The “Dark Relics” of Christianity: Preserved Skulls, Blood & Other Grim Artifacts

Chris­tian­i­ty often man­i­fests in pop­u­lar cul­ture through cel­e­bra­tions like Christ­mas and East­er, or icons like lambs and fish. Less often do you see it asso­ci­at­ed with vials of blood and dis­em­bod­ied heads. Yet as the new Hochela­ga video above reveals, the most famed Chris­t­ian arti­facts do tend toward the grue­some. Take one par­tic­u­lar­ly renowned exam­ple, the Shroud of Turin: hear the name, and you imag­ine a cloth bear­ing the image of Jesus Christ. But think about it a moment, and you remem­ber that it’s the blood­stained wrap­ping of a cru­ci­fied body — that is, if the tales told about it are true in the first place.

As with any reli­gious relics, you have to decide for your­self what to believe about all of these. If you pay a vis­it to the Basil­i­ca of St. Antho­ny in Pad­ua, you’ll see on dis­play the pre­served jaw of that holy fig­ure — which does, at least, look like a real human jaw. In south­east­ern France, at the basil­i­ca of Saint-Max­imin-la-Sainte-Baume, you’ll find a skull pur­port­ed to be that of Mary Mag­da­lene.

And we cer­tain­ly can’t rule out that it real­ly is, spec­u­la­tive though the evi­dence may be. The sit­u­a­tion grows some­what more com­pli­cat­ed with the head of John the Bap­tist — or rather, the heads of John the Bap­tist, four of which have been claimed in dif­fer­ent places so far.

“Dur­ing the Mid­dle Ages, relics were in high demand, and there were always peo­ple will­ing to sup­ply them,” explains Hochela­ga cre­ator Tom­mie Trelawny. “It’s often joked that, if you gath­ered all the alleged frag­ments of the true cross, you’d have enough wood to build a small for­est.” Even the Shroud of Turin has come under unfor­giv­ing scruti­ny. Radio­car­bon dat­ing has placed it in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, imply­ing a forgery, but more recent X‑ray tests sug­gest that its linen was made in the first cen­tu­ry, between the years 55 and 74: close enough to what we under­stand as the time of Jesus’ bur­ial. Debates over the authen­tic­i­ty of all these arti­facts will con­tin­ue for cen­turies — and quite pos­si­bly mil­len­nia — to come, but their pow­er­ful embod­i­ment of both “the deeply dis­turb­ing and the haunt­ing­ly beau­ti­ful” won’t fade away any time soon.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Our Depic­tion of Jesus Changed Over 2,000 Years and What He May Have Actu­al­ly Looked Like

The British Muse­um is Full of Loot­ed Arti­facts

Europe’s Old­est Intact Book Was Pre­served and Found in the Cof­fin of a Saint

Did Psy­che­del­ic Mush­rooms Appear in Medieval Chris­t­ian Art?: A Video Essay

The Real Sto­ry of East­er: How We Got from the First East­er in the Bible to Bun­nies, Eggs & Choco­late

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.