The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Paranoid Style Podcast
The Vatican Secret Archives
This week at The Paranoid Style Podcast we're throwing a Hail Mary pass as we attempt to infiltrate the private, separate, distinguished… Oh! Let's just say it SECRET Vatican Archives. Let's find out what treasures or terrors are hidden away in the miles of mysterious storage underneath Vatican City. From ye ol' medieval nudie mags to the Third Secret of Fatima. From the Ark of the Covenant to the skulls of long, dead aliens. From the Chronovisor to well… probably a few copies of Dan Brown's "Angels and Demons". We at the Paranoid Style like our mysteries like we like our baked potatoes… with some spooky Ar-chives on top!
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Music/SoundEffects used in this episode is from:
Jesus Christ Superstar Movie Clips "Heaven on Their Minds"
Vatican City Anthem
Donald Rumsfeld Quote - National Constitution Center
RPDR Shade Rattle
X-Files Theme
Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/
ARK: [00:00:00] Hey sister
CCK: Hey sister And also with you and Hey listeners Welcome to the paranoid style podcast where we check out conspiracies referenced strange mysteries and periodically delve into stories of high strangeness Those library puns Can't be a good sign
I'm Christine And in high school I used to make tiny reproductions of Dutch Flemish paintings of beheadings of John the Baptist for fun.
ARK: I [00:00:30] remember those paintings and they were actually pretty good
First of all
CCK: because I had a very detailed process for copying them from this big book of paintings that we had it involved like a piece of carbon paper because I wanted to put the paintings on this really thick water color paper So it couldn't just trace directly from the book So I had to use a piece of tracing [00:01:00] paper over the book then a piece of carbon paper over the water color paper
ARK: Okay Did you have alright I have so many questions with this going to be part of a larger project or it was just more like a study
CCK: I don't know if you remember sister but occasionally I would just get fixated on something for no good reason And I think that [00:01:30] that was part of it And the other part was I also seem to remember turning them in for religion class to get extra credit So I think it was a
ARK: well my name's Amanda and I'm not with her Although I mean I suppose I had my own sort of weird religiosity obsessions Jesus
Christ
superstar
CCK: A production of Jesus Christ superstar [00:02:00] is where I first learned that every cast member Have a production really does count because we went to go see a production and there was a notice out front that a parcel number three I don't even think that they gave him a name Cause he was just one of the
ARK: I swear it was like a puzzle number two Well
he wasn't even that high up
on the list of a boss
CCK: A possible number 12 is being played by someone else
ARK: [00:02:30] understudy
CCK: And we were both like
does it matter Would anyone
ARK: even bother telling us who cares no one's going to be looking at a parcel number 12
wrong
CCK: we were so wrong because the possum number 12 was dancing exactly the opposite way of everyone else in the
ARK: God love him He's stuck out like us soar Thumb his costume was a little
Like
CCK: Ill-fitting
ARK: His
wardrobe was a little off from everybody Else's like
they were
Oh we can't [00:03:00] find him pants Can't find pants to fit this guy So just let him wear his own pants His dancing was out of saying but man he was loving
CCK: He seemed to be really happy to be
ARK: He was very
CCK: and that went a long way
ARK: It really did
CCK: This week, we’re cataloging one of the most mysterious collections of documents and artifacts in the world. Amanda, tell me what you know about the Vatican's Secret Ar-chives.
ARK: Well, first of all, it's archives
CCK: I know, ar-chives just makes me giggle and also want a baked potato.
ARK: and secondly, let's do a little run down on the Vatican itself first.
CCK: I think it's time for a Vatican round-up!
ARK: Vatican City is the smallest country in the world at about 1/7th the size of Central Park and with fewer than 1000 permanent residents. Vatican City, more commonly known as The Vatican is within the borders of the city of Rome in Italy, but has its own police force and is governed as an absolute monarchy, with the Pope as its leader as well as leader of the entire Catholic Church and it's estimated 1.2 billion followers.
CCK: Which is about 16% of the entire world's population.
ARK: The Vatican mints its own euros, prints its own stamps, issues passports and license plates, operates media outlets and has its own flag and anthem.
<Clip of O Felix Roma>
ARK: The Vatican became an independent city-state as a result of the Lateran Pacts which Mussolini, the fascist dictator of Italy at the time, signed to make official in 1929.
