People from different cultures and historical periods have given different answers to these questions. Yet one organ has often been held in particularly high esteem: the heart. In the Middle Ages, the heart was regarded as the seat of the soul, of life, and of a person’s personality, a view that could already draw on the teachings of Aristotle. This view of the heart could lead to the practice, especially in Western Europe, of surgically removing hearts from corpses and preserving and burying them separately. In this way, the heart was what remained. Placed in a small lead container known as a “heart vessel”, it could be deposited inside an urn and preserved for long periods. The practice also demonstrated the anatomical knowledge and surgical skills of the experts of the time. Such procedures were not carried out discreetly or hidden from view, but openly depicted in the visual media of the time, as in a thirteenth-century stained-glass window at Freiburg Minster. Nor did people shy away from representing the statues of the dead on their tombs with visible scars from their “heart operations”.

A prominent example of heart burial is Emperor Frederick I (1122–1190), also known as Frederick Barbarossa. After his death in 1190 in the cold waters of what is now the Göksu River near Silifke in southern Turkey, an attempt was initially made to preserve his body in vinegar so that it could be transported onwards. When this failed, his corpse was boiled, dismembered, and buried in several places: in Antakya, Tyre, and Tarsus, where his heart was also taken.

Around 2,000 documented cases of heart burial are known worldwide. Only a small and privileged elite could afford such a practice and, in this way, occasionally sought to transcend time. This included ruling dynasties and aristocratic families in particular. The heart of the English king Richard the Lionheart (1157–1199) could thus still be examined scientifically more than 800 years after his death. Traditions of burying different parts of the body separately and in different places often developed, particularly among ruling dynasties such as the Bavarian Wittelsbachs and the Austro-Spanish Habsburgs. Ecclesiastical dignitaries, too, had their hearts buried separately. The heart of Julius Echter, Prince-Bishop of Würzburg and founder of the University of Würzburg, still lies in the monument dedicated to him in the Neubaukirche, which was rebuilt after the Second World War. In some cases, the heart muscle was preserved so well that it survived for centuries, and was stored in such a way that it can still be viewed today. One example is the heart of Karl August von Hardenberg, which has been stored in the altar of the “Schinkel Church” in Neuhardenberg, near the Oder, since his death in 1822.

Today, burying the heart separately may seem rather odd. Since the first successful heart transplant was performed in Cape Town in 1967, it has become increasingly clear that a person remains largely the same even after receiving another person’s heart. It is now widely known that, at the atomic and cellular level, the human body almost completely renews itself – even the skeleton. A new person? Not exactly. Rather, a person is a kind of cloud of atoms that retains its approximate form while its atomic composition continually changes.

The heart, then, cannot be “what remains”. Nor do the other organs offer much promise in this regard; even freezing the brain is unlikely to be of much use for the foreseeable future. The underlying question persists, and is today particularly prominent in debates among transhumanist and posthumanist thinkers.

But let us stay with the historical perspective for a moment. Another aspect of the question “what remains?” is the cult of relics – loosely translated, the “cult of what is left behind”. In Christianity, for example, since Late Antiquity, various body parts of important “holy” figures have been preserved as relics, including their hearts. These relics soon became associated with beliefs in miraculous powers that, in a sense, could confirm their authenticity.

Research into the historical cult of relics sheds light on the intense religiosity of otherwise often-overlooked ordinary people outside the sphere of complex theological doctrines. It reveals as much about the character of a particular era as it does about its power structures. Access to the relics was channelled and regulated, more or less subtly, through architectural arrangements or social norms. The spread of particular relic cults and their architectural expression were therefore not only religious matters, but political ones as well. Particularly revealing are practices of physical contact: Were relics only to be viewed from a distance, could they be touched, or could one even, as the Late Antique pilgrim from Piacenza reported, drink from the skull of a saint?

These practices and the beliefs surrounding them may seem far removed from us today. Yet similar phenomena can be observed in various fan cultures in different forms. The classic hunt for autographs is just the beginning. Today, the sceptic can verify authenticity without any need for miracles using non-fungible tokens (NFTs). When a Jimi Hendrix guitar fetches a record price at auction, this is presumably because people perceive it as more than just an ordinary guitar. This becomes particularly apparent in objects associated with the Titanic. An otherwise entirely unremarkable wooden plank – the legendary prop that saved Rose but not Jack in James Cameron’s film Titanic – was auctioned for more than $700,000.

Whether one has one’s heart buried separately, venerates heart relics, or has one’s brain frozen, the question of what remains of a person persists.

Text by Philipp Pilhofer
Philipp Pilhofer is a church historian and religious scholar.