This essay is part of a larger project to think about how some of the very sophisticated theories of image use and abuse – ideas about idolatry and the idol – that were developed within the medieval church might also have impacted on secular culture. While the transfer of the theory, language or iconography of idolatry to secular contexts is sometimes explicitly acknowledged, at other times it takes place in modes that are more subterranean – manifesting itself in underlying thought structures or linguistic or iconographic connotations. I shall argue that in these new contexts the medieval figure of the idol takes on many new implications, to the point that it stands in tension with the anti-idolatry discourses in which the notion of idolatry was originally formulated. In these new contexts the figure of the idol may well retain its complexity, its ‘bodiliness’, its opacity, its fascination and exoticism; it may well continue to raise questions about deadness and aliveness, about surface appearance and what might be ‘inside’; but it may no longer necessarily carry a morally negative loading.