CCK: The Vatican was built over a marshy area that was once known as Ager Vaticanus, or the Vatican Field. Vatican City also includes Vatican Hill, one of Rome's Seven Hills. Prior to the fall of the Roman empire, the Ager Vaticanus was the site of the circus of Nero, also sometimes called the Circus of Caligula.
ARK: Oh, circus! Fun!
CCK: The Roman circus was a large open area and was the site of organized Roman executions of Christians beginning in 65AD.
ARK: Oh…much less fun.
CCK: At one end of the circus, there was a large necropolis which was rumored to contain the tomb of St. Peter, an apostle and the first Bishop of Rome, AKA Pope of the Catholic Church who was crucified upside down in 67AD in the circus. It was over this necropolis that St. Peter's Basilica was constructed. Some of the Vatican's other architectural points of interest include St. Peter's square and the Apostolic Palace, which includes the Pope's personal quarters, the Vatican Library, Vatican Museums and the Sistine Chapel.
ARK: And the Vatican Secret Archives, though the term “secret” was a misunderstanding of the Latin name for the archives. The Official name until 2019 was, Archivum Secretum Vaticanumit, and Secretum was meant to indicate “private”, "separate", "distinguished" or "reserved" not “secret”.
CCK: Me thinks the lady doth protest too much.
ARK: In 2019, the name was changed to Archivum Apostolicum Vaticanum or the Vatican's Apostolic Archives by Pope Francis. The Archives are not part of the Vatican Library, but are located in an adjacent building which is part of the Belvedere Palace complex. The highest building in the Archives is the "Tower of the Winds" which contains a sundial where astronomers worked out the Gregorian Calendar in 1582.
CCK: The Vatican library is one of the world’s oldest libraries. It was officially established in the 15th century by Pope Nicholas the 5th though all previous popes had collected documents and books, some of the most precious of which were housed in the Castel Sant'Angelo just prior to the creation of the library. The Castel Sant'Angelo is a squatty fortress that was originally the Mausoleum of Hadrian, the emperor of Rome from 117 to 138 AD. Sant'Angelo is connected to the Vatican's Apostolic palace by a secret passage that runs above the streets along the Roman wall and was twice used to protect popes from invading forces.
ARK: In the mid 16th century Pope sixtus the 5th commissioned the building in which the library resides today. Access to the Vatican library is restricted to university professors, PhD students and professional researchers who must be able to demonstrate that the material they wish to review is not available elsewhere. But there is also a Vatican Library website, and since 2016, efforts have been made to digitize and upload many documents onto the website where anyone can view them.
CCK: If reading handwritten illuminated manuscripts in Latin is your thing, you are in for a treat!
ARK: The Vatican library also known as the VAT is located in a three story building designed by architect, Domenico Fontana, who also erected the 327 ton obelisk located in the middle of St. Peter's square. That obelisk was brought to Rome from Egypt in 37AD by none other than Caligula himself, which makes it a sort of strange choice for a place of honor in the center of Vatican City. It is made of red granite and was carved from a single slab in Heliopolis, Egypt, in 1835 BC as a tribute to the sun god. The obelisk was transported to Rome in a specially built boat which was allegedly filled with dried lentils to act as cushioning for the monument. After it was delivered to Rome, the ship was sunk to act as the
base for the left pier of Claudius' harbor, at the mouth of the Tiber.
CCK: Should we be an obelisk podcast?
ARK: Maybe, because this is one interesting obelisk. Caligula placed it originally in the middle of the Circus area and it was topped with a bronze globe said to contain the ashes of Julius Caesar. However, when Domenico Fontana moved it 800 feet to the center of St. Peter's square with the help of 900 men using 140 horses and 44 winches, the globe was removed and found to be empty. It was replaced with a bronze emblem of Pope Sixtus containing a relic of the cross on which Jesus was crucified.
CCK: I feel like the allegedly goes without saying here. As the 16th-century Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote, "So they say of the cross of Our Lord, which is shown publicly and privately in so many places, that, if all the fragments were collected together, they would appear to form a fair cargo for a merchant ship."
