Wars, crime and famine, among other circumstances, have driven millions to leave home and seek shelter among strangers. The situation worsens daily. This chapter examines strategies for restoring enduring empathy and an accompanying willingness to extend human rights across borders. It seeks to explain why giving sanctuary (a place of refuge and safety) is a human imperative. In seeking and offering sanctuary, we manifest, acknowledge and strengthen our sense of shared humanity and affirm life as a value. Providing and seeking refuge, furthermore, entail the recognition that human rights extend beyond the narrow scope of national boundaries. As such, sanctuary relies on a degree of empathy that reaches beyond perceived “in groups” to include all human beings. Conversely, the denial of sanctuary dehumanizes refugees and transforms an enriching resource into a threat to prosperity. That is not accidental. Where we dehumanize, we eradicate empathy. Where we fear, we strike to destroy. Is it possible, then, to have human rights for those among us forced to emigrate as refugees? Have human rights become through alienating practices only citizen rights? Outside the law of a given land, what protects and supports life? To address these questions, this chapter will discuss two myths and two affirmations that express powerful reasons to proffer refuge and extend empathy, not only toward human beings but also toward all living beings and toward the earth.

Two Myths

In Western civilization, two myths of shared origins have sought to explain and awaken among human beings a sense of kinship and community: Plato's audacious invention characterized by Socrates as a noble lie (Republic, 414b–e) and the creation stories in Genesis, 1:26-27; 2:7-8 and 2:19-25. Consider the latter first. In Genesis (1:26-27) the god creates all living things, the human to the god's image and likeness. As kin sharing a divine origin, all life commands respect and appreciation. The story, however, gives to the human dominion over the others. With dominion came hierarchical distinctions that dispelled from human emotion most fellow feeling toward other life forms. Once privilege-based dichotomies enter reasoning, alterity is deemed harmful to filial relations among living beings. The importance of biodiversity for providing stability and enriching the environment becomes blurred in anthropocentric policies that ignore extinction and endanger the variability of species. Failure to relate to living things, to experience oikeiôsis among living organisms, fractures relations among humans.

Vulnerable reading works on the opposite side of the street from narrative medi-cine: the side of the street where ill people live. But not only ill people. Vulner-able reading is for all those who are willing to acknowledge that they are strugg-ling to hold on to their sense of self and purpose, and even their desire to live. Some of these people are healthcare workers. Most will be ill people or people who are not immediately sick but whose chronic conditions or disabilities make them vulnerable. Vulnerable reading is about what these people might look for when they read to help them in their different struggles.

Unlike the usage common to narrative medicine, I do not—emphatically not—speak of patients as those who need vulnerable reading. Ill people become patients only during those times when they are being attended by a healthcare Interventionsworker. Vulnerable reading can help people reflect on what happens during those times of medical attendance, but ill people have an extensive life outside of whatever time they spend being patients, just as healthcare workers have lives outside that work. Vulnerable reading seeks to enrich those extensive lives (Frank, 2019).Narrative medicine's core mandate and focus has been teaching student clini-cians—at first medical students and now multiple health professions (Bleakley, 2015; Charon, 2017; Frank, 2017).

As demonstrated above, there is a long Gothic tradition in Swedish literature and film. It goes back to the Romantic period and the early nineteenth century when the first phase of imported English and German stories inspired Swedish writers to modify and adapt Gothic conventions to their local audiences. From the beginning, Swedish Gothic were place-focused stories, in which the Nordic landscape takes the role of a labyrinthine Gothic castle as a space of fear and terror. At the same time, the Swedish version of Gothic was densely intertextual with explicit references to well-known and iconic works produced outside Scandinavia. Thereby, Swedish writers placed themselves in a tradition of transnational Gothic, at the same time as they took for granted that their audiences were genre-aware and recognised references to iconic works. The first Swedish vampire story, Viktor Rydberg's The Vampire (1848), is an extended and elaborated response to Polidori's story from 1819, while Aurora Ljungstedt's The House of the Devil (1853) is a Gothic novel in the style of Ann Radcliffe and with explicit references to Radcliffe's novels.

