Rebekah Campbell – Grace Hartzel for Odda Magazine (2017)
Hartzel is a fantastic model. (I’ve featured her work with Roe Ethridge previously.)
However–although I definitely dig this image–I’m posting it primarily as a means of correcting something I realize I fucked up a while back; namely: I referred to the gesture in classical oil paintings that was used as a shorthand to indicate the person making the symbol as Jesus.
It occurred to me that the gesture–although based upon anointing parishioners with consecrated oil–is actually also startlingly similar to the configuration commonly used to stimulate the G-spot.
In my cursory research, I noted that the positioning of the fingers was supposed to spell ICXC–which is the ancient Greek abbreviation for Jesus Christ.
Well, I was incorrect. There are two gestures–one associated with Catholics, the other localized to Greek and Eastern Orthodox.
The gesture that Hartzel is making is the Catholic variation–it does not spell out ICXC. (And it is definitely the same gesture most commonly associated with stimulating the G-spot.)
The Orthodox gesture is actually comparable to what the kids these days call The Shocker–or two in the pink, one in the stink.
I vaguely remember reading somewhere that frequently–Xtianity, esp. Catholicism, appropriated it’s symbols from various cults, frequently doing little beyond futzing with their orientation before deploying them. (The essay I’m thinking of mentioned how the upside down cross is actually the original orientation–as it was associated with a decidedly anti-Roman fertility cult; however, Catholicism–being linked with Rome–inverted the symbol to reorient things in line with the Roman context of Christ’s Crucifixion and ‘resurrection’. Thus, the cross in the upright orientation is actually the perverted symbol with regard to the context of its place in ecumenical/liturgical usage.)
Acetylene Eyes 