Mortuary relics and treasured reliquaries
By G. S. Cheema

IN India the dead are usually cremated, and the ashes are cast into some river or the other.Very often the clothes of the deceased are also distributed among the poor, and only his memories survive. Except in the case of the emperors and ruling princes of yore (and, prime ministers of the present state), there are normally no memorials corresponding to the graves and sepulchres of Christendom. Of course Muslims bury their dead, and so do many other communities as well, but the sepulchral practices of Europe will strike most Indians as decidedly unusual.

First, take the burial practices of the great, and there can be no better example than the Imperial House of Habsburg. The Church of the Capuchins in the little street of Marco d’ Aviano-Gasse in the heart of Vienna is its official sepulchre. The Imperial crypt contains the coffins of 13 emperors, 17 empresses, and over a hundred archdukes. They are not actually buried in the earth, the coffins are merely kept in an underground chamber. And, curiously, at least in the case of the emperors, the internal organs were usually removed and kept in separate urns — which can be seen in the crypt of the Cathedral of St. Stephen. The hearts are in yet a third church, that of the Augustinians. Thus the remains of a single emperor are distributed in three different places! Similar practices prevailed in other countries. Louis XV, for instance, was laid to rest in two lead coffins, with abundant wine poured in, to act as a preservative. He died of ‘confluent small-pox’, so pickling in alcohol had to substitute for the ceremonial evisceration, to reduce the risk of infection. Some readers may recall the story of Robert Bruce, who, disappointed that he had been unable to fulfil his resolve to go on a crusade to the Holy Land, directed Lord James Douglas to ensure that his heart was able to complete the vow. So the faithful Douglas set out for Palestine, with the heart in a silver casket round his neck.

If it was thus with kings, it was so with popes. While St Peter’s is the official sepulchre for most, as many as 22 Popes bequeathed their hearts and viscera to San Vicenzo ed Anastasio, the parish church of the Quirinal Palace, which was the papal residence until 1870. The hearts are kept in marble urns, like the canopic jars which contained the viscera of the Egyptian pharaohs.

So much for the rulers. But lesser mortals, nobles and even haute bourgeoisie could also be absurdly particular. Prince Eugene of Savoy, the famous Imperial general was buried in Vienna, but his heart lies in the family vault of the Savoyard house in Turin. Jacques Neckar, Genevois banker and briefly finance minister of France, was so infatuated with his wife, that he had her body embalmed, and kept it in his house while her pyramid-like mausoleum was under construction. Finally, she was laid to rest in a glass-topped coffin, filled with wine! The key of the tomb was with the husband who would regularly visit her, topping up the wine as it evaporated. When his turn came, he too was pickled in the same sarcophagus, and the tomb was sealed. It was opened again, 13 years later, to admit the coffin of their daughter, the famous Germaine, Madame de Stael. She, however, had no longing for corporeal permanence, and the normal processes of decay were allowed to run their course, in her case. In Europe, and particularly the USA., corpses are still commonly embalmed before burial. That this practice is cultural rather than religious is suggested by the case of Lenin and Stalin, who too were embalmed and displayed in glass coffins in their Red Square mausoleum, even though Communism denies the existence of God or of a life after death. One is reminded of ancient Egypt.

With a background like this, it is scarcely to be wondered that there is a society in the USA which — for a substantial fee — undertakes to freeze their clients, when they die, in liquid nitrogen, and to keep them in that condition indefinitely (or as long as funds last) in the hope of a future resurrection, when science may have found a cure for their disease. The members of this Cryogenic Society are truly the descendants of the ancient Egyptians.

The treasuries of European churches, abbeys and cathedrals, are full of grisly mortuary relics. Bones of saints which should have been allowed to fade to dust in their graves have been set in golden ‘reliquaries’ and ‘monstrances’ and are cherished as sacred relics.

The most famous relic of this nature is the ‘incorruptible’ body of St. Francis Xavier, in the Church of Bom Jesus in Goa. It was brought from Malacca and first deposited in the Church of St. Paul, and later moved to its present location in Bom Jesus. During the canonisation process, the papal authorities had demanded proof of its incorruptibility, so the right arm of the saint was amputated and sent to Rome. It was actually cut into four pieces, and some of them sent to members of the Portuguese royal house. The ‘incorruptible’ body, therefore, lacks an arm. Two of the toes of the right foot are also missing. One was reportedly bitten off by a Portuguese lady as she bent down to kiss the foot on the occasion of an exposition! Saintly relics are credited with miraculous powers, and are therefore coveted. But because of the risk of further damage to the saint at the hands of the pious, expositions are now extremely rare and far between. Until recently, another such ‘incorruptible’ relic, the body of St. Clare, could also be seen in the Church of Poor Clares in Assissi. Notwithstanding its reputation, the shrivelled and blackened face of the saint presented a macabre sight, and happily, it has now been put away. Until the 50s, anyone could request the sacristan for the saint’s darshan.

