Episode #97 - The Shroud of Turin & Veils of Veronica
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Hi Janina. Hi Emma. How you doing? Not too bad, how are you? Hi, you know, taking it along. Well as can be. We're recording this on the 5th of November. Yep. So, both a lot of fireworks and also... A lot of stress, a lot of election stress. A lot of stress. A lot of extra stress. I have decided that given the amount of emotional energy the American election cycle has taken from me over the past decade, I should be able to vote. Yeah.

Yeah. Yes. I think that everybody should be allowed to at least have like maybe like the whole rest of the world is like one state and we all get a go. Yeah. If they're going to be this influential and have this dysfunctional democratic system, then I think the rest of us get to chime in.

Yeah. Yeah. I do often think sometimes when I'm like, for some reason, stress reading about like gubernatorial elections in Wisconsin or whatever about that article that was from an Australian. Yeah. We should be able to mute America. We should be able to mute America. Like, why do I know about this? Yeah.

I shouldn't have to know about this. You don't know about the mayoral elections in Belfast. Yeah. So why should I know about the governor of Florida? And yet I do, and it stresses me. But we're not going to talk about... I will accept that some of the stress is self-inflicted. I do voluntarily listen to a lot of 5 to 4, which is a podcast about the American Supreme Court and how deranged it is.

But also, even when I try, like currently, when I do my very best to avoid it, you just can't. It's unavoidable. It's thrown in your face all the time. Yeah, it is. It's like whatever newspaper you read, it's there right now. Yeah. And it's cost, it's taken years of my life thinking about American citizens. And I just think in recognition of that, I should get a vote.

I think you Janina should be allowed at least one vote. Yeah. Who has never and will never lived in America should get to vote. But you should. Oh, yeah. Well, it'd be like when I was in school, we used to, whenever there was an election and I was in like middle school and primary school, they used to let us do a little children's vote and we would go into a cupboard and do like a little secret ballot. That's really good. Yeah.

Yeah, the Green Party always won in my school. But I do not even come from Brighton. I'm near enough. But I actually grew up in a profound Tory stronghold. But the yeah, but we got to do a little vote. So and then everybody would feel like they had engaged in civic participation. That is genuinely great. That is one of the things that more schools should be doing there. They're not.

I do think that this might be at least partly responsible for how jazzed I get about voting, which is very jazzed. Like I get so thrilled about voting and especially I've talked about this a lot. I will talk about it probably for the rest of my life. Like the joy of single transferable vote and being able to do ranked choice voting rather than just put in an X in a box just has not worn off at all. And I love it. Yeah. Yeah.

a genuine it's a genuine joy it's I'm like there's no no sarcasm no irony there is a profound and genuine like this presumably is like the thrill that people get from other stuff that I just get from voting I just love it yeah it's nice to vote in a way where it feels like your vote counts yeah yeah

Depressing to cast your vote knowing that it isn't really going to impact you. Yeah. Even, to be fair, I still quite liked voting even when I lived in England. But it's much more fun now. Yeah. Well, let me tell you, Janina, we tried to campaign for it and it lost. Yeah. But that's enough of that. Anyway, no more election talk. Hopefully by the time people are listening to this, the election has gone well.

Yeah, at least, at the very least, hopefully it's over. All of our stress will have been for nothing. It's never for nothing. It's always taking, like, burning through our cells and giving us wrinkles. But hopefully people at least won't be talking about it so much anymore. That would be nice.

And then they can be like, God, you know what I want to listen to? I would like to listen to Eugenina talk about relics that have faces on them and what the hell the deal is with all of the relics that have Jesus's face on them. Yeah. And we will be able to say, boy, oh boy, do we have the approximately an hour for you. Yeah.

Thanks to Stuart Webb, who asked us what the difference is between the Shroud of Turin and all of the other relics with holy faces on them. Where do they come from? What do they do? Yeah. Why are there so many of them? Because there are a lot. There's a lot of face-based relics, as I have been calling them. Yeah. And there's a lot of relics just in general. Like, people got very...

into relics. Yeah, and I did just now during a last minute bit of reading I read a list that claimed that the trained in relics really took off after the second Nicene Council because before then there had been all of this back and forth about whether it was okay to have relics.

because the iconoclasts obviously believed that you shouldn't do that, that it's heretical to worship a relic as opposed to just God. And then the second councilman I see was like, nah, it's chill actually. Do it all you want. Have all the relics you want. LAUGHTER

