The Morbidly Fascinating World of the Saints

And why working with them should be part of your practice

Christianity is one of those religions where, the closer it is examined, the more bizarre and incomprehensible it becomes. Take, for example, its chief deity: simultaneously a male creator-god and the tribal figurehead of an obscure Canaanite group, characterised as an entity so bloodthirsty and vindictive that estimated deaths at his hand are in the region of 25 million. A god so aroused by the ‘pleasing aroma’ of burning flesh that his portable home (the tabernacle) required the slaughter of a sacrificial lamb every morning and evening for 440 years, and the dedication of his permanent temple was marked by the ritual slaying of 22,000 cattle and 120,000 sheep and goats. A god so capricious that he engineered a fait-accompli-masquerading-as-free-will resulting in eternal torment for 99% of the beings created in his image. A god so wrathful at his creations that he required the extreme mortification and death of his son (an aspect of himself), in order to slake his anger. A god so psychopathic that the only rational response was Gnosticism.

This obsession with blood, death, pain and sacrifice caused bemusement amongst the pagans of the mediterranean regions during the earliest years of Christianity, but it tells us a lot about the context in which the cult of saints emerged. Although ancestor worship and veneration of the dead were not alien concepts to Hellenistic and Roman pagans, the behaviour of Christians in relation to the mortal remains of the first martyrs – victims of pagan persecution – was considered abnormal. Eunapius of Sardis observed how:

They collected the bones and skulls of criminals… made them out to be gods, and thought that they became better by defiling themselves at their graves.

Pagans put in place careful boundaries between the domains of the living and the dead, mediated by festivals, rituals, privilege and class. These governed the accepted modes of interaction with those buried in the necropoles of the Roman world; the great cemeteries lying outside its cities. Christians however yearned for regular, prolonged physical closeness with their mighty dead. The place of a martyr’s burial was considered hallowed, and graves rapidly became shrines – loci of divine power. The types of veneration occurring at the tombs of these sancti included: vows, petitions for cures and other miracles, dream incubation and offerings of goods to the clerics who had charge of the tombs.

The exact reason why early Christians regarded martyrs’ tombs as places of divine power is difficult to pin down, but it seems to be rooted in the belief that the asceticism and torture they endured created conditions where supernatural power could accrue. Denial of the body gave way to the inflowing of the holy spirit and this process reached its culmination at death, resulting in the corpse retaining its sanctity postmortem. Thus, saints represented a conflation of celestial and chthonic: the physical body of the saint resided in the grave, while the saint’s soul resided in Heaven. In late antiquity this was regarded as a literal phenomenon: the saint actually remained present in the grave while existing simultaneously amongst the stars via the soul’s apotheosis. The tomb was the point where Heaven and Earth met.

This belief – that the corpse of the saint was a source of a persistent divine power, charisma and continuing personality – defined a radical new form of reverence completely alien to the pagan mind; one where physical proximity to the corporeal remains of the dead was paramount; a concept that achieved its culmination in the medieval cult of relics.

The praesentia of a saint – the holy presence or incarnation in place – sacralised the surrounding land and effectively cleansed it of demonic influences. Thus, proximity to the saint’s tomb gave rise to miraculous phenomena such as healing and exorcism. It also, inevitably, led to that sacralised space becoming highly prized and contested. Pilgrimage was commonplace, as was the placing of objects within or near the tomb, to absorb the martyr’s virtue, and to then be widely distributed or sold for profit. Another consequence was the tradition of ad sanctos burial, the custom of burying the dead near the tombs of saints in the belief that souls would derive spiritual benefits. In 295 CE, the gentlewoman Pompeiana obtained the body of the martyr Maximilianus and buried it beside the grave of St Cyprian, where she herself was ultimately interred. Well-to-do Christian families were therefore able to enclose and privatise access to the saints’ sacral space. The logical conclusion of this was to translate the saints’ remains to ecclesiastical houses where they were enshrined in a purpose-built sacred building. This enabled abbeys and bishops to hallow their own land where, through the saints’ virtues, the miraculous was made manifest. They could also pocket the vast wealth to be made from control of the physical, bureaucratic and spiritual systems that facilitated mass pilgrimage. To be fair, by the Middle Ages pilgrimages urgently needed an imposition of order and control: they were often chaotic affairs and saints were possessed of a strange, anarchic and potentially dangerous charisma, sometimes provoking a kind of mass hysteria.

Of course, pagans recognised some of their own traditions in the Christian veneration of saints. For example, dies parentales – a nine-day Roman festival held in honour of family ancestors – included offerings made to the manes – the shades of the dead – at family tombs located outside Rome's sacred boundary. And by the late fourth century, saints fulfilled the role of an ‘intimate, invisible friend’, much like a pagan daimon, or the parhedros of the Greek Magical Papyri. The cult of saints and its practices may even have been directly influenced by paganism, to some extent at least. One argument is that early church leaders made explicit concessions to a variety of pagan practices to which the masses were still attached, or were unable to control the vectors of grassroots popular religion: veneration of the dead and a belief in the efficacy of objects charged with supernatural power: charms, fetish objects, talismans, effigies etc. This capitulation allowed a nascent cult of saints and cult of icons to flourish, infused with behaviours and beliefs reminiscent of paganism.

