of the town chiefs
who represented the indigenous population (Ryder 1969; Bradbury 1967, 1973;
Rowlands 1993; Okpewho 1998). After an age of expansion in the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, there followed a long period of civil wars, culminating in a
popular rebellion in 1699 which led to
the destruction of the capital, and forced
the king to reach an accommodation with the town chiefs:
The struggle between the Oba and the chiefs took the form of constant and grad-
ually successful attempts of the latter to limit the sovereign’s profane power by
means of inflicting new binding taboos on him, and hence volens nolens increas-
ing his sacrality inversely proportional for “lists” of royal taboos . . . . The final act
ran high in the early seventeenth century when the chiefs succeeded in depriving
the Oba of the right to command the army in person. Relations of the Europeans
who visited the Benin court in the late sixteenth–nineteenth centuries are full
of vivid stories and surprised or contemptuous remarks testifying to the “king’s”
complete impotence at the face of his “noblemen.” (Bondarenko 2005: 32)
While every newborn child in the kingdom was duly brought before the Oba,
visitors were only allowed to see his foot (the rest was hidden behind a curtain),
and the king himself could only leave the palace twice a year. It was the queen
mother, instead, who was delegated the task of judging important trials and
mediating disputes (Kaplan 1997).
416
ON KINGS
The result in many ways resembles the situation Ekholm describes for the
BaKongo, from the dominance of merchants, the sequestering of the king from
any contact with foreigners, even the visions of a terrifying and hostile natural
universe (Rowlands 1993: 298). But the hidden king gradually took advantage
of his new position to develop ever-more elaborate ritual powers. Again the
situation can be likened to a chess game, each move followed by a countermove.
The king’s sequestration was ostensibly due to his terrifying, witch-like powers,
which might otherwise devastate the land. The king responded by importing a
new god from the Yoruba town of Ife—the royal ancestor, Oduduwa, father of
the original stranger-king—accompanied by ferocious cannibal stranger-priests
(ibid.). The new priesthood instituted human sacrifices to the royal ancestors
to protect the kingdom, and these did indeed devastate the land, increasing in
scale and terror until, by the end of the nineteenth century, hundreds of subjects
might be rounded up and crucified or beheaded during important rituals or na-
tional crises. (Members of the indigenous chiefs’ clans, however, were immune.)
These spectacular displays, which so horrified foreign visitors, were in part sim-
ply demonstrations of sovereignty: though the Oba no longer had direct contact
with his people, he alone could take life (Bradbury 1967: 3). This in turn led to
further taboos.
Intrigued by such dynamics, Bondarenko and Korotayev (2003) created a
“Ruler Sacralization Index.” Basing themselves on Henri Claessen and Peter
Skalník’s database of twenty kingdoms in their book The early state (1978; cf.
Claessen 1984, 1986), they ran a statistical analysis and discovered that, over-
all, the more powerful the state apparatus—they defined this in terms of the
presence or absence of impersonal laws and administration—the more sacred
the ruler becomes. The great exceptions, they note, are Axial Age civilizations,
or what they call the “Axial Historical Network” (Bondarenko and Korotayev
2003: 119), from Europe to China, which take off in the opposite direction—
presumably, they say, because of the importance there of priests of the great uni-
versalistic religions, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Otherwise,
whether among the Mexica, Yoruba, or in Japan, strong, autonomous bureau-
cratic systems will regularly declare the monarch a quasi-divine being and lock
him in his palace.
All this is intriguing, but the sample is skewed in so many ways it’s a little
difficult to know what to make of it. First of all, the list is of “early states,” so
kingdoms that can in no sense be considered states since they have no signifi-
cant administration—like the Shilluk, or the Natchez—simply aren’t included.
NOTES ON THE POLITICS OF DIVINE KINGSHIP
417
But of course these include many of the prototypical examples of “divine king-
ship.” So: Does sacred kingship tend to decline when kingdoms first turn into
states (presumably under the aegis of ambitious warrior-kings), only to return
once they have developed an autonomous administration?
The Axial Age argument seems biased by the relatively small sample as well.