ARK: Don’t quit your day job Erasmus. The last thing I will say about that obelisk though is it is one of the few without any Heiroglyphics etched into it. The base on which it now stands has inscriptions on the north and south sides memorializing the moving of the obelisk to its current location and the inscriptions on the east and west side of the base are exorcist formulas.
CCK: Say what now?
ARK: You heard me…The east side reads: Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat: ab omni malo plemem suam defendat.
CCK: Christ conquers, He reigns, He commands; may He defend His people from all evil.
ARK: And the west side is inscribed with the Motto of St. Anthony, a prayer St. Anthony is said to have given to a woman to ward off the temptations of the devil:
CCK: Ecce Crucem Domini! Fugite partes adversae! Vicit Leo de tribu Juda.
ARK: Behold the Cross of the Lord! Be gone all evil powers! The Lion of the tribe of Judah conquers.
CCK: I'm officially creeped out.
ARK: Prepare yourself to be creeped out-er if we ever make it into the archives.
CCK: Color me intrigued, Let's finish up with this library stuff. The basement of the Vatican library contains a large collection of ancient papyrus and also houses 75,000 codices as well as 1.1 million printed books, 8500 incunabula and it has over 26 miles or 42 kilometers of shelving.
ARK: A codex is a book comprised of handwritten manuscripts usually on vellum or papyrus. An incunabula
CCK: doo doo doo doo doo
ARK: Is an early example of printing in book, pamphlet or broadside form published prior to the year 1500.
CCK: Documents and artifacts in the archives were separated out from the Library collection in the 17th century by order of Pope Paul the 5th. The archives contains all documents generated by the Popes, including letters and journals as well as Vatican state documents like account books, state papers and acts promulgated by the Holy See, also known as the Pope and the Roman Curia, the central government of the Catholic Church.
ARK: Access to the Archives was limited to only the Holy See until the late 1800's, when Pope Leo the 8th opened up the archives to a limited number of outside researchers. Currently this access is restricted to 60 scholars a day and requests for access must include proof of credentials, recommendation letters and information about specific titles being requested which is difficult because there does not exist a public index for the information in the archives. Visitors are accompanied by priests and guards while in the archive and are not allowed to bring pens, cameras or phones and can only view up to 5 documents a day. The archives have 53 miles or about 85 kilometers of shelving, so it is about twice as big as the library.
CCK: What is on all those shelves?
ARK: Good question. To answer it, let's turn to Donald Rumsfeld
CCK: Fugite partes adversae!
ARK: Donald Rumsfeld has nothing to do with the Vatican as far as I know, but he was a former American Secretary of Defense under Gerald Ford and George W. Bush and the person who engineered a way to push aspartame through for FDA approval in 1981 in spite of a previous FDA ban on the sweetener related to findings that it "might induce brain tumors." For our purposes though, I am interested in Rumsfeld's quote from 2002 regarding Iraq's alleged possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction:
<Rumsfeld Recording?>“[A]s we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
CCK: Now that is some authentic American jibberish! So do you speak Rumsfeld, what does it mean? Do we know any of what's in the Vatican Archives for sure?
ARK: It's a mixed bag. Let's start with the known knowns. These are documents that have been confirmed to be a part of the Vatican Archives by researchers who have been allowed to study them, or by the admission of the church itself. These are historically interesting and mostly a snooze for creep and conspiracy factor, but we'll give a quick synopsis of some of the biggies.
CCK: The Inter caetera from 1493. This was a papal bull, otherwise known as a public decree, by Pope Alexander the 6th which split the New World between Spain and Portugal.
ARK: That was nice of him! From the early 1500's, there's a letter from Michelangelo which records his frustration that Vatican guards detailed to the in-process Sistine Chapel had not been paid for 3 months and were threatening to walk off the job. This letter contains Michelangelo's signature.
CCK: From 1520 and 1521, the documents that started the Protestant Reformation, Pope Leo the 10ths decrees condemning and then excommunicating Martin Luther for his Ninety-five theses of 1517 and other writings in which he disputed the Catholic Church's use of indulgences and the path to salvation. Pope Leo the 10ths 1520 decree called Luther a “wild boar in the forest” whose teachings were “destructive, pernicious, scandalous, and seductive to pious minds.” Leo wanted everyone to view Luther's teachings as “utterly condemned, reprobated, and rejected” by the church. In addition, he stated that every one of Luther’s books and pamphlets were to be “burned publicly and solemnly in the presence of the clerics and the people,” as a testimony that Luther was “a true heretic.” He forbade Luther to write, teach or preach.
