IT’S AN UNCANNY FEELING, WHICH I SUSPECT MOST OF US HAVE from time to time, to wonder whether you belong, to wonder whether you might not be a stranger in a strange land. In fact, it’s a timeless and universal feeling, one that has left traces in our literary history as far back as the 5,000-year-old Sumerian legend of Gilgamesh.
Gilgamesh, the king of his city, had no friends until he encountered and connected with the wild man, Enkidu. In despair after Enkidu died, Gilgamesh set off on what turned out to be an unsuccessful quest to acquire for himself the herb of immortality, and in the end, he was left alone again, facing his own mortality — just like any other human being.
The existential isolation Gilgamesh experienced is the defining characteristic of the stranger. Strangers feel outcast, alien, strange — which is what they are believed to be by those around them.
When you feel like a stranger yourself, you’re caught up in an archetypal manifestation of the ego’s encounter with the self, in which the ego is differentiating itself from the blissful security of its unconscious roots. The developing ego often feels isolated as it haltingly stumbles in quest of its destiny. In myth, this is the hero’s journey, and no one is more of a stranger to the world than a would-be hero on his or her quest.
Consider the medieval European Grail legends. Each Grail hero began his quest for the Holy Grail by entering the forest at its darkest point, where there was no path. Each set out alone, a stranger traveling into strange lands.
Or, consider the myth of Eros and Psyche. Psyche begins her journey toward self-realization when she is abandoned to a lonely death by her family. She doesn’t die, but finds herself alone in a wondrous paradise, where she is visited each night by a shadowy lover — the god Eros, hidden in the darkness. What a stranger she was in the world of the immortals, but she proved herself there, nonetheless.
If an alienated ego on its developmental journey feels like a stranger, so does a fully individuated ego in union with the self. This extraordinary state of being is symbolized in archetypal images like the biblical prophet and the Daoist sage. When called, a biblical prophet became an outcast, set apart from others in dramatic and sometimes deadly fashion. In ancient China, as the Daoist texts make clear, the sages knew they were truly alien in relation to the others around them. Prophet and sage alike knew themselves to be strangers in strange lands.
When people see someone else as a stranger, a different archetypal dynamic typically comes into play. In this situation, the stranger is the “other,” and is all too often seen as a threat. Now the stranger, the “other,” looks like an archetypal shadow figure. There is developmental potential for those able to engage the shadowy stranger, but such encounters are risky.
When Abraham extended hospitality to the three strangers who appeared outside his tent at Mamre (Gen. 18:1-15), he had no way of knowing whether they were friendly or hostile, whether they were angels or demons. His connection to and trust in God (in psychological terms, his union with the self) prepared him for the encounter with these strangers. Indeed, Abraham was himself a stranger sojourning in a strange land.
Of course, both aspects of the archetypal stranger live all around us, all the time. We find images of encountering strangers and being strangers in popular songs, movies, television shows, and modern literature. We also feel like strangers or see others as strangers as we live day-to-day in a world teeming with a wide diversity of other people.
It is indeed uncanny to feel like a stranger, but the feeling, if we were to become more self-realized, might help transform our fear of the other into empathy for the stranger in our midst.
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