This essay introduces contributors and other readers to the themes and thrust of Gods’ Collections, outlining some of the areas and questions that the project will explore. These include (1) the questions of why and how temple collections develop, (2) the managing, curating, and cataloguing of these collections, (3) how these collections are used, and (4) how some temple collections become museums. This digital essay is designed to be read in conjunction with more detailed case studies on the ‘Collections’ page, more of which will be added as the project develops.

1. How and why do ‘Gods’ Collections’ develop?

By no means all objects in temples constitute 'collections', but many of them do seem to take a road (or stop somewhere on the road) that leads from 'accumulation' to 'collection' to 'museum'. Many temples deliberately collect relics, but others simply accumulate votive offerings, donations, antiquities and curiosities. At some point many of these, too, come to be seen and treated as collections, and some collections transform into actual museums. Groups of objects, as well as individual objects, have their biographies. It is these biographies of groups of objects in temples, found throughout history and throughout the world, that this project aims to celebrate and to understand.

The list below outlines some of the broad categories of objects found in temple collections.

Ritual kit 

The basis of many temple collections are their 'tools of the trade' – the objects used in the temple's rituals and daily activity. These can extend from golden chalices to the plates used in the gurdwara langar or the Chapel teas. In England in 1959 the Goldsmiths Company funded the first of a long series of Cathedral Treasuries which displayed both the altarplate of the cathedral and the more interesting and precious plate from parish churches in the diocese (Hare 2008). Some of these Treasuries have since developed into museum-style visitor centres.

Relics

The temples of many faiths house relics; the great medieval Catholic churches competed with kings and great nobles in building up collections. The ‘winner’ of this competition was perhaps King Louis IX of France. In 1248, his Sainte Chapelle opened next door to the royal palace in the centre of Paris. Deliberately designed to be like a reliquary itself, it housed the ‘relics of the Passion’ Louis had bought nine years earlier, plus fragments of the True Cross and of the Holy Lance, and others.

Over 1000 years earlier the Indian emperor Ashoka had distributed ‘84,000’ relics of the Buddha ‘throughout the earth’. Relics are found in many faith traditions and many parts of the world. Frequently they are the symbols and cynosures of the local community, and even when not venerated (as in Protestant chapels) are respected as the mementos of founders and leaders.

Votive offerings and donations

Votive offerings to the temple's saint or divinity can range from Mexican Catholic folk-paintings to Sikh silk rumalas, from wax body-parts to Renaissance paintings. They have been given at least since Egyptian farmers made offerings to Hathor around 1400 BCE. Very frequently offerings are displayed as a collection in the temple, for they reflect the power and popularity of the saint or divinity.

As well as purpose-made votives like retablos or wax body parts, temples also attract other kinds of donations. Often these are precious objects, especially jewellery, and some collections are of unimaginable wealth. In fact, many modern temple museums exist because their temples were rich and accumulated many precious objects.

Gods' collection or State's collection?

In very many societies, the property of the state and the property of the deity are almost one. Temple collections and palace collections are often indistinguishable, and collections are kept to honour deity and ruler alike.The temple collection best known to tourists is perhaps the Treasury of St Mark's Basilica in Venice, which was the chapel of the Doge's palace. Its incomparable treasures thus reflect the successes and failures of the Venetian State, including much loot from Byzantium dating from the Fourth Crusade, and lacking much that was plundered after the French occupation in 1797. Temples sometimes simply offer a (comparatively) safe place for local people to store their goods – everything from jewellery to corn and cattle (Davies 1968, 73-76).

In modern times – certainly since the French Revolution – many states have nationalised temple property, most notably the early Soviet Union where closed churches came together with atheist exhibitions to create a new category of atheist museum (Paine 2010). Even where government refrained from outright seizure, it everywhere ensured a tight control over rich and powerful temples. The legislation in British India transferring Hindu temples to trustees remains controversial to this day. In Meiji Japan the government, in preparation for Japan’s participation in the Vienna Exposition of 1873, 'conducted a study of “treasures” belonging to renowned Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines, and aristocratic families in the Ise, Nagoya, Kyoto, and Nara regions' (Suzuki 2007, 133), which were seen as the nation's 'cultural property'.

Dubovský (2015, 42) shows that the Temple in Jerusalem stored gifts, vows and tributes, as well as precious utensils and decorations. Some of the spoils of war were consecrated to God and stored there, as were King David's weapons (Kings 2, 11: 10). So the Treasury was used for three purposes: the safe storage of the nation's convertible wealth, the care of objects consecrated to God, and the preservation of the nation's memories – the role of the museum.

