SNP’s word of the day: Reliquary

Word: Reliquary

Meaning: A shrine filled with, well, relics.

Usage: “Have you beat the Reliquary of Souls yet?” —something you would say if you played World of Warcraft. Don’t look at me like that!

You should know it because: the word “reliquary” seems like a relic itself, although not in the true definition, which goes something like “the remains of a saint, or a venerated religious object.” Reliquaries came into Christian use in the fourth century, says Wikipedia, proliferated through the Middle Ages, and were built magnificently until about the 16th century, when the church got all reformed. There’s not such big business to be done in saintly body-part storage now. But, as evinced by recent shrines—far apart but alike in intensity—to the great singer Amy Winehouse and the great Canadian politician Jack Layton, there are new possibilities for the reliquary in the realm of public, secular art.

“The beauty of a reliquary was intended to reflect the spiritual value of what it contained,” or so says the British Museum’s website; they have a relics-‘n’-reliquaries exhibit on all summer. I like this sentiment. One might argue that Amy Winehouse’s spiritual value was more than the mix of flowers, emo scrawls, empty wine bottles, and cigarettes contained in her Camden shrine; then again, maybe it wasn’t, and I don’t mean that disparagingly in the least. Winehouse’s sins made a saint out of her in the end. The same happens when any venerated star leaves the earth: the day Michael Jackson died, I was in Seattle with my boyfriend. The next morning, we went to the EMP Museum and witnessed the Holy Grail–like handling of his sequined glove, enshrined for-maybe-ever in a glass case. There’s even a sacred shrine to Jon Bon Jovi in New Orleans, even though, unless he died and Twitter didn’t tell me, it’s a little premature.

There’s another sort of reliquary now, too, which you must have somewhere: that box of old tech stuff you can’t (or don’t know how to) dispose of altogether. In 2008, the artist Tim Tate made reliquaries—he called them that, not me—out of tiny videos on loop, surrounded by tech detritus, encase in glass. It makes sense. Our phones and players and palm-sized things of convenience are the only sacred objects we non-believers have.

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