VENERATION VENDING

I LEARNED RECENTLY of an ancient coin-operated holy-water dispensing machine. Geez—or is that Zeus?—this calls for more research.

A coin-operated holy-water dispensing machine. Image from Smith College Museum of Art.

Heron aka Hero of Alexandria. Smith College’s Kristy Beauchesne, ’97, Niki Bennett, ’00, and Vanessa King, ’99, wrote, “Designed by the Greek inventor Heron, this coin-operated holy water dispenser was used in Egyptian temples to dispense water for ritual washings. Worshippers would place a coin into the machine and receive holy water to bathe themselves with before entering the temple. At the end of the day, the slot machine would be emptied of its coins and refilled with holy water for the next day’s worshippers. Dropping a coin into the slot machine initiates a chain reaction: the weight of the coin depresses a metal pan, which in turn results in the opening of a valve, which in turn allows the water to flow out for the worshipper.” 

Wikipedia notes, “Hero of Alexandria (also known as Heron of Alexandria; fl. 60 A.D.) was a Greek mathematician and engineer who was active in his native city of Alexandria in Egypt during the Roman era. He is often considered the greatest experimenter of antiquity and his work is representative of the Hellenistic scientific tradition.” Among his other inventions were the aerolipile (the first steam engine), a wind-powered organ, and an entirely mechanical play almost ten minutes in length (powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel. The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum).

Hero’s wind-powered organ (reconstruction). Image by W. Schmidt from Wikepedia.

Other Vending. According to Wikipedia, “Coin-operated machines that dispensed tobacco were being operated as early as 1615 in the taverns of England. The machines were portable and made of brass. An English bookseller, Richard Carlile, devised a newspaper dispensing machine for the dissemination of banned works in 1822. Simon Denham was awarded British Patent no. 706 for his stamp dispensing machine in 1867, the first fully automatic vending machine.”

I also recall seeing period English movies with coin-operated meters operating gas lighting and heating. And today in Japan with some 4.5 million vending machines (one for every 28 people), you can buy everything from cigarettes to sake to snacks to underwear to condoms. 

The highest-buck purchases I’ve found are automobiles: Wikipedia cites, “In November 2013, online auto retailer Carvana opened the first car vending machine in the U.S., located in Atlanta. In late 2016, Autobahn Motors, a car dealership in Singapore, opened a 15-story-tall luxury car vending machine containing 60 cars, dispensing Ferrari and Lamborghini vehicles.”

Back to Holy Stuff. In 2013, The Daily Mail reported the “World’s First Religious Vending Machine Installed in Church to Sell Holy Accessories to Worshippers.” A dispenser in St. Joseph Church, Hamburg, Germany, reportedly soon sold out of rosary beads and religious trinkets.

Pastoral assistant Sebastian Fiebig and his church’s sure thing. Image from The Daily Mail.

Reading of rosaries, I was reminded of Quebec City’s Lower Town, “where I bought my mom a rosary from a shop run by a dissident cult of Catholics who had their own Canadian pope, Gregory XVII. In fact, it turns out there were two other alternative-fact Pope Gregory XVIIs at the time, one in Spain and the other in Italy. Out of deference to mom’s Roman Catholic orthodoxy—and to Pope John Paul II—I never did tell her the complete story.”

Listen Up, Martin Luther and Tom Lehrer. “Hostie to go” was a project in 2015 on the occasion of the annual art exhibition in the Old Church of Amsterdam: As the website describes, it’s “for the independent believer who wants to celebrate mass anytime and anywhere. For only two euro the ‘Hostie to go’ can be purchased from the vending machine in the church. Each package contains one altar bread which allows you to have your individual celebration of the Lord’s Supper.”

“This installation,” says the website, “aims to criticize today’s mentality of consumption on the go, because there is no time anymore to stand still and concentrate on what is going on around us. The holy ritual of receiving the body of Christ is used here as an example to exaggerate the limits of the ‘to go’ mentality. The reactions to this project were of anger and amusement.”

I’m unsure what Hero of Alexandria would think. ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023