Demonic Bodies and the Dark

Ecologies of Early Christian Culture

Travis W. Proctor
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/demonic-bodies-and-the-dark-ecologies-of-early-chris
tian-culture-travis-w-proctor/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early

Christian Culture Travis W. Proctor

https://ebookmass.com/product/demonic-bodies-and-the-dark-
ecologies-of-early-christian-culture-travis-w-proctor-2/

Aristotle’s Theory of Bodies Christian Pfeiffer

https://ebookmass.com/product/aristotles-theory-of-bodies-
christian-pfeiffer/

The Evil Creator : Origins of an Early Christian Idea

M. David Litwa

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-evil-creator-origins-of-an-
early-christian-idea-m-david-litwa/

The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Biblical

Interpretation Paul M. Blowers

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-early-
christian-biblical-interpretation-paul-m-blowers/
Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of
Modern Sound Culture Shawn Vancour

https://ebookmass.com/product/making-radio-early-radio-
production-and-the-rise-of-modern-sound-culture-shawn-vancour/

Animals and Sacred Bodies in Early Medieval Ireland:

Religion and Urbanism at Clonmacnoise John Soderberg

https://ebookmass.com/product/animals-and-sacred-bodies-in-early-
medieval-ireland-religion-and-urbanism-at-clonmacnoise-john-
soderberg/

Philo of Alexandria and the construction of Jewishness

in early Christian writings First Edition, Impression:
1. Edition Jennifer Otto

https://ebookmass.com/product/philo-of-alexandria-and-the-
construction-of-jewishness-in-early-christian-writings-first-
edition-impression-1-edition-jennifer-otto/

Biblical Interpretation in Early Christian Gospels:

Volume 4: The Gospel of John Thomas R. Hatina

https://ebookmass.com/product/biblical-interpretation-in-early-
christian-gospels-volume-4-the-gospel-of-john-thomas-r-hatina/

A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in

Christian Transmission Alexander Kulik (Editor)

https://ebookmass.com/product/a-guide-to-early-jewish-texts-and-
traditions-in-christian-transmission-alexander-kulik-editor/
Demonic Bodies and the Dark Ecologies of Early
Christian Culture
 Demonic Bodies and the Dark
Ecologies of Early Christian Culture
TRAVIS W. PROCTOR
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and
certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2022
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in
writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under
terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning
reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department,
Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same
condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Proctor, Travis W., author.
Title: Demonic bodies and the dark ecologies of early Christian culture /
Travis W. Proctor. Other titles: Rulers of the sea
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2022] |
Originally presented as author’s Thesis (Ph.D.—University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,
Department of Religious Studies, 2017) under the title: Rulers of the sea) |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021049822 (print) | LCCN 2021049823 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197581162 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197581186 (epub) | ISBN 9780197581193
Subjects: LCSH: Human body—Religious aspects—Christianity—
History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. |
Demonology—History of doctrines—Early church, ca. 30–600. |
Rites and ceremonies—History—To 1500. | Church history—Primitive and early church, ca.
30–600.
Classification: LCC BT741.3.P76 2022 (print) | LCC BT741.3 (ebook) |
DDC 233/.5—dc23/eng/20211109
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049822
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021049823
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197581162.001.0001
For my parents, with love and gratitude.
 Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Evil Entanglements

1. Disabled Demons: Demonic Disembodiment in Second Temple
Judaism and the Gospel of Mark
2. Bodiless Demons: Ignatius of Antioch, the Coptic Apocalypse of
Peter, and the Demonic Body of Jesus
3. Changeable Demons: Demonic Polymorphy, “Magic,” and
Christian Exorcism in the Writings of Justin Martyr
4. Belly-Demons: Clement of Alexandria and Demonic Sacrifice
5. Abject Demons: Tertullian of Carthage, Roman “Religion,” and
the Abject Body
Conclusion: Christians among Demons and Humans

Notes
Bibliography
Index
 Acknowledgments

My fascination with demons began early in my academic journey,

when I wrote an undergraduate thesis at Washington University in
St. Louis on the demonology of Justin Martyr’s Apologies. This book
is in many ways a sequel to that initial venture, and thus over a
decade in the making. A project with such a long history
accumulates many debts.
First, I am deeply grateful to Bart Ehrman, whose patient
guidance of this project in its form as a doctoral dissertation at UNC-
Chapel Hill was essential to its success. Bart provided stalwart
mentorship, attentive guidance, and careful feedback at every stage
of the work. It would be a much inferior project, and I a much lesser
scholar, if not for his direction.
Elizabeth Clark welcomed me into her courses and intellectual
community with open arms, providing good company, stimulating
conversation, and valuable feedback all along the way. Zlatko Pleše
and James Rives likewise provided careful comments and feedback,
often supplying important yet patient correctives. Other faculty
members at UNC similarly furnished support and guidance: Randall
Styers, Juliane Hammer, David Lambert, Lauren Leve, Laurie Maffly-
Kipp, Jodi Magness, Omid Safi, Jes Boon, and Brandon Bayne,
among others.
I owe a deep debt to others who have read all or parts of the
manuscript in its various forms: Annette Yoshiko Reed, Dale Martin,
Jennifer Knust, Mark Letteney, Heidi Marx, and Dayna Kalleres.
Special thanks are due to the friends and colleagues who have
inspired me with great conversation and supportive comradery:
Andrew Aghapour, Matthew Hotham, Michael Muhammad Knight,
Leif Tornquist, Nathan Schradle, Megan Goodwin, Ilyse Morgenstein-
Fuerst, Kathy Foody, Anne Blankenship, Stephanie Gaskill, Shannon
Schorey, Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Jenna Supp-Montgomerie, Shaily
Patel, Jason Combs, Jason Staples, Brian Coussens, Erin Walsh, Julie
Lillis, Jeremiah Bailey, CJ Schmidt, Brad Erickson, Bo Eberle,
Benjamin White, and Pam Mullins Reaves.
I am appreciative of the support of the North American Patristics
Society, whose Dissertation Completion Grant furnished additional
time for research and writing. I am also indebted to the Dolores
Zohrab Liebmann fund, which provided funding for teaching releases
at important stages of my research and writing.
Before my time in North Carolina, I benefited from the great
mentorship of Religious Studies and Classics faculty at Washington
University in St. Louis, especially Roshan Abraham, Jonathan
Schwiebert, and Daniel Bornstein.
Steve Wiggins has been an excellent editor who expertly guided
me through the review and editing process. The anonymous readers
at OUP, whose generosity was matched only by their careful
attention to detail, made very helpful suggestions that improved the
manuscript.
I owe thanks to the many students at UNC-Chapel Hill, Northland
College, and, most recently, Wittenberg University, who have
humored the ways in which demons seem to show up in all corners
of Religious Studies courses.
I am grateful for my friends and former colleagues at Northland
College, especially Kyle Bladow, Jessica Eckhardt, Dave Ullman, Kate
Ullman, Emily Macgillivray, Kevin Schanning, Brian Tochterman, Ruth
de Jesus, Erica Hannickel, Jason Terry, Leslie Alldritt, and Tim Doyle,
who provided great intellectual comradery and friendship as this
project was transitioning from its dissertation to book phases.
Thanks are also (and especially) due to David Saetre, my
predecessor in teaching Religious Studies at Northland, whose
friendship and mentorship were invaluable as I began my
postgraduate career.
At Wittenberg University so many have provided guidance and
support, including Nancy McHugh, Chris Raffensperger, Michelle
Mattson, Heather Wright, and Julius Bailey. My greatest debt of
gratitude is owed to Jennifer Oldstone-Moore, whose friendship,
mentorship, and support have been unfailing.
This project would not have been possible without the steadfast
support of the library staffs at UNC-Chapel Hill, Northland College,
and Wittenberg University. In particular, to Elizabeth Madsen-
Genszler, Julia Waggoner, Suzanne Smailes, Karen Balliet, and Lori
Judy: thank you.
No other person supported me over the length of this project
more than Casey Proctor, whose intelligence, good humor, and
abiding love make the work worth doing, and worth taking a break
from. My two children, Caroline and Jackson, have constantly
reminded me how fun it is to learn new things. My sister Heather
and niece Madison have provided unwavering support and good
laughs along the way. This book is dedicated to my parents, David
and Tina Proctor, whose selfless care and unending support nurtured
my love of learning, even when it took me far from home and into
the unfamiliar worlds of academia. May this be a small token of
gratitude for all that they have given me.
 Introduction
Evil Entanglements

Demons and Bodies in the Ancient

Mediterranean
This is a book about demons—the residual spiritual offspring of
primordial fallen angels (or fallen angels themselves) who waged an
obstinate onslaught on humans in general, and the followers of
Jesus in particular.1 But reader beware: demons are notorious for
telling half-truths. In his Literal Commentary on Genesis, published
in the early fifth century, Augustine explains that demons use their
“far more subtle” (longe subtilior) bodies to inform humans of events
that have occurred elsewhere in the world, deceiving humans into
thinking that their informants possessed skills of divination
(12.17.34–38). Similarly, the second-century Christian apologist
Tatian advises his readers that demons “slip on the masks” of the
Greco-Roman gods in order to fool unsuspecting worshipers into
offering them sacrifice (Address to the Greeks 16.1).2 Christian
writers also warned that those who consort with demons are
sometimes apt to take up their ways, falsehoods included. It will
become clear that the present author is no exception, as this book-
about-demons will at times shapeshift into a book-about-humans,
and back again.
According to early Christian accounts, demons afflicted human
victims with harmful maladies, usurped their bodies, and dissuaded
or distracted them from appropriate worship practices. On these
points, Christians largely agreed. On other demonological issues,
Christians diverged. Are demons gaining strength, or waning in
importance? Do demons “haunt” particular places, or is their
presence primarily occasioned by certain human actions? Do demons
have their own bodies, or are they purely “ethereal” entities that can
only inhabit the bodies of others (e.g., humans and nonhuman
animals)? The latter question was apparently the subject of some
dispute. According to Origen of Alexandria, for example, some
Christians claimed that demons were incorporeal, while others
argued for the “fine” corporeality of demons:

Now this [demonic body] (daemonici corporis) is by nature a fine substance and
thin like air (subtile quoddam et velut aura tenue), and on this account most
people think and speak of it as incorporeal . . . It is customary for everything
which is not like [the human body] to be termed incorporeal by the more simple
and uneducated of humans (incorporeum a simplicioriubus vel imperitioribus
nominatur) just as the air we breathe may be called incorporeal because it is not a
body that can be grasped or held or that can resist pressure. (On First Principles,
pref.8; emphasis mine)3

