Iconophages: A Historical past of Ingesting Pictures by Jérémie Koering is a dense, well-researched e-book on what appears, at first look, a airtight subject material. It charts the historical past of rituals involving the consuming and ingesting of icons, or non secular artworks, starting in Historical 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 non secular 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 complicated.
A big a part of Koering’s thesis is that within the pre-Christian period, similar to within the historical metropolis of Byzantium, magic and faith had been one and the identical. Based on 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 grew to become symbolic. On the 1551 Council of Trent, the Catholic church adopted the ritual of consuming a cracker as an emblem for the physique of Christ, and the ingesting of pink wine because the blood of Christ.
This appears easy sufficient, however Iconophages shouldn’t be a simple learn. It’s full of main 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 treatment a girl affected by paralysis in 1170 Canterbury, or how small woodcuts illustrating the miracles by the Medieval jurist Giuliano di Francisco Guizzelmi had been usually positioned within the mouths of the deceased to carry them again to life. The e-book is basically an extended, detailed record of such circumstances, and I discovered myself questioning what precisely all of this was meant to inform me about human want. 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 may, 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 full of 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 unique type of consumption, such because the buying of iconic meme cash, guarantees a treatment. 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 get rid of the plague. Slightly, 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 Pictures (2024), written by Jérémie Koering, translated by Nicholas Huckle, and revealed by Princeton College Press, is obtainable for buy on-line and in bookstores.
