A.D. Brock Adams
For educational and theological purposes.
Prologue: A Word to the Ambitious
There is a peculiar madness loose in the world at present — the madness of men who want to be kings.
Not in the old sense. Not in the sense of the Iron Age chieftain who understood, with cold clarity, exactly what the title entailed. In the new sense: the sense of men who want the power, the deference, the accumulation, and the immunity of kingship without any inconvenient engagement with what kingship has historically cost its holders.
What follows is a historical and theological reflection, offered in the spirit of public education, on the ancient institution of sacred kingship — its obligations, its hazards, and the mechanism by which communities throughout human history have addressed the problem of a king who has forgotten what the job is for.
Consider it a footnote. Consider it a warning. Consider it, above all, a reminder that certain ideas now circulating in popular discourse — eat the rich, for instance — are not revolutionary innovations but the re-emergence of something very old, very well-documented, and entirely logical within the framework of the societies that practised it.
What a King Actually Was
Let us begin at the beginning. In the Iron Age Celtic world — and in scores of other cultures across the full span of human history — the king was not primarily a figure of personal accumulation and self-aggrandisement. The king was a sacred vessel. He embodied the covenant between the community and the land that sustained it. His body was the body politic in the most literal possible sense: when he was well, the crops grew; when he was weak, the harvests failed; when he broke faith with the sacred obligations of his office, the land itself registered the breach.
The king had great power but also great responsibility to ensure the prosperity of his people. Through his marriage on his inauguration to the goddess of the land, he was meant to guarantee her benevolence. He had to ensure the land was productive, so if the weather turned bad, or there was plague, cattle disease or losses in war, he was held personally responsible.
Personally responsible. Not in the sense of a strongly worded letter from a parliamentary committee. Not in the sense of a mildly uncomfortable press conference. Personally responsible in the sense that, when things went sufficiently wrong, the community looked at the king — the man they had entrusted with the sacred covenant, the man whose body was understood to be mystically bound to the welfare of the land — and began to consider whether the covenant might be better served by a new arrangement.
The bog tells us what that new arrangement looked like.
The Evidence in the Peat
Old Croghan Man was a giant for his time — close to two metres tall, with manicured fingernails that suggest he never did heavy work. He was well-nourished, of high status, found at the foot of an ancient hill that was once the inauguration site of kings. He was, in every material sense, one of the most privileged individuals of his age.
He died horribly. Holes were cut in his upper arms through which a rope was pulled to restrain him. He was stabbed repeatedly, and his nipples were sliced before he was finally cut in half. Cutting the nipples was more than torture — the aim was to dethrone him. Sucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland. Cutting them made him incapable of kingship in this world or the next.
By using a range of methods to kill him, the ancient Irish sacrificed to the goddess in all her forms. This manner of death is peculiar to the ritual killing of kings — it means that a king was being decommissioned.
The archaeological evidence indicates that Iron Age bog bodies such as Clonycavan Man and Old Croghan Man represent ritual killings rather than mere executions — part of sovereignty rituals linked to the king’s inauguration and his covenant with the land. They were found on tribal boundaries, near inauguration hills, at the margins between the king’s territory and the world beyond it. The message was clear: when the covenant fails, the covenant-holder is returned to the land that received his vows.
This was not an aberration. This was the institution.
A Universal Arrangement
The Irish were not unusual in this. They were, if anything, unusually systematic about it.
Sir James George Frazer, in The Golden Bough — that magnificent monument to the universal human conviction that power carries consequence — documented the ritual killing of kings across Africa, Europe, Asia, and the ancient Near East with the thoroughness of a man who had clearly never expected to find quite so much material. Frazer proposed that in early societies, the king or chief was believed to embody the life-force of the community and the land. His physical condition affected the fertility of crops, the health of livestock, and the welfare of the people. When the king weakened — through age, illness, or a specified term of office — he had to be killed and replaced by a younger, more vigorous successor to prevent the land from failing.
He compiled examples from African, European, Asian, and American cultures: the king of Calicut who was required to cut his own throat at the end of a twelve-year reign; African chiefs who were strangled when they fell ill; Scandinavian kings who were sacrificed in times of famine.
Among the Shilluk of the Nile, from time to time a sort of fury seized the people, and they marched through the streets chanting with loud voices the fatal words: The king must die. When the king heard that song of death he knew that his hour had come.
Nobody wanted to be king then the way people want to be king now. This is a fact worth sitting with.
In Sparta, the kings held their office under perpetual scrutiny, their authority suspended during military campaigns if the omens were unfavourable. In Rome, the Rex Sacrorum — the King of Sacred Rites — was a figure of ritual rather than power precisely because the Romans remembered, with a collective cultural shudder, what happened to kings who confused their sacred function with personal sovereignty. The office of king was sacred. That is another way of saying it was dangerous.
The majority of old religions were fertility cults that practiced rituals involving the periodic worship and sacrifice of a sacred king. This sacrifice was crucial for a bountiful harvest — the deification and sacrifice of an individual for the common good.
