SOUL FOOD:

Advertised as 100% genuine, the 30-year-old yarmulke fetched $162 on EBay. The lucky — and trusting — winner placed the best of 12 bids to win the kippa, whose seller claimed it had been worn by Bad Religion guitarist Brett Gurewitz during his bar mitzvah.

In a photograph, potential buyers could see “Bar Mitzvah of Brett Gurewitz, May 24, 1975,” inscribed on the satin-lined head covering. Was it for real? Heaven knows. It didn’t come with an authentication of any kind, for whatever that might have been worth.

In the land of EBay, where tendered authentications sometimes come with their own claims of authentication, a buyer better like an item for its face value — or remain forever content with unflappable self-deception.

For days before Pope John Paul II died and for many more weeks thereafter, medals and rosaries and other religious articles — including two Holy Communion wafers said to have been blessed by the Holy Father of Roman Catholics himself — sold briskly on the Internet auction website.

By way of authentication, some of the items came with prayer cards bearing the words of a blessing once offered by the pope or with old ticket stubs to past papal audiences, or occasionally both. Coming from an utter stranger, how much could any of these have been worth?

More often these sacred things came with affected anecdotal stories. Laced with typos, misspellings and poor grammar, such a tale might have began: “This rosary belong to my belove great uncel who died it in his fingers 40 years ago. I treasure it and I would not let it go accept I belief now is the time I showed share it’s miracless blessing with some other than myself.”

In between the lines, not all too subtly, drift the words, “Buyer beware!”

Yet that rarely stops the buying. As EBay auctions demonstrate time and again, the human craving for the supernatural can lay waste to prudence and common sense.

Purported images of Jesus and his mother Mary on everything from English biscuits to marshmallows have yielded sums both trifling and tidy. Nothing, though, has quite trumped the profit or the fanfare raised by Diana Duyser’s auction for an image of the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich.

After making the sandwich, Duyser noticed the likeness as she took a bite. First frightened, then awed, she preserved it in cotton balls inside a plastic container.

A decade later, the grilled cheese icon showed no signs of deterioration. That had at least one reporter at Slate.com reaching for explanations: The trans fats in the margarine the sandwich was grilled in combined with the calcium in the cheese and acted as a mold retardant, he speculated.

Duyser, who said the sandwich had brought her good luck, merely accepted it as another sign of the sandwich’s miraculous nature.

After winning $70,000 at a Florida casino, she decided it was time to let someone else share in its benefits — for a price. After all, these days, $70,000 doesn’t go all that far.

Duyser’s EBay auction brought skepticism, not the least from EBay, which at first removed it, citing the company’s policy barring listings “intended as jokes.” The auction was restored when Duyser convinced EBay she was sincere.

The 10-year-old sandwich attracted hundreds of thousands of look-sees and bids as high as $69,000, though they didn’t all stick. In November, the final selling price for the holy image on white bread and American cheese settled at $28,000 — $26,000 more than one of the Communion wafers said to have been blessed by the late pontiff.

Many found Duyser’s auction tasteless. Tens of thousands of Roman Catholics called and wrote to EBay condemning the auction of blessed Communion wafers, which they perceive to be the Body of Christ, as sacrilegious.

But EBay places the barest restrictions on items listed for auction, including sacred accoutrements. It’s up to members of the marketplace to sift the nefarious from the holy, the spurious from the authentic.

Forget grilled cheese. Want a reliquary of the Virgin Mary or St. Paul? Or an antique altar monstrance?

EBay Virtual auctioneer italycallingyou has just what you’re looking for. It can be yours for the highest bid.

If you’re more inclined to kitsch, maybe you’d prefer freak-e-mart’s deluxe Jesus action figure. His hands glow in the dark. He comes with five plastic loaves of bread, two fish and a jug of water to turn into wine.

The small print: “not guaranteed to work for real.”

Pick a faith — a commonplace faith, an obscure faith, any faith. Jehovah’s Witnesses. Wicca. Orisha. Rosicrucian. Type it into EBay’s search engine and you’ll find objects associated with the faith for sale.

If an auction item offends, EBay is content to simply suggest buyers not bid on it. So the religious and spiritual terrain of the famous auction portal remains expansive and diverse.

Reading the auction listings is akin to taking a grass-roots course in comparative religion. Many descriptions express beliefs that defy conventional labels. It is at times hard to tell whether or not a seller believes what he professes or is instead an electronic-age evangelical con man.

A man who goes by the name of LeGean runs a small EBay store called Good Hootie. There he sells costume jewelry, some of it, according to him, that is haunted.

On his EBay biographical page, the man claims to be a “critically ill minister,” a psychic, a medium and a Christian. He is, he writes, “the 3rd son of a seventh daughter,” whose “mother & grandmother were also seventh daughters (777).”

“Good hootie” is the term his aunt used to describe “all the good spirits” she believed surround us. This week, LeGean has more than 300 haunted items for sale.

Among them is a gold-tone bracelet bezel set with scarabs. It is, as potential buyers learn when reading the bracelet’s description, “blessed with fairies,” able to provide its wearer with the spirits of healing, protection and happiness — sold “as found/as is.”

Some objects provide the lure of the spiritual without appealing to any particular religion. An “awesome gold ring blessed by 12 elder spiritual gurus” is being offered by someone who otherwise appears to trade in reading glasses and cell phones.

“This is a real miraculous ring for healing and prosperity,” the auction description reads. “Stop suffering and be blessed.” The ring is “priceless.”

Plunk down $5,000 and it’s yours. All proceeds will be sent to “two helpless girls in the Caribbean.”

I’ve long thought these auctions might be a fruitful subject for a masters or doctorate thesis. They may say more about our nation’s religious beliefs than all of the Barna Group and Gallup polls laid end to end.