shanmonster | Sacred Fake: The Holy Prepuce (Reply)

Long before archaeology was ever called archaeology, there were people going around searching for historical artefacts. In particular, people sought out holy relics. A holy relic is a part of a venerated person, or a piece of an artefact associated with that person. Although many of the relics are fake (it's been said there were enough splinters of the True Cross to build an armada), these fakes were still items of import. In medieval Christianity, "the physical remains of saints and holy figures were considered an essential part of the faith, offering a powerful connection with Heaven" (1). Pilgrimages to holy relics were vital, and could be used as Indulgences to cut down on time languishing in Purgatory. The most important relics of all were the ones associated with Jesus Christ. Since he was believed to have physically ascended to Heaven, the opportunities to retrieve a piece of Jesus were slim, and limited to hair, blood, fingernail clippings, or his foreskin.

At one point in history, there were a reported eighteen foreskins of Christ floating around Europe. Barring some loaves-and-fishes-style miracles, it is obvious these can't have been real. Even if the foreskin of baby Jesus had been saved, such a tiny scrap of organic matter should have rotted away while he was still an infant.

Regardless, the relic(s), called the Holy Prepuce, got around. Determining the veracity of these relics was vital, and specialists arose. The most common testing method was a taste test. "A properly trained physician chosen by the local priest would chew the shriveled leather...to determine whether it was wholly or partly human" (2). When Pope Innocent III was called upon to pass judgement on the authenticity of one Holy Prepuce, he demurred (3). I can't say I blame him.

One such Holy Prepuce was personally delivered by an angel to Austrian nun Agnes Blannbekin in the thirteenth century (4).

"Crying and with compassion, she began to think about the foreskin of Christ, where it may be located [after the Resurrection]. And behold, soon she felt with the greatest sweetness on her tongue a little piece of skin alike the skin in an egg, which she swallowed. After she had swallowed it, she again felt the little skin on her tongue with sweetness as before, and again she swallowed it. And this happened to her about a hundred times. And when she felt it so frequently, she was tempted to touch it with her finger. And when she wanted to do so, that little skin went down her throat on its own. And it was told to her that the foreskin was resurrected with the Lord on the day of resurrection. And so great was the sweetness of tasting that little skin that she felt in all [her] limbs and parts of the limbs a sweet transformation" (5).

Since people have been making dick jokes for thousands of years, much to the displeasure of the Catholic Church, the topic of the holy foreskin was a source of ribaldry. By 1900, they'd had enough of it, and it was decreed that talking about Holy Prepuce was an offense punishable by excommunication.

By the twentieth century, there was only one known holy foreskin, anyhow. It resided in Calcata, Italy. "For more than four centuries, the 'Holy Prepuce' had been the city's treasure, kept behind bronze doors over the altar in the Church of the Most Holy Name of Jesus. It was displayed every year on Jan. 1, the Feast of the Holy Circumcision", finally vanishing in 1983 (6).

Where did this relic end up? There are numerous speculations. Considering the fate of an earlier Holy Prepuce was transmogrification into the rings of Saturn (7), the hypothesis that it was reclaimed by the Vatican is quite reasonable (8).