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Isaac

The 2011 video game, ‘The Binding of Isaac’, which sold two million copies worldwide, is based on the story, told in the Book of Genesis, in which God challenges the biblical patriarch Abraham to bind and sacrifice his son, Isaac. In this garbled console version, among the cast of characters is a Judas, known to gamers as ‘Judas Isaac’, who clutches not thirty pieces of silver but three pennies, and sports a curious fez hat, borrowed by the creators from an erstwhile friend who they claim betrayed them.

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Jung

Carl Jung, the founder of analytical psychology, writes at length in his Psychology of the Unconscious (1912) about Judas, describing him as a powerful archetype, tapping into a force in the collective unconscious. Judas illustrates, he says, ‘the psychological fact that envy does not allow humanity to sleep in peace, and that all of us harbour, in a hidden recess of our heart, the wish that the hero should die’.