All Hallows' Eve Countdown: Fake Saints from the Catacombs

Art historian Paul Koudounaris has just published a book about fake saints' skeletons. These macabre faux relics were created in the 1500s by Catholic authorities during the Counter-Reformation. They reveal the oddly literal-minded and powerful Catholic tradition with which Luther contended, since these jewel-encrusted skeletons were supposedly saintly remains (although they weren't), and the gold and jewel decorations were meant to show the wealth one would enjoy in the afterlife:

A relic hunter has lifted the lid on a macabre collection of 400-year-old jewel-encrusted skeletons unearthed in churches across Europe. Art historian Paul Koudounaris has photographed dozens of skeletons in some of the world's most secretive religious establishments. ...

Thousands of skeletons were dug up from Roman catacombs in the 16th century and installed in towns around Germany, Austria and Switzerland on the orders of the Vatican.

They were sent to Catholic churches and religious houses to replace the relics destroyed in the wake of the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s.

Mistaken for the remains of early Christian martyrs, the relics, known as the Catacomb Saints, became shrines reminding of the spiritual treasures of the afterlife.

They were also symbols of the Catholic Church's newly found strength in previously Protestant areas.
Each one was painstakingly decorated in thousands of pounds worth of gold, silver and gems by devoted followers before being displayed in church niches. ...

They were renamed as saints, although none of them qualified for the title under the strict rules of the Catholic Church which require saints to have been canonised.

But by the 19th century they had become morbid reminders of an embarrassing past and many were stripped of their honours and discarded.

Koudounaris' new book, Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures and Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs [out 8 October 2013], is the first time the skeletons have appeared in print. ...

[Koudounaris comments on his findings:]

"The skeletons would then be dressed and decorated in jewels, gold and silver, mostly by nuns. They had to be handled by those who had taken a sacred vow to the church - these were believed to be martyrs and they couldn't have just anyone handling them. They were made saints in the municipalities. One of the reasons they were so important was not for their spiritual merit, which was pretty dubious, but for their social importance. They were thought to be miraculous and really solidified people's bond with a town. This reaffirmed the prestige of the town itself. ... Tracking down the remaining skeletons involved lots of detective work, and for all the ones that are on display there are a lot that aren't. Some were in churches but others were hidden away in storage containers and lock-ups. I'm positive there are some out there that are yet to be discovered. I'm of the opinion these are the finest works of art in human bone ever made."

You can see Dr. Koudounaris's Website here; he has explored ossuaries, catacombs and charnel houses across Europe and published another book on the subject, The Empire of Death (2011). See my earlier post on creepy ossuary decor here. See more images below the jump. All images are taken from a HuffPo report, unless otherwise watermarked from Dr. Koudounaris's site; all images are © Paul Koudounaris and reproduced under Fair Use for non-commercial discussion and review.

All Hallows' Eve Countdown: Mark Twain's Young Satan

Mark Twain depicted Lucifer as ambiguous, attractive and psychopathic. Image Source: The House of Vines.

October marks the start of harvest season in the Northern Hemisphere. Hallowe'en is just around the corner. Every year, the site Countdown to Halloween runs a blogathon so that interested blogs can comment on the season in any way they see fit (I highly recommend Gothtober). This blog participated in 2011 and 2012 (see those posts here); this year I am participating again.

2013's All Hallows' Eve Countdown at Histories of Things to Come will offer horror-themed posts with a twist. These posts will mostly address how horror straddles the dotted line of acceptability: how horror can have non-horrific origins; how horror's marginal aspects become mainstream (not always in a good way); how horror carries mixed messages; or how horror stories convey moral messages. Posts in the countdown will be more or less every other day; there will also be some regular, non-countdown posts this month.

Mark Twain (pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (30 November 1835-21 April 1910)). Image Source: University of California Press.

Today's post concerns some of the darker writings of the famous American writer Mark Twain. Twain's real name was Samuel Clemens; he took his pseudonym from sailing Missouri steamboats on the Mississippi river in the late 1850s, where mark twain was the call which meant 'safe water' at two fathoms, or twelve feet deep.

Michaelmas

St. Michael Vanquishing Satan (1518) by Raphael. Image Source: Dark Dorset.

