Historian Charles Freeman takes a look at the origins of the Turin Shroud;

http://www.historytoday.com/charles-freeman/origins-shroud-turin

I shall enjoy reading that in full later tonight.

I went to see the Shroud when it was on display in the late 1970s (either 1977 or 1978) and have maintained an interest ever since.

There is a theory that artists, having access to silver nitrate (a photographic material) could have made a crude photograph on linen. The Shroud was first noted in the era of Leonardo da Vinci, and he has been suggested as the person with the skill and interest to make such a religious hoax.

The hows, whys and whens are talked about in the book by Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince.

The lack of symmetry in the shroud image has always been a very obvious and damning indictment of the argument that it somehow was created through undefined means while folded under and over a corpse, be it in the first century or later. It is refreshing that Freeman refers to the "dislocated" head. It is something that advocates of the shroud's authenticity as a divine relic which once genuinely draped the corpse of their favourite messiah address by simply ignoring it, probably hoping that by not referring to it maybe no one else might notice either.

I thought that article was a very good summary of the evidence - all of which seems to point to the cloth and image being produced in 13th century Europe - but also, and perhaps more importantly, it gives a good raison d'etre for the whole caboodle. 

I have always been suscpicious of the conspiracy theories concerning the shroud, whether supposedly started by the Catholic church, the Freemasons, Leonardo da Vinci, the Iluminati, Dan Brown or whoever ... and I always thought that if it was originally intended as a "forgery" those responible would have made a better job of it: ie less artistic and more anatomically correct. Thus I found Freeman's premise satisfyingly simple and eminently plausible. So, the Turin Shroud would seem to have been, in its time, quite a common piece produced specifically for the celebration of easter. It was basically a stage prop for church theatre and so only unique and miraculous in that this one alone has survived the ravages ot time. He even manages to square-the-circle, as it were, by pointing out that just because it is 'merely a medieval painting' doesn't exclude it from possibly having miraculous attributes - for those that believe.

It is indeed an impressive work of art in its own right (and an extremely striking and eloquent expression of religious devotion on the part of the artist), an aspect to the painting that the "believers" who wish it to be Jesus's actual funerary shroud are obliged to overlook (to their own detriment).

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/news/2014/10/29/scientist-dismisses-new-turin-shroud-claims/

Interesting that he claims that it is "the science" that convinces him, but absolutely no "scientific" evidence is adduced in his support.

It certainly is an intriguing artefact in its own right but I can't believe that those renaissance art collectors and particularly artists really believed it to be the winding sheet of Christ. A devotional object yes but the very shroud - with the image having no distortion from being wrapped around a corpse? No chance. The populace may have fallen for the 'miracle' but I can't see those with their understanding of anatomy and perspective being fooled.

It's interesting but not surprising that it seems to originate from the period when devotion to the five sacred wounds and the bleeding heart came into vogue, particularly revered by religious women, so it just might have been a devotional aid from a convent.

Barrie Schworz in the Catholic Herald wrote:

I have examined, studied and lectured on the shroud for nearly 38 years yet would have great difficulty in describing the image on the cloth in writing.

A very strange admission, but it does also contain the most likely reason why Mr Schwortz will not welcome attempts by others to rationally explain the artefact's true composition and provenance. It's his livelihood.

I agree that it is very important to acknowledge that the Shroud is a work of art. But I think that is an important admission to make about many things to do with "religion": we deal in "limping metaphors" (C.S.Lewis's phrase) to describe what we struggle to understand or express. The Shroud (like the "prose-poems" of the Gospels?) may be such an inadequate metaphor, but whoever created it - or them - was a great artist. But such a viewpoint is viewed with contempt - and a lack of understanding - by many.

Various recent Popes have been very cautious when talking about the Shroud; but I suppose they have to be "careful" - the word the Independent favours. But you can be too careful at times - a little honesty can at times work wonders. But it can also utterly destroy, of course. I believe Pope Francis in his heart favours honesty, and we should perhaps not dismiss anything he says simply because he is the Pope. I actually like what he suggests here - that we should accept the image on the Shroud as an image of suffering - a stark reminder of man's inhumanity to man. I note that honest word from the quote below - "represented". It must be very hard for Pope Francis, but, his "living" at risk or not, I just wish he would come out with it and say that we must be prepared to look - and perhaps read - in a new way. And that goes for everyone - "believers" (whatever that word means) and non-believers. But I don't suppose the Archbishop Cesare Nosiglia of Turin would agree: he is probably more wary of honesty.


