From New Dawn 199 (Jul-Aug 2023)
“MAN IN HAT SITS IN CHAIR.” That was British satire magazine Private Eye’s mock-commemorative headline for the coronation of Charles III on May 6 of this year [2023]. That sarcastic phrasing expresses a common attitude in an era when most people in Western societies habitually think of symbolism and ceremony as a collection of irrelevancies.
A little attention to the writings of Carl Jung could have helped with that. So, on a grimmer plane, could a little attention to the way that Hitler and his inner circle deployed potent symbols to take control of the collective imagination of Germany and weaponise it in a quest for world power.
Symbols matter, and ceremonies – which are the active mode of symbolism – matter even more, if they’re crafted and performed by people who know what they’re doing.
What makes the coronation of a British king particularly worth watching in this context is that its symbols and actions are not recent inventions. Of the remaining royal families of Europe, Britain is the only one that retains its ancient coronation ritual. All other European monarchies have discarded the old rites in favour of some more modern and less symbolically potent set of formalities.
The ceremony enacted in Westminster Abbey for King Charles and Queen Camilla, by contrast, was based on the text preserved in the Liber Regalis (Royal Book), a volume in the collection of Westminster Abbey which was prepared for the coronation of Edward II in 1308. That ritual in turn was a revision of the one drafted by Saint Dunstan for the coronation of Edgar, King of the West Saxons, in 973. Like the British monarchy itself, the coronation ceremony dates back to an era when the power of symbolism was much better understood than it is today.
Ancient Pagan Kingships
To understand the rite enacted in Westminster Abbey on May 6 of this year it’s necessary to grasp the ancient nature of kingship itself. The Old English word cyning, the source of the word “king,” literally means “son of the kindred” or “kinsman.” The equivalent Old English word cwen, the source of our word “queen,” means simply “woman.” In ancient times the king was the kinsman, the queen the woman; their central task was to represent the men and women of their tribe in the presence of the gods.
Thus kingship was not originally a political office. Its central roles were spiritual and symbolic. In both the Celtic and the Germanic regions of old Europe, the king was seen as the husband of the land, typically portrayed as a goddess who had the power to give or withhold the harvest, and also the right to give or withhold the gift of sovereignty that created a king. The queen functioned as the representative of the goddess of the land in certain important rituals.
Like most of the old Pagan traditions, these deities had a profoundly local dimension, reflecting the small scale of local political structures. In old Europe, each tribe had its own king and queen, and the tribes in question were rarely large; kingships were thus common and widely distributed. When the Romans arrived, for example, Britain had dozens of kings, and Ireland in the early Dark Ages had more than a hundred.
Such political issues as might arise on so small a scale typically got settled by debate among a council of elders – the witenagemot, as it was called in Old English – or via the less orderly route but more decisive route of single combat and blood feud.
Far more important to the collective life of the tribe than such passing squabbles was the maintenance of good relations between the people and the land, and this was the king’s central task. He was subject to curious taboos: the kings of the Franks, for example, were forbidden from cutting their hair, and the Mabinogion tells of one Welsh king who was forbidden from setting his feet on the ground, and had to have them held above the floor on formal occasions by a virgin. Such magical rules were considered essential to the king’s religious duties, which allowed him to mediate between the gods, the land, and the members of his tribe.
All this shaped the ceremony by which the new king of a tribe received the kingship. That ceremony was divided into several distinct stages. First, the members of the tribe gathered together at the traditional place for king-making, which was very often a burial mound or some other place hallowed by the presence of the honoured dead. There the new king was brought out by the tribal elders and presented to the tribe’s members for acclamation.
In many of the old kingships, any healthy man who belonged to the royal family could become king if the elders and people agreed to support him, and there was often a great deal of jockeying among potential candidates and their supporters to win the support of influential families and communities.
It might also be necessary for the king-to-be to satisfy a ritual or magical requirement to prove his right to the kingship. In Ireland, for example, the high kings of Tara were expected to place their foot on a sacred stone, the Lia Fáil or Stone of Destiny, which traditionally shouted in joy when trodden by the rightful king. Other tribes and nations had their own traditions along these lines. An oath to the people of the tribe, swearing to carry out the duties of the kingship, was often a feature of this stage as well.
