Strange are the thoughts that steal upon you, a thousand feet underground in a Polish salt mine. Under the glow of chandeliers, surrounded by samizdat saints and kings, entire chapels carved in rock salt by generations of miners, I found myself thinking not of the holy and exalted but an icon of disgrace.
According to apocrypha and Christian folklore, the Roman centurion Longinus pierced Christ in the side with his spear during the Crucifixion. There are several versions of this. In almost all, he’s punished for his crime. In one, he is sentenced to eternal life, fated to wander the earth, reborn over and over, stuck in a helical loop, a universal soldier condemned to die in successive wars. This reincarnation myth made its way subliminally into fiction (Barry Sadler’s Casca series), music (Jimmy Webb’s “Highwayman”) and cinema, in the form of Nick Cave’s script for his lamentably unfilmed sequel to Gladiator.
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