• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.
A

Anonymous

Guest
The uncorruptables??

I read about these people in a old forteantimes, can't remember which issue. It was
about these people in either Central or Southern America where after they died they
didn't decompose or only partially decomposed. The natives put them on display in
a little makeshift museum. Was it just a marketing ploy to attract tourists or is it the
real deal. I've heard that some saints were uncorruptable, can't come up with any of
the top of my head, but does anybody have any info or point me in the right direction.
All replies are welcome.
 
Have you got the latest FT? No. 159. It's full of them. :)
 
Nope, I don't have a subscription due to lack of funds, and they don't sell FT in
bookstores or really any other stores in this area. I think the issue was maybe june/july
99, have any scientists a reason why uncorruption occurs. Also does anybody know
where I could find FT in the Chicago and northern Indiana area, I can't find them
anywhere. Thanks
 
US and Canada subscriptions: Contact
IMS. 3330 Pacific Av. Suite 404, Virginia beach, VA 23451-2983, USA.
Tel: 1 888 428 6676
Fax: 1 757 428 6253


(Query to FT: do I get a commission for this?!)
 
I get all my FT from a Barnes & Nobles in Burlington, Vermont. I don't know if all B&N carry it, but check around.
They had it for a while, then the stopped carrying it... and I freaked out... and then magically it was back. But of course I've been at college all year and only pick it up every few months on vacations.
I need a subscription, but I too am low on $$.

Last one I got was March's... ech, I really need a subscription.
 
Can't your local paper shop order it in for you? Or am I living in an episode of Miss Marple here? :(
 
I have a strange fascination with incorruptibles - probably because my dad was an undertaker and our car (a Volvo estate, handy for corpse transportation) smelt of embalming fluid.

Does anyone remember the article a couple of years back about the South American village where the bodies didn't rot and no-one could figure out why? Is there any more news on this?

Also, why in some countries are graves emptied and ossuaries used? It seems a bit odd, or is that my English squemishness concerning bodies being moved after burial?
 
Fashionably late response...

I don't have the time to hang out here as much as I used to.

The use of ossuaries is most common in countries where space for burials is limited and cremation is uncommon. Exhuming corpses and recycling the burial plots is a more efficent use of land that could be used for farming etc, especially if there is a limited amount of appropriate land (sufffient soil.etc to allow for the hole to be deep enough). For that reason it occurs where there is largely rocky or sandy terrain.

I don't have any new info about the S American village though, although I suspect it would come down to the chemistry of the soil as much as anything else.
 
I went on holiday to Kefalonia in Greece when I was a child and I saw an incorruptible. I can't remember the name of the chap, but he'd been cannonised and they only opened his coffin when there were only Greek people about (evidently not wanting a corpse to become a tourist attraction). Unfortunately, I was mistaken for a Greek and I was still in the church when they opened the coffin. I was about 6 at the time but I found it extremely interesting and not scary at all. He was brown like old, wrinkly brown paper, and there was a cloth over his feet which the faithful kissed. He was buried when he died, and they had to move him, and when they exhumed the coffin several years later, he hadn't disintegrated. He's paraded around the nearby village every year in a glass coffin.

Thanks for explaining ossuaries. I've seen photos of a church somewhere in Eastern Europe where they decorated it with bones, so that there was candle stands and and altar all made from bones. And I think there was once something in FT about somewhere in Paris which is similarly decorated. I was wondering if, because the body bits are used to decorate a church, it's not seen as shocking or disrespectful to the dead.
 
What an amazing experience.
There's a fascinating website with examples of holy incorruptibles you might find interesting -

http://members.aol.com/ccmail/incorrupt4.html

(although like a lot of such images I've seen, there seems to be some creative use of wax involved.)

Dansette said:
I was wondering if, because the body bits are used to decorate a church, it's not seen as shocking or disrespectful to the dead.

Keeping death out of sight and as sanitised as possible is a relatively modern convention. In societies with a high mortality rate, death is quite literally part of life and people are far more up front about it.
Decorating churches with symbols of death such as skulls and bones (real or sculptured) was a way of reminding the living of their unavoidable mortality.
 