The authors argue that the creation of a priestly class in the “Axial Historical
Network” traces back to Indo-European age-sets, where they see elders as trans-
forming into priests (ibid.: 121–23), and suggest something similar might have
happened in very early times in the Middle East. But this still doesn’t explain
why China became an Axial Age civilization, and rejected divinization of the
emperor, but Japan developed in precisely the opposite direction; or why Hindu
kingdoms, which have the strongest priestly castes of all, are also most likely to
have sacred and divinized kings.
I have myself (Graeber 2011a: 223–50) proposed a rather different argu-
ment: that Axial Age civilizations found their origin in the emergence of new
social and military technologies (especially, professional armies paid in coined
money), and followed a remarkably similar pattern, whether in China, India,
or the Mediterranean. The rise of standing armies and eventually slave-based
empires led first to a highly materialistic phase, where rulers began to treat
wealth and military power as an end in itself divorced from any larger cosmo-
logical framework; then, to popular movements of contestation which included
what were to be remembered as the great religious and philosophical traditions;
then, finally, to a phase when, as the empires reached their limits, their rulers
embraced one or another of the religious movements in a last-ditch attempt to
preserve their rule. This historical process led to kingdoms where the constitu-
ent war between king and people was partly displaced onto a war between kings
and priests, or, anyway, between secular and religious authorities. Or better, per-
haps, it became a kind of three-way contest. God, King, and People all existed
in dynamic tension with one another.
Nonetheless, adverse sacralization of the monarch was a trick that could
still be played, and indeed often was. The institution of the harem plays a key
role. It’s interesting to note that while in most of the kingdoms discussed so
far, kings had multiple wives, the women were in no way sequestered. Often, in
fact, it was the king who was confined to the palace, and women who moved
back and forth, communicating freely with the outside world. Historically, the
practice of confining palace women can only be traced back to the Sumerian
Third Dynasty of Ur (2112–2004 BC), though over time the practice seems to
418
ON KINGS
have become commonplace across much of Eurasia, with the exception of the
Christian West.38 There is no reason to believe Mesopotamian kings, whether
Sumerian, Babylonian, or Assyrian, were in any sense confined to the palace,
but the
ir wives and concubines increasingly were; by Assyrian times, one already
reads of harsh punishments for anyone who so much as chatted with or gazed
on one unveiled (Barjamovic 2011: 52).
The problem, of course, is that if one designs a trap, one can oneself fall into
it. Eurasian history is full of examples of royal figures who ended up sequestered
in much the same way as their womenfolk. Probably the most famous example
are the Ottoman sultans of the late sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, notorious
in Orientalist fantasy for being, as historian Peter Baer once put it, “hidden in
the palace like a pearl in an oyster, aloof, secluded, and sublime, hermetically
sealed from the world, confined and condemned to a wilted life in the harem”
(2008: 20). As it turns out, the stereotype in this case was not too far off the
mark. During this period, sultans—not unlike the Byzantine monarchs who
had come before them—were surrounded by such rigid protocol that ordinary
subjects were not even allowed to converse with them:
[They] withdrew from subjects and servants and from public view. Because or-
dinary speech was considered undignified for sultans to use, they communicated
by sign language. Unable even to speak, the sultan became out of touch, and was
visible only on rare, carefully staged processions through the capital. The sultan
had become a showpiece and sat silently on his throne in a three-foot turban, like
an icon, immobile. (Baer 2008: 141; see also Necipoğlu 1991: 102–6)
Once again, too, the effective confinement of the ruler occurred at a time of
widespread popular unrest: by the mid-sixteenth century, sultans were deprived
of most of their military functions, there followed a series of Janissary uprisings
in the capital, then rural upheavals which left large stretches of countryside in
the empire’s heartlands lost to Celâli rebels (Neumann 2006: 46–47).
Leslie Peirce (1993) has described the period from 1566 to 1656, from the
point of view of ruling circles, as “The Age of the Queen Mother.” Prominent
court women were often in de facto power. The key turning point was Mehmed
38. This was partly owing to royal monogamy, a custom which goes back at least to
Rome. Of course, for much of Christian history, many women were cloistered for
religious purposes, but they were expected to remain celibate.