Loot

In most human societies war involves looting; in many societies, indeed, the capture of the enemy's powerful and symbolic objects was in large part the purpose of war, and was in no way considered disreputable. Often the most significant and telling of the captured objects were brought back to be kept in the conqueror's temple. In his seminal Lives of Indian Images (51-87), Richard Davis describes a number of instances in medieval India in which the ruler brought back to his city temple divine images from that of his conquered rival. In 1509 the Viyayanagara emperor overcame the Gajapati emperor, who accepted his sovereignty. He brought back as a symbol of his victory a black granite statue of the boy Krishna, and for it he built a complete new temple, resembling in plan and design the statue's former home. At its consecration the conqueror presented Krishna with gold and silver vessels, and a substantial rental income. ' . . . it was part of a ritually incorporative imperial policy, requiring the conspicuous, ceremonial presence of subordinated polities in the capital' (67). Five centuries earlier the poet Padmagupta described how the founder of the Paramāra dynasty brought back a legendary Siva image to Dhar, his capital; establishing it in the temple of Siva Mahākāla gave him the authority to rule his kingdom. In medieval South Asia what we would call looting was an important element in the rhetoric of kingship, and perfectly honourable behaviour, especially when the loot was given to temple deities.

Antiquities

Like many institutions, temples treasure relics of their past – redundant decorations, old furnishings and finds – and these have in turn attracted antiquities from the locality and from other temples. Temples in the past were also sometimes given private collections that today might go to a secular museum. 

For example, by the eighteenth century English cathedrals were attracting many middle-class tourists, and their treasures were as much of a draw as their buildings.

For the northern gentry who frequented York for race week. . . the curiosities of the Minster fitted in very well with the 'puppy show' seen by [diarist Nicholas] Blundell and the 'exhibition of a stuffed zebra and other animals at the Blue Boar. . .' (Owen 1977, 258).

The Winchester Cathedral collection, like so many others, includes a mixture of antiquities from the cathedral itself – displaced Romanesque and later sculptures, 15th century painted mortuary chests, Queen Mary Tudor's chair, figures from the 17th century organ case, rings and other finds from graves – plus such stray items as a Victorian Basalt Ware model of the cathedral font and a silhouette of Jane Austen (Hardacre 1989).

Curiosities

Temples also tend to accumulate curiosities and souvenirs, like the whale jawbones still found in a few English churches. Unicorn horns were held in a number of European cathedrals and churches in the Middle Ages; St Denis in Paris had one, New College Oxford still has two. Sometimes these could take on magic powers; unicorn horns could detect poison. Other curiosities found in European churches included a stuffed crocodile, effigies of kings, bones of giants, and meteors (Davies 1968, 76, 188). In Japan the Ryuguji temple in Fukuoka has the bones of a mermaid washed ashore in 1222 at Hakata Bay, on the island of Kyushu. Visitors were given water in which the 'mermaid bones' had been soaked to protect them from disease.

These admittedly were individual objects, but sometimes it is whole collections that end up included in the wider collections of temples. Canterbury Cathedral library preserves in three original cabinets the collection of Cathedral Canon John Bargrave, who in 1646 became a travelling tutor to young noblemen abroad. His collection of souvenirs included the expected coins, medals, intaglios and geological specimens, but also such curiosities and oddities as a Venetian stiletto, Roman bronze figures, a crystal from the Alps, a pack of French playing cards, and a Cree porcupine-quill-work necklace, belt and armlets, given him by one of the merchants he helped to rescue from Algiers (Sturdy & Henig, n.d.).

2. Managing ‘Gods’ Collections’

The second aspect the project will examine is how temples have looked after their collections, and how this has reflected the ways they have understood and valued them.

Curating collections

Caring for collections – preventive and active conservation – has not until modern times been very consciously pursued. There are exceptions: in the Edo period, Japanese temples performed annual summer airings of their treasures, such as paintings, calligraphy and textiles, by exposing them to the air and sunlight where they could be checked for mould and insects. (Moreover, the opportunity was taken to allow public viewings.)

Nor until fairly modern times do we usually know who on the staff was responsible in any particular temple for the care of the collections, though one striking find from below the Temple Mount in Jerusalem is a fragment of a clay seal, once attached to a bag, presumably from the Treasury. It has been read as 'Belonging to [..]lyahu son of Immer'. The Immer family was a well-known priestly family at the end of the First Temple period, around the 7th-6th centuries BCE. Pashur son of Imer is mentioned as ‘Chief officer in the house of God’ (Jer. 20:1). But we can only guess who actually did the work.

