The Nomadic Alternative – Page 36

consciousness which recorded his anxiety or feelings of guilt for failing to enact the ideal paradigm. A society 'reduced to its minimal expression', performs its myths in the course of its daily activities and they remain unstated. But the deranged society ritualizes or dramatizes them, performing them in mime to compensate for their loss. A drama, from the Greek dromenon, is simply a 'thing done'. s'egqses a wjm

THE IDEA OF THE JOURNEY is, along with the Creation and Oedipus stories, one of the most persistent of all human myths. And for a band of wandering hunters - perhaps twenty five of them, perhaps fifty - walking unprotected through the wilderness, matching their footfalls to the progress of the seasons - from the water-hole to sources of food or on visits to their neighbour, savouring alternate phases of plenty and want, suffering the trials of youth and the debilities of age, life was quite literally a journey - and, in the light of palaeozoology, a dangerous and heroic one for all. Through life our ancestors walked through a sequence of initiations or new beginnings and correctly timed their final appointment with death.

But once they settled down and barricaded themselves from the horrors of the bush, they began to compare their settlement with the dangerous but exciting mobility of former times. Settled home brought no new freedom from anxiety, but introduced fresh sources of anxiety. And it remained for them to reenact symbolically the Myth of the Archetypal Journey, that of the Hero and his Road of Trials. Deprived of an actual journey the mind invented one. The animal compulsion to migrate through life emerges in man as the Idea of Life's Journey. And this is what my exegesis has been about.

The heroic myth, saga or adventure story plugs an information gap between how a man knows he ought to be and how he is. The theme seldom varies. A young man, bursting with vigour and often credited with superhuman audacity in childhood, leaves home on a long journey. After a sequence of adventures in remote and fabulous lands, he faces the Jaws of Death. A fire-breathing monster menaces with