Legion

The Gospel of Mark opens its fifth chapter with the most detailed possession scene in the whole Bible. When Jesus lands on the far shore of the Sea of Galilee, in the country of the Gerasenes, a man who lives among the tombs comes out to meet him. No one can restrain him: he has been bound many times with shackles and chains, and the chains he has torn apart and the shackles he has crushed. Day and night he roams the hills and the tombs, crying out and cutting himself with stones. On seeing Jesus he runs to him, falls down and shouts not to be tormented, calling him «Son of the Most High God». And when Jesus asks his name, there comes the answer that made the episode famous: «My name is Legion, for we are many». Luke repeats the account and adds a weighty detail: the spirits begged him not to send them into the abyss. Matthew, for his part, tells the same episode in the region of the Gadarenes, with two demoniacs instead of one, and without the name. The name is everything: a Roman legion counted five to six thousand soldiers, and modern commentators have not failed to point out that Mark writes under the Roman occupation of Palestine, and that the Legio X Fretensis, which operated in the area, bore a boar among its emblems.

Everything Legion can do is born of its number. Strength is the first thing the text documents: the crushed shackles and broken chains are no later legend, they are in the verse, together with the note that no one had the strength to tame him. The second is the voice: thousands of spirits speaking through one mouth, in singular and plural at once, «my name is» and «we are», the grammar itself possessed. The third is knowledge: Legion recognises Jesus at once and names him correctly while no one around yet knows who he is. And the fourth, the most revealing, is fear. All the power of the episode is inverted the moment the multitude begs: not to be sent into the abyss, says Luke; not to be driven out of that country, says Mark; to be allowed into the swine. The demon that broke chains negotiates its surrender. In later demonology that paradox became its hallmark: multiple possession overwhelms the exorcist because one does not expel a spirit but an assembly, yet the whole assembly obeys a single word spoken with authority.

Jesus grants the request, and what follows is one of the most violent images in the gospels: the spirits enter a herd feeding on the hillside (about two thousand swine, Mark specifies) and the whole herd rushes down the cliff and drowns in the sea. The swineherds flee to tell it, and the town's reaction is the most human moment of the whole episode: they do not celebrate the miracle, they beg Jesus to leave their region. They have just lost two thousand pigs and seen something they do not understand; fear wins out over gratitude. The only one who wants to stay with Jesus is the former demoniac, found «sitting, clothed and in his right mind». Jesus does not allow it: he sends him home to tell what has been done for him, and the man proclaims it through the Decapolis, the ten Hellenised cities east of the Jordan. Commentators see there an enormous turn: in gentile land, the first herald of the message is a man who had lived among tombs. The demon's name, meanwhile, made a fortune of its own: «my name is legion» remains, twenty centuries on, the way of saying that evil does not come alone.

The episode has a map problem that readers noticed as early as Antiquity. Mark and Luke set it in the country of the Gerasenes, but Gerasa (modern Jerash, in Jordan) lies some fifty kilometres from the lake: a herd stampeding from there would have to run for two days before getting wet. Matthew corrects to «Gadarenes», and Gadara is closer, about ten kilometres, but it does not touch the water either. The third reading, «Gergesenes», was defended by Origen in the third century precisely on the ground's evidence: at Gergesa, modern Kursi on the eastern shore of the lake, there is indeed a cliff falling toward the water, and there Byzantine tradition raised a monastery to mark the spot. The manuscripts waver among the three forms across the three gospels, and the most accepted explanation is the simplest: copyists kept correcting an obscure place-name into cities they knew. For the being's entry, the riddle is part of the character: Legion is a demon with three addresses and none, as befits one who answers «we are many» when asked who he is.