About Me

I'm a PhD student researching the role of the archaeological dead in contemporary British society. Think of this as a scrapbook of all the interesting links, snippets of information and random bits and bobs I come across pertaining to death, dying and the dead. Enjoy?!

Instagram Shots

    See more

    More liked posts

    Vatican denounces Mexico Death Saint

    A senior Vatican official has condemned the cult of Santa Muerte, or Holy Death, in Mexico as “blasphemous”.

    The president of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Culture, Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, said worshipping Santa Muerte was a “degeneration of religion”.

    Cardinal Ravasi spoke at a series of events for believers and non-believers in Mexico City.

    The cult, which reveres death, has been growing rapidly in Mexico.

    It is represented by a cloaked female skeleton clutching a scythe.

    It is particularly popular in areas of Mexico that have suffered from extreme violence carried out by the country’s drug cartels.

    The cult is believed to date back to colonial times.

    It merges indigenous beliefs with the tradition of venerating saints introduced by Christian missionaries after the Spanish conquest of Mexico.

    (Source: BBC News)

    All the Saints You Should Know: (This week I’m going to mix it up a little bit and publish a...

    allthesaintsyoushouldknow:

    (This week I’m going to mix it up a little bit and publish a long(er)-form piece I’ve been working on about the role of eating disorders and self-harm among female saints. Trigger warnings ahoy.)

    I’ll admit to a certain macabre fascination with mortification of the flesh, the Catholic…

    Orthodox Jewish man photographed covering himself in plastic bag during flight because faith forbids him to fly over cemeteriesA startling photo of a plane passenger who wrapped himself in a plastic bag for his flight has hit the internet.   The man dressed entirely in black beneath folds of plastic, sightly bows his head beneath the tied ends seen piled on his head. The passengers behind him strain to catch a look.  The photo was posted to Reddit on Thursday amid suggestions that the man is a Kohein, religious descendant of the priests of ancient Israel, who are banned from flying over cemeteries. Many wrap themselves in plastic bags as a compromise measure. ‘In orthodox and Conservative communities, Kohanim,’ plural of Kohein ‘are expected to abstain from coming in contact with the dead, which includes a prohibition on visiting cemeteries except for the funerals of close relatives,’ Rabbi Jeffrey W. Goldwasser writes in an article for About.com. As a controversial solution - not entirely agreed upon even by those in the Jewish Orthodox - the plastic bag used by the man here, would create a kind of barrier between the kohein and the surrounding tumah, or impurity. Some flights also go to great lengths to take specific paths to avoid cemeteries. Passengers can also be made aware in advance if a body will be aboard the plane in cargo. (Source: The Daily Mail)

    Orthodox Jewish man photographed covering himself in plastic bag during flight because faith forbids him to fly over cemeteries

    A startling photo of a plane passenger who wrapped himself in a plastic bag for his flight has hit the internet.  

    The man dressed entirely in black beneath folds of plastic, sightly bows his head beneath the tied ends seen piled on his head. The passengers behind him strain to catch a look. 

    The photo was posted to Reddit on Thursday amid suggestions that the man is a Kohein, religious descendant of the priests of ancient Israel, who are banned from flying over cemeteries.

    Many wrap themselves in plastic bags as a compromise measure.

    ‘In orthodox and Conservative communities, Kohanim,’ plural of Kohein ‘are expected to abstain from coming in contact with the dead, which includes a prohibition on visiting cemeteries except for the funerals of close relatives,’ Rabbi Jeffrey W. Goldwasser writes in an article for About.com.

    As a controversial solution - not entirely agreed upon even by those in the Jewish Orthodox - the plastic bag used by the man here, would create a kind of barrier between the kohein and the surrounding tumah, or impurity.

    Some flights also go to great lengths to take specific paths to avoid cemeteries. Passengers can also be made aware in advance if a body will be aboard the plane in cargo.

