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Comment by cicero | Hacker News Reader

I read this article in order to compare this case with those of Catholic and Orthodox saints who are incorrupt. Sure enough, this woman lived her final years in a convent.

For some reason that I've never heard explained, living a holy life (according to Catholic and Orthodox Christian measures) sometimes has the effect of retarding the process of decay after death. I used to suspect the stories of incorruptible saints as being frauds perpetrated to advance the agenda of the Catholic Church, but as I have learned more, it has happened too many times in too many different ways for me to think that anymore. In the case of this French noblewoman, no one is trying to advance the cause of her canonization. She was found accidentally, seemingly by someone who has no interest in Catholic saints.

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I see no basis for a miraculous explanation.

Convents and holy sites are much more likely to remain undisturbed. In many other western european sites, every other inch of land has been farmed continuously for centuries, making it unlikely to find an undisturbed body. This wealthy woman was in a lead coffin at a convent, and was probably much better protected from the elements than 99.99% of her contemporaries.

I didn't claim a miraculous explanation; I only said I no longer think these cases are faked. I think "incorruptibles" are a fascinating phenomenon that I can't explain. I believe in miracles, and I think some incorruptibles might be miracles, but I don't really know. There might be other ways that the lifestyle we tend to call "holy" does something to retard decomposition.

However, I don't think your explanation is sufficient because decay usually begins immediately upon death due to the presence of organisms already in the body before death. Sealing the coffin would not prevent such decomposition.

If you dry up before you can really get rotting you will be pretty well preserved. The bottom line of that being that if your corpse is well-prepared before burial and your casket happens to be either well-sealed or otherwise escape water penetration for the period you are buried you will be in pretty good shape 300 years on.

There are a lot of ways a dead body can stay dry and a lot of dead bodies out there to discover.

Another example of that would be the mummies in Egypt that lasted >4k years in a hot, dry place.

There are also some other conditions that can result in surprising preservation, such as alkaline conditions leading to saponification (basically turning body fat into a soap-like substance).

I have no idea why you were downvoted—that was exactly my thought on reading the article as well. In her particular case, she's well-preserved while those around her have been reduced to skeletons, which suggests quite strongly that hers are a case of authentically corrupt relics.

The redditification via downvotes here every single time makes me applaud Facebook for only allowing positive votes.

I was downvoted because I dared to hint of something supernatural on Hacker News. I didn't even explicitly claim a supernatural cause; I only said I used to think these cases were faked, and now I don't.

Buddhist example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dashi-Dorzho_Itigilov

Unless we have some corpse preservation domain experts involved in this discussion, I generally tend to suspect that these "outlier" examples of corpse conditions are just misunderstandings by lay people. It doesn't help that death and handling of corpses is not a widely-discussed topic in most cultures.

This doesn't even make sense from a Catholic/Greek Orthodox perspective. Why would the body be preserved without the soul? Strikes me as almost blasphemous.

> This doesn't even make sense from a Catholic/Greek Orthodox perspective.

Sure it does.

> Why would the body be preserved without the soul?

As a sign of God's power, as a message to others, the same as any other miracle.

> As a sign of God's power, as a message to others, the same as any other miracle

Well sure, but you might as well point out the stain in the corner is a "sign of God's power". It seems to me the "correct" approach would be to appreciate the ineffability of what happened, not make ridiculous claims about holiness causing preservation when there is literally no rational implication of this.

It's a sign of the person's holiness.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incorruptibility

> Why would the body be preserved without the soul?

Because that soul and body formed a person who was more holy than most, and thus sanctified his (or in this case, her) body, which is thereby preserved from the corruption which normally afflicts corpses in a fallen world.

In Orthodox thought, bodies and souls are of equal importance (rather than the Gnostic idea of the living soul animating an essentially dead body). An Orthodox thinker would say that we are our bodies (unlike many Western Christians), but not just our bodies (unlike a materialist).

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