OK, I tried to say the same thing you do but I found myself doing it with fetishes and magic. Same end, different means.
On holy relics, a pope (I'd have to look up who) banned the "boiling of bones" during the crusades because so many "bones of saints" were making their way back to Europe, when in fact they were just bones of anyone. Churches in Europe were in desperate need of holy relics and were bidding up the prices...and ending up with multiple jawbones of the same purported saint. Ah, the capitalist spirit! Of more interest is that the ban against the boiling of bones (the neat way to ship Crusader bodies back home was to boil off all the flesh) was taken as a ban against dissection, which it wasn't. But the Church didn't like dissection and so it let the ambiguity remain. Thus the secrecy of dissection until the 16C and even then it was considered cultic. Medical science and art were probably stymied by the ban. WC --- On Wed, 11/12/08, Michael Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > From: Michael Brady <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > I disagree a bit with you, and a lot with Miller's > cavalierly equating > the desire to see an original work with wanting to posses a > relic. > Relics, whether a splinter of the True Cross or a > sheep's bone, are > venerated at religious articles and often are believed to > posses > apotropaic power to ward off evil or calamity. Not so with > ancient > artifacts.