A rare description of a temple's curator’s work is given by the late John Hardacre. When he was appointed Curator in Winchester Cathedral in 1984, he was the first full-time qualified curator in an English cathedral. He describes the cataloguing of the collection, his role as 'housekeeper', advising on the handling and storage of objects in everyday use, the commissioning of professional conservation of the collection, and the creation of a new gallery in the cathedral's triforium. Interestingly, he puts much emphasis on scholarship, describing the curator's role as 'one of an enabler, a catalyst that allows a reaction to take place between the scholar and the object' (Hardacre 1993, 331).

In many temples the object collections grow up in the care of the temple librarian.

Housing collections

Collections have been kept in many parts of temples: relics for example in prominent honourable locations, curiosities and antiquities sometimes in odd corners. Surprisingly often, though, temples have erected special buildings to house their collections; these have varied from three-story treasuries attached to great churches, to huge vaults below South Indian temples and the chedis, relic-rooms and image-rooms of Buddhist temples.

Many of the great churches of medieval Western Europe had treasuries: often distinctive, strongly-built additions to the main church fabric. The standard pattern was to have three floors to accommodate relics (at the top), the church's muniments, and the church's treasures, whether in money or precious metals (Milner 2017). Such an arrangement is also found in colleges: New College Oxford has a 1380 Muniment Tower that on the ground floor stored the less-valuable plate used in hall, on the first floor the chests containing the college's title deeds and leases and the college seal, on the third the gold and silver used on feastdays and the college's monies, and in the highest room the vestments, relics, ornaments and plate used in chapel (Jackson-Stops 1979, 180).

But even relics are not always all kept together. In Sri Lanka Buddhist temples sometimes distinguish three ritual places in which to keep the three types of relic of the Buddha and his arahants: corporeal relics (hair, cremation-ash) are kept in stupas; relics of use (clothing, begging-bowl) are often kept in the Bodhi-tree shrine; images of the Buddha are kept in the image house (Trainor 2013, 516).

In Ethiopia, most churches – certainly the larger and more ancient churches and monasteries – have in their compound a store house, an eqa bet. Here are kept all the church's treasures: vestments, icons, church plate, manuscripts, magic scrolls, sistra, bells and drums, umbrellas, thuribles. Sometimes they preserve other treasures, as the church of Däräsge Maryam in the Semien Mountains guards gifts and the intended coronation paraphernalia of Dejazmatch Wube, who lost his struggle with Tewodros in 1855 (McEwan 2013, 125).  

Keeping them safe 

Collections have often been of great value and so at great risk, from burglars as well as invading armies or rival temples. The means temples have used to protect them range from the cobras said to guard the legendary one-trillion-dollar treasure of Sri Padmanabhaswamy Temple in Trivandrum, to more modern approaches.

The treasury of the Jerusalem Temple had seven seals, requiring the presence of seven different individuals, including the king, in order to open it (Fonfeder et al. 2003). In Ancient Greece the temple key became the insignia of female priests (Karatas 2019).

Cataloguing collections

 How information about the objects in collections has been preserved throws great light on how those collections were valued and understood in different societies and at different times, but also on how history itself was understood and what from the past was valued.

In the funerary temple of King Neferirkare (who died around 2460 BC)

Temple staff periodically undertook meticulous inventories of the material and property of shrines for which they were responsible. The information gathered was noted in cross-ruled tables. Two different inks, black and white, were used to separate different notations. Each column was used to describe the condition of a certain object. During subsequent inspections, these objects were noted as "present", and any modifications to their physical condition were noted. The headings across the top . . . indicate the material (quartz, galena, incense), the type of object (vase, bowl, chest), and technical specifications (silver-plating). The observations are astonishing detailed. A vase for example is described as "empty, leaks, many repairs, numerous chips..."

Leah Comeau (2020, 144) records how among the ubiquitous inscriptions in South Indian temples, often recording such gifts as land or cows, are to be found records of donated treasures: 

An impressive list of gifts registered on the wall of the Arulmiku Cuvetaranyecuvaracuvami temple in Thiruvenkadu includes donations by queen-mother Parantakan, the queen of Uttama-Cola, Parantakan-Devi, and several other royal patrons. Gifts include gold and silver pots, gold images, ornaments set with gems, and the queen's presentation of a golden flower.

 Josephine Shaya has analysed a Hellenistic stele from the great temple of Athena at Lindos on Rhodes. The stele, now in Copenhagen, presents as a catalogue of the temple's treasures, describing around 45 objects, their donors, and literary references to them. Shaya, though, shows that this is not a simple working catalogue, but rather a selection of those things that once were (or should have been) in the temple, and which together glorified Athena but also 'testified to the history and identity of the Lindians and the antiquity and renown of their sanctuary'. Standing in the sanctuary, Lindian visitors

stood in the footsteps of their ancestors and the kings, heroes and leaders of ancient Greece, Persia and Egypt. The catalogue informed them that they worshipped a goddess who had been honoured by the honourable throughout the ages (Shaya 2005, 430).

