Grigori Rasputin’s dick is on display at the Museum of Erotics in Saint Petersburg. Housed in a jar of formaldehyde, the member, which the museum’s owner claims he obtained from a French antiquarian, is quite sizable. Actually, it’s enormous for a human penis: Wide and meaty, it measures about a foot long. According to the museum, just gazing on the preserved member can cure a range of problems, everything from infertility to a humdrum sex life. But the specimen isn’t a human penis. It more than likely came from a horse.

It wouldn’t be the first time something inhuman was passed off as Rasputin’s dick. An earlier version circulated after Rasputin’s 1916 murder, legendary for being long and difficult: an initial failed poisoning, followed by multiple gunshots, a beating, and finally a drowning. Legend has it that in the midst of the horror show the man in charge of the grisly plot, Prince Felix Yusupov, somehow managed to castrate the mad mystic. Rasputin’s penis was supposedly scurried out of the country and ended up in the hands of Russian émigrés in Paris. There, his dick became a kind of religious relic of their vanished homeland, a potent piece of a vanished social order.

According to Rasputin biographer Patte Barham, the émigrés treated it as quasi-sacred, keeping it in a makeshift reliquary and venerating it. The powerful appendage of the dead mystic had strength or reassurance to offer the beleaguered community. By the 1970s, Barham reported that Rasputin’s dick looked like “a blackened, overripe banana, about a foot long, and resting on a velvet cloth.” When Rasputin’s daughter Maria discovered that others were in possession of the only remaining earthly piece of her father, she successfully demanded the member be returned to its rightful heir. It stayed with her until her death in 1977, after which it was confirmed that the relic was actually a sea cucumber.

Horse or sea cucumber, the fantasy of Rasputin’s mystically imbued potency was real enough. Relics are proven false over and over again, yet pilgrims still seek them out, yearning for the blessings the shriveled body parts of long-dead saints can bestow. Western Christianity has long fancied itself free from sex, looking down on “pagan” traditions where faith and sexuality intersect, but in fact penis worshiping has a rather robust tradition in Europe. Rasputin’s dick was by no means the first venerated member in Europe. It drew its power from already existing practices of venerating the body of Christ, whose foreskin was a much sought-after relic during the early modern era.

The Holy Prepuce, as it was known, was housed in churches across the continent, and figured in medieval liturgical texts. As the only remaining scrap of God on earth, it brought together the patriarchal powers of the church and the state in ritual obeisance. The foreskin aroused mystical visions and devotional practices throughout the history of the Catholic Church. But its near-total disappearance at the dawn of the modern era indicates that the two institutions felt compelled to hide their phallic object when faced with the end of their absolute reign.

According to the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, Christ’s circumcision was performed in a cave on the eighth day, in accordance with Old Testament Law. Jesus’s brith milah served a two-fold purpose: first to maintain the genealogical covenant commanded by God of Abraham and his descendants; secondly to prove that, in fact, God had been rendered in human flesh. The anonymous author(s) of the Gospel of Thomas had little to say about the actual bris. They described instead an “old Hebrew woman” who took the discarded holy foreskin “and preserved it in an alabaster-box of oil spikenard.” The old woman then passed it to her son “a druggist, to whom she said, ‘Take heed thou sell not this alabaster box of spikenard-ointment, although thou shouldst be offered three hundred pence for it.’”