St. Erasmus (Elmo)

Who they were

Erasmus was a bishop of Formia martyred under Diocletian. That core is ancient; the elaborate life of him is later embroidery. He became one of the most invoked saints of the medieval world twice over, and both times by accident.

First the sea. Sailors took him as patron, and the bluish electrical glow that dances on mastheads in storms was read as his promised presence: Saint Elmo's fire, which is a corona discharge, and which six centuries of mariners took courage from anyway. Second, the misreading. His emblem was a windlass, a ship's winch, for the sailors. Later viewers mistook it for an instrument of abdominal torture, a suitably grim episode grew in the legend to explain it, and out of that error bloomed a genuinely tender patronage: Elmo became the helper invoked for stomach ailments, colic and children's bellyaches, prayed by mothers for centuries. God appears to work even through iconographic typos.

Why people turn to St. Erasmus (Elmo)

Boaters, with St. Brendan the Navigator and St. Nicholas of Myra. And people living with digestive illness, whether that is Crohn's, colitis, IBS, or the exhausted parents of a colicky baby, asked alongside the treatment and not in place of it.

How to ask their intercession

At the dock and at the two in the morning colic hour alike, briefly, which is how the helpers were always asked.