There's a village in Italy I think, I'm not sure exactly where, but the composition of the soil means that anyone interred in the region remains intact for several centuries... I don't remember any more details though
 
I've done a Google, and the saint was Agios Gerassimos, who died in 1579. You can see a photo of the church he's kept in here:

http://www.kefalonia-island.co.uk/agios.html

That's not him sat on the plastic patio chair! I can't find a photo of him, but I do remember by grandad got a postcard of it which my mum told him off for showing me - she thought it would give me nightmares, even though I'd seen the real thing! If you go to the church you can go into the cave underneath which he hacked out to live in. But I didn't see Nicholas Cage when I was there. ;)

Thanks for the incorruptibles website. It's fascinating. The thing is with Agios, have Greek Orthodox incorruptibles been reported as much as Catholic ones? Or have the Catholics cornered that niche?
 
Chanubi, please remember!

anyway, I've managed to find a photo of Agios Gerassimos:

http://www.imk.gr/eng/mitro/mitro02.htm

You need to click on the thumbnail on the left in the middle. You can just about make him out in his silver box, wearing a gold cross. His advanced state of wrinkliness makes me think that those Italians are up to something!
 
Sorry, me again.

One of the Kephalonia websites I looked at said that there used to be a temple to Zeus on the mountain just behind Agios' church.

Hmmmm.....
 
I saw Bernadette Soubirous' (the Lourdes visionary) body in Nevers about 10 years ago, with only the little finger decayed. You weren't allowed take photos, but there were postcards on sale. I recall seeing (in FT?) two photos of her face - one taken at the turn of the century (1900s) and one more recent. The differences were so marked that it didn't look like the same girl at all... or was it just the lighting & b/w vs. colour?
 
hospitaller said:
or was it just the lighting & b/w vs. colour?

Never having seen it in the flesh I obviously can't be sure, but that is certainly one of the bodies that IMO seems to have a suspiciously 'waxy' look to it.
 
According to The Unexplained (p.1512), all incorruptible bodies now displayed by the Church have a thin coat of wax applied, to keep the body appearing perfectly lifelike (negating the effects of the display, eg lighting &c)

Oh and Dansette, I tried tracking down that reference for the village but I cant find it anywhere :(
 
Originally posted by Dansette
I've seen photos of a church somewhere in Eastern Europe where they decorated it with bones, so that there was candle stands and and altar all made from bones. And I think there was once something in FT about somewhere in Paris which is similarly decorated. I was wondering if, because the body bits are used to decorate a church, it's not seen as shocking or disrespectful to the dead.

<leaps into the thread a mere 2 months after the last post>
The Cemetery Church of All Saints in Sedlec, Czech Rep has an ossuary of plague victims. In the late 18th century a woodcarver was given permission to create skeletal decorations.

More info at http://www.ludd.luth.se/users/silver_p/kutna.html - the gallery is very striking.
 
I saw it mentioned in a book about the Plague (In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made by Norman Cantor, I think) and made a note to look into it later...then I saw your post and did a Google.

Is the Paris one the Paris Catacombs (lots of stuff on Google)? I heard a programme about it on Radio 4 once - the security guard said that everyone leaving the place is frisked and every day they catch at least one person trying to smuggle a 'souvenir' out.
 
Saponification

Emperor said:
I was watching a repeat of CSI and they mentioned incorruptibles. I'm not sur eif this has come up before in this context bu it appears that the bodies fat can turn to mortuary wax through the process saponification where pH is high (alkaline) and oxygen levels are restricted. I'm sire it isn't the expalntion for all incorruptibles but jam a bit of wax on to build up some features and apply some makeup and bingo!!

New report:

Mysteries of bog butter uncovered

Wax found in Celtic bogs is the remains of ancient meat and milk.
17 March 2004

PHILIP BALL



Chemical detectives have traced deposits of fat in Scottish peat bogs to foodstuffs buried by people hundreds of years ago. The 'bog butter' is the remains of both dairy products and meat encased in the peat, say Richard Evershed of the University of Bristol and colleagues.

Those who live in the countryside of Ireland and Scotland and dig up chunks of peat for fuel have long been familiar with bog butter. While gathering the compressed plant matter, which can be burned in fires, diggers occasionally slice into a white substance with the appearance and texture of paraffin wax.

This is thought to be the remains of food once buried in the bog to preserve it. Waterlogged peat is cool and contains very little oxygen, so it can be used as a primitive kind of fridge.

The question is what type of food was buried in the peat. Local lore sometimes says that the waxy stuff is literally the remains of butter. For example, the seventeenth-century English writer Samuel Butler remarked in one of his famous poems that butter in Ireland "was seven years buried in a bog".

