The fourth chapter analyses what scholars have called ‘symbolic’ or ‘heavenly’ coronations in Byzantium. With the expansion of Christianity throughout the Mediterranean, self-coronation and the mediation of priests became a point of divergence. Emperors in Christian Byzantium are to be crowned by the patriarchs in ritual practice, but they are frequently crowned by the iconographic representation of the ‘hand of God’. This chapter engages in a comparative analysis of the reality of church intervention in the real performative ceremony of the imperial coronation and the imaginative fiction of the crowning of the emperor directly by Christ and his angels and saints, as established in some iconographic representations. In Byzantium, imperial art was given the task of translating into a visual and symbolic – but not necessarily referential – language the values and ideology that prevailed in each dynasty concerning the source of its power.

The second chapter explores diverse forms of mediation in pre-Christian civilisations, from the Israelite to the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Persian and Greek monarchies, and the symbolic meanings connected with the idea of ‘consecration without mediation’. Based on textual, epigraphic and iconographical evidence, it privileges the analysis of the royal investiture ceremony in Achaemenid and Sassanid Persia, since the practice of self-coronation decisively influenced subsequent periods, reaching Islamic and even contemporary Persia (including the self-coronations of Shah Reza Pahlavi in 1926 and his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1967) and expanding beyond its borders, in Byzantium and central Asia.The objective of this chapter is try to find proof of the growing presence of the investiture and coronation ceremony in the images and narrations that have been preserved from antiquity, such as cave reliefs, coins, murals and historical texts. A natural consequence of the consolidation of this ceremony among the monarchies of the ancient civilisations was the multiplication of the ritual forms in which it appeared, and the consequent images that preserved the ceremony or imagined it. These images necessarily imply, regardless of whether they had a ceremonial reality, the unequivocal message of consecration-without-mediation of the sovereign, a resistance to priestly mediation.