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The Lost Magic
The primary problem of Protestantism is word-fixation: Scripture-study is at its heart. No fleshly mediator is needed between the soul and God; no images of saints, Mary, or God are permitted, though portraits of the Good Shepherd began to slip into some denominations within the last century. In highly ritualized Italian and Spanish Catholicism, by contrast, there is a constant, direct appeal to the senses. One of my earliest memories is of staring transfixed at a brightly painted statue in a niche near the altar of my baptismal church: boyishly appealing, prettily posed Saint Sebastian, arrows sticking from his bleeding, seminude body. I interpret the ravishing sadomasochistic sensuality of such iconography as evidence of the ancient, buried paganism of Roman Catholicism. Catholic crucifixes and gory depictions of the martyrdom of ecstatic saints preserve the pagan intuition that our lives in the body are submerged in the Dionysian continuum of pleasure-pain.
Mainline American Protestantism, outside the Evangelical movement, systematically repressed both sex and emotion as part of the Puritan bequest.
— Camille Paglia
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Blanche wanted magic, but she didn’t feel she deserved it, or could find a safe place for it. And she had no one with whom she could share it. This is her primary tragedy. People can beat you and place you anywhere they…
