Journeying with Janus: A Mythic Perspective of Blood Cancer
When first diagnosed with a rare blood cancer, I saw it almost exclusively as a mechanical problem; something was wrong with my body that required fixing. It took many years to understand its true nature; that it was not something to be feared and fought, but an attempt to initiate my own process of deep healing.
Furthermore, a realisation that the physical manifestation of my illness might be the latter stages of something that has resided inside me since I was a young boy — a tightly held story that was no longer serving me.
I am reminded of the D.H. Lawrence poem, ‘Healing’.
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake, and the freeing
oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
A decade after my diagnosis, I have been led to a very different space. My life has transformed from the corporate world to that of meditation teacher, mentor, and an avid scholar of the mythopoetic — a storyteller of sorts.
The realm of myth is always with us; while often deeply veiled in our ‘adult’ existence, it is retained in our imagination, our childlike curiosity. It allows us to remain malleable, keeping our minds open to a worldview that does not become diminished and myopic, but remains as big as the world itself. It offers us the opportunity to let go of rigid ideas and of how things should be — so often a misguided concept of what it means to ‘grow up’.
Entering, or allowing for, a mythic perspective opens us to a life not bound by time. It is the middle way, the space between. Similar to a meditative practice, we can better see the true nature of our issues and then bring imagination to bear upon the surface level of hard facts. We emerge from this process more open to becoming whole; to heal.
In early 2011, I was diagnosed with a Myeloproliferative Neoplasm (MPN), a chronic condition in which the bone marrow makes too many abnormal red blood cells, white blood cells, or platelets. In my case, it is predominantly platelets.
I have always found this interesting, as I’m well aware that my early life experiences seduced me into holding onto a story around ‘protection’, which over time distorted to become ‘overprotection’. This played out again and again in all aspects of my life, from relationships to self-care, even body dysmorphia.
It’s of no great surprise to me that platelets play a key protective role in the body and that I now make too many of them.
The stories we carry can put us in touch with our own unique potential, our genius. However, we are more often than not inclined to grasp for a story that makes us feel more in control and less anxious. They become coping mechanisms, and we hold onto them for — quite literally — dear life.
Perhaps over time, this ‘clinging’ can lead to related physical manifestations.
Would it be more useful to become curious and ask the story what it wants of us — what it is pointing at, rather than what it appears to be — and therefore not attach to it so completely?
With that in place, let us take a deeper dive into the world of MPNs. For many of us impacted, it involves a gene called JAK2. This gene provides instructions for making the JAK2 enzyme, which is very important for both encouraging and controlling the production of cells, especially blood cells. As such, the JAK2 enzyme is usually acting inside the stem cells in our bone marrow as a kind of traffic cop — however, in certain MPNs, a mutation in this gene causes the JAK2 enzyme to always stay on, so overproduction occurs, creating a cascade of serious issues over time.
Janus kinase (JAK) is a family of intracellular, non-receptor tyrosine kinases that transduce cytokine-mediated signals via the JAK-STAT pathway.
That sounds about as dry off the tongue as it feels in the body. What’s much more interesting to me though is that the acronym JAK was initially derived from the term “Just Another Kinase”, since they were one of many discoveries in a screen of kinases. However, they were ultimately published as “Janus Kinase”, the name taken from Janus — the Roman god of beginnings, endings and duality — because JAKs possess two near-identical phosphate-transferring domains. One domain exhibits the kinase activity, while the other negatively regulates the kinase activity of the first.
Depictions of the god Janus show two faces looking in opposite directions, representing the old and the new. January — the month I was diagnosed actually — derives its name from Janus. His backward-looking face reviews the year past, while looking the other way, he makes predictions for the year ahead. His image appeared over gates and doorways and thus, Janus also represents thresholds, transitions and change.
As a god of transitions in these both literal and abstract ways, Janus was also responsible for motion and time. He was present at the beginning of the world, guarding the gates of Heaven, and he also presided over the creation of life.
At a deeper level, Janus represents the opposition of the time-bound and the timeless. He is where the physical and spiritual bodies meet. He also reminds us that the world has to be symbolically destroyed before it can be recreated, in order to break the hold that our old stories and beliefs have over us.
In one of the many myths in which Janus played an important role, Romulus, one of the founders of Rome, was attempting to kidnap the Sabine women. Janus saved the women by creating a volcanic hot spring which erupted and buried the aggressors in boiling water and ash, a mixture used in ancient times for the healing of both physical and emotional wounds.
This leitmotif of ‘ashes’ appears often in myth and could be described as a soul descent. It requires sitting in the ashes of one’s life, examining the wounds and experiencing the necessary grief that inevitably comes. This is the process that opens the Janus door to transformation and healing.
Mythologically, one thinks of Cinderella, or the Norse ‘Cinderbiters’; young men who spent years in isolation eating ashes.
Take a moment to sink into your own imagination. I offer you an invitation to draw some insights of your own from this mythical fire pit. What in your life has turned to ashes? Are you willing to grieve it, release it, and allow for healing?
I like to think that in order to restore ourselves, we need to re-story ourselves.
There is this sense that I am entering through a doorway of initiation, crossing a ritual threshold of sorts. I have been called — invited actually — and there’s a deep part of me which feels very welcome.
There’s an ancient idea that such ritual spaces must be initially heated in order to have their transformational impact — by drums, singing, prayer or fire. What better way to heat this sacred space inside me than with my own blood.
The Greek word ‘hema’ is derived from the ancient verb ‘aetho’ which means to ‘warm or heat’ — itself stemming from ‘hesmae’ which literally means ‘incandescent’.
Many ancient peoples (Greeks, Phoenicians, Persians, Egyptians and Hebrews to name a few) hinged their beliefs about blood as directly related to mythology.
Greek savants considered blood to be the same as soul, in the sense that it contained some non-material source of life — spirit.
“haema fasi tines einai ten psychen”
“The soul is said to be blood” — Aristotle
Perhaps this implies that ‘psyche’ (soul) is the root of our mythological understanding — where all stories reside — and hema (blood) is the liquid story-carrier which transports it to the physical world and into our consciousness. The blood can then be tainted by holding stories that no longer serve, that have become stagnant and polluted.
Thus, with Janus as my guide, I continue this work of ‘blood and ashes’. It allows me to see that there is so much more to my situation than meets the eye. Everything is transitional. I can look both ways in the presence of blood cancer and not feel drawn by the need to anchor my hopes to this or to that.
I wish you well on your own journey, sure-footed in the knowledge that the doorways you encounter will always lead you to where you are meant to be.
A deeper exploration of this story can be found in Dr Edward Tick’s marvellous book, Soul Medicine, published by Healing Arts Press in 2023.
