Whore of Babylon
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| The Beast Within: Madonna as Whore of Babylon, reading passages from the Book of Revelation |
On being a fan of Madonna:
I’ve been a great Madonna fan since the start, back in 1983 and ’84, and I’ve been defending her from the very beginning. She’s kind of like my double: we’re both these Italian-American dominatrixes, we both identify strongly with gay men and drag queens, and I think we both had discovered the latent paganism in pornography and Italian Catholicism.
On speaking for Madonna:
Madonna is at her weakest when she tries to explain herself in words… She does her deepest thinking in music and dance. And I think music and dance are the oldest kind of thinking—thinking through the body, through the sensory language of the body… The word obsession of current feminism or of current academe is part of the problem we’re in now.
On Madonna as the Whore of Babylon:
Oh, she is and I love it! [The Whore of Babylon] is really the great goddess of antiquity that Saint Augustine banished, which Judaeo-Christianity thought was buried forever. But see, I believe that paganism has erupted three times since the Dark Ages: I think it was at the Renaissance, at Romanticism, and now with popular culture. I view popular culture with all its unpalatable aspects as an eruption of paganism.
Camille Paglia
(November 1992)
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