Even a brief survey of early Christian literature substantiates Origen’s

observation: early Christians held variant viewpoints on demonic
(in)corporeality. Several Christian writers depict demons as lacking
bodies; Ignatius of Antioch, for example, refers to demons as
“bodiless” and contrasts their ethereal existence with the “flesh” of
human corporeality (Letter to the Smyrnaeans 2–3).4 Other Christian
authors, by contrast, posit that demons indeed have bodies, even if
composed of thin material “stuff” (see later discussion).5
But what would it have meant to argue over whether a demon
has a “body,” especially in the context of Greco-Roman antiquity?
Origen’s previously quoted comments regarding the “fine” or “thin”
body of demons alert the modern reader to the important
observation that while ancient terms for the body (Gr., σῶμα; Lat.,
corpus; Copt., ⲥⲱⲙⲁ) parallel modern usage in their reference to the
“physical” bodies of humans and other creatures, they were also
frequently applied to a much broader range of “embodied” entities
that had a more ethereal material composition. In his landmark
treatment of the issue, Dale Martin helpfully traced how post-
Cartesian dichotomies between “immaterial” mind/soul and
“material” body can be misleading when applied to the ancient
world.6 Most significantly, it should be stressed that “corporeal” did
not always simply equate to possessing a body similar in “material”
composition to humans. Rather, as Gregory Smith puts it, ancient
conceptions of the body comprised “a more or less finely graded
range of material existence, ranging from the tangible human body
and its parts (inside and out), to the fine-material stuff of souls,
demons, and air (including pneuma in its various forms).”7 Many
ancient thinkers, for example, held that embodiment might be
defined not only by physical constitution, but also by the ability to
act or be acted upon, extension through space, or three-
dimensionality. The Epicurean Lucretius, for example, held that the
possession of corporeality was necessary in order for anything to act
or be acted upon; every active being in the world, therefore,
including ethereal entities such as souls, were necessarily considered
“embodied” in Lucretius’s understanding.8 Stoic intellectuals similarly
argued that corporeality was not restricted to those entities
possessing bodies similar to humans, but extended to anything that
exists within the world (whatever its substance).9 Finally, Clement of
Alexandria and Tertullian of Carthage, the subjects of Chapters 4 and
5, respectively, equate corporeality with possessing three dimensions
(length/height, depth, and breadth), rather than a specific material
constitution.10 These intellectuals are just a few examples of what
we might call “expansive corporealists,” that is, ancient thinkers or
traditions that were willing to grant corporeality even to entities that
were composed of rather ethereal “stuff.” This concept means that
we, as modern readers, must allow ancient terminology for “body” to
encompass a wider range of entities than our cognate terminologies
typically permit.
Significantly, ancient writers from a wide variety of intellectual
traditions included demons among the classes of embodied entities,
a point superbly laid out by Gregory Smith in his 2008 article “How
Thin Is a Demon?”11 But in such cases, what was the “stuff” of the
demonic body? Many writers of the ancient Mediterranean—Greco-
Roman traditionalists and Christian intellectuals among them—
characterized demons as possessing bodies made of pneuma
(“spirit”; πνεῦμα, spiritus, ⲡⲛⲉⲩⲙⲁ).12 In antiquity, pneuma often
referred simply to “breath” or “spirit,”13 but was also used to
describe the composition of “thin-bodied” entities (e.g., the human
soul, angels, demons). The Christian apologist Tatian, for example,
claimed that the composition of demons was “spiritual”
(πνευματικός).14 Origen of Alexandria similarly asserted that the air
in the atmosphere around the earth was of similar substance to that
of demons.15 The Neoplatonist Porphyry of Tyre also argued that
demons had bodies (or “vessels”) composed of pneuma, which
allowed these entities to change shape and become visible to
humans.16 As a final example, the Greek Magical Papyri (PGM)
include spells that seem to presume the pneumatic composition of
“demonic” assistants.17
Ancient descriptions of demonic composition as “pneumatic” or
“soul-like” might imply to contemporary readers that demons were
indeed “bodiless,” or perhaps lacking “solid” material physiology. But,
as Smith aptly notes, “when it comes to demons in Roman and later
antiquity . . . tidy material divisions between mind and body are best
checked at the door.”18 Indeed, ancient writers typically
characterized pneuma as “fine material”—that is, it possessed some
form of material “stuff,” even if imperceptibly so.19 Demons’
pneumatic or “airy” physiology, moreover, was closely related to their
residence in the “intermediate” atmosphere between earth and the
heavens, a connection noted by several ancient authors.20 For many
in antiquity, therefore, the “stuff” of the demonic body was as real
and tangible as the air humans breathe and the atmosphere that
envelops the earth. “Demons . . . were thoroughly mixed up with
matter,” Smith fittingly concludes.21
Nevertheless, despite the relative popularity of expansive
corporealism, not every ancient thinker was quite so eager to extend
embodiment to ethereal entities like demons. Most famously, Plato
(and many of his intellectual successors) posited a rather strong
dualism between body and soul, arguing that the soul as an
“intelligible” entity should be distanced from the “corporeal” nature
of the body.22 What is more, we have seen already how Origen
disparages the “simple and uneducated” for equating “incorporeal”
with, so to put, “things that do not have bodies like humans” (see
previous discussion). Tertullian of Carthage makes a similar remark
with regard to the soul, noting that “the tenuousness and subtlety
(tenuitatis subtilitas) of its structure militates against the belief in its
corporeality” (On the Soul 9.6).23 Tertullian’s and Origen’s comments
both attest that, despite their own expansive corporealism, other
thinkers in antiquity often equated “corporeality” with “possessing a
body similar to that of humans”; in such cases, demons would
presumably be classified as “incorporeal” (ἀσώματος). Within early
Christian literature, we encounter a likely example of such reasoning
in the work of Ignatius of Antioch.24
Nevertheless, as Dale Martin has noted, “for most ancient
philosophers, to say that something was incorporeal was not to say
that it was immaterial.”25 Indeed, while “incorporeal” was sometimes
used to indicate that something lacked the normal “fleshly” body of
humans, this did not necessarily mean that an entity was purely
immaterial or lacking a physical constitution altogether.26 Rather,
strict immateriality or incorporeality was most often reserved for the
highest divine beings (or abstract concepts and ideas); entities that
acted within the mundane or supra-mundane cosmos were typically
presumed to have some kind of physical constitution, whether or not
it was characterized as a “body.”27 This is a significant insight for
what follows, in that even when demons are described as (or implied
to be) incorporeal, they were still often imagined to be active agents
in the world, wreaking havoc despite (or thanks to) their rather thin
physiques.
Demonic Bodies captures the diversity of early Christian portrayals
of demonic (in)corporeality by exploring instances in which Christian
writers explicitly ascribe some form of corporeality to demons (e.g.,
Chapters 3, 4, and 5) as well as cases in which it is implied that
demons lack bodies (e.g., Chapters 1 and 2). While Origen opines
that such ideational diversity is due to varying levels of intelligence
among Christians, my findings suggest that Christian demonological
discrepancies are informed at least in part by concomitant
divergences concerning the makeup of the (ideal) Christian body. Put
another way, Christian demonological constructions took shape in
tandem with concurrent anthropological concepts. My interest in the
Christian body signals my indebtedness to gender- and cultural-
studies scholarship that traces the social contingency of human
embodiment. Studies of early Christianity have drawn extensively on
this brand of scholarship,28 but one aspect of ancient embodiment
has remained relatively underexplored: the interconnection between
cultural constructions of the body and surrounding nonhuman
environments. This approach requires the marshaling of new
theoretical resources for telling fresh histories of the early Christian
cosmos.

Theorizing Early Christian Ecologies

Scholars, activists, and civic leaders are increasingly grappling with
what it means—and will mean—to be human in a time when the
bearers of that label have wrought destruction on a grand scale to
ecosystems, creatures, and global environments. Many
contemporary scholars have argued that modern constructions of
the human body as separate and disconnected from its surrounding
nonhuman environments have been primary culprits in historical
ecological malpractice. Bruno Latour famously argued in We Have
Never Been Modern that one of the distinctive “practices” of
modernity has been the creation of “two entirely distinct ontological
zones: that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans
on the other.”29 Linda Nash has traced similar histories within the
realms of medicine and environmentalism, noting how (premodern)
“ecological” anthropologies typically viewed human bodies as
“malleable and porous entities that were in constant interaction with
the surrounding environment,” whereas the “modern” period
witnessed the creation “of a distinct and bounded body, clearly
separate from its environment.”30 Contemporary environmental
theorists frequently point to this distinctly “modern” view of the
body, most often traced to the thought of Descartes, as the root
cause for modern mistreatment of nonhuman nature. And so Laurel
Kearns argues, for example, that the “dualism” between human and
nonhuman has led to the “othering” of nonhuman entities and
environments (as well as humans associated with them), and thus to
their designation as entities “deserving less respect, less justice, and
less acknowledgment.”31
In response, posthumanist theoretical perspectives have
scrutinized the historical consolidation of “human” as a cultural
category, while also drawing attention to the many interconnections
between humans and nonhuman ecosystems, as part of a general
attempt at disrupting the isolation of humans from their nonhuman
contexts.32 A “posthuman” approach, then, designates “the
variegated efforts to rethink the human,” which collectively respond
“to the legacies of humanism by breaking up, fracturing, distributing,
and decentralizing the self-willing person, questioning its subjectival
unity and epistemological conceits.”33 Along such lines, Kim TallBear
calls on scholars to investigate how humans and other (nonhuman)
entities “are coconstituted with cultural, political, and economic
forces.”34 Through this process, we can begin the process of
“thinking-with” the nonhuman, such that “the domain of ways of
being and knowing dilates, expands, [and] adds both ontological and
epistemological possibilities.”35
Such “posthuman” connections are not unique to our modern
period; rather, humans and nonhuman others “have always
performed an intricate dance with each other. There was never a
time when human agency was anything other than an interfolding
network of humanity and nonhumanity.”36 The historical connections
between humans and nonhumans push us to consider not only
posthuman futures, then, but also what we might call “prehuman”
pasts—that is, how premodern humans historically conceived of their
relationship with nonhuman entities and environments in ways that
trouble human/nonhuman boundaries.37 In this way, Denise Kimber
Buell notes how “the ‘post’ of posthumanism need not indicate an
attempt to ‘get beyond’ the human but rather a marker of the desire
to question and transform what humanness can be and may
become.”38 Demonic Bodies posits that early Christian cosmologies
provide key opportunities for exploring such “prehuman” ecologies,
and that investigating ancient ecosystems has the potential both to
inform our understandings of ancient subjectivity and to dilate
contemporary theories of human/nonhuman interconnections.
Extant early Christian texts reveal the degree to which ancient
writers (and, most likely, many of their readers) imagined and
experienced themselves to be enmeshed in cosmic environments
teeming with hosts of nonhuman entities, including god(s), demons,
angels, ghosts, and nonhuman animals, to name but a few.
Nevertheless, when entities such as demons and angels have been
considered in early Christian studies, they have typically been
grouped under analyses of “supernatural” cosmologies, rather than
the “real” environments as part of which humans lived and moved.
This categorization may be due in part to the difficulty of assessing
the impact of entities, such as demons or angels, which are less
“available” to modern readers for close analysis and investigation.
Nevertheless, it must be emphasized that nonhuman entities were
no less impactful to ancient Christian worldviews and lived realities,
as the ancient Christian body “was embedded in a cosmic matrix in
ways that made its perception of itself profoundly unlike our own.”39
Ellen Muehlberger has traced similar insights with respect to ancient
angels, noting how such nonhuman entities “are real to religious
practitioners” insofar as they are capable of “influencing behavior
and the generation of new ideas because they are given parts of late
ancient Christian culture.”40 In this vein C. Michael Chin has called on
scholars to conduct multifaceted “cosmological historiographies,”
which duly appreciate that “events and actions are necessarily the
products of multiple interacting agents, only some of whom are
human.”41 Demonic Bodies investigates how Christian writers of the
first–third centuries CE created Christian modes of thought and
practice as co-constitutive with nonhuman, demonic entities. While
previous studies have emphasized the significance of demons for
issues of early Christian identity and practice, I turn attention
specifically to the demonic body (or its absence), noting how it was
part of the broader production of multispecies (i.e., human and
nonhuman) cosmological ecosystems.
My focus on demonic and human (in)corporeality builds upon the
robust scholarly interest in ideational perceptions and portrayals of
the body. In this line of inquiry, the body and its concomitant
materiality or gender/sexuality are not natural attributes, but
culturally contingent products of ideological constructions. I examine
how the body is a “performative” entity, or “a stylized repetition of
acts” that produces the corporeal “self.”42 My focus on early Christian
ritual, in particular, traces how bodies emerge through “a process of
materialization,”43 entailing “reiterative and citational” practices that
echo and allude to prior corporeal performances.44 To aid in my
exploration of the body’s relation with nonhuman entities, I utilize
the lens of “trans-corporeality,” adapted from the work of
environmental theorist Stacy Alaimo. This concept calls attention to
the ways in which “the human is always intermeshed with the more-
than-human world,” to such an extent that “the substance of the
human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment.’ ”45 Trans-
corporeality draws attention to the fact that humans are constantly
ingesting, absorbing, or coming into contact with air, water, plants,
animals, toxins, bacteria, and viruses, to name just a handful of the
nonhuman entities that constitute our most immediate
environments. According to Alaimo, considering these kinds of trans-
corporeal exchanges between human bodies and nonhuman entities
“enacts an environmental posthumanism, insisting that what we are
as bodies and minds is inextricably interlinked with the circulating
substances, materialities, and forces.”46 Posthuman here does not
gesture toward a teleology of human progress, then, but comprises
“an assertion that, to echo Bruno Latour, we have never been human
—if to be human begins with a separation from, or a disavowal of,
the very stuff of the world.”47
Demonic Bodies traces this insight into antiquity, demonstrating
how ancient Christian notions of the human body were inter-
implicated with demonic corporeality. Of course, writers in the
ancient Mediterranean, including early Christians, held to a wide
variety of views on the physical constitution, origin, and ultimate fate
of the human body. In each chapter, therefore, I provide detailed
overviews of the specific anthropologies evinced by each author or
text(s), and note how their views of the human body in particular
draw upon or contribute to concomitant views on demonic
(in)corporeality.48 In doing so, Demonic Bodies traces how trans-
corporeal relationships between humans and nonhumans are not
only characteristic of our “posthuman” present, but also an
important element in understanding our ancient “prehuman” past.
My specific focus on early Christians’ trans-corporeal relations
with demons—malevolent beings par excellence of Christian
ecosystems—is part of a conscious attempt to capture the “dark
ecologies” of human experience. Environmental theorist Timothy
Morton has noted how the foundations for contemporary
environmental awareness too often precede either from viewing
nonhuman “nature” as an entity external to the human subject or
from idealized ethics that view human-nonhuman interconnections
purely in romanticized terms.49 On the latter point, Lisa Sideris has
argued that contemporary Christian eco-theologians too often
ground their environmental ethics on notions of ecological “benign
interdependence,” which (rightly) stresses interconnections between
humans and nonhumans, but (misleadingly) implies that these
interrelationships are uniformly positive.50 Humanity’s
interconnection with nonhuman entities, however, comprises what
Morton aptly calls a “demonic proximity”—the two “become
entangled” in ways that are ambivalent and even harmful.51 One
might here think of toxic waste sites, polluted rivers, disease-
carrying mosquitoes, or carnivorous predators, all of which are part
of ecological relations—pollution, spread of disease, or predation—
that have the potential to bring harm to humans or others.
Hence a challenge for modern environmental theorists and
ethicists: how does one theorize environmental interconnection such
that our ecological “awareness” includes due acknowledgment of
these rather disconcerting ecological linkages?52 Demonic Bodies
emerges from the conviction that formulating more robust
environmental ethics depends at least in part on telling “darker”
environmental histories: our multispecies historiographies must call
attention to our trans-corporeal relations with nonhuman
ecosystems, even (or especially) when those relations are
ambivalent or harmful.
Ancient demonology may seem an odd place to turn for such a
task. What do Christian “supernatural” beings have to do with
environmental “realities”? As Morton notes, however, the modern
dichotomy between external “reality” and internal “imagination” is
problematized by ecological perspectives: “If the very question of
inside and outside is what ecology undermines . . . , [then] surely
this is a matter of seeing how ecosystems are made not only of
trees, rock formations, and pigs (seemingly ‘external’ to the human)
but also of thoughts, wishes, or fantasies (seemingly ‘inside’ our
human heads)?”53 Even those elements of human culture considered
“fantastical” or “imaginative” (e.g., religious “mythologies”), then,
can be important constituents of humanity’s environments. Stuart
Clark has noted elsewhere, for example, how Christian writers,
despite modern construals of demonic beings as “supernatural”
creatures, consistently depicted (evil) demonic entities as part and
parcel of the “natural world.”54 Indeed, as discussed previously,
numerous ancient intellectuals—including Christian writers such as
Athenagoras and Tertullian, as well as non-Christians like Apuleius of
Madaura and Plutarch of Chaeronea—argued that demons had their
“natural” abode in the “airy” atmosphere above the earth, where
their ethereal substance was most at home.55 Hence no exploration
of ancient Christian “ecosystems” would be complete without taking
account of the myriad cosmic entities—demons among them—that
populated early Christian worlds.
Ancient demonologies present an opportunity, therefore, to reflect
on how early Christians conceived of their “dark” ecological
connections with malevolent entities, and how such relations
contributed to the formation of Christian cultures. Demonic Bodies
traces in particular how early Christian perceptions of demonic
propinquity contributed to the simultaneous valorization and
marginalization of particular Christian corporeal paradigms, and thus
to the creation of asymmetric cultural valuations of the human body.
My tracing of the human body’s trans-corporeal relationship with
demons, while troubling the historical stability of the human subject,
does so as a first step in proposing new ways of understanding
human culture and its many interconnections with nonhuman others.

