One thing people know about saints, even if they don’t believe in saints, is that a good number of them weren’t so saintly in their salad days. Everyone remembers Saint Augustine’s famous prayer, “Oh, Lord, make me chaste and continent, but not yet,” and he was not the only spiritual superstar with an early fondness for sex, booze, and general carousing. Why, young Saint Francis partied so much that his buddies called him “the king of revels,” and Saint Patrick never did give up his tipple, which may be one reason people still honor him by binge-drinking on his day.
With so many pious reformed (and not-so-reformed) drinkers to choose from, you’d expect the Catholic Church to have named someone really special as the patron saint of drunks, wouldn’t you? Alas, no. Instead, they’ve picked an obscure nonentity—not even a proper saint—with a truly uninspiring recovery story.
The story starts out promising enough but quickly fades: Dubliner Matt Talbot (1856-1925), son of a drunken dock worker, developed his own alcohol problem when he was hired by a wine merchant at either twelve or thirteen. From then until his late twenties, he worked hard and drank hard until, one day, after no one would stand him a drink, he took the pledge for three months. At the end of three months, he took the pledge for life and never drank again. Over the next forty years, he became increasingly devout, spending most of his non-working hours hearing mass, studying devotional texts, participating in religious societies, and praying. Then he died.
Th-th-th-th-that’s all, folks!
In other words, don’t look for a Damascene moment in the Matt Talbot story because there isn’t one. Even Matt Talbot’s most fervent supporters have so little idea why he suddenly went teetotal that they credit his turnaround to—surprise!—the Virgin Mary. What did Our Lady of Memorable Spectacle do to inspire Matt’s abstinence? Did she hover in midair outside his favorite pub and rain tears of blood down upon it? Obviously not, or Dublin would be a major pilgrimage site. Did one of her statues weep regular tears when Matt arrived at morning mass still drunk—or even just look a little teary to Matt’s bloodshot eyes? Nope, still too much drama. Well then, did Mary at least visit Matt in a dream, not necessarily crying but with a worried look on her face? Sorry to disappoint again, but no. She just crossed his mind occasionally while he was drinking, which is really phoning it in for the superstar of Lourdes and Medjugorje. Seriously, if a few passing thoughts of Mary were enough to permanently sober up a drunk, then Ireland would be one of the most abstemious countries on the planet, rather than one of the least.
So, what about Matt’s life after he took the pledge? Chock full of inspiration for those who would follow him down the path of sobriety? Only if you’re inspired by austerity, self-abasement, and obedience to authority in both work and religion. Tellingly, Matt’s most famous sober accomplishment was his refusal to carry any money, ever, because he might spend it on booze—and not just for a year or two but for the rest of his life. I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel very inspired by a man whose sobriety was so shaky it couldn’t handle pocket change. And who didn’t do much worth recording except not drink.
Oh wait, after he died, he was found to have three chains around his body. Or maybe it was one chain around his leg. Were these heavy chains of self-mortification, like Beckett’s hair shirt? Or were they light symbolic chains representing “holy slavery” to Mary? Well, that seems to be a matter of debate, though the pro-mortification side has been discredited for factual errors. For what it’s worth, Wikipedia goes with light chains, one of them a watch chain, citing four authoritative sources, so I think we’re talking jewelry, not manacles. And, before you ask, yes, holy slavery to Mary is a thing, though most people have the decency to call it “holy servitude” these days.
Thing or no thing, Matt Talbot’s life leaves me cold, and it’s not because I don’t like hagiography as a genre. In fact, I’m a fan, especially of stories about saints who behave badly then transform into great spiritual athletes, like Augustine and Francis and my personal favorite, Mary of Egypt, who fucked her way from Alexandria to Jerusalem in her dissolute youth then later walked across the Jordan River, sanctified by forty-seven years alone in the desert. Like Matt, she started out dirt-poor, had to beg and spin flax to support her carnal adventures, so clearly poverty is no barrier to awesomeness. Lucky sex addicts to have Maria Ægyptiaca as their patron saint!
As for us drunks, we get Matt of Dublin, who drank his way from the North Strand to Montgomery Street in his dissolute youth then later walked across town because he refused to carry bus fare. What would his icon look like: a man with a chain around his waist waving away a bus that had stopped for him? Oh wait, he already has an icon—several, in fact. Here’s my favorite.
