Alexaminos Worships His God

Rituals of Exit, Continued...

The earliest existing depiction of the crucifixion of Jesus is thought to be a piece of graffiti from roughly 200CE. It was scraped into a wall in Rome. The image shows a man stood before the execution of a human form with the head of a donkey. The scrawled text reads “Alexaminos worships his god.” Here is a window into the imagination of that old imperial world. The idea of a crucifixion scene as a thing of reverence was a weird mirror to the pax romana. At first, no doubt, it found the vision embarrassing and absurd, as this piece of archaic street art shows.

It's significant that the subject is animalised. People were crucified naked, without the garb that distinguishes the human from the animal. The subject is excommunicated from the human community of civilisation.

It's also significant that the subject is depicted as a donkey, an animal considered both stupid and useful, a beast of burden and venting space for condescending anger toward the non-rational. In Roman law, crucifixion was a punishment that could only be given to those outside the bounds of citizenship. The crucified body seen by the road was very often a slave: a non-citizen, categorised as property, whose embodied life was itself being performed as the payment of a debt to the masters. Crucifixion was, in fact, commonly referred to as “the slave's punishment.” This was a matter of security. The slave population of Rome in the First Century is estimated at five to ten million people, so it wouldn't do for these resident outsiders to feel too much hope. As the slave Sceledrus says in Plautus’ play Miles Gloriosus,

“I know the cross will be my grave. That is where my ancestors are, my fathers, gandfathers, great-gandfathers, great-great-grandfathers…”

Crucifixion wasn’t just the fate of some unfortunates; it was an identity marker for all slaves. It belonged to them, and they to it. Every slave lived under the shadow of crucifixion.

It is thought that Alexaminos might have been a slave, and that some mischievous friends or bitter enemies had graffitti'd this image in his honour. Certainly, if any might resonate with the absurd image of a crucified messiah figure, the slaves of Rome would. Whoever he was, he spoke for the slaves, because crucifixion was written across their whole existence. In this astonishing image—the messianic crucifixion—their exclusion from life was no longer their shame; it might even become their power. A strange and sudden transferal had occurred. The violent tool of the master was now in the hands of the subjected. They had found a way to own it, in this image which spoke of the sacredness of their own excluded lives. The image of a crucified Messiah might be the image of a slave who didn't cower from the curse but took it and made it their own. This non-citizen was no longer governable by the fear of punishment. The cross itself becomes the point of exit from an economy in which they were property, out into an open beyond all debts and masters.

Here is a mystery: a transformation that sometimes occurs quite suddenly, and of its own volition, after years lived under the threat of some curse. Something that was always quietly and secretly known to the oppressed life is birthed into the world against all expectation. There is a widening of the eyes, a drawing of breath, a jolt of awareness. They are grinning, because now they are hungry and all their fear is gone. Anything might happen. All the rules have fallen away. Something in the cosmic balance has shifted. Something has triggered a wondrous exchange. In a moment of awakening, they will find that the grief of living under the constant threat of that curse finally outweighs the fear of it. In this moment they walk across the room, as though possessed by some deeper mind—not by the law of the state but by the law of the spirit of life. They pick up this thing, long feared, in their hand; this threat that hung over them to control them every day. They say, it is mine now. They say, I know so much more of this than you do. From now on, this will never be used to control them again. From now on it belongs to them, and not the masters. From now on they are the curse. In the blink of an eye they have transformed. They have become something monstrous. They are beyond law, and their way will be decided by other frames altogether, by frames of their own choosing.

Whatever gallows are used to maintain the power relation of tyranny over life, wear them around your neck and grin like a fool.

The first counter-move of power is, generally, condescension and mockery, then violent repression. Last of all it will co-opt the image of defiant exit and to sell it back to the crowd. It will turn it back into a point of entry. The test is simple: from whom did you receive liberation? From the crucified or from the crucifiers?

The first messianic communities chose to gather around the ongoing ritual of breaking bread. This was the centre of their common life and the first expression of their political body. There could be no mistaking the meaning of this. They gathered weekly around the horror of the Slave’s Punishment, the curse that hung over every slave’s life: torn bread for torn bodies. At the centre of everything was the embodied experience of slavery, the sacred life of those excluded from citizenship. Slaves gathered round the table and the table round the slave, until the movement found itself identified with slavery.

And so it is that the Book of Revelation begins like this:

“The Revelation of Jesus the Messiah which God gave him to show his slaves what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his slave John.”

And the Messiah himself was reported to have said that if anyone wished to be the greatest, they should become a slave.