    (Source: The Daily Mail)

    sparkypoo: Artist’s impression of the Shanidar Cave ‘flower burial’.The grave site of Shanidar IV (the 60,000 year-old skeletal remains of an adult male Neanderthal) was found to contain high concentrations of pollen; far more than expected for natural placement. Upon examination of these concentrated pollen samples,it was found that the overwhelming majority of plant species had medicinal properties, pointing to a potential deliberate inhumation with symbolic meaning. Could Homo Neanderthalensis contemplate the notion of life after death? Shanidar, as well as other sites such as Kebara, give us insights into the social lives of our sister species. We might never know whether or not these ‘burials’ were, in fact, intentional - but we can certainly continue to question the Neanderthal stereotype. 

    sparkypoo:

    Artist’s impression of the Shanidar Cave ‘flower burial’.

    The grave site of Shanidar IV (the 60,000 year-old skeletal remains of an adult male Neanderthal) was found to contain high concentrations of pollen; far more than expected for natural placement. Upon examination of these concentrated pollen samples,it was found that the overwhelming majority of plant species had medicinal properties, pointing to a potential deliberate inhumation with symbolic meaning. 

    Could Homo Neanderthalensis contemplate the notion of life after death? Shanidar, as well as other sites such as Kebara, give us insights into the social lives of our sister species. We might never know whether or not these ‘burials’ were, in fact, intentional - but we can certainly continue to question the Neanderthal stereotype. 

    (via theolduvaigorge)

    Halloween Customs in the Celtic World By Bettina Arnold Paper given at the UWM Center for Celtic Studies Halloween Inaugural Celebration, on October 31, 2011 Introduction: Night of the spirits; Feast of the Dead; New Year’s Eve; the year’s turning; Calends of winter; Summer’s End; one of the “joints of the year”; beginning of the barren time; day of divination; festival of the harvest; doorway into the new year; Mischief Night; Punky Night; Samhain; Nos Calan gaeaf; All Hallow’s Eve. These are all descriptions of one of the most important seasonal festivals of the Celtic world, the night of October 31, this evening, Halloween. In Wales it is known as Hollantide, in Cornwall Allantide, and in Brittany Kala-Goanv. Samain’s equivalent on the Christian calendar is All Saints’ Day, introduced by the Catholic church partly to supplant the pagan festival of the dead. Halloween’s counterpart is the other great “hinge of the year”, April 30, Beltain or May Day Eve, which marks the beginning of summer. To understand the significance of these seasonal festivals, we need to step back in time for a moment, closer to the food production cycle than most of us are today. In pre-Christian Europe, most important holidays were celebrated on the evening of the day before the actual date of the transition from one season to the next, since the easiest way of measuring the passing of time was by observing a complete cycle of the moon – the origin of the english word “month”. Full paper here.

    Halloween Customs in the Celtic World

    By Bettina Arnold

    Paper given at the UWM Center for Celtic Studies Halloween Inaugural Celebration, on October 31, 2011

    Introduction: Night of the spirits; Feast of the Dead; New Year’s Eve; the year’s turning; Calends of winter; Summer’s End; one of the “joints of the year”; beginning of the barren time; day of divination; festival of the harvest; doorway into the new year; Mischief Night; Punky Night; Samhain; Nos Calan gaeaf; All Hallow’s Eve. These are all descriptions of one of the most important seasonal festivals of the Celtic world, the night of October 31, this evening, Halloween. In Wales it is known as Hollantide, in Cornwall Allantide, and in Brittany Kala-Goanv. Samain’s equivalent on the Christian calendar is All Saints’ Day, introduced by the Catholic church partly to supplant the pagan festival of the dead.

    Halloween’s counterpart is the other great “hinge of the year”, April 30, Beltain or May Day Eve, which marks the beginning of summer. To understand the significance of these seasonal festivals, we need to step back in time for a moment, closer to the food production cycle than most of us are today. In pre-Christian Europe, most important holidays were celebrated on the evening of the day before the actual date of the transition from one season to the next, since the easiest way of measuring the passing of time was by observing a complete cycle of the moon – the origin of the english word “month”.

    Full paper here.

    Exorcism boom in Poland sees magazine launch

    With exorcism booming in Poland, Roman Catholic priests here have joined forces with a publisher to launch what they claim is the world’s first monthly magazine focused exclusively on chasing out the devil.

    “The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling,” Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy, theology and leading demonologist and exorcist told reporters in Warsaw at the Monday launch of the Egzorcysta monthly.

    Ironically, he attributed the rise in demonic possessions in what remains one of Europe’s most devoutly Catholic nations partly to the switch from atheist communism to free market capitalism in 1989.

