Wodan, id est furor

We all know about invulnerable heroes. Special thing about them is: Almost every one of them is dead. Deathly wounded by their enemy. They are already dead by the time we learn about them and their invulnerability. So invulnerability does not mean immortality in flesh or even longevity. Who stayed invulnerable, then? Gods? But can you achieve the charisma of invulnerability if you have no body to wound and about to be destroyed like ours?

Is invulnerability an all too trivial issue? Simple and foreseeable like Superman stories? Adolescent dreams of omnipotence in male, competitive society or, seeking deeper structures, the regressive dream production triggered by the archaic desire to return to the golden Age of personal history - the protected and risk-ignorant fetal state - compromised with the grown-up urge not to be absorbed, to remain open to the world, self-conscious and auto-mobile with your magic shield and protectional tattoos.


Or is it the last straw drawn by desperate, poorly educated and equipped, magic-believing people about to fight and face death, as happened with some charismatic prophets and leaders emerging in anti-colonial war. Dancing Ghost-Shirts. A helpful and sometimes self-fulfilling collective delusion as some war leaders generate a charismatic flow in success and then thrive on it for some time. Veteran legends turned into mythology.

People may feel invulnerable, this is part of the ‘heart-of-darkness’ combat syndrome, it is a popular ‘adolescent myth’ or a drug induced fantasy, but it is also a phenomenological reality of personal omnipotence, power and wealth which is as extreme as its common counterpart, the experience of total loss, deprivation, helplessness and personal destruction. But beyond such shattering ‘horror trips’ of total vulnerability and victimization is our everyday exposure to forces which may at any time decide to crush us and what is ours. Keeping this simple fact in mind may be paranoid and unhealthy, but whether we take a plane or just sit peacefully in the fast-food restaurant, whenever we move or stay put, there is an invisible Cup which passes by, filled up to the rim with the bitter fluid of our frail and temporary existence.


So is invulnerability an ideal, a regulative idea unreachable in its purity, the dramatic polar cultural embodiment of a reasonable pursuit, namely to diminish ones own real and inescapable vulnerability? The impossible common horizon of both War and Medicine?

Surely there is a genetics and physiology of invulnerability, referring to individual immunity or attraction to diseases and toxic reactions. You can also reach not being vulnerable to magical hazards, using and trusting the appropriate potent magical counter-measures. It works, if you do not die a ‘psychogenic death’ when under a death spell. You may also expose your body to fire and snakes and not be burned or poisoned if you are properly prepared.