(black-and-white photograph of the Shroud of Turin showing distinct burn pattern)

In February, 1989, the respected scientific journal Nature published the results of extensive radiocarbon dating tests conducted on pieces of the Shroud of Turin, and issued the definitive proclamation that the Shroud was a medieval forgery. The tests showed that the manufacture of the Shroud dated from somewhere between 1260-1390, with the probable year being set at 1325.

This result was exactly what the majority of those testing the Shroud had expected to find. How comforting it must have been to achieve exactly the expected result. Science triumphs over superstition yet again.

Lost in the glare of the radiocarbon test results were several nagging questions that have never been resolved in any satisfactory way. Most scientists were willing to dismiss these questions as moot in the face of such a positive radiocarbon result. But even when they were turned out of mind, they remained unanswered.

The most puzzling of these lingering conundrums was the matter of the negative image on the Shroud. If it was faked in or around 1325, why should it be a perfect negative image, when no such thing as a negative image was known about until the invention of the photographic process five centuries later? No one had even realized that the Shroud figure was negative until the first photograph of the image was taken in 1898. And at that time, no one would believe it -- it was over thirty years before a second set of photographs proved that the first man to take pictures of the Shroud had not somehow doctored the images in the darkroom.

Another lingering puzzle was the accurate anatomy of the figure, which is imaged on the Shroud not only from the front but from the back as well (the body was laid upon one half of the long, narrow grave cloth, and the other half was folded over it). European artists in the early 14th century had quite limited skills in portraying body proportions and perspective. This is clear from an examination of the surviving art of the period. They used a rigid style when presenting the human form, and particularly the features of the face. Perspective, as we are familiar with it today, was almost nonexistent in paintings. And because the painters had no firsthand experience with the details of human anatomy, the shape and proportions of the human body were invariably distorted.

Another question arises from the numerous bloodstains on both the front and back of the figure on the Shroud. The stains are real blood -- more than this, they are human blood. Would a medieval forger bother to use human blood to fake his image, when it would have been completely impossible in the 14th century to distinguish animal blood from human blood?

The wounds on the figure carry their own challenge to debunkers of the Shroud. They are completely in keeping with what we might expect to see on the body of a man crucified during Roman times -- yet they are horrifyingly extreme. It might be expected that a medieval forger would stylize the wounds, particularly the wounds to the face, in order to make his subject more sympathetic. The face of the Shroud figure is swollen and disfigured by what was evidently a severe beating. The nose has been broken. It is not a handsome face, even without this disfigurement. It is very obviously a Jewish, or at least a Middle-Eastern, face, not that of a European, as we might expect in a forgery.

The body is covered with small contusions, both back and front, that seem to have originated from the application of a kind of scourge to living human flesh. Such a whip consisted of a short, heavy handle with two or more leather lashes, each terminating in a blunt metal weight that was knotted to the end of the lash. When applied, these metal weights on the tips of the lashes bruised and broke the surface of the skin. It is possible to get a very clear impression from the Shroud as to their exact shape -- they resembled small dumbbells about one and one-half inches in length.

The figure on the Shroud exhibits cuts made by a crown of thorns pressed forcefully down over the head, so that the blood flowed freely, and also a wound in the right side just under the nipple of the kind that might be made by the point of a spear thrust into the body from a low angle (the wound appears to be on the figure's left side in the photograph above, but remember that the image on the Shroud, if genuine, is a reflected image). We would expect these injuries to appear in a medieval forgery --indeed, we could hardly expect them to be absent. But what is not expected is the placement of the crucifixion wounds on the wrists of the figure rather than on the palms of the hands. For many centuries in Christian art it has been customary to show Jesus suspended from the beam of the cross by nails driven through the center of his palms. This image is omnipresent. In the Philippines, when Christian fanatics have themselves crucified to demonstrate the strength of their faith, they are pierced by nails through their palms.

Experiments with corpses have demonstrated that nails through the palms will not support the weight of a human body -- the flesh of the hand tears. However, nails driven through the wrists do support the weight. The Romans would have known what works and what does not work when crucifying human beings. This knowledge was forgotten in Christian times because crucifixion came to be looked upon as a kind of sacrilege. We would expect to see nails through the palms in a medieval forgery; we would expect to see nails through the wrists in a genuine relic of a crucifixion.

Fairly recently in the history of the Shroud a new riddle has come up. Modern computer-imaging techniques have revealed that the image on the Shroud is a nearly perfect three-dimension representation of a human face and body. This three-dimensional effect would result if the image were somehow imprinted on a cloth wrapped close to the skin, so that it took the contours of the body. It does not result when the computer imaging technique is applied to any flat painting, no matter how perfect its perspective.

Then there is the whole puzzle as to how the image was transferred to the linen fabric of the Shroud. It is a very pale yellow color, so pale that it disappears entirely when viewed from touching distance, but becomes evident when looked at from further away. Would a medieval forger have made it so pale that it is difficult to see? Tests have shown that it is not composed of paint, nor of any other applied substance that can be determined or explained. It appears to have been flash-burned into the fibers of the shroud, as though by a sudden burst of extremely intense light.

