Biting St Anne's Foot 20

20

Biting Saint Anne’s Foot:

Preserving and regarding with reverence sacred relics is an important part of the Orthodox tradition and, following this tradition, the monks of Saint Anne’s guard and protect one of Saint Anne’s mummified feet.

If you don’t know who Saint Anne was, well, neither did I when I arrived, but Saint Anne was the Virgin Mary’s mother and so Jesus’ grandmother. The Orthodox truly believe that the object preserved at Saint Anne’s Monastery is verily that historic woman’s actual foot. Right or left I know not and it is not easy to tell when the article under consideration is so extremely antiquated.

Greek Orthodox believe that this relic has a notable miraculous quality: Saint Anne, they say, was past menopause when her daughter Mary was conceived—another miracle in that miraculous family—and many believe that kissing Saint Anne’s mummified foot increases the fertility of, or makes more potent, the believing male. That this relic has indeed this miraculous power is confirmed by the literally hundreds of baby mementos that decorate the chapel altar attesting to successful pregnancies: little shoes, photos, baby toys and such.

As I have said, only male pilgrims ever visit these monasteries—usually only Greek males since few outside the Greek Orthodox community know of the existence or have the slightest interest in Agion Oros. But pilgrims and even the most devout resident monks have to be somewhat interested in women–they all had a mother, after all– and Holy Mountain in it’s entirety is dedicated to a woman: Mary, “The Mother of God”. So women, at least women of the imagination, figure in the story of Agion Oros.

Naturally, most of the pilgrims to Saint Anne’s want to see and pay reverence to the famous foot, so every afternoon there is a short ritual wherein a monk holds a showy reliquary box, opens the hinged lid and displays the relic. Then those pilgrims who wish are invited to come forward one by one to kiss this object of veneration.

Since I am not a sanctioned Orthodox believer, I didn’t kiss the foot, but I did attend the interesting ceremony on several afternoons and watched other reverent believers kiss the relic.

One breakfast the monks were even more serious and silent than their usual serious and silent selves, so I asked Father Athanasius if there was something wrong.. He admitted there was.

“Something very bad happened at the foot ceremony yesterday which has shocked us all. One of the pilgrims whose wife can’t get pregnant, pretending to kiss the relic, bit off a fragment and swallowed it in the despairing hope that, like a dose of medicine, it would increase his virility. We will have to stop allowing the pilgrims to kiss the relic if this barbaric behavior does not immediately cease.”

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