Outlining the Project

Demonic Bodies argues that ancient Christians described and
experienced their bodies as trans-corporeal entities, which were
caught up in a multitude of interactions with nonhuman others,
demons among them. I trace the trans-corporeal relationship
between humans and demons in three ways: physical connections,
conceptual constructions, and ritual performance. First, many
Christian writers claimed that the human body was vulnerable to
becoming physically entangled with or influenced by demonic
creatures; we see this vulnerability especially through anxieties
surrounding demonic possession or attack (Chapters 1 and 5) and
illicit demonic influence over the human mind or soul (Chapter 3), as
well as the metamorphosis of human corporeality into some kind of
“demonic” state (Chapters 2 and 4). In this way, Christians imagined
the boundaries of the Christian body as rather unstable and porous,
sometimes easily traversed or altered by ambiguously corporeal
entities such as demons.
Second, Demonic Bodies traces how conceptual constructions of
demonic (dis)embodiment informed attendant constructions of
proper and improper Christian (human) corporeality. Specifically, I
argue that Christian descriptions of demonic (in)corporeality reflect
shifts and differences in early Christian anthropology, insofar as the
attributes that characterize constructions of proper human
embodiment are frequently portrayed as inverted or deficient in
Christian representations of demonic (dis)embodiment. Ignatius of
Antioch, for example, asserts the “bodiless” nature of demons, while
simultaneously arguing for the salvific value of the flesh.56
Conversely, Clement of Alexandria stresses the “corpulent” and
“fattened” nature of demonic corporeality, to be contrasted with the
“thinned” flesh of the idealized Christian intellectual. .57 As
evidenced by these two examples, Christian disagreements
regarding the nature of the demonic body frequently contributed to
and drew upon adjacent discrepancies regarding human
(in)corporeality. I note how in this process the demonic body proved
doubly useful—as an entity with a rather unsettled (in)corporeal
nature, on the one hand, demonic bodies shifted in conversation
with the concerns and ideologies of various Christian authors and
communities. And yet, as nonhuman creatures of a higher-order
cosmic sphere, demons served Christian writers well in undergirding
their diverse anthropologies and heresiologies with more stable
cosmic foundations.
Third and finally, I outline how the threat of physical
entanglement with demons, combined with conceptual constructions
of demonic (dis)embodiment, informed particular Christian ritual
practices and thus contributed to Christian corporeal performances.
Throughout the work I use ritual to denote the way in which humans
engage in formal, rule-governed, symbolic, and performative
activities that distinguish a particular time or space as sacred or
important.58 My work examines in particular how early Christian
demonologies helped to shape (and were shaped by) ritual
discourses, which enacted “bodily dispositions” that held “practical
sense” for their practitioners.59 In this way, demonic (in)corporeality
played an important part not only in reflecting early Christian bodily
ethics, but also in reproducing Christian corporeal performances.
Through conceptual demonization and attendant ritualizations, I
argue, Christian writers assembled inequitable ecosystems whereby
particular Christian groups, rituals, or ideas were marginalized
through their linkage to evil cosmic agents.
Across these three areas—physical connections, conceptual
constructions, and ritual enactments—Demonic Bodies outlines how
demonic (in)corporeality played an important role in how the human
body took shape as a trans-corporeal, ecological entity.60 “To think
ecologically,” Levi Bryant states, “is not to think nature per se but to
think relations between things.”61 Demonic Bodies explores the
bodily relations between demons and humans, noting how these two
creatures were mutually enmeshed in cosmic ecologies, and thus
were a part of complex, multidirectional, and multi-agential
corporeal ecosystems. My emphasis on ecological enmeshment,
moreover, draws attention to the fact that, in the same way that an
organism might have multiple and variable relations with the various
other entities within its ecosystem, so also the Christian body
experienced interconnections with the demonic in numerous ways;
whether via demonic possession, attack, temptation, or
transmutation, the relation between Christian corporeality and its
demonic counterpart took on a variety of forms.
The project comprises five case studies, each of which traces the
Christian body’s trans-corporeal relations through a specific theme:
(dis)ability, physiology, changeability, animality, and abjection,
respectively. The first two chapters inaugurate the study through
examinations of early Christian traditions regarding “bodiless”
demons. Chapter 1, “Disabled Demons: Demonic Disembodiment in
Second Temple Judaism and the Gospel of Mark,” examines how the
Gospel of Mark portrays demons as impaired, disembodied entities,
closely mirroring ancient Jewish traditions that identify demons as
the residual souls of antediluvian giants. The disembodied status of
the demonic, in turn, informs their misplacement as foreign
“spiritual” entities in a fleshly world. In this regard it is notable that
two of the major exorcism narratives in Mark involve Jesus’s
interaction with “foreign” (i.e., non-Jewish) peoples. In the second
part of the chapter, therefore, I trace how the Second Gospel’s
exorcism narratives utilize Jesus’s expulsion of “foreign,” impure
spirits to delineate relations between Jewish and non-Jewish
members of the Jesus movement. The chapter concludes by tracing
how the Second Gospel constructs the human body as prone to
possession by external spirits, as evidenced in the exorcism
narratives as well as Jesus’s implicit claim to being possessed by the
“holy spirit.” While many ancient corporeal paradigms held that such
porosity was characteristic only of “weak” bodies, the Gospel of Mark
emphasizes Jesus’s masculine potency through his “binding” of the
Strong Man through exorcism. In this way, the disabled body of the
demonic emerges as a key component in the Second Gospel’s
construction of the potent abilities of Jesus the exorcist.
In Chapter 2, “Bodiless Demons: Ignatius of Antioch, the Coptic
Apocalypse of Peter, and the Demonic Body of Jesus,” I turn to
another tradition of “bodiless” demons, found in Ignatius of Antioch’s
Letter to the Smyrnaeans. There, Ignatius claims that any Christian
who believes in a phantasmal Jesus will be “just like what they
believe,” that is, they will be “without bodies” and “demonic”
(Smyrn. 2). Through this equivalency, Ignatius caricatures his
opponents’ views of Christ by equating them with a demonic
Christology. Furthermore, Ignatius condemns his opponents to a
bodiless and demonic afterlife. Elsewhere in his letters, Ignatius
emphasizes the importance of Jesus’s existence as a dyadic flesh-
and-spirit body, as well as the continued presence of Jesus’s flesh
and spirit in the Christian Eucharist. Ignatius’s citation of demonic
incorporeality, therefore, serves Ignatius well in circumscribing the
Christian community by constraining proper Christian embodiment: a
docetic Christian believes in and will become a “bodiless demon,”
and will thus lack the required corporeality for proper participation in
the orthodox Church and its unifying ritual, the Eucharist. I conclude
the chapter by juxtaposing Ignatius’s portrayal of bodiless demons
with the Coptic Apocalypse of Peter’s depiction of demons as entities
mired in the fleshly world in order to demonstrate how variant
demonologies informed divergent materializations of the Christian
body.
In the three chapters that follow, I examine early Christian
constructions of demonic corporeality that, unlike those traditions in
the Gospel according to Mark and letters of Ignatius, emphasize
demons’ possession of fine-material bodies. In Chapter 3,
“Changeable Demons: Demonic Polymorphy, ‘Magic,’ and Christian
Exorcism in the Writings of Justin Martyr,” I explore Justin Martyr’s
claim that demons, like their angelic fathers, mutated and assumed
various forms as part of their efforts to deceive humans, promote
improper worship, and inspire persecution against Christians. I argue
that Justin’s distinctive highlighting of demonic changeability
emerges alongside his counter-emphasis on the “immovability” of
the Christian God, which, in turn, functions to undercut the
polymorphic Greco-Roman pantheon’s collective claim to divinity. In
the second part of the chapter, I explore Justin’s distinctive retelling
of the myth of the Watchers in his 2 Apology, which omits the
characters of the giants in its recounting of demonic origins. In doing
so, Justin promotes a closer correspondence between fallen angels
and demons, highlighting his simultaneous ascription of polymorphic
capabilities to both angelic fathers and demonic sons. In the
chapter’s third part, I explore how Justin associates demonic
changeability with “magical” trickery, which aids the Apologist’s
constructions of proper Christian exorcism as a “simple” practice
distinct from “magical” alternatives.
In Chapter 4, “Belly-Demons: Clement of Alexandria and Demonic
Sacrifice,” I explore Clement of Alexandria’s exhortation that
Christians not mix the “body of the Lord” with the “table of demons”
by engaging in gluttonous eating habits. I note that, following Paul’s
comparable claims in 1 Corinthians, many early Christian writers
claimed that demons promoted animal sacrifice because they
consumed the blood and smoke produced as part of the sacrificial
process. In his own rendition of this claim, Clement of Alexandria
portrays the demonic body as animalistic and grotesquely “fattened”
due to its excess consumption of sacrificial fumes. Clement contrasts
the demons’ corpulence with his construal of the ideal Christian
body: chaste, thin, and constantly engaged in contemplative
practices that “strip away” the material body. The demonic body,
then, informs and undergirds Clement’s ritual program by providing a
negative stereotype of those bodily attributes that Clement urges his
readers to eschew.
In Chapter 5, “Abject Demons: Tertullian of Carthage, Roman
‘Religion,’ and the Abject Body,” I examine the intermixture of
demonic and Christian bodies in the writings of Tertullian of
Carthage. I begin by exploring Tertullian’s construction of humanity’s
dual flesh-and-spirit body in On the Soul, wherein he emphasizes the
pervasive attachment of demonic spirits to the human soul. This
demonic affliction stems, Tertullian claims, from inadvertent
participation in demonolatry via Roman “religious” rites. The only
method by which Roman citizens can remove their attendant
demonic spirit is through Christian baptism, a practice that Tertullian
views as essential in the creation of a new, demon-free Christian
body. In this way, the demonic body functions within Tertullian’s
writings as a kind of abject entity—one that is foreclosed as part of
the ritualized construction of the Christian body and yet loiters as a
threatening epitome of those elements unbecoming of Christian
corporeality. The lingering threat of the abject demon surfaces
mostly clearly in Tertullian’s On the Shows, a treatise that warns
Christians of the myriad activities contaminated by demons, which
therefore threaten to pollute the body and undo the salvific work of
Christian baptism. I note in particular how Tertullian’s citation of the
threat of demons undergirds Tertullian’s prescriptions regarding
appropriate Christian cultural practices, designed to exclude
“foreign” Roman cultural activities.
In the final chapter, “Conclusion: Christians among Demons and
Humans,” I place the study’s findings in conversation with
explorations in the humanities with regard to the “post-” and
“nonhuman.” I note there that early Christians depicted the demonic
body in widely divergent ways. Whether disembodied or corporeal,
fattened or ethereal, depictions of demonic (in)corporeality were as
diverse as the Christians who articulated them. Yet a consistent
feature of early Christian demonologies is the way in which demons
are enmeshed with their human counterparts. On the one hand,
Christian descriptions of demonic corporeality reflect shifts and
differences in early Christian anthropology insofar as they inversely
correlate to articulations of the ideal human body. In this way, the
demonic body contributed to the formation of exclusionary
environments, which, in turn, became an important part of how
Christian writers, readers, and listeners imagined, examined, and
performed their own modes of embodiment. The early Christian
body emerges, then, as a kind of “posthuman” (or, perhaps more
appropriately, “prehuman”) entity, a being that is thoroughly
enmeshed within its nonhuman cosmic environments—always
evolving and materializing in and through the concomitant
development of adjacent nonhuman entities, including demons.
Building on this insight, the final chapter concludes by reflecting
on how exploring the materializations of demons (and nonhuman
entities, more broadly) in ancient Christian literature can provide a
fruitful avenue not only for understanding antiquity, but also for
addressing contemporary cultural and ecological problems. In this
way, this project demonstrates that contemporary posthuman and
ecocritical theorizing not only has much to contribute to studies of
antiquity, but also that (ancient) history—the narratives humans tell
themselves about themselves—has an enduring importance in
informing how humans understand and interact with nonhuman
others, and thus has much to contribute to contemporary ecological
thought and practice.
 1
Disabled Demons
Demonic Disembodiment in Second Temple Judaism
and the Gospel of Mark

