Someone asked for some hagiographically inspired ideas for Halloween. I though I would simply offer you a smorgasbord of moments from the lives of the saints and let your creativity take it from there.

Exhibit A: Sebastian was shot up with arrows until he looked like a hedgehog. (This is not what killed him by the way. He lived to irritate the authorities another day, but eventually Diocletian's thugs caught up with him and clubbed the poor, holy blighter to death.) Sebastian is probably not the saint to emulate for a party if you're hoping to snuggle with your date at any point in the evening. What am I saying - if you're planning on snuggling, there aren't any saints to emulate!

Exhibit B: There's always Agatha -- she of the amputated breast . She is, however, a bit macabre and may cross the line of taste in some circles. A second consideration with Agatha is that some people might mistake you for an Amazon, and what's the fun of dressing up like a saint and everybody thinking you're just some old figure out of Greek mythology?

Exhibit C: In 869 King Edmund was beheaded by marauding Danes and his head was lost for a while. Eventually his head yelled out directions to the cranial search party, so that body and head might be happily reunited in burial. If you're thinking about dressing up as Edmund, you'll want to ask yourself if the whole headless thing hasn't been overdone. John the Baptist, the headless horseman of Sleepy Hollow, the Green Knight. You could always dress your dog up as a wolf....

Exhibit D: Poor St Julian (husband of St. Basilissa) was sewn into an untanned oxskin and dragged out into the heat of the day. The tormenting prefect's hope was that the skin would shrink, strangle, and suffocate poor Julian. Even if it didn't work, it was all terribly, terribly unsanitary. If you could pull this off, the costume would have the virtue of real novelty.

Exhibit E: There are always the cross-dressing saints, but drag only goes one way in hagiography: women dressing as men. Both Eugenia and Euphrosyne did stints as monks. Eugenia's masquerade as a monk was so successful that the other monks elected her as abbot. Euphrosyne made such a pretty little monk that, for the other monks' peace of mind, she had to live in solitary confinement.

Exhibit F: If you're looking for something a little more glamorous, there's always St. Gilda of Divan, the younger and wilder sister of Ida of Louvain. St. Gilda entered the convent at Divan after a career as the nightclub singer of sixteenth-century France. She is the patron saint of women who have trouble with zippers, and women who lounge provocatively on chaise lounges. In hagiography studies she walks that fine line between reformed prostitute saint and well... barely reformed saint. Many students of hagiography make the mistake of thinking that Gilda is inauthentic because her career as a nightclub singer and her iconography (one long black glove) seem anachronistic. Furthermore, among her holy relics are several miniature portraits on ivory and her resemblance to Rita Hayworth is frankly uncanny.

For those of you inclined to doubt the veracity of St. Gilda, I include a little known anecdote from the hagiography world. Hippolyte Delehaye - one of the premier scholars of hagiography - nearly ended his career before it began by writing an article in which he sought to disprove the existence of St. Gilda of Divan. In private correspondence towards the end of his life, Delehaye recounted how late one night when pouring over Gilda's vita, he had a vision of the saint ("quelle vision") in which she slapped him with a long black velvet glove. Delehaye concludes the account by saying that such was his skepticism of the saint that when he woke, he would have maintained it was all a dream and continued with his work of disproving her, except there was a long black glove tucked into his breast pocket. He carried it with him ever after.

That should be more than enough to get you started, and more than enough to get me finished.