The second stage of the ceremony was a symbolic wedding between the new king and the local earth goddess. At the heart of that process was a ceremony in which the queen, as representative of the goddess, presented a cup of mead or some other sacred beverage to the king. Sharing a cup of mead, beer, or wine was also the central act in ordinary wedding ceremonies in those days, and it had many other functions in the societies of the time. Readers of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf will recall the scene in which the hero is welcomed to the hall of King Hrothgar, and Queen Wealhtheow brings a cup of mead to the king, then takes it to the others present at the feast. It is over the cup that Wealhtheow brings to him that Beowulf swears to slay the monster Grendel or die in the attempt.
Once the new king was married to the goddess of the land, the next stage of the ceremony could begin. Here the new king was given a symbolic weapon, most often a spear, and also received whatever other insignia of kingship his tribe traditionally used. Crowns of the modern type were a medieval innovation, but special headgear for kings dates back to ancient Egyptian times, if not before, and other ritual items might be involved as well. Finally, all the members of the tribe pledged their loyalty to the new king, and a feast followed.
None of these ceremonies were empty formalities. Through them, the new king became the cyning, the representative of the kindred, through whom the all-important link between the tribe and the land was symbolised and reaffirmed. Through the ritual of king-making, the tribe refocused and strengthened its own identity and its relationship to the land that supported it.
Christian Ceremonies of Anointment
The traditions of the ancient kingships thus had potent links to the Pagan faiths of old Europe. Once Christian missionaries succeeded in establishing themselves in the tribal kingdoms of western Europe, the religious dimension of kingship became a source of constant friction. For centuries, even in kingdoms that became nominally Christian, archaic Pagan rites and practices remained common under a thin veneer of the new religion, and the rituals of kingship were among the places where the legacy of the older faiths remained most deeply rooted.
To the tribal peoples of the time, the ceremonies that made a king out of an ordinary man were essential not only to political stability but to the all-important relationship between the people and the land. Centuries passed before the Church succeeded in inserting their own ritual practices into the coronation ceremonies. In the end, they could only do it by placing one of the most jealously guarded of all their holy rites into the hands of royalty.
This was the ceremony of anointment, a central part of the ancient sacramental traditions of the Christian church. Three kinds of sacred oil are used in traditional Christian ritual. One is the “oil of the infirm,” which is used to bless sick people and also has a central role in the sacrament of extreme unction for the dying. The second is the “oil of the catechumens,” which is used to bless infants and converts before baptism and is also used to anoint the palms of candidates for the priesthood during the ceremony of ordination.
The third and most sacred is chrism or holy oil. A drop of this is placed on the baptised person’s head after the cleansing with water, another drop is applied to the head during the confirmation ceremony. It is also used in the ceremony for consecrating bishops, the rite that passes on apostolic succession – the direct lineage and contact of power that connects every properly consecrated bishop with one of the twelve apostles of Jesus of Nazareth. In each case, the sacred oil sets the anointed person apart, charging them with spiritual power.
Beginning in the Dark Ages, Christian bishops set out to replace the ancient Pagan rites of king-making with an equivalent from their own tradition. Anointment was the only ceremony solemn and powerful enough to replace the Pagan marriage of the king to the local earth goddess. The Christian clerics who set out to get this change accepted gained considerable support from the Bible since the Old Testament describes the prophet Samuel anointing Saul and then David as kings of Israel.
To win the support of the kings and their half-Pagan peoples, however, they had to permit a form of anointment that went beyond anything that Christian clerics could expect for themselves. Where priests are anointed on the palms alone, and bishops are anointed on the crown of the head, kings are anointed on the hands, head, and heart. Where the Church had enough power, the oil of catechumens was used for this royal anointing, but the monarchies in England and France were strong enough – and sufficiently willing to challenge the Papacy – that they succeeded in winning the right to be anointed with sacred chrism.
The first European king known to have been raised to the kingship by anointment was the Visigoth King Wamba of Spain, who was anointed by the bishop of Toledo during his coronation in 672. In 751, when Pepin I seized the throne of France from the last of the Merovingian kings, he relied on the approval of the Pope and anointment with the sacred chrism to justify his coup d’etat and the overthrow of centuries-old Frankish tradition. The ritual that was used for Pepin and his successors was one of the texts Saint Dunstan drew on when he put together a Christian coronation ritual for the kings of England two centuries later.
