Not long before the presidential election, I wrote a column in these pages characterizing Joe Biden as a “temporary king” in the tradition of J.G. Frazer’s Golden Bough. The idea was that just as in ancient Babylonian society where, to avoid catastrophe, the real king temporarily abdicated the throne to a foolish imposter who was sacrificed at the end of his short reign, the Democratic party had given over the presidency to Biden until it could find a more permanent leader. Evidently, the Kamala Harris mumbo jumbo in November didn’t work—Biden is still at the center of the party—and I find my mind returning once again to Frazer.
These days though I see Biden less as a temporary king and more as the Rex Nemorensis, the priest of the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi. Anyone who has dipped into The Golden Bough is probably already familiar with the most famous figure in Frazer’s study of magic and religion, so I will be brief. This king, whose job it was to guard a sacred tree near Lake Nemi, held one of the most precarious offices in the ancient world. “He was a priest and a murderer,” Frazer writes. And he was perpetually in fear for his life: “A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.”
Frazer has it that this barbarous office was a relic of a time when the rites of magic preceded the practice of religion. But, he adds, that collapsed world of belief is not so different from our own; indeed, ours was built on its ruins. In 12 mad, fascinating, and frankly sometimes unreadable volumes, he holds forth on the subject, attempting to demonstrate that the motives behind an institution such as the Rex Nemorensis “have operated widely, perhaps universally, in human society, producing in varied circumstances a variety of institutions specifically different but generically alike.”
Now, that is casting a very wide net, but there’s something undeniably attractive about this whole Key to All Mythologies exercise, even if Frazer’s facts are sometimes goofy. And I think it is fair to say that he is not only on to something about the past, but also the present. The office of Rex Nemorensis still exists, more or less, to this day. Its current occupant is Joe Biden.
For how much longer, who can say. Biden became king of the wood in a strange manner. The former king, Barack Obama, abandoned the sacred tree after plucking its bough in 2008 and slaying Hillary Clinton (who, as the events of 2016 made clear, did not understand what had occurred). Obama’s departure left the grove open to a band of robbers and ruffians who aspired to the sacred priesthood. None was stronger or more brutish than Biden, who, right up until early 2020, hacked away at his competitors for the royal title. Of course, once he became king, no crowned head ever lay uneasier.
All throughout his presidency, Biden fought off challengers for the title. Some hoped that senility would be his downfall, but even the insane can hold a sacred office. When Biden was forced to drop out of the race last summer—and it appeared as if Harris had finally dealt him the death stroke—fate intervened, and the defeat was not to be. Biden is still the king, and his party (along with its camp followers) are still trying to cut him down—to replace with a new king. But Biden is a tough old man, and the fight will likely continue beyond the grave. (Ronald Reagan, for example, was still the Republican Rex Nemorensis well into Donald Trump’s first term.) Even in Biden’s enfeebled state, someone stronger or craftier than he has yet to show his face in the wood.
“It is a sombre picture, set to melancholy music,” Frazer writes of the aged priest’s struggle to maintain his kingship, “the background of forest showing black and jagged against a lowering and stormy sky, the sighing of the wind in the branches, the rustle of the withered leaves under foot, the lapping of the cold water on the shore, and in the foreground, pacing to and fro, now in twilight and now in gloom, a dark figure with a glitter of steel at the shoulder whenever the pale moon, riding clear of the cloud-rack, peers down at him through the matted boughs.”
I can almost see it now: Joe Biden, stalking through the old-growth forest just outside Wilmington, trembling and carrying a drawn sword, peering warily about him as if at every instant he expects to be set upon by an enemy. Such is the reward of the priesthood.
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