Founding Myths & Divine Rule

Mythology and Its Place in History

Chapter 2 · Myth as Political Legitimation: Founding Myths & Divine Rule

Chapter 1 built a four-question toolkit — who benefits, how was it transmitted, is there a euhemeristic reading, what does the physical record say — without yet putting real weight on any of it. This chapter runs the first question hard, against two founding myths separated by a continent, a millennium, and a religion, and finds the same real political mechanism working underneath both.

Rome: A Fratricide at the Foundation

The Story, and When It Was Actually Written Down

Twin brothers, abandoned as infants and suckled by a she-wolf, grow up to found a city on the site of their rescue — then quarrel over its exact location, and Romulus kills Remus. Rome's own traditional founding date, 753 BCE, is centuries older than the myth's own earliest surviving written account. The first known written version comes from Fabius Pictor, writing in the late 3rd century BCE — meaning the story existed in some oral or partial form for thirty-plus generations before anyone wrote it down, and the versions that survive (via Livy, Plutarch, and others) genuinely disagree with each other on real details. Romans and Greek writers alike knew several different tellings, not one fixed, authoritative account.

A direct payoff of Chapter 1's own toolkit That instability — multiple competing versions rather than one canonical text — is exactly what you'd expect from a myth built by real oral transmission across centuries, per Chapter 1's own "how was it transmitted" question. A founding myth invented and fixed in writing all at once tends to stay uniform; one that survives thirty generations of retelling before being written down tends to fracture into variants. Romulus and Remus show the second pattern clearly.

Who Actually Benefited? Augustus's Real, Documented Answer

The myth's real political payoff shows up most clearly roughly seven centuries after its own traditional setting, in the settlement that ended Rome's civil wars. In 27 BCE, the Roman Senate voted Octavian a new honorific name. He had reportedly wanted, and seriously considered, one specific alternative first: Romulus.

Why "Romulus" was actually rejected — a real political risk, not just a preference Romulus had been a king — and, in the darker layer of his own myth, one later senators were said to have murdered before he was deified. After Julius Caesar's own real assassination by senators just a few years earlier, "Romulus" carried an uncomfortably specific echo neither Octavian nor his advisors wanted attached to the new regime. The name that won instead, Augustus, avoided monarchy's own toxic associations in Rome while still letting him claim the founder's mantle through other means.

And Octavian did claim that mantle, deliberately and visibly. He built his own residence on the Palatine Hill specifically because tradition held that Romulus himself had once lived there, restoring existing houses rather than raising a showy new palace — a real, physical, daily-visible claim that he was continuing Romulus's own founding work after his own civil war, exactly the way Romulus had supposedly brought order out of an earlier chaos. Coordinated literature from Virgil, Horace, and Livy reinforced the same message in print. Rejecting the name "Romulus" and claiming everything the name stood for anyway is itself a real, telling data point: the myth's political value didn't require literally taking the founder's name, only being seen to inherit his role.

Japan: A Sun Goddess, and a Succession War

The Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, 712 and 720 CE

Japan's imperial house traces its own line to Amaterasu, the sun goddess, through her grandson Ninigi-no-Mikoto and down to Emperor Jimmu, traditionally counted as the first human emperor. This genealogy survives in two real, dated texts: the Kojiki (712 CE) and the Nihon Shoki (720 CE) — and both were commissioned by a specific, real, named ruler with a specific, real, urgent reason to want them written.

Emperor Tenmu, who ordered the compilation project, had come to power through the Jinshin War of 672 CE — a real, violent succession conflict, not a peaceful transition. According to the Kojiki's own preface, Tenmu complained that the existing genealogical records of the imperial and courtier houses had already been "altered and falsified," and ordered a court reciter, Hieda no Are, to memorize the correct imperial genealogy and a body of traditional narratives, later transcribed into the texts that survive today. By tracing the imperial line directly back to Amaterasu herself, the court reframed Tenmu's own contested, recently-fought-for authority as sacred and inevitable — a lineage question settled by divine descent, not by whichever army had actually won the most recent war.

The same mechanism, twice, independently Rome's own founding myth was activated for maximum political use right after a civil war ended (Augustus, 27 BCE); Japan's own founding myth was formally written down right after a civil war ended (Tenmu, within a few decades of 672 CE). Neither ruler invented their myth from nothing — both inherited an existing tradition and deployed or fixed it at the exact moment their own legitimacy was most in question. This is Chapter 1's "who benefits" question, answered identically in two unrelated cultures under near-identical real political pressure.