If perhaps the visitor was in reality standing in a fairly empty space, in imagination they were enjoying an exhibition that reinforced their civic pride and identity at a time when real power was passing to Rome. The catalogue stele was almost a virtual museum in itself.

Disposal

Not everything is kept for ever, or even intended to be; temples too sometimes had their 'collection rationalisation policies'. Sometimes temple staff feel the need to clear some space or create a more coherent and useful collection, but still feel a respect, perhaps even a veneration, for the old stuff to be cleared. Some faith traditions, indeed, have rules on how redundant holy things should be treated.

This 'responsible' disposal seems to go back as far as we have evidence – at least to the eleventh century BCE. Sometime during or before the New Kingdom, the authorities of the temple of the Falcon-God Nekheny at Hierakonpolis in southern Egypt decided to have a clear-out. Within the temple complex, they buried 'a mass of ivories, faience baboons, ibex, fish, falcons, a hippopotamus and other creatures, and a whole range of other objects besides' (Reeves n.d.). This huge cache, found in 1899 and nicknamed the 'Main Deposit', dated from the early Dynastic period or before. It seems most likely that it comprised offerings and equipment ritually deposited in sacred ground. Even larger and richer was a deposit found in 1903 in the courtyard of the Temple of Amun at Karnak. Here in 1903 the Service des Antiquités found 751 statues and stone fragments, 17,000 bronzes, many wooden statuettes, offering tables, quantities of ram bones (the ram was sacred to Amun, lord of Karnak), a few vessels in metal and stone, and a range of architectural elements. These seem to have all been deposited together during or immediately after the Ptolemaic period, and to have originated over the preceding three thousand years.

Sometimes indeed it was the very disposal plan that created the collection. In some Jewish traditions creating a 'collection' is a way of respectfully disposing of things that are damaged or redundant, but still sacred. According to rabbinic law, a worn-out sacred text or paper which contains the name of God cannot be destroyed or casually discarded, but must be buried, or at least deposited in a synagogue storeroom, a genizah, often in the cellar or attic. Ritual items like prayer shawls or branches from the Sukkot ritual are often consigned there too. In this way a collection is formed, albeit one which is not intended to have any use. The most famous genizah by far is that formed over a thousand years in the Ben Esra Synagogue in Old Cairo; its 250,000 medieval manuscripts and fragments, now mostly in Cambridge University Library, have shed a flood of light on Jewish life in the medieval Middle East (Outhwaite et al. 2010).

Many collections and individual objects have left their temple through looting, confiscation, theft, sale or gift, and found their way to modern secular museums, often abroad. The decolonisation movement in museums has sharpened focus on restitution, and religious objects are often seen as prime candidates for 'return'.

3. How collections are used

Usually, though, temple collections are there to be used. Their use is the primary focus of this project, which will examine the variety of uses made for temple collections, particularly those facing the public. It will examine, too, the ways in which devotees/visitors interact with collections. The permanent display of collections ranges from the display of relics or offerings to the faithful, to public art museums built in the temple grounds. There is also, in many faiths and ages, a strong tradition of temporary display (as on saints' days), both static and in procession. Today virtual access raises new 'theological' as well as practical issues.

Display

The main way in which collections are used is display, and this project is concentrating on collections organised as discrete exhibitions within the wider temple. However, the boundary between objects consciously displayed together, and objects on view around the temple is a very fluid one. English parish churches display all sorts of objects: some are seen as collections by most visitors, some by only a few, and some by none. Banners deposited by regiments or Scout troops may be seen as 'collections' by some; 'achievements' (painted coats of arms) or maidens' garlands, once hung in the church after the funeral procession, are probably seldom seen as collections.

Relics are the class of temple object that have for longest been displayed in a manner that might be recognised by a modern museum curator. In 1135 the church of St. Ursula in Cologne was rebuilt with niches in its nave walls to display the bones of St Ursula's 11,000 virgin martyrs, found a generation earlier when the city walls were rebuilt. By the late 14th century there were hundreds of reliquary busts, which came to be displayed on shelves. Then in 1643, after the 30 Years War, they were integrated into a dramatic new Goldene Kammer, with ingenious displays of bones above, and elaborate gold-framed niches with busts below (Mann 2019).

