THE KING’S HIGHWAY

by Jim Kimmis

The claim was put forward that there is a historical connexion, perpetuated in Indo-European languages including English, between the institution of kingship and landscape alignments (leys). This claim rests on the curious etymology of the root-syllable *REG-, which word carries the connotation of ‘rule, government’ in numerous languages (including Old Celtic, Germanic and Latin as well as modern English, German, French, Romany and Hindustani). This syllable occurs in words meaning ‘king’ or ‘ruler’ (rig, ric, rex, regent, roi, rai, rajah) as well as in a series of Latin derivatives extending the basic meaning of ‘rule’ (regulate, direct, correct, rectitude, realm etc.).

According to Eric Partridge’s etymological dictionary, Origins, the first meaning of the syllable *REG- was ‘straight line’ or, by extension, ‘movement in a straight line’. The meaning of the king-words, such as rex, is therefore ‘he who moves or guides in a straight line’. It seems difficult to explain this by reference to the known nature of kingship among those people who have used Indo-European languages; the sacred office of the rex among the early Latins, for instance, is not generally thought to have demanded any kind of straight movement, processional or otherwise. However, the *REG- syllable acquired its peculiar meaning in the prehistoric period, before the dispersal of the various groups of Indo-European speakers and their emergence onto the historic stage as distinct peoples. and it is in that prehistoric period (and specifically the Bronze Age with its widespread folk movements) that one suspects the greatest use of the landscape alignments or leys. The conclusion, therefore, is that practical use of straight lines in {5} the landscape once involved (among other things) the leadership of migratory or nomadic groups in Europe and Asia, and that the office of leader (or guide, or perhaps even priest-surveyor) later evolved into what is now recognized as kingship.

There was not the opportunity at the Symposium to discuss the many sides of this kingship/leys equation, but two useful leads were suggested by others at the time. One concerned the “Royal Roads of Britain”, those inviolate highways attributed by Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Celtic god Belinus and the legendary British king Dunwallo Molmutius; it is a fact that the right of sanctuary available within a certain radius of the king’s person was extended to some major highways, and that this right persisted into the medieval period; and it is a worthwhile speculation that such favoured roads were originally laid out in straight lines. The second comment had to do with a Scandinavian legend concerning (?) Rig the Walker, a god whose name seems to contain the *REG- syllable and who was mythically responsible for the origin of the social order and its various castes; this takes on especial relevance when it is recalled that caste-hierarchy is a cultural trait generally associated with <the> Indo-European linguistic world, and that one of the most important known functions of kingship is to maintain and regulate that social order.

The purpose of this brief contribution to the Symposium was only to test the etymological equation found in Partridge’s dictionary. If it be accepted that the origin of kingship (among Indo-European speakers but probably not in the late Neolithic/early Bronze Age cultures of the Mediterranean and Middle East) had to do with the use of linear geomancy, then further questions remain to be explored: what, {6} for instance, of the apparent connexion between the Chinese landscape lines and the Imperial family and its tombs?; what of the now familiar straight lines in South America and the hierarchical cultures such as Inca? Perhaps most important, what of the clear implication that landscape alignments may, in some sense; be instruments of government? (Reference to Nigel Pennick’s thoroughly-researched book The Ancient Science of Geomancy, Thames & Hudson, 1979, will furnish much evidence that leads to the same implication). Any further contributions to the debate should be most welcome.