God: An Anatomy

by Francesca Stavrakopoulou

But validation might also be sought by means of the taste test: a physician would be appointed by local clergy to nibble a piece of the latest relic to confirm whether it was vegetal matter, animal leather, or human foreskin.38 Its sanctity might also be confirmed by its flavour. Sacred relics were believed to give off a sweet scent; they surely tasted sweet, too. This was indeed the experience of the thirteenth-century Beguine mystic Agnes Blannbekin, who claimed Christ’s foreskin tasted gloriously sweet. Agnes was regularly swallowing the Holy Prepuce, which miraculously manifested itself on her tongue when she received Communion on the annual Feast of the Circumcision. She reported its consistency was ‘alike the skin in an egg’, and that, when she felt compelled to put her finger in her mouth to touch it, ‘that little skin went down her throat on its own’, filling her limbs with a sweetness so great it appears to have triggered an orgasmic out-of-body experience.39