Review of “Stigmata”…

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The film Stigmata (1999) presses a whole lot of my buttons. At the time it was originally released, I had been researching my own novel built on broadly the same premise:  a globetrotting protagonist hunting down miraculous statues and people claiming to have duplicates of Christ’s stigmata (though that’s basically where the similarities ended). And so I was fascinated to see how the film-makers went about bringing this to life.

stigmata-small

Even though the story and script (by Tom Lazarus, the not-quite-so-famous brother of Paul Lazarus III, director of Westworld & Capricorn One) didn’t itself think far out of the [confession] box, something magical happened in the art direction and cinematography: the use of colour, focus, light, time, sets, costume, and even make-up were all exemplary. For me, watching Stigmata was at times like being artfully collaged to death, machine-gunned with photographically (and geometrically) perfect moments: a tick on a piece of paper, Patricia Arquette lying underwater, a blood drop in a pool, blood being drawn, a blood centrifuge – all elegant, spare, swift, and focused. I highly recommend the film to anyone purely to enjoy its five-star visual treatment.

As a writer myself, however, I think the film’s problems stemmed right from the initial plotting – basically, having a priest-scientist (Gabriel Byrne) investigate the stigmata being suffered by a young atheist-hairdresser (Patricia Arquette) beneath a Vatican conspiracy managed by his control-freak boss (Jonathan Pryce) never worked as a setup for me… all too staged / stagey. The walls between the characters stopped the emotional side of the film from developing in a satisfactory way: I also didn’t much like the St Francis of Assisi (arguably the most famous stigmatic?) resolution, but you’d have to see that for yourself to see if you agree or disagree.

Watching this film a decade on, it feels a bit dated: could it be that the Da Vinci Code (and its flood of [make]-me-[rich]-too ripoffs) made the whole notion of devastating-secrets-that-would-topple-the-Church-were-they-to-be-made-public seem lightweight? And I kept wondering: was Holy Blood Holy Grail ultimately to blame?

Regardless, the film set me thinking about the kind of ur-story towards which Tom Lazarus was reaching, with his ancient Aramaic codex (based loosely on the Coptic Nag Hammadi Gospel of Thomas) triggering high-stakes factional infighting within the Vatican, with the supernatural subtext that The Truth Will Out (even beyond death).

Yes, it’s undoubtedly a cliché: and the overarching literary / cultural template at play is pretty easy to sketch out:-

  • concealed message left by an ancient (implicitly perfected) person, that requires…
  • deciphering and translation by (extremely proficient) domain experts, to expose…
  • long-held lies behind contemporary doctrinal messages, which are supported by…
  • powerful present-day conspiracies trying to maintain the (morally untenable) status quo.

Historically, does this sound familiar? After all, it is not vastly different to the entire back-story of the Renaissance (particularly during the Quattrocento). There, you had people scouring the known world for lost or concealed messages left by the Greco-Roman civilizations, to be deciphered by humanist scholars for their presumed wise (and frequently contrarian) messages.

And so I would argue that HBHG-style searches for enciphered traces of a ‘real Jesus’ are arguably little more than back-projecting our present-day cultural insecurities onto early Renaissance cultural insecurities – their search for lost classical wisdom was no different. One irony, though, is that things like the Turin Shroud (which I blogged about here and here) offer us glimpses of an entirely parallel kind of lost Christian history, far beyond the conceptual reaches of most contemporary conspiracy theorists.

What I personally fail to understand, though, is how this whole wonky ‘enciphered anti-doctrinal message’ meme has managed to endure the centuries as a literary conceit. Even my new best friend François Rabelais satirized this none too subtly in Chapter 1 of Book 1 of his alcohol-obsessed Gargantua and Pantagruel:

The diggers struck with their picks against a great tomb of bronze… Opening the tomb at a certain place which was sealed on the top with the sign of a goblet, around which was inscribed in Etruscan letters, HIC BIBITUR, they found nine flagons, arranged after the fashion of skittles in Gascony; and beneath the middle flagon lay a great, greasy, grand, pretty, little, mouldy book, which smelt more strongly but not more sweetly than roses.

Rabelais goes on to offer (“with much help from my spectacles“) his translation of the “Corrective Conundrums” found in that stinky little tome, all of them nonsensical and presumably meant to resemble some kind of vaguely prophetic quatrain-based literary genre popular in France at the time (Nostradamus fans, take note):-

The year will come, marked with a Turkish bow,
And spindles five and the bottoms of three pots, […]
This age of hocus-pocus shall go on
Until the time when Mars is put in chains

So… even though this concealed-text plot pattern was a hoary old chestnut by 1530, can anyone really explain to me how come it continues to drive a low-brow literary industry nearly five centuries later? For me, the big mystery here centres on the apparent lack of cultural progress: does Dan Brown’s success actually prove that we have learnt practically nothing in half a millennium?

Consider that your cipher mystery for the day… 🙂

The Turin Shroud and Jesus’ haircut…?

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Following some interesting off-blog email exchanges triggered by my recent post on the Knights Templar and the Turin Shroud, I’ve taken a fresh look at the evidence, and have a new suggestion… 

The document that Barbara Frale turned up in 2003 appears to confirm a long-standing suspicion among a number of sindonologists (i.e. Shroud researchers, not people who study Donald Sinden) – that the Image of Edessa is the same thing as the Turin Shroud – and that it was secretly held & venerated by the Knights Templar between times (presumably giving rise to confused talk of kissing bearded idols, etc).