Also, today's Swedish writers and filmmakers place themselves in a global Gothic tradition of canonised novels and films. The impact of international blockbusters, such as Blair Witch Project, has resulted in a domesticated Scandinavian version of mockumentaries with distinct Nordic features. The films are often structured as a journey from the ordinary urban everyday world into a mythological world lurking outside or beyond modern society. Here the force of nature acts as an external monstrous antagonist, such as in The Unknown (2000), directed by Michael Hjorth. In addition, a certain kind of Swedish blend of Gothic and realist narration has gained widespread international acclaim. One of the earliest and most successful examples is John Ajvide Lindqvist's bestselling vampire novel Let the Right One In (2007). It is set in a recognisable and explicitly named suburb outside the Swedish capital Stockholm, and it combines social realism with supernatural elements to address topical social problems. It was immediately translated into English and about 20 other languages. Lindqvist was also asked to write the screenplay to Tomas Alfredson's Swedish film adaptation from 2008, while Matt Reeves American remake, Let Me In, was released in 2010.

The most striking feature of Swedish Gothic since the early nineteenth century is the central part played by the Nordic landscape and mythological creatures of nature known from Nordic myths and popular belief.

Art, culture, and health

The links between art, culture, and health make up a growing interdisciplinary area of research that has gained international traction over recent decades. In a review of the documentation of the significance of art and culture for health and well-being in 2019, the World Health Organization (WHO) has singled out art and culture as important resources that can be integrated into various forms of health initiatives (Fancourt and Finn, 2019). Their review was based on a sur-vey of 900 publications, 200 of which were themselves reviews of 3,000 individ-ual studies. This makes it the most comprehensive pool of knowledge that has so far been made on the significance of art and culture in relation to health. It provides documentation for the ability of art and culture to support health services by, for example, promoting well-being and combating social inequality, reaching out to groups that are otherwise difficult to make contact with, and training health professionals in empathy and dialogue (ibid.).

Another smaller Danish review, surveying the literature on the value of art and culture in health initiatives, establishes that participating in artistic, cul-tural, or creative activities can promote mental health (Jensen, 2017). The effects emphasized in relation to such initiatives are increased quality of life, improved well-being and bodily understanding, as well as reduction of negative feelings and anxiety among participants. WHO also indicates the positive effects of these types of initiatives on a range of specific mental health targets and, in particular, underscores life satisfaction, a sense of meaningfulness, self-assessed health and cognitive abilities (Fancourt and Finn, 2019).

While WHO has emphasized the advantages of integrating art and culture in health initiatives from a general standpoint, several specific research projects on the topic are continuously emerging.

The ideological SS universe helps us better understand the actions of the SS men, including the way they rationalized their war crimes and atrocities – a theme we will return to in a later chapter on Waffen-SS atrocities. The question of how ideology influenced and shaped practice at the front is, however, broader and even more complex as we shall see in the following.

Racial Differentiation at the Front

Moving eastwards, the soldiers of the Third Reich faced various ethnic groups which caused countless ideologically motivated reactions among the Waffen-SS men. In October 1941, for example, a Norwegian soldier in the Wiking division informed in a letter that he had lately been guarding POWs, most of whom were Ukrainians. Among these, he found that there was “much strangeness to behold” and continued:

A report from the second SS Cavalry Regiment August 1941 on the massacre in the Pripet Marshes also made a point of distinguishing different groups from each other. Here, the Ukrainians made a relatively good impression: ‘although they were small, they all were of a harmonious figure and build and had a clear look’. As was the case in the Pripet Marshes, such race evaluations could have drastic consequences for the locals. An order from Himmler's personal command staff stated that areas populated by völkisch Germans or Ukrainians, where they did not like the Poles and the Russians, were to be protected. Conversely, where the population was friendly towards the Poles or were ‘racially and humanly inferior’ everyone under suspicion of supporting partisans should be shot and their villages torched. Thus, in this and similar cases a racial distinction was made between the so-called sub-humans and those who might not be Volksdeutsche or Germanic, but were deemed racially acceptable to a degree where their lives were preserved.

Naturally, racial differentiation also applied to the SS internally. In the summer of 1943, for instance, general Steiner instructed his armoured corps to place emphasis on racial and physical appearance when selecting officer material.

Teresa de Ávila lived in tumultuous times. Lutheranism was tearing Christian Europe apart. In France and in the Spanish territories to the North, Catholics and Protestants were at war. In the Americas, Spanish soldiers were facing untold dangers advancing the interests of the Crown, and one by one, Teresa's seven brothers joined their ranks. In Spain, the Inquisition persecuted those suspected of heterodoxy or spurious raptures, especially women. As an ecstatic and the daughter and granddaughter of conversos (converts from Judaism), Teresa was constantly under suspicion. Furthermore, opposition from the Carmelite hierarchy to the new religious order she founded, the Discalced Carmelites, put her squarely on the defensive. And during the last years of her life, the catarro universal—a global pandemic that, like Covid-19, spread like wildfire—claimed the lives of several of her close friends. In the midst of often harrowing circumstances, Teresa (known in the Spanish-speaking world as Santa Teresa de Jesús) sought refuge in her own soul—her “interior castle”—where she found spiritual peace.