The Pope has commented publicly on the shroud before. In an address last year he said the face shown in the relic represented “all those faces of men and women marred by a life which does not respect their dignity, by war and violence which afflict the weakest”.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/pope-francis-announces-decision-to-make-pilgrimage-to-the-turin-shroud--despite-latest-research-claiming-its-a-fraud-9844567.html

I wish he's stick to commenting on the shroud. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-righttodie-movement-is-a-sin-against-god-and-creation-says-pope-francis-9864438.html

ferval wrote:

I wish he's stick to commenting on the shroud. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/the-righttodie-movement-is-a-sin-against-god-and-creation-says-pope-francis-9864438.html

Well, the Pope is a man, and, like all men, he gets things wrong: he also gets some things right.

Papal infallibility is an interesting (historical) topic. Wasn't it Pope Gregory VII who started the whole thing? But then non-Catholics just do not understand - or that's what I've been told.


Though papal infallibility was only set in stone in 1870, the idea had been part of church history and debate as far back as 519 when the notion of the Bishop of Rome as the preserver of apostolic truth was set out in the Formula of Hormisdas.
 
In 1075 Pope Gregory VII in his Dictatus Papae (The Pope's Memorandum) put it more bluntly. He set out 27 propositions about the powers of the office of Bishop of Rome. These included the statement that the papacy "never will err to all eternity according to the testimony of Holy Scripture".



I get terribly confused with the whole idea because I do like my free will. Papal infallibility on certain matters seems to take away the freedom of the individual to make a responsible choice. I can't be doing with that. But I wander off topic. I blame you, ferval. But you did say you wanted the idiots to return.  

PS This rather good Guardian article says Francis has appeared to renounce papal infallibility, but then the Guardian isn't infallible either, so there's probably much more to it.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/18/pope-francis-liberal-bloody-sunday-catholic

The pope can't actually "renounce" papal infallibility. It is as erroneous a view as the notion, also generally assumed by non-Catholics, that Pius IX "invented" the concept during the 1869/70 Vatican Council. Pius had it defined at that council as it was important, he felt, that papal utterances "ex cathedra" have a legal definition and standing separate from any others a pope might make. The dividing line had become blurred after centuries of popes behaving as political and even military leaders, governing populations in a secular as well as spiritual sense, and since the advent of mass media and communications having far more people listening to and interpreting their instructions.

Infallibility is extremely limited in its application according to church doctrine and law. It is reserved completely to utterances which, by their nature, cannot be said to contradict sacred scripture. These "ex cathedra" declarations are relatively rare and must by their nature follow at least a degree of consultation and arbitration within high church circles regarding their format. A pope claiming to speak "ex cathedra" on a matter related to doctrine not already addressed within dogma (the body of doctrine deemed historically immutable by the church) would be like a high court judge passing judgement based on a new law he had just invented and which itself had no relation to any legal case or precedent. It would in fact only be his opinion.

So popes can say what they like about the Shroud of Turin. Whatever they decide, there's no infallibility about it. That's for sure.

Free will, Temp? Didn't you listen to this?  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04p2bcz  Did old Geneva Jo maybe have a point?

I will listen to that later, ferval - thanks for the link.

I'm not sure I can cope with any more information about how my brain works...

It's an excellent series Temp, this week it is addressing "Beauty". What would we do without Radio 4?

Just being the Devil's advocate here - what, if anything, are we to make of this?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/10631973/Turin-Shroud-may-date-from-time-of-Jesus.html

Nothing much. Russian physicists Nikolaj Volodichev and Mikhail Panasjuk have pioneered research into the association between neutron emissions and earthquakes. However their work is based on the observation that a sudden increase in neutron emissions from the earth's surface corresponds to heightened tidal activity - when the earth, moon and sun align in a manner that exerts greatest gravitational pull on the water these emissions can grow to twelve times their normal background level. The scientists' objective is to see therefore if this measurable phenomenon could be useful in forecasting seismic activity, also believed in some cases to be triggered by the same general gravitational forces.