Just so you know, the Image of Edessa’s basic timeline looks like this…

  • 525AD – 544AD: first appearance in Edessa – possibly hidden in a wall above a city gate
  • 609: captured by the Sassanians
  • 944: returned to Edessa and moved to Constantinople
  • 1204: disappeared during the Sack of Constantinople

…whereas the Turin Shroud’s timeline looks like this…

  • 1357: displayed in a church at Lirey by the widow of the knight Geoffroi de Charny
  • 1390: Pope Clement VI allowed the shroud to be displayed
  • 1418: the “Winding Sheet” entrusted to Humbert, Count de La Roche, Lord of Lirey
  • 1452: given to the Duke of Savoy by Humbert’s widow Margaret

Yet there is something rather incongruous about the idea that the image on the shroud is actually of Jesus. Glen Claston points out (by email) that while early images depict Jesus much as you would expect Jews of the period to be depicted (i.e. short-haired, because nobody was allowed into temples with long hair), after 600AD images start to appear with long hair and a beard.

turin-shroud-face-enhanced

Glen’s understanding is that the only people at the time who had long hair were Nazirites (who took a vow not to shave their hair and abstain from grapes, wine and vinegar). In fact, probably because of the surfeit of “Da Vinci Code”-style novels and “H0ly Blood Holy Grail”-style books, the (formerly very marginal) issue of whether Jesus was a Nazirite has now become much debated.

(Incidentally, the most famous Old Testament Nazirite was Samson, which is why it was such a big deal to cut his “seven locks” – and modern Rastafarians have a creed which is apparently derived from the Nazirite vow, which is why they value herbs over alcohol. Hence one surprising issue with the Turin Shroud is whether the squiggles around the face [above] are actually proto-dreadlocks!)

That is, the culturally agreed image of Jesus started out as a mainstream Jew but around 600AD began to transform into something more like a Nazirite. But why should this be so?

My art historical suggestion (which has doubtless been made numerous times before, but what the hey, here it is again) is simply whether it was the appearance of the Image of Edessa in the sixth century which caused this change in the iconography of Jesus’ haircut. That is, rather than any subtle textual misunderstanding of “Nazarene” vs “Nazarite” (as is so often proposed), might it be that artists saw (or heard about) the ‘miraculous’ Image of Edessa and decided to use that as a visual basis for what Jesus looked like?

(Note that this is merely an hypothesis about the cultural reception of the Image of Edessa from 600AD onwards, rather than about any forensic / physical analysis of the object itself – it makes no difference whether the Shroud is genuinely miraculous or some 6th century craftsman’s subterfuge.)

Incidentally, one Turin Shroud-related issue that crops up again and again concerns the apparent height of the person wrapped in it: it is frequently asserted that this person would have been too tall to have been a Jew living two millennia ago. Yet what isn’t widely known is that there is a body of evidence that seems to imply that the Turin Shroud spent some time suspended on a kind of hanging wooden frame (probably for display in Edessa and Constantinople, it would now appear).

And so… why is the suggestion not then made that the herringbone linen of the Turin Shroud might simply have stretched lengthways under its own weight while being displayed? This might well have yielded a pervasive 10%-15% stretch, which (as I understand it) is broadly the kind of height difference in question. If you look once more at the face above, can you not see (as I do) an image that has been slightly vertically stretched? As a guide, here’s what it would look like at 85% of height:-

turin-shroud-face-enhanced-squashed
Turin Shroud, contrast-enhanced negative, 85% of height

Something to think about, anyway! 🙂

PS: as far as the haircut goes, I suspect that artists subsequently evolved Jesus’ haircut to a kind of worst-of-both-worlds middle-length trim – too long to be allowed in a Jewish temple, but too short to qualify as a proper Nazirite’s uncut hair. Might this be some kind of metaphor for the evolution of religion in general? I’m afraid you’ll have to work out your own moral narrative for this – I’m too busy looking at the evidence. 😉

Knights Templar & the Turin Shroud!

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OK, I’ll admit that the following has no ‘cipher mystery’ angle whatsoever: all the same, it’s a truly remarkable story that trumps 90% of Templar fiction.

According to a piece in The Times, in 2003 a historian at the Vatican called Barbara Frale uncovered a misplaced document (dating to after 1287) which seems to prove beyond much doubt that it was the Knights Templar who brought the Turin Shroud back from Byzantium and venerated its “bearded figure” for a century. Historians had long known of its indisputable 14th century history in Italy and its (often-questioned) 12th century history in the town-formerly-known-as-Constantinople – Frale’s discovery thus sensationally answers the long-standing question of where the shroud was in the 13th century. Additionally, it answers many open questions Templar conspiracy theorists have long riffed on about the nature of their alleged heresy and the secret religious things they brought back from the East.

But… hold on, I hear you cry, wasn’t the Turin Shroud scientifically proven to be a medieval hoax? Well, another news story from the last few days (which I also picked up from the Daily Grail newsfeed, but this time from the Daily Mail) relays some unreported comments from a member of the 1978 testing team, the late Dr Raymond Rogers (he died in 2005). Rogers came to believe that the piece of cloth they had taken for testing was from a medieval section that had been added to mend a fire-damaged part of the shroud – by 1998, he realised that what they had examined was a piece of cotton that had been heavily dyed in order to colour-match the rest of the (far older) linen.

Of course, the really big question is whether this sounds the death-knell for trashy Templar historical fiction. Without some bizarre demonomantic kruft to riff off, that whole historical episode must surely cease to hold the seditious / heretical pungency romantic authors seem to relish so much. All the same… I do suspect that novelists for years to come will carry on telling us that the location of the Templars’ accursed treasure is encrypted in the Voynich Manuscript. Oh well!

Update: more details in this follow-up post on the Turin Shroud…