Theirs and Ours

If you followed the coronation of un-bonny King Charlie—as I hope all you aspiring ritualists of Pagandom did—you'll have seen the Sacring (lit. “making sacred”), i.e. Anointing, of the Sacred King.

Or, rather, you won't have seen it, since it was performed behind Ye Olde Anointyng Screene to protect Ye Royal Privacy (that's prih-vacy, with a short I).

Not to worry: it's all right there in the ritual script.

The AB of C (that's Archbishop of Canterbury) anoints the royal hands with holy oil.

“Be your hands anointed with holy oil,” he says.

Then the breast (“Be your breast anointed...”) and lastly the head (“Be your head...”).

Sacred kings are a big deal in the history of the Craft—take a look at Katherine Kurtz's Lammas Night* if you don't believe me—and we have our own version of the Sacring, which we call (in Witch) the Hallowing.

The accompanying verbal formulas I'm not at liberty to disclose, but the king-signing marks are there for all to see: right there in—incredibly enough—the slightly faded technicolor of the movie pagans love to hate, The Wicker Man.

(You can see it here. The Hallowing begins at 16:58.)

Our story so far:

The people of Summerisle strip Sergeant Howie (naked bodies don't scare pagans), ritually wash and dry him.

Then they anoint him.

• Right breast (right and left here are from the king's perspective)
• Left breast
• Right breast (again)
• Sternum
• Solar Plexus
• Brow

Why these five places? That, you'll have to figure out for yourself.

(To do so, you can start here. The King-making of Artos the Bear in Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset will also give you a good leg up on inner meanings.)

Western pagans haven't had kings for a while now. (The last pagan king of Britain died in 573, the last in Europe—Lithuania, to be specific—in 1341.) But who knows?

Things aren't always going to be the way that they are now. Sooner or later, the (unholy) oil is going to run out/become prohibitively expensive, and then the world is going to get both a lot larger, and a lot smaller, than it is now.

So, as for those king-marks: while this may seem arcane and bootless information now, it's the responsibility of those of us who inherit Received Tradition to hand it on intact, “whole and all,” even the parts that seem to us irrelevant.

Who knows what need they may serve, in days to come?

*Unsurprisingly, though—Kurtz isn't pagan—the Sacring signs cited in the novel (p. 405) reflect the New, not the Old, usage.

Above:

Ampulla (oil flask) and anointing spoon

British Crown Jewels