Saturn and the foreskin of Jesus
As it has been for millennia, all Jewish boys are required by Jewish law to be circumcised on the 8th day of their birth. Since Jesus was a Jewish boy, well. However, the question of whether Jesus was circumcised was once a significant issue of debate, one that received comment even from the great Saint Thomas Aquinas himself. The consensus, you may imagine, did not steer far from Luke 2:21, which affirms that:
"On the eighth day, when it was time to circumcise the child, he was named Jesus, the name the angel had given him before he was conceived."
When I agreed to face the same practice long after my 8th day of birth – as was the custom of my non-Jewish people – I never really paid attention to the fate of my foreskin. For me, to be finally regarded as a man, at least traditionally, was enough. But I’d like to imagine that after the surgery that was performed – not in a cave, nor at the riverside in the bone-chilling cold of the early morning, but within the warmth and comfort of the sitting room of our little abode – my prepuce must have been subsequently discarded, perhaps into a pit. There, it would have been located and snacked upon by a ravenous rodent. Looking back, I would be glad that I supplied that rodent with some nutrition using my own flesh, as penance for all the rodents that I dissected thereafter as a student of biology. And as for all the other foreskins of the circumcising human race, my bet would be that most, if not all of them, suffered a similar unremarkable fate.
However, the narrative of the circumcision of Jesus did not end so plainly. A little known gospel – contemporary with the other 4 books but (received by the Gnostics and hence) not included in the final Bible – reports that after circumcision, the foreskin of the Messiah was not only removed but preserved. Chapter II of the Syriac Infancy Gospel, aka “The first Gospel of the INFANCY of JESUS CHRIST” begins thus:
"1 AND when the time of his circumcision was come, namely, the eighth day, on which the law commanded the child to be circumcised, they circumcised him in the cave.
2 And the old Hebrew woman took the foreskin (others say she took the navel-string), and preserved it in an alabaster-box of old oil of spikenard.
3 And she had a son who was a druggist, to whom she said, Take heed thou sell not this alabaster box of spikenard-ointment, although thou shouldst be offered three hundred pence for it.
4 Now this is that alabaster-box which Mary the sinner procured, and poured forth the ointment out of it upon the head and the feet of our Lord Jesus Christ, and wiped it off with the hairs of her head."
If my readers are accustomed to the alacrity of the pious in embracing the absurd, they shall not be surprised by what ensued in the centuries to come. Just like the many familiar fraudulent legends and profitable forgeries such as the Shroud of Turin (and others, too many to be enumerated here), the foreskin of Jesus (alias the Holy Prepuce) soon appeared as a holy relic. As early as the 800s, angels have given this foreskin to kings, kings have given it to Popes, and empresses have given back to kings. It has been hallowed by monks and protected by Bishops, it has been looted in the sack of empires, taken violently by soldiers and stolen silently by thieves alike, and it has been kept in a nondescript shoe-box in someone’s house and also in exquisite golden vessels, girdled in diamonds, in the heart of the Vatican. Overall, the foreskin of Jesus has seen more action than most relics of equal repute. And above all, it has been the object of holy pilgrims for Christians all across the world.
Make no mistake, foreskin business was serious business. A Swedish nun and mystic, St Birgitta, reveals to us in her book ‘Revelations’, of how a vision came upon her in which she was offered the glorious opportunity of consuming the foreskin of Jesus. In her own words, she describes that
"So great was the sweetness at the swallowing of this membrane that she felt a sweet transformation in all her members and the muscles of her members,..."
In her time, this Holy Cannibalism was not unusual, for how else were the flock of the church to verify that the foreskin was legit? The truth of the prepuce lies in the tasting, and that was the most accepted test of its authenticity, often performed by a trained physician who was handpicked by the Priest.
During the Middle Ages, there were at least eighteen different Holy Foreskins in cathedrals across Europe, from France to Germany, and from Italy to Belgium: a testament to its importance to the Christian faith. If you are a Christian, take this moment to meditate upon the hundreds of thousands of your predecessors who pilgrimed for weeks and months, on foot or horseback, across thousands of kilometers, with no cars, trains or planes to easen their travel across treacherous alps and vasts deserts, fighting for their lives against predators and bandits, often succumbing to disease and fatigue, just to visit a remote village such as Calcata in Rome, to see, touch and taste, and thereby receive the glorious blessings dissipated by the foreskin of Jesus Christ. And thus for centuries, on 1st January* of every year (8 days after Christmas), it was custom for many Lutherans, Anglicans, and Eastern Orthodox Catholics across the world to celebrate the “Feast of the Circumcision of Christ”, Jesus’ submission to Jewish law and tradition. And if ‘twas in their possession, such as in Calcata, it was a revered and much anticipated spectacle to parade this strange relic across the streets. This was done until as recently as 1983 when the Jewel encrusted case containing the last known foreskin of Jesus was stolen. But, before we get ahead of ourselves ladies and gentlemen….
With the blessings of a wonderful college of freethinkers that eventually became my most admired friends, I held a telescope in my hands for the first time not too long ago. By then, I was already a young man with a sparse beard. Amongst the vast family of telescopes in existence, this was not a superior piece, but by heavens, it was beautiful. With a powerful 498X lens cut to precision, and with a fully computerized azimuthal mount plus a red-dot finder-scope, my virgin eyes could finally see the wondrous beauties of Spinoza’s God lurking in the celestial sphere. Although the telescope was not good enough to bring to focus all the objects of my desires, it did more than enough to disturb my spirits and make me wave my hands above my head in bewilderment. As we all know, texts and photographs cannot convey the full majesty of things as vividly as the eyes often do.