    “It’s indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation,” Posacki told AFP.

    “If people can make money out of it, naturally it grows and its spiritual harm grows too,” he said, hastening to add authentic exorcism is absolutely free of charge.

    Full story here!

    • Posted 8 months ago
    • September 11th, 2012

    5 Likes & Reblogs

    The Immortality Project

    Millions of people fervently believe in an afterlife. John Martin Fischer, a philosopher at the University of California at Riverside, is not one of them.

    But Mr. Fischer does see the subject as ripe for academic research, and on Tuesday the John Templeton Foundation awarded him a windfall to make that happen—$5-million for a multidisciplinary investigation of human immortality.

    The three-year effort may look at questions like how belief in an afterlife influences human behavior and how near-death experiences vary across cultures. In America, for example, many who survive such events report seeing a tunnel with a light at the end. For Japanese people, the experiences often involve visions of tending a garden.

    The Immortality Project will invite research proposals from philosophers, theologians, and scientists. Stressing interdisciplinary projects, it will award grants ranging from $100,000 to $250,000. There will also be two conferences and a Web site.

    Click through for the rest of the article.

    Mysterious 1200AD temple under Mexico City has bodies of 15 children - and a dog slain to keep them company in the afterlife  Archaeologists in Mexico City have unearthed the skulls and other bones of 15 people, most of them the children of traveling merchants during Aztec times.  The mysterious mass grave had a ceremonial purpose, researchers say - and the children were surrounded by religious items including a dog sacrificed to ‘keep them company.’ It pains me to link to stories from the Daily Mail, it really does, but this is an interesting discovery and so needs must!

    Mysterious 1200AD temple under Mexico City has bodies of 15 children - and a dog slain to keep them company in the afterlife 

    Archaeologists in Mexico City have unearthed the skulls and other bones of 15 people, most of them the children of traveling merchants during Aztec times. 

    The mysterious mass grave had a ceremonial purpose, researchers say - and the children were surrounded by religious items including a dog sacrificed to ‘keep them company.’

    It pains me to link to stories from the Daily Mail, it really does, but this is an interesting discovery and so needs must!

    Vampire beliefs still have bite The recently discovered ‘vampire’ skeletons in Bulgaria may be centuries old but some blood-sucking superstitions refuse to die The unearthed skeleton, pinned down through the chest with iron rod, in an excavation site in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Photograph: National History Museum of Bulgaria/HO/EPA Last weekend, Bulgarian archaeologists working near the Black Sea town of Sozopol unearthed centuries-old skeletons pinned down through their chests with iron rods. Interestingly, this technique was evidently used to “stop the dead from becoming vampires”: people who had been “unusual” in life (alcoholics, criminals and assorted outsiders) were automatically suspect, even before any vampiric assaults had actually occurred. The Bulgarian finds were mere youngsters by comparison with the deviant burials unearthed in Mikulovice, in the Czech Republic, a few years ago. There, the bodies weighted down with rocks were thought to be around 5,000 years old. In the age of modern “vampotainment” – with Johnny Depp recently offering yet another vampire who many women (and men) would die for – we might forget that vampires were not invented for fun. For most of history, vampirism was the subject of mind-shattering terror. During a vampire outbreak, everyone would routinely flee their houses and sleep together in one building. Meanwhile, there was the question of those who fell into a coma. In Greece, one family was so terrified that their comatose daughter risked becoming undead that they buried her alive, against the desperate pleas of the local doctor (secretly, he opened up her grave that night, only to have her die in his arms). In the same country, another luckless man woke from a coma at his own funeral, in his open coffin. Sadly, this was no cause for celebration. Traumatised by this vampiric being, the villagers stoned him to death. Oh, I do love a good vampire skeleton news story! Click through to read the rest of the article.

    Vampire beliefs still have bite

    The recently discovered ‘vampire’ skeletons in Bulgaria may be centuries old but some blood-sucking superstitions refuse to die

    The unearthed skeleton, pinned down through the chest with iron rod, in an excavation site in Sozopol, Bulgaria. Photograph: National History Museum of Bulgaria/HO/EPA

    Last weekend, Bulgarian archaeologists working near the Black Sea town of Sozopol unearthed centuries-old skeletons pinned down through their chests with iron rods. Interestingly, this technique was evidently used to “stop the dead from becoming vampires”: people who had been “unusual” in life (alcoholics, criminals and assorted outsiders) were automatically suspect, even before any vampiric assaults had actually occurred. The Bulgarian finds were mere youngsters by comparison with the deviant burials unearthed in Mikulovice, in the Czech Republic, a few years ago. There, the bodies weighted down with rocks were thought to be around 5,000 years old.

