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• 1 2016-07-24T21:07:26-07:00 Floating Tomb 3 plain 2016-07-24T21:15:09-07:00 Considering that Muslims and Nestorians represented two of the West’s most historically problematic and intractable “heresies” it should come as no surprise that they are also grouped together in Western Christian texts. Western authors of the twelfth century invented a tradition that directly unites adherents of St. Thomas with those of Muhammad: despite the lack of any literary precedent, writers constructed separate legends that the tombs of Muhammad and St. Thomas’s floated in mid-air. In both traditions, the phenomenon proves merely the result of strategically placed magnets. These stories, which were entirely Latin Christian inventions, forge a connection between the Eastern Christians’ reverence of the Apostle Thomas with Muslims’ adulation of their prophet Muhammad as a way of un-knowing the difference between them. 
   
  
  The de Adventu contains the narrative of Thomas’ floating tomb, described beautifully by Uebel (47-65; 55-6). Embrico of Mainz’s twelfth-century Vita Mahumeti inaugurated the tradition of Muhammad’s tomb being suspended in mid-air by magnets. Other twelfth-century portraits of Muhammad, including those in the Chanson d’Antioche and Gautier de Compiegne’s De otia Machometi, offer similar descriptions of Muhammad’s tomb, envisioned ostensibly in order to showcase the way in which Muhammad feigned piety and miracles in order to assure adherents of his sanctity.