The Sacred King is a unification of the concepts of the innate self-ruler; the human being as a potentiality expressed in competence, command, resourcefulness, and self-control. This is united with the mystical, religious, or psychic self, as the leader of the unearthly aspects of the human. The Sacred King joins the office of the secular King and the holy Priest into a single whole person, one who acts with authority and knowledge in the inner and outer realms of human experience. Sacred King seeks to achieve homeostasis but at an idealized level. He (the Sacred King is a “masculine” aspect – it is understood that archetypes are manifested in both genders and sexes) is the bridge between extremes of human social and personal/religious experience. In Eastern metaphysics, the human is conceived of as a bridge between “heaven” and “earth,” whereas in Western metaphysics, humanity is seen as possessing, or linking, the extremes of the “upper” or celestial worlds and the “lower” or...
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Enslow, S. (2014). Sacred King. In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_799
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