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By Joseph Rosenthal, Georgia State University 

“Man shall not live by bread alone,” responds Jesus defiantly in the Gospel of Matthew (4:4) to Satan’s entreaty to break his forty-day fast.  This phrase has been used variously by Christians throughout history as a tribute to the virtues of moderation and as a justification for some of the most extreme forms of asceticism.  Dietary practice is the second most popular domain of religiously motivated self-denial, surpassed only by matters of sex and human intimacy.  The diversity of rituals, laws, and red tape surrounding the consumption of food ranges from prohibitions of basic food types (e.g. shellfish, pork, alcohol, etc.) to extended periods of fasting.  The religious preoccupation with what goes into the body goes well beyond hatred of gluttony, sometimes verging on total caloric restriction. Although usually nothing more than a quirky inconvenience, at its extremes, religious dietary practice is virtually indistinguishable from an eating disorder, and at least as deadly. 

The history of religion abounds with stories of holy men and women claiming to have gone months or even years with little to no food or water.  The theological explanation for such dietary feats is always the same: spiritual nourishment meets all the metabolic needs of the non-eater.  In medieval Europe, voluntary starvation for god went by the name of anorexia mirabilis, or “miraculous loss of appetite,” an affliction—or charism, according to most pre-Renaissance clergy—that almost exclusively affected women.   

Women were particularly drawn to the fast-based lifestyle known as inedia, which often accompanied lifelong virginity, self-flagellation, and a host of other ascetic practices.  Angela of Foligno spurned almost everything but Holy Communion and the puss of the sick, which she described as rivaling the sweetness of the Eucharist.  When force-fed by clergy despairing for her health, Catherine of Siena would induce vomiting by pushing a branch or twig down her throat, in perhaps the earliest recorded case of bulimia.  In actuality, many of these “miraculous maids,” as they were sometimes known, starved themselves to death. 

Today, the Catholic practice of inedia is dead, but the spiritual pursuit of a calorie-free lifestyle persists in many parts of the world.  Claims made by religious people to the effect that they can survive without food are hardly unique to Christianity.  In fact, the majority of such claims come out of Eastern traditions.  In his 1946 book Autobiography of a Yogi, the Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda describes a yogini by the name of Giri Bala who has allegedly lived without food or drink for over fifty years.  As the yogini explains, her prayers as a youth to tame an uncontrollable appetite were answered in the form of a guru, who taught her the “kria technique which frees the body from dependence on the gross food of mortals.” 

For years, highly publicized accounts of Indian monks and sadhus claiming to have survived without food and water for impossible stretches of time have regaled Western audiences.  In the last decade, images of bearded mystics in dusty robes, who starve yet are not consumed, have appeared frequently in newspapers.  In fact, fantastical stories of what Yogananda called “God’s hungerless touch” appear to be so commonplace in India that it would seem long-term foodless survival is something of a banality. 

Shri Hira Ratan Manek is a mechanical engineer from Calicut who claims not to have taken any food since June 18, 1995, save for the occasional glass of tea, coffee or buttermilk (for social purposes only, he insists).  Since 2002, the mutton-chopped yogi has been the subject of international headlines.  According to Manek, all humans can learn to live without food by deriving their energy directly from the sun through the act of solar gazing, a supposedly ancient Jainist practice he claims to have rediscovered, citing Lord Mahavir as his main inspiration.  HRM, as he is known to his followers, lectures around the world to worshipful audiences on the miracles of solar healing and the follies of Western medicine.  But HRM’s inediate (person who lives without food or water) feats pale in comparison to those attributed to Prahlad Jani, an 82-year-old Indian sadhu who denies having had any food or water since 1940.  As Jani explains, a religious experience at the age of 11 acquainted him with the Hindu goddess Amba, who sustains him by pouring heavenly nectar through a hole in his palate. 

Enchanted stories of hunger-less yogis streaming from the East have spawned a number of copycat cases abroad.  In Western countries, most but not all of the religiously-motivated individuals claiming to subsist on, or working towards the fulfillment of, a foodless diet call themselves Breatharians.  While there is no official Breatharian doctrine, most practitioners believe that humans, while equipped to digest food, can be sustained entirely by prana, which is harvested from the air by the act of breathing and from the sun by the act of sungazing (according to the Aryuveda, the main sources of prana are air and sunlight).  In Vedantic philosophy, prana refers to the life-sustaining, vital energy that suffuses all reality.  If anyone could be said to qualify as a figurehead or spokesperson of the Breatharian movement, it is either Wiley Brooks, founder of the Breatharian Institute of America, or Jasmuheen (formerly Ellen Greve), a self-styled Breatharian guru who has authored books such as Pranic Nourishment – Living on Light. 

