How is it that, within societies that lack kings or chiefs or any vertical political authorities, still we find complex concepts of divine hierarchy? From Tierra del Fuego to the Central Arctic to the Philippines, communities that traditionally recognized no rulers or government still possess celestial bureaucracies of deities and spirits with no correspondence to the human social order. Where do these ideas come from, which reflect no living conditions on the ground? How is it that notions of the state seem to be anticipated by cosmology before they are realized in society? These questions lie at the heart of Sahlins's final book, The New Science of the Enchanted Universe, in which he defined the term "metaperson" to encompass the wide spectrum of gods and spirits with whom humans have always lived in continuous reference, and who act as the intimate, quotidian agents of our success or ruin. If "power descends from heaven to earth," Sahlins wrote, "human political power is necessarily and quintessentially hubris, the appropriation of divinity in one form or another." Hierarchy emerges as an inescapable principle imposed on human life, as if from above. Yet how, then, is political transformation ever possible? And how is it that, so often religious ideas are able to spark revolutionary change? Illuminated by Sahlins' earlier work on political dissent, inequality and poverty (Culture in Practice; Stone Age Economics) this paper will approach these questions by examining the creation of contemporary metapersons among us: the deification, even within allegedly "secular" states, of politicians, autocrats, and monarchs, in ways that contest, subvert, and reject hierarchy by drawing on idioms of the sacred.