Christian clerics had important allies in their quest to strip Pagan legacies from the kingships of Europe. Ambitious men in several European countries dreamed of displacing the old tradition of sacred monarchy in order to seize supreme political authority for themselves. That was what motivated Pepin I when he overthrew the sacred Merovingian kings and placed his own Carolingian family on the throne. Similar motives in those same years guided the efforts of the Uí Néill clan to press their claim to the high kingship of all Ireland. Over the course of the early Middle Ages, as a result of these machinations, the tradition of anointment gradually supplanted the older rites and became the spiritual heart of the coronation ceremony, while a Christian communion service was also inserted to replace the older Pagan rituals.
A Twenty-first Century Coronation
More than a thousand years have passed since Saint Dunstan drew up the English coronation ritual, but a surprisingly large share of the archaic rite of kingship could still be seen in the coronation of Charles III. It is interesting to note, to begin with, that the kings of Britain have gradually circled back to a status similar to the one their ancient equivalents held. Charles is not a political leader in any sense that matters. He no longer runs the government or leads the army into battle; instead, he is the titular head of the Church of England and the ceremonial head of the country. His role is symbolic and spiritual, not political.
The gathering of the tribe at the traditional site of coronation, the first stage of the old rituals of kingship, is still very much a part of the current ceremony. Westminster Abbey has been the place of English coronations since the time of William the Conqueror. In the usual way, the Abbey is a burial place of the honoured dead, though of course it is considerably more ornate than the grass-covered burial mounds that so often served the same function in ancient times.
The first stage of the ritual, the presentation of the new king to the members of the tribe, also followed the usual pattern. Charles walked from the west end of the Abbey to the site of the coronation in the east and was greeted by the traditional cries of “Vivat Rex!” (“Long live the King!”) from the scholars of Westminster School. He was then presented to the assembled people by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the crowds responded with “God save the King!” The coronation oath came next, followed by the first half or so of the standard Anglican Communion service.
The coronation chair, the ancient throne of the kings of England, was then set in its place facing the altar. Beneath the seat is the Stone of Scone, on which Scottish kings were crowned; claims dating back to the Middle Ages have it that this is the Lia Fáil, the stone that was once used at the crowning of Irish kings on the Hill of Tara [for more on the Stone, see the article in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 17 No 3]. When Charles removed his crimson robe and sat on the coronation chair, the stone did not shout for joy. We can be sure from this that he is not the rightful king of Ireland – a detail that doubtless came as no surprise to the Irish.
There followed the anointment, the most solemn part of the entire ceremony. A screen held up by four Knights of the Garter concealed Charles from public view as the Archbishop of Canterbury anointed him on head, hands, and heart with blessed oil, the current Anglican substitute for the traditional Catholic sacred chrism.
Once the anointment was finished, the screen was taken down and Charles was clothed in robes made of cloth of gold. He sat again in the coronation chair and was given the regalia of his office. The spear that was once handed to kings in ancient times has been replaced by a pair of short ornate staffs, a sceptre and a rod topped with a dove. One item, however, still echoes the archaic ritual: a symbolic wedding ring by which Charles was married to Britain. Here, changed to reflect current wedding ceremonies, we see the ancient symbolism of the king as husband of the goddess of the land. The crown and other pieces of royal hardware followed, reaffirming Charles’s new status as cyning of Britain.
Once Charles was crowned, the next stage of the old ritual unfolded as he was seated on a new throne and received pledges of loyalty from the archbishops and bishops of the kingdom, followed by members of the royal family. Traditionally all the peers of the realm then pledged their loyalty to the new monarch. This step was omitted in Charles’s coronation, but British government media encouraged those of Charles’s subjects who were watching the proceedings on television to make such a pledge. Thereafter Camilla was anointed and crowned in a much briefer and less formal process. The rest of the Communion service then proceeded to its end, and the royal couple left to appear on the balcony at Windsor Palace in the traditional way, showing themselves to the assembled tribes of Britain.
From the common modern point of view mentioned earlier, all this is simply an atavistic throwback to the habits of a distant age. Here again, though, that attitude misses the importance of symbolism and the potent influences of the deep places of the mind that symbolism alone can influence.
By enacting once again the ancient rites of kingship, King Charles III, the British government, and the British people, all reaffirmed for good or ill the collective identity of Britain as a society with millennial roots and charged the symbols of British identity with the emotional energy and cognitive commitment that ceremonies so powerfully call forth.
The extraordinarily long reign of Elizabeth II meant that most people now living had never witnessed the rites of British kingship in action. It remains to be seen what impact the ancient ceremony will have on Britain and the nations of the British diaspora as the world stumbles forward into a new and challenging era.
© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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