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Too much might depend upon the personal character and will of an omnipotent God-King, capable of breaking with all clan-custom, and of abrogating clan-privileges. On the other hand, there was safety for all alike under the patriarchal rule of the clan, which could cheek every tendency on the part of any of its members to exert predominant influence at the expense of the rest.
But still he is an anthropomorphic deity, a purely human conception of a personal god-king; in these lines he smiles on his daughter Venus and kisses her. This is the reason why Virgil has throughout his poem placed the Fates, or Destiny, in close relation to him, without definitely explaining that relation.
From these names, God, Father, Lord, Divinity, originally belonging to the God-king, and afterwards to God and the king, the derivation of our commonest titles of respect is clearly traceable. There is reason to think that these titles were originally proper names.
Leonidas, Ajax of the Hellenes, had been taken. Themistocles, their Odysseus, valiant as Ajax and gifted with the craft of the immortals, remained. Could that craft and that valour turn back the might of even the god-king of the Aryans? A few days only Xerxes and his host rested after the dear-bought triumph at Thermopylæ.
The Japanese State was an aggregate of religious communities, with a God-King at its head; the customs of all these communities had the force of religious laws, and ethics were identified with obedience to custom; filial piety was the basis of social order, and loyalty itself was derived from filial piety.
Going back to the early time when the deeds of the god-king were recorded in picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so constituted a rude literature, we might trace the development of Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, it presents in one work theology, cosmogony, history, biography, law, ethics, poetry; down to its present heterogeneous development, in which its separated divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to defy complete classification.
Very familiar to collectors are the camel of Obock and the Soudan, the Llama of Peru, the sacred quetzal of Guatemala the transmigrated form of the god-king of the Aztecs the lyrebird and Kangaroo of New South Wales.
Spencer calls "the god-king," and thence to the rudimentary notion of deity. Among such higher savages as the Zulus, the doctrine of divine ancestors has been developed to the extent of recognizing a first ancestor, the Great Father, Unkulunkulu, who made the world.
Going back to the early time when the deeds of the god-king, chanted and mimetically represented in dances round his altar, were further narrated in picture-writings on the walls of temples and palaces, and so constituted a rude literature, we might trace the development of Literature through phases in which, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, it presents in one work theology, cosmogony, history, biography, civil law, ethics, poetry; through other phases in which, as in the Iliad, the religious, martial, historical, the epic, dramatic, and lyric elements are similarly commingled; down to its present heterogeneous development, in which its divisions and subdivisions are so numerous and varied as to defy complete classification.
When the king died, he became Osiris, and passed to the kingdom of Osiris. He passed through the underworld with the sun-god, abode there as Osiris, the god-king, or sped to the heavens to the celestial gods. The gods, as always, were on the side of the moral code, and especially on the side of the organized religion.
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