The Religious Book as Object: An Interview with Dorina Miller Parmenter

Dorina Miller Parmenter approaches the book as object, inspired by her material explorations as a former book artist as well as a desire to understand why and how the book has come to be so important in religion, especially the Judeo-Christian tradition. 

MLA citation format:

Mohan, Urmila and Dorina Miller Parmenter

"The Religious Book as Object:
An Interview with Dorina Miller Parmenter "

Web blog post. Material Religions. 16 December 2015. [date of access]

UM: How did you get interested in materials and objects in religion? 

DMP: I was an art major in college, focusing on crafts rather than the so-called fine arts, and then went to graduate school where I studied ceramics and metalsmithing. I finished my degree in art by studying the history and designs of Medieval treasure bindings and creating my own jeweled and enameled covers for books that I bound. When exhibiting the finished products, the queries that I received most from viewers concerned the contents of the books, implying that the texts must be special to warrant such attention on the covers. Upon discovering that the books had blank pages, the disappointed viewers often shared their take-away lesson with me: “Well, I guess you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.” 

Relic of the Inquisition (Diary 85) 1995; paper, leather, sterling sliver, enamel, and stones; 
5.5 x 5.5 x 1.25 in. Photo courtesy of Dorina Miller Parmenter.

After I got over my irritation that people seemed more concerned with the implied but absent text than they were appreciative of the art that I had created, I realized my own take-away lesson: people do judge books by their covers, among other things. The material elements of a book—including its cover, its size, the materials used to make it, where it is kept, how it is used, and so on—send signals about its purpose and value. When I then went to graduate school to study religion, my attention was drawn to the significations of the material elements of religious scripture, which seemed to be overlooked in textual hermeneutics as well as in ritual studies. 

I no longer practice book arts, although every now and then I conduct basic bookbinding workshops to invite people to think about the materiality of books or the impact of different ways of presenting writing.

Linda's Clan (Diary 90) 1996; paper, leather, brass, fine silver, enamel, and stones; 
7 x 7.5 x 1.5 in. Photo courtesy of Dorina Miller Parmenter.

UM: Do you approach ‘religious books’ and ‘texts’ as sacred objects or sacred knowledge? 

DMP: My view is that the attribution of ‘sacred’ to books and texts comes from the material practices that surround them as objects more than from the meaning of the words conveyed by the text. My mentor and colleague, James Watts, articulated this well in “The Three Dimensions of Scriptures,” stating that scripture involves the ritualization of three related dimensions of texts: semantic, performative, and iconic. The iconic dimension—the representative and recognizable material form of the text that acts as a signifier separately from the signification of any particular words—is crucial to this formula. 

I conduct most of my research in relation to the iconicity of biblical texts, such as an adorned Torah scroll in a synagogue ark, two arched tablets on a granite monument, or the display of a family Bible within the home. As visual objects they might act as symbols of God’s revelation and/or religious history and tradition, as tangible objects engaged in ritual they might be perceived to act as mediators of divine presence, as images and objects manipulated within particular social contexts they might communicate power and legitimacy.

"Bishop High Prayer Book", CC BY-NC-SA 2.0, Image Credit

While my initial interest in the iconic dimension of the Christian Bible related to lavishly adorned books, recently I have been studying rituals that demonstrate an opposing sentiment. In some sectors of contemporary American evangelicalism it is common to display heavily used or worn-out Bibles, often held together with duct tape. In this case the iconic dimension signifies the piety of the individual user who is intimately bound up with the book, and reveals how the book acts as a mediator of God’s saving grace that “holds together” not only the book but its owner. 

"Southern T-shirt", CC BY-NC 2.0, Image Credit 

UM: Would you agree that the materiality of religious objects tends to be marginalised in religious studies in favor of scriptural exegesis? 

DMP: Fifteen years ago I would have agreed that materiality was marginalized in favor of textual interpretation in religious studies, but I think that a focus on everyday objects has moved more toward the center. This has been furthered by the important and prolific works of David Morgan, S. Brent Plate, Colleen McDannell, and Sally Promley, among others, and the publication of "Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief."

UM: Is there more work to be done in highlighting the importance of religious materiality?

DMP: I don’t think there can be too much emphasis on materiality in the study of religion. In relation to materiality and scripture, I’ll take this chance to promote the organization SCRIPT – The Society for Comparative Research on Iconic and Performative Texts. We have sessions at the AAR/SBL annual meeting as well as at some regional and international conferences, and published the anthology Iconic Books and Texts in 2013. The conversations around SCRIPT are great because they are cross-cultural, and one can think about new ideas by hearing about issues of materiality and scripture in different traditions. 

