The King's Three Bodies

Essays on Kingship and Ritual

Burkhard Schnepel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000386943
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: History

This collection of essays deals with the rituals of kingship and royalty in India, Africa and Europe from the social anthropological and ethno­historical points of view. It discusses the dialectical entanglements of rituals conducted for and by kings (including, 'little kings' and 'jungle kings') with the wider social, political, cultural, historical, religious and economic contexts in which they were embedded.
Part I begins with a triangular comparison of kingship among the Shilluks of East Africa, the Gajapatis of eastern India and kings in Renaissance France. The essay entitled the 'King's Three Bodies' makes use of Ernst H. Kantorowicz's classical study, The King's Two Bodies in medieval political theology and extends it, not only in terms of the numbers of bodies that are found to be significant, but also theo­retically. Another significant essay in this part looks at the unexpected but significant theoretical impact of social anthropological studies of acephalous, segmentary lineage societies in Africa on Indian historiography. The second part of this volume consists of three chapters dealing with the royal patronage of tribal and Hindu goddesses in Eastern India, while the third part presents studies on sleeping (and dreaming) kings and on the power of dead kings, a discussion of A.M. Hocart's dictum that the first kings must have been dead kings.

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I. ROYAL AUTHORITY AND THE STATE

1 The King's Three Bodies

Royal Effigies in Southern Sudan, East India and Renaissance France¹

ENTER THE EFFIGY

This essay is devoted to a comparison of the use and symbolic meaning of royal effigies in three different societies. One example is taken from the small kingdom of the Shilluk of southern Sudan, where a wooden effigy, representing the mythical hero and immortal king Nyikang, plays a crucial role during the ceremonies of royal installation. The second example concerns the cult of the Hindu deity of Jagannath, represented by a wooden effigy in the temple of Puri in the East Indian State of Orissa, and its relation to the Gajapati kings of Orissa. A third manifestation of the use of royal effigies discussed here, though not as extensively as the others, is taken from royal funeral ceremonies in Renaissance France.

The relevant literature on these three examples is extensive. As far as publications on the Shilluk are concerned, I have consulted most of the published works as well as some unpublished manuscripts. I also carried out two spells of fieldwork among the Shilluk in 1980 and 1981 and so can refer to some observations and data of my own. My account of the cult of Jagannath and its relation to the Gajapati kings of Orissa is based largely on publications by members of the Orissa Research Project (conducted between 1970 and 1975 under the aegis of the South Asia Institute, Heidelberg). I have also conducted some enquiries of my own in Puri, though my main fieldwork and archival research in Orissa focused on religion and politics in the tribal hinterland of southern Orissa and therefore I only draw on it occasionally. My discussion of royal effigies in Renaissance France is based on a lesser number of publications, with Kantorowicz’s and Giesey’s studies at the centre of attention.²

It goes without saying that an essay tackling three topics which are each quite extensive and complicated in their own right cannot claim to present substantially new material or even analyses.³ Hence, the main insights this essay seeks to acquire are basically those resulting from comparative description and analysis. It is to be hoped that it will be judged on these grounds and that, in the following, the reader will share my conviction that comparative insights emerge as much from the recognition of differences as from the identification of similarities.

BODY MYSTICAL AND BODY NATURAL

Throughout this essay, I will make use of the distinction between two kinds of the body or, better, between two different conceptionalizations of the body, namely the ‘body mystical’ and the ‘body natural’. As this is a genuine European distinction, at least in explicit ideology, I start my discourse by looking at the concept of ‘the king’s two bodies’ in medieval and early modern European thought. In this way, I hope to make explicit a comparison which, in one way or another, informs all anthropological studies: the comparison between ‘them’ and ‘us’. Despite the fact that medieval Europe seems to be a long way from modern Europe (and hence from ‘us’), it should be understood at the outset that the fiction of the king’s two bodies represents one of the ideological elements that have decisively shaped modern institutions and the way contemporary Europeans understand and interpret what is going on in society, politics and religion today. I therefore base my investigations in this essay on the conviction that the medieval and early modern fiction of the king’s two bodies has become an integral part of modern Western institutions and collective representations, and that as such it is also prone to influence accounts of royal ritual and ideology outside Europe. Consequently, I believe that in this context the ideological, political and religious background of the interpreter is best made as explicit as possible.⁴ This task I want to take up by providing a summary of the outstanding work which has guided my understanding of this matter, Kan+3 The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957).

