Mitigation (after Walser)

Just as many centuries later, a deadly curse would be famously lessened to 100 years of sleep with thorns, so the Gerasene Devils, or Legion, commuted a sentence of death on a herd of swine which Jesus had just then decided should be drowned in the lake at the bottom of a hill. The devils, being cast by Jesus into the swine, drained the lake moments before the maddened and unhappy animals arrived at its shore. Out of mercy for their hosts, or for some other reason, they mitigated that absolute lake of certain death into a relative marsh of mild splashing or pleasant wallowing. After this, events proceeded as expected. It is no surprise that the swine were more contented in the marsh than upon the bare hillside where previously they had suffered from sunstroke or exposure. Those tending them, upon finding their herds reclining in the wetland, and not drowning in the depths, made no complaints and were not afraid. But the fishermen of the lake did complain, their boats were now useless, and some had recently become afraid. Being incorporeal, the devils would not have drowned with the swine if the lake had remained itself – so any proffered explanation for this act of commutation would probably not dwell too long upon devils' oft recorded tendency to selfishness or mischief-making. Even so, theologians have since sided with the fishermen. They have written that if every judgment were to be transformed into a mitigation of an earlier judgement, then what criteria could afterwards be used to distinguish devils from all else? Shortly after this particular act of devil's mercy, Jesus departed Gerasene, whereupon the devils flew out of the herd of swine and returned to settle upon the shoulders of the man, and once again he stumbled up the hill’s uneven path, like a pack animal under the burden of them as they dug in their heels beneath his ribs. Like a returning season, they drove the man back up the dry distant hillside, shouting and gesturing, and kept him amongst the lonely or isolated tombstones at the edge of town.