In this scheme of things the sovereign was considered as the

... dynamical centre of the universe, from which lines of force radiate to all quarters of the heaven; so that any motion of his—the turning of his head, the lifting of his hand— instantaneously affects and may seriously disturb some part of nature. He is the point of support on which hangs the balance of the world, and the slightest irregularity on his part may overthrow the delicate equipoise. The greatest care must, therefore, be taken both by and of him; and his whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that no act of his, voluntary or involuntary, may disarrange or upset the established order of nature.¹

The punctiliousness of the rituals of kings such as Louis XIV, Roi Soleil, and the excessive protocol that still surrounds modern monarchies is a vestige of this primitive circumstance. In his role as earthly representative of the gods, the sovereign constitutes a zone of indistinction between the human and the divine (0.12). His right is the right of the gods, of all that is beyond the human and that can be exempted from the cruelties of the real world. But the only way to exempt oneself from cruelty is through cruelty itself. This circumstance would seem coded in Latin, in which the word actio encompassed the active side of things, while passio, which referred to the passive pole, originally meant “suffering”. One can only suffer the actions of the sovereign.

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