Awesome Moment Of Crowning / Real Life

• The ancient Egyptians make this one Older Than Dirt (as always). While records are not perfectly clear on the details, it is clear that Egyptian monarchs marked the formal beginnings of their reigns with a ceremony, and that no later than the New Kingdom this involved placing a Cool Crown on the new pharaoh's head. Actually, two cool crowns; the surviving texts from the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties suggest that the ceremony involved two clerics, the high priest of Ra and the high priest of Amun, respectively carrying the Deshret (the hollow, crested Red Crown of Lower Egypt) and the Hedjet (the ninepin-shaped White Crown of Upper Egypt) into the hall. The priest of Ra would place the Deshret on the king's head first, and the priest of Amun would follow by placing the Hedjet inside the hollow of the Deshret, creating the Pschent, the Double Crown of united Egypt. Significantly, Ra's cult was based in the Lower Egyptian city of Iunu (Heliopolis to the Greeks, because, er, it was the center of the cult of Ra, who was principally a sun god), while the cult of Amun was based in the Upper Egyptian city of Waset (Thebes to the Greeks). The ceremony thus symbolized both the political and the religious unity of the Two Lands that made up Egypt in the person of the pharaoh. (Note: The Egyptian kings had always had crowns—the Narmer Pallette, dated to c. 3100 BCE, shows King Narmer, the founder of the First Dynasty (so far as we can tell), wearing both crowns (separately, in different images on different sides of the carved stone), and carvings from the First Dynasty show the Pschent. However, records of an actual coronation ceremony are hard to find before the Eighteenth Dynasty.) Interestingly, much like more modern coronations, the coronations of Egyptian monarchs were commonly delayed several months to allow time for the deceased king's funeral^note Which was usually 2-3 months after the old monarch's death, as the "full" mummification process afforded to royalty involved a 5-10-week rest in natron and for coronation preparations. The delay was also done to ensure an auspicious date for the ceremony; typically, a pharaoh wanted the start of his reign to coincide with the start of one of Egypt's four-month seasons, and most preferably at the start of Akhet, the Inundation (i.e. the annual Nile flood), which marked the New Year. That said, the Egyptians didn't generally go for full-year delays—one or two seasons at most.
• Charlemagne's crowning as Imperator Romanorum in 800 was seen as a symbolic rebirth of the Western Roman Empire and the ushering in of a new age of enlightenment for Western Europe, and a moment that fired the imaginations of writers and artists for centuries afterward. In reality the whole affair was a study in Realpolitik. The title of "Roman Emperor" was largely an honorific one at that point in history, with very little actual authority attached to it. But by declaring a local warlord as the custodian and guardian of Rome's legacy, the Papacy was able to shut the The Byzantine Empire out of Western Europe's affairs and reassert its authority in the region. That being said, Charlemagne took his role as Emperor quite seriously, and made full use of his symbolic authority to try and restore civilization and improve the quality of life in the regions he controlled.
• Napoleon's coronation culminated in his taking the crown from Pope Pius VII and crowning himself. The gesture had actually been arranged beforehand, as a way of stating his right to rule derived from his merits and the will of the people rather than the Divine Right of Kings.
• Weddings in Ukrainian culture involve the bride and groom wearing and swapping symbolic crowns for portions of the ceremony, sharing the custom with Orthodox Christian weddings. It's really cool to watch.
• The coronation of Jean-Bédel Bokassa, the psychotic dictator of the Central African Republic from 1966-1979. In 1977, he declared himself Emperor of his country and replicated the coronation of Napoleon as best he could. It instead nearly bankrupted the country, everyone thought he was nuts, and several foreign leaders even snubbed his invitations. Like Bonaparte, he also tried to get the Pope to crown him, but this was also unsuccessful. Bokassa replicated everything from the robes he wore to the ceremonial carriage, and like Napoleon, seized the crown and placed it on his own head. The excesses of Bokassa's coronation, combined with growing dissent against his rule and an incident where 100 children were killed by his goons for refusing to wear government-required school uniforms with his image on them, eventually led to his overthrow in 1979.
• The British coronation ceremony is pretty boss. Especially Elizabeth II's, which was commemorated by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reaching the summit of Mt Everest. The whole thing gets even more epic when one realizes that the fundamentals of the ceremony literally go back 1,000 years, to the coronation of Edgar the Peaceful by Saint Dunstan in 973 during the Anglo-Saxon Golden Age.
  • Bonus points for the Coronation Anthems, one of which, George Frederic Handel's "Zadok the Priest", is one of the most epic pieces of music ever written, hands down.
  • Legend has it that when King William I of England was crowned, the roaring cheers of the Normans there were so deafening that the guards outside, fearing that there had been an uprising, burned the wooden Westminster Abbey to the ground. William had to continue the coronation in front of a collapsing, blazing cathedral.
  • Averted after the queens and kings of the United Kingdom became Empresses and Emperors of India starting with Queen Victoria (i. e. from 1876 to 1948). George V eventually had an Imperial Crown made to wear at the Delhi Durbar in 1911 when he was proclaimed emperor, but there was no coronation (to hold such a ceremony was considered too problematic given that the British king was an Anglican Christian but the population of his Indian Empire overwhelmingly consisted of adherents of non-Christian religions, and even the Christians mostly weren't Anglican^note To wit: A plurality if not a majority of His Majesty's Indian subjects were Hindu, closely followed by Muslims, then the Sikhs. After the Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs came a panoply of smaller religious communities, of which the Christians were probably the largest. However, the great bulk of Indian Christians had nothing to do with the Brits and their Anglicanism, try as they might. The biggest sects in India were the Eastern Catholic and Oriental Orthodox churches of the St Thomas Christians of South India, whose community stretches back to the earliest days of Christianity. A not insignificant number of Indians had also been brought into the Latin-Rite Roman Catholic Church through various missions, most especially around Goa (with its heavily Portuguese-influenced culture). (Indeed, today, the Latin Rite Catholics are the largest single sect of Indian Christians, thanks to a combination of healthy growth in traditional areas like Goa and to proselytism.) Protestantism was strong in the northeast of India, but these were generally old Dissenting sects like the Presbyterians, Methodists, and Baptists that had made a point of not being Church of England. Anglicanism was at best an also-ran.) and after George V complained about the crown being too heavy and uncomfortable to wear, neither of his two successors as king-emperor ever put it on.
• Subverted by the Netherlands: They have a monarch, and a crown, and a throne. When it’s time for a new monarch, they get to look at the crown, and then have to swear to uphold the constitution, as if they were a president. Also subverted by Denmark: there is no formal enthronement service; instead the Prime Minister and the new monarch appear on the balcony of Christansborg Palace and the Prime Minister announces "The King is dead/Long live the King." The first part of this phrase was omitted when Frederik X took the throne in January 2024, as his mother Queen Margrethe had abdicated instead of dying on the throne.
  • Indeed, the only time the Danish monarch ever comes into (relatively) close proximity with the crown, is when it is placed on the deceased monarch's coffin during the castrum doloris.

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