Before describing the historical development of the concept of the king’s two bodies in European thought from around the eleventh to the seventeenth century, Kantorowicz illustrates his theme by giving two examples. Only one of these, the statements of certain lawyers in Tudor England, concerns us here.⁵ With regard to a dispute over the holding of land, the so-called ‘Case of the Duchy of Lancaster’ of 1561, the Tudor judges reached the following conclusion:

For the King has in him two bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic. His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal, subject to all Infirmities that come by Nature or Accident, to the Imbecility of Infancy or old Age, and to the like Defects that happen to the natural Bodies of other People. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and Government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the public weal, and this Body is utterly void of Infancy, and old Age, and other natural Defects and Imbecilities, which the Body natural is subject to, and for this Cause, what the King does in his Body politic, cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any Disability in his natural Body. (Kantorowicz 1957: 7)

What strikes us immediately is that the body politic was seen as unchangeable in time. It does not grow old or get weak; it is ‘utterly void of infancy, and old age, and other natural defects’. Concerning the relationship between these two bodies of the king, the judges made the following comments:

. . . he has not a Body natural distinct and divided by itself from the Office and Dignity royal, but a Body natural and a Body politic together indivisible; and these two Bodies are incorporated in one Person, and make one Body and not divers. . . . So that the Body natural, by this conjunction of the Body politic to it, . . . is magnified. (ibid.: 9)

In Tudor England, the two bodies were thus seen as constituting an indivisible unity in which the body politic, as the superior, encompasses and moulds the lesser body, the body natural. As the judges put it elsewhere (Kantorowicz 1957: 11): ‘. . . the Body natural and the Body politic are consolidated into one, and the Body politic wipes away every Imperfection of the other Body’. Nevertheless, even this legal point of view had to account for one ‘defect’ of the body natural – that which is commonly called ‘death’:

The King has two Capacities, for he has two Bodies, the one whereof is a Body natural . . . and in this he is subject to Passions and Death as other Men are; the other is a Body politic . . .; and this Body is not subject to Passions as the other is, nor to Death, for as to this Body the King never dies, and his natural Death is not called in our Law . . . the Death of the King, but the Demise of the King, not signifying by the word (Demise) that the Body politic of the King is dead, but that there is a Separation of the two Bodies, and that the Body politic is transferred and conveyed over from the Body natural now dead, or now removed from the Dignity royal, to another Body natural. (ibid.: 13)

After the ‘demise’ of one body natural, the body politic is transferred to another body natural. Similarly, if political power moves to and fro between one person or dynasty and another, as happened during the War of Roses between the Houses of York and Lancaster, the body mystical or body politic moves with it, even if the former body natural is still alive.⁶

In his diachronic account, which follows his presentation of the theme, Kantorowicz distinguishes between three main types of kingship, namely Christ-centred, law-centred and polity-centred kingship. He shows that in the eleventh century, the king was seen as a persona mixta, i.e. as combining secular and sacred roles. There was also the notion of the king as a duplicated person. One author of that period, known as the ‘Norman Anonymous’, put this idea as follows:

We thus have to recognize [in the king, B.S.] a twin person, one descending from nature, the other from grace. . . . One through which, by the condition of nature, he conformed with other men: another through which, by the eminence of [his deification, B.S.] and by the power of the sacrament [of consecration, B.S.], he excelled all others. Concerning one personality, he was, by nature, an individual man: concerning his other personality, he was, by grace, a Christus, that is a God-man. (Norman Anonymous as cited in Kantorowicz 1957: 46; brackets by Kantorowicz)

According to the Norman Anonymous, kings are christomimetes or personifications of Christ who temporarily embody and represent the eternal Christ in heaven on the terrestrial stage. But there is one important difference: while Christ is king and savior by nature, his earthly representative is king and Christ only through an act of grace. In the words of Kantorowicz:

