Sometimes, I believe, kings are divine by birth, as descendants of gods; but sometimes divinity is conferred upon them with the kingship, as indeed was the case even in the typical instance of Egypt. Tanatoa, king of Raiatea, was deified by a certain ceremony performed at the chief temple. He was made a god before the gods his ancestors, as Celtic chiefs received the chieftainship standing on the sacred stone of their fathers. As one of the deities of his subjects, therefore, the king was worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and honoured with sacrifices. The king of Tahiti at his inauguration received a sacred girdle of red and yellow feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but also identified him with the heavenly gods. Compare the way in which the gods of Egypt make the king one of themselves, as represented in the bas-reliefs, by the presentation of the divine _tau_. In the Pelew Islands, a god may incarnate himself in a common person; this lucky man is thereupon raised to sovereign rank, and rules as god and king over the community. Not unsimilar is the mode of selection of a Grand Lama. In later stages, the king ceases to be quite a god, but retains the anointment, the consecration on a holy stone, and the claim to “divine right”; he also shows some last traces of deity in his divine power to heal diseases, which fades away at last into the practice of “touching for king’s evil.” On all these questions, again, Mr. Frazer’s great work is a perfect thesaurus of apposite instances. I abstain from quoting his whole two volumes.
But did ideas of this character still survive in the Mediterranean world of the first and second centuries, where Christianity was evolved? Most undoubtedly they did. In Egypt, the divine line of the Ptolemies had only just become extinct. In Rome itself, the divine Cæsar had recently undergone official apotheosis; the divine Augustus had ruled over the empire as the adopted son of the new-made { 233}god; and altars rose in provincial cities to the divine spirit of the reigning Trajan or Hadrian. Indeed, both forms of divinity were claimed indirectly for the god Julius; he was divine by apotheosis, but he was also descended from the goddess Venus. So the double claim was made for the central personage of the Christian faith: he was the son of God--that is to say of Jahweh; but he was also of kingly Jewish origin, a descendant of David, and in the genealogies fabricated for him in the Gospels extreme importance is attached to this pretended royal ancestry. Furthermore, how readily men of the Mediterranean civilisation could then identify living persons with gods we see in the familiar episode of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. Incarnation, in short, was a perfectly ordinary feature of religion and daily life as then understood. And to oriental ideas in particular, the conception was certainly no novelty. “Even an infant king,” say the laws of Manu, which go to the root of so much eastern thinking, “must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere mortal: for he is a great deity in human form.”