ARK: Luther didn't obey and in 1521, he was excommunicated and ordered to appear before the Diet of Worms
CCK: In 1521, diet of worms sounds like the menu at all the fanciest restaurants of the day.
ARK: The Diet of Worms was a secular assembly in the town of Worms, in what is now Germany. Pope Leo left it to the non-church authorities to make sure Luther's writings got disposed of and they issued the Edict of Worms which declared Luther a heretic, but this was a futile effort and the Protestant church was formed despite all of all the bulls, edicts and worms.
CCK: Cut to 1530 and the Vatican received a letter, a three foot wide letter, bearing 81 wax seals which was sent from English Noblemen, clergymen and the Archbishop of Canterbury asking Pope Clement the 7th to allow the English King, Henry the 8th to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, allowing him to marry Anne Boleyn in the eyes of the Catholic Church.
ARK: Pope Clement, said, nope, triggering the English Reformation and the creation of the Anglican church.
CCK: Things also didn't go so great for Anne Boleyn. There is a story about this letter that it went missing in the archives and was rediscovered in 1926 under a chair.
ARK: Great filing system, fellas!
CCK: One of the happier documents in the archives is a message written on tree bark from 1887 which was sent from the Ojibwe tribe in Ontario Canada to Pope Leo the 13th. It is dated, "Where this is much grass, in the month of flowers" and calls the pope "the Great Master of Prayer."
ARK: Other known documents include records of both Galileo's trial for the heresy of science and the trial of the knights templar as well as a plea from Mary Queen of Scots to help her avoid execution after being sentenced to death by her cousin, Queen Elizabeth the 1st. Her request went unanswered and she was executed in 1587. There are also recently unsealed documents belonging to Pope Pius the 12th which confirm rumors that he was aware of the murder of Jewish people by the Nazis as early as 1942 and yet failed to condemn Hitler and the Nazis. The Pius documents were released in 2020 and full examination of them was hampered by COVID lockdowns but research has begun again on the 200,000 boxes and over two million documents related to Pius and the church at the time of WWII.
CCK: Records for all popes exist in the archives and they are generally unsealed once the document is 75 years old. Pius's documents were unsealed early, with a statement from Pope Francis that "the church isn't afraid of history."
ARK: Be afraid, be very afraid.
CCK: Thanks to America's sweetheart, Dan Brown, more is known about the layout and contents of the Vatican Archives. After the publication of his book, "Angels and Demons" which told the story of Illuminati brands and clerics wielding anti-matter bombs, public interest in the archives mushroomed and journalist were allowed to tour the archive and take pictures in 2010. In 2012 there was a public exhibition of some documents to celebrate the Archives 400th birthday.
ARK: So moving on to the Known Unknowns. There are documents that are either known for sure to exist in the archive but which are not unsealed or at least one which has been unsealed but is rumored to be a fake.
CCK: Those sealed documents include all church records related to abuse scandals that have been reported within the last 50 years throughout the United States and elsewhere. But the unsealed document that is rumored to have been a fake concerns the Third Secret of Fatima.
ARK: On Sunday, May 13, 1917, three children, ten year old Lucia Santos and her younger cousins, Jacinta and Francisco Marto were tending sheep in the Cova da Iria, an area of Fatima, Portugal which is a small village about 70 miles north of Lisbon. The children saw a bright flash in the sky, like lightning, though it was a clear day. When they looked up, Lucia described “A lady, clothed in white, brighter than the sun, radiating a light more clear and intense than a crystal cup filled with sparkling water lit by burning sunlight.”
CCK: The Lady told them not to be afraid and said she came from heaven. When Lucia asked what she wanted, she replied, “I have come to ask you to come here for six months on the 13th day of the month at this same hour. Later, I shall say who I am and what I desire. And I shall return here yet a seventh time.”
ARK: Lucia then asked if they were all going to heaven and the lady said that Lucia and Jacinta would go to heaven, but Francisco would need to say many rosaries first.
<RPDR Shade rattle>
ARK: The apparition told the children to say the rosary every day to obtain peace for the world and end WWI.
