At midday on Saturday, Charles Windsor ceased to be a human being. As, hidden by a screen, anointing oil marked his breast, head and hands, he was invisibly and entirely transformed. Clad in the vestments of a cleric, crowned as a monarch, blessed as a living symbol of the Divine, he is the last of his kind. For 10,000 years priest-kings, the Rex Nemorensis, representing men to gods and gods to men, preserved in death and life the health of their people and the bounty of their land. And then, in three centuries, they all but disappeared. Where kingship endured modernity, it did so mutilated, humanised, profane. Only in the British Crown is the ancient inheritance preserved entire: a shard of Babylon or El-Ugarit on the banks of the Thames. When Charles emerged, anointed, from behind that screen, he was returning from somewhere in the deep past.
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