OK, this is one WEIRD uncle-niece combination.

Picture it: Mesopotamia, in the first half of the 300s. Abraham (not THAT one) is persuaded to take a bride, but does not want to. In fact, he proclaims that his lack of interest in sexual relations with a woman is because he wants to be in a chaste and virginal state all his life. So right after the wedding ceremony, Abraham explains this to his bride, runs away, and hides himself in a cave. Seventeen days later, his friends track him down. He tells them to go away and let him be holy, and he walls up the cave so that there’s only a peep-and-pass-food-through hole left. He is determined to leave his marriage un-consummated.

Well suddenly, Abraham gets the reputation of both holy and wise and people flock to his cave to get advice from the voice behind the wall. Ten years into his time in this cell, his parents died, and he became exceedingly wealthy as a result. He told a friend he trusted (through the little peephole) to go, sell his lands, and give the proceeds to the poor. This only stirred more people to come to Abraham for counsel.

In fact, Abraham came to be regarded as so particularly holy that the bishop of his area came to the cave, ordained Abraham as a priest, and then ordered him to come out of the cave and go convert heathenish and idolatrous peoples. This made Abraham (who by that time had been in his cave for decades) cry. A lot. All the time. Everywhere he went. His ministry lasted for four years and although he was at first maltreated and jostled, he eventually made inroads and made good church-going and clean-living folk out of those in the area. Then, happily, he went back to his cave.

Well, then his brother–who was on death’s door–came to Abraham and turned his teenage daughter over to him, saying something like “Look, you’re the holy one–do something with her. I’m about to die and she needs looking after.” Abraham took his niece, Mary, and shut her up in a cave near his own. He taught her, we are told, but whether he did this face-to-face or by calling out cave-to-cave is unclear. By the time Mary hit the age of 20, she was sleeping around with a monk in wolf’s clothing (not literally.. I don’t think!) who’d have a booty call with her each time he supposedly was coming to Abraham for spiritual guidance. Then Mary (we are told it was from shame and despair, but it may also have been from finding a sense of freedom) left her cave and went to a distant town, where, Butler writes, Mary “gave herself up to the most criminal disorders.” Details are left to one’s imagination.

This made Abraham cry. For two years. In his cave. Finally, when his prayers and crying didn’t result in any good news regarding his niece, Abraham once more ventured out of his cave in search of her (though wearing a disguise). He found out where her whorehouse was, went in, and then, at dinner, Abraham revealed himself to her. Mary, confused and distraught, agreed (?!?!) to go back with Abraham and mend her ways. For her efforts, Mary was securely walled up in a cell directly behind Abraham’s cave, where “she spent the remaining fifteen years of her life in continual tears” and–this being the part making Mary a saint, too, I suppose–she practiced the most perfect virtues and penances. Presumably, there’s not much opportunity to sin under those circumstances.

Their sainthoods really got on the fast track after they died. Abraham died first–and people scrambled to get hold of scraps of his clothing or some of his bones and experienced miracles that they attributed to their holy thievery. Mary, dying five years after Abraham, gained a widespread reputation for leaving a particularly notable corpse–so much so that people who viewed her body said it to was “so shining, that we understood that choirs of angels had attended at her passage out of this life into a better.” Plus she had the advantage of being the niece of the man whose corpse had already been picked apart and proved so miraculous.

So, these two have been deemed worthy of perpetual remembrance–but what for, exactly?! I mean, they are certainly memorable, if you know what I mean, but… c’mon…