The Negus enters Axum in state, accompanied by his principal officers. At a little distance from the church he alights, and his progress is barred by a cord held across the road by young girls. Thrice they ask him who he is, and at first he answers that he is King of Jerusalem, or King of Sion, and at the third interrogation he draws his sword and cuts the cord, the girls thereupon crying out that he verily is their king, the King of Sion. He is met at the entrance of the church (or sometimes apparently in a tent which is perhaps a moveable church)[29] by the Abuna and the clergy, and enters to the accompaniment of music. He is anointed by the Abuna with sweet oil, all the priests present singing psalms the meanwhile. He is next invested with a royal mantle. Finally a crown of gold and silver, in the shape of a tiara and surmounted by a cross, is set on his head, and a naked sword denoting Justice is placed in his hand. The liturgy is then celebrated, and the Negus receives the Holy Sacrament. When he leaves the church the first chaplain ascends a lofty place and proclaims to the people that N. has been made to reign, and the assembly greet the new monarch with acclamations and good wishes, and come forward in order to kiss his hand.
Unfortunately none of the forms of this rite are accessible. The chief point of interest in it lies in the fact that the Negus is anointed. In view of the obscurity which shrouds the history of Abyssinia during the six centuries which followed the Arab conquest of Egypt it would be precarious to say whence this rite with the accompanying anointing was derived. It may have been an independent development in Abyssinia, derived from the accounts of the anointing of kings found in the Old Testament, more especially as many Judaising practices survive in Abyssinia.
CHAPTER III
THE ORIGIN OF THE WESTERN RITE
The Eastern rite was one and one only. There was only one monarch in the East to be crowned, and therefore the rite was subject only to a natural and internal development.
When, however, we turn to the history of the Western rite, we approach a very much more intricate matter, for the contemporary western documents give only general accounts and are not explicit as to details.
In the old Empire the coronation of the Emperor took place always at Constantinople and never at Rome, and therefore the old rite was essentially Eastern. When, however, the Neo-Roman Western Empire came into existence, and Charlemagne was crowned at Rome on Christmas day 800, there came into existence a Western Imperial rite. There is no record of the forms used, nor do we even know for certain what took place on that occasion, but we may perhaps presume that the Pope intended to do what was proper on the occasion of the accession of an emperor, and followed the Constantinopolitan ritual in outline, while it seems probable that the actual prayers used were Roman compositions made for the occasion. Here, at any rate, in the coronation of Charlemagne we have the beginnings of the Roman Imperial rite.
But if the coronation of Charlemagne marks the origin of the Western imperial rite, it does not mark the introduction into the West of the rite of the consecration of a king, for such a rite had already been in existence in Spain some two centuries before this time. Whether this Spanish rite, which appears to have been well established in the seventh century, was an independent religious developement of the ceremonies which seem to have been observed at the inauguration of a new chieftain among most of the northern peoples, or whether the idea of it was in any way borrowed from Constantinople, there is not sufficient evidence to show.
The Spanish rite was, as has been said, well established in the seventh century. In the canons of the sixth council of Toledo in 638 a reference is made to the oath taken by a Spanish monarch. Julian Bishop of Toledo in his Historia Wambae[30] gives a short description of the anointing of King Wamba, at which he himself was present in 672, and in his account speaks of the customs observed on such occasions. It is then abundantly clear that a consecration ceremony was observed at the accession of the kings of Spain some two centuries before the rite of the coronation was introduced at Rome.