keel the wandering jew

Theory and Analysis:List of Common Misconceptions

A tentative list of misconceptions for the Evangelion TV series.

1 NGE is religious propaganda
2 LCL means "Link Connect Liquid"
3 First Impact killed the dinosaurs
4 "Barons of Hell"
5 Kids born after 2I are soulless
6 Spear of Longinus is the actual holy relic (that just somehow got BIG)
7 A.T. Field is a real-life psychology term
8 Eva-00 has the soul of Naoko
9 Someone we know killed Kaji
10 Rei and Kaworu are actual albinos
11 Toji not only loses his leg, but his arm as well
12 Naoko's Brain in Magi
13 Naoko's Soul in Magi
14 Keel is the Wandering Jew
15 The Dummy Plug Plant is the Chamber of Guf
16 Adam was impaled on the Spear of Longinus by Lilith
17 Death's string quartet scenes take place in the actual series timeline.
18 "Anno's Revenge"
19 The Mass Production Evas have no souls
20 Adam and Lilith were once a single being / Adam was born from Lilith
21 Pre-3I Instrumentality was all in Shinji's head
22 Asuka didn't die
23 The Asuka-Rei-Misato amalgamation
24 The Adam & Eve Scenario (or, Nobody Else is Coming Back)
25 Rebuild is a sequel or time loop from the original franchise
26 Asuka is Tsundere and Asuka X Shinji is "canon"
27 Near Third Impact and Third Impact are two separate events with different causes

NGE is religious propaganda

The religious symbolism in NGE is actually not used in any sort of religiously meaningful fashion. According to Evangelion Assistant Director Kazuya Tsurumaki :

"There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice."' - Kazuya Tsurumaki: Q&A from "Amusing Himself to Death"

Here's an old essay from 2001 of someone getting it wrong : "However, it is revealed at the end of the series that the Angels are actually failed attempts in the Creation (i.e., the Biblical Creation) that preceded mankind". Early inaccurate translations of the show may have contributed to this confusion.

LCL means "Link Connect Liquid"

It is unknown what the initials "LCL" stand for within the anime series, but we do know what they don't mean. According to the Death and Rebirth theatrical program (special edition):

Incidentally, the widely circulated idea that L.C.L is the abbreviation of "Link Connected Liquid" is incorrect.

Nowhere does it say what it means, although Evangelion Chronicle suggests one of the Ls stands for "Lilith".

In Sadamoto's Manga version, LCL is said to stand for Link Connect Liquid, written in the Dossier before a chapter starts.

First Impact killed the dinosaurs

First Impact was never depicted or directly referred to on-screen. This has led several fans upon first glance to incorrectly assume that because the "Second Impact" was supposedly a meteorite collision, the "First Impact" was thus the more well known asteroid impact which caused the mass-extinction of the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago.

However, First Impact (aka "Giant Impact") was actually the collision of a giant spherical object, designated the "Black Moon", into Earth approximately 4 billion years ago. As a result of the impact, huge amounts of debris, including the Black Moon's rocky exterior, were thrown into orbit, eventually coalescing into Earth's satellite, the Moon. This was made clear in the Classified Information . The "meteorite" theory in the above textbook page is a cover story, and is part of the effort to also blame Second Impact on a meteor.

"Barons of Hell"

Almost from the beginning of Eva fandom, there has been an internet rumor that the Evangelions are based upon Biblical entities called "The Barons of Hell". There are two problems with this theory:

One is that there is no such thing as a "Baron of Hell" mentioned in the Bible or in any other Judeo-Christian source; extensive searches for the term have turned up only references to Eva and the video game Doom . Some sources claim that the Barons are the same thing as the "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse", but the descriptions given to the Barons don't match up to the Horsemen.