Sometimes relics appear in museums; sometimes museums are reliquaries. The relics of the founder of the Knights of Columbus occupy a small gallery in the middle of the Knights of Columbus Museum in New Haven, but in the Nuova Gesù church in Naples there is what amounts to a museum celebrating the life of Saint Joseph Moscati; his much-venerated tomb stands close by. He was revered in his lifetime (1880-1927) as a brilliant and generous doctor of the poor, and his body was moved here in 1977. The museum includes not just his medical equipment and miscellaneous personalia, but a reconstruction of his bedroom and sitting room, the furniture and personal possessions given to the church by the saint's sister Nina (Tripodoro 2015, 118). (The collection includes one of the strangest of all relics, an Edinburgh tram ticket, souvenir of his visit in 1923.)

A similar ambiguity, but in a very different context, surrounds the 'relics' of John Wesley. Beside the City Road Chapel, founded by Wesley in 1768, stands his house. For two or more generations after Wesley's death it was used as the home of the Superintendent of the City Road Circuit. Between 1885 and 1888 that was the Rev. John McKenny, and it fell to his mid-twenties daughter Helen to show the ever-growing stream of Methodist pilgrims what she wryly and affectionately referred to as 'the relics'. These included some of Wesley's furniture, books, portraits, and the famous teapot presented to him by Josiah Wedgwood in 1761. Helen McKenny's entertaining and perceptive diary is full of references to showing 'the museum' and 'the relics'.

I have not yet sat in the blessed Chair in the Drawing Room as I think it would be desecration . . . Today I feel I don't care a pin for the old Relics. They oppress me with their antiquity and sacredness! . . . A dear Minister called to whom we showed the Relics. Of course, they are very interesting to a stranger but when you have lived in the house a whole week they become somewhat tame! . . . During the afternoon Mother had three American visitors from Toronto [sic], very nice people . . . When she introduced them to John Wesley's room the lady who was most enthusiastic said, with great emotion: 'I feel – as – I could – fall down on my knees in this room.' . . . After a hasty dinner showed three ladies the relics, who greatly embarrassed me by offering me a shilling! (McKenny 1978: 2, 3, 5, 34. See also Woodward 1966).

Wesley's House is now restored to how it was in his day, and is open to the public. Across the yard, in the Chapel crypt, is the Museum of Methodism. 

A museum can sometimes stand in for missing relics. In 2008, with Cardinal Newman's beatification approaching, the Roman Catholic Church got permission to remove his body from its simple cemetery grave to turn it into relics. Because Newman had specifically asked to be buried with his lifelong friend Ambrose St. John, the project caused big scandal and upset, with charges of homophobia. But Newman had the last laugh, for no trace of his body was found in the grave.

Newman was finally canonised in October 2019, and the Birmingham Oratory, which he had founded and which had long pushed for him to be made a saint, celebrated the occasion by opening its Museum of Saint John Henry Cardinal Newman. Visitors can see personal possessions like the saint's glasses and rosary, pages from manuscripts of his Apologia Pro Vita Sua and The Dream of Gerontius, and liturgical objects like his vestments and chalice. 

This project is essentially looking at temples that accumulate collections that sometimes develop into museums. Occasionally, though, a temple and museum are set up together; this was the case with the other Museum of the Tooth, in Singapore. The Buddha Tooth Relic Temple and Museum was set up in 2007 by The Venerable Shi Fa Zhao, abbot of a local temple. His ambition was an 'ecumenical' temple that drew on the rituals and the art of all the chief Buddhist traditions, and was as welcoming to local people as to tourists. On four floors the temple-museum contains a ritual hall, a funerary hall for people to offer gifts to their ancestors, the Tooth shrine itself, a small relic hall, a gift shop, a roof garden, an Eminent Sangha Museum that celebrates prominent Singaporean monks and nuns, and the Buddhist Culture Museum. This tells the story of Buddhism using some 300 exhibits ranging from Gandharan figures bought on the art market to modern works of art, photographs, ritual objects and text, including many donations (Goh 2016, 118).  With the help of the Singapore Tourist Board, Shi Fa Zhao 'has been able to develop a combination of spectacle, leisure, ecumenicalism, and ritual services that attracts local (and repeat) visitors, as well as foreign tourists and pilgrims visiting Singapore perhaps only one or two times in their lives' (McDaniel 2017, 147).

4. How collections become museums

Finally, we are keen to examine how temple collections have in many cases become museums in the various senses in which that term is understood today. Collections are sometimes formalised as museums in response to a public demand that arises from perception of the objects as 'art' or as 'heritage'. Sometimes the motive is the temple authority's hope of using their collection to tell their story and so put their message across. Sometimes it is pressure from State authorities.

