sarira, relics, multiplying in other religions

Some general information about relics in different religions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relic

Due to the existence of counterfeit relics, the Church began to regulate the use of relics. Canon Law required the authentication of relics if they were to be publicly venerated. They had to be sealed in a reliquary and accompanied by a certificate of authentication, signed and sealed by someone in the Congregation for Saints,[37] or by the local Bishop where the saint lived. Without such authentication, relics are not to be used for public veneration.[38] The Congregation for Saints, as part of the Roman Curia, holds the authority to verify relics in which documentation is lost or missing. The documents and reliquaries of authenticated relics are usually affixed with a wax seal.[37]

If you don't know how relics of some Christian Saints multiply, 

Then you definitely want to invest the 3 minutes it takes to read the excerpt below.

Treasures of heaven: saints and their relics  

10 August 2018

excerpt from:
https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2018/10-august/features/features/treasures-of-heaven-saints-and-their-relics

Avidity for relics might take extreme forms. In 1190, Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, himself destined to be canonised one day as a saint, visited the abbey of Fécamp, in Normandy, to venerate the monastery’s greatest treasure: an arm bone of St Mary Magdalene. The relic was duly produced, sheathed in silk, but Hugh sliced open the wrapping, to see and kiss the bone. Then, to the mounting horror of the monks, he tried to break off a piece and, when that failed, gnawed at it, first with his incisor and then with his molar teeth, at last snapping off and pocketing two splinters. The monks complained that he had profaned the relic “like a dog”, but Hugh would have none of it. What he had done, he declared defiantly, had honoured the saint, and was no more a profanation than when Christians honour their Lord by receiving his body and blood in communion, as he himself had done that day.


St Hugh’s startling behaviour was no one-off aberration: when he venerated the fingers of St John the Baptist at Bellay he took away part of the purple cloth in which they were wrapped, and at Peterborough he sliced and took away a sinew from the incorrupt arm of St Oswald. This was more than a collector’s urge. Hugh’s hunger for relics (he accumulated more than 30) reflected a number of widely shared medieval convictions: the universal belief that the fragmented bodies of the saints were charged with holiness and power, worth journeying great distances to see; the prestige which ownership of such relics brought (the Burgundian Abbey of Vézelay was a rival claimant to Mary Magdalene’s relics); ambiguity over whether the power of the relic could be tapped through its appearance — concealed in this instance by its silken cover — or by brute physical contact with its sanctified matter; the comparison between the holiness of the relics of the saints, and the holiness of the body and blood of Christ in the Mass; and finally the lengths to which someone might go to secure even tiny fragments of the relic for their own church or community. . .

The enshrining of relics in precious materials was fundamental to the whole cult — ivory, silver, gold, coloured enamel, precious and semi-precious stones, even cameos and intaglios from pagan Rome, or rock-crystal perfume bottles from the Islamic East. To the outward eye, relics might seem no more than the dust and residue of corruption and passibility, gruesome fragments of tortured flesh and broken bone. In God’s eye, however, and eventually, at the last day, in the eyes of all humanity, the reality was and would be otherwise. Relics were the seeds of transcendence, trophies and tokens of the imperishable glory in store for all whom Christ had redeemed. As the Victorian Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins put it, though flesh might fade and “mortal trash Fall to the residuary worm”, on judgement day “In a flash, at a trumpet crash I am all at once what Christ is, since he is what I am, and This jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, match­wood, immortal diamond, Is immortal diamond. . .”