Today is Michaelmas, the day devoted to the Archangel Michael, chief of the angels, who threw Satan out of heaven. St. Michael is also an eschatological figure, who is supposed to play a prominent role in the end times. See a great discussion of the significance and old customs of the day in Britain, at Dark Dorset, including cooking a goose at dinner. There's a touch of ancient sacrifice to this festival: "'September, when by custom (right divine) Geese are ordained to bleed at Michael's shrine.'"

Michaelmas also marks the last day of the year for eating blackberries (which explains why an Italian friend put a picture of Bavarese alle more up on Facebook yesterday). Satan, according to religious legend, landed in a blackberry bush when he fell to earth, and cursed the berries after September 29.

September 29 is supposed to be the last day of the year to eat blackberries: Macarons alle more. Image Source: Cucinare Dolce.

Thus, the British holiday overlaps in its practical purpose with harvest festivals at this time of year, such as the secularized Thanksgiving in North America. In 2012, the BBC reported on a revival of the observance of Michaelmas:

The traditional goose meal is seeing a revived interest in the UK, the industry says, with between 5-10% of British geese now being reared for the autumn instead of Christmas, which is the traditional seasonal focus. ... 

Michaelmas celebrates St Michael and all angels, which falls on 29 September for most of the UK. There are anomalies though: It's 4 October in Suffolk, and 11 October in Norfolk.

It falls near the autumn equinox and also marks a medieval festival when harvest was finished and farmers paid rent to the landowners, often offering geese as part of the exchange.

Goose fairs became popular across the country, with farmers driving their geese for miles to get to market.

The Michaelmas goose itself became associated with paying off debts, and according to folklore eating one on the day would bring financial luck for the coming year.

But over the last century "the seasons' festivals we used to have, fell out of fashion", says food writer Karen Burns-Booth, who specialises in food history and traditional recipes.

"We lost a lot of the agricultural emphasis particularly just after WWI… people became more industrialised, started to move to cities, therefore all those festivals sort of fell along the wayside." ...

Michaelmas geese tend to be leaner than their Christmas cousins, because they are slaughtered earlier and have been fed on "lovely lush spring grass", while Christmas geese fatten up during the winter, explains Mr Hegarty [chairman of the British Goose Producers].

A traditional Michaelmas goose can be roasted and served in the same way as a Christmas goose, but a number of recipes instead use seasonal ingredients such as apples and blackberries, or marrow and runner beans.

Facebook Users Pixelated

The Facebook composite. Image Source: Yahoo.

Yahoo reports that Facebook has made an interactive composite image of its nearly 1.3 billion users:

"Relax. We're not breaking any Facebook privacy rule because we don't store anyone's private information, pictures or names," [programmer Natalie] Rojas writes. "We've just found a harmless way to show 1,260,866,093 Facebook profile pictures and organize them in chronological order"

You can click here to see the composite and zoom in anywhere to see individual faces. If you move to the top left corner, you can see the earliest faces on Facebook, starting with Mark Zuckerberg at #1.

Photo of the Day: Naked Sea Butterflies

From Wired: "Clione limacina, the Sea Angel[, aka the Naked Sea Butterfly or Common Clione], is a free-swimming mollusk that ditched its shell and replaced its foot with wings somewhere along the evolutionary path. Delicate and ravenous, these marine cherubs are fast swimmers. Their primary prey are sea butterflies (Limacina), which they catch using six pointy cones stored inside their otherwise seraphic heads. When it's time to eat, Clione heads open up and reveal the hexa-jaws of doom, which can inflate to be nearly half the length of the angel's body. Above, the transition from sea angel to Angel of Death. (The White Sea, Russia/Flickr/Flickr)" (Thanks to -S.)

Millennial Malaise

Vampire awaiting invitation in the doorway: Sean Chapman  as Frank Cotton in Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987). Image Source: Life for Films.

My last post on the demolition of French churches added to a sense of Millennial malaise this week. It came jumbled together on the micro and macro levels. A friend called to complain about a week of rude people and worse - people who are post-rude - who never knew what social conventions they violated in the first place. Another friend sent a link to a Gawker story about,

David Gilmour, the University of Toronto English professor who told a female reporter that he is "not interested in teaching books by women." "What I teach is guys," Gilmour continued. "Serious heterosexual guys."

