Sadly, we will never get to find out what motivates someone in northern England in 2017 to want to get up on a cross and be mock-crucified in the runup to Easter. And to spend £750 for the opportunity. For about a week, you could buy the crucifixion experience on a crowdfunding website, a wheeze to help raise money for putting on a large-scale Passion play in Manchester this weekend.
It would have been an opportunity to empathise, says Alex Stewart-Clark, a member of the committee that organises the annual performance, “[with] what it was like to be on the cross, a humiliating public execution method”. But all the other members disagreed, deciding it was sacrilegious, and the offer was taken down. “The committee are more spiritually aware. They saw the grey area.”
A few years ago, you might have volunteered for studies done in the US by Frederick Zugibe, who died in 2013. A forensic pathologist and author of The Crucifixion of Jesus, Zugibe crucified hundreds of volunteers, using straps rather than nails, to research the effects, following on from earlier crucifixion studies by French surgeon Pierre Barbet.
For a more authentic experience – nails included – crucifixions are re-enacted on Good Friday as devotional practice in several villages in the Philippines (it is frowned on by the country’s Catholic leaders). Some people have been crucified many times – one of the most famous is Ruben Enaje, who has been nailed to a cross 30 times and began his annual crucifixion to give thanks for surviving a fall from a three-storey building. He dealt with the pain, he told Associated Press, by thinking “that God went through worse”.
It has become a rather gruesome spectacle and, in 2015, villages banned tourists from taking part because they were seen to be trivialising it – an Australian comedian was nailed to a cross in 2009, and a Danish film-maker was crucified in 2014. Scottish TV presenter Dominik Diamond travelled to one of the villages in 2006 on a “personal journey” for Channel 5 – he intended to take part in the ritual but pulled out at the last minute. The late artist Sebastian Horsley was successfully nailed to a cross in 2002 in the same village. “An artist has to go to every extreme, to stretch his sensibility through excess and suffering in order to feel and to communicate more,” he said, describing being crucified as “a deeply poetic thing to do” and symbolising “a form of rebirth”.
