The Skull of "Mary Magdalene" at Saint-Maximin: A Relic in a Golden Reliquary

In the crypt of the great Gothic basilica of Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume, behind protective glass, a darkened human skull sits inside a gilded reliquary. The metalwork frames the skull with flowing golden hair and is carried by four golden angels. Roman numerals on the back read MDCCCLX, which points to 1860 as the reliquary's date. Tradition holds that the skull is that of Mary Magdalene, the follower of Jesus whom the Gospels name as the first witness of the empty tomb. Each year, on or around her feast day of 22 July, it is carried in procession through the town.

How a Gospel figure came to rest in Provence

• The Gospels say nothing of her later life or her burial. Early traditions disagree. Gregory of Tours (6th century) places her at Ephesus. Modestus, patriarch of Jerusalem in the 7th century, says she returned to Jerusalem.
• The Provençal story is medieval. In it, Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Martha, Maximinus and others arrive by boat at Marseilles and convert Provence, and Mary spends thirty years in penance in a cave at La Sainte-Baume. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), summarizing the historian Louis Duchesne, states that before the middle of the eleventh century there is no trace of the tradition that these Palestinian saints came to Provence. It says the story first appears in documents connected with Vézelay, the Burgundian abbey that then claimed her body.
• Vézelay first, then Saint-Maximin. Vézelay was the great Magdalene shrine of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In 1265 relics were exhumed there, and Louis IX attended their elevation in 1267. Then, in 1279, Charles of Salerno, later Charles II of Anjou, count of Provence, had the crypt at Saint-Maximin excavated and announced the discovery of her tomb and body. He founded a Dominican convent there. In 1295 Pope Boniface VIII recognized the Saint-Maximin relics. Vézelay's pilgrimage declined. The rival claims have never been reconciled.
• The Golden Legend. The thirteenth-century Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine spread the Provençal story across Europe.

The relics since

• The Revolution. In 1794, during the French Revolution, the relics were despoiled. According to the account preserved by the shrine and reported by EWTN, the sacristan Joseph Bastide saved the skull, and other people saved other fragments.
• The "noli me tangere." For centuries a patch of tissue on the forehead was venerated as the place the risen Christ touched her when he said "Do not hold on to me" (noli me tangere, John 20:17). It stayed on the skull until the eighteenth century. In 1780 it was placed in a glass reliquary of its own.
• The 1860 reliquary is the one seen today.

What science has, and has not, said

• In 2017 the forensic anthropologist Philippe Charlier and the forensic artist Philippe Froesch led a study of the skull and a lock of hair. The shrine did not allow the skull to be taken out of its reliquary. The team made a photogrammetric survey of several hundred photographs and examined the hair under magnification, by scanning electron microscope and by X-ray elemental analysis.
• They proposed a computer-aided facial reconstruction of a woman of about fifty, of Mediterranean appearance, with dark brown hair. They published the work in Clinical Medicine Insights: Ear, Nose and Throat in 2019.
• None of this identifies the person. The identification with Mary Magdalene rests on tradition. The reports on the study themselves state that it is not conclusive historical or forensic evidence.

Symbology

The golden head. Head reliquaries, which enclose a skull in precious metal shaped as a head or bust, were a common medieval form. Here the gold hair recalls the long hair that became Mary Magdalene's attribute in Western art. That attribute comes from a merger. In a homily of 591, Pope Gregory the Great identified her with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7, who dried Jesus's feet with her hair, and with Mary of Bethany. The Eastern churches never made that merger, and the reformed Roman calendar of 1969 separated the figures again in the liturgy.

Touch. The "noli me tangere" relic turns a Gospel sentence about not touching into an object pilgrims could see. A text became a thing.

Connections

Mary Magdalene in the earliest Christian sources and in the debate over women's authority (ch16). Mary as the chief questioner in the Pistis Sophia (ch45). The Reformation's attack on the cult of relics (ch31). Other head and body relics in the Vault: the True Cross (V15), the Veil of Veronica (V25) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (V24).

In the museum

The museum shows a modelled rendition of the reliquary in a niche of its own. It follows published descriptions and a photograph of the reliquary in the crypt, supplied by the site's editor:

• a gilded plinth with a rosette frieze and two enamelled shields;
• four angels lifting a gilded bust, whose hood frames the darkened skull behind a glass window;
• between the angels, a small columned shrine holding a glass vial. The published study reports that the reliquary's maker designed a place below the skull for the vial of the noli me tangere.

It is not a replica. It is not modelled from measurements, and its details are simplified.

In the close-up view the rendition stands in a stone niche under a single warm light. The wear on its gilding (tarnish, rubbed patches, scratches) is a rendered effect chosen to suggest age. It is not a record of the reliquary's actual condition. The same is true of the shadows and of the reflection in the floor.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/skull-reliquary-saint-maximin.html