Otherways- Fiction Fanatics

I mean no disrespect to my Catholic friends, but I have to admit the few times I attended Catholic services in my youth, I found them deeply disturbing. Not that there is anything wrong with the religion, it was the statues everywhere, looking at me. I have to admit, I've never even liked dolls, so it was probably far more something bizarre in my head than any fault of the sculptors. As I got older, they bothered me less, but I never could quite shake the uncomfortable feeling being around some of these statues gave me.

Overactive imaginations can be a curse, I know. Recently, I came across some interesting articles that make me wonder if maybe it isn't all in my head after all.

For example, they recently discovered the mummified body of what is assumed to be a Buddhist monk inside a golden statue of Buddha. It is at least a thousand years old, and for that long faithful members of the religion have been visiting the statue, completely unaware that it contained human remains. It may just be me, but I find this a little eerie. 

It wasn't that uncommon a practice, though, in many religions. The remains of holy persons, most notably the bones, were often believed to have power even long after a person's death. In medieval times they ground up the bones of saints and monks to use in cures. They believed the skull bones to be the most effective, as the person's spirit would leave there last. Of course, they also treated everything they could find with mercury, believing it to be highly magical as well. I can't blame them for that, if anything looks like it ought to be magical at first glance, then a metal that's liquid at room temperature fits the bill. The fact that it is a deadly poison is entirely beside the point.

Keeping the bones of your revered dead in a statue is not that odd, I suppose. After all, the Egyptians had been doing it for centuries before the Christians and Buddhists started making their reliquaries. The practice of having the faithful donate part of their living bodies to make a statue is a trifle more bizarre.

In San Bartolo Cuautlalpan, Mexico is one of those statues of Jesus I have always found disturbing. Known as the "Lord of Patience", it depicts Jesus with open wounds, after he has been beaten. It's hard to look at a statue like that and not cringe, and that's before you know that the statue contains a complete set of human teeth, in good condition. That begs the question of where the teeth came from in the first place.  While it is possible they were taken from a deceased person, it is equally likely that some devout soul donated all their teeth to complete the statue, before anesthetics, despite the fact that the teeth aren't even visible under normal circumstances. Apparently this was a fairly common practice at the time.

If that doesn't give you shivers, I don't know what will.

Cheers,

Michelle