Long before Teresa was born, many in Europe recognized the need for religious reform. By the late middle ages, the Church had become highly bureaucratic and materialistic, and religious practice was often reduced to a series of empty rituals. Parents frequently placed some of their daughters in female convents at an early age, often as young as 3 or 4, to avoid paying a marriage dowry, and some of their sons in male convents because, due to primogeniture, they were ineligible to inherit property. Consequently, these institutions were often overcrowded and inhabited by men and women with no real religious vocation. To counteract this situation, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, new orders were formed that stressed prayer over ritual and sought to foster an authentic relationship with God among their members. Some of the mendicant orders (those that forbid personal property) split into “conventuals,” who maintained a “mitigated” or more relaxed lifestyle, and “observants,” who adopted an “unmitigated” regime designed to promote genuine piety.

However, the spiritual reform was not limited to the religious orders. In the Low Countries, a new movement called the devotio moderna was gaining momentum among the laity as well as the reformed clergy. The devotio moderna was launched around 1374 by Geert Groote (1340–1384), a Dutch Roman Catholic deacon who believed that religious practices had become corrupted and void of meaning.

After the defeat in the First World War, Germany was marred by considerable polarisation and by the presence and activities of para-military organisations. Economic chaos and extensive poverty together with street fights, political assassinations and coup-d’etat attempts characterised life in the Weimar Republic of 1918. Shortly after the foundation in 1920 of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (NSDAP) Hitler became leader. It was one of the political parties, which employed violence in its political struggle most determinedly. In the beginning, the NSDAP engaged various paramilitary organisations to protect their own meetings and harass those of other parties. However, gradually the party developed its own body of Nazi street bullies, the SA. Perhaps the most important sub-division of this organisation was the Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler. At the same time, Hitler had a small number of men for his personal protection – the Stabswache (staff close protection team). The Stoßtrupp and the Stabswache would guard the party meetings and bully gate crashers, and the roots of the Schutzstaffel can be traced back to these units. Like the general SA and other Nazi organisations, these entities were dissolved in the wake of the Beer Hall Putsch in November 1923.

After Hitler's release from prison in the spring of 1925, his bodyguard was re-formed under Julius Schreck. This Munich-based team of merely eight men was soon to be re-designated the Schutzstaffel, and Schreck would become the first in a succession of SS leaders. Although, generally, the Nazis were very inspired by the inter-war paramilitary organisations, using the word Staffel was original. The word originated with the German army which used it to designate minor mounted, motorised or flying detachments. In September 1925, Hitler ordered Schreck to raise, and assume command of, a network of similar detachments all over Germany. Each Staffel should consist of ten men selected among the most trustworthy local party members. These were raised in a number of German cities, and in 1926 there were 26 such SS units in Germany.

Schreck was a devoted Nazi, but his organisational and political skills were mediocre and the newly formed SS units were weak. Thus, as early as 1926, Hitler dismissed him from his post. The new boss was the founder of Stoßtrupp Adolf Hitler, Joseph Berchtold, who soon replaced his title as Oberleiter (senior leader) der SS by Reichsführer-SS. Berchtold was considerably more activist than Schreck.

Since the second half of the nineteenth century, it is possible to make a distinction between two gendered tendencies in Swedish Gothic that are both identified with the gender of the writer and the gender of the fictional protagonist. Furthermore, it is possible to distinguish between what Anne Williams calls a Male formula and a Female formula in terms of plot, narrative technique, gendered point of view and use of supernatural elements. However, the formula is not the same as in Anglo-American Gothic. Although some Swedish women writers portray imprisoned and victimised heroines, they are not as confined and perpetuated by male tyrants as Kate Ferguson Ellis claims them to be in ‘feminine Gothic’ originated from Ann Radcliffe's stories. Nor does the Swedish version of Male Gothic expose a plot of masculine transgression of social norms and taboos. Thereby, it does not fulfil that kind of Male formula that Diana Wallace, Andrew Smith and others have identified as Anglo-American Male Gothic from Matthew Lewis onwards.

