by Frank Sanello
First identified in the 1930s by an Israeli psychiatrist, Jerusalem Syndrome describes a cluster of psychotic symptoms endemic to the Holy Land.
Were the Portuguese Children Who Saw the Lady of Fatima Hallucinating Psychotics?
The syndrome has various manifestations. Some tourists in Jesus’ place of death believe that they hear the voice of God. Other victims think they are God or the reincarnation of saints and archangels shortly after arriving in the city that gives the syndrome its name.
A 1998 Israeli documentary about Jerusalem Syndrome featured a particularly disturbing patient who claimed to be the Archangel Michael and dressed for the part, wearing a long beard, a white robe, and feathered wings. He resembled the forbidding title character in director Luis Bunuel’s 1965 classic, Simon of the Desert.
The film was based on a real-life saint in 5th century Syria, who spent four decades on top of a tall pillar to distance himself from sinners and temptation. From his lofty pulpit he delivered sermons condemning spectators at ground-level for their sins. Trickle-down guilt. Holy hermits who traded the traditional cave for a penthouse perch were known as anchorites.
During the Great Depression, unemployed daredevils engaged in similar stunts atop flagpoles to earn a few bucks from passersby. Flagpole squatters were high-flying panhandlers who kept a hat at the base of the pole to collect money from gawkers.
Early Christian anchorites also hurled curses down on sinful spectators with the usual millenarian warning that the end of the world was nigh. Their earthbound counterparts today sometimes wear sandwich boards that express the same warning: repent before it’s too late.
Jerusalem Syndrome made it to the screen in the 1998 Israeli documentary of the same name, but the pathology has yet to crack the DSM-IV, the encyclopedia of mental illnesses. Some psychologists, however, believe that Jerusalem Syndrome is covered by a entry in the DSM, Delusional Disorder - Grandiose Type.
Grandiosity in the clinical rather than popular sense plagues people who believe they can accomplish or have accomplished feats for which they have neither the training or natural talent. The type is endemic in Hollywood, where pathological liars from all over the world gather with dreams of becoming movie stars.
Fake Rockefellers and Kennedys Prey on the Rich and Credulous
Delusions typically take hold later in life, which may explain why 40-year-old bus boys who moved to L.A. in their 20s hoping to make it big decide to pretend that they have succeeded. Scam bags claiming to be Kennedy or Rockefeller relatives cheat naïve, rich groupies out of fortunes.
Bogus “movie producers” who have never produced anything but fantasies lure credulous young women fresh off the bus from the boondocks with promises of starring them in movies that will never get made. Preproduction conveniently fails to progress to principal photography because the project only exists in the imagination of the fake filmmakers. While waiting for their big break, young women often succumb to sexual overtures from sham producers.
Such scams are contagious, and the rip-off artist may come to believe the fantasy himself, which turns the scamster into a victim of psychosis as well. A more toxic cousin of grandiosity, also in the DSM, is grandiose narcissism, a synergistic combination of incompetence and remorselessness typical of narcissists, who again, in the clinical rather than popular connotation, believe their needs are all important, while the needs of others, if recognized at all, are of no importance.
Mummification Without Preservatives: The Corpse of St. Bernadette of Lourdes Never Decomposed
The DSM reserves a subcategory for grandiose individuals whose lack of remorse is so powerful they can commit murder without the guilt that prevents healthy people from acting on their primitive impulses. These psychopaths are called malign narcissists. Besides Hitler, Stalin and Saddam Hussein have been diagnosed with this virulent form of grandiosity.
Exhibiting the typical lack of remorse, Saddam liked to feed enemies feet-first into wood chippers until he got bored and accelerated the process by inserting his victims head-first. A TV documentary showed the Iraqi dictator smoking and laughing as his henchmen hauled away government officials condemned to death.
Hitler - The Ultimate Malign Narcissist With Delusions of Grandeur
The all-time contender for the title of grandiose narcissist is Hitler, who thought he could conquer the world and didn’t care how many toes or corpses he stepped on to achieve that goal. His dream of world conquest was a daydream because he lacked military training and experience beyond serving as a courier in World War I.
