%20BB.png)
Elphaba and the Inner Healer
- Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 24 minutes ago
In a sparse room that smells of antiseptic and efficiency, the Physician’s Assistant asks me a litany of questions, marking down numbers and checking off boxes while she collects the data points that determine where I land on the health chart.
Once complete, I dare to ask a question of my own: “It feels like my body is changing. Things are off; like something is wrong with me. I’m 48. Should I be doing anything about menopause?” Her response is direct: “We don’t offer hormone replacement therapy.” I take a deep breath, “Okay,” and push further, “but can you tell me where I am, maybe, so I can do some research?” I can sense the desperation in my own eyes. “I will see what I can do,” she offers, though I am not sure where that leaves me. I’m not sick, not really, but I’m not exactly well either. I can feel I am crossing a threshold that requires something of me. But I don’t really know what that is.
Leaving with more questions than answers–is this what healing looks like?
Learning to fly
In the movie adaptation of the musical Wicked, Elphaba also feels like something is wrong with her. Shunned by those around her and even her own father because she is astonishingly green, Elphaba struggles to find her place in a society that adores sameness and simplicity. She seeks healing for her perceived affliction from the Wizard of Oz, whose reputation boasts of his all-knowing ability to fix anything.
Through a series of serendipitous events, Elphaba finds herself attending university with her sister. The university separates her from her society, which shunned her, and exposes her to others seeking knowledge, or at least pretending to do so. Although those around her continue to fear her differences, Elphaba learns how powerful she is under the tutelage of Madame Morrible. Her abnormal greenness is tied to her incredible magical powers, and she begins to recognize that what she is attempting to suppress–what she thought was wrong with her–might actually be her greatest gift.
Seeking to control her power, the Wizard summons her to Oz and offers to “fix” her greenness–he offers to heal her. But during her time of self-discovery at the university, something shifts in Elphaba. And as the pressure from the Wizard builds, she hesitates to accept his offer. Her friend Glinda tries to convince her, “What you've worked and waited for, you can have all you ever wanted,” yet her response questions this desire: “I know, but I don't want it, no, I can't want it anymore. Something has changed within me. Something is not the same. I'm through with playing by the rules of someone else's game” (2:17). And in this moment, Elphaba’s perspective of herself changes. She embraces her magnificent power, defies the Wizard’s attempts to control her, and sings that it is time to “trust my instincts, close my eyes and leap.”
Taking a leap of faith, she falls, and in her free fall, she sees herself as a young girl; she reaches for that child and saves herself as she takes flight. Her external circumstances haven’t changed; everyone around her continues to fear her, but Elphaba changes. She finds her own healing within herself.
Awakening our curative potentialities
In Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine, Joseph Campbell describes the healing rituals held at the temple of Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. While Asclepius represented all aspects of health, such as diet, exercise, and medicine, the Asclepian temple of Epidaurus explored a deeper sense of healing. Protected from the outside world, the temple provided a sacred space surrounded by beauty where patients could meditate, pray, and then sleep in the sanctuary in a receptive state in order to receive a healing dream. Those seeking cures believed that the trek to the sanctuary and separation from daily life awakened the “curative potentialities” within the patient's psyche (123). As Campbell explains, “The whole function of the Epidaurian experience was to awaken the healing power in ourselves and bring about a psychosomatic cure” (123). Healing was not only biological, but also holistic. Rather than something that happened to you through a prescription or procedure, the patient worked to co-create their own cure.
The Healer archetype has long represented the vital role of healing in human society. Throughout history, seekers have searched for healing in various forms, from bathing in sacred springs to magical cures to the advancement of modern medicine. The archetype reflects our yearning for some reprieve from our own unique version of the human condition, our enduring hope for restoration.
The gift in the affliction
The depth of the Asclepian healing experience lies in the fact that we each carry the Healer archetype within us, with its capacity to hold the complexities of all aspects of healing – all that encompasses “the vitality of spiritual consciousness in the life of the world” as Campbell states in Goddesses (120). There are, of course, external needs for health, medicine, and wellness, but healing, as Campbell describes it, is more than numbers and charts. By its nature, such healing expands to encompass the multitude of human experiences within the field of time, with its ongoing evolution.
For Elphaba, her powers expand beyond the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable to the society around her. Her healing journey is one of depth, a psychological shift of self-acceptance that allows her to see the gifts in what has been considered her affliction, to push against society’s limits and step into the power she has always held.
The depth of the Asclepian healing experience lies in the fact that we each carry the Healer archetype within us
Elphaba inspires me to consider that perhaps what I am trying to “fix” in myself might actually be exactly what is needed for the next chapter within my unique journey in the field of time. Instead of trying to fit things into the way they were before, perhaps holistic healing involves allowing these symptoms to summon the Healer archetype from within, initiating the psychological shift necessary to cross this new threshold. Embracing change means seeing the “affliction” of menopause as a gift, an awakening to a deeper sense of healing.
MythBlast authored by:
Stephanie Zajchowski, PhD is a mythologist and writer based in Texas. She serves as the Director of Operations for the Joseph Campbell Foundation and is a contributing author of Goddesses: A Skeleton Key Study Guide. Stephanie is also a co-founder of the Fates and Graces, hosting webinars and workshops for mythic readers and writers. Her work focuses on the intersection of mythology, religion, and women’s studies. For more information, visit stephaniezajchowski.com
This MythBlast was inspired by Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine and the archetype of The Healer.
Latest Podcast
In this episode, we welcome Maria Souza - Comparative Mythologist, poet, educator, and host of the Women and Mythology podcast on the Joseph Campbell Foundation’s MythMaker Podcast Network. Maria’s work bridges myth, ecology, and the sacred. With advanced degrees in Comparative Mythology and Ecology & Spirituality—and years working in the Brazilian Amazon with Indigenous communities—she brings a unique and powerful perspective to the relevance of myth in our lives today. Her book Wild Daughters explores feminine initiation through myth and poetry, and her workshops and mentorships help women reclaim archetypal wisdom and sovereignty through mythic storytelling.In this rich conversation with JCF’s Joanna Gardner, Maria reflects on her journey, the deep initiatory stories of the feminine, and how myth can be a living, healing force for our time. Find our more about Maria at https://www.womenandmythology.com/
This Week's Highlights
"Asclepius’s great temple at Epidaurus was a sanatorium to which people went for health cures. Now, how was healing handled at Epidaurus? It was a great and gloriously beautiful sanctuary of harmony and beauty that included dormitories, temples, and parks. The individual would come to the sanctuary and meditate and pray under the instruction of the priest but would then go to sleep and dream in the sanctuary of the god, and in the dream the healing power would appear.”
-- Joseph Campbell