 

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Exploring Aniconism: IAHR 2015 Panel Review

Mikael Aktor reviews the panel he co-organised on Aniconism at the 2015 IAHR World Conference in Erfurt, Germany.

Anicionic objects from different religious traditions together form a broad category of religious material sources. In fact, it seems both too broad and incoherent. It includes clearly recognizable depictions of wheels, fish, phalli, unmanufactured objects and elements in the natural environment such as unwrought stones, trees, rivers and mountains, fashioned objects, such as stelai and logs, as well as empty spaces, such as vacant seats, and empty rooms. While all of these objects are described as ‘aniconic’ at least in some religious traditions, they differ dramatically in their religious agency and manner of mediating divine presence. A South Asian river can be a Hindu goddess, while it is hardly an image of her. Similarly, a black meteorite could be described as Cybele the mother goddess, yet it does not seem to articulate a vision of the divinity’s imagined appearance. At the same time, a river and a stone have markedly different physical and visual relations to their viewers and worshippers as well as the deities to which they are linked. In order to explore the range of aniconism, Mikael Aktor and Milette Gaifman organised a panel at the 21^st World Congress of the International Association for the History of Religions (IAHR) to discuss these questions. 

In particular panelists were invited to address three themes: How to build up a more precise terminology? There is much confusion as to the meaning of several central words such as ‘representation’, ‘symbol’, ‘icon’, ‘iconicity’, ‘aniconic’ and subcategories of the aniconic such as ‘physiomorphic’, ‘petromorphic’ and more. It is also open to debate as to how many and what categories must or can be included in the aniconic. Is a body relic an aniconic representation of a sacred being? Is fire? It is also common that a god or goddess appears in both anthropomorphic and physiomorphic forms. The river Narmada in Madhya Pradesh, India, is worshipped as a goddess and so is her anthropomorphic image in front of which we find the aniconic banalinga, the direct manifestation of Shiva. What kinds of mediation are going on here? Is the river an ‘aniconic representation of Mother Narmada’ or simply her true form? 

Figure 1: Narmada Temple at the Western point of Mandhata Island in the middle of Narmada River at Omkareshwar, Madhya Pradesh, India. Photo by Mikael Aktor.

Another theme is about historiography. Scholars working in different religious traditions, for instance Greek, Hindu and Buddhist, have often assumed that aniconic symbols predate later pictorial, typically anthropomorphic modes of expression. Recent scholarship has revealed that such periodizations sometimes go together with the hypothesis that early aniconic symbolism was the expression of an original unwillingness to imagine divine beings in iconic forms, an unwillingness that only gradually gave way to iconicity and an anthropomorphic visual imagery. But do such hypotheses stand for a fresh historical scrutiny within single traditions, and if they do, can such developments be explained within general macro-historical frameworks? Lastly, it is interesting to ask questions about how aniconic objects embody and mediate their prototypes. Even if aniconic modes of expression predate iconic imagery, aniconism was never lost. Rather aniconic forms continued to exist as a deliberate choice side by side with anthropomorphic or other iconic representations. What, then, do aniconic forms accomplish in terms of mediating the divine prototypes to which they are related? Also the lack of direct visual links between aniconic objects and the holy or ritually potent presences they mediate raises questions as to how the sensory properties of such objects generate notions of ritual agency and trigger religious thought and practice. Is the missing visual link a way of expressing a more esoteric understanding of the prototype? 

Nine papers were presented at the panel. 

Milette Gaifman critically addressed the genealogy of the notion of ‘aniconism’ from its birth into archeological scholarship in the middle of the 19th century. The word was coined by the German archaeologist Johannes Adolph Overbeck, in the context of an account of the development of ancient Greek art. But it was overlaid with a Protestant ideological bias in favor of transcendence that is inadequate today. The paper also stressed the idea of aniconism as a deliberate choice and showed how Greek gods were given both anthropomorphic and aniconic forms. 

Figure 2: Seat of Zeus and Hekate. Halki Island, Greece. Photo by Milette Gaifman.

Robert G. Bednarik argued that contrary to the widely held belief that iconic palaeoart preceded the aniconic during the early history of humans, palaeoart commenced as non-iconic forms, and in most parts of the world then settled by hominins continued as such during the Pleistocene era. He paid attention to the question of the continuation of aniconism after the introduction of iconicity and the apparent connection between the former and adult initiated groups. He pointed out that the neuroscientific explanation of aniconism shows that it is cognitively more complex than iconic depiction. 