The Myth's Long Afterlife: 1868 to 1946

Amaterasu's genealogy didn't stay a settled 8th-century matter. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 revived and centralized State Shinto specifically around the emperor's own divine ancestry, using the same centuries-old text to underwrite a modern nationalist ideology. That use continued through the Second World War, until a real, dated document brought it to a formal, documented end.

The Humanity Declaration, 1 January 1946

At the request of the Allied occupation authority, Emperor Hirohito issued an imperial rescript, later known as the Ningen-sengen ("Humanity Declaration"), stating that the bond between emperor and people did not rest on "the false conception that the Emperor is divine." The declaration explicitly disavowed the mythological basis of that claimed divinity — the same Kojiki/Nihon Shoki genealogy Tenmu's court had first fixed in writing nearly 1,250 years earlier.

A real complication worth naming honestly The declaration's own wording is narrower than it's often remembered as being. Hirohito specifically denied being an akitsumikami — a deity manifest in human form — a term chosen at the occupation authority's own request. Some scholars have pointed out this leaves untouched a separate, older concept, arahitogami ("living god"), meaning the rescript's real scope is genuinely debated rather than a single, clean renunciation of "divinity" in general. A founding myth's political use rarely ends with one tidy document — it winds down, with real, contested edges, the same way it was built up.

Running the Toolkit Side by Side

	Rome — Romulus & Remus	Japan — Descent from Amaterasu
Myth's own claimed setting	753 BCE, city founding	Mythic age, before Emperor Jimmu
Earliest surviving written account	Late 3rd century BCE (Fabius Pictor)	712 CE (Kojiki)
Who benefited, and when	Augustus, after the civil wars, 27 BCE	Emperor Tenmu, after the Jinshin War, 672 CE onward
How the myth was used politically	Architectural/physical claim (the Palatine Hill), literary propaganda, a near-adoption of the founder's own name	Formal written genealogy commissioned by the court itself, later revived by State Shinto (1868–1945)
How (or whether) the political claim ended	Faded gradually with the Empire itself; never formally renounced	Formally, if narrowly, renounced in a dated 1946 document

What This Does — and Doesn't — Establish

A claim this evidence supports	A claim it does not support
Both myths were genuinely, documentedly activated for political benefit at a moment of real instability	Either myth was invented purely for that political purpose and had no independent existence beforehand
Augustus's real, documented near-adoption of "Romulus" shows how directly a founding myth could be claimed	Every Roman emperor after Augustus used the myth the same deliberate way
The 1946 Humanity Declaration is a real, dated formal renunciation with a specific, narrow scope	It settled every question about the emperor's own status once and for all — the scholarly debate over arahitogami shows it didn't

Questions to Sit With

Reflection 1

Augustus wanted the name "Romulus" but took the risk-free alternative instead, while still claiming everything the name stood for. Can you think of a modern political figure who's done something similar — invoking a legitimizing symbol without formally claiming its most loaded version?

Reflection 2

Both myths were "activated" right after a civil war. Does that timing make you more or less inclined to trust the myth's own claimed ancient origin — and why might a ruler prefer reviving an old story over inventing a new one from scratch?

Reflection 3

The Humanity Declaration's own narrow wording (akitsumikami, not arahitogami) left real ambiguity standing. Why do you think a political renunciation of a founding myth might be deliberately incomplete, rather than a clean, total break?

Quick Reference — Chapter 2

Romulus and Remus: Rome's traditional founding date is 753 BCE, but the earliest surviving written account (Fabius Pictor) dates only to the late 3rd century BCE — centuries of oral transmission producing genuinely divergent variant versions
Augustus really did consider taking the name "Romulus" in 27 BCE, but rejected it as too close to Julius Caesar's own recent assassination by senators — then claimed the founder's role anyway via his Palatine Hill residence and coordinated literary propaganda
Japan's Kojiki (712 CE) and Nihon Shoki (720 CE) were commissioned by Emperor Tenmu after the real, violent Jinshin War of 672 CE, tracing his own line back to Amaterasu to settle a contested succession as divinely ordained rather than merely won by force
State Shinto revived this same genealogy for modern nationalist use starting in 1868, ending (narrowly, and with real scholarly debate over its exact scope) in Emperor Hirohito's 1 January 1946 Humanity Declaration
The same real mechanism — a founding myth activated for political benefit at a moment of instability — appears independently in both cultures

What's Next

Chapter 3: Euhemerism: When Myths Are Read as Distorted History.