The other problem is that we know exactly what the Evangelions are based upon. Evas were fundamentally based upon the oni (commonly translated as “demon” or “ogre”, but actually a specific type of Japanese monster). Says Anno himself (in an interview published in Aerial Magazine):

There's a monster in Japan called the Oni; it has two horns sticking out of its head and the overall image of the Eva is based on that. I also wanted to give the impression that beneath this ‘robot monster’ image is not so much a robot, but a giant human. - Anno's Roundtable discussion

An early sketch Anno did of an Eva clearly betrays their oni roots. Working from this basic premise, and corresponding with Anno along the way, Ikuto Yamashita developed the Evas as we know them (with the exception of EoE's “harpies”).

Kids born after 2I are soulless

A bizarre idea used to explain the drop in birth rate after Second Impact , and why only kids born after Second Impact can synch with the Evangelions. This theory has no basis whatsoever as Ritsuko explicitly states in Episode 20 that Shinji, born after Second Impact, has a soul.

Spear of Longinus is the actual holy relic (that just somehow got BIG)

This is a product of putting too much stock in NGE's religious references. The Spear was actually excavated in Antarctica along with Adam, who was found impaled upon it. According to the Classified Information , each Source of Life is accompanied by a Spear that has a will of its own and can immobilize a Seed for going against its mission. Thus, the Spear of Longinus is billions of years old—not made by a Roman blacksmith—which impaled Adam for committing an unspecified offense.

A.T. Field is a real-life psychology term

Since the very earliest days of Evangelion analysis, there has been a rumor that A.T. Field is a genuine psychological term that describes the barrier that separates autism patients from the world around them. However, extensive searching of online Psychology researches and forums has failed to find any use of the term other than in reference to NGE. Further research by those in the field has proven that "Absolute Terror" or similar terminology is simply not recognized in academia. Therefore, this rumor is false and has been conclusively proven so.

Some examples of fan-pages propagating this rumor: 1 2

Eva-00 has the soul of Naoko

Please visit Eva-00's soul for more information.

Someone we know killed Kaji

Many fans came to the conclusion that Misato shot Kaji , with little or no evidence to back it up. Series creator Hideaki Anno implied with the Director's Cut of Episode 21 that Kaji was not shot by any named character, but an agent sent through either " Seele or Nerv's intelligence division." [1] During broadcast, the scene of Kaji's death was followed by an establishing shot to the door to Misato's apartment with her name. This "evidence" of Misato's guilt was replaced in the Director's cut with a shot outside of her apartment building.

Rei and Kaworu are actual albinos

Actual albinos don't have light blue hair! Albinos cannot walk outside without protection, otherwise they would suffer severe sunburn, and most have very poor eyesight. [2] On the contrary, Kaworu's eyesight appears to be exceptional (such as his noticing Misato in the Episode 24 director's cut lake scene). It is worth noting that Ritsuko's complexion is only slightly darker than Rei's, although she's obviously not an albino.

Toji not only loses his leg, but his arm as well

While Toji's left leg is plainly missing when he's on the hospital bed, it's not certain to tell if his left arm is, as well. However, both Toji's arms are seen as he is being hauled out of the entry plug. The original storyboards for The End of Evangelion contain a scene showing Toji playing wheelchair basketball with Kensuke, where he clearly has both arms, eliminating the possibility that one of his arms was amputated.

Naoko's Brain in Magi

Or any other brain for that matter. This is due to the brain-like object Ritsuko reveals when she cuts into the Magi in episode 13 . It is clearly stated that the Magi merely have personality imprints of Naoko Akagi - herself as a mother, scientist, and woman. The computers are also far too large to be actual human brains.

Naoko's Soul in Magi

Likely originated due to the fact that the Evas themselves have souls. There's also the issue of Caspar 'betraying' Ritsuko in The End of Evangelion , but machines cannot be implanted with souls.

Keel is the Wandering Jew

One of the most bizarre myths about Evangelion. There is an old and racist story that claims that an onlooker at Christ's crucifixion spat upon him, and was punished by receiving the curse of immortality. [3] He thus became the "wandering Jew", never able to make permanent friends or stay in one place, lest people notice his never-aging nature. The theory goes that Keel's motivation in bringing about Instrumentality would at long last allow him to die.

