For Hyperallergic, Claudia Hart draws parallels between the history of rituals involving the eating and drinking of icons—as detailed by Jérémie Koering in Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images. Click here to purchase the book. Click here to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“The most relevant thing about Iconophages, however, is how a version of this ritualistic consumption has continued into our century. After Trump and his gang of irrational fundamentalists took command, I couldn’t help but read this book as a parable about his particular sphere of the internet, another site of fetishistic consumption filled with icons, as well as logos, emojis, memes — and fueled by the irrational and its symbolic transubstantiation into misinformation and lies. There, we find conspiracy theories about vaccines, climate science, dangerous “others”; there, the cult-like Make America Great Again movement assigns supernatural powers to Trump; there, a different form of consumption, such as the purchasing of iconic meme coins, promises a cure. Internet misinformation is a new form of medieval magical thinking, a populist version of dogma meant to assuage contemporary fears. If we are to learn from Koering’s historical examples, this form of magic never did prolong life or eliminate the plague. Rather, Ideological polemics — the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation — resulted in centuries of hostile feuding tribes. And here we go again.”