Rock-pop, folk and soul were making her a prematurely divine relic.
Morocco's constitution holds the person of the king, also known as Commander of the Faithful, to be sacred and inviolate.Such relics of divine kingship may soon go the way of Louis XVI's head.
Los Angeles is filled with various other communities like this, faded relics of divine inspiration.
Nearly all fossils, the museum asserts, are relics of that divine retribution.
The glaringly displayed phallus in the monastery is a brown wooden piece with a silver handle, a religious relic considered to possess divine powers and hence used for blessing the spiritually oriented people.
There are images of metamorphosis, but they are a part of another world, a relic that is sought and found by divine mercy or that warrants punishment.
Remarkably, this relic of the days when kings were deemed divine remains on the books in some European monarchies as well as nations like Saudi Arabia, where a critique of the crown is considered terrorism.
"In a way, Catholic devotion was preparing me for my adulthood in the record collector/taper/critic world — collecting relics, obsessing over hagiography, looking for physical traces of the divine in the most ordinary things".
But in early medieval times, the most tangible form of dissemination was the export of relics: the remains of individuals whose bodies had glowed with divine grace during their lifetimes and retained part of that grace after death.
In a culture that venerated the possession of relics as a means to bring the earthly closer to the divine, Mary left no bodily relics, thus assuming a special position between heaven and humanity.