Yes. That did, I would say, kickstart a real increase in relics. There were quite a lot around before that. They've become kind of a big old thing in Christianity in the 3rd, 4th century. And they're basically the exact same thing as portable magical amulets and things that used to be carried around by Greeks and Romans. And they're just...

that as a practice like transferred onto something else it's kind of nice because you have this moment where the catholic church or the early the early catholic church before they were probably called catholic i guess i don't know when when the term catholic was developed but anyway their their objection to relics was that they were pagan and then later on you get protestants like viewing relics and

essentially is papist nonsense. Yeah. But the thing is, is that people like them. People like weird little things. They like something tangible to hold on to. Whatever the belief behind it, I think it's, you know, it satisfies something. Yes. That is exactly what it is. Yeah. It is a physical example that you can learn

look at and that is a very tangible way of relating to whatever your belief system is but relating to Christianity especially because Christianity is so faith based like the whole point is that you do not know anything you just believe proof is sort of the antithesis of Christianity much to the chagrin of all those new atheist guys but the

Proof is the exact opposite of the point of Christianity. But having a physical thing that you can look at, that you can sometimes touch, that you can say that is the thing and believe it is the thing. Like it is a way of kind of bolstering faith to a certain degree. It makes it easier to understand. It's the same sort of thing as having a gravestone for someone you love. A place, a physical place you can go to feel closer to them.

Because it can be a bit unsatisfying to just, you know, pour your feelings into the ether. It's nice to be able to focus them on something. It is. And sometimes those things are cool and sometimes they're not cool at all. Yeah.

I was on a TV show on Netflix like two years ago called Mysteries of the Faith, which was about relics and specifically that TV show, which I'm pretty sure is still on Netflix. So you can watch it if you want to see me talking about Catholic faith and the beginnings of kind of relics and things like that.

And they were talking about the relics that were related to the crucifixion, basically. So that show is mostly about where they ended up and what the stories are around them. And like the Holy Cross or the True Cross, as it's sometimes called, it's kind of the thing that really kickstarts all of the Christian love for relics. Do you know the story of how the Holy Cross was found? Everything that I've seen about anything like this is that a random woman who then became a saint...

in like the year 1300 and something was like, I went to Jerusalem, I found the cross. Sort of. It was Constantine's mother, Helena, and she went to Jerusalem after he became the emperor and went on like a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. She's one of the first people to do this. Jerusalem is not seen as a Christian city and she is one of the first people who starts Christianizing it. The story is that she has a dream that...

That tells her where the cross is buried, that she excavates the cross, but there are actually three. Well, which makes sense because Jesus was crucified in between two other men. Exactly. But she is able, with the kind of guidance of a divine spirit, she is able to identify which one is the right one. And there's a miracle that I forget what it is, but she is able to identify the correct one. And then she builds the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

which is still there in order to house it, basically. And instantly people start just chopping chunks off of it and handing it out to all their friends. It is like a little splinter now. And there's a couple of other splinters. I think there's one in like Chile.

or Argentina maybe but there are like these tiny little splinters that are around that are alleged and people immediately started taking them and then like putting them in their jewellery and selling them and

like you have all of these letters from like the late fourth century where people are saying you've got to stop wearing bits of gold with the like with the holy cross in them because this is pagan superstition and like there's john christosom says people need to stop wearing bits of the true cross so like relatively early in christianity as a as a religion um

It is still like people just go for it really hardcore. Is that like... By like the 6th century people love it.

Is that a common way that the Romans would have disposed of their crosses, was burying them together where they were used? No, that doesn't make any sense that that's what they were doing. Because I would think they just reused them until they fell apart and then probably burned them for firewood. Yeah, like, yes. There are like a million different things that you could do with a big cross. It's quite expensive to make and transport. Mm-hmm.

And just lying it down with two other crosses and then sort of burying it in the centre of the city. To commemorate a crucifixion that is not important to you at all. It's one of many.

Yeah, when they do crucify a lot of people constantly, like they're very into it. This is, I think, always my question. Like I read about a couple, there are a couple of places where they've got like the chains of St. Paul or the chains of St. Peter, which is St. Peter is like a significant batch of chains because his story is that an angel set him free and broke the chains that were binding him in prison. And then, you know, someone found them in the year 780 or whatever. Yeah.

