In the halcyon days of 2005, when Lost & Desperate Housewives were climbing the charts, and Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone was setting hearts alight, I wrote a blog post about a section of a strange old book I have. It details the supposed resting places of supposed sections of supposed saints. That is to say: it’s about religious relics. There are a surprising number of places claiming to posses body parts that were formerly in the possession of god’s chosen lackeys. Or perhaps what I found truly surprising was how frequently they seemed to be near to each other, or were specimens that no one ought to be be curious about, like “part of a head.”

 

the heads of st. james are very numerous: there is one in toulouse, while two are at venice (one in the church of st. george, another in the monastery of ss. philip and james). there are a skull and a vessel of the saint’s blood in the church of the apostles at rome, a head at valencia, another at amalfi, still another at st. vaast in artois, and part of a head at pistoja. bones, hands, and arms of the saint are scattered about in great numbers, and are shown at troyes, in sicily, on the island of capri, at pavia, in bavaria, at liege, at cologne, and in other places. some bones of the saint are shown in the escorial.”

so for those of you playing the home game that’s like 15 whole bodies for one person.

can you imagine the rivalry between those two churches in the same town that both say they’ve got this guy’s head?

 

In the time since I wrote that, all-lower-caps writing has gone out of style, then back into style again, and a digitized version of the book I mention, Curiosities of Popular Customs and of Rites, Ceremonies, Observances, and Miscellaneous Antiquities by William S. Walsh has been made available online.

I was reminded of my morbid interest in this topic recently when I came across Atlas Obscura’s rundown of The Ultimate Guide to Scattered Body Parts which covers some of the same ground, but with a less 1898 point of view.

One assumes that this particular form of historical artifact preservation is a thing of the past, but you never know. Trends have a way of coming back around. There are a few figures from our era that might leave a bit of themselves for future generations to stick in a museum (or whatever the equivalent of museums end up being in the future). It’s well-known that Einstein’s brain was preserved after death, as well as was Ted Williams’…almost. Gene Roddenberry was launched into orbit, and Hunter S. Thompson was blasted out of a cannon. (Maybe someone still has the cannon.) Walt Disney was supposed to have been frozen, but that’s a myth. (A fable as firmly lodged in public imagination as his eponymous corporation’s dubious legal hold over its intellectual properties.) The blood-stained pink Chanel suit that Jackie Kennedy wore to her husband’s assassination is stored out of sight at the national archives, where it could go on display in the year 2103 at the earliest, as long as whoever JFK’s descendants are at the time decide it’s OK.

So having come to the end of this brief list I conjured out of my memory without trying very hard, I’m forced to admit that we’re not really any better than the people, centuries ago, who ended up creating the two-heads-in-a-town scenario from before. I didn’t want to have to hand it to them and their disturbing hobby, but I guess they showed me. Sorry historical weirdos.