Stigmata Martyr.

"In a crucifixion ecstasy, lying cross chequed in agony. Stigmata bleed continuously. Holes in head, hands, feet, and weep for me. Stigmata, oh you sordid sight. Stigmata in your splintered plight. Look into your crimson orifice in holy remembrance. In scarlet bliss" - Stigmata Martyr, Bauhaus

Last night's London Fortean Society talk, Personal Jesus:A History of Stigmata and the Bloody Wounds of the Crucifixion in The Miller pub near London Bridge, was, to my mind, one of the best for a long time. Even the solitary dog, Charlie, in the audience thought so. As podcaster and self-confessed failed paleontologist Eric Huang took, and left, the stage, Charlie let out a gleeful woof that rhymed with the disappointingly small audience's abundant applause.

The few of us in the audience, however, were well rewarded. Huang, presenter of the Saint podcast - typical topics include martyrs and mystics, was an enthusiastic, knowledgeable, and interesting speaker. He was a nice guy too. I turned up early and we ended up chatting about the Pennsylvania Dutch, failed Portuguese colonialism in Japan, Donald Trump's Germanic heritage, and the former Surrey Canal that I'd walked up to reach the event.

He knew a fair bit about all those things but when it came to stigmata, he was firmly on home turf. Stigmata is when people develop, on their own bodies, wounds that resemble those of the executed Christ. That is two wounds in the feet and two in the hands - where Jesus was nailed to the cross, and one side wound believed to be caused by a lancing on his final journey to Golgotha.

The wounds, both those of Christ and those who boast of or suffer with stigmata, are at best messy. At worst they're truly awful. Post-Christ, they were first reported by St Paul (Paul the Apostle, Saul of Tarsus) in a letter to his followers in Galatia in modern day Turkey. In Galatians 6:17, Paul wrote "from henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus". 

The Greek word for 'mark' is stigmata and Paul, or Saul - make your mind up mate, was saying that he was so holy that he'd developed this 'mark' and that people should go easy on him because of that. This rather weak stigmata excuse unsurprisingly didn't catch on and, if records are to be believed, nobody else tried it on until well over a thousand years later when, in 1222, an Oxford monk, one Thomas Wykes, made claims of meeting a layman with the marks of Christ.

The second recorded stigmata martyr was a layman, not a holy man, but he believed he'd been crucified and that he was actually the son of God. For his troubles, he was incarcerated and eventually died in prison. The church would need a much more believable liar before they could accept that stigmata was, in any way, relevant to the self-promotion that is, and always has been, the dominant factor in the promotion of the cult of Christianity.

They didn't have to wait long. Just two years later, in 1224 - towards the end of his life, St Francis of Assisi made claims of bearing stigmata - and that his stigmata was the result of burns on his his body made by a serif. Or, possibly, even Jesus himself. It is worth bearing in mind that St Francis of Assisi was an enormous liar and, to my mind, one of the most despicable individuals ever in the history of the blood cult that calls itself Christianity.

That's my take though. Not Eric Huang's. His talk took quite a different turn. Following the veneration of St Francis (Pope Gregory IX fast-tracked Francis to sainthood in record time in a quest to wrench more power from the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II), a cult blossomed around Francis and soon paintings were being made showing angels decanting and drinking the blood of Christ into their chalices as it seeped from his side wound.

This fetishisation of the side wound continues to this day in Catholic ritual and ceremony, you'll have heard of wine referred to as "the blood of Christ" as surely as you will know eucharist bread as his body. What is less mentioned now is that the blood of Christ was, for centuries, considered to be of a menstrual nature. Early Christian interpreters turned Christ's horizontal side wound into a vertical one and made it, for all the world, look as much like a vagina as possible.

Vaginal imagery was prevalent in pre-Rensaissance Christianity. Carlo Crivelli often painted holy figures enshrined within blood red front bottoms and Caravaggio even painted Doubting Thomas fingering Christ's gaping hole.

The trouble was that this vaguely pornographic approach to promoting Christianity wasn't really bringing people into the fold. So during the Renaissance, painting Christ with a minge on the side of his tummy was proscribed. It's rarely spoken of now but that didn't stop the spread of stigmata.

As the European powers conquered and colonised Africa and the Americas, they took with them the ideas of the Franciscan death cult and soon it wasn't long before many other accounts of stigmata were being reported. Mattia Ciccarreli, an Italian nun from Abruzzo known as Christina, had stigmatic wounds that bled every Easter. She also claimed she had an orgasm every time she prayed and that demons had cursed her bed by filling it with fleas.

Which is a good excuse for never doing any laundry. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina was an Italian cleric who died in 1968 (the year of my birth) boasted not just of having stigmata but of being able to levitate (another one of St Francis' spurious claims), to translocate, and to heal the sick. He also bragged about having had an actual physical fight with Satan. His not at all gullible followers, after his death, claimed that his wounds, his stigmata, smelt of violets, lilies, and fresh tobacco.

The idea that stigmata smells so fresh, so clean is a common one. In reality it seems unlikely. After two other pontiffs refused to elevate him to sainthood, he was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 2002. Padre Pio would never allow anyone to scientifically test his claims as he believed, or said, that to test a miracle would be heresy. He was described by one observer as a "a self-mutilating psychopath".

The Catholic mystic Therese Neumann of Bavaria was another Franciscan who was taken seriously by the Vatican. She was said to have bed sores so extreme they exposed her bones and when she suffered a stigmatic episode it was said that blood would gush from her eyes. Eye witnesses attested to the fact they'd seen her inflict her own wounds.

So the story of stigmata is not really a sacred one but a story of severe mental illness. Christianity in itself is, to my mind, a form of mental illness and in Aldous Huxley, in his 1952 novel The Devils of Loudin - later made into a film by Ken Russell, I find someone who not only recognises that but sees demonic possession as being caused by sexual repression and abuse.

Most stigmatics, across time, have been women. The vast majority of them have grown up in extremely religious communities and a huge number of them have been hospitalised on numerous occasions for very severe mental problems. Many of them, it is believed, have been abused, often by sadistic priests, and it seems quite likely that the idea of admitting a person of such high religious standing has done something so transgressive is so difficult that alternative excuses are made for the self-harming behaviour that is stigmata.

Eric Huang believes that most stigmatics, with the possible exception of Padre Pio, are honest and genuinely believe they have been blessed or cursed with the marks of Christ and I'm inclined to believe him, more or less, on that. Seriously damaged people look for sense in a world where there is none. Even supposedly well-adjusted people do.

There was a more jokey section of the talk when Huang talked about people who'd developed scars on their hands from playing Super Mario or constructing IKEA furniture (Mario stigmata, IKEA stigmata) and an interesting diversion when he talked about how the spread of goth culture into Japan, South Korea, and Latin America has brought with it a rise in reported cases of stigmata but it soon moved back to more instructive theme with the recent discovery that Jesus era crucifixions would not have involved nails through the feet or hands.

It's not a case of 'no need for nails'. More that, purely practically, the nails had to go through the ankles and the wrists to ensure the desired result of death. A nail through the hand won't pin you to a cross and a nail to the feet just means your feet fall off. Sadly, yet inevitably, most recent cases of stigmata have involved people with suspicious looking wounds on their ankles and wrists and not on their feet and hands like that faker St Francis.

In concluding it seems that when we try to use our bodies as reflections of our faith we fail. Instead we simply show our bodies as reflections of our own psychosis. In that, and to my mind, stigmata is a very accurate symbol of Christianity and religion.

"In nomine patri et filii et spiriti sanctum. Father, son, and holy ghost. Stigmata martyr"