    In the age of modern “vampotainment” – with Johnny Depp recently offering yet another vampire who many women (and men) would die for – we might forget that vampires were not invented for fun. For most of history, vampirism was the subject of mind-shattering terror. During a vampire outbreak, everyone would routinely flee their houses and sleep together in one building. Meanwhile, there was the question of those who fell into a coma. In Greece, one family was so terrified that their comatose daughter risked becoming undead that they buried her alive, against the desperate pleas of the local doctor (secretly, he opened up her grave that night, only to have her die in his arms). In the same country, another luckless man woke from a coma at his own funeral, in his open coffin. Sadly, this was no cause for celebration. Traumatised by this vampiric being, the villagers stoned him to death.

    Oh, I do love a good vampire skeleton news story! Click through to read the rest of the article.

    Preserved heart of Dublin's patron saint stolen from cathedral

    Thieves have stolen the preserved heart of Dublin’s patron saint from the city’s Christ Church cathedral.

    In the latest in a spate of holy relic raids to hit the Irish Republic, the 12th century heart of Saint Laurence O’ Toole was taken from Saint Lauds Chapel within the cathedral.

    Investigating gardai believe it was taken some time between last night and around 12.30pm Saturday afternoon.

    The saint’s preserved heart was kept in a wooden heart-shaped container sealed within a small iron barred box.

    The latest bizarre church theft follows two others in recent months.

    How to honour the ancient dead The pagan debate about the treatment of ancient remains sheds light on our own beliefs as well as those of the past Regrettably, there’s little evidence that the contemporary pagan festival of Samhain (aka Halloween) has the ancient origins claimed for it by many. It seems likely that modern paganism took the idea of the festival being dedicated to the dead and to the ancestors from the Catholic tradition, rather than the other way around. However, at the risk of sounding cavalier, traditions do change and mutate and most of the pagan community will, at this time of year, be undertaking some kind of ritual work that pays respect to the departed. But what does that really mean? I’ve been marking the season by reading Steve Mithen’s excellent After the Ice, a global look at human history from 20,000 to 5,000BC. Using the narrative device of a time-travelling anthropologist, Mithen’s book traverses the world, from the Fertile Crescent to Europe, the Americans and beyond. The impression that the reader gets is both excitingly diverse and depressingly familiar: tales of human ingenuity in the face of extreme climatic shift, but also tales of a widespread tendency to screw up the immediate environment (as with the Mesolithic visitors to Colonsay, who processed hazelnuts in such industrial quantities that the crop never recovered). A great deal of Mithen’s book necessarily relates to burial customs. While there is clear evidence for those burials in the form of bones, grave goods and so on, the beliefs which lay behind them remain obviously opaque: it’s difficult enough to try to put yourself in the mindset of, say, a comparatively recent Anglo-Saxon, let alone trying to evaluate the beliefs of anyone this far back. Perhaps one of the most poignant burials – a young mother and her baby from Vedbaek in Denmark, the child laid on a swan’s wing – could have a number of interpretations (the child’s spirit being carried downriver, up into the sky, or the wing simply forming a mark of respect or a convenient receptacle). The academic treatment of burials such as these splits the pagan community: there are those who are campaigning for the reburial of ancient remains, such as Honouring the Ancient Dead (HAD), once information has been gleaned from them, and those who feel that those remains are primarily archaeological artefacts which should be retained for study in the event of new data-gathering techniques coming into use. Organisations like Pagans for Archaeology not only question the need for reburial, but are in many cases opposed to it. “Respect,” says the PFA’s website, “should mean memory, which involves recovering the stories of past people.” (They’re also against littering ancient sites with tea lights and crystals – even if one has no particular horse in the reburial race, this does seem entirely reasonable.) I will admit to a bias in favour of the PFA’s approach. This is not so much because I’m basically opposed to the ideas championed by HAD, which are commendably nuanced – they’re mainly concerned with remains that have no further research potential, do not claim that reburial should be mandatory, and they take on board the need for study. Nor do they claim that they know what kind of rites would originally have been used, or what kind of religious beliefs lay behind any particular form of burial. HAD’s restraint is laudable, but I remain embarrassed by the less sophisticated “arguments” for mandatory reburial that the tabloid press tend to get hold of and which tend to focus around the high-visibility sites of Stonehenge and Avebury – this is where you get people claiming that any uncovered bones are their personal ancestors, or that they’re channelling the dead person’s wishes – this is a bit of a paper tiger as far as an argument in favour of reburial goes, but it does make a lot of pagans cringe, including me. I don’t think anyone’s gone as far as claiming that they’re a reincarnated version, but it’s only a matter of time. Any attempt to second-guess what ancient people would have wanted is just that: a guess at worst, a hypothesis at best. There is no secure cultural affinity between ancient pagans and modern ones, and the language game issue promoted by Wittgenstein holds: entering someone else’s world view, especially across such a span of time is next to impossible. The debate relating to ancestral reburial is significant for what it tells us about our own beliefs, as with all historical research, we learn about ourselves as well as the past. But as far as contemporary paganism goes, our own notions of showing respect for the ancestors remain just that – our own. Via the Guardian

