The elephant dung affixed upon ‘The Holy Virgin Mary’, an allegedly blasphemous image of the Madonna created by Chris Offili, a British artist, and exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Art on October 2, 1999, resulted in an indignant uproar throughout the city and nation. Mr. Ofili’s allusion to his African heritage as the inspiration for the excremental adornment did not satisfy the caustic conservative critics who demanded the immediate removal of the insult and the withdrawal of public funding for the museum.

Critics who believed the image was desecrated by the dung necessarily believed the image was otherwise sacred, wherefore they were idolaters themselves, for images of beings are not the beings themselves. Indeed, staunch mystics have traditionally averred that any figurative representation whatsoever of the only possible Holy One, no matter how lovely the image might be, is sacrilegious. The Divine Mother is Immaculate Space, the Maternal Ark of All, the Dark Womb, the Black Virgin.

Iconomachists, people who hate the worship of images, would normally have been too busy waging war on Catholic images to be concerned with a single image at the Brooklyn Museum. In any case, people who love images are better idolaters than those who hate them. The squabble between the two idolatrous camps might be called a dung fight. Indeed, the Greek word eidolon is used to translate the Hebrew word for dung – Ezekiel’s favorite term for idol was gillotim, meaning “dunghill”. That is to say, idols are worthless vanities or nothing at all, as are fixed ideas carved on stone or written in books and worshipped as such.

For example, posting the Decalogue on the wall to be adored as some sort of magic charm or formula is absurd. The Ten Commandments should be discussed for a few minutes everyday, until the spirit in which they were uttered circumscribes the hearts of every participant in the great conversation. That conversation must not end in stone, for such a stone would mark the gravesite of human civilization, which is, after all, morally and mentally – that is to say spiritually – inspired.

No, the ultimate sacred power cannot be confined to an idol in a certain location, not even in the Ark of the Covenant in Jerusalem; as Jeremiah said:

“I will give you shepherds after my own heart, and these shall feed you on knowledge and discretion. And when you have increased and become many in the land, then – it’s Yahweh who speaks – no one will ever say again: Where is the ark of the covenant of Yahweh? There will be no thought of it, no memory of it, no regret for it, no making of another. When that time comes, Jerusalem shall be called The Throne of Yahweh; all the nations will gather there in the name of Yahweh and will no longer follow the dictates of their own stubborn hearts.” (The Jerusalem Bible).

Jeremiah took a dim view of things in his day (c.640-580 BCE). He wished he had not been born. He prayed for the death of his family. He shunned society and avoided marriage. He thought his god Yahweh had raped him. He was a traitor to his country. He believed it was Yahweh’s will for Judah to submit to the Babylonians; surrender would be “the way of life”, and resistance “the way of death,” yet he turned down a handsome offer from Babylon. He was eventually carried off by his people to Egypt, where he was presumably stoned to death. In contrast to his pessimistic outlook, Jeremiah had a bright place in mind for his people, a utopian dream city, a dream city that was never realized on Earth.

Although he may have been mistaken about the virtues of a dream city, Jeremiah spoke with the authority of personal experience, if not from divine revelation, about arks and political reform. He was born when the great iconoclast King Josiah was elevated, at 8 years of age, to the throne of Judah, by the revolutionary faction after the assassination of King Amon. Judah had been a vassal of the Assyrian Empire, which had imposed its alien cults; but the Empire had weakened, and fell into chaos. Egypt was also weak at the time, hence Judah was presented with a golden opportunity, and Josiah happened to be king at the right place and right time for reformation, and he acted accordingly. Now Jeremiah commended Josiah for being a just and righteous King; Jeremiah might have been an itinerant preacher of Josiah’s reforms in the early days; even so, he was greatly disillusioned.

During repairs to the Temple, whose cult and priests Jeremiah sharply criticized, the Deuteronomy book, purportedly the record of farewell address delivered by Moses on the verge of the Promised Land, was found and brought to Josiah. Deuteronomy contains a revised covenant or treaty between Yahweh and His vassal, Israel. Josiah was so taken aback when he read it that he rent his garments and proceeded with the reformation forthwith. The Deuteronomy we have today is not what it was then, but the gist of the old text is apparent in the new, and one legal clause of the code is particularly striking:

“You must destroy completely all the places where the nations you dispossess have served their gods, on high mountains, on hills, under any spreading tree; you must tear down their altars, smash their pillars, cut down their sacred poles, set fire to the carved images of their gods and wipe out their name from that place.”

