Divinity Atlas

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Departure, Crossroads, and the Long Way

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Departure, Crossroads, and the Long Way

The road is one of the oldest figures for a life there is. Scripture speaks of ways straight and crooked, broad and narrow; the Tao is literally the Way; pilgrimage made the road a discipline, and the language has never let the metaphor go, so that a dreamer on a dream road is walking inside an idiom their waking tongue already speaks. Interpreters inherit the built symbolism whole: the fork as decision, the crossroads as fate's junction, the long straight road as the foreseeable, the road out of sight as the not yet known.

The crossroads carries its own freight, having been a place of omen, offering and uncanny meeting in European and African diasporic folklore alike, where what is buried or bargained at the crossing of ways binds the traveller. A dream that sets the dreamer at a crossroads borrows that charge whether or not the dreamer knows the lore.

Freud's contribution is characteristically stark: in the symbolism of dreams he read departure and setting out on a journey as one of the standing images of dying, the leave taking that stands for the last one. His school applied it with care to dreams of missed trains, which he read as consolation, the dreamer reassured they will not depart. These are the readings of their traditions; the plainer modern reading, the road as the life underway, its surface and weather as the going, remains the commonest and needs no theory at all.

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