The transition from a divine pantheon to a human one happens early in human social development. During a certain stage of primitive society, says Victorian mythologist and anthropologist James George Frazer, “the king or priest is often thought to be endowed with supernatural powers or to be an incarnation of a deity…” According to Frazer, the succession to the primitive throne of Rome was exogamic and matrilineal, that is, the parents were foreigners and the right to the kingdom was transmitted by the mother (1.2). The unknown father, apart from appeasing the son’s right to the throne and avoiding parricide (1.1, 1.5), explains the legend according to which Latin kings were born of virgin mothers and divine fathers. If at the birth of these kings, Frazer tells us,

their fathers were really unknown, the fact points either to a general looseness of life in the royal family or to a special relaxation of moral rules on certain occasions, when men and women reverted for a season to the license of an earlier age. Such Saturnalias are not uncommon at some stages of social evolution… Children born of more or less promiscuous intercourse which characterises festivals of this kind would naturally be fathered on the god to whom the particular festival was dedicated.¹

Mikado, one of the names with which the Japanese used to call their emperor—from mi, “sublime”, and kado, “gate”—was considered a descendant and incarnation of Amaterasu, the sun goddess that rules over the entire universe and therefore, over gods and men alike. The “sublime gate,” the emperor, is the path where the divine penetrates into the human. However, the term Mikado is obsolete and the name given to the emperor today is Tenno, which means “celestial sovereign.” This identification of the emperor with the heavens and the sun reveals that modern monarchies still maintain a connection, however faint, with the early layer of social development which gave rise to it.

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1. James George Frazer, The Golden Bough, 168. ↩︎