ColossiansOne

mind · 3 claims

Madness

The Gerasene demoniac is the fullest clinical description in the corpus: tombs, broken chains, self-injury, and a name that is a number.

FrenzyBeing out of one's mind

Mark 5 is unusually detailed. The man lives among the tombs, cannot be bound even with chains because he tears them apart, cries out night and day, and cuts himself with stones. Asked his name, the spirit answers 'Legion: for we are many' — a Roman military unit of several thousand, which is either the size of the infestation or a political joke, and commentators have argued for both since.

What follows is equally specific: the man is found afterwards sitting, clothed, and in his right mind, which is the text's own measure of what was wrong. Elsewhere the Testament gives madness about women to Asmodeus, and the Hebrew Bible sends an evil spirit on Saul that only music relieves.

Oldest first

Who was blamed, and by which text?

Each card is one text making one attribution, in its own framing. Reading down the column is a transmission history rather than a set of independent witnesses — and where a claim carries a grading, that grading is about how well it is grounded in the passage it cites, nothing more.

An evil spirit from the LORD

Hebrew Bible & Deuterocanon · c. 900–100 BCE

Troubles Saul after the spirit departs from him — described as sent rather than as intruding.

What stops it
David playing the harp; the spirit departs while the music lasts.

1 Samuel 16:14–23

Legion

New Testament · c. 50–110 CE

A man among the tombs who breaks chains, cries out night and day, and cuts himself with stones. The spirit names itself Legion, for they are many.

What stops it
Cast out at a word into a herd of swine; the man is found sitting, clothed and in his right mind.

Mark 5:1–15
Historical depiction of Asmoday

Asmodeus

The Testament of Solomon · c. 100–400 CE

Says he spreads madness about women and plots against the newly wed.

What stops it
The angel Raphael, and the smoke of the liver and gall of a fish.

Countermeasures

What the texts say stops it

c. 900–100 BCE

David playing the harp; the spirit departs while the music lasts.

c. 50–110 CE

Cast out at a word into a herd of swine; the man is found sitting, clothed and in his right mind.

c. 100–400 CE

The angel Raphael, and the smoke of the liver and gall of a fish.

Which texts make these claims?

Oldest first. The distance between the earliest and the latest is the thing worth looking at: a claim made in an incantation four thousand years ago and one made in a paperback in 1973 are different kinds of evidence about the same symptom.

All afflictions