Gregory's ServerTIL that the purported skull of Mary Magdalene is enshrined in a gold reliquary in Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, in France, and that reliquary is _the_ most Warhammer-40k-looking real thing I have ever seen in my life, bar none.
 62 comments
 @tedmielczarek Maybe that's what the angels are protraying, the process of slotting it in place?   @mhoye @gnomon @tedmielczarek this will be the perfect sequel to #BattlePope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_Pope  @barubary @mhoye @gnomon @tedmielczarek ooh that looks intriguing - do you know if it's available as a single volume omnibus?  @tedmielczarek @mhoye @mhoye St. Valentine's skull, for comparison, is just sitting in a fancy box in a church in Rome.  @tedmielczarek @mhoye ok maybe these abrahamic religions aren’t as patriarchal as I thought lol  @mhoye This is the stuff of road trip legend, also the framing of the picture here makes the wings look like golden spider's legs which just adds to it.   @mhoye Earlier this year I visited a church where they had this guy, just chilling there, waiting to be painted like one of your French girls. They even had a second one! https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Regensburg_St_Emmeram_2012_Nr_-49.jpg @mhoye You might enjoy Anneli Rufus's book "Magnificent Corpses", in which she goes to a number of shrines like this across Europe   @mhoye You might like this - https://www.cultofweird.com/art/holy-face-mask/ which someone did at peak COVID and was the previous holder of the "most WH40K thing ever" title.   @jtheseamstress @mhoye I may be weird too, but all those tests look like something that would tell really interesting things about the medieval relic trade!
You HAVE to read 'Afterlives of the Saints' by Colin Dickey. It's absolutely wild.     @mhoye #ALT4you Golden plated statues of angels, facing away from the viewer, holding up a golden plated bust with hair and a glass bubble in place of the face, inside the bubble, a darkened skull is visible, held in place in a red fabric case. The bust is placed upon another golden plated structure with intricate details that, from the point of view of the picture, makes it look like a robotic body. All that seems to sand in a rock cave or cemented structure. @mhoye Please, could you add an image description to make your toot accessible for everyone ? For instance :
Feel free to adapt is, as English is not my first language. @mhoye this is probably (extremely likely) one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen in my life.  @mhoye @ramsey i knew of catacomb saints (Katakombenheilige) where european churches bought skeletons claimed to originate from rome and decorated them, to claim they have their own saints. Baroque death cult tends to be quite something. I took the main picture on this wikipedia article @mhoye How does that square with: We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory. @artnacrea @mhoye Mary the mother of Christ is not Mary Magdalene, the latter was a sex worker who he befriended (and according to some historians maybe had a relationship with). The previous his mother. The fact they have the same name can be quite confusing. @GLaDTheresCake @artnacrea @mhoye  @mhoye makes sense given 40k's Imperium seems to be a mix of the worst excesses of Victorian England with the aesthetics of the Catholic Church on crack  |
@mhoye holy fucking shit, I NEED to go and see this