Note that Sister Irene has cunningly resolved the chain question with a compromise: the chain looks more symbolic than flesh-mortifying, but it’s heavy enough to tilt the Marian icon at the other end, so not jewelry. More of a dog leash, I’d say; not painful but controlling. Note also that the smashed bottle has a little broken chain hanging from it to signify that Matt traded one form of bondage for another. Such an inspiring message: slavery is great, folks, as long as you have a worthy master. John C. Calhoun would be so proud!
But let’s not cheer Sister Irene too loudly because Matt hasn’t earned that big fat gold halo he’s wearing. In fact, he may never earn it, as his canonization appears badly stalled. Pope Paul VI set him on the path to sainthood by declaring him “venerable” in 1975, but Matt has dropped the ball by not performing the two miracles required for canonization. (For comparison, Paul VI himself banged out two confirmed miracles as soon as he was named venerable and made saint within six years.) In 2014, there was a brief moment of optimism that Matt had finally managed his first miracle when prayers to him were credited with ensuring a healthy birth for a Kansas baby named Talbot despite “chromosomal abnormalities” detected a few days earlier. But there hasn’t been a peep from the Vatican since then, and Matt hasn’t been promoted from venerable to blessed, so I assume the church’s official miracle commission found that medical science could adequately explain a normal birth after a scary lab test.
But the faithful continue trying to help poor Matt. Just last year, a Massachusetts church formally prayed for his canonization during a forty-hour devotional marathon, presumably using his official canonization prayer, which includes the line, “Father, if it be your will that your beloved servant should be glorified by your Church, make known by your heavenly favors the power he enjoys in your sight,” which in plain English is “Hey, God, if you want this guy to make saint, arrange some miracles for him.”
But the prayers don’t seem to be doing the trick. In other words, despite the enthusiastic backing of lay fans and of the highest church brass, Matt lacks the one supporter who matters most—and I’m going to go out on a limb here and interpret this heavenly laissez-faire as agreement that Matt Talbot, though a good, pious man who lived a good, pious life, is simply not up to the job of being patron stain of drunks.
So who is? Mary Magdalene? Not the domesticated Magdalene we know today but the medieval Magdalene, the wine-swilling slut who, after meeting Jesus Christ in a tavern, acquired powers and adventures enough for a superhero franchise (some of the best ones “borrowed” from Mary of Egypt). She could definitely do the job. But the Reformation clipped her wings, and she’s already patron saint of way too many groups, including women and penitents, so she’s not my choice. Here’s a cool picture of her anyway, covered with hair from fasting for thirty years in the desert (sound familiar?) and paying a quick visit to heaven with the help of some angels.
No, my candidate comes from the other side of Asia and isn’t technically a saint, though he does the most important thing that saints do, which is first die and then help people way more than they did while they were alive (are you listening, Matt?)
Unfortunately, my choice is as popular as Mary Magdalene—maybe more popular, as he’s revered by millions in China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Vietnam—but he’s just so perfect that we’ll have to make allowances. And he’s really powerful, a god in his own right, so I think he can handle some extra responsibility.
My guy is Zhong Kui, which, if you’re an English speaker, sounds more like Joong Kway (with the “oo” sound of “book,” rather than “doodle). The first thing to know about Zhong Kui is that there are many, many legends about him, some of which contradict one another on the most basic facts. By all means, look him up on Wikipedia, but do not be fooled by the confident-sounding “biography” you will find there. It’s not wrong, just as it’s not wrong to say that Helen of Troy sat out the Trojan War in Egypt while the combatants fought over a fake Helen made of air. It’s one version of a story with lots of versions, not all of which can be reconciled into a single coherent narrative. So, with that in mind, here’s a version of Zhong Kui’s story, which begins to take shape in the reign of Tang emperor Xuanzong (712-756).
Zhong Kui was brilliant but ugly to behold. Exactly how unattractive is disputed, but but he’s generally depicted with bulging fish eyes, a bushy black beard, a protruding belly and/or butt, and a slouch. Still, he was a great scholar, so he and a friend traveled to the Chinese capital of Xi’an to sit for the imperial examinations that qualified successful candidates for administrative posts. Zhong Kui earned the highest score, entitling him to a prime position at court, but the emperor stripped him of the honor saying, “You’re too ugly to be top-scorer!”
Though some legends say Zhong Kui immediately killed himself by bashing his head against a pillar, a stone step, or a gate in the emperor’s palace, others say he walked away humiliated, turning to alcohol to numb the pain of his unjust rejection. As people who once admired his intelligence saw him wandering the streets in a drunken stupor, his reputation suffered, increasing his despair—and his reliance on alcohol.