Figure 3: Petroglyph in Kienbachklamm, Austria. Photo by Szojak via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

Jay Johnston considered the materiality and mediality of sacred and ‘magical’ stones in Northern European vernacular belief practices (especially Gaelic traditions). Her paper focused on the materiality and ontology of the objects, their associated visions and the relations such stones are understood to have produced. As sites of divine agency and efficacy the stones were imbued not only with spiritual agency, but also placed within an invisible network of relations that linked individuals, non-human animals, the landscape and the metaphysical realms. 

Jørgen Podemann Sørensen presented material from ancient Egyptian religion, where images of the gods served to secure their presence in the world. Statues used in ritual were the vital presence of the god, and when kings were called ‘the living image’ (as in the name Tutankhamun) of a god, this was really based on the role of statues in ritual. At the same time there was an idea that gods had a ‘true form’, independent of all kinds of iconic or aniconic representation. This was demonstrated by the many iconic and aniconic representations of Osiris. 

Hans Jørgen Lundager Jensen discussed the promotion of aniconism as a general rule for the Yahweh-religion: Images of the god Yahweh were strictly prohibited. The reason for the prohibition was not Yahweh’s inherent indescribability but can be understood in the broader context of the religious revolutions (the so-called ‘axial age‘) in the middle of 1. Mill. BCE. As such it can be regarded as an element in a general transformation from a ‘pre-axial’ type of religion, based on cult, ritual and material culture, to an ascetic, and cognitively sophisticated, form of religion. 

Mikael Aktor presented his field work in Nepal and India on the Hindu pancayatanapuja, a ritual where five deities, Shiva, Vishnu, Surya, Ganesha and Devi, are worshipped in the form of five stones from different locations of South Asia. In particular, he examined the anthropomorphization that seems to take place when aniconic objects are appropriated in devotional rituals of worship. Inspired by Milette Gaifman’s idea of seeing aniconism not as an absolute mode of representation but as part of a spectrum he presented a chart showing the continuity between various aniconic forms. 

Figure 4: Shalagramas (Ammonite fossils), the manifestations of Vishnu, with tilaka marks and facial characteristics. Muktinath, Nepal. Photo by Mikael Aktor.

David L. Haberman presented his research on the worship of landscape elements in Hinduism. He focused on the worshipful interaction with three such natural phenomena: the Yamuna River, sacred trees of Varanasi, and Mount Govardhan. He stressed that although all three would be considered aniconic religious objects, they all have iconic forms as well, typically personified as various gods or goddesses. Like the previous paper, a major aim of the presentation was to examine the devotional tendency to anthropomorphize aniconic objects as a way of manifesting their full being and bringing out their personality—in other words, to draw the iconic out of the aniconic. 

Richard H. Davis discussed the many manifestations of Shiva that we see in South Indian temples as understood from the perspective of Shaivasiddhanta theology. A Shiva temple contains both iconic and aniconic forms, for Shiva to inhabit and for human devotees to worship. Davis presented the varied forms that are transformed ritually into manifestations of Shiva during a Shaiva temple festival, as spelled out in medieval priestly guidebooks. Apart from the aniconic Shivalinga and the anthropomorphic processional icons, these also include a flagpole, a sacrificial fire, a trident, a pot of water, a drum, and a temporary linga made of rice and yogurt. The festival provides a demonstration of Shiva’s divine ubiquity. 

Klemens Karlsson stressed that meanings attributed to objects are not inherent to the objects themselves. Instead, meanings are the result of cultural and historical processes and are constantly changing. The same applies to ‘aniconic’ objects. Early Buddhist cultic sites in South Asia were covered with signs that have been interpreted as ‘aniconic’ representations of the Buddha. This paper focused on the shifting meanings of these signs from the early ‘aniconic’ phase to the time when these signs exist side by side with anthropomorphic presentations of the Buddha and became symbolic signs that serves as vehicles for Buddhist doctrines. 


The panel was convened by Mikael Aktor, co-editor of Objects of Worship in South Asian Religions (Routledge 2015) and Milette Gaifman, author of Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford University Press 2012). 

MLA citation format: Aktor, Mikael "Exploring Aniconism: IAHR 2015 Panel Review" Web blog post. Material Religions. 14 October 2015. [date of access] 

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