The Sage is a complex archetype that is both compelling and possibly the most dangerous. Building upon the Innocent's designs for a utopian future, the Sage seeks an absolute, unique Truth. This gives them both great capacity for goodness, because they want to learn more about the world and its Being, but it also creates a tendency to reject others and, in many cases, fall to evil.

Background

For those of us just seeing this series for the first time, I'm writing a series on using Pearson's personality archetypes (affiliate link) in storytelling. This profile, of the Sage, is the fourth of twelve entries in this series, following the Destroyer, Orphan, and Innocent. You might also be interested in my earlier series on the Hero and Hero's Journey and the Nemesis.

If you just want a quick recap or introduction, here's the gist: archetypes are recurring patterns that have proven to be pretty universal. They're cognitive schemes that allow us to examine behavior and narratives in light of a coherent whole. That makes them valuable tools to audiences and storytellers, since they make stories authentic and lend them meaning.

Understanding the Sage

The Sage is perhaps as accurately called the Priest, because it is closely associated with religion and mysticism. They're not always strictly religious, but they have the same approach as a person of faith even when they come from strictly secular backgrounds.

The Sage is somewhat different from the Innocent, who has an innate belief in some great future (with rare exceptions, the Innocent is typically an archetype that characters will not transition into, but may transition from, as their dominant archetype). The Sage often starts with a tabula rasa approach to their universe, telling themselves that some great Truth is out there.

This can be scientific, as we see with Victor Frankenstein (who only has aspects of the Sage), but more often than not it has its realms in ethics, politics, or morality. Other archetypes handle the pursuit of power better than the Sage, especially the Creator or the Magician.

The Sage does make a good hero, if only because they seek ennoblement much the same as an audience does.
One of the things that leads to the Sage less often being associated with heroes is that the Sage archetype often becomes dominant only later in the Hero's Journey, and that many Sages play the role of a mentor or assistant to a hero or a supporting character in a story.

There's also a tendency of the Sage to become a hermit. This doesn't stem from any sort of rebellion against society or great disgust with the world (in most cases), but rather, like The Giver in Lois Lowry's book of the same title, finding Truth no longer allows them to fully live in the world that they were born in.

This ties into the fact that most Sages have completed a Hero's Journey in the past. The Sage is commonly formed in the transfiguration of the supreme ordeal and triumph, and they are altered by their encounters with the supernatural world in ways that others are not.

The Tragic Sage

The best example of the tragic Sage I can think of is Javert, from Les Misérables. That immediately should raise some red flags, because Javert is the main antagonist of the novel, but many antagonists are simply fallen heroes that have fallen to the Shadow of their dominant archetype.

The tragic sage can go one of two ways: they are deceived, or they are over-confident and elitist. Sages who are deceived usually recover, because of the nature of their archetypes, or are transfigured into a different archetype.

Victor Frankenstein is disabused of being the Sage at two points in Frankenstein, one of which almost entirely removes that element from his psyche. This occurs to him first when he arrives at university and discovers that the alchemists he studied as a child were charlatans at best, and later when he realizes that the power he has found is not actually the force for good he initially believed due to self-deception. I like this example because it is a reminder that the Sage can be deceived internally, if only because they have a limited concept of the world (you see this often with Sage/Innocent combinations).

When this happens, there can be a tragedy (for instance, when such a Sage makes this discovery on his deathbed), but typically this deception self-resolves. The Sage is looking for Truth, and they will discard things they realize fall below that standard.

It is when the Sage finds something that looks like Truth, or is partial Truth, that makes them become dangerous.
Javert's Truth is that crimes must be punished. This is archetypally correct. We crave the universe being set right by an arbiter of justice.

Javert's tragic fall comes when he fails to realize another element of Truth, that people can redeem themselves. This leads him to hunt a reformed Valjean (the protagonist) through a series of trials, actively causing much more harm than he winds up fixing.

In the end, when he realizes that his sliver of Truth is incomplete, Javert kills himself. Unable to reconcile his Truth with the whole, and unwilling to pardon Valjean, he is stuck under the influence of the Sage in his psyche. With no alternative to fall back to, he is destroyed.

Gustave Brion illustrates Javert recognizing Jean Valjean

As with most dominant archetypes, the fall of the Sage is dependent on their shadow, but I theorize that the Sage is generally more likely to lack influence from other archetypes in their tragic forms.

The Villainous Sage

We've already looked at a fantastic antagonist who is merely an example of the tragic Sage, so what entails a truly villainous Sage?

Greed, intolerance, and vainglory.

The villainous Sage puts the Truth above all else, then warps the Truth to fit their vision.

They are the sorts who pursue the Philosopher's Stone by climbing a mountain of corpses, who sacrifice human beings upon the altars of augury.

If the great and loathsome totalitarians of the twentieth century were not Innocents or Rulers succumbed to Shadow, they were Sages who equally embraced their Shadow.

The villainous Sage is perhaps best illustrated in a scene from The Brothers Karamazov, where a Grand Inquisitor imprisons Christ because he is doing too much good in the world, and because he opts for freedom of will over permitting absolute security.

By pursuing a phantasm of the Truth and adopting it as Truth above the Truth itself, the villainous Sage has become so corrupt that they have reached the point of the Innocent's Shadow, where they are willing to overlook all evils in themselves, but compounded it by actively considering all who dissent evil.