A news story in a nearby town reported on a pregnant woman who was raped by two men on a well-traveled path behind her house, while she was walking her baby in a stroller. The baby was unharmed. And these days, that is surprising. Another local news story - in a normally low crime area - involved a girl who was almost abducted from the sidewalk by two men in a black van with darkened windows.

In non-local news, 300 teenagers invaded and trashed the home of ex-football player Brian Holloway in New York state. They posted their party on social media. At first, Holloway responded with unusual grace, and offered not to press charges if the kids would show up and help him fix the damage. He set up a Website to make his appeal. Only four teenagers showed up (some accounts state that one showed up) to help Holloway; the parents of the teens "threatened to firebomb his house, and are now planning to sue" Holloway rather than see their kids charged. After that, Holloway began pressing charges. Nor is this an unusual incident (see here and here).

There was the Kenyan shopping mall siege; I wondered if this was a not-so-dry run for terrorist attacks at other malls elsewhere in the future,  at Christmastime. A few other people thought the same thing (here, here, here, here and here). Then there was that island exposed by an earthquake off the coast of Pakistan, a bad dream made real, which is now emitting flammable gas.

Some entertainment news stories, like this and this and this, further reminded me that the cultural means for digesting the real world malaise have descended into an impoverished atmosphere. After that, I came upon a 2005 rant in the Guardian by the British actor Sean Chapman, in which he bemoaned the degraded state of the film industry in the UK.

The Post-Postmodern Side to Local Government

Gesté St. Pierre church 'deconstruction.' Images Source: Yahoo.

The recession has consumed another of its children. A report from Yahoo describes the demolition of Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens church in Gesté, western France on 7 September 2013; the church was built in the 19th century and is being demolished due to economic concerns over upkeep and renovation:

The Saint-Pierre-aux-Liens, a 19th century neo-gothic parish church was scheduled for demolition in 2007 by the city council. With only the bell tower and crypt remaining, the current church will be replaced in 2016, [with a building] which will be cheaper to maintain. This destruction is part of a large debate across France where villages are faced with churches in deteriorating condition, diminishing populations, fewer parishioners and priests, and increasing upkeep costs.

Is this how mercenary materialism plays out in the end? Perhaps. But oddly enough, the trend started before the recession, in 2007, when mayors in the area of Anjou began proposing the demolition of churches. Local authorities are responsible for expensive upkeep of these buildings under early 20th century secularization laws. Nearly 3,000 churches were reported in 2007 by The Telegraph as being "in peril" because of the municipal policy of 'deconstruction'; if ever there was a definitive example of Post-Postmodernism, it is here:

A wave of threatened demolitions in the Anjou area has sparked fears of a wider phenomenon as mayors struggle to pay for the upkeep of the buildings, a responsibility they have held since secularisation laws passed in 1905.

No exhaustive list of the nation's rural churches exists. However, of its 15,000 protected rural religious buildings, 2,800 are "in peril", according to l'Observatoire du Patrimoine religieux, a religious heritage watchdog.

For some villages it is already too late. In Saint-Georges-des-Gardes, population 1,500, a wall with rusty metal spikes is all that remains of the parish church, built in 1870.

The edifice is the latest victim of what mayors call "deconstruction" - a term more usually associated with the French [Postmodern] philosopher Jacques Derrida than knocking down churches.

The mayor said a full renovation would have cost more than a million euros. It was far cheaper to build a new one. His move has emboldened several other mayors to consider following suit.

In nearby Gesté, a pretty neo-gothic church stands majestically atop the hillside.
However, the mayor, Michel Baron, has announced his intention to "deconstruct".

Alain Guinberteau, who runs a website, 40000clochers ... celebrating France's churches, was the first to sound the alarm. Without its church, the landscape of Gesté will be disfigured, he said. "It will be cut off from its past. A part of our heritage and history is wiped away with one bulldozer. France is viscerally attached to its rural churches, which represent the very soul of French villages."

Mr Baron said a renovation would have cost three million euros, while "deconstruction" will cost less than half that amount. "We tried to have the church listed to receive public funds, to no avail. In its place we will put a modern hall of 500 seats, easy to heat. Villagers have taken it well," he claimed.