And I was like, but like, is this a reasonable, like they would have just kept using the chains and then maybe melted them down to make something else. It just doesn't seem realistic to me that they were just left sitting there after their one prisoner that they held. Yeah. Maybe you don't understand. They identified it. Yeah. Through the power of Christ. Yeah.

I don't know what the problem is. Yeah. So relics are a thing fairly early on, and then they become pilgrimage sites pretty early on. People love to walk around and do a pilgrimage. That is just a fun thing for everybody to do. One of my favorite stories from an early pilgrimage is one of the earliest stories that we have is a woman called Egeria, who...

traveled around and wrote a lot like she did like a big long pilgrimage around europe and went to jerusalem and she writes that when people have to bend down to kiss the holy cross in jerusalem they are watched over by a bishop because people keep biting bits off of it to take them home

Which I find very funny indeed. By like the 12th century, relics and portable Christianity and pilgrimage is like such a big business that this is when you get like every church in, you know, there's like 750 thumbs of St. Paul. Like how many thumbs did the man have? Yeah, there are at least four heads of John the Baptist, like properly enumerated and golden stuff. Yeah.

But this does not stop people believing them. And that is fine. Because the thing is, if you don't know how many there are, then if you believe that you saw it, then you saw it and it's fine. But what you start to get then is interesting relics. So bones are obviously your kind of classic relic. Yeah. Except for Christ, where you have crucifixion relics because they are the closest thing that you can get to the body of Jesus. But mostly what you have otherwise is bones relics.

Bones of saints and the clothing of saints, if you can't have that. But Jesus, you can't have bones or clothing. So instead, you have things that touched him. And occasionally you get a miraculous face. So we're specifically going to talk about face-based relics, which all appear, or all of the ones that are kind of famous in Europe anyway, appear in relics.

the 12th and 13th century to a frankly suspicious degree they all appear in a very similar time there is two well there's three stories about how the face miraculously appears on a bit of cloth in european christianity there is a third a fourth story even in kind of more ancient eastern religion but

But I don't think that anybody actually knows about the Mandylion. So I'm not going to worry about it too much. Have you ever heard of the Mandylion? No. It's written Mandy Lion, which is very fun to read for an English reader. But the Mandylion is probably the earliest face-based relic. It's also called the image of Edessa. Edessa is in Turkey. Mm-hmm.

And it is a portrait of Christ on a square of cloth that the original story start off with it being the image of Christ embedded on a tile. And then it becomes a bit of cloth and it traveled around everywhere.

Turkey and ended up in Constantinople and then it disappeared to France and then it vanished completely in the French Revolution. But it was said to be that kind of God appeared in a sort of hole and Christ appeared and then his face was like burned with a candle onto a piece of fabric. Sure. And that was around for a while. But it's not famous anymore. No one's ever made a TV show about it because it vanished. Yeah.

So what you do have is the Shroud of Turin, which is, as far as I could find, the only one that claims to be, or the only one that is left, that claims to be the Holy Shroud of Jesus. Yeah. I think there have been a few that have popped up at various points in history but not lasted or disappeared. Yes. They do not have the cultural cachet, shall we say, of the Shroud of Turin.

which I think is the, like, I think if you were going to ask people what a face-based relic, like if they could name one that's got Jesus' face on it, they would say this. I think that possibly Rex Factor listeners might say the Holy Face of Luca, to which I would have to break it to them that the Holy Brace of Luca is a statue. Yeah.

just as 8th century statue it's a very big statue and it's quite cool but it is not technically a face based relic it's just a real big statue yeah I didn't realise in time but I could have gone to see the holy face of Luca when I was in Italy a few weeks ago I was quite close to it but I didn't

You didn't. You could have gone. Could have gone. Next time. Yeah. So the Shroud of Turin is said to be the cloth that was used to wrap Jesus's body when he was taken down from the cross by Joseph of Arimathea.

It was said to be, this is in all of the gospels. So all four of the gospels say that Joseph of Arimathea, a rich man, came and took the body and wrapped it in fine linen and then put it in the unused tomb. And then two of the gospels say that after Jesus had risen, that the cloth was left behind. Yeah.