Grave wax

But there could be an alternative source for the waxy material: dead animals. In the eighteenth century, French chemists discovered that human corpses often contain adipocere, a substance also known as 'grave-wax'. So bog butter could be the remains of carcasses rather than dairy products.

To find out, Evershed and his colleagues took a close look at the fatty acids in bog butter. The chains of hydrocarbons in these molecules differ between those derived from dairy and those from meat. The chains in dairy products tend to be shorter than those in animal fat. And there are also differences in the relative amounts of normal and 'heavy' carbon they contain. Most of the carbon in organic material is carbon-12, but about one percent consists of the heavier isotope carbon-13. The exact amount of carbon-13 depends in part on whether the fat came from meat or dairy products.

The team verified some of these differences by analysing artificial bog butters, which were made in the 1970s from mutton fat and butter mixed with soil and water. They then looked at nine samples of bog butter provided by the National Museum of Scotland, some of which are 2000 years old. Six of the bog butter samples come from dairy products, and three are from animal fat, they report in The Analyst1. So ancient Scots clearly used the peat to store both types of food, they say.

But there remains some mystery: researchers still do not know for sure if the food was buried solely to preserve it. Perhaps chemical reactions in the soil helped to transform the foods to more palatable products in a kind of primitive food processing, says Evershed. He plans to bury some modern fatty foods in peat to find out if anything interesting happens to them.

References
Berstan, R. et al. The Analyst, 129, 270 - 275, doi:10.1039/b313436a (2004).

http://www.nature.com/nsu/040315/040315-5.html

Full text of that article is available:

Characterisation of bog butter using a combination of molecular and isotopic techniques

Robert Berstan , Stephanie N. Dudd , Mark. S. Copley , E. David Morgan , Anita Quye and Richard. P. Evershed
Article available free of charge:


Abstract:
The chemical analyses of bog butters recovered from peat bogs of Scotland were performed with the aim of determining their origins. Detailed compositional information was obtained from bog butter lipids using high temperature gas chromatography (HTGC) and GC-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The results indicate the degree to which bog butters have undergone diagenetic alterations during burial to form an adipocere like substance, consisting predominately of hexadecanoic (palmitic) and octadecanoic (stearic) acids. GC-combustion-isotope ratio MS (GC-C-IRMS) was used to determine 13C values for the dominant fatty acids present, revealing for the first time that bog butters were derived from both ruminant dairy fats and adipose fats. The results are compared and contrasted with modern reference fats and adipoceres produced in vitro.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1039/b313436a

Emps
 
Uncorrupt bodies

A couple of years ago I became interested in uncorrupt bodies. These corpses are almost always from Saints but while gathering info on Belgian uncorruptable saints, I also came across a whole bunch of corpses which were either beatified or who were just common people who stayed uncorrupt. I think I've got a pretty clear picture on the Belgian situation and even on the rest of Europe but it would always be interesting to find some more dead mummified corpses. All weblinks are welcome.

One of our Belgian bodies, we called her "Nieke zuip", Nieke the drunkard, even had stigmata during her life and she also helped to heal people after her death. Similar stories are also welcome.
 
mandragoire: Yep I think it is just religious corpses which tend to get re-examined after they are buried.

I also wonder if they tend to be more likely to be sealed in air tight coffins? There were a lot of partially preserved (someitmes 'liquified') corpses in the Spitalfields excavation and there were an awful lot of lead lined coffins there.

Anyway I had done a bit more digging after my first post on this which I hadn't posted.

As well as appearing CSI it also featured in a recent episode of "Cold Squad" - episode 42 "Murder Farm".

This site is possibly the best online resources for adipocere:

http://adipocere.homestead.com

There are also lots of good resources on the process of saponification (as animal fat + alkali is the natural way of making soap - as people probably picked up in Fight Club):

http://www.realhandmadesoap.com/folders/FAQ/what_is_saponification.htm

http://groups.msn.com/TheAlchemistsCorner/saponificationiscleanchemistry.msnw

Emps
 
The mention of bone art reminded me of an artist whose name I cannot now remember and it's bugging me. He was around probably in the 1600's/1700's and made tableux and dioramas out of the skeletons of new born babys and human veins and other body matters. I think there's only engravings of his work left and the one I remeber seeing is of a tiny skeleton holding the caul from a babys birth to its eyes like a handkerchief. I think his name begins with a 'V'. Can anybody remember?
 
There are several references to incorruptibles in my 'Fortean Timeline'. Most are in Europe, but there's also one from China.
 
Back
Top