The Mikado, for example, was and still is regarded as an incarnation of the sun, the deity who rules the entire universe, gods and men included. The greatest care must therefore be taken both _by_ him and _of_ him. His whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that no act of his may upset the established order of nature. Lest he should touch the earth, he used to be carried wherever he went on men’s shoulders. He could not expose his sacred person to the open air, nor eat out of any but a perfectly new vessel. In every way his sanctity and his health were jealously guarded, and he was treated like a person { 238}whose security was important to the whole course of nature.
Mr. Frazer quotes several similar examples, of which the most striking is that of the high pontiff of the Zapotecs, an ancient people of Southern Mexico. This spiritual lord, a true Pope or Lama, governed Yopaa, one of the chief cities of the kingdom, with absolute dominion. He was looked upon as a god “whom earth was not worthy to hold or the sun to shine upon.” He profaned his sanctity if he touched the common ground with his holy foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their shoulders were chosen from the members of the highest families; he hardly deigned to look on anything around him; those who met him prostrated themselves humbly on the ground, lest death should overtake them if they even saw his divine shadow. (Compare the apparition of Jahweh to Moses.) A rule of continence was ordinarily imposed upon him; but on certain days in the year which were high festivals, it was usual for him to get ceremonially and sacramentally drunk. On such days, we may be sure, the high gods peculiarly entered into him with the intoxicating pulque, and the ancestral spirits reinforced his godhead. While in this exalted state (“full of the god,” as a Greek or Roman would have said) the divine pontiff received a visit from one of the most beautiful of the virgins consecrated to the service of the gods. If the child she bore him was a son, it succeeded in due time to the throne of the Zapotecs. We have here again an instructive mixture of the various ideas out of which such divine kingship and godship is constructed.