Soon, his drunkenness grew so infamous that two hard-drinking demons heard of it. In human disguise, the two challenged him to a drinking contest, which Zhong Kui won before passing out. When he woke, he found his prize: a magic sword that could vanquish demons, which he now resolved to do. But neither the magic sword nor his new sense of mission could stop Zhong Kui’s downward spiral. Finally, he threw himself into a river and drowned.
Though a suicide would normally undergo grisly torture in a hell realm followed by an unpropitious rebirth, the Jade Emperor, the supreme ruler of heaven, felt sympathy for Zhong Kui’s unjust treatment and admiration for his talents. So he made Zhong Kui king of ghosts, a god reigning over tens of thousands of spirits and responsible for keeping them under control so they didn’t cause trouble on earth, as ghosts are wont to do. Already a demon-fighter, Zhong Kui now became the scourge of all supernatural evildoers, hence of the everyday calamities they create. For hundreds of years, throughout East Asia, artists have depicted him vanquishing ghosts and demons with his magic sword, as in this vintage print from Japan, where he is known as Shôki.
In addition to the red and blue demons, note the ghosts hiding in the folds of Zhong Kui’s robe, one of which is chomping on the blue demon’s midsection. As king of ghosts, Zhong Kui has some 80,000 spirits under his command—defeated demons, too, which is why he’s frequently represented with ghost or demon attendants who carry his magic sword, light his way with a lantern, shield him with a parasol, and perform other duties. A different kind of holy servitude, if you will.
In addition to painting and sculpture, Zhong Kui is a frequent subject of literature, theater, opera, puppetry, dance, film, video and other kinds of performance, sometimes as religious rite, sometimes as entertainment. For example, during the seventh lunar month, when the dead wander among the living (and the living placate them with food and gifts), Daoist adepts representing Zhong Kui perform an elaborate ritual dance to ensure that no ghosts overstay their welcome—a possibility taken seriously in traditional East Asian religions. In contrast, the Netflix series The Devil Punisher features Zhong Kui in a supernatural soap opera, hotting him up by reincarnating him as a handsome young man in pursuit of the immortal lover whose equally hot reincarnation has forgotten him.
Splitting the difference is the 2020 horror film Rope Curse 2, which features a tragically aborted Zhong Kui dance, as well as (spoiler alert!) the rescue of the film’s heroine by Zhong Kui himself after the dancer dies trying to save her. Discussion of the film on social media runs the gamut from worry about sacrilege that could cause real harm in the world to embarrassment that “folk belief” persists in the twenty-first century. It’s clear, however, that, even among skeptics, Zhong Kui retains huge cultural cachet, sort of like the Norse gods do in the US at the moment. Imagine Thor with tens of millions of actual devotees, as well as shamans to channel him so he could perform regular giant-quelling rituals to reduce chaos and destruction in the world. That’s Zhong Kui.
In short, Zhong Kui is a great patron saint for drunks because he’s awesome and because he was himself a drunk—a drunk who hit a way lower bottom than Matt Talbot, which I’ll talk about in a minute. But, before I do that, I want to point out that Zhong Kui isn’t just a former drunk; he’s a warrior against drunkenness and the harms it can cause. In the acrobatic street performance known as “Zhong Kui and the Five Demons,”[1] the action begins with the demons out of control, running around, doing flips, assuming martial poses, and menacing one another. Some demons embody particular kinds of evil, such as the sword-bearing demon representing violence, and among these is usually a visibly drunk demon carrying one or more wine jugs, like this guy:
When Zhong Kui arrives and starts dancing, however, the demon sobers right up. Now, rather than staggering around and falling to the pavement, he moves in concert with the other demons, striking elegant poses that respond to Zhong Kui’s movements. In other performances, the demon drunk sometimes takes longer to subdue, requiring the king of ghosts to force him to his hands and knees and stand on his back, but he’s always stone sober long before the dance ends. Drunkenness is well and truly quelled.
There’s a very different kind of tribute to Zhong Kui’s power against drunkenness in the beautiful essay “King of Ghosts: A True Story of Alcoholism Told Through Tattoos and Folklore” by James Gordon. In this essay, the author’s intoxication keeps a tattoo artist from finishing a sleeve of Zhong Kui (as Shôki), whose legend resonates with the author’s own experience in profound and lyrical ways, ways that bend toward redemption without being cheesy or schematic. In addition, “King of Ghosts” demonstrates the value of Zhong Kui’s legend as a more nuanced way to think about our demons—as enemies and as useful servants. Plus, it’s one of the best essays I’ve read on turning the corner from addiction to recovery, so, if you click any link in this post, make it the one at the beginning of this paragraph. If you like good writing, you’ll thank me.