Apollonius of Tyana was not one for subtlety. According to his

biographer Philostratus, the neo-Pythagorean wonderworker once
helped the citizens of ancient Ephesus by putting an end to a plague
afflicting the city. Apollonius’s cure did not entail healing sick
Ephesians individually, but the removal of the ultimate source for the
disease: a demon masquerading as an old beggar in the city’s
famous theater. Apollonius confronted the plague-demon and urged
the Ephesians to stone him to death; although they initially
hesitated, they eventually realized he was a demon, showered him
with stones, and killed him. Apollonius thereafter directed the
Ephesians to remove the stones that had piled upon the demon.
Much to their surprise, what was revealed underneath was not the
body of the human beggar, but a massive dog “spitting foam from
the side of its mouth, as if rabid.” Philostratus informs the reader
that a statue of Hercules now stands “in the place in which the
apparition (φάσμα) was pelted to death” (Life of Apollonius 4.10).1
Philostratus’s vivid tale of the Ephesian plague-demon embodies
many themes found in exorcism narratives of the ancient
Mediterranean, including the association of demons with disease and
the ability of particularly powerful ritual experts to heal the afflicted.
What is particularly notable here, however, is the text’s emphasis on
the ambiguity of demonic embodiment. Did the demon actually take
on the form of a human beggar, or was this merely an appearance?
Was the form of the rabid dog the creature’s true nature, or another
deceptive facade? Does the demon’s identification as an “apparition”
mean that it did not have a body at all? Philostratus leaves such
questions unresolved, but he is not alone: as will be made evident in
the case studies to follow, the demonic body is nothing if not
polymorphic.
We can begin to appreciate the hybridity of demonic corporeality
by turning to the exploits of another first-century miracle worker,
Jesus of Nazareth. The Synoptic Gospels, our earliest extant
accounts of Jesus’s life, concur in depicting Jesus as one who—like
his contemporary Apollonius—had the ability to thwart the afflictions
of demons. But what was the nature of the creatures he expelled?
Previous treatments of New Testament and early Christian exorcism
narratives have largely ignored the nature and origins of the
demonic entities involved, preferring instead to focus their analyses
on the sociocultural, medical, or ritual elements of ancient
possession and exorcism. While such approaches have gleaned
important insights, they have sometimes viewed early Christian
demonologies in a “demythologizing” vein—that is, they have largely
ignored questions regarding the origin, nature, and activity of
demons themselves, preferring instead to examine how demons
point to other, less “fanciful” sociocultural realities.2 The bodies of
possessing demons, in particular, have received scant treatment
from contemporary commentators. This neglect is perhaps due to
the fact that possession and exorcism narratives portray demons as
usurping other (human, animal) bodies, and therefore imply that
demons lack autonomous corporeality.
In what follows, however, I note that the demons’ ostensible
disembodiment, much like the Ephesian plague-demon’s appearance
as a beggar, obscures a more manifold corporeal history—one that
includes a past as a fully embodied antediluvian “giant.” I excavate
this history through analysis of the Gospel according to Mark, our
earliest extant gospel and a text that stands as the source for much
of the early Jesus movement’s exorcism narratives.3 Demons in the
Gospel of Mark are disembodied, invasive, “impure” spirits who
desire to inhabit the human body and are able to inflict violence on
their human hosts with unnatural strength. This portrayal dovetails
with contemporaneous Second Temple Jewish demonologies,
wherein demons are understood to be the residual spirits of the
gigantic offspring of fallen angels and mortal women.
When contextualized in light of Second Temple Jewish and early
Christian mythologies, then, demons emerge as corporeally impaired
entities, dispossessed of their former (gigantic) fleshly corporeality.
This impairment informs the demons’ ultimate misplacement—
despite their “spiritual” nature, they are consigned to the earth, the
realm of fleshly bodies. In this way, demons emerge as paradigmatic
foreign, “out-of-place” entities. Notably, two of the major exorcism
narratives in the Second Gospel feature foreign (i.e., non-Jewish)
characters: the Gerasene demoniac and the Syrophoenician woman.
In the second part of the chapter, I trace how the Gospel of Mark
utilizes the exorcism of demons, cosmically out-of-place entities, in
order to demarcate relations between Jewish and foreign non-Jewish
members of the Jesus movement.
The chapter concludes by juxtaposing the disabled body of
demons with the empowered corporeality of Jesus of Nazareth,
exorcist par excellence in the Second Gospel. I note in particular
how the Second Gospel constructs Jesus’s body as porous, able to
“leak” divine power and also receive the indwelling holy spirit. While
some ancient paradigms of corporeality configured such porosity as
“weak” or too “feminine,” the Second Gospel underscores Jesus’s
masculinity and bodily potency through its depiction of exorcism, the
exemplary “binding of the Strong Man” (i.e., Satan/Beelzebul). In
this way, the mythic disablement of demons plays an integral role in
the Second Gospel’s construction of the potent abilities of the Jewish
exorcist, and thus in the construal of both the cause and remedy for
humanity’s corporeal entanglements with its demonic forces.
 Watchers, Giants, and Demons in Second
Temple Jewish Literature
Second Temple Jewish writers exhibit an apocalyptic demonology, a
view of demons as entirely evil beings that operate solely to harass,
possess, and inflict harm upon humans as part of the broader
eschatological battle between good and evil.4 According to prevailing
Second Temple mythologies, demons originated as the evil spirits of
primordial giants, who were themselves the offspring of fallen
angelic “Watchers” and their female mortal paramours. This tradition
forms the foundation for (most) Second Temple Jewish
demonologies, including that of the early Jesus movement.5 Genesis
provides one of the earliest accounts of the Watchers and giants.
After the creation of humanity and its multiplication over the earth,
Genesis relates the following cryptic account:

When men began to increase on earth and daughters were born to them, the
divine beings saw how beautiful the daughters of men were and took wives from
among those that pleased them . . . It was then, and later too, that the Nephilim
[LXX: “giants”] appeared on earth—when the divine beings cohabited with the
daughters of men, who bore them offspring. They were the heroes of old, the men
of renown. (Gen 6:1–2, 4 [Jewish Publication Society])

Genesis describes the primary characters of this myth vaguely, and

so Jewish and Christian interpretations of this passage have varied
widely. The Septuagint version of Genesis 6, however, identifies “the
Nephilim” as “giants” (γίγαντες). This identification suggests that
from an early period Jewish exegetes interpreted Genesis 6 as a
reference to the myth of the “Watchers,” a legend found in several
Second Temple texts that narrates the events immediately preceding
the great flood.
The earliest extant version of the Watchers myth appears in The
Book of the Watchers, a third-century BCE text that was eventually
included as part of 1 Enoch (chaps. 1–36).6 According to the Book of
the Watchers, heavenly angels began to lust after earthbound mortal
women, resulting in the angels’ descent to earth and copulation with
human partners (1 En. 6–7). In this way, the Book of the Watchers
attests to the possibility for trans-corporeal “relations” between
human and nonhuman creatures. In this case, however, such
interrelations have disastrous consequences. Soon after their inter-
species affair, the wives of the angels

conceived from them and bore to them great giants . . . And the giants began to
kill men and to devour them. And they began to sin against the birds and beasts
and creeping things and the fish, and to devour one another’s flesh. And they
drank the blood. (7:2, 4–5)7

The giants’ unruly behavior seemingly results from their motley

composition, as their mortal flesh did not properly mesh with their
angelic spirit.8 This theory is suggested by the Book of the Watchers’
identification of the giants as those “who were begotten by the
spirits and flesh” (15:8). The Book of the Watchers explains,
moreover, that things from heavenly and earthly realms should not
intermingle: “The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling; but
the spirits begotten on the earth, on the earth is their dwelling”
(15:10). On the basis of these passages, Archie Wright proposes
that there might have been “an innate incompatibility between the
angelic spirit of the giant and his flesh,” which then brought about
the giants’ violent behavior because they were “illegitimate and not
properly constituted.”9 In other words, the giants’ misplacement on
earth stems from their mixed human/angelic nature, which itself
stems from the trans-corporeal intermixing between heavenly and
earthly creatures.
The unholy union of angels and women, furthermore, leads to the
proliferation of human violence, spread of illicit knowledge, and
ecological pollution (7:6). In response, God commands that the
angel Gabriel punish the giants by setting them against one another:
“Go, Gabriel, to the bastards, to the half-breeds, to the sons of
miscegenation; and destroy the sons of the watchers from among
the sons of men; send them against one another in a war of
destruction” (10:9).10 The gigantomachy that ensues leads to the
death of several giants. Those that remain do not escape God’s
wrath, but perish in the ensuing worldwide deluge. The spirits of the
giants, however, exit their drowned fleshly bodies and live on as evil
spirits:

But now the giants . . . they will call them evil spirits on the earth . . . The spirits
that have gone forth from the body of their flesh are evil spirits . . . And the spirits
of the giants <lead astray>, do violence, make desolate, and attack and wrestle
and hurl upon the earth, and <cause illness>. They eat nothing, but abstain from
food and are thirsty and smite. (15:8–9, 11)

