Feast of Persephone 04 Aphrodilia 2024

They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes.[a] 2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones.

6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”

9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”

“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10 And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.

The Gospel Acording to Mark, 5:1-20 New International Version

There is a demon in my head who insists that I have free will. 

How does one discuss the concept of self-injury? If we begin by offering a comprehensive formulation of what we mean by self harm, then we must begin by acknowledging its long and complex history, its often arbitrary and always culturally specific applications to a diverse host of actions which in the same or other cultures may alternatively or additionally be named art, ritual, drug, expiriment, exercise, discipline, crime, punishment, perversion, enlightenment, death-driven, life affirming, immanent, transcendent, demonic, divine. Rather than offer a definition which would then need to stand up to an exhaustive survey of contexts and caveats and which would necessarily prejudge the discussion), let us begin with the scene above in Mark Chapter 5, which has the double advantage of being familiar to many and being a literary construction—which is to say, if it depicts a specific historical event or kind of event, namely a demonic possession and exorcism in first century Palestine, it does so through a specific literary frame, that genre called Gospel, one of a number of texts written and circulated in the generations after the career of the historical person of Yesuhua of Nazerath, and which were in conversation with an ongoing oral tradition relating his alleged words and actions and those of his contemporaries. Between that generation and now, there have been perhaps nineteen hundred years of accumulated exegesis, translation, interpretation, and application of this literary construction, of which I choose the New International Version specifically because it is representative of those I read while growing up as a devout Christian.

This is not to say that the NIV is an ideal rendering of the text. Far from it. For academic purposes the New Oxford Annotated Bible is preferable, and it departs from the NIV is several pertinent ways. Foremost for our purposes, the NOA renders “κοπτω” in verse 5 differently, so that it reads not as “cut himself with stones” but instead “bruising himself with stones.” 

I do not know how long he has been here. Possibly before I showed up. I have been so many selves trapped in this body. I have been a body haunted by so many ghosts.

While researching the passage, I came across a rather strange and offensive exegetic interpretation of “κοπτω ”.

“The verb κοπτω (kopto) means to strike; to apply a sudden forceful blow in order to either arrest something moving or cut off something attached. It describes a brutal interference with an item's natural course of action (hence our English word "comma"), which in turn relates it to the verb πενομαι (penomai), meaning to toil or labor, from whence comes the adjective πονηρος (poneros), or evil.”

“Together with the preposition κατα (kata), meaning down: the verb κατακοπτω (katakopto), meaning to beat down. This verb occurs in the New Testament only in MARK 5:5, where the demoniac "beats himself down" with stones. To the uninspired eye this story might tell of some drooling lunatic who hits himself with pieces of rock, but the wording obviously forces a parallel with a very serious person who submits himself rigorously to a regime of rules and regulations.”

https://www.abarim-publications.com/DictionaryG/k/k-o-p-t-om.html

Not trusting this passage, I continue looking. Next find: a dissertation from Santa Clara University Theology Department.

https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1085&context=jst_dissertations

Well that wasn’t very helpful.