Finding the right place to hide a time capsule can be tricky. Stashing a box inside the walls of your childhood home is a little creepy, and sealing your treasured trinkets in something that looks like a bomb could prompt a citywide evacuation and get all your stuff blown up. But a Spanish priest in 1777 had the right idea, and decided to hide a little note about his life in a place almost nobody would think to look—inside Jesus’s butt.
According to the New York Post, art restorers in Spain said they uncovered a centuries-old, rolled-up note while working on an old wooden statue of Christ. Employees at the restoration company Da Vinci Restauro first noticed a small opening in the hollow statue’s bum covered by an old piece of cloth, and when they took a closer look inside, they realized that the statue was home to a secret scroll.
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The handwritten document is basically a time capsule, documenting everyday life in 18th-century Spain. Its author, a priest named Joaquin Minguez, reportedly slipped the note inside a crack in the statue’s ass for safe keeping sometime around 1777, likely expecting it to be pulled from the depths of Christ’s butt and read by some distant, future generation.
Now, hundreds of years later, that’s finally come to pass.
Minguez was a priest at the cathedral of Burgo de Osma in Central Spain, where the Jesus statue was displayed at the time he penned the note. In it, he covers a huge assortment of topics, from the state of Spain at the time to his town’s economics to then-current trends and celebrities to the effects of typhus fever, according to the Sun.
“It is amazing,” a local historian named Efren Arroyo told Da Vinci Restauro, “because it really is unique to find hidden handwritten documents inside such statues.”
Da Vinci Restauro has not yet said what it plans to do with the historic butt note or given any more details about its contents, but it did release a short video of its staff reenacting the note’s discovery, for some reason.
The video shows two art restorers pulling off a section of the Jesus statue’s bum and uncovering the rolled-up paper like some kind of Kinder surprise egg. The clip is strangely scored by music that sounds like a Curb Your Enthusiasm outtake, but if you discover a 300-year-old time capsule inside the butt of Christ, you’re allowed to make any kind of video you want.
Watch it above and dream about what other kinds of ancient treasures lurk inside museum asses around the world.