    How to honour the ancient dead

    The pagan debate about the treatment of ancient remains sheds light on our own beliefs as well as those of the past

    Regrettably, there’s little evidence that the contemporary pagan festival of Samhain (aka Halloween) has the ancient origins claimed for it by many. It seems likely that modern paganism took the idea of the festival being dedicated to the dead and to the ancestors from the Catholic tradition, rather than the other way around. However, at the risk of sounding cavalier, traditions do change and mutate and most of the pagan community will, at this time of year, be undertaking some kind of ritual work that pays respect to the departed. But what does that really mean?

    I’ve been marking the season by reading Steve Mithen’s excellent After the Ice, a global look at human history from 20,000 to 5,000BC. Using the narrative device of a time-travelling anthropologist, Mithen’s book traverses the world, from the Fertile Crescent to Europe, the Americans and beyond. The impression that the reader gets is both excitingly diverse and depressingly familiar: tales of human ingenuity in the face of extreme climatic shift, but also tales of a widespread tendency to screw up the immediate environment (as with the Mesolithic visitors to Colonsay, who processed hazelnuts in such industrial quantities that the crop never recovered).

    A great deal of Mithen’s book necessarily relates to burial customs. While there is clear evidence for those burials in the form of bones, grave goods and so on, the beliefs which lay behind them remain obviously opaque: it’s difficult enough to try to put yourself in the mindset of, say, a comparatively recent Anglo-Saxon, let alone trying to evaluate the beliefs of anyone this far back. Perhaps one of the most poignant burials – a young mother and her baby from Vedbaek in Denmark, the child laid on a swan’s wing – could have a number of interpretations (the child’s spirit being carried downriver, up into the sky, or the wing simply forming a mark of respect or a convenient receptacle).

    The academic treatment of burials such as these splits the pagan community: there are those who are campaigning for the reburial of ancient remains, such as Honouring the Ancient Dead (HAD), once information has been gleaned from them, and those who feel that those remains are primarily archaeological artefacts which should be retained for study in the event of new data-gathering techniques coming into use. Organisations like Pagans for Archaeology not only question the need for reburial, but are in many cases opposed to it. “Respect,” says the PFA’s website, “should mean memory, which involves recovering the stories of past people.” (They’re also against littering ancient sites with tea lights and crystals – even if one has no particular horse in the reburial race, this does seem entirely reasonable.)

    I will admit to a bias in favour of the PFA’s approach. This is not so much because I’m basically opposed to the ideas championed by HAD, which are commendably nuanced – they’re mainly concerned with remains that have no further research potential, do not claim that reburial should be mandatory, and they take on board the need for study. Nor do they claim that they know what kind of rites would originally have been used, or what kind of religious beliefs lay behind any particular form of burial.