The Telegraph article quotes a certain Professor Alberto Carpinteri of the Polytechnic University of Turin. What he says in these quotes would seem to indicate that he associates these emissions with earthquakes as an effect, not as an associated and slightly premonitionary symptom of gravitational force. This would appear to mean that either Carpinteri dismisses the Russians' otherwise very well regarded theory or in fact fails to understand it. After all, if the emissions occur at the same time as an earthquake or just after then they are of limited use in attempting to predict seismic activity. This reversal of sequence I assume is something that other physicians might query, though why he should make this claim might be associated with his own private area of research which is (ironically in the circumstances of his "shroud" claim) the compression of substances in order to create what he calls "piezonuclear fission", a form of splitting nuclei without releasing gamma radiation or nuclear waste. As director of the Istituto Nazionale di Ricerca Metrologica (INRiM) in Turin he commandeered more and more funds into this line of research (which as yet has no demonstrable basis in scientific fact) and as a result INRiM was closed down after almost all of his senior colleagues resigned en masse in protest and he himself was dismissed. The Polytechnic Uni job has been his fall-back position, and of course there he has been denied funds to further his highly debatable scientific research claims about non-radiating fission.

So forgive me if I am not surprised that Professor Carpinteri has seized on a topical subject guaranteed to generate media attention in order to promote his theories. He's rather stuck in an academic backwater at the moment and I am sure would dearly love to attract funding to pursue his pet area of research. However I am more than a little amused to see that his theory about radiation in this procedure has now been crucially modified - from none at all to being strong enough to create messiah images on cloth (though apparently unnoticed by dependable observers of the period).

And I notice they've printed the rather discredited "findings" of Giulio Fanti at the University of Padua who claimed his investigation using spectroscopic analysis rather than carbon dating "definitively" placed the shroud fabric's age to between 300BCE and 400CE (Fanti originally claimed in his book 220CE but when even his own published spectroscopic graphs indicated otherwise he quietly just began changing the date range depending on who he was talking to).

So, one Italian professor in dire need of funding, who happens to be based in Turin, and who (apparently) knowingly misrepresents actual research conducted by others in order to generate interest in his own speciality, and while doing this also cites the local tourist attraction in the period coming up to one of its much vaunted expositions when he knows people (ie. the media) will pay attention. And another Italian professor who simply put aside absolutely all of the evidence produced by analysis excepting spectroscopy (not normally a technique used primarily to determine age of anything) and who then publicly contradicted this evidence of age with "findings" of his own based on spectroscopic analysis, figures that have been continually amended since first published.

Hmmm ... a tough one, this! Who to believe ...

You beat me to it Nordman - and as usual you expressed the issues far better than I was about to.

But also thanks to you Temp for playing Devil's advocate .... my gut-feeling was that the science expounded in that article was dodgey at best, but I had no facts to hand. So your post made me read up about C14 dating and all the uncertainties, certainties, effects and influences associated with it (most of which, needless to say, are well known and factored in to any published dating). For instance I never knew that carbon dating a dead Soay sheep will always give a false date (until corrected) just because they tend to eat seaweed, or that C-14 dating of things that died in the early 1960s has to be massively corrected to account for the brief global reduction in atmospheric C14 due to nuclear weapons testing.

I'm also intrigued by the bland assertions that near-photographic images can be produced by "neutron emissions" anyway, as is also referred to in the article as if it is almost a proven scientific principle. I would love - just once - to see this actually being demonstrated. Don't these people know what a neutron is?

Nice discussion here. http://www.badarchaeology.com/?page_id=322

nordmann wrote:

Don't these people know what a neutron is?

Does anyone?

Well, yes. In as much that a photon and a neutron bear as much resemblance in character, composition and behaviour to that which pertains between a tampon and a Klingon, besides of course the -on ending.

How can a sub-atomic particle whose primary definition rests on the fact that it contains no charge (no innate ability to interact with other atoms) then be claimed to be the main agent in photographic effect? 