Since childhood, grandiose narcissism had afflicted the dictator, who felt qualified to overrule his high-ranking military advisors. A high-school dropout, he despised and resented intellectuals who made him feel inadequate, a rare instance of a correct self-assessment by Hitler.
In his febrile imagination, the Austrian corporal of World War I was field marshal and generalissimo. Genuine military experts considered him an incompetent strategist who would destroy Germany. Conspirators among his inner circle made more than 40 documented attempts to assassinate the Fuehrer without success. Hitler’s blunders were so helpful to the Allies that they eventually called off all plans to assassinate him. They considered the bumbling warlord more valuable alive than dead.
Despite its label, Jerusalem Syndrome has no geographical limits. The syndrome has been reported all over the world, where it’s an equal opportunity destroyer, afflicting not only Christians, but Jews and Muslims as well. For unexplained reasons, a related pathology called Paris Syndrome only afflicts Japanese tourists after one too many bus trips to the Louvre and Notre Dame.
The granddaddy of these delusions is Stendhal Syndrome, named in honor of the 19th century French novelist who fainted after being overwhelmed by artistic masterpieces in Florence and Rome.
You Don't Have to Be in Jerusalem to Suffer Jerusalem Syndrome
Victims of Jerusalem Syndrome Often Believe They Are the Archangel Michael, Joan of Arcs's Favorite Hallucination
Because Jerusalem Syndrome is not limited to its namesake city, the phenomenon may explain the actual cause of miracles at Lourdes and Fatima and other venerated sites. Forensic psychologists speculate that psychotic children were hallucinating when the Mother of God appeared to them in Portugal and France.
None of the thousands of worshipers at either shrines ever shared the children's hallucination, but gift shops at both shrines still do a brisk business, especially Lourdes. The faithful believe the spring at Lourdes contains curative water which is sold in miniature bottles for tourists who take them home for later medical emergencies.
In fact, Lives of the Saints and other hagiographical works describe mystics who chat with God. These saints may have been psychotics whose divine visitors would have disappeared had antipsychotic medications been available in the Medieval era, the heyday of thaumaturges, Medieval Latin for miracle-workers.
Many thaumaturges and others who had God on speed dial did not knowingly defraud the faithful. They may have had schizophrenia, a particularly debilitating form of psychosis that causes hallucinations and delusions. Schizophrenics have abnormally high levels of the neurochemical dopamine, which can be regulated with an antipsychotic drug like Risperdal or an antidepressant like Zoloft, America’s bestselling drug for beating the blues.
Unlike Lourdes' bottled water, these medications have truly miraculous healing powers. The agitation and hallucinations associated with schizophrenia disappear within days, while delusions vanish after a few weeks of drug therapy. Seventy-percent of schizophrenics and other psychotics respond to drug therapy and regain sanity until they feel "cured" and stop taking their meds, which plunges them back into their personal hell on earth.
Joan of Arc - Saint or Psychotic?
Joan of Arc, Saint or Schizophrenic? Did God or Bad Brain Chemistry Cause the 15th-Century Saint's Visions?
Who can say? The judicious use of antipsychotic medications, had they been available in the 15th century, would have silenced Joan of Arc’s imaginary visitors - God, Saints Catherine and Margaret, and the Archangel Michael. The delusional doppelgänger of the archangel appeared in the Israeli documentary about Jerusalem Syndrome. Suspiciously, the message of Joan's visitors was political, not spiritual. The apparitions ordered her to expel the English army from France. Medications would have spared the life of history’s most famous burn victim by banishing the holy troublemakers’ dangerous military advice.
Jerusalem Syndrome may sound like an impious joke, but the disease is no laughing matter to those who experience its more pathological forms. An average of 100 tourists in Jerusalem require hospitalization every year. A survey conducted between 1980 and 1993 by Kfar Shaud Mental Health Centre in the capital of Israel reported that 1,200 severely ill victims of the syndrome turned up at the clinic during the 13-year study.