I must confess that the universe was often unkind and she gave me a clear sky but once only, as I toyed with this Celestron NexStar telescope in front of the Chapel of the School I love the most. On that day, I reached neither for the stars nor for the planets but I aimed for the moon. And to both their delight and to my heart’s content, I showed the craters of the moon to hundreds of little minds that eagerly lined up behind me, minds that may never remember my name, but will never forget the grand depressions that they saw peppering the surface of the moon.
Before I came along, many men had already peered into the sky far deeply than I ever will, but none of them makes my heart rejoice in laughter more than Leo Allatius.
Leo was a Greek Scholar and a scholar of Greek, who by the twists and turns of fate became the Keeper of the Vatican library in the 17th Century. He was also trained as a physician and he was perhaps the first scholar to perform an analytical consideration on vampires. As a studious contemporary of Galileo, he was also among the earliest men to peer into the heavens with an aided eye.
One day, I imagine, he must have overheard some rumors in his local parish about the mysterious objects that Galileo – the astronomer extraordinaire, engineer and infamous blasphemer – had seen around Saturn using the 30X spyglass that he built with his own hands. As is the nature of men of the cloth who are driven by their theologies to apologetics rather than to reason, I can imagine he disbelieved the reports of Galileo and vowed to see the heavenly objects for himself. The official doctrine of the Church – which was the truth and nothing but the truth – was that the Earth was the centre of God’s creation and everything in the heavens revolved around it. However, Galileo’s mischief of examining the heavens with his own eyes instead of accepting the doctrines of the church had made him see outrageous things, such as some moons that the Good Lord had allegedly cast around Saturn instead of around the Earth, breaking the perfect symmetry of the celestial spheres. Galileo’s great mischief was using his brain, and as it is famously documented, it did not go unpunished.
At first, Galileo had seen the blurry but distinct rings of Saturn, but he believed himself to be seeing Saturn surrounded by two large satellite planets instead. To his wealthy patron, Cosimo II de’ Medici – the then Grand Duke of Tuscany whom Galileo had tutored when Medici was but a child – the blasphemer wrote that:
"The planet Saturn is not alone, but is composed of three, which almost touch one another and never move nor change with respect to one another. They are arranged in a line parallel to the zodiac, and the middle one (Saturn itself) is about three times the size of the lateral ones."
He had discovered a 3-body system where there was supposed to be one, or so he thought. However, when he checked again 6 years later, the 2 ‘satellite planets’ seemed to have disappeared. It was impossible! he thought. Galileo did not know, but neither did any man back then, that Saturn’s rings appear and disappear from view as their angle of inclination towards us changes. This is due to both Saturn’s axial tilt and our relative position to the ring plane as both planets revolve around the sun. We, therefore, get varying views of Saturn’s rings from the earth at different times. Twice every Saturnian year (every 15 years or so), the Earth passes through the ring plane and at that moment, because we are looking at the edge of the rings head on, they disappear from view. After all, we are looking at them from 1.2 billion kilometres away, yet the rings are 20 metres thick on average: that’s like trying to spot a strand of human hair floating about in the air from 1,200 kilometres away. Unfortunately for Galileo, he died decades before his contemporaries could build better telescopes to correct his ideas and explain his observations.
As is the nature of the human imagination, it often tends to run wild, especially when aided by mythologies and superstition. Leo Allatius is humorously known to have contrived the perfect explanation for that mysterious object that Galileo had identified surrounding Saturn. Leo, after all, was among the proper thinking Christians of his time, a skeptic, who had doubted the fact that the real foreskin of the Messiah was housed in one of the many churches, such as in the cathedral of Calcata, Italy. So, when he gazed at the wondrous object that seemed to wrap around Saturn, long before scientific propositions held sway, the answer that came to his mind was as clear as day.
Leo, thereby, penned a treatise on the Saviour’s foreskin skin titled ‘De Praeputio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Diatriba‘ (Discourse on the Foreskin of Our Lord Jesus Christ). He speculated that as Jesus ascended into heaven in the presence of his apostles, 40 days after his resurrection, his 33-year-old foreskin emerged from whence it had long lain – perfectly preserved by some substance or by the grace of God – and ascended into the sky with him. But, instead of merging with the member from which it had been carved, or just accompanying the Messiah on his way to the right hand side of the Lord, the Holy Prepuce had other ideas of its own. It made a sharp turn and flew a billion kilometres away from the ascending Messiah, and upon encountering the gas giant Saturn, it expanded into the rings that we see today, with an excess of over 500,000 kilometres in circumference.
As the universe is often unkind, this treatise by Leo Allatius was never published, so we have thus been deprived of the pleasure of reading it and exploring its author’s ideas in their original form. However, the treatise was listed in Johann Albert Fabricius’s Bibliotheca Graeca (Bibliography of Greek writers), which cites a booklet in which the foreskin treatise was scheduled to appear (in volume 8 of Allatius 10-volume publication). It is therefore probable that in an ancient library somewhere, perhaps within the dusty recesses of the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, is an unindexed document by no less a personality than a former keeper of the Vatican library, containing an articulate exposition in high Latin of how the foreskin of the son of God ascended with him into the sky, and detoured towards a newer and more vibrant fate as the magnificent rings of Saturn. Ah, so sweet are the infrequent joys that religion brings!
Happy New Year folks.
*On the Julian calendar, 1st January, the day of the Feast of the Circumcision of Christ, now corresponds to 14 January on our Gregorian Calendar, and will do so for the next 80 years.
How sweet the joys indeed!
Imagine that!
Imagine that!