There are, at the very least, two huge problems with this notion. One being there's absolutely nothing in the series to indicate this is Keel's motivation.

The other is that when Keel appears in flashback in episode 21 , he is visibly younger than in the series' present, and as has been noted, the Wandering Jew is supposed to be ageless.

The Dummy Plug Plant is the Chamber of Guf

The Chamber of Guf is mentioned by Ritsuko in episode 23 when she, Misato, and Shinji are down in the Dummy Plug Plant . This comment likely lead people to believe the two were synonymous. Please look here for an explanation of Guf within NGE.

Adam was impaled on the Spear of Longinus by Lilith

The "Duel of the Seeds" idea was made up to explain why one Seed would be skewered by the Spear of Longinus and placed in suspended animation while the other would be free to spread life on Earth. The interaction between Rei and Kaworu was interpreted to mean that both of them (as Lilith and Adam respectively) had interacted previously. This idea was disproved when the Classified Information files revealed that each Seed was sent with its own Spear, and that Lilith's Spear was either lost or destroyed during First Impact. Adam was placed in suspended animation by its own Spear, which was used to impale Lilith later on.

Death's string quartet scenes take place in the actual series timeline.

This one is easily disproven, as both Asuka and Kaworu appear in the String Quartet sequences. In the actual series timeline, Asuka is in the hospital under heavy sedation when Kaworu arrives, and is still there when he gets squished; they never meet. The String Quartet motif serves to separate the different focuses in Death as well as fitting together with the musical score that was used, Pachelbel's Canon in D major.

"Anno's Revenge"

Many are lead to believe, one way or another, that The End of Evangelion was Anno's revenge against the fans for the negative response received from the ending of the TV series.

Some say it is because Anno brutally killed off all of the main characters; however, this isn't anything new in the world of anime. Most notably, Yoshiyuki Tomino's Space Runaway Ideon , where not just all the main characters are killed off, even children are brutally massacred. Even though Ideon may be one of Anno's biggest inspirations for Evangelion, the End of Evangelion was closer to the planned ending to the TV series Anno's October 2013 interview . Some of the footage used in the TV series ending (corpses of Misato and Ritsuko) indicates that, even before the TV series ended, Anno had planned on killing these characters.

Some say it is because of scenes such as Shinji visiting the sedated Asuka in her hospital room. Although slightly out-of-left-field compared to the ending of the TV series, this scene does serve its purposes. Most importantly, it shows that Shinji has hit the lowest of lows, and secondly, it's referenced later in the movie when Asuka says "Idiot! I know about your jerk-off fantasies of me. Do it again like usual... I'll even stand here and watch."

A subjective argument for Anno's revenge is the cinematic and narrative mindfuck that takes up most of the 2nd half of End of Evangelion. A subjective retort could be, "What about the end of the TV series?". As far as a non-subjective response, films have been known to use clashing motifs, non-linear story telling, and highly symbolic/obscure imagery, and the End of Evangelion isn't the first to use all three. Also, from an interpretive standpoint, the second half of the movie does very well in showing the chaos and disembodiment of Instrumentality , specifically, what Shinji was going through.

Finally, some argue that the smoking gun for Anno's revenge is the sequence of quickly flashing (about one per frame) death threats/hate mail which can be seen at the end of the live action sequence in the second half of the movie. However this rumor was started, it was probably propagated by the Commentary track on the Manga Entertainment release of End of Evangelion, where Amanda Winn Lee gives a mention of hate mail during this sequence. Since these have been translated to English, the majority of the letters and emails are that of personal attachment to the show, praise, or encouragement/anticipation for the End of Evangelion movie. Only one of the emails can be considered 'hate mail', and it was criticizing Death and Rebirth (not the end of the TV series at all), and the only 2 possible instances that could be considered a 'death threat' was graffiti on the wall outside of Gainax's studio (which was hypothesized to be from religious fanatics) and an email that said "Anno, I'll kill you!!!", which was a close-up of only that message on a computer monitor and lacked any context whatsoever. This puts the smoking gun argument on very shaky ground, as this sequence isn't used as a "This is why I'm taking revenge on you people" message, or anything along those lines.