Skeptics dismiss the virulence of the epidemic, noting that two million tourists flock to the Holy Land annually. The 100 patients who require hospitalization each year are statistically insignificant, researchers say, but the syndrome is not insignificant if you are one of the unlucky psychotics who comes to believe he is Jesus or His Mother reincarnate.
Martin Luther, Victim of an Ungodly Variant of Jerusalem Syndrome
Demons not Saints Appeared to Martin Luther, Who Threw an Inkpot at One Uninvited Guest From Hell
There’s an ugly, evil twin of God and other heavenly visitors to earth. Martin Luther, a reformer who condemned the superstitions of Roman Catholicism, nevertheless endured a horrific permutation of Jerusalem Syndrome.
But instead of divine apparitions and conversations, Luther believed the devil had appeared to him on many occasions. Like most hallucinations, Luther’s sighting seemed real enough that he hurled an inkpot at the satanic intruder, according to a psychoanalytical biography, Young Man Luther, by the late Harvard child psychologist, Erik Erikson.
The devil or Luther's hallucination of him pursued Luther to his deathbed. "A few days before his death, Luther saw the devil sitting on a rainpipe outside his window, exposing his behind to him," Erikson wrote.
Devout Protestants condemn Erikson's depiction of Luther as blasphemous, even though hermit monks, like St. Anthony in fifth century Egypt, also played unwilling host to houseguests from hell. So many demons converged on St. Anthony’s cave dwelling, the venue was SRO.
The Son of God Had Second Thoughts About the Deal He Made With Dad
Perhaps the most famous victim of Jerusalem Syndrome was Jesus Christ, who talked to His Father on at least two occasions. In the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, Jesus had second thoughts about His sadistic Dad’s plans for His son’s death when Jesus prayed to be relieved of the “cup” of crucifixion.
On the cross, a ghastly form of execution reserved for cheeky slaves and rebels against Roman rule, Jesus seemed to repudiate his earthly mission when he asked His Father rhetorically, “Why hast Thou forsaken Me?”
According to the propagandists who created the New Testament, God the Father and God the Son had made a deal that the Son would die to atone for the sins of mankind, in particular, the dubious sin of eating forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden.
This so-called Original Sin committed by Adam and Eve was inherited by all their descendants, except the Virgin Mary. Jesus’ death on the cross somehow absolved baptized Christians from a sin they never committed, unless you believe in generational guilt.
How Can Jews be Guilty of a Crime Authorized Two Millennia Ago by a Roman Bureaucrat?
Until the mid-20th century, Catholic ideologues still referred to contemporary Jews as Christ-killers or deicides, Latin for God-killers. Vatican dogma moves at glacial speed. It wasn’t until the Second Vatican Council, in 1965 that Pope Paul VI finally absolved the Jews of killing Christ.
During the Third Reich, Pius XII justified Hitler’s genocide as punishment for the crime allegedly committed by ancestors of the Jews. Morality aside, history is on the side of the angels, but not the papal inhabitants of heaven who have been canonized.
In ancient Judaea, Jewish leaders were not allowed to impose the death penalty, a power reserved for the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate. If any people share collective guilt for a 2,000-year-old crime, Romans, as Pilate’s heirs, are the real Christ-killers. Pius XII, who blamed all Jews for Jesus' execution, was born, raised, and educated in Rome.
Generational guilt was the philosophy used by Christianity to justify two millennia of persecuting Jews because their distant ancestors voted to free the bandit Barabbas instead of a gentle, proto-socialist Jeshua ben Joseph, Jesus’ name in Hebrew, “ben” meaning “son of.”
If Hitler had been a Bible scholar and an antiquarian, the people of Rome, not the descendants of King David, would have filled cattle cars bound for the killing fields of Eastern Europe.
Sources:
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 1994.
Butler, Alban. Lives of the Saints (1883). Kila, MT: Kessinger, 2008 reissue.
Erikson, Erik. Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1958.
Sanello, Frank. Why Marie Antoinette Never Said "Let Them Eat Cake" or Why (Almost) Everything You Thought You Knew About the Past Never Happened. Los Angeles: in-press, 2010.
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