CCK: The children reported their story to their families and were met with mixed reactions, though Jacinta and Francisco's parents were more accepting. News spread of their vision and on June 13, they returned to the Cova da Iria with around 50 villagers. Once again they were visited by the virgin, who told them to keep praying the rosary and told Lucia that she should learn how to read. When Lucia asked if the lady could take them to heaven with her, she replied that Jacinta and Francisco would be there soon, but Lucia would live a long life and needed to spread her message.
ARK: Good God woman! Everyone who's going to live to spread my message step forward. No, not you Jacinta and Francisco, also Francisco, keep working on that rosary.
CCK: There were 5 more appearances by the virgin as promised but on the third visit on July 13, 1917, the lady told the children three secrets.
ARK: Francisco and Jacinta both died from the Spanish flu in 1919 and 1920 respectively, but Lucia joined the church and became Sister Mary. She lived to be 98 years old and in 1941 she wrote the third volume of her memoirs about the Fatima visitations. In this volume, she revealed two of the secrets that had been given to her by the lady, but said the third could not be released until 1960.
CCK: Secret # 1 was a vision of souls in hell. Secret #2 was a recommendation for devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary as a way to save souls and ensure world peace. The lady also called for a conversion and consecration of Russia to the Immaculate heart. There was also a prediction that WWI would end and another great war would begin, after a "great sign". On January 25, 1938, an aurora borealis appeared over the northern hemisphere, and was visible in North Africa, Bermuda and California. Lucia took this to be the predicted "great sign" and a little more than a month later Hitler seized Austria and eight months after that invaded Czechoslovakia.
ARK: The third secret that Lucia stated should not be revealed until 1960 was turned over to the church in a letter from Lucia and secured in the Vatican Archives. In 1960, the Vatican published an official press release stating that it was "most probable the Secret would remain, forever, under absolute seal."
CCK: Definitely the move to make sure that people don't think you're hiding anything in those “private”, "separate", "distinguished" and "reserved" archives.
ARK: Then, surprisingly, on May 14, 2000, Pope John Paul the 2nd okayed the release of the third secret 19 years after the anniversary of an assassination attempt on his life that occurred on May 13, 1981 on the 64th anniversary of the first visitation of the Lady of Fatima.
CCK: OR DID HE?
ARK: Or did he? Cardinal Angelo Sodano, the Vatican Secretary of State in 2000 explained that part of the prophecy foretold an assassination attempt on a pope: The "bishop clothed in white," who is the pope, "makes his way with great effort toward the cross amid the corpses of those who were martyred," "He too falls to the ground, apparently dead, under a burst of gunfire." The letter from Lucia was released, but after the original statement in 1960 that it would never be unsealed, the text was met with skepticism, even from some within the church who felt that part of the prophecy had been omitted.
CCK: Speculation about that omission is that it concerns details about an apocalypse or possibly the demise of the church.
ARK: And now we have fully arrived at the unknown unknowns, which in this case, consist of speculations about what might be in the archives, and there are some doozies.
CCK: We begin with artifacts. Photos of the archives do sort of look like the scene at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark where the Ark gets put into a warehouse with thousands of other mysterious objects in boxes.
ARK: Unsurprisingly, many people think the Ark of the Covenant resides in the archives. The ark is described as a pure gold-covered wooden chest with an elaborate lid called the Mercy seat. The Book of Exodus says it contains the two stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. People also believe that the true cross, the crown of thorns, Jesus' foreskin, the holy grail and Noah's Ark are hidden in the archives.
CCK: Good luck dewy decimal-ing foreskin.
ARK: When Pope Pius the 11th died in 1939, he asked to be buried in the grottoes underneath St. Peter's basilica. Dozens of popes had been buried there, so additional excavations were needed to make room and pieces of bone were discovered in a funerary monument with a casket and an engraving in Greek that read "Petros eni", or "Peter is here." Those nine bone fragments were displayed in a jewel box inside a bronze case in 2013 at a mass held in St. Peter's Square by Pope Francis. No pope has definitively stated that they are the bones of Peter, but they also trotted them out for mass, so it's sort of implied that they're not just some rando's bones.
