Magazine Madonna

This is not a promising beginning to 2020. An actress and Alt-Med bafflegab grifter presented herself as the Blessed Virgin Mary, under the banner of "Falling for magical-thinking scams = Female Empowerment".

After @SmutClyde stepped into Goop, I cannot unsee this vaginal virgin birth with God as clitoris pic.twitter.com/kaKP7jG51n

— Leonid Schneider (@schneiderleonid) January 7, 2020

It goes without saying that there is a backstory to this Vesica-Piscis / Mandorla tradition in Marian iconography. Early christian artists had adopted the motif of a full-body aureole from Buddhist artists, in the same way that they'd borrowed the head-centred aureole (whence cometh halos). Then the theoreticians and commissars of Formalised State Art ret-conned a rationale, borrowing the Vesica Piscis image from Pythagorean and Neo-Platonist thought to symbolise the Intersection of Realms of Existence.


It was totally not because of Another Kiwi taking the Riddled Time Machine back to the Council of Choronzon in C.E. 397 in search of fresh dates for the Christmas Ale, and offering the locals his old 1960s New Maths textbooks (with all the Venn diagrams) in exchange.*

Those early artists ignored the religious-symbolism potential of Venn's 4-class diagram, so we are in a position to re-sell it to other traditions. Anyone who wants the Four Overlapping Ellipses to become an emblem in the iconography of their preferred religion, talk to Another Kiwi in the Wigglesworth Lounge any night at the Old Entomologist and offer him a bag of dates. Just not $cientology. Also, not 397, it triggers his camel allergy.

There is room for argument on how far those early artists were aware of the Yoni symbolism of the conventions they developed. Hans Bellmer certainly thought about it for his illustrations for 'Madame Edwina'.

* The Whackyweedia entry on Venn diagrams (as elaborations of Euler diagrams) traces the trail of prefigurements back to Leibnitz and Llull... but not to the Neo-Platonists chiz chiz.