The Hero's Path

The great myths show that when you follow somebody else's path, you go astray.

The hero has to set off by himself, leaving the old world and the old ways behind. He must venture into the darkness of the unknown, where there is no map and no clear route. He must fight his own monsters, not somebody else's. explore his own labyrinth, and endure his own ordeal before he can find what is missing in his life.

Thus transfigured, he can bring something of value to the world that has been left behind. But if the knight finds himself riding along an already established track, he is simply following in somebody else's footsteps and will not have an adventure. In the words of the Old French text of The Quest of the Holy Grail, if he wants to succeed, he must enter the forest "at a point that he, himself, had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path."

         

The wasteland in the Grail legend is a place where people live inauthentic lives, blindly following the norms of their society and doing only what other people expect.

--From "The Spiral Staircase" by Karen Armstrong