Now, that is everything that you hear about the Shroud of Jesus until about 1349, when a French man called Geoffrey appears and writes to the Pope and says, I have got this cool shroud and it helped me miraculously escape from the English. And I would like to build a church to celebrate this. And the Pope's like, eh,

Okay, I don't think that's the real shroud. But his name is Geoffrey de Charney. And the Pope says, yeah, you can build the church. That's grand. I'd prefer it kind of if you didn't put this shroud on display because it sounds fake. But he did put it on display. And then there's like quite a lot of backing and forth about...

whether it should be and whether the church was going to officially kind of give it a stamp of approval and the deal is basically that the church says no like we don't think that this is real they do an investigation into it and one bishop claims that he's found the artist who painted it

it who has admitted to painting it but he doesn't name this person which is very annoying he just says it's not real found the guy don't worry about it he obviously did not know in 1389 that this was going to become a whole fucking for the next 600 years

Otherwise, he might have written down his name, which would have been helpful. But yeah, so it basically it's in this church in this little church in rural France. And then it gets sold. So his granddaughter is running out of money in 1453. So she swaps it for a castle.

which is a pretty good deal. That's a pretty good deal. I would take a castle over a shroud. Yeah. Like, what's the shroud doing for you? You're not even allowed to... Like, at this time, the church is still saying not real. But she swaps it. That's pretty good. It kind of meanders around France for a while. It goes to Chambry. It goes to Nice. It's seen by people who all have a big opinion on it in...

1532, it's damaged by a fire and some silver melts onto it. And then some people try to repair it, like some nuns try to repair it, which becomes a big deal later on. Again, they could not have guessed that radiocarbon dating would have been invented. Yes.

But this is a whole thing. In 1578, it ends up in Turin and it is installed in Turin Cathedral and it gets given the name the Shroud of Turin. And it's after that point when it's in a big cathedral that it becomes a real focus of pilgrimage and people start to get really into it. And they're very good at marketing it. Yeah. And it becomes like a big part of Turin-based pilgrimage. It is...

kind of on and off display when I was looking around apparently is going back on display in 2025 so you can go and have a look at it and I do feel like you probably would like if it wasn't for the fact that there would definitely be queues around the entire city if I was in Turin like would I go and have a look and see what it was all about yes I would yeah it looks from pictures like a kind of slightly grubby bit of cloth yeah

With vaguely a face on it. With vaguely a face on it. It could be worse. There are some of them, like, we're going to get into some of the veils and they're uninspiring, shall I say? LAUGHTER

But, yeah, so the Shroud lives in Turin and becomes over time like this massive deal. And there are also the arguments about its authenticity start from the day that Geoffrey declares that he got it in Constantinople and brought it home with him.

and are still ongoing to this day. Like they're still quite furious. Yeah. Debates about whether it's real. And people get into it as well. Like I read a claim that the shroud is based on burial practice that wouldn't have been used in this case. They're not the Jewish customs that were used at that time where the body would have been wrapped in strips of linen, but something like a smaller cloth would have been used on the face. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. People love to get into these kind of arguments. There's loads of details. I feel like the most compelling point is that it's been carbon dated and it's not that old. Yes. Well, the carbon dating was done in 1988. And you can read the article. I will link the article in the show notes. It's very simple to read, even for people who don't know anything about chemistry. But they carbon dated it. They basically were allowed to cut like a tiny little fragment off of it and then to date it. And they dated it to...

Somewhere anywhere between 1260 and 1390 which is kind of perfectly the era which it appeared. Shockingly.

And they thought the people who did this, who were a research team who basically said, like, we reckon that we have put this down. Like, the results prove conclusively that the linen of the Shroud of Turin is medieval, basically. Like, they were like, we've done this. We don't need to, like, worry about this anymore. That's the entire problem resolved. But the problem is, and I don't think that this is a shocking problem, that for...

faith is part of it. Proof is not part of it. If you want to believe in the child of truth, then evidence doesn't come into it. The point is faith. And arguably, the evidence that it is quote-unquote science is just a test of faith. And you can still believe. It doesn't make any difference. It is two fundamentally different...

kind of paradigms of knowledge that have nothing to do with one another so you can say oh yeah no we did a radiocarbon dating and it's from 1350 and they'll go oh yeah sure okay i still believe it isn't yeah like what are you gonna do and there's nothing you can do because it just doesn't the radiocarbon dating doesn't matter to people who want to believe that it genuinely did touch jesus and who want to take faith from that and feel it bolster their faith and you

So, God bless them for trying. I do think it was a massive waste of time. I am personally of the very strong opinion that doing science on religious stuff is a complete waste of time because they're just... It's nothing to do with science. A good friend of the podcast, Hero, likes to send me things off of Tumblr that they find that are bananas.