The Book of the Watchers’ etiology for evil spirits here is significant,
in that it explains that the demons’ current status as purely spiritual
entities was not their original or natural state.11 Rather, the entities
that would come to be labeled as demons originally existed as
giants, unruly combinations of mortal flesh and angelic spirit, and it
was only the debilitating catastrophe of the worldwide flood that
destroyed their flesh and brought about their continued existence as
evil spirits. In this sense, the demonic body emerges within Second
Temple Jewish literature as an impaired entity—one that is lacking its
original physical component. As emphasized by the Book of the
Watchers, because of their lack of flesh, these spirits will no longer
be able to consume food or drink, two favorite pastimes of the spirits
in their lives as giants. Most significant for my purposes, the evil
spirits’ impairment stems from their having lost the mortal aspect of
their existence (i.e., flesh), which they had inherited from their
human mothers. This backdrop—the evil spirits’ loss of their human-
derived flesh—provides a possible explanation for demons’ repeated
possessing of human bodies as part of ancient exorcism narratives:
the act of demonic possession is actually an act of reclamation, of
overcoming an imposed impairment by regaining (even if
temporarily) the fleshly vessel the giants lost in the flood.
In reading the creation of demons through the lens of
impairment, I draw on insights from disability studies. Tracing its
roots to activism by people with disabilities in the 1960s and
1970s,12 the academic study of disability seeks to examine and
dismantle connections between impairment, defined as “the
functional limitation within the individual caused by physical, mental,
or sensory impairment,” and disability, “the loss or limitation of
opportunities to take part in the normal life of the community on an
equal level with others due to physical or social barriers.”13 As seen
here, disability studies frequently differentiate between an
individual’s physical or sensory incapacities, classified as
impairments, and the social or cultural barriers that impaired
individuals face, referred to as disabilities.14 While recent disability
theorists have criticized this impairment/disability dichotomy,15 I
nonetheless find this approach helpful for its careful attention to the
cultural or social dimensions of corporeal impairment. Specifically,
attending to corporeal impairment as a social and cultural
phenomenon entails treating disability as “the attribution of
corporeal deviance—not so much a property of bodies as a product
of cultural rules about what bodies should be or do.”16 The cultural
dimensions of disability, therefore, require attention to the “culturally
and historically specific social construction” of corporeal
impairment.17
Turning to the Enochic account of demonic origins, we might here
think of the demons’ primordial disembodiment, through the punitive
drowning and perishing of their gigantic bodies, as their physical
impairment. No longer would these creatures be able to partake of
physical pleasures or interrelations, or benefit from their physical
strength and stature. This physical impairment becomes a social and
cultural disability, moreover, through its relation to demonic cosmic
misplacement. “The spirits of heaven, in heaven is their dwelling,”
the Book of the Watchers claims, “But now the giants who were
begotten by the spirits and flesh—they will call them evil spirits on
the earth, for their dwelling will be on the earth” (1 En. 15:7–8).
According to the Book of the Watchers, therefore, the demons’
punishment is perpetual misplacement: they are doomed to wander
the earth despite the fact that the physical constitution of their
bodies is more fit for the heavenly realm.18 In this way, see how the
demons’ impairment (a lack of a fleshly body) becomes a disability—
the misplacement of their fleshless bodies in a fleshly realm
becomes a social or, in this case, cosmic barrier to their well-being.
Some aspects of their formerly corporeal existence will continue,
however: “And the spirits of the giants <lead astray>, do violence,
make desolate, and attack and wrestle and hurl upon the earth and
<cause illness>. They eat nothing, but abstain from food and are
thirsty and smite” (1 En. 15:11). Thus, as in their existence as
giants, the demons will continue to spread violence and warfare.
Despite their corporeal impairment, moreover, the demons retain a
measure of their former vitality. The Greek Codex Panipolitanus
version of 1 Enoch 15:8 refers to the giants’ residual spirits as
πνεύματα ἰσχύρα (“strong spirits”), a point that underscores their
postmortem endurance and violent tendencies.19 Even without their
gigantic bodies, therefore, the evil spirits are powerful. This is
perhaps due to their half-angelic composition, which enables a
continued spiritual vitality even without a fleshly vessel. Thus, while
demons experience disability in the misplacement of their fleshless
bodies, their trans-corporeal origins allow them to remain potent in
other ways.
The Book of the Watchers claims that evil spirits will “rise up
against the sons of men and against the women, for they have come
forth from them” (1 En. 15:12). The evil spirits will continue their
adversarial relationship with humanity until the end of the present
age: “[The evil spirits] will make desolate until the day of
consummation of the great judgment, when the great age will be
consummated” (16:1). Loren Stuckenbruck proposes that the evil
spirits’ continued affliction of human beings is due to envy, since
“humans, and not they, have escaped the destruction with their
bodies intact.”20 1 Enoch 15:12 (quoted previously), however,
suggests that the spirits’ primary motivation is to exact revenge for
human women’s role in creating their gigantic forebears (“for they
have come forth from them”). The impairment (via illness) or
harassment of humans by demons, therefore, stems from the
demons exacting revenge for humanity’s role in the creation and
ultimate impairment of the giants and their spirits.
 The story of the fallen Watchers and their monstrous offspring
appeared in a wide array of Second Temple Jewish writings,21
including the Similitudes of Enoch (1 En. 37–71), the Dream Visions
of Enoch (1 En. 83–90), the Epistle of Enoch (1 En. 91–107),
Jubilees, The Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, 2 Baruch, Tobit,
The Book of the Giants, and the Genesis Apocryphon. The popularity
of the story was such that it influenced the textual history of Genesis
6; some biblical manuscripts include versions of the story wherein
scribes substituted “angels” for the more prevalent “sons of God”
phrasing.22 The giants of Enochic literature also appear in several
texts as cautionary tales, used to remind readers of the dangers
involved in disobeying God’s will.23 Because of the popularity of the
Watchers mythology, the story of the drowned giants and their
disabled offspring emerged as the primary etiology for the existence
of evil spirits.24
Many Second Temple texts presage developments later seen in
the Gospels. The second-century BCE Book of Jubilees, for example,
contains a rendition of the Watchers myth wherein evil spirits, as the
residual souls of giants, are explicitly identified with “demons” (5:7–
10, 7:21–25, 10:1–5).25 Also of note, Jubilees states that the
demons are “impure” (10:1–2), likely a reference to their original
dual composition of both angelic and human materials (cf. 10:5).
Jubilees marks an important point in the development of ancient
Jewish demonology, as it is the earliest extant text to identify the
spirits of the giants as “evil spirits,” “demons,” and “impure spirits,”
the three terms used for demonic entities in the literature of the
early Jesus movement. Finally, Jubilees claims that the demons have
a “leader,” Mastema, who intercedes on their behalf with God and
directs their activities (10:7–9); this idea finds parallel with the
figures of Beelzebul and Satan in early Jesus movement writings
(see later discussion).
The connection between the giants of Enochic mythology and evil
demons persists in Jewish traditions of the later Second Temple
period. The Testament of Solomon, a text of the first–third centuries
CE that contains both Jewish and Christian elements, narrates
Solomon’s binding and interrogation of various evil demons, whom
he ultimately utilizes as manual laborers for building the Jerusalem
Temple.26 Interestingly, some of Solomon’s demonic interlocutors
reveal their origins. One of the demons, “Ornias,” claims that he is
descended from “an archangel of the power of God” (2:4).27 Another
demon, Asmodeus, is offended that Solomon, a mere mortal, would
speak arrogantly to him, a demon of angelic ancestry: “You are the
son of a man, but although I was born of a human mother, I (am the
son) of an angel” (5:3–4, emphasis mine).28 Later in the same text,
a “spirit having the shadowy form of a man and gleaming eyes”
claims to be “a lecherous spirit of a giant man who died in a
massacre in the age of giants” (17:1–2). The Testament of Solomon,
then, speaks to the ongoing association of demons with the spirits of
the giants, and thus to the disastrous consequences of illicit trans-
corporeal mingling, in both the writings of Second Temple Judaism
and the early Jesus movement.29
The preceding survey demonstrates that the story of the fallen
angels and their gigantic offspring appeared in an extensive variety
of texts, both in “mainstream” Jewish circles and “factional”
offshoots.30 The wide popularity of the Watchers tradition indicates
that the primordial impairment and disability of the demonic, which
both allowed for and instigated demonic retaliation against humans,
served as the primary wellspring for ancient Jewish explanations for
the origins and activities of evil spirits. The broader proliferation of
this narrative attests to and perpetuates the trans-corporeal
interactions between demons and nonhuman creatures, whether via
narratives of angelic dalliances with mortal women, gigantic
creatures made of earthly flesh and heavenly spirit, or the continuing
harassment of humans by their demonic kin.
 Possession and Exorcism in Second Temple
Jewish Literature
According to ancient Jewish accounts, the primordial impairment and
displacement of demons resulted in concomitant ailments for
humanity. As noted already with regard to 1 Enoch, Second Temple
Jewish literature includes narratives of demons inhabiting or
afflicting human bodies in ways that anticipate similar themes in
early Jesus movement texts.31 In the Book of Tobit (third/second
century BCE), for example, the angel Raphael instructs Tobit’s son
Tobias to repel the demon Asmodeus by using a fish’s heart and liver
(8:3). We likewise find possession/exorcism accounts in the Dead
Sea Scrolls. In the Genesis Apocryphon (1QapGen), Abram cures
Pharaoh of an “evil spirit” through prayer and the laying on of hands
(20:28–29). The Community Rule (1QS) declares that the end times
will include the “ripping out” of evil spirits from the innermost parts
of the human body, ostensibly referring to some sort of exorcistic
process (IV 18–22). Additionally, The Apocryphal Psalms (11Q11)
contain adaptations of biblical psalms repurposed for thwarting
demonic affliction (V 4–12). The most explicit description of
exorcism appears in 4QExorcism (4Q560), which contains a formula
for addressing demons that enter the body:

Evil visitor . . . [. . .] [. . .who] enters the flesh, the male penetrator and the
female penetrator [. . .] . . . iniquity and guilt; fever and chills, and heat of the
heart [. . .] in sleep, he who crushes the male and she who passes through the
female, those who dig [. . .w]icked [. . .]. (fr. 1, I 2–5)

The second column of the same text includes an apparent thwarting

of the demon(s): “and I, O spirit, adjure [. . .] I enchant you, O spirit
[. . .][o]n the earth, in clouds [. . .]” (fr. 1, II 5–7). Because of the
fragmentary nature of this text, little can be gleaned with regard to
the nature of the demonic or its affliction of humanity. Nevertheless,
it suggests that demons “penetrate” humans and bring about
physical afflictions (chills, heartburn, etc.), but can be expelled
through appropriate adjurations.32 We find evidence for similar
apotropaic techniques in the Songs of the Maskil (4Q510–511),
wherein the narrator “sage” provides a message by which humans
can keep demons at bay:

And I, a Sage, declare the splendour of his radiance in order to frighten and
terr[ify] all the spirits of the ravaging angels and the bastard spirits, demons,
Lilith, owls and [jackals . . .] and those who strike unexpectedly to lead astray the
spirit of knowledge, to make their hearts forlorn. (4Q510 I I 4–6, emphasis
mine)33

The association made here between demons and “spirits of the

bastards”34 suggests that the passage has in view the Enochic story
of the “bastard” giants who were the offspring of fallen angels and
mortal women and now live on as “evil spirits” or “demons.”35
Outside of the Dead Sea Scrolls, we also find Jewish accounts of
exorcism in the writings of Josephus. In Jewish War, for example,
Josephus informs the reader that a root known as “Baaras” “quickly
drives away those called demons” (7.180, 185).36 Jews learned to
exorcise demons, Josephus claims, from Solomon, and Jewish
exorcists continue to use the Israelite King’s techniques in Josephus’s
day (Antiquities 8.42–46). For evidence for the continuing potency of
Jewish exorcism, Josephus points to the activities of a certain
Eleazar, who uses roots, incantations, and the invocation of
Solomon’s name in order to drive out demons (8.46–48).
This brief survey demonstrates that for many Second Temple
Jews, demons were indeed capable of penetrating human hosts, and
afflicted individuals required ritual intervention. This point
underscores again the trans-corporeal entanglement that
characterized the relationship between the human body and its
demonic assailants in Second Temple Jewish mythologies. Just as
demonic entities had originated as combinations of heavenly and
earthly elements, so they continue to transgress the boundaries
between human and nonhuman bodies. Demonic spirits, on the one
hand, persistently insinuate themselves into their human
counterparts, thus intermingling their own “spirits” with the bodies
of their human progenitors. So also the human body becomes
intermingled with the demonic, leading to the articulation of the
human body as one that is easily afflicted by assailing spirits. In this
way, the fleshless, impaired history of demons contributes to a
concomitant construction of the human body itself as compromised
by afflictions.37 Jewish ritual expulsion of the demonic will have
shaped the performative materialization of the human body as a
trans-corporeal entity, mutually entangled and co-constituting with
its disembodied demonic foe.
Second Temple Jewish accounts of exorcism are also significant in
that they establish prominent commonalities between Second
Temple Jewish demonologies and those of the early Jesus
movement. This connection is evident especially in shared
assumptions regarding the invasiveness of demonic spirits and the
fact that ritual techniques were required to expel them from human
hosts. Notably, some ancient Jewish exorcism stories betray reliance
upon the Watchers mythology as attested in Enochic literature. As a
movement within Second Temple Jewish culture, it is likely that the
early Jesus movement’s narrations of demonic possession and
exorcism likewise draw upon this mythic matrix.

Watchers and Giants in the Jesus Movement

and Early Christianity
Since Jesus’s original followers constituted a small band of Jewish
adherents, it is no surprise to find that some of the earliest writings
produced by the Jesus movement contain allusions to the Watchers
mythology (e.g., Jude 6; 1 Pet 3:18–22; 2 Pet 2:4–6.).38 The witness
of these texts and other allusions to the Watchers mythology led
R.H. Charles to argue that the “influence of 1 Enoch on the New
Testament has been greater than that of all the other apocryphal
and pseudepigraphical books taken together.”39 The area where 1
Enoch’s “influence” is most evident is the appearance of the
Watchers fallen angel tradition in the writings of the Jesus
movement and early Christianity, particularly as part of
interpretations of Genesis 6.40 Christian writers from a wide variety
of geographical and theological contexts allude to the Watchers
narrative, which suggests that for many followers of Jesus, “the
‘book(s) of Enoch’ seem to have functioned as Scripture.”41 Support
for such a proposal surfaces in the manuscript production and
preservation practices of early Christians: in several manuscripts,
Enochic texts such as the Book of the Watchers are preserved
alongside Christian works.42
Despite their widespread popularity, scholars have often
neglected the influence that Watcher mythologies had on the New
Testament gospels.43 This omission is in part due to the assumption
that the early followers of Jesus would have been mostly reading
and interpreting a Hebrew Bible that aligns with modern editions.
However, there was nothing resembling a closed and exclusive
“canon” within Second Temple Judaism at the time of the early Jesus
movement. Rather, Jewish scriptural production and interpretation
was markedly diverse, a fact that should encourage contemporary
scholars to account for more flexible notions of Jewish and Christian
textual practices in this era.44 In what follows, I consider how this
broader appreciation for the diversity of ancient Jewish textual
practices might enable more fruitful investigations of the entangled
bodies of demons and humans.

Demon(iac)s in the Making: Demonic Bodies in

the Gospel of Mark
If the Synoptic Gospels are any indication, Jesus’s earliest followers
maintained a notable belief that “unclean spirits” or “demons” could
usurp the bodies of unsuspecting human hosts.45 There are forty-
eight references to demonic possession in the New Testament,
totaling around twenty-four unique mentions (i.e., discounting
Synoptic doublets or triplets).46 The Gospel writers use three terms
for possessing entities: “unclean spirit” (πνεῦμα ἀκάθαρτον),
“demon” (δαιμόνιον, δαίμων), and “evil demon” (πονηρὸν
δαιμόνιον). Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s interchangeable use of these
terms suggests that they are functionally equivalent.47 Because of its
early date and compositional priority among the Gospels, the Gospel
of Mark is one of the most important witnesses to demonological
discourses of the early Jesus movement. The Second Gospel
emphasizes the significance of Jesus’s exorcisms, and thus provides
considerable demonological material for consideration.48 As such,
the gospel makes for a natural starting point for exploring
constructions of demonic (in)corporeality among Jesus’s early
followers.