    HAD’s restraint is laudable, but I remain embarrassed by the less sophisticated “arguments” for mandatory reburial that the tabloid press tend to get hold of and which tend to focus around the high-visibility sites of Stonehenge and Avebury – this is where you get people claiming that any uncovered bones are their personal ancestors, or that they’re channelling the dead person’s wishes – this is a bit of a paper tiger as far as an argument in favour of reburial goes, but it does make a lot of pagans cringe, including me. I don’t think anyone’s gone as far as claiming that they’re a reincarnated version, but it’s only a matter of time.

    Any attempt to second-guess what ancient people would have wanted is just that: a guess at worst, a hypothesis at best. There is no secure cultural affinity between ancient pagans and modern ones, and the language game issue promoted by Wittgenstein holds: entering someone else’s world view, especially across such a span of time is next to impossible. The debate relating to ancestral reburial is significant for what it tells us about our own beliefs, as with all historical research, we learn about ourselves as well as the past. But as far as contemporary paganism goes, our own notions of showing respect for the ancestors remain just that – our own.

    Via the Guardian

    Zombie, vampire or saint? A grave disturbed, the coffin opened, and the body of a young girl, years dead, freakishly un-decomposed: Undead monster or miracle of faith? It depends on who’s asking.  Under other circumstances, being discovered in a state of less than natural rot can be bad news for a corpse. In Germany and Italy such undecayed dead were considered highly suspect and likely to be named vampire and have a brick crammed in their undead mouth. But the rules are different for potential saints. Where some see evidence of the rampaging undead, and others might see a really just slightly-less-than-funky corpse, the right people saw what has been come to be called “incorruptibility” - which is a good thing if you want to be saint. It’s also a good thing if you are a local church that would like to lure visitors by displaying a dead lady in a box for a few hundred years. First class relics, or bodies and parts of bodies of saints, have long been among the Catholic church’s most revered artifacts, and these “Incorruptibles” are the best one might ask for, in terms of attracting the curious masses into your church. The mysteriously preserved body of a the particularly pious were seen as an indication of potential saintliness, their exhumed bodies expected to give off a sweet odor known as the “Odor of Sanctity”. This alone was not reason for canonization, but it was a step in the right direction.  There are in reality, many reasons a corpse might not decay at a normal rate. In cases of a cold and humid environment, a process known as adipocere can transform the body’s fat into a waxy substance resistant to decay. Bodies buried in lime can become saponified, transforming that fat into something akin to soap. And finally, a dry environment can of course naturally produce the kind of mummies our favorite Wild West museums have propped up in corners. Whatever the cause, there are LOTS of dessicated saints on display, some dating back hundreds of years and others recent enough to have been photographed in life. In some cases, the term “incorruptible” seems perhaps overly generous. When the devout and lovely-in-life Bernadette of Lourdes was exhumed in 1919, a witness described the body thus: “The body is practically mummified, covered with patches of mildew and quite a notable layer of salts, which appear to be calcium salts… The skin has disappeared in some places, but it is still present on most parts of the body.” Readers of the above might be surprised to find out that not only was this considered good news and proof of incorruptibility, but that her mildewed and skinless corpse has been on display in a fairy tale style glass coffin for nearly a hundred years, and is widely considered to be among the most beautiful of the holy dead. However, seekers of proof of the miraculous might benefit from knowing that the hauntingly beautiful face and hands seen by thousands of pilgrims were in fact made by a designer of fashion mannequins in Paris.  Via Atlas Obscura

    Zombie, vampire or saint?

    A grave disturbed, the coffin opened, and the body of a young girl, years dead, freakishly un-decomposed: Undead monster or miracle of faith? It depends on who’s asking. 

    Under other circumstances, being discovered in a state of less than natural rot can be bad news for a corpse. In Germany and Italy such undecayed dead were considered highly suspect and likely to be named vampire and have a brick crammed in their undead mouth.

    But the rules are different for potential saints. Where some see evidence of the rampaging undead, and others might see a really just slightly-less-than-funky corpse, the right people saw what has been come to be called “incorruptibility” - which is a good thing if you want to be saint. It’s also a good thing if you are a local church that would like to lure visitors by displaying a dead lady in a box for a few hundred years.

    First class relics, or bodies and parts of bodies of saints, have long been among the Catholic church’s most revered artifacts, and these “Incorruptibles” are the best one might ask for, in terms of attracting the curious masses into your church. The mysteriously preserved body of a the particularly pious were seen as an indication of potential saintliness, their exhumed bodies expected to give off a sweet odor known as the “Odor of Sanctity”. This alone was not reason for canonization, but it was a step in the right direction. 