Breatharianism is not explicitly a Hindu practice (most Hindus would probably prefer to distance themselves from the Breatharian community, if they are even aware that such a thing exists), nor is it associated with any particular religion.  Rather, it is an amalgam of Hindu philosophy, Yogic and Aryuvedic practice, and various New Age currents.  It has also caught the attention of certain quasi-religious dietary movements, most notably Raw Foodism. A popular practice among many raw foodists is “juice fasting,” wherein the only thing consumed for weeks or months is freshly pressed vegetable or fruit juice.  Some of the more diehard practitioners have tried to transition into a full-fledged Breatharian lifestyle, while others are content to join fellow dieters on periodic “fasting retreats.”  Even further along the spectrum of dietary extremism, Breatharianism holds an obvious appeal to the pro-Ana community, an online support network for individuals with eating disorders, where “support” means egging on and mutual encouragement.  Accounts of solar-powered yogis and the teachings of Jasmuheen serve as regular “thinspiration” on pro-Ana forums and other thinspo-themed websites. 

Not surprisingly, Breatharianism in America has had a number of muddy run-ins with the law.  Three deaths have been definitively linked to the starvation cult and to Jasmuheen’s publications in particular, but many more are suspected.  These cases have forced legal experts to grapple with the familiar question of where religious freedom trespasses onto public safety.   

In 1998, after reading Jasmuheen’s book, Lani Morris, a 53-year-old mother of nine, recruited Jim and Eugenia Pesnak to guide her through a 21-day Breatharian initiation program.  During the course of the program, her health deteriorated to the point that she lost the use of her limbs and began to cough black liquid, which the Pesnaks attributed to the effects of spiritual detoxification.  Morris died on July 1 of severe dehydration, kidney failure, and the effects of a stroke.  On November 19 1999, the Brisbane Supreme Court found the Pesnaks guilty of manslaughter.  Earlier that year, the semi-naked body of Breatharian enthusiast Verity Linn was found dead at a remote camp site in the Scottish Highlands.  Her only belongings consisted of a sleeping bag, a copy of Jasmuheen’s book Living With Light, and a diary detailing her descent into starvation. Jasmuheen has denied all responsibility for the deaths in connection with her writings, and expresses doubt that these victims indeed died of hunger.  As of this writing, she has not been officially charged with the deaths of any of her followers, though authorities have seized control of her website. 

While no less fervent in their claims, Western Breatharians have not achieved the same level of “popular legitimacy” enjoyed by Eastern inediate yogis.  And unlike Dr. Sudhir Shah and his team of investigators at Sterling Hospital in Ahmedabad, India, who have devoted thousands of government-funded man-hours attempting to validate such claims (for which they have incurred the censure of organizations like the James Randi Foundation and the Indian Rationalist Association), most American scientists won’t even give Breatharians the satisfaction of their time.  The fact that so many Indian physicians and scientists, including the Indian Defence Institute of Physiology and Allied Sciences (DIPAS), consider inediate claims a worthy subject of medical investigation constitutes a profound failure of their basic scientific and medical educations, and should be a point of national embarrassment.  As it turns out, there is such thing as starvation without hunger.  Breatharian mania at home and abroad is yet another bitter reminder that in the 21^st century, large swaths of the human population are positively starving for rationality, a kind of hunger that can’t be felt, that consumes without always killing its victims, and for which the only known treatment is a sound scientific education.

*********************************

Joseph Rosenthal is very near the completion of a B.A. in Religious Studies at Georgia State University, with a minor in Chemistry. His main areas of interest in Religious Studies are the historical and contemporary relationship between science and religion, the cognitive science and evolutionary psychology of religion, memetics, and the so-called New Atheism. He intends to pursue a Masters degree in Chemistry at Georgia State University, where he currently works in a research lab as a synthetic chemist.  

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By Louis A. Ruprecht, Jr.

On the day after Osama bin Laden’s unexpected death was announced by the US President, a fascinating new exhibition was previewed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.  Entitled “Savage Beauty,” it bore more than a casual relevance to the city’s attempt to grasp the right tone in the twinned face of this assassination and the upcoming decennial commemoration of the September 11^th attacks. 

