Perpetua: Defeating Dragons, Devils, and Gendered Barriers
The second winning blogpost from my graduate seminar last Spring.
I am so pleased to host this blogpost by Sacha Gragg. I had the privilege of teaching Sacha in my graduate seminar on Women and Religious Authority last semester. Sacha defended her MA thesis in Communication last Spring at Baylor University and is starting her Master’s of Religion at Yale Divinity School next week. The images are from the public presentation Sacha delivered on Perpetua in my seminar class.
Visions, dragons, women transforming into men to battle with the Devil: The Passion of Perpetua and Felicity, known as The Passio, isn’t your typical Christian martyrdom account. In Christian history, Perpetua is the saint who stepped on the head of a dragon and survived a crazed cow because of her faith. When we read about her martyrdom, Perpetua stands out because of her wild feats and visions, because she is a notable woman in the sea of men Christian history prioritizes, and because her story provides a unique and powerful first-hand account “she herself wrote” of her imprisonment and execution. Most importantly, however, Perpetua reminds us that even in the Greco-Roman world, a context characterized by gendered confines, calcified societal limits, and class boundaries, one’s gender and faith are not merely liabilities but are means of empowerment.
An influential individual, Perpetua leveraged her identities as a woman, privileged citizen, mother, daughter, and Christian to assert her agency and tell the story not only of how she died but also of her path to martyrdom and how she lived her faith in victory to the very end. The Passio recounts the story of Perpetua and her fellow catechumens (Christian converts undergoing the multi-year formation period leading up to baptism) from their time in prison to their eventual execution in the gladiatorial arena. In between the narrative bookends written by an unknown author, the majority of the narrative is told by Perpetua, making her story the earliest first-hand narrative written by a Christian woman. Right from the introduction, Perpetua is the central figure of the text. While little is mentioned about the other prisoners, we learn that Perpetua is a “woman of good family and upbringing.” She was 22 years old, newly married, upper-class, with a nursing infant son. These biographical details not only make Perpetua into a multidimensional figure for the reader in the context of her narrative, but they also provide insight into what life was like for a Christian woman in Carthage, North Africa in 202 C.E..
Due to a refusal to recant her Christian faith, the governor scheduled Perpetua for execution during the upcoming gladiatorial games. With the looming reality of death, Perpetua received a hasty, emergency baptism in prison without completing the catechumen process. Yet this distinction does not stop Perpetua from asserting authority rooted in her confidence as a Christian and upper-class citizen. Woven throughout the story are Perpetua’s visions showcasing her spiritual strength. In her first vision, Perpetua ascends a ladder to Heaven. On her way up, Perpetua tramples a dragon seeking to prevent her from climbing up. At the top, she meets a white-haired Jesus who affirms her as “daughter.” From the vision, Perpetua learns she will die but rejoices in it as an ultimate victory rather than responding in fear.
In her next vision, Perpetua sees one of her brothers who had died of cancer as a child. She witnesses his suffering and understands that she is to pray for his healing. In the following vision, her brother is healed and playing with other children. The subsequent vision confirmed Perpetua’s unwavering confidence in her capacity to heal her deceased brother through prayer. In the final vision, Perpetua finds herself in an arena where she is to battle an Egyptian man—the Devil himself. Perpetua is dramatically stripped naked by attendants and suddenly becomes a man. In her new, masculine form, Perpetua lets "fists fly" in brutal combat against the Egyptian and emerges victorious. While in her male form, the trainer—who (plot twist!) is Jesus—once again affirms Perpetua as “daughter.”
Just because she was in prison on her way to death, we should never doubt that Perpetua remained there by her own volition. She reminds her guards of this fact several times. Prior to being led into the arena for execution, the guards try to dress the prisoners in the priestly robes of local deities to entertain the crowd. Perpetua refuses, arguing, “We came to this of our own free will, that our freedom should not be violated. We agreed to pledge our lives provided that we would do no such thing.” In the end, the officer agrees to Perpetua's demand. The prisoners walk into the arena without violating the religious beliefs for which they were sacrificing their lives.
Despite her incredible visions and bravery, what has captivated history’s imagination about Perpetua’s account of her own martyrdom is not her strength, her vivid pummeling of the Egyptian Devil, her authority in overcoming the men who would dictate to her, or her victorious death in the amphitheater. Rather, it is in the arena, dazed from the blow of a mad cow, when Perpetua comes to the aid of Felicity, her fellow martyr. We only learn about Felicity, the other female prisoner, briefly in the third act when she gives birth days before the execution. “Then [Perpetua] got up. And seeing that Felicity had been crushed to the ground, she went over to her, gave her hand and lifted her up. Then the two stood side by side.” The moment when Perpetua lifts Felicity to her feet and the two hold each other up in solidarity lingers in our imagination. Every icon and image of Perpetua throughout history has depicted in her that position, embracing and protecting Felicity. In that instance in the arena, we are reminded that these two are not just pious paragons of womanly virtue or women defying cultural norms with masculine traits and wild visions. Perpetua and Felicity are young mothers who sacrifice for their faith and embrace each other despite the significant societal and class barriers that would have kept them apart.
The victory foretold to Perpetua in her visions did not come to pass from stepping on the head of a dragon or defeating the Devil in hand-to-hand combat. Rather, Perpetua’s victory came from following in Jesus’s footsteps of smashing cultural barriers, overcoming limitations, and embracing death so that in the end she has life.