Alexander McQueen for Givenchy, Spring 1997, balcony of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts during Givenchy's Haute Couture show
Editor’s Note:
Christmas and New Year’s celebrations have always been an item. Christmas is a threshold. The old year dying. The new one gestating. A moment when the world pauses and resets its desires.
The sacred enters flesh. The body becomes luminous. The promise is not purity, but incarnation.
To celebrate is to indulge. To feast. To touch. To gather warmth against darkness. Pleasure becomes protection against despair.
Faith, like sex, asks us to risk ourselves. To open. To surrender. To believe in something that cannot be proven but can be felt.
Welcome to EX VOTO, XXX: a journey through sacred erotica, orgasmic saints, fetishized wounds, angelic hips, tantric cosmologies, pagan afterlives, and the deliciously unholy truth that belief, like sex, has always been about losing control beautifully.
This is not blasphemy. This is theology with a pulse.
Fig 1 Angels in Heaven by Marc DeBauch, 2017
Fig 2 Le festin des Dieux, 1890 by Jean-Baptiste Cariven, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Gaillac
Fig 3 Alexey Kondakov artwork. Ukrainian artist who combines classical art with contemporary cityscapes. His photo collages transfer characters from Renaissance paintings, via Cultura Inquieta Instagram
INTRO: (UN)HOLY CHRISTMAS, SACRED NEW YEAR
Gold light. Incense thick as breath. Bodies kneeling. Silk brushing skin. A virgin giving birth. A god entering flesh. The sacred sliding, unapologetically, into the body. Strip away the carols and consumer glitter and what remains is a drama of penetration, surrender, ecstasy, blood, milk, pain, pleasure, and devotion.
Religion has never been the enemy of desire. It has been its greatest stylist.
Long before pornography had platforms, pixels, or paywalls, the Church perfected a visual language of arousal: parted lips, rolling eyes, pierced flesh, ecstatic collapse, ritualized submission. Faith didn’t repress the erotic—it sanctified it.
Fig 4 1930s Vintage art cover - Maurice Pépin for Le Sourire Magazine
Fig 5 Mike Ludlow (1921 – 2010), Esquire Pin-Up Calendar, 1957-January
Fig 6 and 7 Christian on the couch, 2023 art print / Naughty Santa, gouache on paper 2014 Art Prints by Marc DeBauch
Fig 8 Tom of Finland (Touko Laaksonen) Untitled, 1985 colored pencil on paper
SACRED BEFORE PORN
Before cameras, screens, or printed smut, there were altarpieces.
Religious art was humanity’s first immersive erotic media—designed to overwhelm the senses and seduce the faithful into submission. Churches were not quiet spaces of reflection; they were theaters of sensation. Flickering candlelight. Perfumed air. Choirs vibrating through the ribcage. Knees pressed into stone. Eyes lifted toward bodies floating in impossible states of grace and agony.
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Click HERE for the author's earlier piece Viva La Vulva: When Erotica Meets Sacred Art
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