Explaining the icon of St-George slaying the dragon to a 4 year old is amazing. Explaining the icon of St-George to a 10 year old is excruciating — “Yeah, but dragons don’t exist, do they?”. Do they? When someone tells you that dragons don’t exist or that monsters don’t exist, what is it they are […]
The icon of the Holy Prophet Jonah is one of the the most ancient images of Christianity. Like the story of this prophet, his image is a powerful symbol of death and resurrection. I want to look closely at the story of Jonah and its iconography because it brings together almost all the elements I […]
This is post 2 of 2 in the series “The Dog Headed Icon of St-Christopher” In my last article on the dog-headed icon of St-Christopher, I promised to take the reader on an encounter with the Saint. In order to do this, we must travel quite far from our main subject of iconography, but this […]
One of the most surprising images one is faced with considering Orthodox liturgical symbolism is the bishop’s staff sporting two snakes flanking a small cross atop it. Especially in a Protestant North American context, this image seems to hark back to ancient chthonian cults, more a wizard’s magic staff than anything Christian. As I have […]