However, the real power of saints lay in their ability to tackle the resilient traditions of pagan magick, particularly in northern Europe. The subtleties of theology and doctrine were probably lost on the majority of the populace, but their persistent desire to consult magickal specialists was a profound concern for the church. As an Abrahamic monotheistic religion with a morally dualistic cosmology, Christianity was and is required to demonize all other religions, beliefs and practices. So rather than rejecting the reality of magick, the church placed ever more emphasis on its diabolical origins, and therefore its existential threat to both the individual and society. The only acceptable and legitimate form of Christian ‘magick’ was miracles; all other miraculous phenomena were the result of demonic meddling. Miracles were the product of divine intervention; magick the product of demonic assistance. Obviously, this did not prevent the populace from consulting sorceresses, seers and witches to find lost objects, interpret past and future events, conjure, chant, divine, and perform every type of magickal art. The church realised that, to gain inroads, it needed to stop condemning pagan magicians and instead attend to the needs they fulfilled.

Saints served this purpose well. In the genealogy of Christianity they could be understood as divine ancestors. Saints were simultaneously ‘friends of God’ – active intercessors on behalf of the living – and an ‘intimate, invisible friend’ to their devotees; a supernatural being entrusted with the care of the individual, much like a pagan genius, daimon, or guardian angel.

While the likes of Augustine and Martin of Tours pontificated on the dangers of impious pagan veneration of local trees, wells, springs and stones, saints were deployed to fulfil the same function as local gods or tutelary spirits. They provided general peace and protection to the locality, fecundity to the land, health to the inhabitants and providential weather, a bulwark against demonic influence, a defence against enemies and a source of justice to felons. This relates back to the concept of a saint’s praesentia. The land surrounding a saint’s corporeal remains was inherently unholy, but became sacralised and imbued with holy significance by virtue of the divine power resident within the saint’s corpse. The land was hallowed further as a result of the ritual and ceremony that occurred during the saint’s festival. It was a symbiotic relationship, the ‘health’ of the saint was sustained by the community in which it resided. In turn, the earthly site became empowered by the saint’s bodily remains. Pilgrimage enabled the exploration of a wider saintly landscape, including secondary sites beyond the main cult focus, but still with sacred significance, creating a kind of hagiographic topography with the saint’s resting place functioning as an adytum or holy-of-holies.

The intercessionary role inhabited by saints is not unique to Christianity; bodhisattvas, rishis, walis, tzadikim and shengren are all, to some extent, apotheosised humans serving as divine helpers. But the specifics of Christian saints are unique and, often, bizarre. The requirement for extreme suffering or mortification reflects the privations undergone by Christ himself, who can be considered an ur-saint. Christ is therefore the ur-intercessor, the advocate who presents human concerns to the capricious, wrathful god. Saints are, in turn, little Christs.

The liminal saintly state of aliveness-in-death is also strangely morbid, leading to a fetishisation of the corpse; a kind of necrophilia or, more accurately, necrodox¹. For example, in the Middle Ages the veins of St Gerard Majella were opened annually so that the people could dip their handkerchiefs into his still-warm blood. Its closest comparison is probably the Norse haugbui - literally ‘mound-dweller’- a type of draugr or revenant (although ‘zombie’ would be a more accurate term) that continues its life-in-death existence as a corporeal being animated with supernatural power; the characteristics of the Norse haugbui and Christian saint are also quite similar.

The tension between elite and popular religion illustrates how saints functioned as an idiosyncratic nexus for spiritual, cultural, societal and political forces. By virtue of their remains being located in a specific geography, saints became embodiments of the land and the locality in much the same was as pagan genii locorum. Elite secular and clerical forces promoted the cult of their saint for their own ends, aiding the acquisition of an abbey’s endowments. Relics were as much a mark of status as devotion. But although saints were widely patronised by the aristocracy and social elite, they were frequently considered to be ‘of the people.’ Saints were invoked by the poor against the mighty as righters of wrongs and champions of the dispossessed. And of course, the saint him or herself was an independent and unpredictable power, capable of delivering supernatural help or hindrance in unexpected ways.

Many modern practitioners, myself included, cleave to certain saints regardless of any religious affiliation, on the basis that a long-lived intercessionary tradition in esotericism – whether grimoire spirits, gurus or saints – has proven, and continues to prove, efficacious. Obvious examples are saints Cyprian, Brigid, Mary Magdalene, Albertus Magnus, and Columbus. One advantage of working with saints is the simplicity of exhortation: prayer is usually sufficient, although proximity to the saint’s shrine – whether it remains in situ or not – is additionally helpful. Other techniques from the medieval era can employed, such as simply speaking the saint’s name, reading the saint’s passio aloud, or gazing upon an icon or depiction. Given a saint’s connection to a specific locale, and their authority over it, their name can be invoked when conducting land or nature-based magick; the same applies to their areas of patronage, or the miracles they have exhibited.

In the next essay I’ll focus on one Anglo-Saxon saint in particular; an exemplar of all the traits and characteristics of sainthood, and who intersects with non-Christian traditions in a way that is both unique and archetypal.

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Further reading

Bremmer, Jan N; Veenstra, Jan Riepke: The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period; Peeters (2002)

Brown, Peter: The Cult of the Saints; Its Rise and Function in Latin Christianity, Enlarged Edition (2014)

Kieckhefer, Richard: Magic in the Middle Ages; Cambridge University Press (2000)

McIntinre, Ross T: In the Footsteps of the Saints: Sacred Landscapes and Saints’ Cults in the Anglo-Norman World, 1066-1220 (2020 thesis)

Wilson, Stephen (ed): Saints and Their Cults: Studies in Religious Sociology, Folklore and History; Cambridge University Press (1983)

1. A portmanteau word: necro, from the Greek nekros: ‘corpse’; dox, from the Greek doxa: a belief driven by opinion; the practice of worship.