Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Cilice
Summary
A cilice ˈsɪlᵻs, also known as a sackcloth, was originally a garment or undergarment made of coarse cloth or animal hair (a hairshirt) worn close to the skin. It is used by members of various Christian traditions (including the Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, and Scottish Presbyterian churches) as a self-imposed means of repentance and mortification of the flesh; as an instrument of penance, it is often worn during the Christian penitential season of Lent, especially on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and other Fridays of the Lenten season.
Hairshirt cilices were originally made from coarse animal hair, as an imitation of the garment worn by John the Baptist that was made of camel hair, or sackcloth, which throughout the Bible, was worn by people repenting. Cilices were designed to irritate the skin; other features were added to make cilices more uncomfortable, such as thin wires or twigs. In modern Christian religious circles, cilices are simply any device worn for the same purposes, often taking the form of a hairshirt cilice as well as a (spiked metal) chain cilice.
The word cilice derives from the Latin cilicium, a covering made of goat's hair from Cilicia, a Roman province in south-east Asia Minor. The reputed first Scriptural use of this exact term is in the Vulgate (Latin) translation of Psalm 35:13, "Ego autem, cum mihi molesti essent, induebar cilicio." ("But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was sackcloth" in the King James Bible). The term is translated as hair-cloth in the Douay–Rheims Bible, and as sackcloth in the King James Bible and Book of Common Prayer. Sackcloth can also mean burlap, but is often mentioned as a symbol of mourning and was probably a form of hairshirt.
There is some evidence, based on analyses of both clothing represented in art and preserved skin imprint patterns at Çatalhöyük in Turkey, that the usage of the cilice predates written history. This finding has been mirrored at Göbekli Tepe, another Anatolian site, indicating the widespread manufacturing of cilices.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.