Building Religions 30: Relics

Only two of our world's major religions include relics as objects of devotion: Buddhism and Christianity. Despite that fact, however, they seem to appear in a number of fantasy settings as an unquestioned part of religious practice. What I would like to discuss here, following up on my post on how to deal with death and the dead, is an overview of what relics are, their perceived status in the religions that focus on them, and the kinds of religions that might incorporate their veneration into their rituals.

The English word relic derives from the Latin reliquus, which means a remnant. At its most basic level, that's all that a relic is: either the remains of the body of a holy person, some fragment of those remains, or an object associated with their life. (In Catholic tradition, relics are divided into three classes of decreasing power: the actual parts of a saint, a saint's possessions or objects connected to his miracles, and anything that has touched a relic of one of the first two classes.) The size of the remains is unimportant: a hair can be as potent a relic as an entire body; a holy body that is divided up into tiny pieces becomes many relics, not many parts of one.

Functionally, relics may be treated either as conduits to the sacred power of the person of whom they were a part or as actual embodiments of that person after death. That is to say, the person lives on—in an active, even animate, way—wherever the relic is present. Relics, therefore, continue to perform miracles for, or bring prosperity to, the community that possesses them. They may be fed, clothed, or communicated with. Their will may be interpreted through events that occur within the community: if misfortune strikes, it is because the relic is displeased; if they are lost, it is because they wish to move elsewhere. (In mediaeval Europe, the theft of relics was a fairly common event, and was sometimes justified by the argument that the saint had appeared in a vision and asked to be taken. Here's a good account of the theft of the relics of St. Nicholas.)

Because they provide access to sacred power, relics have frequently been gathered by those with political power who wish to bolster their own status. A ruler who possesses an appropriate relic could be considered to represent divine authority in ways that no one else can, especially in cultures in which political leaders are already thought of as intermediaries for divinity. Again, the loss of such a relic could signal the end of power for the unfortunate ruler, which would make the theft or destruction of relics an important part of any invasion or revolution.

Beyond political motivations for collecting relics, there is also an economic one: relics draw pilgrims. This makes them the religious equivalent of tourist attractions, bringing money into the local economy in the same way that modern tourist destinations do. The more relics that one place can acquire, or the greater the prestige attached to those relics, the more the wealth that follows. Imagine a small village with an enshrined relic: as more pilgrims begin to visit, the people of the village set up a marketplace to cater to their needs. They build inns to house them, attract merchants from nearby villages who also want to trade with the pilgrims, and gradually expand into a thriving town. It's a delicate economy at first, but after a time, the town may become stable enough as a centre of trade that even the loss of the relic wouldn't destroy it.

Those, then, are three types of power that you can associate with relics: sacred, political, and economic. The pursuit of any of them can drive forward a story. But before you start planning a complicated fantasy thriller involving rival groups trying to steal a royal relic, you still need to consider the question of what sort of religion might be interested in relics to begin with.

After all, in cultures for which corpses are considered unclean, the idea of treating a piece of one as an object of veneration can be unthinkable. At the other end of the spectrum, if they are treated as entirely sacred and approached with ritualized respect, the idea of dividing them is equally repugnant. What's required is a particular combination of attitudes. First, enough of an otherworldly focus in the religion that its adherents think of bodies as temporary vehicles for some more permanent spirit. Second, enough of a this-worldly grounding that the idea of a body acting as a vessel of sacred power is not unreasonable. If the first is true, but not the second, there may still be worship at tombs, but not in the actual presence of the dead; if the second is true, but not the first, there may be elaborate processes of preservation and the veneration of entire bodies, but not the division of relics. If you have already thought about the ways that your fictional religion approaches death, then you may already have an answer to which of these practices (if any) could follow.