And they sent me a thing that was like about people talking about the plagues of Egypt in the Old Testament and how there was a volcano that went off in like Mycenae at the proximate time of the plagues of Egypt. And therefore it's possible that the Nile could run red or that frogs could have come down from the sky because of this volcano. I'm like, no, no.

It's either a miracle or it didn't happen. Like, don't try to pretend. Like, there's no... Either believe it. Like, don't science away the wonder if you want to believe in it. I think sciencing the wonder serves a particular type of...

of Christian person who wants to believe but also believes in there being rational explanations for things yeah I think that's what it does it doesn't give anything to people who don't care about science and it doesn't give anything to people who don't care about religion it's just for that weird that little crossover yeah and I I don't think it should be encouraged basically

Because, like, no. Either it was a miracle and God was releasing the Jews from slavery or it didn't happen and, yeah, get over it. But anyway, they did this and there have now been several other, like, attempts to, like, do different tests on it. One of the major arguments that kind of pro-science people who also wanted to believe that the...

shroud was real came back with was that those repair efforts that had been done in the 1500s had introduced new basically like the fire and then the repair efforts had introduced new materials to the cloth and therefore you couldn't prove that the scientists or chemists were testing the right part

They might have been testing a repaired part. Right. And maybe the smoke from the fire might have introduced carbon that was then throwing out all of the tests. And so even didn't even convince the people who allegedly would have been convinced by radiocarbon dating. So basically just a big waste of money. Yeah.

It's my opinion. I'm willing to be talked out of it if somebody wants to give me a good reason why the people did this. It just, like, what were they going to do if it came back that it was from the first century? Like, were they going to be like, oh, okay. It's real. Christianity is real. Like, I don't know. But that is the Shroud of Turin, basically. It claims to be the shroud that Jesus was wrapped in, which because of the kind of

of his divinity, he has imprinted his face and body onto it. And that is the only one that is left that is still around. I googled around to see if there were any that were still around fairly recently, but they've all gone. And it won the battle of the shrouds, if there ever was one, and is now the only one. So that's pretty good for the shroud. What there are, however, is many

many different relics that claim to have touched Jesus and have his face on them that have miraculously appeared exclusively in Europe and they all have a kind of a slightly different story as to how it happened and they do compete a little bit

So it's called, they're sometimes called the Veils of Veronica or the Veil of Veronica. And there are two separate medieval stories about where the Veil of Veronica comes from. One is that there is a moment in the Gospels where a woman with menstrual bleeding touches the hem of Jesus's coat and she is healed. Right.

And in the apocryphal acts of Pilate, she is called Veronica. And then later in the medieval period, in the kind of 12th, 13th century, a myth kind of evolved around it that Jesus gave her a, what kind of feels like the Jesus version of a signed photo. He gave Veronica a, like a cloth with an image of his face on it as some kind of like reward for,

for like being healed from the terrible decades of bleeding that she was suffering and then she took that veil with his face on it her signed Jesus photo and yeah and now it is in one of various different churches in Europe and

The second version, which I think is probably the more popular version now because of the Stations of the Cross, is that Veronica was a woman who approached Jesus while he was carrying the cross down the Via Dolora and wiped his face at the sixth station and wiped the blood and sweat from his face. And that imprinted image of his face on her veil that she used. Sure.

The third version, which is the official Catholic Church version, some of the best fudging around an issue I've ever heard in my entire life, which is that, because the Vatican has one of these. Yeah. But they do, because both of these stories are medieval in origin, they are not based on the Gospels. There is no Veronica in the Gospels at all. So they can't say that it's either of those two things. Like they're not going to, they're not dum-dums. Like they're not going to.

go with the veil of any of the veil of Veronica's but they do like the name veil of Veronica and it has been called the veil of Veronica for a long time so what they've come up with is that Veronica doesn't mean a woman's name

It is a compound word of the Latin vera, meaning truth, and icon from the Greek, meaning image. And actually a veil of Veronica is just a veil with a true image of Christ on it. It's very sneaky. Yeah.

It's very good. Whoever, whatever Cardinal came up with that, I hope they got some kind of raise. Yeah, got a pal of a bonus there, yeah. Like, you don't have to disagree with anything, but you also don't have to say anything that is heretical, genius. And you don't have to piss anybody off. It's brilliant. So there are quite a lot of these knocking about, of which two are probably the most...