Seeing things as ‘art’

In ancient China, the Hellenistic West, and the Renaissance, there grew up an appreciation of beauty, and an aesthetic gaze to a considerable degree replaced the religious gaze. For much of the elite, at least, objects became beautiful rather than primarily holy, and a culture of collecting developed among the wealthy. Many temples accepted this new understanding of their collections – and many still do. As Josephine Shaya (2015, 25) puts it:

New cultures of viewing developed in the Hellenistic period, characterized by intellectualized and antiquarian ways of seeing ancient gifts to the gods, by the conscious selection of particular objects to tell a story or witness an event, and by the cataloguing and displaying of collected objects: in brief, the invention of collecting.

Modern Japan offers some of the finest examples of temple collections becoming, or generating, modern art museums. The Kofukuji National Treasure Museum in Nara is mentioned above. The Hoshokan Museum in Kyoto, first opened in 1965 and rebuilt in 2001, displays treasures from the Byodoin Temple. The Zuiganji Art Museum in Matsushima, opened in 1995, houses the collection of the Rinzai Zen Buddhist Seiryuzan Zuiganji temple, and includes calligraphy by former head monks, fusuma paintings, teacups and portraits, a statue of samurai ruler Date Masamune, and the great sword commissioned in 1655 by his son. Much the same has been happening in China, where for example Beijing's principal Tibetan Buddhist temple, Yonghegong Lama Temple, has dedicated two pavilions to changing exhibitions of the temple collection.  

Seeing things as ‘heritage’

If something is seen neither as holy nor as particularly beautiful, it may yet be seen as historic. The craze for heritage, which grew up in the Enlightenment and has since spread through much of the world, gave collections of old things a new purpose and public interest.

As we have seen, in the classical world temples housed works of art and curiosities dedicated by citizens, the spoils of war, and the personalia of heroes. Together these amounted to a celebration of the history and glory of the polis, but sometimes it amounted almost to a microcosm of the world, in the way aspired to by some Renaissance collectors, or claimed by some big museums today. Gahtan and Pegazzano (2014, 7) point to Vespasian's 75CE Temple of Peace:

What may distinguish it is the contemporary perception that the collections it housed represented the whole world – an archetype of the universal museum as the product of empire. 

What happened to such temple collections when the Empire went Christian and temples were suppressed? Though much was no doubt destroyed, much survived simply because it was now appreciated as 'art'. Many statues and pictures were absorbed into private collections, or displayed in public places; the Emperor Theodosius II had in his collection two famous cult statues: the Aphrodite of Knidos by Praxiteles and the Olympian Zeus by Phidias. As the fourth century Christian apologist Prudentius asked: 'let these statues, the works of great craftsmen, stand undefiled; let them become the most beautiful adornments of our native city – may no depraved purpose taint these works of art, no longer in the service of evil.' (quoted in Gahtan and Pegazzano 2014, 9).

Using the collection to tell the temple’s story

 Many temples have used this public interest in heritage as a way into the telling of their story, and so to promote themselves. Again, such collections are found in temples today throughout the world. The Beijing Confucian Temple and Guozijian Museum has six exhibitions telling the story of the temple/college, and also of Confucius.

To the traditional displays of relics of the Gurus, some Sikh gurudwaras in the twentieth century added – or spawned ­– museums displaying realistic pictures of incidents from Sikh history. They aim to reinforce faith and identity by telling the story of Sikhism, but just how that story is interpreted reflects, as historiography always must, modern experience. Kanika Singh (2017a, 108; see also Singh 2017b) points out that 'Sikh museums combine the secular authority of the museum with the conviction of belief. This makes the display in Sikh museums especially powerful in propagating a particular version of the Sikh past.' Such museums also have a significant outward-facing role. In 2002 the Queen visited the Guru Nanak Sikh Museum in the gurudwara at Leicester, and remarked

Here in Leicester, you have a reputation for successful cultural integration, producing a distinctive city. All-faith communities are part of what it is to be British in 2002. (Murphy 2015, 50).

Like the UK, Thailand has a tradition of 'micromuseums', as Fiona Candlin (2016) calls them: small – sometimes very small – local museums, or private collections of often-eccentric enthusiasts, and covering every imaginable subject (McDaniel 2017, 149). Thai monasteries, too, often offer local museums – or at least collections of local things, whether archaeological finds, local crafts or curios.