The Sage in Star Wars

Star Wars has a couple archetypal Sages, and it's worth considering them from a couple different perspectives.

Collectively, the Jedi Order is an institution that embodies much the same attitudes as the Sage; seeking Truth it has become focused around this dualism inherent in the Force.

Two of its members typify this best: Obi-Wan and Yoda.

Obi-Wan is a Sage only reluctantly, starting out as an Innocent (or perhaps in such a nascent state that it is hard to typify him) at the start of the prequels. As he becomes more senior in the Order, and becomes responsible for Anakin's instruction, he is struck by the momentousness of the task ahead of him and begins to seek Truth.

Unfortunately, the prequels are dubiously consistent in their portrayal of Obi-Wan, but the final moments of Episode III and Obi-Wan's role in A New Hope gives us sufficient material for the enterprise.

At the end of Episode III, Obi-Wan finds that his apprentice has fallen to the Shadow (literally) of his Ruler archetype, and this fosters his final transfiguration into a man dominated by the Sage. He encounters Truth in the realization that he may have been too unfeeling, too distant, to realize that Anakin's fall was coming.

Anakin's fall is Obi-Wan's apotheosis, but he still suffers greatly from the loss of his pupil (and Order 66). Adopting an alternate name, Ben, he heads out into the wilderness to watch over Luke and impart the Truth upon him when he is ready to receive it.

"Ben" Kenobi is living out in the wilds of Tattooine, not fully divorced from society, but pretty much as close as one can get. Obi-Wan still holds the knowledge of the Truth in his mind, which he is hesitant to fully unfold to Luke, knowing how dearly-bought his knowledge is.

Entrusting Luke only with the knowledge he can handle, Obi-Wan gives him a basic crash course in the Force, then sends him on his way. Later, on Obi-Wan's instructions, Luke will go to Dagobah to seek tutelage under Yoda, another Sage.
Yoda is able to give Luke more guidance; he has not yet become fully aware of who he is, but Luke is now ready to take a side in the pursuit of Truth. As the Destroyer, Luke needs this basis in his life if he is to become successful (something that he loses sight of in the sequel trilogies), but Yoda, like a Sage, is wise enough to know that Luke can blossom if given the right circumstances (consider that Yoda had seen Anakin's fall, and still had faith in Luke).

It's important to note that Luke never becomes the Sage; this is why he is dominated by fear and turns on his apprentice. The transfiguration of many heroes into the Sage archetype does not happen in the new canon (though it did happen in the original extended universe, where Luke was successful in becoming a mentor to many new Jedi).

Using the Sage in Storytelling

If you want to tell a clear moral story in your narrative, put a Sage in there. Whether they are heroic, tragic, or simply a mentor figure, their pursuit of Truth can echo your own reflection of reality.

You will typically need a Sage at some point in a fully-featured Hero's Journey, as the Sage makes a good mentor for a hero (the Ruler, Lover, or Creator can do in a pinch, but have their shortfalls).

The Sage gives you an opportunity to ask and answer great moral questions, and they contribute a mother-lode of meaning to your story.

The reason for this is simple; they are philosophical in nature. You might find that a story full of Sages or where a character heavily dominated by the Sage archetype gets most of the screen-time is dry (welcome to the world of the philosophical novel), but it's also a great opportunity to present information and truths about the world.
CS Lewis does this well, I think. In his Chronicles of Narnia, he playfully teases out great wisdom from his characters through the use of a third-person narrator who is willing to speak openly to the audience (treating them as children, but not in a condescending manner) about the lessons to be gained from the stories they are encountering.

The Sage also serves as a great focus for a Hero's Journey of their own.

Simply make the goal of their quest some great and noble knowledge that is currently secret.
In George Orwell's 1984, the protagonist is a Sage as much as anything. In fact, the Sage is a common archetype among dystopian anti-heroes, or in any Kafka-esque situation.

One of the other things that makes a Sage interesting to use as a writer is that they are able to be plied in directions that you would have a difficulty getting other characters to go. They are willing to illustrate the Truth (if they are not so consumed by their Shadow that they think it obvious and condemn all who disagree), using an object lesson to illustrate their knowledge or, like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, working in ways that seem enigmatic and mysterious to others.

The Sage is able to cast the world into relief against a common trend of themes and motifs that would be difficult to assemble elsewhere. Even characters who only bear an aspect of the Sage can illustrate Truth.

Using the Sage in Games

The Sage is powerful in games, but is difficult to pull off right. They require a perfect blend of stimuli and environs, and the unfortunate truth of the matter is that many players will not create a character who is purely the Sage because such a thing does not occur to them (or because what they believe to be a Sage may be transfigured into the Magician psyche by the stress of game mechanics).

A Sage fundamentally needs three things:

• Truth, either found or waiting to be found, in their universe
• A distinction between the Truth and non-Truth in the world
• A pathway upon which they can fulfill their desire to learn Truth

With these things, the Sage is able to appear and reach apotheosis.

Wrapping Up

The Sage loves Truth, powerful and universal Truth, above all else. This makes them potentially dangerous if they fall to their Shadow, as they rely upon their own perception and judgment, often condemning others.

However, the Sage is also the only person who can truly unpack the secrets of the universe because they are willing to do so for no personal gain or no power over others. Their lack of an agenda other than Truth justifies their pursuit of Truth and prepares them to reject untruth.