A STATUE'S thirst for milk can be blamed on two things - religious hysteria and the
well-known phenomenon of capillary action.
It is the latest in a long history of bizarre religious statue behaviour that is most striking
because the purported miracle - whether milk-sipping, crying or bleeding - is so mundane.
Any spontaneous movement of the milk into the statue is due to the unbalanced molecular
attraction at the boundary between the liquid and the tiny pores in the surface.
If the liquid molecules near the boundary are more strongly attracted to molecules in the statue than to other nearby liquid molecules, the liquid will be drawn into the pores and tiny cracks.
There is a limit to how much fluid that a statue can absorb, without the help of a pump or
other trickery.
Devotees at the Vishwa temple were told the marble statue of Shiva's bull had stopped
accepting milk at 12.29pm; Liverpool and Warrington announced that the statue of
Ganesh - the elephant god of wisdom - which "drank" milk on Thursday, accepted
none yesterday.
James Randi, the world's best known "miracle buster" and debunker of pseudo-science,
said: "We apparently have lost our common sense." The picture brought to mind by the
latest miracle "is an idol bending over a saucer of milk and lapping it up like a cat," he said.
"But when a teaspoon of milk is held up to any portion of the idol - and I don't suppose they
try it on the elbow - it is being absorbed by capillary action."
Why not try ink, said Mr Randi, rather than a liquid with such symbolic significance?
"I predict that a plaster statue of Margaret Thatcher will drink tomato sauce."
One Hindu woman in her 30s was equally unimpressed after seeing a milk-slurping statue
down the road from the Vishwa Temple in Southall. "They are only using a tiny teaspoon
and all of it is going into the tray underneath. I don't believe it at all," she said.
In May, Mr Randi was involved in an investigation of a statue of the Madonna purportedly
crying tears of blood in the Italian town of Civitavecchia. Working with Prof Luigi
Garlaschelli of the University of Pavia, they found that all that was needed to recreate the
phenomenon were a hollow statue of porous alabaster that has been fired to give it a shiny
surface, some human blood and a nail.
"If you scratch the surface of the glaze, that is the only exit for the liquid and it runs out," said Mr Randi.
A genetic test was done on the blood from the Civitavecchia statue and it turned out to be
male. "When we asked the priest about it, he smiled and said: 'Yes of course, it is the blood
of Christ'."
What if it were female blood? The priest replied: "That would be all right too - it would be
her blood in that case."
A few years ago, Prof Garlaschelli also explained the miracle of the blood of St Gennaro,
one of the most venerated relics, in which the blood liquifies from a dark brown solid.
Bad luck is believed to hit Naples and, more recently, its football team, when the miracle
fails to occur.
He showed it was little more than medieval alchemy, having recreated the effect in his
laboratory using chemicals plentiful in clays from Mount Vesuvius.
The congealed blood is a "thixotropic" mixture, a solid that becomes liquid when shaken
or vibrated: during the annual ceremony, the cardinal takes hold of the reliquary containing
the "blood" and gives it a shake.
Perhaps the best known fake is the Turin Shroud. Many believers have argued that the
Christ-like image was burned on to the linen during the Resurrection. But carbon dating
tests demonstrated with 95 per cent certainty that the cloth was a medieval forgery.