CCK: Multiple Vatican jesuits and archeologists have come out strongly against the odds of those being the bones of Peter, considering the huge number of people murdered by the Romans under Caligula and Nero and buried in the Necropolis, but any efforts to make some genuine scientific study of the bones have been denied, partly because of a 1000 year old curse that threatens anyone who disturbs the peace of Peter's tomb with the worst possible misfortune!
ARK: But do they come with a free frogurt?
CCK: Yes, but the frogurt is also cursed!
ARK: Next up, are the archives home to a real live dead alien body? Or several that were unearthed during excavation under the vatican library in 1998 as claimed by the program, "Unsealed: Alien Files" from the Sci-Fi channel. There are rumors that the Vatican found elongated skulls with tiny faces and that they are hiding them with in the archive.
CCK: More plausible might be the claim that the archives contain numerous accounts and artworks depicting alien encounters throughout history. You might remember in our Alien Visitation episode that all the way back in 74 BCE, Plutarch, a Platonist philosopher wrote about a battle between the Roman army and an army from the Kingdom of Pontus, that was suddenly interrupted when quote: “the sky burst asunder, and a huge, flame-like body was seen to fall between the two armies. In shape, it was most like a wine-jar, and in colour, like molten silver."
ARK: The controversial Tulli Papyrus from 1440 BC described "firey disks" floating over the skies of Egypt. And in Nuremberg in 1561 a newspaper article complete with illustration of the event reported that residents had seen hundreds of spheres and cylinders engaged in an ariel battle above the city which was only stopped by the appearance of a massive black, triangular craft. Perhaps this was just a case of ye old swamp gas, but doubtless other reports or depictions of ufo sightings might exist in the millions of documents located in the archives.
CCK: One thing we know for sure are located in the archives are books, so is it such a stretch to believe that this might include a very evil book, called "The Grand Grimoire" also known as "The Red Dragon"?
ARK: Is that by the Silence of the Lambs guy?
CCK: Different Red Dragon. The Grand Grimoire was allegedly written in the 16th century by a man named Honorius of Thebes, who claimed to be possessed by the devil but other accounts say the book is actually from the 17 or 18 hundreds and was authored by someone named Antonio Venitiana del Rabina who supposedly gathered the information from original writings of King Solomon.
ARK: A Grimoire is a book of magic spells and invocations. The Grand Grimoire has two parts. The first part details how to summon a demon and the tools needed to make them do your bidding. The second part contains instructions for making a pact with a demon and getting them to do your bidding without external tools, but with a higher risk of personal danger. It also details spells for winning the lottery
CCK: Adding on my to do list, find Grand Grimoire and figure out how to win the lottery
ARK: The book also details steps for talking to spirits, being loved by a girl and making oneself invisible. But if you'd rather cut out the book work, Father Gabriel Amforth, the former Chief Exorcist at the Vatican before his death in 2016, who performed tens of thousands of exorcisms was quoted as saying that the devil resides within the vatican. Now possibly he was being philosophical, but this is also the man who said, “Yoga is the Devil's work. You think you are doing it for stretching your mind and body but it leads to Hinduism.” and 'My advice to young people would be to watch out for nightclubs because the path is always the same: alcohol, sex, drugs and Satanic sects.'
CCK: Dang Amforth…what kind of nightclubs were you attending? And also, I'll have what she's having.
ARK: We could probably spend several episodes recounting all the various guesses as to what may be hidden in the depths of the archives, a vast collection of ancient porn, proof or disproof of the existence of Christ, the real scoop on the Illuminati, but we'll wrap up with a discussion of an object believed to allow one to virtually experience the past, The Chronovisor.
CCK: I think it's called Meta now.
ARK: The Chronovisor was described by a French Catholic priest named, Father François Brune in his 2002 book "Le Nouveau Mystère du Vatican".
CCK: Brune stated that the Chronovisor had been created with funding from the Vatican in the 1950's and resembled a pair of glasses that could be worn and which was engineered to process electromagnetic radiation leftover from past events and turn them into visual images and audio. Father Brune claimed to have witnessed historical events such as the crucifixion of Christ and a performance of the lost tragedy Thyestes.
ARK: However, concerns soon arose that the item was too powerful for humans to wield and it was squirreled away in the archives never to be seen again.
CCK: Unless someone finds it lying around under a chair someday.
ARK: Or probably the aliens are using it to watch reality television from the past.
CCK: Good times.