But in many monasteries of the modern Forest tradition in Thailand there can also be found museums that tell the story of the monastery, and especially of its founder. Many of these (in 1998 Louis Gabaude [2003, 182] listed 25) have grown out of the stupas that house the relics of saints, usually their founders. These museums-cum-shrines can contain, besides the corporeal relics of the saint, personal possessions from toothpick to adjustable wrench, mosquito net to betelnut set, photographs, newspaper cuttings, publications, and amulets. Often dominant is a lifesize statue of the saint, more recently highly-realistic resin figures. Though in form museums, these places are also shrines that invite the visitor to make merit and gain good karma by venerating a saint through his images and possessions. 

Such 'telling our story' museums may be found today in temples of all sorts of tradition; for example, London can boast a big variety, including the Museum of Methodism in the crypt of Wesley's Chapel, the Museum of Freemasonry opened in the United Grand Lodge in 1841, the Object Collection in St Paul's Cathedral, the Salvation Army International Heritage Centre, the Understanding Hinduism Exhibition in the Sri Swaminarayan Temple, and the St Sophia’s Greek Orthodox Cathedral Museum.

Using the collection for mission

By telling their story from a 'heritage' perspective, temple museums help promote their mission, but they also do that directly, building up collections of objects that help tell the story of their faith and help to explain it.

The museums that temples hive off often combine an 'art gallery', institution history, local history and curiosity cabinet role. The Islamic Museum in Jerusalem, for example, was set up in 1923 by the Supreme Muslim Council. Today housed in a historic building next door to Al Aqsa Mosque on the Haram al Sharif, its name implies that it is there to advance the cause and understanding of Islam. Many of the objects on display, though, are admired by visitors for their artistry and beauty, and in kind do not differ from exhibits in the Museum of Islamic Art in West Jerusalem. Many of the exhibits derive from the mosque itself or from the Dome of the Rock, such as stained glass, Fatimid wooden panels, ceramic tiles and inscriptions. Others were donations to the mosque, like 600 copies of the Qur'an, dating back to the 8th century. Other exhibits might be considered local history, relating to Jerusalem itself, or to Palestine more widely. These include stone inscriptions, enormous cooking pots from the Sultan's consort's soup kitchen, a collection of weapons, archaeological finds – and bloodstained clothes of the Palestinians killed during the Temple Mount riots in 1990. The museum has collected, as well, objects illustrating Islamic history and civilisation from many countries. 

Occasionally temples use their museum collections to make a very particular argument. The creation of the 1643 Goldene Kammer in St. Ursula's church, Cologne, mentioned above, was perhaps prompted by the desire to affirm the traditional Catholic cult of the dead in the face of Protestant hostility (Mann 2019, 17-19).

Conclusion

Gods’ collections may be valued for their power to argue, for their beauty, their sacred power, their contribution to mission, their evidence of history, their curiosity, their value as treasure, their attraction to visitors – even sometimes for their revenue-generation. Whyever temples value their collections, it seems that objects have accumulated, become recognised collections, and sometimes turned into public museums, in places of worship of every imaginable sort, from the earliest days of humankind. Whether gods’ collections really are a universal human phenomenon it is one aim of this project to discover.

Bibliography

Businge, Conan. 2007. Uganda: Buganda Activists Storm Museum. AllAfrica. Available at https://allafrica.com/stories/200711210284.html

Candlin, Fiona. 2016. Micromuseology: An Analysis of Small Independent Museums. London: Bloomsbury.

Cole, Peter and Hoffman, Adina. 2011. Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza. New York: Schocken Books.

Comeau, Leah Elizabeth. 2020. Material Devotion in a South Indian Poetic World. Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Davies, J. G. 1968. The Secular Use of Church Buildings. London: SCM Press.

Davis, Richard H. 1997. Lives of Indian Images. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dubovský, Peter. 2015. The Building of the First Temple: A Study in Redactional, Text-Critical and Historical Perspective. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.

Fonfeder, R., Holtzman, M., & Maccarrone, E. Internal Controls In the Talmud: The Jerusalem Temple. The Accounting Historians Journal, vol. 30, no. 1, 2003, pp. 73–93. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40698278. Accessed 28 Sept. 2020.

Gabaude, Louis. 2003. 'A New Phenomenon in Thai Monasteries: The Stupa-Museum' in The Buddhist Monastery: A Cross-Cultural Survey edited by Pierre Pichard and François Lagirarde. Paris: Ecole français d'Extreme Orient.

Goh, Aik Sai. 2016. Nagapuspa Buddhist Culture Museum, Singapore. Material Religion: the Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 12, 1, 118-121.

Hand, Rachel. 2015. Brass Necklet, Uganda. In Trophies, Relics and Curios? Missionary Heritage from Africa and the Pacific, edited by Karen Jacobs and Chris Wingfield. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Hardacre, John. 1989. Winchester Cathedral Triforium Gallery: Sculpture, Woodwork and Metalwork from Eleven Centuries. Winchester: Dean & Chapter of Winchester.