However, Jean Leclerc. 62, a villager, said the decision was shocking. "Lots of people are unhappy about it," he said. "We are not against modernity but the village will lose a lot of its charm and history."

The local priest, Pierre Pouplart, refused to take sides. "These are matters for the local authorities," he said.

In Valanjou, 45km away, where another church faces its last rites, locals have formed a defence association.

"There is a great deal of resistance," said René Cottenceau, 67, its president. "About 80 per cent of the villagers are against the move. The safeguard of our heritage is being overlooked. Just at a time when we are coming to appreciate the value of such buildings, ours is to be knocked down."

The church's plight has attracted the attention of the art historian Didier Rykner, who runs the art review, La Tribune de l'Art.

"Not since the Second World War have we seen churches reduced to rubble," he said. "These mayors are the new enemy. They are in the process of destroying the very soul of their own villages. Churches don't just have historic and artistic value, they have intimate personal histories attached to them - christenings, weddings, funerals."

I wonder if this is less a story about the collapse of older values and economic problems, and more a story about local government. The 20th century - with its 'Hemoclysm' that saw the deaths of some 180 million people - was an object lesson on the perils of how different states could overcentralize according to various ideologies. Practically universally, the lesson came back that overcentralizing, no matter how you do it, is a bad idea.

Despite fears from the political right wing and libertarians during the Great Recession that Keynesian-styled government spending will create bloated centralized states, perhaps the larger Millennial trend - spurred by technology - is that governments are essentially decentralizing.

Local governments were supposed to offer the antidote to Big States when the latter were crippled (to take the American example) by special interests, lobbyists, corporate sponsorship and political stalemates. Municipal and county authorities were supposed to be apolitical loci of practical, hands-on action: these officials work at the level of government where problems really get solved. The Center for Strategic and International Studies argued in 2011 that this was the classic, yet troubling, rationale for decentralization:

The implicit rationale for decentralization goes something like this. If a government can perform closer to the people it is meant to serve, the people will get more out of government and, in turn, will be more willing to accept that government’s authority. The rationale is compelling, and despite the potential pitfalls associated with implementation, most scholars agree that a decentralized system of government is more likely to result in enhanced efficiency and accountability than its centralized counterpart. Still, disparities between the theoretical rationale for decentralization and what is actually gained in practice are gaping.

I am only guessing that local governments are becoming stronger in unusual ways. In the French case, it might be tempting to attribute these stories to the decline of Christianity and eroding communities in France. But many citizens are very upset about France's demolished churches. Maybe deconstruction of churches is just the French 'local flavour' of a much larger pattern in the developed world. The salient question is: why are local people so helpless against the very local officials whom they elected? There is something else at work here besides changing values.

Other odd examples come to mind. The Swedish police have just confirmed that they kept illegal records and family trees of thousands of Roma people, based not on criminal activity, but on biological data. A host of American cities have gone bankrupt, most famously Detroit.

There are many reports in Canada about municipal authorities acquiring ever more power, even as they slash services, and their budget demands nevertheless continue to skyrocket on fiscally unsustainable paths. This is a non-transparent, mysterious, general trend across the country, which has emerged over the past 20 years; the trend is evident in property taxes, municipal debt, local corruption, municipalities' insurance premiums, policing - although this view is challenged by critics.

Central governments, seeking to cut costs and deficits, fob off their expensive policies and programs on local authorities. Strangely, the economic pressures on town councils offer them a 'get out of jail free card' to exercise greater autonomy and to enforce strange policies in the name of cutting costs.  In other words, localities are going broke, but they're becoming more powerful because they're going broke. Another facet of this trend is the rise of municipal politicians to national levels of power. Something tells me this pattern is at work in France. Will the 21st century provide history's cautionary tales about the dangers of overdecentralization?

See related stories on demolitions of churches across France, here, here, here, here and here. Below the jump, a video of the demolition of the church of Saint Jacques in Abbeville, France in April, 2013.

Eagle Eyes

Image Source: Turbo Squid.

Just in case you needed a pick-me-up, see the video of the day below the jump: from the perspective of an eagle in flight in the French Alps, Chamonix, Mer De Glace area. Is it a real camera strapped to an eagle's back, and not a simulation? I certainly hope so (Hat tip: Joseph De Palma).