The Mass Production Evas have no souls

In Episode 24 , Kaworu says that the A.T. Field is "The light of the soul", indicating that a soul is required to produce an A.T. Field . This is consistent all throughout the TV Series as well as in the movies, since the Mass Production Evangelions , in fact, do produce A.T. Fields:

Some say that it is the pilots (Kaworu dummy plugs ) which produce the A.T. Field. However, Ritsuko in Episode 17 says:

Indicating that there is no real soul in the dummy plugs. Therefore, it is impossible for the dummy plug to generate an A.T. Field.

Adam and Lilith were once a single being / Adam was born from Lilith

This misconception comes from a mistranslated line via Manga Entertainment's The End of Evangelion release. Misato's line should read, "Humans were born from Lilith, who is a Seed of Life just like Adam." This makes Adam and Lilith two equal beings.

Pre-3I Instrumentality was all in Shinji's head

During Pre-Third Impact Instrumentality, Shinji and Asuka witness a scene from Misato's college days, where she is having sex with Kaji. Shinji clearly has never seen this before asking "This is Misato? She does... this?" in which she replies "Yes, this is also me... The melting into one another's hearts... The me that Shinji doesn't know." If this entire sequence was all "in Shinji's head", there is no way he'd know these things.

Asuka didn't die

Asuka and Eva-02 were killed by the Mass Production Evas. Maya's and Shinji's horror and the mangled state of Eva-02 make it explicit. Since Asuka was suffering actual physical damage corresponding to the Eva's damage, there was no way Asuka could have survived the multiple Spear impacts or the subsequent mangling. Furthermore, Asuka's bandages in the final scene correspond with her injuries from that battle.

The Asuka-Rei-Misato amalgamation

This very common misconception was born due the last scene of End of Evangelion with Asuka and Shinji alone on the beach. Asuka's arm is bandaged (like Rei's in Episode 01) and her eyes appears to be brown (like Misato's). This lead some people to speculate that Asuka is really a combination of all three girls, and therefore Shinji's "dream girl" but this notion is absolutely false. The bandaged arm is due to her battle trauma in Eva-02 earlier in End of Evangelion (when a replica lance splits Eva-02's right arm completely). Her eyes are still blue, merely tinted due to the hue of the scene occurring at night.

Before Instrumentality ends, Rei tells Shinji "If you wish once more for the existence of others, the barriers of the heart will separate everyone once more..." while Kaworu asks "Is it okay for the A.T. Fields to hurt you and others once more?" , indicating that the A.T. Fields have separated everyone from each other.

The Adam & Eve Scenario (or, Nobody Else is Coming Back)

Considering that themes of Genesis pop up all over NGE, the final scene of End of Evangelion leads many to assume that Shinji and Asuka are the new Adam and Eve, left alone to re-populate the world. But this theory is false if we are to believe Rei and Yui when, during the dissolution of Instrumentality, Rei states, "Anyone can return to human form as long as they can imagine themselves in their own heart.", alongside Yui's reassurance: "All living things have the ability to return to their original form... and the heart to go on living."

Rebuild is a sequel or time loop from the original franchise

One infamous theory going all the way back to the release of Evangelion 1.0 in 2007 posits that the four movies of the Rebuild of Evangelion tetralogy are sequels to the Neon Genesis Evangelion TV series and take part in the distant future of the TV series. One variation springs from the Adam & Eve scenario above and claims that the rebuild versions of Shinji and Asuka are the distant descendants of Asuka and Shinji from the TV series. The impetus for the original idea appears to have been the result of the sea being red in Evangelion 1.0, much like it was depicted in End of Evangelion after Third Impact, and a line by Kaworu about wanting to see "The Third" again. None of the variations of sequel theory have any solid evidence that can't be explained from within the Rebuild of Evangelion continuity - for instance, it is made explicit in Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 that Second Impact "purified the seas" and turned them red. The release of Evangelion: 3.0 + 1.0 confirms that any notions of the Rebuild tetralogy being "sequels" or Kaworu "time looping" are on a meta-level.