The Gospel of Mark and the Watchers Tradition

The Gospel of Mark displays demonological characteristics that align
closely with assumptions in other Second Temple Jewish texts,
particularly those associated with Enoch and the fallen angels. In
what follows, I provide a thorough juxtaposition of the Gospel with
Enochic traditions, as part of a broader effort to throw into relief
embedded demonological motifs and logics that will have been
operative in the earliest communities that read and interpreted the
Gospel of Mark. In such a way, my reading of Mark’s demonology
provides a lens through which to read the Gospels’ demonological
tenets in a way that renders them comprehensible within Second
Temple Jewish and early Christian contexts.
There is evidence internal to the Second Gospel that suggests
points of contact with Enochic demonologies.49 First, both Enochic
demonologies and the Gospel of Mark use “unclean spirit” and
“demon” interchangeably in reference to evil spiritual beings.50 Such
terminological usage is unparalleled in the Hebrew Bible, and not
found in any Greco-Roman text prior to the third century CE; thus
this terminology appears unique to late Second Temple Jewish and
early Christian writings.51 Second, as noted previously, the idea of
demonic usurpation or possession of the human body surfaces
frequently in Second Temple Jewish literature and the Gospels, but
rarely in Greco-Roman texts.52 What is more, healers in Greco-
Roman literature typically assuage demonic possession through
appeasement, rather than combative expulsion.53 Third, within both
Enochic traditions and the Gospel of Mark demons are
conceptualized as part of an apocalyptic evil front, under the
leadership of a chief demon (e.g., Satan, Beelzebul, Mastema), allied
against the forces of good. While such evil forces hold sway now,
they will eventually face a day of judgment, as part of an end-times
scenario wherein their powers will be stripped away. It is within this
combative eschatological context that Jesus’s dramatic exorcisms
become comprehensible.54 Rather than seeing demons as members
of a relatively unified, if capricious, divine order (as would be typical
of Greco-Roman traditions), Second Temple Jewish and early
Christian writers view demons as wholly evil combatants in an
ongoing cosmic battle between good and malevolent forces.
These shared demonological tenets—the impurity of demonic
spirits, demonic possession, and apocalyptic belligerency—
demonstrate that the possession and exorcism narratives of the early
Jesus movement can be fruitfully interpreted as discourses operating
within and as a part of broader Second Temple Jewish
demonologies.55 In the section to follow, I provide a comparative
reading of Enochic traditions and the Gospel of Mark, noting two
points in particular: (1) traces of the demons’ former gigantic modes
of embodiment echo in their affliction of humans, thus reiterating
the Enochic tradition’s framing of the demonic as a formerly gigantic,
disembodied entity; and (2) the “disabled” nature of the demons’
impairment—that is, their cosmic misplacement—mirrors the social
dislocation of two prominent characters afflicted with demonic
possession (the Gerasene Demoniac and Syrophoenician woman’s
daughter). In this way, the mythic disablement and dislocation of the
demonic comes to inform the Gospel of Mark’s portrayal of trans-
corporeal relations between demons and humans, as seen especially
in the Second Gospel’s treatment of bodily impairment and social
dislocation.
 Exorcism and Enochic Echoes in the Gospel of Mark
The Gospel of Mark highlights Jesus’s adroitness at exorcizing evil
spirits from afflicted demoniacs. Mark signals exorcism’s importance
by its priority: the exorcism of an unclean spirit from a demoniac in
Capernaum is the first public activity performed by Jesus (1:21–28).
In addition to this initial exorcism, Jesus also expels demons from
the infamous Gerasene Demoniac, the Syrophoenician woman’s
daughter, and a boy afflicted by muteness (5:1–20; 7:24–30; 9:14–
29). Taken together, these four exorcism narratives encompass the
most frequent type of miracle attributed to Jesus by the Second
Gospel.56 Additionally, summaries of Jesus’s ministry in the Gospel
portray exorcism as one of his most frequent undertakings. Mark
claims, for example, that Jesus “cast out many demons” as part of
healing activities performed at the house of Simon and Andrew
(1:32–34).57 Similarly, in its summary of Jesus’s preaching tour in
Galilee, the Second Gospel states that Jesus went about
“proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out
demons” (1:39). Jesus’s combative relationship with demons and
unclean spirits might go as far back as his temptation by Satan in
the wilderness, which some scholars interpret as a spiritual
preparation for Jesus’s emergence as a prominent healer and
exorcist.58
The Gospel of Mark clearly prioritizes exorcism as an important
aspect of Jesus’s public ministry. But what can this tell us about
ideas regarding demonic (in)corporeality? Consideration of ancient
Jewish demonologies helps bring into relief some notable aspects of
Mark’s construction of the nature of demonic spirits, including their
invasiveness, violent disposition, unnatural strength, self-
destructiveness, and impurity. These elements collectively shape the
Gospel’s portrayal of trans-corporeal interactions between demonic
spirits and their human “hosts.”
 Demonic Violence and Invasiveness
According to the Second Gospel, Jesus inaugurated his public
ministry by preaching and exorcising in the synagogue at
Capernaum, a rural Jewish village in Jesus’s home region of Galilee
(1:21–39). Jesus enters the synagogue and begins preaching “as
one having authority,” all the while displaying a teaching aptitude
that left crowds there “astounded.” During his instruction, however, a
“man with an unclean spirit” (ἄνθρωπος ἐν πνεύματι ἀκαθάρτῳ)
interrupts Jesus (1:24–25). The Second Gospel’s reference to an
“unclean spirit” likely draws upon Enochic terminology, thus
identifying this demon as a lingering soul of one of the antediluvian
giants.59 This link between the antediluvian giants and contemporary
demons, moreover, potentially informs Mark’s broader portrayal of
the demons’ combative interactions with Jesus. In many cases, the
demons immediately recognize Jesus, acknowledge his superiority,
and beg for a pardon from punishment. In the story of the
Capernaum demoniac, for example, the unclean spirit proclaims,
“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to
destroy us? I know who you are, Holy One of God” (1:24–25). The
spirit’s recognition underscores Jesus’s messianic identity,60 while
also calling to mind the historical backdrop for the demon’s lingering
existence as disembodied spirits. In the Jubilees narrative, God
spared the lives of ten percent of the demons only after an
intercession on their behalf by Mastema (10:11). This reprieve,
however, will persist only until the apocalypse, when the fallen
angels and evil spirits will face divine judgment (10:8; cf. 1 En. 16).
The unclean spirit’s desperate response to Jesus, then, attests to the
precarious nature of its existence: it knows that time is short.61
For his own part, Jesus wastes no time in dispatching the demon;
“Be silent, and come out of him!” Jesus commands the evil spirit
(1:25).62 The demon departs at the command, though not without a
struggle: “the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud
voice, came out of him” (καὶ σπαράξαν αὐτὸν τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ
ἀκάθαρτον καὶ φωνῆσαν φωνῇ μεγάλῃ ἐξῆλθεν ἐξ αὐτοῦ) (1:26).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 “I would not have told you so suddenly in any other case,” he says, with
all his old gentle considerateness; “but now—at the pass we have arrived—
it may come to you almost as a relief.”
“What may come?”
“Your—your sacrifice would not avail the old man for very long! He—
he is not going to get well.”
She stares at him, not half comprehending. “Gout does not—does not—
kill people!” she stammers.
“No. But in his case the doctors have discovered that it is complicated by
a fatal disease, which has already made great progress; so that, as I say, if
we can only stave it off for a while—not a long while—things will come all
right!”
“All right! Do you call that all right?” she cries it out in an agony, taking
in now the full meaning of his words; while, in flood, a miserable
realization of this new calamity pours over her soul.
Her men! who had loved her so well; upon her fond tendance of whom
she had prided herself! One is not; the second is only to be rescued by the
hand of death from a more quickly slaying knowledge of her false cruelty;
and, as to the third, now that the mask so steadily held before his face as
long as there was any need for it has dropped away,—she can see that she
has killed his heart!
“Is it quite certain?” she asks, as soon as her dry mouth allows a husky
whisper to creep through it. “Is there no hope?”
“It may be sooner, it may be later; but it must come!” He pauses a
moment or two, to let her take it in; then, very gently, “So that if we can
only hit upon some plausible reason for postponement——”
She breaks in like a sudden hurricane. “No! no! NO!! If he is going to die,
he shall have his little bit of happiness first! You must marry me! You
cannot be so inhuman as to refuse!” Then, seeing, or fancying, a start of
shocked negation on his part, “I have done nothing bad enough to make it a
disgrace to you, and it need be only nominal!”
“And his hopes?” Like three icy drops the low words fall on the flame of
her passion; and for a minute or two entirely quench it. Then it springs up
again alive and alight.
“He will be dead before he knows that they are not to be realized.”
 There is a heavy silence; while, before her mental vision, the dreadful
programme she has drawn up of their future life unrolls itself. What his
thoughts are she cannot tell; nor whether he will accept or reject her offer.
Even when he does speak, she remains still in the dark, for he only says—
“And then?”
“And then what?”
“When he is dead?”
She gives a dry sob. It has come to this, then! She has brought it to this
—that what ought to be the prime calamity of the death of him to whom she
has owed everything but the bare and dubious gift of life, is to be regarded
only as a subsidiary incident in the drama of ruin which she has brought
upon them all!
“When he is dead!” she repeats automatically; but Rupert treats it as a
question.
“You will be saddled with me for perhaps fifty years, and”—with a
smile, cruel in its gentleness—“I am afraid I am too great a coward to
release you by suicide!”
She starts as if stung by a hornet; and yet taking to herself a sort of
horrible comfort from his words. Yes; that is why she has betrayed him; that
is why she has never been able to love him really! He is a coward. He has
been telling her so for three and twenty years; and there is no reason for
disbelieving him! They have been standing still on the high-road; but now
she breaks away from him, walking so fast that it is a moment or two before
he overtakes her. In wordless wretchedness they step along side by side, the
sweet Babel of evening birds in their ears, the acrid sweetness of hawthorn
in their nostrils, and death in their hearts.
“Even if I freed you from my presence, as, of course, I should do, there
would still be the legal tie,” Rupert resumes presently, in a matter-of-fact
voice, whose would-be indifference the dead whiteness of his face and a
slight twitching of the lips contradict. “I believe that, under the
circumstances, it might be got rid of; but it would involve a publicity that
would be painful to you.”
She listens dully, so dazed with pain as to feel that he must be talking of
some one else.
 “And if it were not got rid of,” she foggily hears him continue, “it would,
of course, shut up any possible avenue to future happiness for you.”
At that her great anguish breaks through the merciful fog that has begun
to envelop it.
“There is no such avenue!” she answers thickly.
He glances at her with what looks like compassion. “You think so now,
but you will not think so always.”
“Always! always!” she repeats choking.
He shakes his head as one knowing better. “I am afraid your plan will
not hold water,” he rejoins, not irritating her by any spoken contradiction of
her asseveration of perpetual woe. “We must think of something more
feasible.”
His voice is so coolly dispassionate that once again, and for the last time
in both their lives, the balm-bringing idea flashes across her that he does not
care much after all—that his finicking womanish nature is incapable of the
pangs of a great thwarted passion. But one glance at the profile beside her
in the lined patience of its self-government, knocks the unworthy prop from
under her self-esteem.
They cover almost a mile in total silence; two miserable blots on the
sweet pageant of evening. They meet a herd of cows returning to their juicy
pasture after milking, straggling over the road, snatching mouthfuls out of
the lush hedge-rows; a few children loiteringly picking flowers, and
wastefully tossing them away, with the prodigal cruelty of Mother Nature
herself; a farm servant tittering over a gate with a ploughboy. Married birds
sing the joys of the nest and the family, and one blackbird seems to keep
pace with them as they go, merely to mock them with his liquid telling that,
as his Creator had done, he finds his world of the hedge and the pasture and
the new green tree very good. Both Rupert and Lavinia are dully sensible of
the jar with the surrounding happy suavities that Lavinia’s resumption of
the conversation brings with it.
“Can you suggest anything better? You must remember how short a time
we have.”
“Yes, I remember.”
“If you are quite resolved not to marry me——”
“I am quite resolved.”
 “You have never told me why?” She says it faintly, glancing at him with
that new and most uncharacteristic shiftiness which she feels that his all-
noticing eye must already have observed.
“If you wish I will tell you.”
“No!” she answers with almost inaudible haste. “It is enough for me that
you no longer wish it! I do not doubt that you have good reasons; but”—
growing more distinct in a feverish sophistry of desire to put herself in the
right—“let it be clearly understood that it is not I who go back from the
bargain! I was—I am willing to fulfil it.”
“Thank you.”
The courteous irony of his gratitude stings her back into muteness; and
again they walk on, unconscious of time or distance.
“I am willing to tell you what I have done, what happened, how it came
about!”
“But I am not willing to hear.”
Her offer has been incalculably difficult to make, and its refusal ought to
bring her some relief; yet the mournful magnanimity of that refusal crushes
her. She struggles weakly to crawl from under its weight.
“Though you will not listen to my explanation, you will take my word
that I have not done anything absolutely disgraceful!”
He gives a sort of shiver, the kind of gesture of disgust—only a million
times intensified—that she has formerly seen him make at any instance of
glaring bad taste in art, literature, or manners.
“Yes, I take your word! Only”—with that shudder in his voice—“don’t
say that you are sorry, and that you won’t do it again!”
She bows her head in profound humiliation, accepting that stinging
chastisement as so much less than her due; while at the same moment a
contradictory flash of repulsion from him for being able at such a moment
to see the æsthetic side of the situation whizzes through her consciousness.
Between them they have slain all talk that can be possible at such a
moment. Incapable of thought, her brain a caldron of boiling miseries,
Lavinia sets one foot before the other, plodding blindly on; while Rupert—
she has never possessed the plate-glass window into his soul, which he has
