The Two “Bodies” of the Icon: Communication with the Sacred Image as Appropriation of its Power

Abstract

The paper focuses on an appropriation of power/grace emanating from icons in the beliefs that are widespread mainly in East-Christian traditions.Appropriation is a specific strategy of communication with the sacred images. In a wider context, it unites icons, relics and other sacred Christian objects with magical tools used (also in Christian communities) as the permanent source of power. As the most important sacred objects in Russian orthodoxy, icons have always been included in a variety of actions that directed the holy image’s power/grace at the target object or person or object so that his/hers/its state or condition is changed in a desired way. This is a manipulative strategy - the physical action is prior to addressing/praying to God or a saint. The range of such actions is extensive. First of all, it includes the variety of rites linked to healing, welfare-producing or protective magic that works in different spaces: private (the body, the bed or the house), public (the field, the village or the city) and the other’s / hostile ones (the foes, the alienate/heterodox territories). Moreover it also includes a set of practices associated with the physical transfer of grace to new objects and with the creation of various brandea, contact relics, which are secondary to the “mother” holy thing. All these practices presuppose the icon (or another sacred object) to have not only the physical and visible “body” but also the invisible one that has a spatial extent and somehow limited form lines. The author analyzes main types of actions that are typical of the appropriation strategy on the historical and partly modern Russian material.