Collage of Yorkshire pigs at a wallow in mud at the Poplar Spring Animal Sanctuary in Poolesville, Maryland (evoking the Gadarene swine in the story of Legion) as photographed by Mark Peters and licensed for Wikipedia “Pig” under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en and Artemisia herb-alba (a plant believed to be the original wormwood as source for the bitter Biblical metaphor) photographed by Floratrek and licensed for Wikipedia “Wormwood (Bible)” under  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

(6) LEGION & WORMWOOD

Yes – it’s my third matched pair of villains from Biblical mythology but in this case, they are both from the New Testament, as Behemoth and Leviathan are both from the Old Testament.

Legion and Wormwood stand out among the demonic beings referenced in the New Testament because of their sheer evocative resonance.

Legion is the more chilling of the two, from the declaration of their identity “I am Legion, for we are many” – connoting “a large collection of demons that share a single mind and will” in the gospel incident (in the Gospels of Mark, Matthew, and Luke) variously described as the Exorcism of the Gerasene demoniac or the Miracle of the Gadarene Swine. That is, where Jesus exorcises a demonic horde from a man into a herd of swine, which then run down a hill to a lake and drown themselves.

One can’t help but feel the original story may not have been so much literal but a parable against the Romans controlling Judaea, given the demonic self-description evoking a Roman legion and that they are driven into pigs, the archetypal unclean animal of Jewish ritual – and also evocative of the boar emblem of the Tenth Legion that was centrally involved in the first Roman-Jewish War.

Wormwood – or more precisely Star Wormwood – on the other hand has his, her or its singular appearance in the Book of Apocalypse, as a prophesied star or angel that falls from heaven and makes a third of fresh water “bitter” or deadly to people.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)