always had into hers, so that what memories, projects, torments, occupy his
mind during that last half-hour she never knows.
 The sound of a church clock rouses both—her from amid her steam of
boiling vapours; him from his unread thoughts. They have reached a part of
the road where the railway runs parallel to it, and a gate, faced by another
on the opposite side, gives entrance to the line. They pause to listen and
count, impatient of the interval between the deliberate strokes.
“Seven! Surely it can’t be seven! He will put himself into a fever if we
are late.”
Man and girl look at each other in shocked surprise, their own calamities
for the moment entirely sponged off their memories.
“And—is it possible?” throwing an astonished glance of apprehension
around—“we are close to Rivers Sutton! It will take us quite an hour to get
home.”
“Not if we run along the line!” The shot-out suggestion is Lavinia’s.
“The line!” Rupert echoes doubtfully.
“Yes, the line!” she repeats in a passion of irritation at his hesitancy.
“Are you afraid of being run over, or of the penalty of forty shillings?”
The gate is locked, but they are on its other side in a minute, and racing
along the grass edge that borders the metals. For the time every idea is
abolished from both their minds, but that of reaching home with the least
possible delay. In a perfect unanimity of distressful haste they speed along,
scarcely spending words for fear of wasting breath after the first outburst of
remorseful ejaculations.
“How could we have forgotten him?”
“The specialist told me that the least friction or worry was above all
things to be avoided.”
They run along for a while in perfect silence, their long legs skimming
over the abounding spring flowers that always seem to relish the railway
bank.
Then Lavinia cries out, “What time is it now?”
Without a break in his run, Rupert pulls out his watch, looks at it, holds
it to his ear, and answers in a key of acute annoyance—
“It has stopped!”
“And Rivers Sutton Church clock does not strike the quarters?”
“No.”
 “It can’t be more than ten minutes past,” she rejoins, panting a little,
though not much, for she is a muscular modern girl, and in good condition;
“for I hear the 7.10: it has just left Rivers Sutton station.”
“It is always late.”
Lavinia casts a glance over her shoulder, still flying along, to see
whether the train, faintly heard coming up behind them, is yet in sight; and,
having done so, pulls herself up to a stop with such sudden violence that her
knees rock under her. The horrified cry that accompanies her arrested
motion stays Rupert’s flying steps too, though the impetus of his going
carries him several paces beyond her before he can stop himself.
Astonishment at what can have checked a haste so urgent as hers makes
him too look round, gives to his sight also the object that has frozen her
flight into a paralysis of still horror. A curve of the line hides the
approaching train from their sight, though their ears plainly inform them of
its increasing nearness; but at what appears to be about halfway between the
point at which they stand and the curve, though in reality it is much nearer
to themselves, a little child is clearly seen standing out against the strong
yellow light of the May evening—a little child obviously at that most
dangerous age which has legs to toddle, but no judgment to guide those
legs. Probably it has crept through a gap in the hedge from the pointsman’s
cottage, which they had passed close to the locked and climbed gate; but the
two spectators of its prowess have no time to speculate as to how it came
into its present position of imminent peril.
“It is all right; it is on the up line,” Rupert says, with a sort of hiss.
“No, it isn’t; it is on the down.”
An instantaneous thought leaps from one pair of eyes to the other; and in
Rupert’s Lavinia reads a blind terror. That sixtieth part of a second reveals
to her that it has been the apprehension of her lifetime to find such a terror
in his eyes at some such crisis of his existence—the predominating, all-
mastering, terror of an injury to his own skin. If the endangered infant is to
be saved, it will not be by him. Without a second glance at her companion
—yes, she is almost—would to God she could be quite sure afterwards that
she had not thrown him one glance of contempt or reproach!—she rushes
back along the way she has come at the highest speed of which her already
strained limbs and labouring lungs are capable, taking instinctively to the
metals themselves, so as not to be impeded by grass and flowers. Will she
be in time? She tries to shout a warning to the little toddling thing, but not a
sound louder than a useless dissonant whisper will issue from her protesting
throat.
The train is coming round the curve. The engine, with its rocking train of
carriages, is rounding into sight. Thank God, it has not got up its full steam
yet; it is not going nearly at its highest speed. If it were, there would not be
a chance. As it is, there is just a possibility. It all depends upon whether she
can hold out. Yes, she will hold out, even if she drops down dead the
moment afterwards. No, she can’t; her powers are going to abandon her just
too soon, just when she is within a hundred yards of the object to be
rescued. She staggers—recovers herself—runs a couple of yards—staggers
again; drops on her knees, and then falls flat—happily half on to the up line.
She has just sense enough left to drag herself quite on to it—just sight and
hearing enough left to be aware of a hatless figure making the air sing in its
mad rush past her to meet the locomotive, before consciousness leaves her.
 CHAPTER XX
“How is he?”
“Just the same.”
“Not conscious?”
“No.”
“Never has been?”
“Not for a moment.”
It is the morning that follows that “serious and it is to be feared fatal
accident on the line between Rivers Sutton and Shipston,” to whose
occurrence at 7.15 p.m. on the previous evening the Shipston Weekly
Advertiser will give a paragraph in its next issue, and the London papers
record with greater conciseness, and in smaller type.
The interlocutors are exchanging whispered questions and answers in the
verandah, Mrs. Prince having risen at an unprecedented hour, and laden her
carriage with a pharmacy of drugs to show her neighbourly sympathy; and
Mrs. Darcy having spent the night at Campion Place, a vigil to which her
appearance lends no improbability.
“I do not yet understand quite how it happened.”
“Will you mind coming a little farther from the house?”
“But I thought you said he was quite unconscious?”
“So he is; but they are not.”
“To be sure! to be sure! Poor things! poor things!”
They tread out stealthily on the sward, where the morning meets them in
its still wet splendour of dew and flower. The young sun has flung away the
thin rosy scarves that lightly swathed him at his birth, and is magnificently
wheeling up the eastern sky. In the shortening shadows the pale green
leaves of the late tulips carry little globes of bright moisture upon them, and
their gallant deep cups still hold some of the wine of the dawn.
“The servants tell me that they were walking along the line. How came
they to be walking along the line?”
“They were late, and afraid of keeping Sir George waiting. It was the
shortest way home.” The rector’s wife pauses, her dead-white face and
sunken eyes turning towards the glory-promising mist, through which the
trees, fields, oast-houses of the weald, dwindled by distance, are beginning
to pierce. Her voice sounds like that of one reciting a lesson, which she
knows will have to be infinitely repeated.
“And then?”
“They heard the train coming up behind them, and Lavinia looked round
to see how near it was, and saw the child on the line.”
“Whose child was it?” asks Mrs. Prince, with an irrelevant curiosity
which jars—if anything can still jar upon nerves so strung and tense—on
her hearer.
“It was the pointsman, George Bates’s. The mother had run in next door
to speak to a neighbour, and left it alone in the house!”
“It is a scandal that such a thing should be allowed! A child of two left
alone in a house!”
Mrs. Darcy acquiesces, faintly conscious that the unescapable worst of
her story is still ahead.
“And then?”
“Then they both set off running back as hard as they could to try and
reach it in time.”
“Yes, yes?” rather breathlessly.
“Lavinia stumbled and fell.”
“How very unlike her!”
“But Rupert ran on.”
“Yes?”
It is hard to be pulled up so near the dénouement, as Mrs. Prince feels,
but yet it is evident to even her not very acute perceptions that, for the
moment, whip and spur are useless. Yet, after what is in reality a very short
interval, the tale is taken firmly up again.
“He got up just in time, snatched the child, and threw it safely on to the
grass.
“Yes, yes? Oh, please go on!”
“But then—then”—will she ever be able to get through it? and this is
only the first time out of hundreds that she will have to repeat it—“he
seemed to lose his head; he stood for half a second right in front of the
engine, and one of the buffers knocked him down, and the whole train went
over him!” It is done! She has got it over; but of course there will follow a
flood of questions and comments.
Mrs. Darcy has not long to wait. After the strong shudder that the
dreadful narrative provokes comes a train of horrified curiosities as to
detail.
“Was he—they told me not, but yet I can’t understand how it could be
otherwise—was he terribly mutilated?”
Mrs. Darcy puts a thin hand up to her mouth to oblige it to cease
twitching.
“Not in the least; beyond the injury to his head, from which he has been
unconscious ever since, and a slight wound in the right leg, there was not a
scratch upon him.”
“How miraculous!”
“The train was going quite slowly.”
“Then his life might have been saved—he might have got off scot-free,
if he had not lost his head?”
“Yes; if he had not lost his head.” Oh, is not it nearly ended? how much
longer will it continue?
There is a respite of a few moments; but when Mrs. Prince’s next
sentence appears it is in the nature of a comment that makes her companion
regret the questions that have preceded it.
“In any other case one would have said that it looked almost like suicide;
but, of course, in his, that is absolutely out of the question.”
“Absolutely!”
“How did you hear the details?—not from Lavinia?”
“My husband went down to Rivers Sutton Station last night, after—after
Rupert had been brought home, and saw the engine-driver and fireman.”
“Dear me! how shocking!” The ejaculation is not one particularly
apposite to the special fact recorded; but at least it needs no answer, nor do
the sincere tears that follow it, nor the struggle with a pince-nez, which
refuses to remain riding upon a nose which is being blown. “And Sir
George! Poor man, in his state of health too! I suppose he is quite crushed,
stunned?”
 The catechism has recommenced; but to this question, at least, the
answer is easy and readily given.
“Do you know what he said to me just now, when he came out of
Rupert’s room to speak to me?” Mrs. Darcy asks, her wan face lit by a
strange shining in the fagged eyes. “He said, ‘No one can say that I have not
had two brave sons!’ ”
“No one can say that I have not had two brave sons!” repeats Mrs.
Prince, with an accent of stupefaction. “He took it that way? Well, I am
afraid we all have been rather in the habit of taking poor Rupert for
somewhat of a muff!”
The other turns away, writhing at having her own thought translated into
the brutality of words. Who has held Rupert so cheaply as she? During the
enormous hours of the so-called short summer night, how many slighting
words and contemptuous thoughts have risen upon her remorseful memory?
She has always, always belittled him; always sought to set him lower in the
esteem of her for whose love he has served through so many unobtrusive
years. Always, always, except—thank God, that there is an except—on that
last day in the kitchen garden—is it possible that it was only the day before
yesterday?—she had taken his part, had spoken up for him—had done him
some tardy justice! To her over-wrought feelings—unbalanced by
sleeplessness and shock—the thought of that one half-hour seems to be all
that can make it possible to her to endure herself!
“I shall not attempt to see him—I mean Sir George,” says Mrs. Prince,
sobbing with an unchecked frankness of emotion which smacks more of her
original class than of the one to which she has attained. “But be sure you
say everything that is kind and proper. And tell him from me that if there is
anything of any sort that we can do or send, we shall be only too glad. One
of the most valuable privileges of wealth is to be able to help its less
fortunate friends in their need!”
She goes away still sobbing, but partially comforted by her own bit of
bunkum, and the thought of the magic properties of the Dropless Candle.
An out-of-place flash of what, under less dreadful circumstances, would
have been amusement at the thought of Sir George’s frenzy at being
patronized as one of Mrs. Prince’s less fortunate friends, darts
incongruously across the rector’s wife, as she turns her steps homeward.
Her household has to be arranged for; so as to do without her during the
next and perhaps many succeeding days—a deprivation to which they
usually so strongly object as quite to prevent it, but in which they now
acquiesce with tearful eagerness.
Yet what can she do for the stricken household? Can she lift the lids of
Rupert’s shut eyes, and bring consciousness, recognition, forgiveness, into
them? One agonized ejaculation from Lavinia has revealed to her that the
knowledge of having something to forgive had come to him, before setting
off on that last walk—a knowledge that had, perhaps, helped him to “lose
his head.” “To lose his head!” Yes; that is the phrase which she must always
employ, never quitting her hold upon it during the hundreds of times that
she will have to repeat the tale. As she stands listening outside the shut
door, Lavinia steals out, a ghastly noiseless shadow in the morning light.
“They want more ice!” she says, looking at her friend with dead eyes
that do not seem to see her.
“I will order it for you. Is there any change?”
“No, none; but”—an angry terror bringing life back into her face—“that
does not mean anything bad?”
“Oh no; not necessarily.”
“They do not expect it yet?”
“Of course not, of course not. While I fetch the ice, won’t you change
your dress? it would freshen you, and I would call you in a moment if there
was any change.”
“No, no; he might speak. Just while you are calling me, he might say
some one thing; he may be saying it now.” And she slips back into the
darkness.
But the days pass, fall into the ordered routine of habit, and Rupert does
not speak, does not say the one thing for which Lavinia listens day and
night—the one thing whose utterance can keep her sane. It is not her fault
that there is any interruption day or night to her listening; and, while forced
away for necessary food, there is but one thought in her mind—the thought
that he may speak, and she not be by to hear! Daily she strains her ears to
listen through the ordeal of the luncheon or dinner, to whose endurance she
compels herself for his father’s sake, and through the worse ordeal of
relating to Sir George over and over again—since he is never tired of
hearing—how it happened. Oh the torture of that repetition! and the keener
torture of that explanation which on the first relation has to be given, and
has more than once to be repeated, as not quite clear!
“You say that you were ahead! How did you come to be ahead?”
“I caught sight of it first; that gave me a start.”
“And you were within a hundred yards before he caught you up?”
“About that, I think.”
“And the whole distance was a quarter of a mile?”
“I should think so.”
“How was it that he did not overtake you sooner?”
“He—he had a greater distance to cover; he had run on ahead of me
before we saw it.”
“How much ahead of you?”
“I can’t say.”
