Wrapping Transcendence: The Semiotics of Reliquaries

AbstractAfter pinpointing the semiotic mechanism of relics, this essay highlights the danger of their being turned into fetishes with reference to the Tractatus Garsiae, a hilarious medieval parody that wittily uncovers the semiotic proximity between the collection of fetishized relics and that of fetishized money. In subsequent sections I point out how reliquaries have been adopted as an antidote to the fetishizing of relics and explain how that works through a theoretical analysis of the human anthropology of wrapping. After indicating some possible directions for further analysis (in order to deepen the typological and comparative knowledge of reliquaries), I conclude the essay by focusing on a case study of a pragmatically felicitous instance of a reliquary: the semiotic “open work” of Francis Xavier’s seventeenth-century reliquary in Goa.