Asuka is Tsundere and Asuka X Shinji is "canon"

These two misconceptions tend to work off each other. A tsundere character tends to act angry, violent, or holier-than-thou towards others while eventually showing a softer side towards their love interest - sometimes acting especially angry or haughty towards their love interest to hide their feelings. While Asuka's character design and behavior superficially appear to be indicators of a tsundere at first, her entire character arc and motivations, once revealed in full, reveal a completely different personality and a horribly traumatized psyche. Asuka's haughtiness, violent tendencies and attention-seeking behavior are the product of a traumatic childhood and her need to find validation and attention from Shinji stems from the latter's performance as an Eva pilot. Equally pervasive is the idea that the "Asuka x Shinji ship is canon" - while Asuka and Shinji indeed demonstrate mutual attraction and tend to form "both sides of the coin" for the Hedgehog's Dilemma in terms of their interactions with one another, the idea that they have some kind of canonical "romance" is debatable and far from clear-cut, especially since the arc of their relationship deconstructs the notion of a romantic relationship so thoroughly. Furthermore, if more proof were needed, the propensity to give Shinji numerous romantic options in spin-off games like Girlfriend of Steel show that there's nothing canonical about this point. Whether one wants to ship Shinji with Asuka (or Kaworu, or Mari, or Rei, or Mana Kirishima or many of them at once) is entirely open depending upon one's individual opinions and preferences.

Near Third Impact and Third Impact are two separate events with different causes

This is a common misconception that is unfortunately aided in its spread by questionable dubbing decisions and the includion of the dub closed captions as a subtrack (saying "Near Third Impact" where the original says "Third Impact"). In the car ride to the purification plant, Kensuke tells Shinji this: "Someone had to sacrifice themselves in order to stop the Third Impact." Kaworu later explains this to Shinji: "Once awakened, Eva Unit 01 opened the Gates of Guf and acted as the trigger to bring about the Third Impact. The Lilin call it the Near Third Impact. You were the key to it all." In the flashback to Kaji's sacrifice, we see Wille markings and Takao cites him as one of Wille's founders, therefore this must have happened after the uprising against Nerv and, subsequently, after Kaworu and Kaji have met, meaning the uprising can't have been in between the end of Evangelion 2.0 and its postcredit scene. Taking these together paints the following picture: -Shinji started the process of Third Impact, before being interrupted by the Spear of Cassius, which closed the Gates of Guf and stalled the surface destruction, but did not end the actual event. -The Wille uprising takes place an unclear amount of time afterwards -Another unclear amount of time passes, when the stalled process resumes; still the same impact even, started by Shinji and carried out through the body of Unit 01 -To bring it to an end for good, Kaji chooses his own life as the necessary sacrifice

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Flying Dutchman

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Many lands and peoples have legends of a man who is Barred from the Afterlife and cursed to go Walking the Earth (or sailing or flying or...) forever . Most versions of this fall into one of two types: the Flying Dutchman , cursed to sail the seas, and the Wandering Jew , forced to wander the earth.

The Flying Dutchman variant first popped up in the seventeenth century, and was said to be an old sailing superstition. Sources differ on whether "Flying Dutchman" was the name of the ship or a nickname for her captain, who is usually named "Hendrick van der Decken" or something close to that. The most common form of this story is that the ship was trying to get around the Cape of Good Hope, a notoriously stormy and risky crossing for sailing vessels, and was caught in a gale; at this point, Captain van der Decken cursed God and vowed that he would round of the Cape even if it took him until Judgement Day, earning himself the curse that he shall do precisely that. The ship is then said to be stuck eternally trying to make the trip, sometimes appearing to other vessels to either run them down, try to leave messages to people long dead, or just generally portend doom.

