66. Holy Thorn Reliquary (France, AD 1350-1400)

St. Louis. In The Maltese Falcon, you get the classic Hollywood McGuffin, defined by Hitchcock as “something the characters in the story care about, but the audience doesn’t.” McGuffins have always been useful tools for screenwriters, and George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and their friends took it one step further when making their great Indiana Jones films; since the central character was an archeologist, he was always chasing around after some McGuffin, for no better reason than to put it in a museum, or a wooden box in some government warehouse, at the end of the story. “Soon we’ll have the slipper and can go home,” the Baker says to his wife in Sondheim’s masterpiece Into the Woods. “No more running around the woods looking for strange objects!” And Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows must be the apotheosis of this kind of story, where there’s this long list of objects and few of them have any genuine interest...they merely serve to propel the story along.

I blather about this here because this Crown of Thorns icon is certainly worthy of a film along the lines of The Red Violin. Theoretically, the Crown of Thorns they gave Jesus made its way to Constantinople, where it was a treasured relic of the Eastern Orthodox Church for many centuries. Then, when the Byzantines were in trouble because of the encroaching Turks, they pawned the relic to the Venetians, with whom they’d long been friends and enemies. France’s King Louis IX leaped at the opportunity to buy the crown from the Venetians, and so it came to France, where he had built the outrageously gorgeous Sainte-Chappelle, one of the most beautiful rooms on Planet Earth, to house it.

(The perfect king of medieval Christendom, Louis 9, later St. Louis, died on crusade; his crown of thorns is nowadays in Nôtre-Dame. During the 1200s, his period, France had the drop on England, fueling Plantagenet inferiority complex with this ‘relic gap’ because they had the crown of thorns and we didn’t!)

A thorn from the crown was given to the Duc de Berry somewhere along the way, before the Renaissance, who built this beautiful reliquary to house it. Later the entire reliquary ended up in the possession of the Hapsburgs, and it spent most of the early modern period in Vienna; a Jewish banker eventually gave it to the British crown, and that’s how the museum got it. They had it off exhibit the day I was there, so I photographed the poster explaining where it was instead.

And yet, the important thing here—unlike most of Voldemort’s Horcruxes—is that the thorns that pierced Christ’s head really have devotional power, millions of people think about them everyday. It’s like finding the holy grail, where the first few drops of the blood that’s at the center of the religion got started. Whether or not the relic is real, or has interesting adventures and peregrinations, there’s got to be something real about that much psychic energy.