Apotheosis

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.

Historians of Roman religion generally read imperial apotheosis as serving political functions inseparable from whatever religious belief accompanied it: formal deification by the Senate legitimated a new emperor's succession by tying him to a divine predecessor, and the honor could be withheld or, in rare cases, later revoked as a form of posthumous political judgment on a reign, making the practice as much an instrument of Roman politics as a straightforward religious conviction that the deified emperor now genuinely governed some portion of the cosmos. Roman elite opinion itself held mixed and sometimes openly skeptical views about how literally to take the deification of emperors, a skepticism the satirist Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, a mocking account of the emperor Claudius's posthumous divinization, illustrates directly from within the Roman literary tradition.

Apotheosis in this atlas is treated as a comparative category naming a recurring practice of formally elevating exceptional humans, chiefly rulers, to divine or quasi divine status, distinct from the broader and less formal phenomenon of a ruler simply being honored as unusually favored by the gods. Egyptian, Mesopotamian and other ancient Near Eastern kingship traditions developed their own related but distinct claims of royal divinity, generally treating the living king as divine or semi divine by nature rather than elevating him through a later, separate ceremony of deification.