List of 5 Patron Saints of the Strange

A world full of gods. That was the interwoven reality in which Christianity of antiquity found itself. The Romans, the Greeks, the Druids, the Persians, the “Barbarians” they all had their respective pantheons. Gods of these pantheons ran the gamut from the mundane house hold variety to the specialty gods of the sacred cults of the oracles. The evolution, export and spread of early Christianity was to be dictated by these parameters. Making a switch to monotheism was going to prove to be a hard sell.

It has been documented that without the clout and persuasion of an aristocratic class among the Roman subjects who had converted to Christianity, the movement might not have succeeded in it's nascent form. These vested noblemen were also outstanding marketeers. They grasped that a synergistic and gradual shift to monotheism would be much easier than a drastic 1-80. Moreover, the Romans were steeped in ancestor worship and had a culture anchor in reliving tales of history. The abandonment of hundreds of years venerating many gods was not a concept in their collective wheelhouse.

So, the Christians of early antiquity kept the many gods but slowly altered their intrinsic meaning. The Saints were not gods but rather a group of more pious Christians than the rest of the believers. They were to become middlemen, sin brokers, and divine mediators. What was the rational? Why employ a Saint as a go between? To answer that we draw on the comparison with polytheism's many gods concept and their significance with the mundane; Jesus, the Ghost and God are just too damn busy. Don't bother the Godhead if you can use a Saint. It's akin to using a 1^st line call center-customer service-help desk instead of getting patched through to the Chief Technical Officer.

Potential Catholic saints were scrutinized on the merits of their wonders before their canonization as a bona fide Saint. If the Pontiff is swayed by the empirically fuzzy proof then the dead person enters an undefined period of beatification. The beatification marks a cooling off period whereby more “proofs” of exceptional earthly divinity are gathered and filed away. Once enough evidence has been amassed the reigning Pope can cast off the beatification and officially canonize the Saint “in waiting”.

Catholic saints are believed to fly about, to have stigmata's, heal the infirm and occasionally imbue their clothing with mystical holy powers. Their place of birth and/or death are transformed by the believers into shrines of devotion. These shrines are the locale where yearly pilgrimages terminate and relics are bought and placed to insure the sanctity of the pilgrim and the shrine. Some are the patron of lost items or travelers or children or good health. The List of 5 Saints of the Strange has a few WTF's in store.

St Monica

Era: Circa 331-387 A.D.

Patron Saint of: Alcoholics

Feast Day: August 27

Reason for patronage: Betrothed to a pagan man of her parents choosing. He proved to be philander and alcoholic until his conversion years later after copious amounts of dedicated prayer by St. Monica.

Fun Fact: Monica of Hippo was the mother of St. Augustine of Hippo.

St Isidore of Seville

Era: Circa 560-636

Patron Saint of: Internet

Feast Day: April 4

Reason for patronage: He was an astute learner and prolific author who published books grammar, astronomy, geography, history, and biography as well as theology. He has the acclaim of orchestrating the conversion the barbarian Visigoths.

Fun Fact: He was born into a saintly dynasty. His two brothers, Leander and Fulgentius, and one of his sisters, Florentina, are venerated saints in Spain.

St Fiacre

Era: Died Circa 670

Patron Saint of: Sexually Transmitted Disease and Hemorrhoids

Feast Day: September 1

Reason for patronage: Little is known about him prior to his trip and establishment of a hospice in France. He carried and yielded a large staff which he used to plow otherwise fallow ground. The same staff was used to poke and prod the infirm back to health at the hospice.

Fun Fact: He was an unabashed misogynist and refuse to aid woman and even forbid them from entering the hospice, hermitage and chapel.

St Lidwin

Era: 1380-1433

Patron Saint of: Ice Skaters

Feast Day: April 14

Reason for patronage: At age 15 while ice skating, she fell and broke her ribs. From that day forward she became progressively more paralyzed. She acquired the divine talent of healing and was known to cure disease in and around her home town of Scheidam, the Netherlands.

Fun Fact: Documents purport that she shed skin, bones and her entrails all of which were kept by her parents in a vase. The vase supposedly emitted a sweet aroma.

St Guy of Anderlecht

Era: Circa 950 - 1012

Patron Saint of: Outhouses

Feast Day: September 12

Reason for patronage: An austere, pious and hardworking unlettered man he invested in maritime trade. The ship sank carrying the good. He saw this as a sign of his sinful avarice. He subsequently gave away his possessions and went on a penance pilgrimage first to Jerusalem then to Rome. Along the return journey to Anderlecht he died.

Fun Fact: He is also invoked as the patron saint against epilepsy, against rabies, and against mad dogs.

Public Health versus the Ship of Fools

Let's jump right into it; shall we? The use of illicit and prescription drugs are not and should not be considered criminal. They should not clog our justice and penal systems. Abuse of both illicit and prescription drugs is a public health problem which demands attention but not detention.  