    There are in reality, many reasons a corpse might not decay at a normal rate. In cases of a cold and humid environment, a process known as adipocere can transform the body’s fat into a waxy substance resistant to decay. Bodies buried in lime can become saponified, transforming that fat into something akin to soap. And finally, a dry environment can of course naturally produce the kind of mummies our favorite Wild West museums have propped up in corners.

    Whatever the cause, there are LOTS of dessicated saints on display, some dating back hundreds of years and others recent enough to have been photographed in life.

    In some cases, the term “incorruptible” seems perhaps overly generous. When the devout and lovely-in-life Bernadette of Lourdes was exhumed in 1919, a witness described the body thus:

    “The body is practically mummified, covered with patches of mildew and quite a notable layer of salts, which appear to be calcium salts… The skin has disappeared in some places, but it is still present on most parts of the body.”

    Readers of the above might be surprised to find out that not only was this considered good news and proof of incorruptibility, but that her mildewed and skinless corpse has been on display in a fairy tale style glass coffin for nearly a hundred years, and is widely considered to be among the most beautiful of the holy dead. However, seekers of proof of the miraculous might benefit from knowing that the hauntingly beautiful face and hands seen by thousands of pilgrims were in fact made by a designer of fashion mannequins in Paris. 

    Via Atlas Obscura

    The Santa Muerte cult of Mexico… A goddess worshipped with cigarettes and alcohol in a Mexico City backstreet shrine? That’ll be La Santa Muerte. I was 24 years old and living in Mexico City when I first encountered the Saint of Death. The image of the grim reaper was everywhere in Mexico; it dangled from the rear-view mirror of nearly every taxi and bus, and was sold in the markets at the witchcraft stalls among the herbs, candles and images of Mary and Jesus. Here, the personification of death was known by a different name – La Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death. Although many of her devotees would happily classify their beliefs as Catholic, the church does not agree that the Grim Reaper is a saint. Some bishops condemn her followers as devil worshippers; others argue that it’s just an unfortunate theological misunderstanding. Regardless, the Santa Muerte “cult” is the fastest-growing religious sect in Mexico, with more than two million followers in Mexico City alone. It fascinated me how death itself could be considered a saint. I had read that in pre-Columbian cultures images of skeletons often symbolised health and fertility. And I liked the fact that this rogue saint, who was not a concoction of the Catholic church, was busily winning over hearts and minds. I wanted to learn more.. Photograph: In Mexico City, figurines of Santa Muerte are displayed outside the shrine, Jan Sochor/Alamy Click through to read the rest of this short but interesting article by Lucy Neville of The Guardian, which caught my eye as I’m off to Mexico myself next month…meeps! 

    The Santa Muerte cult of Mexico…

    A goddess worshipped with cigarettes and alcohol in a Mexico City backstreet shrine? That’ll be La Santa Muerte.

    I was 24 years old and living in Mexico City when I first encountered the Saint of Death. The image of the grim reaper was everywhere in Mexico; it dangled from the rear-view mirror of nearly every taxi and bus, and was sold in the markets at the witchcraft stalls among the herbs, candles and images of Mary and Jesus.

    Here, the personification of death was known by a different name – La Santa Muerte, the Saint of Death. Although many of her devotees would happily classify their beliefs as Catholic, the church does not agree that the Grim Reaper is a saint. Some bishops condemn her followers as devil worshippers; others argue that it’s just an unfortunate theological misunderstanding. Regardless, the Santa Muerte “cult” is the fastest-growing religious sect in Mexico, with more than two million followers in Mexico City alone.

    It fascinated me how death itself could be considered a saint. I had read that in pre-Columbian cultures images of skeletons often symbolised health and fertility. And I liked the fact that this rogue saint, who was not a concoction of the Catholic church, was busily winning over hearts and minds. I wanted to learn more..

    Photograph: In Mexico City, figurines of Santa Muerte are displayed outside the shrine, Jan Sochor/Alamy

    Click through to read the rest of this short but interesting article by Lucy Neville of The Guardian, which caught my eye as I’m off to Mexico myself next month…meeps!