One of these claimants should please demonstrate. It will fundamentally change our understanding of physics so it would be a crime against humanity to keep it to themselves.

nordmann wrote:

How can a sub-atomic particle whose primary definition rests on the fact that it contains no charge (no innate ability to interact with other atoms) then be claimed to be the main agent in photographic effect?

Well don't ask me; I really have no idea.

But it was a genuine question.

Does anyone really understand all of this? Do the physicists have all the answers? Are "primary definitions" in physics always definite?

And are the laws of physics really fixed, set in stone, or is that view now being challenged by scientists like Lee Smolin? I think he is a respected academic and not a mountebank, but one never knows.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Reborn

I hesitate to post again here, as I really am woefully ignorant about any of this, and, like everyone else on this thread, I am very wary about extravagant claims made about Catholic relics. That said, it's important to keep asking questions.

But I'm probably not asking the right ones.

Are primary definitions in physics always definite? Well, no. But they are primary definitions for a very good reason.

Ignorance of that reason is forgiveable - as is all ignorance ultimately. Ignoring that reason is however unforgivable, at least in terms of comprehension and its importance in formulating any valid concept of the universe that we inhabit. Of course for people to whom comprehension in those terms holds little or no relevance then physics, reason and even forgiveness are relatively unimportant concepts when compared to what they want (as opposed to are educated) to believe.

The desire to be astounded is an important motivation for self-education, When it exceeds in importance the capacity to understand however it is a major obstacle to comprehension.

nordmann wrote:

I'm also intrigued by the bland assertions that near-photographic images can be produced by "neutron emissions" anyway, as is also referred to in the article as if it is almost a proven scientific principle. I would love - just once - to see this actually being demonstrated. Don't these people know what a neutron is?Don't these people know what a neutron is?

Actually you can produce high resolution 'photographic' images using neutron radiation. High energy (high speed) neutrons can directly ionize target atoms by knocking electrons out of their orbits and this effect alone can be used to obtain an image. So theoretically, using neutrons, I suppose one could produce an image onto a linen sheet that had been given a suitable chemical coating. But the usual method of performing neutron radiography is to use a conversion screen, typically made of gadolinium, which converts the neutrons into high energy electrons and then expose these onto a normal single emulsion x-ray film.

Using the conversion screen there are then two methods. The direct method is performed with the film present in the beamline, so neutrons are absorbed by the conversion screen which promptly emits high energy electrons that expose the film. The indirect method does not have a film directly in the beamline. The conversion screen absorbs neutrons but some time delay exists prior to the release of radiation. Following recording the image on the conversion screen, the screen is put in close contact with a photographic film for a period of time (generally hours), to produce an image onto the film. The indirect method has significant advantages when dealing with radioactive objects which would by their own emitted radiation fog the film.

Neutron radiography is a commercially available service, widely used used in the aerospace industry for the inspection of aircraft engine turbine blades and other critical components. Neutron radiation is highly penetrating and so can be used to examine the internal structure of metal items which are impenetrable to X-rays. But high energy neutrons are also highly damaging to organic tissue, whether that be the living tissue of the operators, or the dead tissue in old linen shrouds. Accordingly using neutron radiation safely requires considerable shielding (say a couple of metres thick of concrete) and strict operating protocols. The whole set up for neutron radiography is considerably bigger than a Box-Brownie, and that's not counting the particle accelerator or nuclear reactor required to generate the neutrons.

And I doubt even a massive earthquake would generate anywhere near sufficient high-energy neutrons at the earth's surface .... an air-burst atomic explosion might do it, but I should think that wouldn't have gone unnoticed if detonated over 1st century Jerusalem or 14th century Turin.

There you go, the image of a vertebrate (in this case it's a frog I think) taken by neutron radiography:



Note that neutrons are strongly scattered by hydrogen atoms, and therefore by all organic tissue whether it's as bone or softer tissue, living or dead. Thus a neutron image does not strongly distiguish between bone or muscle, and so a neutron image of a living (or dead) creature is never going to be as clearly defined, between bones-and-flesh-and-skin, when compared to say an X-ray image.