Various scientists and professional stage magicians and artists have come up with explanations as to how the image might be created. I have studied these explanations with interest. In my opinion, none of them is credible. They fail to even produce a good simulation of the Shroud image, and a simulation, even a good one, would be no proof one way or the other. Why would a medieval forger have failed to use some form of pigment to create an image? If it was forged, it was undoubtedly forged by an artist, and any medieval artist would have relied on the tools and materials with which he was most expert.

Another problem with the Shroud as a 14th century fake is its recorded history, which seems to go back to the Byzantine Empire. In 544 the Persians reportedly found a cloth bearing the image of a Christ-like face above a gate while laying siege to the city of Edessa. The image of the face was a power object for the residents of the city, and had probably been placed above the gate to repel the invaders with it magical authority.

This cloth with its male portrait came to be known as the mandelion, a word that means "kerchief." The record of its existence extends over centuries. It vanished from history in the 13th century, during which it had been placed on public display in Constantinople. This is around the same time that the first mentions of the Shroud surface.

An ingenious theory has been put forward to account for how a kerchief can be mistaken for a burial shroud. The view of these theorists is that the Shroud was repeatedly folded until it was small in size and exposed only the face of the image, which was set within a circular frame. In this way the same linen cloth could have been both mandelion and shroud. And, indeed, it has been the traditional practice to store the Shroud folded and refolded in a small silver-sheathed wooden box. We would expect this form of folded storage purely for practical reasons, since the Shroud is more than twice the height of a man. It would not be surprising if the owners of the Shroud during the Dark Ages displayed the most recognizable, the most visually powerful, and most conveniently presentable, aspect of its image, its face, at the expense of the more obscure torso and limbs. The negative image as a whole is very difficult to distinguish at some distances and in some lighting conditions, but because of the inherent nature of human perception, facial features are easy to recognize as facial features, even when poorly presented.

These are only some of the mysteries surrounding the Shroud that the radiocarbon tests have not answered, or even addressed. I am not in a position to dispute the results of the test -- I simply do not know enough about radiocarbon dating or about the way the tests were conducted. The suggestion has been raised that the tests were falsified by substituting medieval test samples for the Shroud samples. This strikes me as highly unlikely. I think that the scientists who ran the tests acted in good faith, and performed the tests to the best of their abilities. I also believe that they began the tests with the firm conviction that they were dealing with a medieval forgery, and got exactly the result they confidently expected. To go into a scientific testing procedure with a predetermined expectation of the result is always dangerous, and liable to introduce errors.

Above, I have mentioned some of the factual arguments that contradict the radiocarbon dating of the Shroud. But I want to close this essay with a more subjective observation. It is simply not plausible to me that the image on the Shroud is a deliberate forgery by a medieval artist. The image is too convincingly lifelike, and too surprisingly unexpected and unconventional. The wounds are too brutally honest and accurate. It is my personal conviction that the Shroud is not an artistic forgery.

It does not necessarily follow that the image on the Shroud is the image of Jesus. It is the image of a real man, a man who has actually been crucified -- of that I have no serious doubt. The bloodstains on it are this man's blood. But there is no way to know when the image was formed, or which man's corpse formed it, or indeed how the image was generated.

I am inclined to doubt the intense flash of light theory as the cause of the image. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that the image was generated by gases given off by the corpse over a period of time, perhaps over many years. True, Egyptian mummies are wrapped in linen, and the wrappings of no mummy have ever displayed such a detailed, precise image. But it should be considered that Egyptian mummies were embalmed with spices and extensively prepared before being wrapped. The man in the Shroud appears to have been wrapped immediately after being taken down from the cross, and not to have been prepared in any way, other than to force his stiffened arms down so that his hands were folded over his groin.

In my opinion, the Shroud of Turin is a genuine relic of an ancient crucifixion. It is not a fake in the usual sense. If it was deliberately created, this was done by torturing and then crucifying a man, and wrapping his corpse in the Shroud. This seems unlikely, since those committing such a crime would have no reason to expect the corpse to generate an image on the inner surface of the cloth, unless they coated the entire body with some form of pigment, and no such pigment has been discovered on the Shroud.

As a scholar and practitioner of magic, I find the burn marks that stain the cloth on either side of the figure's shoulders fascinating. They are seldom mentioned by scientists or historians who examine the Shroud, since any remarks about them would be looked upon as unscientific or superstitious. Since I have no scientific reputation to protect, I can say that they resemble two screaming faces. Their placement at the shoulders of the figure suggests that they are the faces of guardian angels, their extreme distress over the fire that seems about to destroy the Shroud captured in some unknown way, even as the image of the figure itself was mysteriously captured and preserved.

(curious burn marks created by the 1532 fire at Sainte Chapelle in Chambéry, France)

This may seem a silly speculation to many readers, but from an occult perspective it is not an unreasonable hypothesis. The Shroud has been the focus of the most intense religious veneration from millions of devout believers over many centuries. It would not be at all surprising that this energy has created spiritual beings associated with the Shroud that are interested in its preservation. As an aside, I might observe at this point that it would be unwise for anyone to deliberately seek to vandalize or destroy the Shroud, regardless of whether it is genuine or a forgery. This is likely to result in misfortune for those committing such a crime.

Is the Shroud of Turin genuine? In my considered opinion -- and I have considered this matter at length -- it is indeed the genuine grave cloth of a crucified man. Is it the death shroud of Jesus Christ? There is no way to identify the man whose body generated the Shroud image -- however, I would not rule out this possibility.