The rex nemorensis, as everyone agrees, is a very primitive figure, a remnant from the distant past, when the first settlements of Latin peoples were forming in the Alban hills and probably no more than the odd shepherd had as yet taken up residence on the Palatine [Hill, where Rome now stands]. He was a priest of Diana and a king, whatever that might have meant. He was linked to a tree that was sacred…

When a challenger appeared, identified by his success in obtaining a bough from the sacred tree, the rex was required to fight him to the death. The victor, whether challenger or incumbent, from that moment became, or continued as, Diana's priest and the King of the Wood. The rex was important (though we do not know precisely how) to the power of Aricia and to Aricia's pre-eminence within that earliest alliance of Latin communities in the sixth century BCE. We know hardly anything else about his cult; and yet already what we do know far exceeds our evidence for any Italic cult outside Rome, and indeed for most cults in Rome itself.

C.M.C. Green

As Carin Green reminds us, the story that you’ve heard is an old one. Very possibly, it is one of the oldest stories of all, and certainly it’s representative of a set of ideas that have been studied and discussed for more than a century. The question is: was it ever anything more than a story? Did these things happen, and, if they did, how can we be sure about both the events themselves and – much more contentiously – what they meant?

This is far from an easy problem to address. The idea that ancient kings (or proxies for them) were regularly sacrificed as part of a pre-Christian religion that sought power over the natural world and control of its fertility was once very widely believed. The idea was highly influential between around 1915 and 1970, influential enough for the concept of the blood sacrifice of monarchs to crop up in almost every popular retelling of the history of the Celtic period, and to seep out into fiction and film as well. The classic British horror film The Wicker Man (1973) is possibly the best-known example of the latter genre, but the same idea also underpinned the more recent, well-regarded Swedish film Midsommar (2019).

The problem with all this is a twofold one. The first part concerns our sources, which are scanty and late; this makes it even harder than it usually is to guess which bits of them might refer to real practices and real events. The second part is rather more unique; this particular topic, more than any other I can think of, has been promoted by writers of such eminence that their ideas became a sort of article of faith for many people, academic and lay alike. The sacrifice of kings was first written about in detail by the pioneer anthropologist James Frazer. From there, his ideas were taken up and dramatically elaborated by the very long-lived (1863-1963) Margaret Murray, who – despite starting out as an Egyptologist, and having essentially no qualifications in the field – took up Frazer’s mantle as the English-speaking world’s most famous anthropologist between his death and hers. Murray energetically promoted the concept of sacrificial kings in a series of three books written for the general public which were published between 1921 and 1954.

It was Margaret Murray who was responsible for suggesting these sacrifices were organised and carried out by the members of a multi-generational witch cult that was responsible for preserving an “old religion” that antedated Christianity, and which flourished, underground, long into the Christian period. This is an idea that I dissected here some time ago in a response that looked at the best-known of the supposed royal sacrifices written about by Murray, the death of the English king William II (William Rufus) in 1100, and it’s one that serious scholars of pagan religion, such as Ronald Hutton, have roundly dismissed. But Murray’s claims were catnip to the new generation of self-styled witches, led by Gerald Gardner, which emerged in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s and collectively founded the religion we now know as Wicca. Gardner recognised that Murray’s claims offered his brand-new faith the chance to claim continuity with an historical religion of tremendous antiquity and, apparently, considerable power – something that made the claims of Wicca and the Wiccans vastly more impressive and imposing. The result of all this was that the ideas first pioneered by Frazer have not only long outlived him; they have become a core part of the belief systems of large numbers of modern Wiccans and New Agers, who continue to spread them as widely as they can. In the age of the internet, that is pretty widely – certainly widely enough for them to have reached you.

I could write at considerable length about Murray and Gardner, but really everything they said was based on the ideas that Frazer had pioneered – and their elaborations of those ideas are pretty much entirely ahistorical. So it probably makes more sense to return to The Golden Bough and discuss what Frazer’s lifetime of scary work habits turned up in terms of evidence for the reality of sacrificial kings (he was famous for reading and taking notes in several languages for anything up to 15 hours a day, seven days a week – but notorious among later generations of anthropologists for writing about the world he had never actually seen for himself; he practically never left his study).

Frazer devoted most of his long life to tracing, exploring and setting these ideas down in what became, over time, The Golden Bough (1890-1915). This 12-volume study of comparative religion has certainly been more revered than actually read (and I don't claim to have read the whole thing myself), but it was a foundational influence on several generations of anthropologists; no less a figure than Bronisław Malinowski, indeed, could write that Frazer’s masterpiece was “in many respects the greatest achievement of anthropology.” Beginning his study with a famous, and highly romanticised, retelling of the legend of the rex nemorensis – the priest-king of Nemi, a runaway slave who reigned as “king of the wood”, but only for so long as he could defeat all those who sought to challenge him in a single combat fought to the death – Frazer expanded his focus to study every aspect of what he termed “the dying god”. This involved the belief that the youth and health of a divine monarch had a direct bearing on the quantity and quality of the annual harvest, and that ritual death of such a king might be (and was) used to redress crises caused by drought and bad harvests, and so restore prosperity to a people.

Wow. Thank you very much for this in depth and carefully considered, well researched response. The sourced that are cited will certainly help me understand more about this. I knew that the bog bodies tied into it but all in all wasn't sure of it was myth or history. Again i thank you for the bevy of new information.

I wonder how Frazer came to that translation "the reaped ear of corn" for a phrygian. Does wheat have an ear lol? Or any grain? This seems to be a very contentious subject.

Yeah man i completely get why it would take that long and certainly don't mind waiting for such a rich response. I had to read it then re-read it just to digest it all. I wasnt expecting it to be so full of detail with so many sources, which i did specifically ask for that way i could read more about this.

That makes sense. I never put any thought into an ear of corn before. Funny how something like that can totally blow your mind. Anyway really appreciate it. As I said more than I could have hoped for

Also when it comes to the phrygian king being addressed as the green or yellow ear of corn Im confused because I thought "Corn" In the ancient world was a reference to grain? As I always understood it there were no ears of corn anywhere In that region. Mesoamerica is the only place I thought where ears of corn grew? Maybe its about translation?