A political variant has the victims unable to ever stop wandering due to lack of a passport , being an exile, or other bureaucratic bungle that leaves them without the paperwork to settle. The counterpart to the political variant sees the character, instead of wandering, stuck in an airport or otherwise transitional area, which moves it far from the original trope.

When people wander by choice, this becomes Walking the Earth . Compare Limited Destination Time , where it's external circumstances that prevent someone from staying long in one place. When a ship is being followed, it's a Stern Chase instead; a vehicle of any kind that takes dead souls to another world is an Afterlife Express . There may also be some overlap with Noble Fugitive . The cursed character can sometimes be co-opted as The Drifter , or if they're specifically out to do good, a Knight Errant . And if it's nobody's fault, they may just have No Sense of Direction . It's a possible destiny of those who are Barred from the Afterlife .

Flying Dutchmen

One Piece : The Flying Dutchman appears with a reversal of the legend: Instead of being unable to set foot on land again, the captain (who is a fishman ) can never swim again due to eating a Devil Fruit. Said captain is actually a descendant of the original captain from the legend, who apparently wasn't quite as immortal as the legend would say.
Marvel Universe : Captain Fate betrayed his captain Maura Hawke, selling her to a satyr in exchange for untold riches. Maura was furious to learn that her crew had truly left her, and she cursed them all to never reach port, never enjoy their new found wealth, and to sail on forever, beyond time, beyond death. The Serpent's Crown lifted off the water into the sky, sailing the space winds for eternity it seemed. Fate and his crew became Space Pirates , occasionally returning to Earth to act as Sky Pirates .
The Silver Surfer actually battled the Flying Dutchman's ghostly captain in one Silver Age story, and the captain has since appeared once or twice to bedevil The Avengers among others.
Supergirl story Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot : After her death and her universe's reboot, Supergirl's spirit became stuck into the new Earth, existing as an aimless wandering ghost.
A Romano Scarpa Uncle Scrooge story tells us about the Flying Scotsman , an ancestor of Scrooge's, a former vicious pirate who is kept alive by an oath to atone for the crimes he did against poor villagers . His ship literally flies because it's so old it's completely dried out .
Carl Barks used the actual Flying Dutchman in a Scrooge story a couple of years later; in this version it turns out that the ship itself has been frozen inside an iceberg for centuries; its "ghost" image was a mirage caused by the unusual properties of the ice in that region .
A The Mighty Thor story has him fighting a ship full of authentic Vikings that were cursed to sail the seas for 1,000 years... until they reached America.
Doctor Who Expanded Universe : In one of Doctor Who Magazine 's strips, Kroton, the Cyberman with a soul, once ended up on the spacefaring "Flying Dutchman II."
Star Wars: Galactic Folklore and Mythology : The Frozians, a race famous for their heavy use of airships and zeppelins, have an aerial version of this in the form of the Black Rolyat , a ghostly dirigible that made a Deal with the Devil for safe passage through a storm in exchange for the soul of their person to go down the ship's gangplank; the captain fulfilled this deal by throwing the ship's jonzi (a catlike animal) across the gangplank on arrival, and the furious Devil cursed the ship and its crew sail the skies for all eternity. Frozian sailors say that the ship can be seen flying during terrible storms, and that such a glimpse carries very bad luck.
Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest pilots a ship called the Flying Dutchman . His original purpose was to ferry souls across the sea at World's End. If his love was waiting after ten years, he would go on land again for a single day with her before returning to his duty for another ten years (and so on for eternity). His love was not waiting, so he abandoned his duties and became a badass roaming pirate. His crew turned into half-men half-sea-creatures.
By the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End , Will Turner becomes the new captain of the Flying Dutchman. His love waited the ten years, and bore him a child, to boot . Despite this, it seems good ol' Will has gone down the rogue path like his predecessor, as he has started to turn into a half-sea-creature as well.
In Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales , the crew of the Silent Mary was cursed into vengeful ghosts who can Walk on Water , but if they set foot on land, they disintegrate.
