Tag Archives: red

The Whore of Babylon

Posted on by
Reply
Two depictions of the whore of Babylon: left, in the Beatus Apocalypse (an 11th century Romanesque illuminated manuscript); right, a 1532 hand-colored woodcut by Hans Burgkmair in Luther’s translation of the New Testament.

I saw a woman mounted on a scarlet beast…. the woman was clothed in purple and scarlet and bedecked with gold and precious stones and pearls. In her hand she held a gold cup full of all obscenities and the filth of her fornication…. I saw the woman was drunk with the blood of God’s people and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. (Apoc. 17:3-4, 6)

This woman, the famous “Scarlet Woman” and the “Whore of Babylon,” is the antithesis of the woman clothed with the sun in Apocalypse 12. The woman clothed with the sun gives birth to Christ in her children; the Scarlet Woman is drunk with the blood of those children, now martyred. The woman clothed with the sun is attacked by the dragon, the Antichrist; now the dragon, the Antichrist, escorts the Scarlet Woman in her apparent hour of triumph. The woman clothed with the sun is a mother who remains forever a virgin; the Scarlet Woman is the mother of all abominations and prostitutions imaginable. If the woman clothed with the sun is Sophia, the Divine Wisdom (Proverbs 8-9, Baruch 3-4, Wisdom 6-8), then the Scarlet Woman is the “loose woman” whose house is the gateway to Hell (Proverbs 7, 9).

The icons of Novgorod used scarlet as the background of divine light, out of which the saints stepped to greet the faithful. It is also the color of the Hellmouth, the great beast who devours the damned in icons of the Last Judgement. Scarlet is the presence of God who can be accepted or rejected but never escaped.

The Scarlet Woman is at the moment of decision, capable of giving herself over completely to the destruction of beauty and light or of turning aside from that path of destruction. She can remain the Whore of Babylon or become the Virgin Mother of the faithful, the “holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride for her husband” (Apoc. 21:2).

(For a fuller discussion of the woman clothed with the sun and the whore of Babylon, see my chapter “Clothed in Scarlet, Clothed with the Sun: Thoughts on the Women of Apocalypse 12 and 17” in Earth’s Abominations: Philosophical Studies of Evil available here.)

Dancing Plague

Posted on by
Reply

Dorothy's ruby slippers are the most famous red shoes in history.

Dorothy’s ruby slippers are the most famous red shoes in history.

In the searing July heat of 1518, Frau Troffea stepped into the streets of Strasbourg and began to dance. Bathed in sweat, she continued to dance. Overcome with exhaustion, she stopped, and then resumed her solitary jig a few hours later. Over the next two months, roughly four hundred people succumbed to the same agonizing compulsion. At its peak, the epidemic claimed the lives of fifteen men, women, and children a day. Possibly 100 people danced to their deaths in one of the most bizarre and terrifying plagues in history.

Eventually, 2 cures were found for the plague: making an offering at a local shrine to St. Vitus, long thought the patron of those afflicted with “St. Vitus’ Dance” (epilepsy), or wearing red shoes. Or donating a pair of red shoes to the shrine. Although many pairs of magical footwear appear in fairy tales (the seven-league boots, the silver slippers in Baum’s original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the slippers Cinderella wore to the ball, the slippers of bread dough a wealthy Czech woman wore to her damnation), the red shoes have both healed uncontrollable dancing and damned their owner to uncontrollable dancing (as in Anderson’s story of the Red Shoes).

Red was an especially expensive dye to obtain or use; red clothes were the prerogative of the wealthy and the ostentatious. Red (associated with blood, fire, life, and sex) is also used to mark those who misbehave sexually as well as the saints (“washed in the blood of the Lamb”). In Slavic languages, the same word can mean both “red” and “beautiful” so instead of calling it “Red Square” outside the Kremlin, a better translation might be “Beautiful Square.”

TO read Elizabeth King’s fascinating essay about magical shoes in fairy tales, click here.

TO read more about the fascinating Dancing Plague, click here and here.