Both the Male and Female formulas of Swedish Gothic revolve around the devious Nordic wilderness. Many stories by Swedish male writers and film directors are set in a hostile landscape and revolve around the male protagonist's meeting with an alluring female being, sometimes a creature from Swedish folklore. At the same time as she represents untamed nature, she also demonstrates that forces of nature are dependent on female agency. In that way, the Swedish version of Male Gothic confirms a recurrent motif in today's EcoGothic that Elisabeth Parker calls ‘Monstrous Mother Natures’ or ‘the She-Devil in the Wilderness’. In the female version of Swedish Gothic, women writers explore gendered concept of the Nordic scenery and its mythological creatures. Since the late nineteenth century, they have employed the formula of Anglo-American Female Gothic to communicate gendered issues, and since the millennium, a female subgenre of Gothic stories has emerged, in which the female protagonist is both persecutor and prey. Instead of being a victimised heroine, the female character develops supernatural powers or exceptional knowledge of magic. In addition, in today's many stories targeting young female adults, the protagonist is often a witch or a collective of witches, who is assigned to participate in an ongoing struggle between good and evil forces in nature in order to save the world.

In this chapter, we move to our exploration of how the deep culture theory can be used to analyze the hero as a symbol in contemporary popular culture. The hero myth was first ever recorded in human history as the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh. It is perhaps the most widespread, recognizable symbolic mytheme and has been extensively employed in contemporary Hollywood screenwriting. Indeed, the hero myth has become the basis for countless books and famous Hollywood adventure movies, including Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, The Matrix, Hunger Games, and Avengers. Yet, depictions of the hero's journey in Hollywood and elsewhere tend to be rather uniform and truncated. Moreover, understandings or analyses of the hero's journey are often disconnected from ordinary, “lived experience.” This is typically because while the hero's journey may be narrated to include symbolic elements, the hero him-or herself is often not recognized as a symbol and therefore as neither complex nor relevant.

In fact, the hero is not just an element in a story that encodes other symbols, which is how the hero's journey tends to be viewed. Rather, the hero him-or herself is also a symbol, and was always enfolded in a mytho-logos, or logic, within which the hero's journey carried meaning for inner transformation. Such a logos was well understood in the journey of the hero as a rite of passage in many cultures documented by anthropologists. And, we argue, this logos was also understood as the way to make sense of fictionalized hero myths in antiquity, such as Odysseus’ epic journey home. However, modern re-tellings of the hero story are typically not accompanied by a manual, as it were, that tells us how they fit symbolically into our lives. Using the theory of deep culture, in this chapter we recover some of the elements of the logic enfolding the hero as a symbol, concentrating on two aspects in particular: the hero symbol's multivalent complexity, and its role in inner transformations. From this perspective, we connect the hero as a symbol to everyday life, which was the function of ritualized practices in traditional cultures.

One point to note here is that storytelling is an important venue where the hero as a symbol gets to work on audiences, while related images like paintings reinforce the story. However, the hero can also be recognized as a symbol in other venues, for instance in political narratives.

Doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers spend a lot of time working in the medical environment away from home. In a medical career that spans four decades, a typical full-time healthcare practitioner spends approximately 36 percent of their lifetime on the job. This amounts to about 125,216 hours out of a total of 349,440 hours. For surgeons, this estimate of lifetime accumulation hours may be a low. And this time does not include the time spent in college: four years of medical school and three-to-four years of residency and internship. During their training years, medical trainees work day and night.

This chapter aims to focus on determining what is a refuge for healthcare practitioners. The word “refuge” is simply defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as: (1) A shelter or protection from danger or distress; (2) A place that provides shelter or protection; (3) Something to which one has recourse in difficulty. Can the medical environment as it exists today be considered a place of refuge? Of course, this is a dif-ficult question to answer in a historical period confronting the COVID-19 pandemic. Nowhere are healthcare practitioners safe from illness and death, not at the clinic and in their homes. Thousands of healthcare workers have died from the virus, including their relatives (Mollica et al. 2021, 1-4; Mollica and Fernando 2020, e84). Healthcare workers of color and their families have been especially hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior to the pandemic, “burn-out” among physicians was high, that is, greater than 50 percent, but the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified the stress and danger on the medical profession. Key findings of The Physicians Foundation's 2021 Survey of America's Physicians reveal the following:

• 1. Eight in 10 physicians were impacted as a result of COVID-19:

  • a. 49 percent reported a reduction of income

  • b. 32 percent experienced a reduction in staff

• 2. 61 percent of physicians reported often experiencing symptoms of burn-out

• 3. More than half of physicians (57%) have felt inappropriate feelings of anger, fearfulness or anxiety because of COVID-19

• 4. Despite the high incidence of mental health symptoms, only 14 percent of physicians sought medical attention

• 5. Most physicians identify their family (89%), friends (82%), and colleagues (71%) as those helpful to their mental health and wellbeing

• 6. More than half (55%) of physicians know of a physician who has either considered, attempted or died by suicide.