A Practice in Retreat

Royal anointing has receded sharply as a live practice across the modern world, tracking the broader collapse of monarchy as a form of government and, among the monarchies that survive, a general modern preference for ceremonial and constitutional roles over claims of sacral or divinely conferred authority that anointing was designed to assert.

The United Kingdom is now the only European monarchy that still anoints its sovereign as part of coronation, a survival that reflects both the comparative continuity of the English and then British crown since the Norman Conquest and the Church of England's established status, which keeps the anointing's theological claims institutionally anchored in a way most other European thrones no longer possess. Where anointing has been retained, its once fully public character has sometimes been curtailed rather than abandoned outright, as when the anointing itself, though not the surrounding coronation, has been shielded from television cameras in recent British coronations on the grounds of its especially sacred character, a modern accommodation between an ancient claim to sacred status and a media age uncomfortable displaying it without qualification. Outside Christian monarchy, comparable royal or imperial consecration rites exist in other traditions under different names and different theological logics, addressed elsewhere in the atlas rather than treated as variants of this specifically Christian rite.