With neutrons there is some effect from density - in that bone shows darker than muscle and the thicker thighs are darker than the thinner calves - but the effect is not so obvious as with X-rays. Note also that most metals, even the denser/heavier ones like iron/steel, lead, copper, tin, silver, gold, are mostly transparent to neutrons, and so would be almost invisible in a neutron photgraph. If one were to take a similar image of a human cadaver (and if they weren't dead at the start, they would certainly die soon after from radiation damage) ... then one would only see very faint images of any metal objects: wedding rings, jewellery, body-piercings, dental fillings, limb prostheses, pace-makers etc, ... whilst all of these would of course show up very strongly on an X-ray image.

Crikey, MM - very impressive science from you, and all really interesting, even if it is quite beyond me. This neutron radiography explanation can't be entirely ruled out, then???

(I shall scuttle back to the simplicity of the Moggy Thread now!)

Oh come on Temp, that's very defeatist of you ... What, exactly is, "quite beyond you"?  You're an intelligent person and so I'm sure you could understand the basics of even quantum theory ... dammit I've taught it to BTech and OU students and while they were mostly good students, they were none of them exceptionally gifted. Science, even 'really hard science' , is mostly just common sense you know, once you've got the maths ... though one does need to see maths as a language rather than just a method of doing 'sums' or calculations. 

But deep quantum science, I admit,  is something completley else. But hey! In practice one only needs to invoke it very, very rarely ... indeed for most people never at all!

Meles meles wrote:

Oh come on Temp, that's very defeatist of you ... What, exactly is, "quite beyond you"?  You're an intelligent person and so I'm sure you could understand the basics of even quantum theory ...

Not defeatist, MM, just realistic. I was put off physics when I was eleven - got told I asking stupid questions. Do you know I can still remember the lesson? It was about magnets and I was terribly confused because, although I could see what was happening, no one seemed able to explain to my satisfaction why it was happening. I dropped physics as soon as I could.

But I liked chemistry - I passed my O-level with quite a good grade. I remember getting very excited when I grew my copper sulphate crystal. It was a lovely blue colour and became quite enormous.

Back to Turin now...

Temp wrote:

This neutron radiography explanation can't be entirely ruled out, then???

Even more ruled out, I'd say Temp, by MM's succinct points regarding how it works. In neutron imaging techniques there are three rather basic constants; a massive expenditure of energy to get the neutrons free and moving, a system whereby their movement can be forced to remain unidirectional and unlikely to be disrupted by impact with "rogue" or unwanted atoms en route, and then a system to trap them on a surface primed to convert the inert neutrons into something with a charge in order to "create" the image through chemical process.

You can see the problem this poses as an "explanation" for the image on the shroud. Even if one persists in the (frankly weird) hypothesis that the linen was a good substitute for the target plate, and even if one then persists in the (frankly even weirder) hypothesis that unidirectional neutrons could be maintained without pollutant distortion over so large a field, one is still left with the rather inconvenient fact that the linen displays a "front" and "rear" view of the corpse, making the source of the emission not only inside the corpse but representing an amazingly flat plain bisecting the body completely from head to foot running parallel to the platform on which it rested and extending beyond the actual corpse to a degree in order to record "edge" in the image.

Creating small nuclear explosions within a corpse might at least account for a neutron discharge of the amplification required (leaving the keeping of the source constant on a lateral plain bisecting the entire body for someone else to waste their time contemplating the absurdities of the proposal) but I imagine the resulting image on the nuclear explosion resistant linen would not be a very pretty sight at all.

Well, put like that, it does all sound utterly ridiculous, doesn't it?

But (and I am again playing the Devil's advocate here), could it be that something "weird" did happen 2000 years ago - something that we dismiss as "impossible" in our 21st century scientific terms?

Because aren't we still - in scientific terms - not much more than puzzled children in the laboratory? Perhaps we should admit that, despite the amazing Large Hadron Particle Collider thing (it uses magnets!), and the man on the moon, we are actually not much wiser than the old medieval alchemists? (I've been listening to ferval's link too, and thinking about how little we really understand. I'm very disturbed to think my mind - or my soul - is just a bit of software. Mine needs updating, no doubt.) If the alchemists were doing Year Seven science, perhaps in our century we've got to AS level?

