(From Handbook For Humans)
We don’t necessarily take on heroic archtypes in any particular order, but do tend to cycle through them again and again, learning their lessons at deeper levels.
Yet the wanderer is often the first heroic archtype of our journey. The wanderer arises when the pain of being an orphan becomes too great, and we feel that we must set out on a journey to find some answers. So in one way or another, the wanderer leaves the safe confines of normal life, or the normal way of doing things.
As a wanderer, we’re looking for something different, a new answer. So we set out on a new course, away from our normal consolations, on a path into the unknown.
An enduring theme in art and mythology is the story of someone on a journey. The traveler, the knight, the cowboy, the prince or princess seeking something—the treasure, the goal, the holy grail that will lend meaning or fulfillment to life and remove its sense of disjointedness.
The journey may be inner or outer, of course, and it may not look dramatic. It can be something as simple as trying out a new style of doing something, or something as profound as beginning a spiritual path. Since it doesn’t necessarily look a particular way, our external circumstances may or may not stay the same when we begin our journey.
Often, the wanderer’s story begins in captivity. In fairy tales this is often a literal captivity in cave or castle, perhaps imprisoned by a dark force or a spell or a dragon. Closer to home, we may just feel that our life is confining in some way. Our relationships, our society, our job, even life itself may come to seem oppressive.
The wanderer breaks free in some way, attempting to find something that feels more life-affirming, more authentic, more real and alive.
The journeys of both the Buddha and Francis of Assisi began this way. In both cases they possessed “everything”—status, money, kinship, pleasure, etc.—and yet in the midst of this plenty felt that something was still missing. So Francis renounced all his possessions, and the future Buddha left a kingdom and a family and rode off at night into the forest and an unknown fate.
But our journey need not necessarily involve a change in our circumstances. Sometimes we begin our journey while still fulfilling our customary roles in life, as a spouse or parent or worker or whatever. Or maybe not—nobody can say except for us. But one way or another, we’ve begun searching.
This in itself already alters our relationship to pain and suffering. For by taking on the archetype of the wanderer, we’ve declared that life is not fundamentally pain, but rather, an adventure.
The danger of the wanderer archetype is the loss of community, of being self-absorbed and thus missing the joys of love and giving and relationship. But what we can learn from it is to trust ourselves, to trust our inner knowingness, our sense of what is right for us.
One quintessential form of the wanderer archetype is the spiritual search. There isn’t any way to have somebody else go inward for us, not even a master. For even when it’s done with a group of like-minded people, the journey inward is still always a solitary one, always unknown, always to some extent uncharted. Like all journeys of the wanderer.
Above all, the journey of every wanderer takes courage and a measure of trust in existence. And so those are the first things that it teaches.
© 1997 by James Sloman
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