Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image

175 Pages·1999·3.09 MB·English

by  Tina Pippin

APOCALYPTIC BODIES

Apocalypse can be broadly defined as any representation of the end of
the world or anxiety over and preparation for the end of time. In this
timely volume, Tina Pippin traces the biblical notions of end times as
represented in ancient and modern texts, art, music and popular culture,
and addresses the question of how we, in the late twentieth century, are
to be competent and ethical readers of and responders to the “signs of
the times.”
Apocalyptic Bodies: the Biblical End of the World in Text and Image presents
a cultural critical reading of apocalyptic texts and images, using a variety
of critical perspectives, including body criticism, ideological criticism,
and horror and fantasy theory. This innovative and provocative volume,
which contains a selection of unusual apocalyptic images from folk art
to old masters, offers new ways of thinking about the Bible and about
the end of the world.
Tina Pippin is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Agnes Scott
College, Decatur. She is the author of Death and Desire: the Rhetoric of
Gender in the Apocalypse of John.

APOCALYPTIC
BODIES

The Biblical End of the World in
Text and Image

Tina Pippin

London and New York
First published 1999
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.

© 1999 Tina Pippin
The right of Tina Pippin to be identified as the Author of this Work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested

ISBN 0-415-18248-4 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-18249-2 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-02703-5 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-20062-4 (Glassbook Format)
CONTENTS

List of illustrations vii
Prequel, or Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiv
1 Introduction: apocalypse as sequel 1
2 A good apocalypse is hard to find: crossing the
apocalyptic borders of Mark 13 13
3 Jezebel revamped 32
4 The power of Babel: spiraling out of control 43
5 Peering into the abyss: a postmodern reading of
the biblical bottomless pit 64
6 Apocalyptic horror 78
7 Apocalyptic fear 100
8 Conclusion: the joy of (apocalyptic) sex 117
Notes 128
Bibliography 137
Index of names and terms 153
Index of biblical and related texts 158

v

ILLUSTRATIONS

2.1 Billboard on Highway 70 in Smithfield, North
Carolina, 1960s–1970s 14
2.2 Sign on a public swimming pool in Smithfield,
North Carolina, in the 1960s 16
2.3 Sign on farmland on a country road near Goldsboro,
North Carolina, 1990s 30
2.4 Urban graffiti in Atlanta, Georgia, 1990s 31
3.1 Detail from The Death of Jezebel (1865) by Gustave Doré 36
3.2 Detail from Jehu’s Companions Finding the Remains
of Jezebel (1865) by Gustave Doré 36
3.3 Detail from the Flemish Apocalypse (c. 1400 CE) 37
4.1 The Confusion of Tongues (1865) by Gustave Doré 45
4.2 Detail from The Small Tower (1563) by Pieter Bruegel
the Elder 49
4.3 Tower of Babel (1965) by Stanislao Lepri 52
4.4 Tower made of bodies (c. 1967) by Cobi Reiser 53
4.5 Lotte Medelsky as “Frau Welt” (summer 1931) in the
Salzburg Theatre 54
5.1 Detail of a hell mouth/abyss from the Hours of
Catherine of Cleves (fifteenth century) 69
6.1 Whore of Babylon in a plastic snow (glitter) bubble
with the three crosses of Calvary in the background 90
6.2 Celestial Season’s Tension Tamer Tea 91
6.3 The Whore of Babylon (1916) by Lovis Corinth, from
his series of six lithographs on the Apocalypse of St John 93
7.1 The appropriate response of fear: John Falling as
though Dead before the Son of Man by Silvan Otmar
(Augsburg, 1523) 102
vii
ILLUSTRATIONS
7.2 Lord God Scares: southern folk art on a wooden plaque,
1990s 110
8.1 The erotic horrors of hell by Dieric Bouts (1410–75),
Descent into Hell 120
8.2 Detail from The Calling of the Elect into Heaven from
The Last Judgment by Luca Signorelli (c. 1450–1523),
fresco in the cathedral at Orvieto, Italy 126
8.3 Panels from Hans Memling’s (c. 1430/40–94) The Last
Judgment: The Elect and The Damned (1466–73) 127

viii
PREQUEL, OR PREFACE

What are your favorite scary parts of the Bible? Do you try not to
think about them, to avoid them, or look to the more pleasant parts
of the Bible? One of my arguments in this book is that “apocalypse”
is in excess in the Bible and in Western culture; apocalypse is not
relegated to a fenced-in area in certain prophetic texts or gospels or
the back of the Book. I explore several scenes of apocalypse in this
book, scattered throughout the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament.
By “apocalypse” I want to employ a broader definition that is about
the end of the world but also any total destruction, or any revelation
about “any catastrophe of such a scale that it seems to put this world
in jeopardy” (Collins 1997:1). My choices are a few among many,
since there is much death and destruction in the Bible. I am also
committed to a feminist reading that remembers and reveals the
destruction of the human body, particularly women’s bodies. The
scary parts of the Bible I seek out in this study involve body parts.
As in the film Blue Velvet, I have found a human ear on the ground,
and it leads me into a world of horror.1 “Let anyone who has an ear
listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (Apoc. 2:11).
The Apocalypse of John (aka the Book of Revelation) provides
the biggest crunch at the end of the Christian Bible, and I spend the
most time in this book gazing at its horrors. I am fidgety in the
Apocalypse of John; I think it opens forward and backward and
sideways and all ways into other spaces. The excess is evident in the
final “s” that so many people, including some biblical scholars, put
on the end of the name of the last book, Revelations. I imagine
some of the academics are being cynical in their renaming of this
narrative. Nonetheless, the Book of Revelations is a created object,
texts outside the text, excessive reading and writing. The Revelations
are legion and can only be tamed and regulated by dismissal, by over-
ix