ABSTRACT
The hero’s journey begins with a call to adventure and departure from life as it has been known. For Ruusbroec’s would-be mystic-hero, this occurs in the midst of his or her initial situation in the everyday world, no longer satisfied with life and the world as they are, and awakened to the possibility of something more. This chapter examines this stage of the archetypal hero answering the call and departing for the journey in Ruusbroec’s description of the ‘active life’. This stage includes Ruusbroec’s development of the initial meeting between the mystic-hero and Christ, who acts in the archetypal role of supernatural helper. The stage concludes with the hero crossing the first threshold after overcoming the threshold guardian, which for Ruusbroec takes the form of reason (intellect, understanding), and the crossing marks the transition from Ruusbroec’s outward-oriented ‘active life’ to the ‘inner life’ and the second stage of the journey.
