Sychronicity: Delacroix, me, and a homosexual encounter

Copyright 2018, InterAmerica, Inc.

Those paying attention know I provided a Delacroix painting here the other day; it was his The Death of Sardanapalus [1827]:

The painting, as I noted, popped up while I was listening to Beethoven overtures on YouTube.

The day after posting the painting, my copy of The New Yorker [October 1, 2018] arrived and there on pages 70/71 was a an article about a new Delacroix exhibition by the magazine’s Art Critic, Peter Schjeldahl.

This the day I also received a Delacroix book from Daedalus I had ordered a week earlier.

And scouring that book, I found a painting by Delacroix about Jacob’s wrestling with an angel [Jacob’s Fight with the Angel(s), 1861]

The episode found in the Old Testament in Genesis, Chapter 32:21 ff. where it is written (in my Confraternity/Douay Bible, 1957) that “Someone [sic] wrestled with him [Jacob] until the break of dawn.”

(The footnote for “someone” stated “This someone was an angel.”)

The angel touched  the socket of Jacob’s thigh “so that it was dislocated.” The angel then said “Let me go….” But Jacob said “I will not let you go until you bless me.” which I interpreted as a sexual activity, from reading the Hebraic account in The Hebrew Bible, including it as one example in a booklet I wrote in the 70s: The Biblical Paradigm for Homosexuality.

Today I still see that episode as sexual in nature but ask myself, who or what was that “angel”?

Did Jacob actually fight with an angel of God? Or was it, as the Ancient Astronaut crowd might see it, an extraterrestrial, cavorting around the Mahanaim camp.

At any rate, that all the Delacroix paintings came together in this short time-frame may be trying to tell me something. But what?

RR