Judas

Reading Otto Rank's work on The Myth of the Birth of the Hero I am really excited about the realization that the Judas mythology from the point of view of the church is lacking. That originally Judas had a background that resembled Oedipus. He was born in Scariot of parents who were told by an angel that he was going to be the ruination of his people, so the parents "exposed" him by putting him in a bsasket and sending hom down a river or some such method. This exposure is very similar in story line as Moses and other heroes. Hercules was placed in a field as an infant and thereby exposed. The idea that this original abandonment by parents connects back to betrayal as an archetypal aspect of the story. Also the child is saved and that saving has a transformational impact on the life of the hero. Moses raised by the Pharoah, Hercules suckling the milk of Hera and becoming immortal, and Judas being rescued and raised by a childless woman. When the parents do have a child Judas kills his step brother and is banished form his country and goes to live under Pilate and work in his house but gets into a fight with his next door neighbor and kills him and then marries his wife later to find out it was his original father he killed and mother he married. The story then goes on to tell us that Judas found Jesus and followed himn until he betrayed him and the rest of the story we know from Christian mythology.

The fact that this back story was not advertised is intersting to me. Oedipus is the universal hero, Freud aside. He builds his heroic structure which always has a shadow which is either projected or swaollowed. His shadow was of course the killing of the father and marrying the mother. When he confronts this shadow he is able to come to peace with it after he has blinded himself and he is able to see with a different "sight". This is required of the hero when he has to abandon his heroic structure. That structure eventually betrays us. Recall the "Shirt of Nessus" in the Hercule myth. Hercules was given a shirt by his wife who did not know it was cursed by the foe that Hercules killed, Nessus, and before he died gave Hercules' wife a shirt as a gift for him. The shirt cause Hercules to burst into flames and cause immense pain and suffering that was so intolerable Hercules killed himself. Hercules was immortal remember so could only die of his own hand. Hercules could not abandon the heroic structure he created. Hercules was all about hero and overcoming all enemies. He could not withdraw his shadow projections, he could only literally kill that which he projected his shadow upon. Eventually the structure that held him betrayed him in the form of the shirt of Nessus.

Back to Judas. Judas could not handle his shadow so he projected onto Jesus the heroic stance he himself could not carry and when that heroic pathway was not going in the direction he expected he betrayed that hero and had him killed, then of course he killed himself according to the most accepted version of Christian mythology. There was no opportunity for self reflection and trnasformation because he could not own his projections. This is a very modern look at how we come to terms with the end of our life. You would think this story is a cautionary tale about not owning your own shadow but I am afraid the story of Judas allows the Christian the opportunity to project shadow onto Judas and use him a scapegoat. And if Christ is a scapegoat, you have two scapegoats in the same story and we understand how some of the mythology behind these two figures gets intermingled even to the suggestion that Judas really was the Christ. What practical value was served by the Oedipal heroic structure being transformed into the Jesus heroic structure or the "scapegoat" structure. Perhaps the belief in an afterlife was offered in the latter story and in Oedipu there is coming to consciousness.

The Cloaking of Death

The term palliative is used freely in the hospice industry and now throughout healthcare. It's root words are the Latin ,palliare, meaning to cloak. Palliate also means to alleviate suffering and symptoms causing suffering without curing the disease. But what is being cloaked? If we return to our story the physician must make it very clear to the patient when Death has taken a stance at the foot of the bed that there is no remedy that can save him and no physician that can heal him. We cannot seem to say these words today. If the heroic pathway is a denial of death then the palliative pathway is the cloaking of death. Kubler-Ross challenged the medical status quo in 1969 with the publication of On Death and Dying. In one brief moment she empowered the dying with a voice and a choice in how they want to die. While our fairy tale physician was turning the bodies of those marked for death around and saving them, Dr. Kubler-Ross was telling the patients there was no more that can be done and now is time to die. We are not good at these conversations. We cloak these conversations in euphemisms and tell the patient we will focus on symptoms now rather than living longer.

What else are we cloaking? Perhaps we are also cloaking the cost of healthcare and palliative care is designed to save healthcare dollars so expensive treatments are not wasted on those who are dying anyway. This healthcare rationing can be cloaked in the Hospice benefit as well as palliative care and it is largely because the rest of the industry has not modulated the addiction to the heroic pathway.

So all this turing of bodies around and betraying Death has had a toll on us but where is this manifested? In our story the physician pays the price with his life. Perhaps the sacrifice in our historical or I should say archetypal drama is the relationship of the physician to the patient, a relationship in which the physician assists the patient in making decisions based on the values of the patient as perceived by the physician. That relationship has died. Now the physician offers choices because he cannot bear the burden of being the betrayer. We are cloaking the betrayer as well as the betrayal.