Agency and the Author as Sacred King

The instant the concept of passing on power or agency through death appeared in Barthes and Foucault, my mind did a little dance and shouted, "Hey, everybody! It's the Sacred King!" For those unfamiliar with the term, the folkloric/mythopoetic construct of the Sacred King Cycle involves a god-king, often intimately connected with the cycles and well-being of the land (as in King Arthur: "the king and the land are one"), who dies and is reborn. The concept of the Sacred or Divine King was first examined in-depth in James G. Frazer's anthropological work The Golden Bough. The whole thing is twelve enormous volumes long; I myself own an abridgment which is enormous in itself.

When the Sacred King archetype is manifest in the form of the Dying God or the Hanged God (think Tarot's Hanged Man), he is able to be reborn into his own form. However, when the Sacred King  is a human god-king, the spirit of the Sacred King, or  the power of the land, is passed from the current Sacred King to a new man when the King dies. However, "The man-god must be killed as soon as he shews symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay" (Frazer, 228). It is important to kill the Divine King before he dies a natural death, so that the kingship can be transferred in its full power to the new king. If the King dies a natural death, his people also risk losing the spirit of the Sacred King to the Underworld or Afterlife.

Now, what does this have to do with Barthes and Foucault? In their theoretical articles, the writer plays the  role of the Sacred King. Foucault writes that "writing has become lined to sacrifice, even to the sacrifice of life" and discusses the close relationship in the collective mind of writing with death (905). He cites the act of writing as having the "right to kill, to be its author's murderer" (905). Barthes echoes this notion, saying that "as soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively... this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins" (875).

What is the purpose of this author-death? Barthes writes that after the author is dead, or "removed" from the work, "the claim to decipher a text becomes futile" (877). Essentially, the text becomes meaningless. To give that text meaning again, the text must be given to the reader, in whose reference frame the text takes on new meaning and the symbols can be interpreted. "The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text's unity lies not in its origin but in its destination" (877). Here the power of the text and its interpretation is being transferred from the author to the reader, as the right of the Sacred King is transferred between the old king and the new. Foucault and Barthes argue there is a transference of  power through the discourse of the texts. If the author is the Sacred King, he passes his agency to the reader through his text, and it is no longer the author but the reader who gives the work meaning. Like the cultures who kill their god-kings are attempting to preserve the life of their land and keep the spirit of the Sacred King immortal, and like the gods who are killed or sacrifice themselves and thus transcend the boundaries of life and death to become psychopomps, the relationship between author and reader exists "to keep death outside the circle of life" (Foucault, 905).

This is the citation for my copy of The Golden Bough.
Frazer, James G. The Golden Bough: A New Abridgement. Ed. Robert Fraser. 1890. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Print.