Book Review: A History of Ingesting Images

Iconophages, Jérémie Koering, translated by Nicholas Huckie. Zone

Jérémie Koering’s delightful Iconophages is a fascinating Western history of eating images. He begins well, with the shock and horror of Ralph Fiennes’ destruction of William Blake’s The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun in a restoration laboratory of the Brooklyn Museum. Fiennes, cast as the serial killer Francis Dolarhyde in the 2002 movie Red Dragon, knocks out a mousy curator, tears the masterpiece into shreds and eats it, his passion revealing the depth and breadth of his madness as he becomes bestial in his chewing and champing at the image. By consuming the picture of the dragon, Dolarhyde assumes its spirit and character.

It is an extreme moment of madness, and a terrific introduction to this absorbing book. But Koering promptly reminds his readers of customary and innocent instances of eating images – gingerbread men, cakes cast as figurative portraits, marzipan figures of Santa Claus – and suddenly the light of inquiry shines upon these gentle cultural phenomena. We are what we eat. But what images are we eating, and why?

It’s a charming idea for an art history. There is a bite-sized hole in Western culture left by edible art, an unexamined lacuna which Koering characterizes as a sort of communion – when art is made to be eaten, it is not art, but a representation of art, and eating it is to become it. This destruction is not iconoclasm, as much of this art is deliberately made for the purpose, created to be consumed, the act of ingestion an affirmation of the representation.

Iconophages is a nonsequential history. In the first chapter, “Ingesting Images”, readers are led through a fascinating narrative of mankind's relationship with the gods, seeking unity with them by eating and drinking food made sacred by sacrifice and offering. Koering is a good guide, beginning with the medicine, magic, and religion of the ancient Egyptians, who were instructed to drink water poured over stone sculptures of Horus the Child while reading out loud the hieroglyphs inscribed upon the stela. To the Egyptians, water was endowed with special power – life rose from the primordial waters of Nun, and some of the gods were born of bodily fluids: Shu from the ejaculate of Atum, Tefnut from his spit. The spiritual emanations radiating from the effigies could be absorbed by the sacred water and heal supplicants who drank it. At the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, petitioners were instructed to lick an image of the primordial spirits painted on the hand of a man. Magical formulas were painted on reeds, then dissolved as potions.

The ancient Greeks engraved semi-precious stones with magical inscriptions, pictures, or names, then ground them to dust and used them as medicines. Following the traditions of analogous thinking championed by Saint Augustine, Christians continued the practice with images of Solomon or Saint Sisinnius riding down a female demon inscribed into the gems. As saint cult shrines proliferated, penitent pilgrims sought proximity to the relics as a means of finding an intimate relationship with divinity, and like their Egyptian predecessors, they drank water or oil which had washed the bones of the martyrs, binding them in a deeply personal connection with their sacred heroes. In Loveto, even the dust that settled in the House of the Blessed Virgin Mary was gathered in small sachets and served to the sick in tonic brews. Pilgrims carried the practice of eating the relics of the saints to extremes. In Nantes, the corbel mounting of a statue of Saint Maudez had been scratched and chipped so frequently by pilgrims eager to cure their children of stomachache by mixing it into their drink that it was in danger of collapse. The sensual side of such practices extended into sexuality at the shrine of Saint Guerlichon, who had a reputation for making barren women pregnant. His statue was recumbent, and pilgrims mounted it and drank a potion made with the scrapings of his genitals, which were soon eroded away by this attention.

Catholics of the German states of the 17^th century consumed communion wafers stamped with the image of Jesus and were criticized for it by Protestants, who said they were devotional cannibals. Commercial woodblock printers produced paper sheets with multiple little images of saints, which were placed beside famous images and reliquaries to absorb their holy aura, then the prints – now miraculous images – were added as decorative embellishments to breads or biscuits and sold to pilgrims, who ate them. The practice continued in the 20^th century with photographs taking the place of the prints as the new technology became ubiquitous.

In “Imagining Ingestion”, Koering considers the medical theory that led people to perceive eating images of their gods as therapy. In ancient Egypt the god Seth had to penetrate the body in order to heal it, and the liquid touched by his image could answer the prayers of the sick. Galen’s medical ideas dominated Europe until the French Classical Age and sought balance between the humors: black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. His natural magic was tied to God, to movements of the planets and stars, to herbs, simples, and superstition, and while it was gradually supplanted by science, many of the ritual practices of the church and magicians were incorporated into medicine. The ritual magic of the communion placed congregations in direct contact with their savior, the healing Jesus, and the passion and sensuality of accounts like that of visionary Catherine of Siena, whose soul entered the body of the resurrected Christ when she pressed her lips to the wound in his side and drank his blood, reinforced the physicality of the mystical experience of God at the eucharist. This was not the only bodily fluid ingested by the saints – Saint Bernard drank milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary, and sculptures were made to commemorate the event fitted with tubes so that pilgrims could share the experience.

And if the physical manifestation of the power of the saints shared in their bodily fluids was insufficient to sustain the faith of believers hungry for unity with the divine, then they could follow the example of the prophet Ezekiel, who ate holy texts, making himself one with the word of God, or John of Patmos, who described meeting an angel in his apocalyptic Revelation. The angel gave him a scroll and instructed him to eat it, and it tasted as sweet as honey, but turned his stomach sour. Eating words dated from antiquity, when teachers gave children cakes to encourage them to learn their alphabet. In the 16^th century, Erasmus instructed teachers to make cookies in the shape of letters, as the ancients had, as an incentive. The word was good.

The final chapter, titled “Sharing Images”, describes communal sharing of edible images as a practice designed to strengthen social relationships. The Egyptians had made cakes bearing the imprints of bound hippopotami for the festival of Typhon, and in the 4^th century, made bread effigies of the gods to be censed and eaten, allowing the deities to inhabit the bodies of the supplicants. In ancient Rome, wooden stamps were made to impress bread with the images of sacrificial animals standing in for the real beasts. Now, Koering describes the widespread custom of eating the stamped hosts of the eucharist, and their relationship to the craze for gingerbread caricatures of politicians and popular figures from folklore which emerged in the 19^th century, as the enlightenment pushed god-eaters away from the divine, and toward eating secular celebrities.

Candy skulls from Mexico provide a very short interlude from Koering’s concentration on European customs, where sugar sculptures were an entertainment for the rich for centuries, then he briefly enters the world of so-called contemporary art, following the fascination for ephemerality that intrigued many during the apocalyptic end of the twentieth century, and finding art-eaters among them. 

Eat this book! Koering has cooked up an excellent feast for the senses.

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