The king is a twinned being, human and divine, just like the Godman, although the king is two-natured and geminate by grace only and within Time, and not by nature and (after the Ascension) within Eternity: the terrestrial king is not, he becomes a twin personality through his anointment and consecration. (ibid.: 49; Kantorowicz’s emphasis)

In sum, the liturgical kingship of the monastic High Middle Ages was based on the idea of a divine prototype, Jesus Christ, who has two natures, human and divine, and two functions, royal and priestly. Added to this was the idea of the king as the image or representative of Christ on earth. This imago or vicarius Christi has, like his prototype, two natures: the human nature comes to him per naturam, whereas the divine nature he holds only per gratiam, through the ritual of anointment and consecration. And like his divine prototype, the earthly king has two functions, that of priest and king.⁷

As Kantorowicz points out, the Norman Anonymous’s main source of inspiration was theological: his ideas were Christocentric and Christological, and the duplications of the royal person were mirror images and imitations of the duplications of Jesus Christ. However, at the time when this author was writing, the concept of the king as imago Christi was already out of fashion, and the Christocentric-liturgical concept of kingship was about to give way to one which was rather theocratic-liturgical. The ensuing law-centred kingship of the twelfth century saw the gradual substitution of the Bible as an authoritative text by Roman law; instead of the Books of Kings or Romans 13, for instance, we find references to the Law Books of Justinian. Simultaneously, from being the imago of Christ, the king developed more and more into an imago dei, a mirror image of the just God and father, and, still later, of the Goddess Justitia. The king’s relationship with law and justice became significant, while the importance of his relationship with the altar and the sacrament diminished: law replaced liturgy. Kantorowicz characterizes these developments, which started under Frederick II, as follows:

The mediaeval patterns and concepts of kingship were not simply wiped out, neither by Frederick II nor by others: practically all the former values survived – but they were translated into new secular and chiefly juristic modes of thinking and thus survived by transference in a secular setting. Moreover, the patterns and values were rationalized not by means of theology, but preferably by means of scientific jurisprudence. (ibid.: 115)

In this context, we also find that duplications of the king no longer took a Christological form. The king was henceforth regarded as someone who stands above as well as beneath the law, being the fountain and the servant of justice at the same time, a twinned nature aptly expressed in the metaphor of the king as pater et filius justitiae. While the change from a liturgical to a juridical kind of kingship was fluid, so that the conceptions may well have existed simultaneously, there was one important change: grace no longer played a role. We recall that in the Norman Anonymous’s earlier conception, the king only participated in the divine nature of Christ per gratiam. But where did this grace come from, if not through an act of anointment and consecration? And who conducted this ritual, if not the bishops or the pope? Thus, with the diminishing importance of grace as the basis of the king’s legitimacy, the Church lost its decisive power in the making of a king. And no doubt the struggles for power between the popes and the emperors (or between popes and kings) was one driving force behind these changes in the political theology of the time.⁸

In general, the history of Church-State relations in medieval Europe was one of mutual borrowings of various kinds and at many levels. However, the character of these borrowings changed during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when emphasis was laid less on ruling personages than on ruled collectivities. A polity-centred kind of kingship came into being. In Kantorowicz’s words, ‘the field of mutual influence, expanding from individual dignitaries to compact communities, henceforth was determined by legal and constitutional problems concerning the structure and interpretation of the bodies politic’ (ibid.: 193). The term corpus mysticum or body mystical, which stood at the forefront of theories of corporations at that time, initially had a purely sacramental meaning, denoting the consecrated host in the Eucharist. But from the early fourteenth century onwards we encounter the concept of the Church as the body mystical of Christ, Christ himself being its head. This new concept provided the basis for a duplication of the body of Jesus Christ that differed from the older distinction between his two natures in being sociological in content: it distinguished an individual and natural body of Christ on the one hand and a collective and mystical body of Christ on the other. The concept of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue and Acknowledgements
• I. ROYAL AUTHORITY AND THE STATE
• II. KINGS, ‘TRIBES’ AND GODDESSES
• III. OF SLEEPING AND DEAD KINGS
• List of First Publications
• Picture Credits