The divine power of kings and fictional histories of empires thrived until these kingships and empires weakened or were conquered. The deification of Sumerian kings and consecration of Roman Emperors ended with the breakdown of their supporting cultures. Divinity attached to Egyptian pharaohs came to an end with the death of Cleopatra in 30 BCE. Verifiable historical information concerning the spiritual status of ancient kings of the Greeks and Hebrews is minimal or missing. The Japanese Kojiki, Persian Shahnameh, Ethiopian Kebra Nagast, and Malay Annals begin their accounts of rulers with myth and legend, with subsequent events so decorated that historical fact is difficult to discern beneath the literary coloring. Spirituality has now faded from royalty, leaving it unprotected by myths of divine origins. Imperial rule ended in China in 1912 when the last emperor, Hsian-T’ung, was forced to abdicate at the end of Sun Yat-sen's republican revolution. Imperial rule in Russia came to an end when Nicholas II, the Romanov Tsar, and members of his family were executed in 1918. Both brought to an end monarchic narratives established centuries earlier. Religious founders are an exception; they transcend the erosion of time and history. Their affective appeal typically subverts factual investigation because their spirituality is assumed by believers to be reliably historical.

More recent narratives have tended to fade or have been overturned. In the past few centuries, three societal narratives have been overcome and rendered obsolete by a historical change. The American Puritan presentation of themselves as the new Chosen People and the New World as the Promised Land ran aground during the Enlightenment, a victim of the astronomy of Galileo and Herschel, the geology of Hutton and Lyell, and the sidelining of religion in the American Bill of Rights and related democratic formulations. The nineteenth-century predictive narrative of Marx and Engels never achieved its promise of a classless society and was overwhelmed in the twentieth century by the capitalist economic system it opposed. The dictatorial lust for power of Adolf Hitler and the anti-Semitic narratives of Nazism and Fascism were defeated by a worldwide military coalition and the triumph of industrial warfare.

While monarchy as a spiritually inspired system is effectively dead, purely symbolic monarchies have remained, though the two most long-lasting are now under a shadow of controversy.