✎ grazing_hermits [the libarynth]

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Bosci; the Grazing Hermits.

On one of my explorations through hagiographic literature in the Central Library of Amsterdam, I came across a text which just mentioned a piece of very very odd behavior.

When Christianity was legalized by Roman Emperor Constantine, the Christian Saints were no longer prosecuted. To prove their dedication to faith they found a new way to suffer, Asceticism. Soon this practice got really out off hand and people would come up with ever less comfortable ways of existence. Starving and suffering, they could go for hours, or even days without the normal signs of life. Dead to the world they lived in God. Saints became like athletes of Christ and in this passage I read the most stunning account yet, that there were even hermits who grazed like sheep. The golden age of grazers was the 6th century, when people ate grass all their lives at the coasts of the Red Sea.

In 'Tales of Early Ages' by Horace Smith, this passage appears on page 171, claiming the grazing hermits where known by the name of Bosci and were located it the Thebaid, the Southern most part of Egypt.
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.....Of the same class but labouring under a less desperate hallucination were the Bosci, or grazing hermits, hirsute, bearded, satyr-like savages, clad in the skin of wild beasts; who having neither cells nor habitation of any sort, but living like the cattle in the fields, spent their whole time in praying and singing psalms, and when hungry, tore up with their nails the grass and wild herbs, which they devoured without cooking.
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In 'An introduction to the history of the Western tradition' by Edgar Nathaniel Johnson on page 359 notes:
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The Anchorage is to be met in such extravagant types as grazing hermits, those living on grass or herbs, and pillar saints such as Saint Simeon Stylites, who spent some thirty years atop of a sixty foot pillar.
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Edward Gibbon writes in his work 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', in Chapter XXXVII:
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....some savage saints of both sexes have been admired, whose naked bodies were only covered by their long hair. They aspired to reduce themselves to the rude and miserable state in which the human brute is scarcely distinguishable above his kindred animals; and the numerous sect of Anachorets derived their name from their humble practice of grazing in the fields of Mesopotamia with the common herd.  They often usurped the den of some wild beast whom they affected to resemble; they buried themselves in some gloomy cavern, which art or nature had scooped out of the rock; and the marble quarries of Thebais are still inscribed with the monuments of their penance.\\
note: Sozomen, l. vi. c. 33. The great St. Ephrem composed a panegyric on these or grazing monks, (Tillemont, Mem. Eccles. tom. viii. p. 292.)
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