Leviathan's Wake: On Effigies and Icons

On the first level, the veneration of the Icons of the Saints can be likened to and is of the same quality as the relationship a man continues with his deceased relatives. If one’s mother has died, he may visit her grave and speak to her or leave her trinkets. Or perhaps he may keep a photo of her and keep it in place of remembrance and speak to her of what is held deep inside himself. And perhaps, with no such place or memento, he may still simply speak his mind, addressing his mother. In this way a relationship is truly maintained between the two and despite the veil of death, a true connection remains and communion maintained. His respect and love is still known to be communicated - very deeply. And with it his needs and desires. It is communicated in a way that is not often possible in mortality.  And he knows what he has to give and to say is still passed on to the loved one. In this way, he venerates loved one and this is to be encourage. And the images he keeps and the relics that remain take on new meaning and become a means for that relationship, that communion, and that communication. 

Similarly, the primitive cultures understood the nature of the image. For this reason they created effigies, substitutes, and objects like ‘voodoo’ dolls. We say, for example, that we burn Guy Fawkes in effigy. The grammar here shows that we mean that Guy Fawkes, himself, is to be burned.  All of sympathetic magic works on this principle - the homeopathic principle. And if a relic of the subject for the effigy may be acquired, it is included - the contagion principle - as what is to the relic is passed on, just as what is done to the image is passed on. In magical superstition, it is said that what is done to the effigy is done to the original. If you burn a man in effigy, you burn the man. The voodoo doll is the same of application of these principles of sympathetic magic. There is, perhaps, a fallacy in this superstition of magic - that the practitioner is a purveyor of power, or can command powers to act on his behalf through the rituals and rites of his specific traditions or customs. The attempt is to, not only pass along the malice, anger, or whatever other passion and action is to conveyed, but to force the physical manifestation of a desired and specific end result to that person. But it is not obvious in these rites that the man needs to purvey power, but that the conveyance of intent is immediate and inherent in the action of the interaction with the image or relic. 

Similarly, men, animals, and lifeless idols have been made the substitutes of bodiless powers on earth. Some men were said to be gods and then sacrificed to the gods they were said to be. In controlling the substitute or image of the God, it was considered that the God could be controlled - at least insofar as rite and taboo were practice properly. For this reason monarchies which were said to be the embodiments of divinity commonly lost political power to their court councils due to the taboos placed upon them by their assumed godhood. A king may have been bid to not move almost at all, for any fidget could have disastrous impacts on the kingdom, as the king being the image of the deity that held the nation or the world together, any movement of his body would naturally impact a part of the nation or the world. It is often forgot that while Athens was lead politically by a democracy of free men, it retained monarchs who were purely religious in their function.

In these primitive liturgical practices around these god-kings it is still possible to see an iconographic ordering of society which has been heavily distorted by the extremities of superstition. Still, the extreme treatment, many of whom were forced to live a life of extreme abuse and agony, of many of these god-kings still manage to foreshadow the sufferings of Christ. Further, they show the aims and means of Christ’s enemies and the whole of the magical fallacy - the forcing of items incoherent to the iconographic structure of things in order to subvert and pervert the whole image towards a new end, and the expecting that the alteration of the icon effects the whole reality. This attempt at alteration cannot, ultimately, alter reality and whatever distortions created are brought back into wholeness in a process commonly called judgement.