The Virgin Made Visible: Intercessory Images of Church Territory in Egypt

Abstract

In the dark midnight hours of 11 December 2009, the Virgin Mary (al-‘adhra) burst into visibility against the skyline of al-Warraq, a working-class district on the neglected peripheries of Giza, Egypt. Hovering within a glowing triad of crosses, the apparition attracted spectators to the Church of the Virgin and the Archangel Michael along the main thoroughfare, Nile Street, even in the inconvenient hours between dusk and dawn. Within days, the Virgin was being discussed far and wide by Christians and Muslims, Egyptians and foreigners, skeptics and believers. Reactions were diverse: A journalist announced to his friends, “Even if the Virgin appeared before my very eyes, I would deny her.” A cab driver explained, “It is a trick, a big laser show in the sky.” A young mother urged, “Why [forbid oneself] the joy that the Virgin brings?”

A minority at the bar: Revisiting the Coptic Christian (in-)visibility

“…In addition to the street demonstrations, anthropologists Anthony Shenoda (2010; 2012) and Angie Heo (2012; 2013; 2018) have also looked at other aspects of visibility that are not only necessarily situated in the revolutionary moment of 2011, but also still operate in dispute with the ‘entente’ between the state and the Church. The visibility that Shenoda and Heo write about is mainly connected to divine interventions from heaven.…”

“…Similarly, Heo investigates the circulation and the mediation of Saints’ apparitions through material pictures but also interrelated ‘heavenly’ lights. For example, Heo discusses ‘how the politics of [Saints’] intercession is distinct from the politics of clerical arbitration [of the Coptic Church] and state citizenship, and how it puts forward a representational order that transcends the marginalizing terms in which Coptic Egyptian belonging continues to cast’ (Heo, 2012: 366).…”

Figurations and Sensations of the Unseen in Judaism, Christianity and Islam

“…Orthodox image practices in the shadow of the Second Commandment thus turn our attention to the ways in which images are not just products of the imagination, but embedded in particular material traditions of depiction. Th e picture is not just an expression of a mental image formed by an artist, but an outcome of an authoritative tradition whose aim is to shape and constrain a 'saintly imagination' ( Heo 2012 ) as much as to stimulate it. If we accept that most people practice religion within an established environment of artefacts, bodily practices, sounds and other sensory stimuli, then the question is no longer why people resort to supernatural explanations in the absence of sensory evidence.…”

Does God Exist in Methodological Atheism? On Tanya Lurhmann's When God Talks Back and Bruno Latour

“… Eastern orthodoxy has been a particularly rich domain. For instance, work by Hanganu () on icons in Romania or Angie Heo's (, ) recent pieces on the circulation and visibility of relics and apparitions in Coptic Christianity. Closer to forms of religiosity that are in identifiable dialogue with the North American Pentecostal/Charismatic Christian scene are Fenella Cannell's work on the materiality of Christianity both in Catholic Bicol () and in the Utah‐based Church of the Latter Day Saints ().…”