Apotheosis names the elevation of a human being to divine status, either during life or, more commonly in the clearest historical cases, after death through formal religious or political ratification. Roman practice developed the clearest institutional form: the Senate could vote a deceased emperor divus, divine, following funeral rites that included the release of an eagle understood to carry the emperor's soul skyward, beginning with Julius Caesar and continuing as a regular, though not automatic, honor for emperors judged to have ruled well, while a tyrannical or widely hated emperor could instead suffer damnatio memoriae, the formal erasure of his memory and honors, the practice's deliberate opposite.
Chinese imperial religion developed a related but distinct practice in which deceased emperors, and in earlier periods living rulers who claimed the Mandate of Heaven, were understood to take up a position within an ordered bureaucratic pantheon of ancestral and cosmic spirits, an apotheosis embedded in the wider Chinese practice of ancestor veneration rather than modeled on the Roman senate's single formal vote. Japanese State Shinto in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries drew on a comparable logic in state doctrine holding the emperor to be a living deity, a position formally renounced by Emperor Hirohito in 1946.