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman , a 1951 movie where the Flying Dutchman (James Mason) goes ashore in the 1930's and meets singer Pandora Reynolds (Ava Gardner).
While we don't see the character-type, we do see a wrestler with this name in the first Spider-Man movie.
The Gathering has a Wandering Jew variant involving a group of people who stopped to rubberneck at Christ's crucifixion, and are doomed to know be present at all of humanity's worst events, only able to observe.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge is a rare variation on the Flying Dutchman version of this trope, whereby genuine repentance allows the mariner to escape his fate, with the only requirement that he tell his story to other people to warn them off his path — although he still has to move like night from land to land. Repentance just gets him off the ship; it doesn't completely uncurse him. In a slight subversion, although he is forced to retell his story to other people, he still has a normal lifetime. His curse occurs in his youth and by the time he tells his story, in the poem, he has aged severely.
Slayers : Try has an episode about a ghost ship that is cursed to wander the seas because the captain neglected his duties in favor of his hobby: collecting vases.
The Dune universe has the in-universe legend of Ampoliros : a starship whose crew experiences group psychosis and believes the human race has been wiped out by aliens. They elect to wander the galaxy, taking as many of the aliens with them as they can. The time dilation effect of near light speed travel makes them effectively immortal, every planet is hostile by definition, and any ship is a legitimate target. To make things worse, the men are sick of, and fatigued by, their endless voyage ("forever prepared, forever unready")... but in their minds at least, to stop would spell the end of the human race. If you are of the point of view that the various abilities shown in Dune's timeline are the results of aliens having either genetically engineered humans over the millenia or interbred/assimilated them , there is always the nightmarish possibility that they're right...
The Nautical Ballad of Ben Bo Bohns introduces the Will o' the Wisp , which seems to be a phantom ship by choice. In the poem, it forms a Power Trio with the Flying Dutchman and the ship of the Ancient Mariner.
Robert Bloch published a story in a 1940s pulp magazine in which the captain of the original Flying Dutchman vessel now hijacks a modern subway train, evicting all the passengers except one elderly man and woman. The story consists of a diary kept by the elderly man: he and the woman, captives on the runaway subway train, continue to grow younger as the ancient Dutch sea captain pilots it backwards in time to a rendezvous with his ship.
Brian Jacques (of Redwall fame) wrote a trilogy called Castaways of the Flying Dutchman , which feature not only the original Dutchman but a boy and dog who were allowed to leave the ship because they were pure of heart. An angel grants them immortality and a psychic link with each other, but they end up Walking the Earth and leaving behind everyone they ever love so no one will notice that they never age. The one time the boy tells their secret, it leads to disaster. (Though, really, it seems as if everyone they meet can sense that he's extraordinary just by looking into his eyes.) They're also constantly haunted by nightmares about the Flying Dutchman. Add in that the boy is forever stuck at age 14, and this is a definite case of Blessed with Suck .
Diana Wynne Jones 's The Homeward Bounders : The eponymous characters, one of whom is the actual Wandering Jew (and another is the actual Flying Dutchman).
Daniel Pinkwater 's book Yobgorgle: Mystery Monster of Lake Ontario is about a modern cursed Dutchman named Captain Van Straaten who sails Lake Ontario in a self sufficient submarine shaped like a giant pig. The curse is eventually broken not with The Power of Love , but with the use of hydroplaning and a corned-beef sandwich.
Star Trek: The Next Generation : Ghost Ship has the crew of a present day Russian naval vessel trapped as disembodied intelligences in a giant space going creature.
Dragonlance has the Green Gemstone Man, condemned to wander the earth. He had a green gem from a column embedded in his chest; the gem prevented the gods from returning to the world of Dragonlance because the column was incomplete. He could be killed, but would be reincarnated.
Swallows and Amazons : The legend of the Flying Dutchman is mentioned, in which it's noted that Peter Duck (a seaman who loves the sea so much he considers going in to port for supplies to be an unwelcome necessary evil) would be a perfect choice to captain it.