The other thing I've been mulling over is the bit in St. John's gospel about "noli me tangere". That has always intrigued me: why was Mary Magdalene warned not to touch the risen Christ? But then the original Greek (got it off Wiki), mή μου ἅπτου (mē mou haptou), is better represented in translation as "cease holding on to me" or "stop clinging to me" which changes things rather. Noli me tangere has much more of a ring to it if you are arguing (using the word "arguing" very loosely) for "weird" radioactivity or such like.

All absolute nonsense, no doubt - and an idea open to any amount of ridicule. I'd better stick with my metaphor of the empty tomb - much safer, certainly around here, even if it does mean, according to some, that I'm destined for the everlasting bonfire.

If it's any comfort I never really understood how magnetism works either ... and I worked for several years developing magnetic alloys!

I was also a bit blasé saying basic quantum physics is "common sense". One can describe the various effects easily enough: refraction of light, photo-electric effect, etc but explaining what's really going on is where it all gets very murky.(eg refraction implies light is a wave but photo-electricity seems to show that light delivers it energy in lumps like a particle would - how to marry these together was what Einstein et al struggled with). And the world of quantum mechanics is anything but "common sense" and indeed seems to work in completely counter-intuitive ways ... or at least counter-intuitive for those used to seeing how things seem to 'work' on our scale of experience.

Might something "weird" have happened 2000 years ago? .... well maybe something that doesn't happen very often and so is currently completely outside our ken, yes possibly. It would be interesting to find out what it was ... rather than just saying it was a miracle - God did it! Though applying Occam's razor would discourage seeking "unknown" events in favour of the shroud being, what most of the evidence points to, a 14th century painted cloth made for the celebration of Easter.

Scientifically it would be unwise to categorically rule anything out, with of course the proviso that when an apparent "process" defies not only the known natural properties of matter but also the known mechanics of matter integrity then there is a strong possibility that what one is looking at is not a single process at all but an apparent effect produced by several disparate processes which normally have no natural business running in conjunction at all. The anomaly however is in the conjunction of independent processes, not the mechanics of the event. In this case this means that the original "photograph" analogy has to be ditched completely and analysis begin again without the encumbrance of a presumed single process emulating the chemical reaction of photons bombarding silver halide crystals (and such emulations exist - digital photography being the most obvious one). Neutron imaging incidentally is not as close an analogy of normal photography, rather more of x-rays etc. It provides a semi-transparent image of organic material in the end akin to x-rays, whereas the shroud's image is of the epidermis only.

To make the Turin shroud into such an emulation - be it substituting neutrons for photons or linen for acetose coated with silver halide crystals suspended in emulsion - one has to accommodate "stuff behaving magically" at every turn. There is not one law of physics being challenged here, but actually almost every such law so far deduced.

However I realise that the acceptance of such radical departures from immutable physical law is commonplace amongst certain people who have placed a value on the presumed effect of those unexplained processes which appear to contradict those laws. While this undoubtedly makes the world a much more varied and interesting place to experience - illogicality is as much a boon as a bane to human imagination and happiness - it unfortunately is almost always a bane to the deduction of how and why things actually occur. The shroud is a notable example of where too many intellectual resources better applied elsewhere have been consigned to what must remain a dead end in these terms. An entertaining diversion, but a diversion nonetheless. Especially when the simpler hypothesis of the relic being an engineered product of human intervention is - and always has been - so eminently plausible. Not a challenge to science in other words - but definitely a challenge to our gullibility as humans.

The only positive thing I can say about the Italian team is: at least they published in a peer-reviewed journal and didn't just go for the rewarding book deal like the ID crowd do - as far as I know!

I really can't see why it is necessary to investigate the possible mechanisms of generating particles and so forth, surely in this case common sense is enough. To achieve an complete flat cripto-photographic image of a 3 dimensional object on cloth then that cloth would have to have been stretched taught on something like a frame otherwise it would have wrinkled, folded and draped and there's no sign of anything like that on the artefact. 

