#warning for talk under the cut of nasty medieval ppl collecting human remains from saints

[cometcalloway]

Ok to reblog, but only within the dark souls rpc, please! source: [xxx]

Pilgrimages and saints’ relics -

In the Middle Ages, pilgrimages to holy sites were common.  Technically, the ideal was to show devotion to faith, but people might go on pilgrimages for all kinds of reasons, including taking a fun trip (the lecturer said that pilgrimages could be an equivalent of taking a cruise, for some).  Pilgrims would wear clothes/hats/etc. that identified them as pilgrims.  It was seen as a means of devotion in of itself for people to offer pilgrims food and shelter and such, so it was actually viable to become a ‘professional pilgrim’ and essentially couch surf your way across medieval Europe as a lifestyle, as long as you were traveling (or presumably traveling) to holy sites.  You’d find specific accommodations for travelers around common pilgrimage routes.  Holy sites would have patches and badges and souvenirs, so people could prove that they’d been there.  One common reason to go on pilgrimages was to try and heal sickness through faith healing, so some holy sites became hospital sites as well. 

Some holy sites were Big Deal holy sites, like Jerusalem.  Other holy sites might be much quieter, like a church that had a saint’s relic, which is unfortunately a bone of a saint, or another body part, like a finger, or blood, or hair, or even fingernail clippings.  I forget the name for it, but a relic might be housed in some kind of special container decorated with jewels and whatnot.  If you swore an oath on a saint’s bones/etc., that was considered to make your oath absolutely unbreakable (which made communication with, say, vikings, extra difficult because vikings didn’t find the same things holy & kind of liked to raid monasteries because monks don’t put up much of a fight).  There was actually a black market for saints’ relics, full of forgeries, which, I’m guessing, is exactly as gruesome and horrible as it sounds. 

In the Middle Ages, Christianity/Catholicism was the main religion in Europe, and all of this had to do with specifically Christian churches and saints and so on.  In Dark Souls, there are a lot of religious factions, some of which have living figureheads a pilgrim could, in theory, actually visit (Gwyndolin, Rosaria, Aldrich, Lothric before he left, etc.).  So the nasty body part thing has this complicating factor of some of the figures involved actively being alive and able to live for centuries (I’m almost positive saints in real life would have to have already died to be considered for sainthood).  In the spirit of being true to how nasty medieval people were, it could be plausible that a god might give trusted followers blood or hair or whatnot to send to distant churches and sites important to the religion, to legitimize those sites for followers living further away.  And maybe people would make pilgrimages to those sites, and maybe the god’s actual location would be the more impressive pilgrimage site.  And maybe to protect the god from spending all day mobbed by paparazzi, maybe they’d have a blood or hair type relic for people to look at and be satisfied with, even at their actual site of residence, and actual audience with them might be limited to a very chosen few.  Of course, there must have been plenty of other figures considered saints in a more usual devout & deceased sense too. 

Perhaps swearing an oath on a god or saint’s ‘relic’ would be considered unbreakable.  Perhaps swearing an oath in the presence of a god, who gave their blessing to the oath, would have the same effect.  Perhaps swearing an oath to a god would be considered unbreakable automatically, with no casual version available.  Perhaps you’d have to be careful that this person you were trusting to see an oath as unbreakable actually worshiped or supported the god whose presence or relic you were using.