I don't know if they're even that famous, but people like to go and see them. Probably maybe the most famous is the one that's actually in St. Peter's. Because you're only there to see some impressive stuff at St. Peter's. Yeah. You can only see it once a year. But if you go to St. Peter's Basilica on the fifth Sunday of Lent, which I think is Passion Sunday maybe,

Then they bring it out and they hold it up on a balcony. And everybody that has seen it basically says that you can't really see anything. Like they're on a balcony, they're quite far away. And it is a very, very thin thing.

very delicate piece of material like kind of brownish material that is behind glass um like you can't see anything on it you have to get very close to it and you would have to look very very hard in order to see anything that is on it um

they won't let anybody touch it or look at it because there are some good kind of historical controversies around it. It appears first in the records of St. Peter's in 1011

when it appears that there is a guy whose job is keeper of the veil, which I'm sure was very challenging. And then in 1199, two pilgrims say that they saw it. So kind of by their...

11th, 12th century. It's there. It's on display. People can go and see it. There's no mention of it really before that. There are controversial references to other images, but that's the main one, like nobody. Then in 1527, Tudor period, is the period where popes keep getting kidnapped. Okay.

and the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V storms into Rome sacks Rome sacks the Vatican and steals just loads of stuff from the from the Vatican one of those things may or

may not have been the veil of Veronica. Some contemporary reports say that it was ripped out and was being handed around taverns in Rome. Other reports say that it was still there because there are copies made of it. One of those copies, which was copied in 1617, is in Vienna. And it says, like,

It's got the guy's name on it. It says 1617. We know he was in the...

Vatican. So like, it seems like something was still there at least. At some point in the late 17th century, it was found in a, like hidden under the dome, like hidden in a stone that was holding up the dome of St. Peter's. And that is the one that is now on display. So there's a like 200 year period when nobody's real,

150 year period where nobody's real sure whether it was there or not and it's just one and they're like yeah this is the one this is it this is the one yeah if you look at it real close then it's kind of got a face on it yeah it's faded because it's old you're like okay fair enough yeah they don't really as far as i can tell make any claims about how that face got on that bit of fabric um they call it the veil of veronica but they don't they just say veil of veronica means truth true image this means the true image of god

So they don't make any real statements about it. There are, however, other ones which do make statements about what it is. There's quite a good one in Alicante, which I think is quite fun. I think they'd be fun to go on holiday to Alicante and then go and see some. That appeared in 1489 and was bought by Pope Nicholas V for some guys who claimed they were members of the Byzantine royal family.

And nobody is 100% sure that they were. And he sent it to Alicante, presumably because he wasn't 100% convinced on what it was. But it is said that when it arrived, the veil cried and a tear ran down the veil. And then a drought that had been plaguing the city ended with that tear. And it rained and everybody was very happy about it. Yeah, I mean, if I saw that, I would probably be convinced. But when you look at it,

As an image, it's less convincing to me. I mean, yeah, none of them I think look like amazing. I would expect a true image to be more photorealistic and a little less just random medieval style drawing. My personal favorite looks very much, I think, like a random medieval style drawing by someone who is only 50% good at...

That draw ring, like, which is the Mano Pello, Veil of Mano Pello. I love the Veil of Mano Pello for its artistic value. It is definitely not a million miles away from a portrait that I drew in third form art class.

Yes. It does have that you can, I'll put the link to it in the shows, but you can Google it and it's on the Wikipedia. It is like strikingly in comparison to a lot of the other face-based images, very clear. But it's also very, very much looks like someone drew it. It looks like it's someone's GCSE art project. Yeah.

It also has a fantastic story around it, which is that, so they argue that it is a shroud. Sometimes they argue it's a shroud, sometimes they argue it's a veil of Veronica. And in the TV show that I did, they had a woman who was arguing quite ferociously that it was the shroud that wrapped Jesus in and had got into some like real deep dive niche.

picky stuff about whether what it is made of because there's a person who believes it is made of bisus which is sea silk and whether you would ever use whether bisus existed in the Roman Empire whether it would ever be used as a shroud or a veil and what you could yeah it was quite intense she is very furious about the situation she's got too far down that rabbit hole but it fills her days but

