Why is Saint Christopher depicted with a dog’s head? Why does the Virgin Mary have three hands and a fish tail? How did Pushkin, Stalin, and football players end up in an icon? “Iconographic chaos” is a book about how the most unusual plots of the Russian icon appeared and what they truly mean. It will tell you about the six-armed Christ, the Orthodox centaur, and the pigeon with four heads. You’ll immerse yourself in mystical images where human life is shown as a labyrinth, where mysterious hands grow from the Crucifixion, and a multitude of eyes looks at the viewer. You’ll see brutal scenes in which saints—and even Jesus himself—take up weapons. You’ll understand how laptops, football balls, and nuclear reactors appeared on sacred images. Together with the author, you’ll decode the meaning of mysterious allegories, take excursions into theology and world history, learn about the most unbelievable Russian conspiracies and beliefs, and see the rarest icons, previously available only to specialists. But most of all, after reading this book, your familiar culture and history will open to you from a completely new, unknown side. Sergey Zotov is a cultural anthropologist, a winner of the “Enlightener” prize for the book “Suffering Middle Ages. Paradoxes of Christian Iconography,” a PhD student at the University of Warwick (UK). He is the creator of a popular blog about unusual icons “Iconographic chaos,” from which the idea for this book originated.