There is such a helpless anguish in her voice that he stops questioning
her for that while; but the doubt and the explanation are sure to crop up
again at the next of those dreadful meals, spent in hiding their own food,
and compelling each other to swallow his or hers.
“I can’t quite understand how you kept the lead so long!”
Slightly varied, it always comes back as a question, a wonder, a
reflection, and she learns to recognize with a terrible sharpness the signs of
its approach. Her uncle’s own illness seems to be in abeyance, kept at arm’s
length by the force of his will, and through those dreadful days of waiting
his spirit maintains a strange level of exaltation.
“We put the saddle on the wrong horse when we called him Milksop!”
Lavinia hears him say repeatedly, in a tone of triumph.
He is very tender in his manner towards his niece, going entirely out of
his own character to entreat her to eat, and trying humbly to emulate the son
he had despised in self-forgetting attentions, and he rives her heart and
conscience unknowingly by the sympathy and pity for her in her tragically
interrupted nuptials, which every one of his words and actions implies.
 CHAPTER XXI
The day that was to have been that of Rupert Campion and Lavinia Carew’s
wedding has come.
“I am always afraid of some ill luck when the bride does not change her
initials,” Miss Brine has said in the Rectory school-room, in answer to the
children’s lamenting comment upon the fact.
A thoughtful silence follows the governess’s utterance, broken by
Phillida, who says meditatively—
“Then if Lavy had married Captain Binning, she would have been all
right.”
But the wily Brine is not to be trapped into any such admission.
“Miss Carew would undoubtedly have changed her initials in that case,”
she replies cautiously.
Lavinia had hoped that her uncle would—in the general upsetting
consequent upon the catastrophe, the removal of all the landmarks of
ordinary life—have forgotten to note the date of a day so outwardly
identical with its gloomy fellows that it would have passed unnoticed in its
obscurity and disgrace; but luncheon-time undeceives her.
“This is not quite the way in which we expected to pass this day!” he
says, after sending away the servants. “It is rather rough on you; but there is
a French saying, I believe, that what is deferred is not therefore lost. There
may be a good time coming.”
The cheerfulness valiantly forced into the old voice for her sake, in his
new selflessness, must, at whatever cost to herself, be met in the same
spirit, and she compels herself to repeat in French the saying he has alluded
to, with what—since intention is everything—must do duty for a smile, “Ce
qui est différe n’est point perdu.”
“Though it may not be to-morrow or the day after, we shall perhaps still
hear Darcy exhorting you and him to increase and multiply!” continues Sir
George, with a distressing attempt at pleasantry, and a painful harking back
to his old theme. “In any case, it will do no harm to drink to your wedding
day. Come, let me fill your glass.”
 She holds it out with an unshaking hand, and commands her throat to
swallow, to drink a toast, the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of the wish
contained in which are alternatives equally horrible. And then they return
hand-in-hand—the old man has added a new caressingness to his other
tendernesses—and resume their places, one on each side of the silent,
motionless form stretched between them with bound, ice-covered head, in
the darkness; and Lavinia takes up again her day-long, night-long
employment of repeating over and over and over again to herself the
question which she is beginning to see written in red whenever she turns her
eyes in the obscurity—
“Did he lose his head? Was it suicide? And if so, was it something he
saw in her face that drove him to it?”
She is going through them in the usual sequence at about four o’clock in
the afternoon of her wedding day, when she happens to be for a few
moments alone with the still living rigidity beside her, when in the almost
complete darkness, her eyes and ears—or have they gone mad too?—detect,
or seem to detect, a slight movement in the bed. She darts noiselessly to the
window, and, pulling aside a bit of the curtain, casts a glance backwards
towards the bed—a glance that can hardly travel, for the weight of the hope
it carries. Whatever she may be, her senses are not mad; nor have they told
her a lie. Rupert is feebly stirring, and his eyes are open. In a second she is
at his side, and stooping over him; the word is coming—the priceless word
on which her reason hangs! It is spoken so low that she has to bend very
close down to catch it. It is only an almost inaudible—
“Well, dear!”
In the reeling immensity of her joy, she can but stupidly echo, almost as
inaudibly, the greeting that seems to have come to her from the speechless
other side. “Well, dear!” There is a long pause. Into Rupert’s eyes, as they
turn slowly round, the watcher sees consciousness, recollection, gradually
returning. When those long-absent inhabitants have reoccupied their seats,
will he take back his greeting? While the answer to that inquiry is in
suspense, the functions of life seem suspended in her. The slowly
wandering eyes return to their point of departure—her face; regained
knowledge is in them; but neither anger nor pain.
“I muffed it, as usual,” he says, with a ghost of his old self-ridicule, and,
wearied with the exertion of speech, falls back into unconsciousness.
 * * * * *
Sir George has never been what is called a “professing Christian,” which
indeed is a title that seems to promise a paucity of performance; but ever
since Rupert’s accident, he has daily asked Lavinia—possibly only with
some dim feeling of a propitiatory sacrifice to a fetish—to read him a
portion of Scripture, and on the evening of that wedding day he finds with
some difficulty—for he does not know his way about very well—the
chapter that tells of him who, even while being carried out to burial, was
recalled to life and to the widowed arms that had thought to have for ever
loosed him. He listens, leaning back comfortably in his chair with a sort of
smile of triumph on his face; and on the open page Lavinia’s tears drop hot
and blessed as she reads.
During the night that follows Rupert speaks again, and though it is only
to ask for water, the two or three languid words keep the flame of hope
alive and steady in the watchers’ hearts. On the next day he has a slightly
longer interval of consciousness; on the day after that a longer one again;
and on the day after that for a whole hour his eyes are open, and faint
speech rises to his lips. If he were allowed, he would by-and-by even ask
questions; but rigorous quiet is enjoined upon him, and since it is Lavinia
with whom he makes most efforts to converse, she is banished from the
room. Such exile is of comparatively little moment to her now, now that it
will be possible to her to wait, and wait sanely, even for weeks and months,
for the answer to that question which she feels she must yet put.
Since she last looked at them, the horse-chestnuts in the Rectory garden
are quite over. They were in fullest bloom the day she pasted them going to
Rumsey Brake. Was it B.C. or A.D. that she was last in Rumsey Brake? The
former date seems far the more probable. The door into the churchyard
opens cautiously. Lavinia is standing under the verandah, and through it
appear, as they have appeared many times a day during the late crisis, the
Darcy children. Almost always they have borne gifts, and to-day is no
exception.
“Could not he fancy one of his own eggs?” asks Daphne, lifting the lid
of a basket on her arm, and displaying the creamy ovals of three beautiful
specimens of the product of the clerical poultry-yard.
“I am sure that he will in a day or two; but why his own?”
 “We have re-christened Gatacre, and called him Rupert,” explains
Daphne. “He is always the one who begins laying first.”
“If we had known that Rupert was a hero, we should have christened a
hen after him long ago,” says Phillida, coming to her sister’s aid. “But one
can’t always tell by people’s looks, can one? I think that heroes ought to
have some mark to know them by; but Miss Brine says it would be
invidious.”
“There could be no mistake about beloved Captain Binning!” says
Daphne, with the delightful liberty to express its preference of sweet and
wholesome childhood. “One saw at a glance what he was.”
“The Nubia has got to Las Palmas; it was in the paper this morning,”
says Phillida. “But of course you saw it.”
Until the mention of Binning’s name, Lavinia had been enjoying the
company of her young friends; now the one desire concerning them that
occupies her mind is, that they should go.
“You must remember that for the last ten days I have seen and heard
nothing. I am as behindhand in my information as a convict,” she answers,
laughing uneasily.
The days pass, each one with a trifling gain to distinguish it—perhaps
only a curtain allowed to be a little more drawn back; an atom more colour
in the pale lips; a fuller sound in the thready voice. Every day some small
stretched privilege is accorded, each dealt out with a frugal hand, that feels
its way tentatively, lest the bruised brain should avenge itself for any
temerity in hurrying it to be well. Whether thanks to these precautions or to
a natural wiriness, Rupert is apparently returning to life and vigour, without
a throw-back, and with an even steadiness that—considering the nature of
the accident that has laid him low—seems nothing short of miraculous.
“Humanly speaking, we are out of the wood,” the doctor says.
It is needless to state that he is an old doctor. A young one would have
scorned the possibility of there being any other way. Since he is “humanly
speaking, out of the wood,” Rupert is allowed to receive one visitor a day
for half an hour at a time; and since Sir George and Lavinia do not count, it
is a party of three that gathers round his bed, on the occasion of Mrs.
Darcy’s being for the first time admitted. In the midst of the gentle
heartiness of her greeting to the explorer so lately returned from the dim
limits of life, the rector’s wife catches herself wondering whether Lavinia is
recalling the last time on which they had met by a sick man’s bed; or
whether the preceding weeks have wiped it off her memory, as they have
wiped the youth off her face.
“Tell the rector we shall require his services sooner than he thinks,” Sir
George says, his face, scored with time and sorrow, beaming at Susan from
the other side of the bed. “If only this lazy chap will hurry up. I believe he
enjoys lying here and being pampered.”
“I am sure he does,” Rupert answers, with a white smile.
“We are thinking of August or September at latest,” continues the old
man, looking round half suspiciously at the three faces about him, as if
defying contradiction of his optimism.
Rupert has never contradicted his father. He does not now.
“If we make it September, we shall have the hop-pickers to grace it,” he
answers, with another little smile.
“Can you never look at life except from the ridiculous point of view?”
cries his father, in quite his old manner. Then, riddled with remorse, he falls
to scolding Lavinia for having—as she has not, nor is ever likely to do—
forgotten the moment for administering some potion or extract.
The girl smilingly rebuts the accusation, appealing quietly to the clock to
defend her; but the curtain at the bed-head—it is an old-fashioned tester—
which her hand is desperately clutching, could tell a less placid tale. She
does not quite hear what next passes, and is aroused only by the sound of
Sir George’s voice uttering a strident fiat.
“Time’s up!” he cries, with his watch in his hand, in slight to the clock
which has proved him wrong; “and we do not allow a minute’s law.”
He marshals Mrs. Darcy relentlessly out of the room as he speaks, and
the cousins are left tête-à-tête. Rupert’s fingers play a meditative tune on
the bedclothes; and Lavinia, watching him, and vaguely trying to make out
what is the air which they are intending to convey, is surprised by a criminal
thought of what a much less virile hand it is than that which she had seen
lying in the gauntness of its departed strength on the other man’s coverlet.
The air continues, set to a slight sigh.
“It is odd to hear him beginning to harp on the old string,” says the
man’s weak voice.
 Lavinia gives a slight shiver. Is the theme to be taken up again, just
where the striking of Rivers Sutton Church clock had broken it off five
weeks ago?
“I do not think you ought to talk of anything agitating yet.”
“But it does not agitate me. A knock on the head is not supposed to be a
sedative, but in my case it seems to have been one.”
The voice and look are as calm as the words, but he has stopped his
drumming on the sheet; and she waits in silent apprehension, praying that
the subject may drop, since she knows that the time is not yet ripe for her to
put her one question. Rupert, however, as is soon clear, has no intention of
dropping the subject.
“Poor old gentleman! He is not quite up to date, is he?”
Lavinia is trembling all over. Has not the moment now come for her to
fulfil the vow so solemnly taken, so intertwined with her frantic prayers for
his restoration as to be inseparable from them?—the vow to cleave to him
through life and death and eternity, without one backward glance, if he be
but given back to her extremity of asking? And now that the Invisible
Awfulness, whom she had wearied with her insistence, has accomplished
His part of the bargain, how dare she tarry with hers? If she does, may not
He take back His boon, and leave her to endure an existence made
unendurable by a for-ever unanswered question?
“If he is not up to date, neither am I,” she replies.
Rupert’s eyebrows go up in the old familiar way. “Is that a riddle, dear?”
“No,” she answers, purpose and voice strengthening as she proceeds, “it
is not a riddle; it is good plain truth. If you mean that your father is not ‘up
to date’ because he still believes that we are engaged to be married, I am in
the same boat, for I still believe it.”
Perhaps from the feebleness of his body, perhaps from an inability to
frame an answer that can nicely hit a case so difficult, the young man is
silent; but there is no hostility, nor even much melancholy, in the glance that
first rests on and then delicately averts itself in compassion from her
convulsed face.
“I have been disloyal to you,” she goes on, fighting down her distress
lest it should gag her before she has time to get her full confession out. “I
offer again to tell you to what extent——”
 He stops her with a prohibitive movement, full of dignity, of his pale
hand.
“No,” he says; “I have no wish to know the tale of kisses. Many or few,
we will take them for granted.”
Her head sinks on her breast in an agony of shame.
“Many or few, they are past and done with,” she cries out. “And now I
beg you to forgive me! on my knees I beg you to forgive me!” As she
speaks, she suits the action to the word, and drops on her knees beside the
bed.
He looks at her, disturbed at the humiliation expressed by her whole
being, yet with an underlying calm that dominates her.
“The only thing that I can’t forgive you is your present attitude,” he
answers; and, as he speaks, there is just enough of gentle disgust in his
voice to bring back before her, in prosaic strength, his æsthetic detestation
of all scenes, rows, uglinesses.
“I must keep it till you answer me,” she returns, chilled, yet persistent.
“Will you forgive me? and will you prove it by marrying me?—by
marrying me as soon as you get well? I will stay here until my knees grow
to the carpet, if you do not say ‘Yes.’ ”
He lies silent for a moment or two, considering her with a sort of high,
detached pity.
“I have no alternative,” he answers, with a grave smile. “Since you wish
it, I will marry you—when I get well; and now, would you oblige me by
standing up?”