But basically the story is that an anonymous pilgrim in 1508 gave a package to somebody just sitting in front of the church and they opened it and it turned out to be this veil with Jesus's face on it. They have argued that it was the Vatican one which was stolen from the

either during the sacking of Rome or in a slightly later rebuilding of Rome that it was stolen and that the one in the Vatican is fake and the one in Manapelo is the real one and that is why they will let people look at it and the people in the Vatican won't because they know that their one is a fake one that they have replaced it with that is a pretty compelling argument to be fair

I mean, it's not a bad argument. It is very fun. This guy, his name is Heinrich Pfeiffer, and he basically appeared in 1999 and gave a big press conference and said that he had discovered it, that it was the real thing, that he had done lots of work on it, and that it was the real Veil of Veronica, or that it is the real shroud, and that it should be more popular than the one in the Vatican. Mm-hmm.

It was actually visited by Benedict, Pope Benedict, which is quite fun. But basically, it just really looks like a drawing. The thing is, you can't just say it really looks like a drawing. Apparently, that is not a good enough argument. Yeah.

There have been lots and lots of people doing tests on it. And there is... I did read a study where somebody tested it and they got some fibers. They were allowed some fibers off it. And they were like, this is linen with paint on it. Like, I'm pretty sure it's linen with paint on it. But that apparently is not enough to stop people either. It is great. I sort of love the...

the veil of Manapelo just because it is like there are these really intense people who are if every time you're like it really looks like a painting they're like no it is the forces unleashed by whatever has put their face there and that's why it looks so good you're like yeah but it's got eyeballs

Like, why isn't the fact that it's got eyeballs enough? I can see individual hairs. Yeah. I love it. Yeah, it's very good. It's very flat, you know? There's no dimensions to it at all, do you think? Contributes to it not feeling like a real...

It doesn't. It does have miracles associated with it because that's the other thing that a good relic has. Yeah. Is that it has miracles. And there were a couple that were in the TV show. I think it was one that cured somebody's back. Yeah.

And one that a guy went to visit it and like on the day that he went to visit it or the day after the mine that he worked in collapsed and he was saved from it. That's pretty good. Yeah. There are kind of other ones around that you can visit that are copies and everybody knows that they're copies and nobody pretends that they're not copies.

So there's like, there's one in Vienna, which is an acknowledged copy. There's one in Spain. There's one in Genoa, another one in San Silvestro. And everyone's like, yeah, these ones, like the way that they would make these is they would paint a face on a board, like on a bit of,

wood or on a canvas and then they would lay the fabric over the top while the paint was wet and it would like imprint on it which is why it all looks like flat painting and these ones everyone's like yeah no no those ones i can't see any difference personally it

But I am not an expert, I guess, in true images that have not been made by hands, but are in fact made by... Divine intervention. Yeah. Made by divine intervention. Yeah. And...

And I'm also not making any money off of it, which people very much are. It used to be one of my favorite things about relics is like during the real heyday of relics when pilgrimage and relics were massive, they would make... People would want something to take home with them. Yeah. Or they would want some kind of divine...

like to be able to take a bit of the divinity with them, like some kind of divine spirit. And they wanted like, you know, because these things, they cure you, they will help you. They have, they are a conduit to divine power. They have some kind of divine power. And so people want that. And,

But you can't have people taking away bits of them because they're finite. But what you can do is you can imbue fabric and oil with the power of the relic. So there are these reliquaries which you would keep them in where they would put like the bone...

inside this reliquary. And then there are a complicated series of tubes which kind of go around the relic and they would pour oil in the top and it would go around the relic and then come out the bottom. And then they would bottle that and sell the oil as relics.

holy oil that has been touched by the finger of mark right and but if you were too good for that maybe if you wanted like some fabric to be embedded then they would do that they could put fabric like in with it so in the tombs for example they would say we'll put it in the tomb of this saint but they would weigh the fabric beforehand and then put it in overnight and then weigh the fabric afterwards and they'd be like look it's gone up by like two grams

That's two grams worth of power you're getting. So this is what you owe us. And yeah, they were quite mercenary in there, which is why Luther wasn't into it. Why he really took against the whole situation. But I appreciate the ingenuity, entrepreneurial spirit. Yeah, you know, everyone's got to make a living. Everyone's just trying to survive. Yeah. The reliquaries where you can kind of roll oil through them are amazing. Like they're quite...

like to make them must have been like genuinely quite challenging because they're made of like obviously this is catholic church they're made of gold they're made of silver they're embedded with stuff like they're not just like a crappy wooden box they are fancy as all hell and then they've got a sort of complicated series of tubes inside as well which is tough work to do with gold it is tough yeah i love them i

I do quite like a good, I always quite enjoy getting to see a good relic. Just always quite pleasing, I think. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of craft that's gone into a lot of them. If you look at the various heads of John the Baptist, what they've done to display them is, you know. It's true. I'm a really big fan of when churches become too isolated and go weird and then put bodies everywhere. Yeah, absolutely.