The common good. That is the phrase that keeps recurring. The king exists for the common good. His body is pledged to the common good. His wealth — such as it was — is held in trust for the common good. And when the common good is sufficiently damaged by the failure of the man who holds that trust, the community reserves the right to address the situation through whatever means the tradition provides.
The Brehon Law: Power as Sacred Obligation
Under the Brehon legal system of early Ireland, kingship was neither hereditary nor absolute. The head of every tribe, according to the people, should be the man of the tribe who is most experienced, the most noble, the most wealthy, the most wise, the most learned, the most truly popular, the most powerful to oppose, the most steadfast to sue for profits and to be sued for losses. No person not of age, stupid, blind, deaf, deformed, or otherwise defective in mind or body, or for any reason whatsoever unfit to discharge the duties of the public position, could be chosen for king or could hold the kingship.
The wealth qualification is instructive: the king was required to be wealthy not so that he could accumulate further wealth in office, but so that he had sufficient resources to fulfil the primary obligation of his position — the feast. The king who could not feed his people had no business being king. The king who could feed his people and chose not to had already lost his legitimacy. The feast was the visible, public, legally enforceable proof that the covenant between the ruler and the ruled was being honoured.
Under Brehon law, the lord who refused to convene the feast — who held his wealth and withheld the communal obligation — did not simply attract criticism. He forfeited his lóg n-enech, his honour-price, his legal standing, and ultimately the legitimacy of his claim to govern. Power without feeding the people is not kingship. It is theft.
A Note on Contemporary Developments
In June 2026, Elon Musk’s net worth soared past billionaire to trillionaire status after SpaceX went public, making him the world’s first trillionaire. Oxfam analysis reveals Musk would be richer than the poorest 46% of the world population — 3.8 billion people — combined. Just 10% of his fortune could end global extreme poverty for a year, lifting over 800 million people above the extreme poverty line.
“A trillion dollars in the hands of one man is incompatible not only with an affordable economy, but also with a healthy democracy. Economic inequality begets political inequality, and ordinary people bear the brunt while billionaires continue to write the rules for their own benefit.”
In the old understanding, a man who held the combined wealth of half the world’s population while one in four people on earth did not have enough to eat would not be celebrated as a visionary entrepreneur. He would be recognised as a king who had catastrophically failed his covenant with the land and the people. The harvest has failed. The weather is breaking down. The cattle are diseased. The people are hungry.
The Brehon law is clear on what happens next to a lord who will not fuel the feast.
The bog has a long memory.
As for those elsewhere in the halls of power who have decided that the presidency of the most powerful nation on earth is insufficient and that something more permanent, more heritable, more kingly is required: the ancient institution they are gesturing toward came with terms and conditions that their advisors appear to have neglected to mention. Sacred kingship is a covenant, not a throne. It is a sacrifice, not a reward. The crown was worn by the man most willing to pay the price that wearing it might ultimately demand — not by the man most eager to avoid accountability for the consequences of his decisions.
The Shilluk knew the song. So did the Irish. So, in their bones if not yet in their words, do the people marching in the streets of every major city in the world right now.
When they chant eat the rich, they are not being revolutionary. They are being traditional. They are remembering, with the deep cultural memory that bypasses conscious thought and goes straight to the gut, that the covenant between the powerful and the community they hold power over has always had teeth — and that the teeth were, in the old days, rather more literal than metaphorical.
This is, of course, a purely historical and theological observation.
A Closing Word to the Would-Be Kings
The tradition does not advocate violence. The tradition advocates the restoration of covenant. The tradition says: those who hold power hold it in trust, not in ownership. The land is not yours. The people are not yours. The wealth extracted from the labour of millions is not yours to accumulate without limit while the people who generated it go hungry.
The tradition says: the feast must be convened. The table must be set. The vulnerable must be fed. And the lord who refuses these obligations has already made his choice about what kind of lord he intends to be.
History has a consistent view of that choice. The bogs of Ireland are patient. The peat preserves extraordinarily well. And the archaeological record, from Old Croghan Hill to the shores of the Tollund Lake to the marshes of Lindow, tells a very clear story about what happens when the community finally decides that enough is enough and the covenant must be renewed.
We offer this reflection in the spirit of historical education and theological commentary.
We trust it will be received in the same spirit.
Aoraidh am Dhiathan, Cron Gin, Eagal dad.
Worship the Gods, Harm None, Fear Nothing.
References
- Kelly, Eamonn P. (2006). Kingship and Sacrifice: Iron Age Bog Bodies and Boundaries. Archaeology Ireland Heritage Guide No. 35.
- Frazer, Sir James George (1890–1922). The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Macmillan.
- Kelly, Fergus (1988). A Guide to Early Irish Law. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies.
- Oxfam International (2026). Resisting the Rule of the Rich: Protecting Freedom from Billionaire Power.
- The Destruction of Dá Derga’s Hostel, trans. Whitley Stokes (1901).
- Stokes, Whitley, trans. (1910). The Destruction of Da Derga’s Hostel. Harvard Classics.
The author wishes to clarify that this essay is a work of theological and historical commentary in the tradition of prophetic literature. Any resemblance to a call to action is purely the reader’s own inference from two thousand years of documented human behaviour.
ArdNemeton na Tuatha 
Leave a comment