Moths for the flame, jewels for the pigs

In the span of about 15 minutes, I finished a chapter in Denver Snuffer’s The Second Comforter, read two pages in Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan, and checked Synlogos.

In Snuffer, I read:

Putting jewelry on pigs is no more appropriate today than it was when Christ advised against it (p. 176).

This stuck out to me because what Jesus actually advised against was “casting pearls before swine.” The image of a pig actually wearing jewelry is not from Jesus but from the Old Testament:

As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion (Prov. 11:22).

I then read this in Yuknavitch:

Everyone’s last wish turned out to be love: may I be consumed by the simplicity of a love story, any love . . . It was a wish like the moth’s wish for flame. It was a wish to fuck the sun. To be burned alive inside a story . . . (p. 15).

I then checked Synlogos. I don’t normally read Vox Day’s Sigma Game blog, but the title made me click in spite of myself: “Pretty Moths Drawn to Hellfire.” It’s about Manic Pixie Dream Girls, and as in Yuknavitch, the flame they are drawn into is a “story.” The post warns others not to get drawn into “this contagiously story-driven passion.”

The first comment on Vox’s post, by someone called The Keeper of the Flame, includes this quote from the Bible:

"Like a gold ring in a pig's snout, is a beautiful woman without discretion." --Proverbs 11:22