These strange relics

In any religion, there is a tradition to worship the relics of revered saints. But if it is natural for believers, how to explain the deification of completely secular relics, like the eyes of Einstein or the penis of Napoleon?

Power - with a hammer?

Regardless of our belief in the afterlife, it is unlikely that any of us would agree that after his death fragments of the dead body went under the hammer on eBay. The reason for the article was a recent complaint about the site of an online auction, where one of the clients came across an ad for the sale of a bone fragment, as was assured, one of the Catholic saints. The outraged user raised an intriguing question about the sanctity of our physical body, more precisely, about respect for what remains after our death.

What do we worship?

The eerie theme of preserving and worshiping the remains of revered figures, of course, does not contain anything new. For centuries, believers made pilgrimages in order to see, touch, pray near the relics of prophets and martyrs. How authentic these relics are is another matter. By the way, is there really a tooth of the Buddha that is allegedly kept in a temple in the city of Kandy, Sri Lanka, or hair from the beard of the Prophet Muhammad (stored in the palace in Istanbul), the sacred umbilical cord of Christ (claiming it is kept in the Basilica of Saint John of Lateran in Rome). In any case, these shrines are revered by believers, and this is important and deserves respect.

But what about the rest?

Not everyone is lucky enough to be classified as a saint. Their units, and the Earth is inhabited by ordinary people. And even those of us who are extolled by history, also consist of flesh and blood. What will become of us after ten, one hundred years of repose? The vast majority of us, no doubt, will remain in place intact under the tombstones and will remain as much as the worms will allow, forgive for the black humor. But not everyone is so lucky. Fans of the history of the world are waiting to be shown how the features or individual parts of the body of one or another figure looked. Here are some anatomical relics.

The finger of Galileo

In June 2010, Italy celebrated one of the most unique holidays in the history of culture. This was due to an amazing event: the Museum of the History of Science in Florence purchased at auction the large and middle fingers of the astronomer Galileo Galilei. Already at the exhibition in the museum visitors were introduced to the tooth of a medieval scientist. Now it's bundled with new acquisitions. It is known that parts of the body of Galilee were seized by desperate followers and admirers, in order to preserve at least part of his genius in this world. It happened in 1737, at a time when the remains of Galileo were transferred from one grave to another. The beneficiaries got their fingers, one tooth and part of the vertebrae. Truly, fetishism does not know the limit of the reasonable! Now artifacts are exhibited next to a pair of telescopes invented by an astronomer. Fingers can be seen in a glass vessel, and modern pilgrims can see with their own eyes this pseudo-snare, where the spirit of a man who catches the sky like no one before him is hanging.

Penis of Napoleon

While some secular relics are kept in state museums, others are in private collections. Take at least the penis of Napoleon Bonaparte. In 1821 an English surgeon made an autopsy of the body of a recently deceased French commander on the Atlantic island of Saint Helena, where he was expelled six years earlier, after the defeat of the French at Waterloo. Since then, part of the body of the commander, whom the French have been dubbed "a shriveled tendon," has been passed from hand to hand. The relic was sold and resold at auctions. I was first in the hands of an Italian priest, then at a London bookseller who paid $ 2,900 for her in 1969 and kept a piece of dried flesh under the bed in a suitcase, until his death in 2007. Then an intimate fragment of the body of the emperor was transferred to a private collection of an American urologist. In June 2016, his extensive collection of historical curiosities, including ampoules of cyanide, which committed Herman Goering, was auctioned to a collector from Argentina.

Einstein's Eyes

Unlike Napoleon's body of public view, Einstein's brain and eyes were placed in a special bank safe in New Jersey. Before cremation, his brain and eyeballs were blasphemously removed from the body of the deceased physicist. This was done by the autopsy pathologist Thomas Harvey, who for decades kept the brain in a glass jar filled with a special solution, in his cellar. And he passed the eyes for storage to the bank of New Jersey. And only in 1998, Harvey, tired of such a great responsibility, passed the brain of a genius to storage in the laboratory of the medical faculty of Princeton University.

Einstein's eyes were transferred to the storage of ophthalmologist Henry Abrams, who died in 2009. The eyes of genius have not yet been exhibited at auction as a lot. Time will tell. Strange exhibits are always in price.

"The Last Sigh" by Thomas Edison

Existential aspiration to keep unsaved - that's how you can call the next relic. At the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan, a glass vial is sealed with a cork. It holds the last breath of the inventor of the phonograph, the movie camera and the electric bulb of Thomas Edison. In 1931, when the brilliant physicist died in his bedroom, next to him was a personal doctor who managed to take the last breath of a dying man into the test-tube and seal it. Edison's son Charles, perhaps believing (like the Greeks) that the spirit (or pneuma) is soul-bound, later passed the test tube for safe storage to his father's business partner, automobile magnate Ford.

Parts of the body of Pancho Villa

The corpse of the Mexican revolutionary General Pancho Villa was exhumed by grave robbers three years after his car was ambushed and the hero was shot.

It is not surprising that the obsession and desire to possess the remains of famous personalities induces fraud and the use of false fragments. In 2011, the world learned about one of such problematic relics. In El Paso, Texas, talking about the sale of personal items and body parts of the deceased general. It was suggested, for example, a trigger hook from the weapons of Pancho Villa. But how revolutionary the revolutionary was during his lifetime, he remains as elusive after death. Already too many people claim the right to possess a skull capped general, separated from the body during the exhumation in 1926. He also mentions his hero finger, "wrinkled and slightly curved," as described in the descriptions of the reporter Dave, who advertised the auction put up for auction. Naturally, there is no guarantee of the authenticity of the finger, he simply bought this fragment five years ago. But Dave still does not want to sell a finger, he on his Facebook page never tires of making promises that "you'll never find a more authentic exhibit like this."

Eventually

What motivates a person to possess a material proof of the physical existence of another, in the last analysis, a stranger? Perhaps such fragments are considered as conductors, through which the history is traced, bursts of life on its various coils? Or, perhaps, they believe in totems that can drive away the idea of the inevitability of death? The owner of Einstein's eyes, an ophthalmologist, admitted to the reporter in 1994: "The life of the professor did not end. Part of it is still with me. "