Hardacre, John. 1993. 'Caring for the Collections'. In Winchester Cathedral: Nine Hundred Years, edited by John Crook. Chichester: Phillimore.

Hare, Susan. [2008]. 'Cathedral Treasuries and the Goldsmiths' Company', in Timothy Schroder (ed.) Treasures of the English Church: a Thousand Years of Sacred Gold and Silver. London: Goldsmiths Company & Paul Holberton.

Jackson-Stops, Gervase. 1979. 'The Building of the Medieval College,' in New College Oxford 1379-1979 edited by John Buxton and Penry Williams. Oxford: Warden & Fellows of New College.

Karatas, Aynur-Michèle-Sara. 2019. Key-bearers of Greek Temples: The Temple Key as a Symbol of Priestly Authority, Mythos: Revista di Storia delle Religioni, 13. https://doi.org/10.4000/mythos.1219.

McDaniel, Justin. 2017. Architects of Buddhist Leisure: Socially Disengaged Buddhism in Asia's Museums, Monuments and Amusement Parks. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press.

Mann, Jackie. 2019. “Cologne’s Goldene Kammer of St. Ursula: A Medieval Ossuary,” Annual Midwest Medieval History Conference, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, IN, September 21, 2019. 

McEwan, Dorothy. 2013. The Story of Däräsge Maryam: The history, buildings and treasures of a church compound with a painted church in the Semen Mountains. Zurich: Lit Verlag.

McKenny, Helen. 1978. A City Road Diary: The Record of Three Years in Victorian London. Edited by Alfred Binney and John A. Vickers. Bognor Regis: World Methodist Historical Society (British Section).

Milner, Lesley. 2017. Lincoln Cathedral Treasure House. The Antiquaries Journal 97. London: Society of Antiquaries of London. 

Murphy, Anne. 2012. The Materiality of the Past: History and Representation in Sikh Tradition. Oxford: OUP.

Murphy, Anne. 2015. 'Sikh Museuming' in Sacred Objects in Secular Spaces: Exhibiting Asian Religions in Museums edited by Bruce M. Sullivan. London: Bloomsbury.

Outhwaite, Ben and Bhayro, Siam (eds.) 2010. "From a Sacred Source": Genizah Studies in Honour of Professor Stefan C. Reif. Cambridge Genizah Studies Series, Volume 1: Brill.

Owen, Dorothy M. 1977. 'From the Restoration until 1822' in A History of York Minster edited by G.E.Aylmer and Reginald Cant. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Paine, Crispin. 2010. Militant Atheist Objects: Anti-Religion Museums in the Soviet Union. Present Pasts, 1(1)

Reeves, Nicholas. n.d. Ancient Egypt The Great Discoveries: A Year-by-Year Chronicle. n.p.: Thames & Hudson.

Shaya, Josephine 2005. 'The Greek Temple as Museum: The Case of the Legendary Treasure of Athena from Lindos' American Journal of Archaeology, Vol. 109, No. 3 (Jul., 2005), pp. 423-442.

Singh, Kanika. 2017a. Representation of Heritage in Museums of Sikh History A Case Study of the Museum at Sis Ganj Gurdwara Delhi. PhD thesis for Ambedkar University, Delhi.

Singh, Kanika. 2017b. Sikh Museums in India. Material Religion: the Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 13: 2.

Sturdy, David and Henig, Martin.  n.d. [1983]. The Gentle Traveller: John Bargrave, Canon of Canterbury, and his Collection. Abingdon: Abbey Press.

Suzuki, Yui. 2007. Temple as Museum, Buddha as Art: Horyuji's Kudara Kannon and its Great Temple Repository. In Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 52, 129-140.

Thomas, Nicholas. 2016. The Return of Curiosity; What Museums are Good For in the 21st Century. London: Reaktion Books.

Trainor, Kevin. 2013. The Buddha's "Cave of the Midday Rest" and Buddhist Relic Practices in Sri Lanka. Material Religion: the Journal of Objects, Art and Belief 9: 4.

Tripodoro, Antonio. 2015. Translated by Michael J. Miller. Saint Guiseppe Moscati: Doctor of the Poor. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.

Welbourn, F. B. 1962. Kibuuka Comes Home. Transition 5, Jul. 30 - Aug. 29.

Woodward, Max. 1966. One at London: The Story of Wesley's Chapel. London: Friends of Wesley's Chapel.

Header image: Buddha Tooth Temple & Museum, Singapore. Photograph by Crispin Paine.