Chapter 6 returns to William Thackeray’s Mediterranean travel writing to show how his humor fails to challenge the dominant heritage discourse in Jerusalem. Although Thackeray derides other Mediterranean sites for inauthenticity, he cannot profane Jerusalem, which means he cannot return it to human (and imperial) use, either by word play or physical contact. Anthony Trollope takes up this problem in his novel The Bertrams, in which he reconceives some places, like Alexandria, for modern use. These sites are wiped of their significance to British heritage discourse as ancient lands and rendered available for modernization. Jerusalem, though, proves too sacred, and thus too integral to British cultural heritage, to be colonized in the same way. Some holy sites thus endure as historical relics while others are rewritten as a “middle” East.

This chapter explores transformations in the embodiment of the sacred and the profane through the study of a series of objects that emerged from belief systems of the Native peoples, such as cemis, or Europeans, such as chalices, and which were then resignified during colonial encounters. Surveying a wide range of historical and geographical contexts, including the early stages of European colonization of the islands of the Caribbean and later attempts at the colonization of what is now the US Southwest, this essay explores how the resignification of objects, which transition from sacred to profane depending on the cultural context they inhabit, points to an ongoing questioning of the hierarchical nature of spiritual and religious discourses.