The drug war is a nebulous and misleading war which finds most of it's pitted battles fought on the premise to send addicts to jail. Mention of pharmaceutical abuse and the billion dollar corporate pharmaceutical empire is wholly omitted. Institutions like the Center for Disease Control (CDC )and the World Health Organization (WHO) have each weighed in on the scourge and attempted to reclassify a succincter and more befitting label to the psychosocial phenomenon drugs. They unanimously conclude that it in the realm of public health and not a criminal problem. Moreover, the overarching theme of their research implies that the resources of our morality and finance are withering on the vine with no hope of even vinegar being made from the rotting grapes. We will all suffer the socioeconomic and psychosocial repercussions of this malaise. The choice we have is simple. We collectively pay either on the front or the back end. But pay we shall.

In the industrialize world we have established a morality code which allows us to disengage our conscience by institutionalizing our shortcomings. It's tantamount to the practice during the middle ages in Europe when the ship of fools was ushered down the waterways. A ship laden with degenerates, reprobates, mentally ill and the devilishly insane meandered the rivers of Europe until they stranded on an unsuspecting hamlet. Then they disembarked and fanned out across the village until they moored up again in a large town or city where they were de facto given a travelers respite because of the size of the municipality they found themselves. Soon the populace would discover their misfortunate tidings and the play of ill fecundity would begin again and the unwanted would be corralled and coerced to gain passage on the next ship of fools. Locking away addicts of socially and legally forbidden substances is like condoning a vacuity of empathy; even psychopathic at its extreme.

Michel Foucault details the emergence of the insane asylum with it's relocation of the unwanted, like rubbish, to the outer edges of society and disposing of them in an institution. He outlines his take on the history of western collective moral philosophy in his book “Madness and Civilization”. Foucault chronicles the transition of societal ethos concerning the mentally infirm. There is a disconnect, as he sees it, through etymological changes in how we define madness and insanity. These aberrations allow for the collective moral “ok” needed to legitimize incarceration. Not unlike the ship of fools.

In the WHO's 'Guidelines for the Psychosocially Assisted Pharmacological Treatment of Opioid Dependence' (2009) the problem of drugs is viewed tangibly as a public health concern which has far reaching effects on the economy by way of things like comorbidity. However, the take-away message is summed up here (author's highlights);

“Substance dependence per se should be regarded as a health problem and not a legal one. Given the multiple medical problems associated with opioid dependence and the nature of pharmacological treatment, provision of pharmacological treatment for opioid dependence should be a health-care priority.”

Perhaps the loss of mysticism in everyday life. The shift from sacred to profane as the blinkers of the Enlightenment narrowed our vision. A profundity gleaned from an increasingly detached and spiritually aloof relationship with the deviations of nature. This was one of the root causes. “We can fix it” became the zeitgeist motto. Not because we need to fix it but because we felt it can be fixed. Breaking down the whole into parts which can be modified meant there was a golden ratio both physically and metaphysically in which everything needed to correspond.

The “village idiot” was no longer seen as a wayward court jester. A character among many who had a polished piece of sagacious insight. He would impulsively regurgitate this insight back into the world; bookending it with his disjointed rants.

This was the sacred; much like epilepsy in the west was perceived and recorded as a divine soothsaying gift as far back as Hippocrates. Both petit and grand mal seizures produce vivid and descriptive hallucinations. Of course, this is not an endorsement of nor an advocation for seizures; that would be morally corrupt and ethically perverted. Yet, if we carefully comb through the tangles of what is being said and begin to erect a broader picture of the what is happening socially, we stumble headlong into a public health epidemic of the sacred and the profane.

Unfortunately, The America National Institute of Health (NIH) still maintains that the spearpoint of their campaign to reduce the negative impact drugs have on society is because they spuriously link drugs to crime. Of course, there are those who are recidivistic and are a palpable burden. Largely these people are also without adequate therapy because drug addiction is viewed as a crime and not a public health problem. Ironically, the NIH doesn't feel it necessary to mention the rampant abuse of pharmaceutical opioids, which each community feels viscerally and any law enforcement agent worth his salt tells you engulfs too many resources and too many man hours.

Clearly, this view misses the mark. By suggesting that a significant amount of those incarcerated have substance abuse problems but neglects to address the millions incarcerated for possession of illicit drugs. It is the same old threadbare empty rhetoric of the “stepping stone” or “gateway” hypothesis. Yes, some people behind bars are substance abusers but not all people behind bars who are substance abusers are criminals. Of course they have committed an act of defiance against a particular law but they are prosecuted for a victimless crime. A crime which does not afflict the “personal property” (e.g. body) of another. The repeal of antiquated and draconian sodomy laws by the Supreme Court should have elucidated that principle. Unfortunately, that has not seeped in to the collective pathos of the United States of America.