And sometimes they decorate those bodies with gold. That's my personal favorite. Like if you've got a church where you just put like a load of...

a load of nuns like femurs on the wall there's great one in cologne that i don't think enough people go to the the tongue and jaw of saint anthony in padua is outstanding yes a very good one yeah enormous fan of these i think that there should i mean there shouldn't be more of them it's weird it's very weird but i think that i should be allowed to go to them yeah

It's very fun. And that is... I think that's the difference between all of the holy face things that exist. There are... I mean, there's faces of the Virgin, but I think that's a whole different situation. These are like the main...

The ones that you can visit right now that still exist that have a holy face on them. These are the ones. Yeah. Yeah. And they're fascinating. Yeah. And one of them is called the Mandillion and that's fun. That is fun. The Mandillion. The Mandillion. Yeah. I think that'd be a good band name. Yeah. There are also lots of relics that are not Christian. There are Buddhist relics. There are the teeth of Buddha around. There are footprints of Muhammad. Yeah.

around so it's not just it's not just a catholic thing people love this shit they like to have a tangible connection to yeah to something that's nice it's nice to see a thing that is and be like that is a real thing yeah that is more than just or just to have something to focus on as you say like it's hard to just project spirituality into the air yeah or to project feeling into the air it's nice to have something to focus on yeah yeah it's a good time yeah yeah

Yeah. So that's relics. I'm afraid I'm just too much of a Protestant like to take them too seriously. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to a very modern Baptist and Presbyterian churches where in

In gymnotoriums with cafes in the foyer. It's how we do things. Both my parents are quite staunch atheists, but I went to a Methodist church, which is about as low church as you can get. Like, profoundly. Everything is wood. If you put a touch of gold on anything, once someone came in with a guitar and everybody freaked out because it was too fancy. And everyone was about 112 years old. Oh, see, we were more...

Putting Perspex around the drum kit to aid the mix in my journey. Okay, yeah, no. We were very much like anything that is outside. Like we're very silent prayer, very, you know, personal relationship with God and nothing else. So anything beyond that feels baffling to me. Yeah.

But I know that some people, as I said, the relics of you women who are from Lourdes in Belfast right now and people are having a lovely time seeing them. And I watched a thing of them on the news and they all said that they were going to bolster their faith. They felt that it would bolster their faith, which I thought was quite nice. Yeah, that is nice. I hope that it does, I suppose. Yeah. Actually, next time we're also talking about religion, but a completely different kind of religion that I might get a bit soapboxy about, actually. LAUGHTER

Excellent. Our question is from Bronwyn Cole, who said, what's the deal with Druids and the Celtic gods and goddesses? And I don't think I've mentioned this, but I just wrote a book with Greg Jenner for children about Roman Britain, which has quite a lot of stuff in it about pre-Roman Britain, what is erroneously called the Celtic Britain stuff and the Druids and what we know about the Druids. So, yeah, I thought we would talk about that. Yeah. Because...

just everything about it is kind of nonsense. Yeah, we need some nonsense. We got very grim for a while and the world sucks, so let's have a fun nonsense look at some druids. Weird. And then the episode after that is our 100th episode, Janina. Yeah. So we're going to decide on something fun to do. Yeah. I'm going to ask the patrons what they think we should do for our 100th episode and, yeah, that will be a fun one. Yeah. In some way. We haven't decided yet, but it will be fun. Yeah.

Where can people ask us questions, Janina? You can go to history60.com and fill out a wee form to ask us a question. There are also links to our social media accounts, to Patreon, to Ko-fi, you

everything you can need show notes and whatnot show notes yeah if you are a patron then you get a sticker from me if you are the three or five pound level when we eventually get around to doing bonus content then that will be yours and you can also hear episodes early and occasionally when there's something to ask you like now I will ask you a question you can have some input into what we do for our 100th episode and so it's definitely worth it yeah that's it that's what we've got yeah so until next time Janina

Bye.