The 'negative' nature of the image suggests to me something like a rather sophisticated lino cut.

nordmann wrote:

Not a challenge to science in other words - but definitely a challenge to our gullibility as humans.

Well, I've always been a sucker for the yogibogeybox approach to life. Sheer intellectual laziness, I suppose.  

Gold star if one of you scientists can tell me where that lovely word was first used, by whom, and to what it referred (no googling). We always used to call the TV remote the YBB in our house.

I always assumed it was one of Joyce's inventions, and was specifically a dig at William Renison. Renison was a "sculptor" who also made his studio available to spiritualists and the like for their meetings. Joyce, ever the sycophantic social climber, had once been flattered to be invited into their company but they quickly disliked the egotistical little turd as much as he disliked their sham "spirituality". He got his revenge on them (and half of Dublin) in "Ulysses". You're going to tell me now that it was an actual word and not one of his at all (which is a shame as against his normal standards that one could actually be seen to make sense).

nordmann wrote:

 You're going to tell me now that it was an actual word and not one of his at all (which is a shame as against his normal standards that one could actually be seen to make sense).

No I'm not. I'm going to give you your gold star. "Yogibogeybox" was indeed a word coined by James Joyce.

It's in the Scylla and Charybdis chapter of Ulysses (or Useless, as Battery Sergeant-Major "Shut-Up" Williams calls it on It Ain't Half Hot, Mum).  Stephen Dedalus is in the National Library in Dublin, and is involved in a wordy encounter with a group of intellectuals who are discussing Shakespeare, Hamlet, ghosts and, so I've been told, metempsychosis.

And you are dead right about the dig at spiritualists: the yogibogeybox is the box of tricks used by such people to fool the gullible into believing the dead have really returned. That's why I mentioned it. Here's the quotation:

"I don't know if I can. Thursday. We have our meeting. If I can get away in time".
Yogibogeybox in Dawson chambers ... the faithful hermetists await the light...

Dawson chambers presumably refers to your sculptor's rooms?

And the title of the chapter refers (again, so I've been told) to the twin dangers of Aristotle and Plato. Stephen, trained well by the Jesuits, favours Aristotle and he tells the platonist Russell (George, not Bertrand) that Hamlet's musings on the possibility of the after-life are, like Plato's, shallow in comparison with Aristotle's ideas. Wasn't it Pythagoras anyway who really liked the idea of the transmigration of souls? But I really have no idea and this is all, no doubt, pretentious "mummery", from Joyce, Stephen Dedalus and from me. I don't know if Joyce was a little turd, a social climber, a clever con man or a genius. I suppose it's possible to be all of those things.

But yogibogeybox still makes me laugh - and I think Garryowen is an excellent name for a dog.

Renison's house, Dawson Chambers (more prosaically referred to these days as 12, Dawson Street) was in the news in the early 1990s. The listed Georgian building fell down, itself a newsworthy event, but then proceeded to become something of a bete noire when the redeveloped property, designed by its architect (according to the architect) to respect the Georgian character of the milieu, ended up looking like this:



Joyce's ultimate revenge.

Temp wrote:

I don't know if Joyce was a little turd, a social climber, a clever con man or a genius.

3 out of 4 isn't a bad score.

I've found the clip! It's a bit into the scene around 2minutes 43 seconds - when Sergeant-Major Williams breaks up the dress rehearsal to inspect what the men have been reading:



Sorry, this is nothing to do with the Shroud of Turin.

Temperance wrote:

I am very wary about extravagant claims made about Catholic relics. That said, it's important to keep asking questions.

One intriguing thing about the Turin Shroud is the fact that one of the longest stretches between public showings took place in the 20th Century. This was between the public showing of 1933 and the showing of 1978. It was locked away for 45 years. That was the longest stretch of time when the Shroud went unseen over the last 300 years.

For people in the 1960s, for example, the Turin Shroud (if thought about at all) must have seemed literally mythical. Since 1978, however, there have been 4 public showings and with a fifth planned for next year. That's 5 showings within 37 years compared to none during the previous 45. One wonders if the 'mystique' of the item has been lost somewhat and in more ways than one.