CULT OF THE SOVEREIGN. - In primitive groupings the head of the community holds the double function of king and priest (magician, sorcerer), as one who, being in greater contact with the higher powers, knows how to interpret their will and to act as spokesman before them for the needs of the community itself.
Given his function he must always be in a position to represent his group effectively; therefore when age and infirmities have weakened his powers he is eliminated or replaced. But as long as he is in full vigour he is the object of interdictions (taboos) and of cares aimed at preventing the mediating Power that is in him from being dispersed to the detriment of the community.
The progress of civilization and culture, which tends to separate the two functions, sacred and civil, in the person of the sovereign, does not deprive kingship of its privileges. Thus in the Chinese Empire the monarch, though not considered a god, exercises the function of Heaven itself in regulating the relations between the gods and men, performs the official sacrifice to Heaven, and makes amends with expiatory ceremonies for the wrath of Heaven angered by the evil deeds of men.
In Japan the sovereign is considered as an incarnation of the sun goddess Amaterasu: once a year the gods go to pay him homage at his court, abandoning their temples for a month which is therefore called "without gods."
In Babylonia the sovereign is chosen by the gods who "pronounce his name," predestining him to the office from his mother's womb; King Hammurabi in his code calls himself "royal offspring formed by the god Sin," "god of kings," and his name is invoked in oaths like that of a divinity. The pharaoh of Egypt was deified already while alive; he is the son of the Sun (Ra, Rē), the good god, begotten by the god himself, who united with the queen under the form of her husband.
In Greece the cult of the sovereign would not have been possible in the classical era, but it developed during the Hellenistic era. Alexander found the adoration of the sovereign well rooted in Egypt, in Asia Minor, in Babylonia, in Persia, and when the Romans succeeded his successors in the various Kingdoms of his dismembered Empire (Ptolemies, Seleucids, Attalids), divine honours were paid to the representatives of Rome: the Senate, proconsuls, the goddess Roma, the emperors.
In Rome itself certain presuppositions of the possible exaltation of the human person are found in the ancient religion: the flamen dialis is a personification (ἐμύργος) of Jupiter; the victorious general assumes in the ceremony of the triumph the attributes of the god; every private family venerates the genius of the father of the family as protector of his gens; the dead are honoured with particular veneration and called gods (di Manes). With the triumph of Hellenism this divine exaltation of illustrious personages developed: Julius Caesar after death was enrolled among the gods with the official title of Divus Iulius and venerated in a special temple. Augustus, the restorer of the official religion, permitted that the grateful devotion of the people be directed to his person, granting that a cult be paid to his genius associated with that of the Lares compitales, protectors of the various subdivisions of the city. This was the origin of the imperial cult, which in the East associated the figure of the sovereign with that of the great divinities who had in the various metropolises temples with annexed assemblies of a religio-political character (κοινῶς); while in the West, where such assemblies did not exist, the institutions fixed by a special law the obligations of the head of the priesthood (flamen), the regulation of the provincial gatherings (Concilium, conventus) and the norms of the sacrifice. The rite of apotheosis (consecratio), which consisted in cremating on a pyre the corpse of the sovereign, at the same time releasing an eagle that signified the assumption into heaven of the emperor's soul, set the seal on the solemn ceremony.
Christianity has, naturally, abolished the cult of the sovereign, but an echo of the supernatural power that has always been attributed to the person of the king can be recognized in the privilege (with which the kings of France and England felt themselves invested) of healing by the touch of their hands those sick with scrofula (écrouelle), called for this reason "the king's evil" (mal le roi, King's evil).