When these odd images first began to emerge, they seemed so disassociated from the people I was reading, so off, that I felt that I had somehow lost my intuitive accuracy. Yet these readings ultimately proved helpful for every person. Then one day in 1991 everything fell into place for me. I was listening to a conversation between two women in one of my workshops. Within five minutes of meeting, they had exchanged the ordinary details of their lives, such as where they lived and what kind of work they did. After the basic physical details, they then spoke about what life experiences had brought them to a spiritual workshop. Suddenly they found a life pattern they shared, an energy link that was immediately noticeable in their heightened response to each other. Their children were grown, their marriages were happily established, and they had arrived at a natural transition point in their lives—they were tired of being everyone else’s “servant.” Now they wanted to serve themselves. Retired and liberated, they wanted to pursue their own interests and to develop their own spirits.

As I listened to these kind souls describe the pattern of their lives, I was seeing through their conversation to its symbolic level. As good mothers and marriage partners, they had acted in behalf of others for most of their lives, but having accomplished this early mission, they were now striking out on their own, as the Servant of myth and legend must. When the biblical Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, for instance, he bided his time and did the work requested of him through many years of service. But then he used his singular gifts as a dream interpreter to earn his freedom and become a great leader in the land—going from Servant to Master.

All of a sudden the vivid but mystifying images that I had been getting in my recent readings made sense. The Pirate, the Artist, the Actor, and the Servant were not part of the individual, physical chronology that I had been used to reading. Rather, these images were a part of each person’s spiritual chronology, a personal mythology that had begun even before they entered their physical lives. These images were archetypes, energy guides that could direct people toward their spiritual purpose, their Contracts.