Page - 69 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/02

Unruly Images | 69www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/2, 55–86 cated from a missionary point of view, but instead were mostly borrowed from other collections that emphasised the strangeness or unnatural char- acter of the represented scenes. They can be read against the development of anatomical sciences, commenting critically upon bodily postures that do not accord with God-given normality. One example is the famous image of a yogi over a fire that appeared in Bernard and Picart’s archaic work of 1723 and is republished here with a few alterations (fig. 6). While the im- age’s original publication context (fig. 7) emphasised the extreme postures of Indian yogis who were practising austerity “by devotion, in the honour of a god” (in the original French caption), the comment accompanying its republication speaks of “public atrocities” which for the most part were “fortunately” banned by the British.34 Finally, the volume published examples of the iconography of Indian gods such as Brahma, Kali, or Hanuman. While some of these representa- tions obviously reflect Christian apologetics, others were simply copied from traditional iconography. Thus, one image that is allegedly of Kali (fig. 8), actually borrows elements from the Christian iconography of Moloch – with the bull head and the evocation of child sacrifice – and shows nothing even remotely resembling the traditional iconography of 34 Anonymous 1884, 9. See the comment of von Wyss-Giacosa 2006, 165–166 for an analysis of the image’s construction and its relation with an image published in the classical work of the Dutch chaplain active in South India, Abraham Rogerius (1609–1649), De open-deure tot het Verbogen Heydendom 1651. Fig. 8: Panel 30, “India: religion”, “Forced worship of Kali”, Bilder-Tafeln, Calwer Verlagsverein.