How is the King-God social person formed?

 The theory of great men that 20th Century anthropology has used to explain the origin of kings, has in its favor the fact that it is a simple hypothesis and that it seems to agree with experience as we see it operating in our lives. The thesis, in the form that is presented in anthropology more or less explicitly, says that the history of humanity is basically the history of a few great men who have been able to promote the development of the whole group. From this point of view, the kings would be the first great men who, spontaneously, were emerging with the specialization of the work of the Neolithic revolution. The thesis, supported by philosophers such as Hegel, Carlyle, Nietzsche, and Spencer, and endorsed by the masses in different traditional theological forms, as well as by the practice of the artistic theory of genius, and it is validated within the social Darwinism of corporate and state capitalism (contemporary China) of the XX and XXI centuries, as well as among the Marxist ideas of the “enlightened elite” that leads revolutions. 

The problem with this explanation is that it already assumes the existence of the figure of the great man, a figure that is observed in the shamans, caciques, and heads of cold societies, to explain the emergence of the figure of the king. In all cases, these are male social persons, although later a very small group of women were incorporated, which, if we take the matter to the level of basic emotions, tells us that it is a question of leadership analogous to animals in which a dominant male ensures the transmission of his genes and controls the sustenance of the group and the security. The first caciques, as anthropological studies of cold societies show us, were characterized by being great providers of the community, something like promoters of collective actions capable of obtaining followers from more or less immediate prizes. At different levels of scale and complexity, this occurs among great apes, so it is not risky to see in this polarization of economic people merely the work of the mammalian emotional system.

However, the social differences that we are talking about occur with the change in economic activity, specifically with the surplus that occurs with agriculture, whose redistribution is no longer egalitarian, and a group of subjects generates social persons that legitimize the difference and inequality. The generation of wealth in the first societies could only be through domestic agricultural and artisan production, or through the external activities of trade and war. The processes of accumulation through the internal generation of wealth are slow compared to those that allow war, and trade in some cases, which points to a possible double formation of leadership. The first would be the one that comes from a progressive and slow warming up of the community from the differences in the productive capacities of its members, an accumulation of small differences with a generational multiplicative effect. In these cases, the differences in production capacities are linked to the differences in the numbers of the clans and the available technology, both in the economic fields and in the general epistemological (of explanation and prediction of vital actions), as well as the use in the actions of primitive determination of an ideological technology to establish and justify a social order. These capacities found the prestige of the figure of the leading shaman-priest, someone who controls the technology of the rain, since he speaks with the gods, and who knows the plants and the identity narratives that allow the group of totems to function with a minimum unification. In already stratified societies, such as some cities of the early dynastic period of Mesopotamia (XXVIII BC), this type of leader, who came from the extension of priestly power, was called Sangu, who was distinguished from the leader of other cities that he had risen to power by warlike methods, the Lugal.