It would appear that in the old days most people of consequence were laid to rest in underground crypts. Only ordinary people were apparently buried in a proper grave dug in the earth. In many churches and cathedrals, you can see the massive stone sarcophagi and the heavy lead-lined coffins. There is, of course, usually an extra charge for climbing the towers, or the dome; and more for visiting the museum or cloisters.

Another example of the morbid obsession with mortuary relics is the cemetery of the Capuchin fathers in Rome, which Frommer’s Travel Guide to Italy classes as ‘Rome’s Most Macabre Sight’. Guidebooks of old used to rank it along with the Forum and the Colosseum as the top attractions of the city. Qualifying as one of the most horrifying sights in all Christendom, it is an underground cemetery of skulls and crossbones woven into "works of art". To make this allegorical dance of death, the bones of more than 4000 Capuchin monks were used. Some of the skeletons are intact, and dressed up as monks. The write-up for tourists suggests that the cemetery should be visited keeping in mind the historical moment of its origins, when Christians had a rich and creative cult for their dead, when great spiritual masters meditated and preached with a skull in hand. We are all familiar with Hamlet’s soliloquy over the skull of Yorick; Byron used to keep a skull in his study; and so did the illfated Archduke Rudolph of Austria. Of Pope Pius IX, it is said, that when he was a youthful priest he would often keep a skull beside him on the pulpit while giving a sermon; once he covered a thighbone with spirits and set fire to it to illustrate the terrors of hell. The Capuchin crypt is something like that, pointing a moral, a gigantic memento mori. But those who have live through the days of death camps and other horrors of World War II may view it differently, as being illustrative of that horrifying aspect of western civilization which made the Holocaust possible.I really cannot think of anything comparable in India.

Death and mortality are the constant refrain of all religions and cults. We have our share of the macabre in the cult of Kali, and Durga with her garland of skulls. Animal sacrifice also survives in Kali temples, but mortuary relics are never worshipped or adored, at least in mainstream Hinduism. Bones and skulls may, and do survive in the rituals of Aghora sadhus and tantriks, but theirs is a dark, subterranean world, only dimly acknowledged, and remote from the mainstream.

‘Sacred’ relics exist in Islam also, but they are rarely more substantial than, say, a hair of the beard of the Prophet. Graves may be worshipped, after a manner, despite strict injunctions to the contrary, but mortuary relics were never stolen or traded as they were so often in the West. The Venetians stole the bones of St. Mark from Alexandria, and the Emperor Baldwin, last of the Latin Emperors, sold vast numbers of relics, filched from the churches of Constantinople, in a desperate attempt to raise funds to save his bankrupt and crumbling state. Buddhism too has its Temple of the Tooth. Its stupas and chortens also house mortuary relics of the Buddha and other saints and bodhisattvas, but the caskets containing these relics are buried inside the masonry. If some of them are now displayed, it must be remebered that they were uncovered in the course of archaeological excavations. The callousness with which western archaeologists have dug up ancient (and not so ancient) cemeteries, in the cause of ‘science’ has deeply hurt the sentiments of many people. Some of them, notably the Lapps and some Amerindian tribes, have long been agitating for the return of the remains of their ancestors from the ethnographical museums where they have been lying for decades in numbered boxes, carefully catalogued.

Indians have a horror for keeping human remains in thehouse if the ashes of the dead cannot be taken for immersion immediately after the cremation they are left at the cremation ground, till such time when the journey can be performed. The very thought of exposing the pathetic remains of the dead to public gaze would seem sacrilegious.

The customs of others always seem strange and barbaric. Today, because of pressure on cemetery land even Christian are increasingly preferring cremation to burial, though when George Bernard Shaw was advocating it in the 1920s it certainly seemed strange and novel. After all Hell was popularly represented as an everlasting cremation of the resurrected sinner. For similar reasons, Muslims have a horror of cremation or death by burning. Further the kind of mutilation to which St Francis’s corpse was subjected during the canonical proceedings would have been considered unimaginably disrespectful by Muslims. On the Last Judgement, the poor saint would have to appear before God’s throne minus one arm, and many a king would rise without his heart and other organs (most rulers are heartless anyway). And just think of all those who were beheaded. It would surely be a most hair-raising scene!