Iconophages: A Historical past of Ingesting Photos by Jérémie Koering is a dense, well-researched e book on what appears, at first look, a airtight material. It charts the historical past of rituals involving the consuming and ingesting of icons, or spiritual artistic endeavors, starting in Historic Egypt and persevering with via the Byzantine Empire, Center Ages, and even the twentieth century. Dousing the Met Museum’s “Magical Stela (Cippus of Horus)” (360–343 BCE) and ingesting the water that handed over it, as an example, supposedly cured venomous snake bites. (It didn’t.) However hidden beneath entertaining however obscure references to licking, bathing spiritual icons (and ingesting the bathwater), grinding relics into powder and consuming them, and different enjoyable esophageal tales, is a narrative concerning the cultural evolution of the mind-body advanced.
A big a part of Koering’s thesis is that within the pre-Christian period, corresponding to within the historical metropolis of Byzantium, magic and faith had been one and the identical. In accordance with this logic, the icon made seen the holy being, and ingesting it established a relationship between the buyer and the divine energy, in addition to membership in a cult of shared perception. Then, this consumption turned symbolic. On the 1551 Council of Trent, the Catholic church adopted the ritual of consuming a cracker as a logo for the physique of Christ, and the ingesting of pink wine because the blood of Christ.
This appears easy sufficient, however Iconophages isn’t a simple learn. It’s stuffed with major documentation so detailed that it appears to lack an even bigger image — scores of pages delineating how the bloodstained shirt of Thomas Becket was soaked in water that was then used to remedy a lady affected by paralysis in 1170 Canterbury, or how small woodcuts illustrating the miracles by the Medieval jurist Giuliano di Francisco Guizzelmi had been often positioned within the mouths of the deceased to convey them again to life. The e book is actually an extended, detailed record of such instances, and I discovered myself questioning what precisely all of this was meant to inform me about human need. Are we simply ruled by the worry of loss of life, and trying to find a simple repair, even it clearly doesn’t work? Or are we merely a tradition of simpletons? Nonetheless, readers would possibly, like me, benefit from the gross and gory fairy-tale high quality of all of it.
Probably the most related factor about Iconophages, nevertheless, is how a model of this ritualistic consumption has continued into our century. After Trump and his gang of irrational fundamentalists took command, I couldn’t assist however learn this e book as a parable about his specific sphere of the web, one other web site of fetishistic consumption stuffed with icons, in addition to logos, emojis, memes — and fueled by the irrational and its symbolic transubstantiation into misinformation and lies. There, we discover conspiracy theories about vaccines, local weather science, harmful “others”; there, the cult-like Make America Nice Once more motion assigns supernatural powers to Trump; there, a special type of consumption, such because the buying of iconic meme cash, guarantees a remedy. Web misinformation is a brand new type of medieval magical considering, a populist model of dogma meant to assuage modern fears. If we’re to study from Koering’s historic examples, this type of magic by no means did lengthen life or remove the plague. Somewhat, Ideological polemics — the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation — resulted in centuries of hostile feuding tribes. And right here we go once more.
James Gillray, “Tiddy Doll: The Great French-Gingerbread-Baker” (1806), hand-colored etching (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Crucifixion (1587), plaster solid after a mannequin in wooden
Iconophages: A Historical past of Ingesting Photos (2024), written by Jérémie Koering, translated by Nicholas Huckle, and printed by Princeton College Press, is accessible for buy on-line and in bookstores.