Naturally, that strange-sounding juxtaposition needs some explanation. It has something to do with the sacred. That is to say, it has something to do with an important aesthetic and religious category very popular among the Romantics: the Sublime. 

The idea was this. Beautiful things make us pause in appreciative wonder, beauty creating a mingled desire to possess or to imitate it.  Sublime things stop us short, dead in our tracks, startling us into a new awareness, and new ways of seeing.  Earthquakes and volcanoes can be sublime, as can the infinite expansiveness of deep space: it is part of Nature’s way of showing us how small we are, how replaceable, how cosmically insignificant.

In that sense, September 11, 2001 was a day punctuated with sublimity, the spiritual shock that stopped a nation in its tracks.  It was a reminder of the savage side of human nature, and of the world, a reminder of beauty’s savage underside.  Even a supernova is beautiful, if you are far enough away from it.

And yet the show at the Metropolitan showcased, of all things, a fashion designer, presenting an elegant and thoughtful combination of what were arguably the most ambitious and theatrical and sublime collections of his generation.

Alexander McQueen was born in Lewisham, South London, on March 17, 1969, the youngest of six children (and the third son) to Ronald and Joyce McQueen.  He died by his own hand on February 4, 2010.  He was only forty.

Alexander McQueen, more than any other living designer, managed to transform the runway show into performance art, and the fact that he choreographed four of these events each year for an explosive and creative span of five years speaks to the restless energy, the extraordinary imaginativeness, and the spiritual ambitions of the man.  If fashion can be conceived as High Art, and the creation of clothing as a Spiritual practice, then it will in something like the terms McQueen—created and left—in his meteoric wake.

McQueen’s meteoric rise through the ranks of a very exclusive club reads like Romantic mythology.  After attending primary school and a lackluster stint at Rokeby, he left school at age 16; he already knew that he wanted to be a designer, an artist.  He worked for two years at Anderson & Sheppard (1985-1987), tailors to royalty, then for one more year at Gieves & Hawkes (1988-1989), working mostly on military tailoring. He apprenticed himself briefly to Koji Tatsuno and Romeo Gigli.

And then he bought a one-way ticket to Milan where he stayed for less than a year (1989-1990).

What he learned in all of this was every aspect of the way in which clothes are made.  He learned cutting and stitching; he learned materials; he learned how to mix media.  He was like a painter learning how to mix paint, to stretch canvases, and draw backgrounds—all before getting an easel of his own.

Back in London and still just 21 years old, McQueen landed a coveted place at Central Saint Martins masters program; he designed his first runway show by way of graduating in 1992. It was called “Jack the Ripper,” and a woman who would become a longtime friend, Isabella Blow, recognized the genius in the thing and purchased the entire collection.

The title of this show bears some reflection, since one of the most recurrent complaints about McQueen’s work was that it displayed a kind of misogyny common enough in one version of the homoerotic fashion gaze. McQueen went to great lengths to counter this criticism by insisting that his fashion was designed to empower women.  “I want people to be afraid of the women I dress,” he said; “It’s almost like putting armor on a woman.  It’s a very psychological way of dressing.” His experience with military tailoring figured in many of his early collections.

Still, McQueen flirted more than casually with bondage, leather, and S&M in later collections. “I especially like the accessory for its sadomasochistic aspect,” he observed, and in a great many cases, his costumes included masks that hid the faces of the women he clothed entirely from view.

McQueen continued to design shows between 1993 and 1997, and he met his most important collaborator, Katy England, in 1994.  These shows garnered attention and remarkable appreciation.  One show in particular, “Highland Rape” (1995-1996), illustrates his purposes best.  Many took the name to be further evidence of his misogyny and celebration of violence against women.

McQueen found such criticism absurd, since the rape in question was clearly the rape of his native Scotland (his father was from the Isle of Skye). The show was a meditation on the Highland Clearings, and McQueen positioned himself in a stunningly original post-colonial position: as a native Scot who nonetheless adored London and cultivated his career in the capital of couture. There is great subterranean violence in his aesthetic, but no victims. The show brought him considerable and much-deserved fame.

So much so that in October of 1996, McQueen was made Chief Designer at Givenchy.  Still only 27 years old, McQueen would now design four shows a year, two haute couture and two ready-to-wear collections.  McQueen sold 51% of his interest in Givenchy to the Gucci Group in December 2000 and moved to Paris.