That injunction was even more severe than the proclamation of Akhnaton, the sun-worshipping, monotheistic pharaoh who ordered the obliteration of all inscribed references to plural “gods.” Akhnaton, after all, had a trinity-in-Aton, and he was obliged to tolerate some of the lesser, more popular personifications, particularly those enjoyed by the populace in the privacy of their abodes. But Yahweh was not as tolerant as the legendary Pharaoh of Love, at least not according to Mosaic lore. Yahweh made only one exception to absolute iconoclasm:

“Not so are you to behave towards Yahweh your God. You must seek Yahweh your God only in the place he himself will choose from among all your tribes, to set down His name there and give it a home. There you shall bring your sacrifices, tithes, and offerings.”

That commandment dovetailed nicely with Josiah’s agenda: the centralization of government and worship in Jerusalem. It was an agenda both religious and political. People did have to draw nice distinctions between religion and politics in those days. Religion was about power, and politics was about who had it. The early monarch was the penultimate if not ultimate personification of power for his people, whether he was an agent of god or was presumed to be a god himself, hence the modern argument over whether ancient iconoclasm was religiously or politically motivated does not coincide with the nature of the beast. Like David, Josiah was anointed by Yahweh. Like Moses, he was leading his people to freedom. He was the instrument of Yahweh’s law. Obedience to that law would save Israel, Yahweh’s chosen people, from bondage to despised foreign and local enemies.

Josiah’s people went on a rampage, smashing and burning the shrines and idols of the enemy. The discrimination was justified because only Israel had a valid contract with Yahweh: Canaanites, Moabites, Ammonites, members of the reviled ruling class and others had no absolute right to exist in Yahweh’s domain. Although the Hebrew Lord was a loving god whose affection extended even to birds, trees, and oxen, he was also a jealous landlord who must not be provoked. Even the local shrines to Yahweh were abolished, their priests ousted or slain; there was only one temple good enough for Yahweh: the Temple of Jerusalem. And at one curtained, windowless end of the Temple was placed the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord, the receptacle of the true Yahweh legislation, the central symbol of Josiah’s administration in the name of Yahweh, the very throne or stool of god. The idolatrous cult of the ark, perfected by ancient Egyptians and Hebrews, was derived from prehistoric Black Africa, where even today a  sacred stool is covered, carried in procession, and then re-lodged in a holy chamber on one end of the lodge, where the holy stool – standing for the law excreted by divinity – and its occupant, now invisible to the public, are protected by spirits and privileged attendants.

All priests and prophets were now under Josiah’s control; the former political authority of local priests was vested in his provincial magistrates. As the revenue flowed into Jerusalem, King Josiah sought to centralize and strengthen his army, and to extend his territory. He decided to engage in battle the forces of Pharaoh “Necho”, who was on his way to help Assyria against Babylonia. Josiah believed that if he were to defeat Necho’s forces, he could unite Judah with Israel. But Josiah was slain: Assyria was defeated; the Egyptians withdrew; Israel was forced to submit to Babylonia, the New Mesopotamian Empire.

As in the case of Akhnaton, Josiah’s reforms died with him: the old idols and high places were soon restored; Jerusalem and its fine Temple were eventually destroyed. Jeremiah had in fact prophesied the Temple’s destruction, denouncing the people’s dependence on it.

Thus do we have an instructive historical occasion of iconoclasm to reflect upon after considering the dung-laden image of a contemporary artist, an artist of African heritage for whom dung may or may not have been sacred in itself, or perhaps made sacrosanct by slapping it on his Madonna along with what appears to be vaginal butterflies – incidentally, elephant dung, particularly the dung of a white elephant, has long been considered to have magical properties in certain parts of the world. As indignant critics wage war over our postmodern excremental culture instead of loving their enemies as their religion professes, we might try to match our deeds with the admittedly absurd command to love our neighbors – the command exists because we hate them.  

Why not lovingly smash all the symbolic barriers between us? It is said that Akhnaton’s religion of  iconoclastic love failed because he did not resort to arms to enforce it – as for loving his neighbors, he did not send material aid to his besieged allies. Certain archeologists now claim – based on the evidence of well-worn footpaths of many soldiers tramping along the perimeter of Amarna – that Akhnaton’s new capital for loving the Power-in-the-Disc was in fact a paranoid armed circle.

As for the commandments to love and fear a transcendental lord as sufficient incentive to desist from our crimes against humanity, faith in words alone shall not suffice to accomplish the works. In Josiah’s case, we see that words in a box, even when supported by the force of arms, do not suffice for enduring, radical reform, for such reform must be of the willing heart.

                                             XYX

Easter Sunday, 2006

South Beach