I don't encounter relics, these being things carrying some religious significance, say a lock of hair from a saint. No, I think my life has been relic free, unless my eyes happened to innocently pass over one while viewing yet another sacred space, the altar.
I mean, the stage of the theater, a tall room intended to impress. so you come away thinking, well yes it must be true, look at the color of those windows! And that ceiling is so tall!
Where people once gathered to honour a supreme being who, if he/she/it even existed, got the job not for amazing work no it is just reward for being there. This we celebrate? I was I think five when this story was laid out before me and even at five I smelled a rat.
A lucky coin is picked up on the street, the ring is slipped on, the reliquary is brought out. We fill them with meaning, over them we pour some sort of precious metal that we have produced from a corner of our minds and there they stand, these things. Full of meaning. And there we stand, illuminated by their meaning.
Solvej Balle in On the Calculation of Volume (Book II)
These are called reliquary, a reliquary being a container for a relic.
Each is a human-sized statue of a saint adorned with elaborate decorations. The hole in the chest is, I assume, where the relic goes.
We saw these reliquary at
Museo Sigismondo Castromediano in Lecce.