For the next decade, McQueen designed his own lines for his own house and choreographed shows that dazzled the eye and the imagination alike.  Women on rotating plates were ominously intruded upon by mechanical paint machinery.  Women moved on a chessboard, removing each other from action. Runway models walked through and were slowly drenched by artificial rain.

But his personal life was coming apart, Isabella Blow committed suicide on May 7, 2007, his mother died on February 2, 2010, and McQueen took his own life a week later, on February 11, 2010.

Alexander McQueen consistently identified himself as a Romantic throughout his brief career, and understood the vastly spiritual resonances of the term.  To be sure, suicide at age forty is itself a Romantic trope of long-standing. A voracious reader (he deeply admired Rousseau, Byron and Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, not to mention Delacroix and Beethoven) , he explored various dimensions of the Romantic adventure in different shows. “Highland Rape” (and “Widows of Culloden”), as I noted, were exercises in Romantic nationalism, right down to the tartan plaids. 

It was intellectually demanding fashion, always. “With me, metamorphosis is a bit like plastic surgery, but less drastic.  I try to have the same effect with my clothes.  But ultimately I do this to transform mentalities more than the body.”

Several shows [Dante, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, Angels and Demons] were done almost exclusively in Gothic imagery. “Primitivism” and “Exoticism” were examined in shows [It’s Only a Game, Dance of the Twisted Bull, Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection and

Horn of Plenty] where most of the clothes were made of feathers, skins, horns, West African tribal beads and the like. “Exoticism” was linked to “Naturalism” in shows where nature’s orgiastic violence was linked inextricably to the sublime.

In all of this work the essential theme was beauty’s savagery–the savagery of material, the savagery of the beauty, the savagery of love. “People find my things sometimes aggressive.  But I don’t see it as aggressive.  I see it as romantic, dealing with the dark side of personality.”

This is the most perennial of Romanticism’s many obsessions, and the chief source of its allure. McQueen had the Shakespearean line, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,” tattooed on his upper right arm. That’s from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

A posthumous show was done in Autumn/Winter of 2010-2011, and it is the line with which the Metropolitan show concludes.

Entitled “Plato’s Atlantis,” McQueen imagined it as an exploration of “Darwin’s theory in reverse.” The central theme of the collection is water, and immersion, in the wake created by the global warming and polar melting.  What kind of humanism will emerge from these depths, in a world defined by water rather than land?  What is striking is that this is arguably his most serene and beautiful show, yet the least savage.  It is an imaginary spiritual glimpse beyond, after the deluge.  Nature is sublime; in that deceptively simple statement nineteenth century Romanticism becomes twenty-first century Postmodernism.

All of it tailored to a tee.

Perhaps a poem by Pablo Neruda best captures the essentially spiritual vision in McQueen’s fashion. Here is a portion of his marvelous “Ode to a Suit”:  

• • I ask whether someday
  • a bullet
  • from the enemy
  • will stain you with my blood
  • and then
  • you will die with me
  • or perhaps
  • it may not be
  • so dramatic
  • but simple,
  • and you will gradually  get sick,
  • suit,
  • with me,
  • you will grow old
  • with me, with my body,
  • and together
  • we will enter
  • the earth.
  • That’s why
  • every day
  • I greet you
  • with reverence and then
  • you embrace me and I forget you,
  • because we are one
  • and we will go on facing
  • the wind at might,
  • the streets or the struggle
  • one body,
  • perhaps, perhaps, motionless someday.

 McQueen could be pithier: “There’s blood beneath every layer of skin.” And, as he knew well, moving that blood across the skein of skin is the human heart.  His best work was always a heart-stopper.

A Partial Summary of Alexander McQueen’s Exhibitions

• Jack the Ripper  -  1992
• Taxi Driver  -  1993-1994
• Nihilism -   1994
• Banchee  -  1994-1995
• The Birds – 1995
• Highland Rape  - 1995-1996
• The Hunger – 1996
• Dante - 1996-1997

            [Givency]

•  Untitled  – 1998
• Joan - 1998-1999
• No. 13  - 1999
• The Overlook  – 1999-2000

             [Gucci buy-out]

•  The Dance of the Twisted Bull - 2002
• Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious - 2002/2003
• Deliverance - 2004
• Widows of Culloden - 2006-2007
• La Dame Bleue  -  2008
• Eonnagata  -  2008
• The Girl Who Lived in the Tree  –  2008-2009
• Natural Dis-tinction Un-natural Selection -  2009
• Horn of Plenty - 2009-2010
• Angels and Demons  -  2010-2011
• Plato’s Atlantis -  2010-2011