Suicide is a competition.

Eusebius, the early-Christian bishop and scholar, complains that the Euphemites, a competing Christian sect, thought themselves overshadowed by the martyrs, and sought to take up martyrdom themselves. The Italian Cardinal, Baronius, rejoices that for every one “heathen” martyr, the Donatists put forth “swarms of men.”

Donne summarizes: “For that age had grown so hungry and ravenous for [suicide] that many were baptized only because they would be burned, and children were taught to vex and provoke executioners so they might be thrown into the fire.”

Donne speaks of the zeal and disappointment of those not sentenced to death – not wanting to be left behind. And he reports of an eventual Roman response: “Our primitive church was so enamored of death and so satisfied with it that, in order to vex and torture them, the magistrate made laws to take from them the comfort of dying and increased their persecution by stopping it.”

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Donne, Biathantos, 24-7.

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In olden times when peasants and nobility both basically spent a lifetime without bathing a suicide was tortured to death by the townspeople to show the suicide. Once dead in a double sense the suicide was scooped up and thrown into a rickety cart pulled by a miserable pack animal and hauled to a crossroads on the outskirts of town. A grave was dug often two or three depths deep and the suicide was dropped in face down with a stake plunged into the back and through the heart and out the front so as to drive the stake into the cold hard ground below. At the crossroads a signpost for town was erected with an arrow pointing in the wrong direction, usually to the most hated and reviled neighboring town. Being buried face down tricks the suicide so that if being now undead he start digging he digs in the wrong direction to get out and never finds the way up again. The stake ensures the suicide is pinned firmly into the darkness. And if the suicide somehow does emerge from the grave the signpost sends him to haunt the wrong people, who, in the estimation of the townsfolk, probably deserve to be haunted anyway.

The problems to this practice are layered and nuanced. There is a moral also. The moral of the story is simply that in truly understanding and enacting the eidos of suicide it is the stake that grounds where the stake is simply life or death. No wincing. Just tranquility.