The King Is Responsible for the Harvest. If It Fails, So Does He

The ruler is not simply a political leader but is understood to stand in a particular relationship to the fertility of the land and the wellbeing of the people. Good harvests, timely rain and healthy herds are attributed to the ruler's condition, and drought, disease or defeat are read as evidence that something is wrong with them. The position is therefore ritual as well as administrative, and a substantial part of the ruler's time may be occupied by observances on which the community's prosperity is believed to depend.

The status arrives with restrictions rather than only with privileges:

• •Elaborate taboos on what may be eaten, touched or seen
• •Restrictions on movement, sometimes amounting to confinement
• •Ritual duties occupying much of the day
• •Physical perfection required, so injury can end a reign
• •Responsibility for events entirely outside anybody's control
• •In some accounts, death or deposition when vigour declines

The concept was assembled into a general theory by James Frazer, whose enormous comparative work appeared from 1890 and argued that a divine king killed at the failure of his powers lay behind an extraordinary range of myth and ritual across the world. The book was hugely influential on literature and on the popular imagination, and modern anthropology has largely dismantled its method, which assembled fragments from unrelated societies to support a single pattern and treated ethnographic reports uncritically. What survives is that some of the individual cases are real, not that they form one universal institution.

A system that blames a ruler for the weather looks absurd and it persisted widely, which suggests it was doing something useful. It supplies an explanation for disaster in societies with no other account of why rain fails, and an explanation with a remedy attached is more bearable than random misfortune. It also constrains a ruler, since a person whose legitimacy depends on results can be removed when results are bad, which is a check on power in a society with no other mechanism for it. And the taboos surrounding such a figure separate them from ordinary people, which is itself a source of authority.

Several well attested examples show the pattern operating without needing Frazer's framework. The Shilluk of the southern Sudan held their ruler responsible for the wellbeing of the nation and recognised procedures for removing one who failed. Rulers in several West African kingdoms were subject to extensive taboos and could be required to take their own lives. Japanese and Chinese emperors performed agricultural rituals and issued penitential edicts after disasters, accepting responsibility explicitly. And European monarchs touching for scrofula into the eighteenth century reflects the same logic in a diluted form.

A ruler held answerable for rain and harvests carries ritual duties, extensive taboos and responsibility for events nobody controls, with deposition or death as the penalty for failure in some societies. Frazer assembled the idea into a universal theory from 1890 that anthropology has since dismantled, while the individual documented cases among the Shilluk and in West Africa remain real.