In summary, here are my reasons why Zhong Kui is a better patron saint for drunks than Matt Talbot. First, Zhong Kui’s story, for all its supernatural elements, represents a more accurate and more compassionate view of habitual drunkenness than Matt Talbot’s story. He starts drinking in response to trauma, both the acute humiliation of being unjustly rejected by the emperor and the life-long drip-drip-drip of unkind comments about his appearance. He falls into a classic shame spiral, in which shame over his rejection leads to drinking, which leads to shame over the drinking, which leads to more drinking, which leads to more shame, and so on. He struggles to pull himself out of this downward spiral, rather than having a neat conversion experience; in fact, he dies of suicide, as too many people with AUDs do. In other words, his transformation from drunk to drunkeness-queller is painful, messy, and incremental, closer to what most of us actually undergo than the sudden sea-change Matt represents.
To be clear, Matt’s legend could explore causes of alcohol problems, such as the trauma of poverty and a family history of alcohol use disorders, but it doesn’t focus on causes. Matt simply takes a job that exposes him to alcohol, and “alcoholism” results, persisting until it inexplicably doesn’t. The real focus of the drinking phase of Matt’s legend is moral: the degradation that “alcoholism” supposedly brings with it, illustrated by an anecdote (one of very few in the whole legend) in which Matt and his brothers steal a blind fiddler’s instrument and sell it for drinks. I’m about 95 percent sure this anecdote comes from an early modern homily against drunkenness, because I know I’ve read it before, but that’s okay because plagiarism is common in hagiography, as we saw with Mary Magdalene “borrowing” from Mary of Egypt. But recycling makes clear what a particular legend wants to emphasize, and Matt’s blind fiddler anecdote serves to convey an unsympathetic view of chronic drunkenness, not as a result—and a cause—of suffering but as an ethical poison. Alcohol dependence is not something to understand, just something to condemn.
In short, Matt represents a dogmatic idea of what it is to have an alcohol use disorder, which involves a total lack of control and automatic moral degradation, followed by a miraculous conversion and a lifetime of penitence and fear of relapse, whereas Zhong Kui represents a more complex idea, one in which an alcohol problem is an attempt to soothe real-world pain, coexists with strengths (i.e. doesn’t neutralize everything good about a person), takes time to overcome, and can be transformed into a public-facing battle against drunkenness and its causes.
But beyond the question of who should be the patron saint of drunks is the larger question of whether drunks need a patron saint at all, especially drunks who are agnostic, indifferent, or actively hostile to religion. It depends on what you mean by “need,” I suppose. A case I’ve been making implicitly throughout this blog post is that representations matter. You don’t have to be Catholic or Daoist to be affected by myths and symbols originating in those faiths; in fact, the more you know about them, the more you see their influence all over our increasingly global culture from Lord of the Rings to Kung Fu Panda. So it matters what kinds of historical or mythic figures represent a successful battle with alcohol; it matters how their drunkenness is portrayed, and it matters how their recovery is portrayed. When Betty Ford became a living symbol of alcohol and prescription drug dependence, she changed public perception overnight by being enormously sympathetic, someone who was good and loving and accomplished and who also struggled with addiction. But the cultural conversation about alcohol dependence and recovery still has a long way to go, so, in addition to celebrities such as Ford, Drew Barrymore, and Kit Harrington, we need avatars of sobriety in all parts of the social imaginary to foster that change. So, yes, I’d say drunks need a patron saint, as long as it’s the right patron saint.
But what about other kinds of need? What about patron saints as more than just cultural touchstones? As a true agnostic, I have no idea whether the universe has dimensions, capacities, and energies that we humans can try to access through prayer, contemplation, ritual, devotion, or other means. I do know, however, that human beings have dimensions, capacities, and energies that are normally inaccessible to our conscious minds but that sometimes respond to irrational approaches such as prayer, contemplation, ritual, devotion, or other means. So a patron saint could possibly represent unconscious energies that can do what patron saints do: help, protect, and guide us. But all I really know for sure is that I feel stronger with Zhong Kui’s image on my wall and his many stories living in my imagination, so, in this way too, I’d say I need him.
[1] In addition to the video I’ve clipped, you can see other performances by copy-pasting <跳鍾馗> (Zhong Kui dance) into YouTube’s search engine or any regular search engine that delivers video results. You can also watch a longer (and beautifully filmed) opera featuring Zhong Kui and the five demons here.