It’s dangerous to be a king. In ancient times a young man was each year groomed to be king, given all beautiful things in excess, lulled with praise, adored as more than human, and in the end, drugged and taken by the venerating populace to the cliff, to the pit, to the cenote, the well to be drowned.

And once the king died/ was put to death in the most adoring of ways, the populace turned to look for another king to fluff and pet. Another blood sacrifice to cavil over, another king of great charisma to take them into a sustained ecstasy of adoration, a certainty of closeness with the drunken Divine…

In a published anthology on popular culture, I wrote this about the ‘cult of the beautiful king who must be sacrificed’…

In our time, the designated ‘famous king who must die’ has to have nearby a preponderance of alcohol and drugs… most often “over-prescribed” by someone attempting to change “I-want-to-rest” behavior into “more profitable behavior.” This is often the final shiv which makes an early blood sacrifice out of the king.

1. In ancient times, in sacrificial rites, the subject who cooperates with adulation is often renamed, (a new name replacing one’s often less prestigious name,) or given a special ritualistic name, such as Lord of the Flowers, or King of all Creation, Primal Warrior, etc.

2. The subject is literally and figuratively drugged in many ways. They may be told they will become immortal and be remembered forever.

3. The naive subject does not realize, often until much later, that he has been chosen not only as someone “special,” but as a sacrificial victim.

4. But, by then he is often debilitated with substances, and conditioning, no longer able to think clearly.

5. He has been brought into position to be sacrificed by being lauded, often appealing to his sense of vanity, the immature ego’s desire for power and immortality, his desire to fulfill what is held out to him as a great honor, sometimes his desire to overcome his sense of inferiority, to be thought of as superior and/or heroic above another specific man, or over all other men.

6. He is further drugged by having his every basic need anticipated and tended to.

7. He is anesthetized with praise, and made drunken with fawning words.

8. His common sense is suppressed with mood-changing substances, music, chanting, bright lights, or else darkness.

9. He is taught and begins to believe that he is a principle and redemptive player in the battle between good and evil, or in the war between the light and the dark.

10. The sacrificial king is given to enjoy now, dancing men con las cinturas de aguas, with waists like water, or else maidens bearing oils and idolizing words.

11. If there are persons tending sexually to the one chosen for sacrifice, they believe that they too are made holy through having sex with a soul whose light is not only about to be offered up for the common good, but whose luminescence is supposed to shine through them by association, forever.

12. Right before the subject is led to his death, rather than appearing beautiful and in heightened awareness, the sacrificee may look pompous, arrogant, completely wrapped up in self, out of touch — or else completely not in his right mind, debased, bedraggled, worn down, starved, pitifully staggering about, led like a beast by others, or else dragged to the killing floor amidst the deafening cries and huzzahs of the community… a community that rises more on spectacle rather than veneration for the talent of the soul.

13. In the end, the result is this: The crowd mourns deeply and sincerely, for the king is dead.

14. The same crowd also cheers and feels freshly energized, dances, sings and mourns. Having been given a tragic king to ritualize and memorialize, the throng continues toward the future with their lives newly engaged. The corpus of the “chosen one” is left behind:

As they say: Long live the king.

A talented person can unwittingly agree to become the sacrificial king, incrementally, as a kind of creeping spell of adulation comes over them in time, deadening their judgment, skewing their boundaries, until common sense becomes for them, anything but common.

Then for the duration of the king’s reign, he will be drained of vitality by the many around him who have rooted themselves in the nourishment of his shine and shrine–some invited– but many others like lamprey eels attaching themselves to the side of a living fish and over time, sucking its guts out til the once healthy fish dies.

The “beauty of youth” is, eventually, no longer upon the king. He may be floating sideways, white-eyed, but no one really notices for long. He may already be dead, or deadened, and yet somehow, he still goes on.

Too often, in our time, in order to try to please his audience then, or to maintain his coffers, or to support an enormous retinue, the king’s energic qualities become rote from fatigue, instead of truly inspired.

Then he can no longer represent the surrounding culture’s desire to be fed by spontaneous and unvanquished youth, by a vibrant energy that ignites all that it touches.

Such a once-person/now-king/ now king in decline, caught in the tangle of fáma, might as well be spirited away in the middle of the night, plied with the poisons of incessant pleasures… and all without realizing that he will surely lose spirit and soul, and potentially… the life of the body as well.

Fáma/ fame can be deeply seductive, a smiling killer with a deep and hidden intent to blood let. We can understand the allure of being invited to enter the cultus of pleasure and the dying God. We can certainly understand the means by which a soul is hounded and lured into such.

Yet, does the once young king actually consciously agree to become a blood sacrifice? I think no. It is rather, a case of a soul whose judgement and ability to weigh and measure, before the fact, deteriorates because they have somewhere along the line, often when quite young and naive, become entirely captured by rapture.

There seems something loose in our cultures worldwide that needs its sacrificial king on a regular basis... for I did not write this anthology essay about Michael Jackson. I wrote it as part of an analysis about the also too short and deeply distressed life of Elvis Presley, shortly after Elvis’s sudden death.

I am sad to say I believe the same deteriorative process applies to the people’s latest sacrificial king too… not to mention the long line of talented maidens who became spellbound, and were sacrificed in the same ways as well.