hannibalinsp | 02. Saints and Martyrs

ICONS

kuuwi / cato-neimoidia / phaust-icons / finalthesis

dearterror / majorminus / finalthesis / unknown

SCREENCAPS
(click for full size) all from kissthemgoodbye

QUOTES

Medieval images of the body have less to do with sexuality than with fertility and decay. Control, discipline, even torture of flesh is, in medieval devotion, not so much the rejection of physicality as the elevation of it—a horrible yet delicious elevation—into a means of access to the divine.
— Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Late Middle Ages’

“It is not about pain,” Beverly has carefully explained. “It is about how to suffer beautifully, like Saint Sebastian.”

— Toni Bentley, ‘The Thin End of the Whip: Insider the Life of France’s Most Famous Dominatrix’

Devotion is full of arrows.

— Joanna Klink, ‘On Kingdoms’

Holiness is in the hands even if it’s always the head that gets haloed.

— C.T. Salazar, ‘self portrait as headless john the baptist hitchhiking’

I shall remember how your ears were curled.

I should for a moment linger

And follow the curve with my finger

And your head beneath my knees---

I think that at last you would understand.

There would be nothing more to say.

You would love me because I should have strangled you

And because of my infamy;

And I should love you the more because I mangled you

And because you were no longer beautiful

To anyone but me. — T.S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of Saint Sebastian’

Transfixed … the picture in my mind was of a man tied to a tree with arrows sticking out of his naked but otherwise perfect body. The expression on his face was not agony but a sort of hungry … satedness.

— Pat Cadigan, ‘A Lie For a Lie’

… the deft agent of her undoing: Eros, armed with a spear, the iron tip of God Himself.

— Julia Kristeva, Teresa, My Love: An Imagined Life of the Saint of Avila (translated by Lorna Scott Fox)

ART
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