In his preface, Kantorowicz himself notes that the book, which was born as an inquiry into the medieval precedents of the juridical doctrine of the king’s two bodies, had gone beyond the author’s first intention and had even transformed itself – as the subtitle indicates – into a “study in mediaeval political theology.” Kantorowicz, who had lived through and intensely participated in the political affairs of Germany in the 1920s, fighting alongside the Nationalists in the Spartacist Revolt in Berlin and the Republic of Councils in Munich, could not have failed to intend the reference to the “political theology” under whose insignia Schmitt had placed his own theory of sovereignty in 1922. Thirty-five years later, after Nazism had marked an irreparable rupture in his life as an assimilated jew, Kantorowicz returned to interrogate, from a completely different perspective, the “Myth of the State” that he had ardently shared in his youth. In a significant disavowal, the preface warns: “It would go much too far . . . to assume that the author felt tempted to investigate the emergence of some of the idols of modern political religions merely on account of the horrifying experience of our own time in which whole nations, the largest and the smallest, fell prey to the weirdest dogmas and in which political theologisms became genuine obsessions” (King’s Two Bodies, p. viii). And with the same eloquent modesty, the author writes that he “cannot claim to have demonstrated in any completeness the problem of what has been called ‘The Myth of the State’ “ (ibid., p. ix).