“The important thing to remember about A-Rod is that he has ginormous purple genitals.”

So speaketh Wisdom in the form of an email from a reckless horndog I know whose life I frequently fear for, as he flirts with danger from the driver’s seat of a nasty black SUV and has lived to tell the tale, probably because he can read trade the way a crack sniper reads the landscape for the false flutter of leaves that aren’t leaves at all but camouflage on the move.

Ginormous purple genitals — can so poetic a phrase be repeated too often? — was his dead-on call when the rumor was floated recently in a slew of overblown tabloids that Madonna had left her dicky hubby for everyone’s favorite mixed-race, 6-foot-3 baseball player wet-dream Alex Rodriquez, he of the mocha-latte skin and slate-green eyes, the tight white pinstripes and prominent athletic cup.

Prominent athletic cups have always been the signature style of the Kabbalah Girl, so late of the Material World. Yet though she was named in this week’s divorce filing from A-Rod’s wife, Madonna shot the allegation down over the weekend. “I have nothing to do with the state of his marriage or what spiritual path he may choose to study,” she told People in a formal statement released through her press agent.

At the center of this otherwise conventional sex drama was, of all things, religion.

Rodriguez’s wife Cynthia was claiming that her 32-year-old husband had been lured from her bedside by the … ageless, shall we say?… Queen of Pop, who had enticed the power hitter into a study of 13th century rabbinical writings, overwhelming the young pup with dusty Talmudic numerology and Kabbalistic word counts, which everyone knows is as catnip to mesomorphs with purple genitals.

Let us forget for a moment that this strange tale sounds suspiciously like the opening gambit in a soon-to-be ex-wife’s divorce negotiations, or that Madonna, never one to be shy about her man entanglements, has made a point this week of being seen holding hands with her husband in many public places, or that the pop star is about to embark on a world tour and frankly a sex scandal can’t hurt. Let us put aside, you and I, absolutely everything we know about how real people really behave and believe, as the gutter press is so happy to, this midsummer’s tale of sex, God and A-Rod.

The story, to be fair, is not without some friendly echoes from the world the rest of us live in. Athletes — especially the kind that are as porn-set-ready as A-Rod (even the nickname has a familiar ring to it, that of a dully salacious double entendre so beloved in the phallo-centric skin-flick world) – athletes are particularly vulnerable to such mystic appeals.

Kabbalah, or the brightly packaged brand that Madonna practices with its red string bracelets (to ward off the Evil Eye) and white uniforms (to attract positive vibes) is a sort of pantheistic embrace: God is everywhere, and everything is God. This is a doctrine common to many esoteric traditions and one that is particularly attractive to celebrities and other children of destiny who at some level know that lucky breaks had a lot to do with their current superb status.

A blue-sky view of the world, then, that works as long as you’re sufficiently self-involved and massively indulged, and never need to consider the gnarled contradiction at its root. If everything is God than Evil is God too. There’s no such thing as opposing ethical values. Good and Evil are merely the same God speaking with different accents, one pleasant, one harsh. One can not get away from the notion that such a bipolar despot must be constantly humored, with red strings and white pantsuits; the Evil Eye that is to be warded off is His own.

Doubtless, these complexities kept A-Rod and Madonna up all night when he’d slip away for moonlight visits — so alleges his wife — while Madonna’s husband was… elsewhere. Certainly the Ouija-board aspect of Kabbalah must have captured the vivid, strictly platonic imaginations of these two children of paradise:

Like a Rosetta Stone dropped from heaven, the Kabbalah promises to reveal all the answers in the universe to those who can bypass the literal meaning of the Hebrew scriptures and concentrate on the sounds and placements of the Aramaic letters, which are believed to comprise a second, secret text. It is a system in which letters are converted to numbers based on their position in the alphabet, and the sum is converted back to another word — a truer occult word — that shares the same sum. Think Da Vinci Code but without Jesus, Mary Magdalene or Da Vinci.

Of course, all the answers to the universe may be a bit overkill if you’re already the highest paid baseball player on earth and all you want is to dock your ginormous purpleness in the warm, welcoming, hopefully surgically tightened harbor of another American icon, Joe DiMaggio to Marilyn Monroe, who guards this harbor and looks down into your eyes, for surely this Marilyn is on top, much like the lit-up Statue of Liberty.

No further quest for answers is necessary for C-Rod (as Cynthia Rodriquez is — was? — called). She blames the end of her marriage not so much on Madonna as on Kabbalah, which as occult second meanings go, has a nice alimony-upping sound to it. It must have slipped her mind the simply smashing facework Madonna started showing off last April, or the taut, power body Madonna has maintained by years of arduous training, macrobiotic meals and of course that red string bracelet.

Madonna, after so many decades in the sun, has now acquired something of the eternal about her. She has reached that age known as ageless, a misty estate without discernable borders, succinctly summed up by Bea Arthur, channeling Jerry Herman, as “somewhere between 40 and death.” (Madonna, of course, passed 40, doing 60, a while back.)

Madonna is one of the lucky ones. She has none of the signs of the botched face job; nothing about her looks too pulled or too surprised or too ghastly in a smile. She reminds me now of late-period Peggy Lee, circa The Dean Martin Show.

Peggy Lee never really looked old. Of course, the woman never moved on stage either, which would have been the giveaway, She would just appear all of a sudden standing stock still against a black background, her skin luminescent in the spotlight, with full, soft cheeks, everything silky and milky and smooth. Madonna has that same contentedly bovine look, minus, of course Peggy’s dazed, prescription-drug smile.

Interesting how Madonna never bought into the rock romance with self-destruction. No Amy Winehouse ticking-clock suicide behavior for her. Nothing, it seems, has ever been quite so interesting for Madonna as making lots and lots of money. (Earlier this year she surpassed Elvis Presley as the artist with the most top ten hits in the history of Billboard Hot 100.)

Kabbalah Girl? SEX Girl? The hidden text inside Madonna is that she has always been the Consummate Career Girl.

A-Rod will just have to wait in line, ginormous purpleness and all.