#903: Madonna

A.k.a. Madonna Louise Ciccone

A.k.a. Esther

We introduced the topic of celebrity loons in our last post, and once that topic is broached it is hard to avoid giving an entry to Madonna (and yes, we do feel compelled to cover some of these celebrity loons, since they actually have quite a bit of influence). Madonna is of course famous for being a proponent of Kabbalah; that is, for her own version of Kabbalah, which reduces a complex form of Judaism and mysticism to mainly be about wearing a red string around one’s wrist and believing whatever shit Madonna wants to belive at any given moment. According to traditional Orthodox Judaism women are prohibited from studying Kabbalah, but given her interpretation of Kabbalah, it is doubtful that Madonna has actually violated that rule.

An obviously loon-wooey aspect of Madonna’s fashionable quasi-religious nonsense is her promotion of Kabbalah water, which has nothing to do with Kabbalah but is promoted by a cult called The Kabbalah Centre as a “dynamic, living fractal and crystalline” form of mineral water. Apparently a process called Quantum Resonance Technology “restructures the intermolecular binding of spring water,” and after the salespeople has meditated over it they sell it, expensively, to rich people, including Maddonna, who paid quite a bit to fill Kabbalah water into the central heating system of her mansion (also here and here) and who thinks the mystical water can solve the radiation problem at Chernobyl. It would at least be as effective, one thinks, as Koranic water.

In 2004 Madonna wanted to change her name to Esther, after her mother, to “attach myself to the energy of a different name.” It did apparently not really catch on.

Diagnosis: I suppose it might be said that Madonna is a victim of a scam – but she also perpetuates it, and is obviously guilty of that kind of grandness of ego that makes her perceive her actions as profound in virtue of the very fact that she elects to perform them (i.e. of course her “version” of Kabbalah” is deep – after all, the fact that a person as respectable as her is into it, is enough to confer profundity onto that version).