Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Sacred Images gathers eight objects that share only the fact of having been treated as holy pictures or figures, and the group splits cleanly between images still venerated and images the site records as exposed hoaxes.

Three are living Buddhist palladia. The Emerald Buddha, carved from a single block of green stone rather than true emerald, is Thailand's most sacred image, touched only by the King, who changes its robes three times a year. The Phra Bang, a standing bronze alloy Buddha about eighty three centimetres tall, gives Luang Prabang its name and has long been bound up with the legitimacy of Lao rule. Both are securely historical objects whose legendary origins, in ancient India and ancient Ceylon respectively, are separate and more doubtful claims.

Two are Christian images said to bear Christ's face without a painter's hand, the acheiropoieta: the Image of Edessa, tied to the legend of King Abgar, and the Veil of Veronica, enshrined in St Peter's Basilica and exposed only rarely. The Palladium of Troy and Rome is the oldest story in the group, a wooden image of Pallas Athena that Greek tradition says fell from the sky to protect Troy and that Rome claimed Aeneas carried west, attested richly in literature but never recovered archaeologically. The Trundholm Sun Chariot, a Bronze Age bronze horse and gilded disc found in a Danish bog in 1902, is read as a day sun and night sun rather than any single deity's portrait.

The Cardiff Giant and the Crystal Skulls close the group as its debunked pair: a carved gypsum statue exhibited in 1869 as a petrified biblical giant, confessed as a hoax by its own maker, and quartz skulls marketed as pre Columbian relics that laboratory study has shown to be modern work.