Sargasso of Space : It's mentioned that the Solar Queen 's Cargo Master collects space folklore and is very good at re-telling the stories, especially the story of a ship called the New Hope , which lifted off full of refugees, never landed anywhere, and now is only sighted by ships which are themselves in dire trouble.
Warhammer 40,000 : In "Legion of the Damned", the titular Legion 's only surviving spaceship (a "Star Fort") appears out of nowhere at the last minute to destroy the Keeler Comet and obliterate the Chaos armada while the Legionnaires wipe out the planetside Chaos crusaders right on the verge of their victory .
Small Gods : The Fin of God seems to be the Discworld version of the Dutchman , only in this case the physical ship sank and the crew drowned. The eternal wanderer is its ghost, since the crew can't enter the afterlife because they killed a dolphin. Of course, because this is Discworld , the crew is only barred from the afterlife for as long as they believe this to be so. And since at the end of the scene they're discussing looking for a different afterlife, there may be hope for them yet.
Stark (and the short TV series based upon it) features the "Leper Ships", which carry highly toxic waste endlessly travel between ports, forbidden to unload. The Big Bad of the TV series intends to sink a few to bring about The End of the World as We Know It in a class-5 Apocalypse How . In the book, it's observed that such an event is inevitable, given the poor state of repair the Lepers are in. All it would take is one bad storm, and the world ends up poisoned...
In the Norwegian children's book Ruffen and the Flying Dutchman , the eponymous little sea serpent encounters the undead sailor and learns that he was cursed by the Queen of the Sea for his hubris .
Hendrick van der Decken, the Captain of the Flying Dutchman, is summoned as a Rider Servant. His Noble Phantasm is his ship the Flying Dutchman, which is manned by his ghostly crew. His ship is only allowed to come on land once every seven years, and he cannot dock at the same place twice unless it has been so long that the place's name has changed and no one living there remembers him. However, when he does come on land, nothing can stop him, not even magical barriers. The curse can be broken if he can find a wife, so he regularly looks for one when on land, though Kundry is too crazy for him to stand.
Hendrick's Master is Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew himself. Since he is immortal, he cannot be a Servant (you have to die to become a Heroic Spirit and enter the Throne of Heroes). His long life has made him very kooky and boisterous.
Kundry is a Stray Rider Servant. She is cursed with Resurrective Immortality and to wander and serve men of strength in every life, only to be used as a tool and cast aside, until she can find her true love. She has gone insane and murderous, endlessly chasing Hendrick and Ahasuerus because she has become a Stalker with a Crush to Hendrick, thinking he is her true love, while killing anyone in her way.
The Marvellous Land of Snergs : Before the beginning of the proper story, Vanderdecken -said to be the Flying Dutchman himself- and his crew disembark on the island completely by accident, and since they had been wandering the seas since they sailed from Holland in the seventeenth century, they don't really mind. Usually the strong sea winds and ocean currents keep all unwanted visitors out of the island, but because Vanderdecken had vowed to round the Cape of Good Hope even if he had to sail till the Judgment Day, his ship couldn't be stopped or diverted from its route.
The Wandering Jew puts in appearances in all three parts of A Canticle for Leibowitz . When not a plot device, as in the first section, he is a sardonic outside observer of human nature throughout the millennia, and of its inability to change.
Matthew Lawe, the protagonist of Nicholas Monsarrat 's The Master Mariner , is an English sailor condemned to immortality for his cowardice against the Spanish Armada.
The Map to Everywhere has Coll, captain of the Enterprising Kraken , cursed to eternally sail the Pirate Stream. In this variation he can put in to port...just not for too long, on pain of the Power Tattoo that allows him to navigate the stream crawling off his skin and strangling him slowly to death.
One story in the Thieves' World anthologies has an especially horrific variant: a man who is cursed not only to wander the earth forever, but also to never eat twice from the same plate nor sleep twice in the same bed. And the one who cursed him? Was himself .
The Andromeda episode "The Mathematics of Tears" is heavily based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, although the Pax Magellanic's crew are androids controlled by a rogue AI, not cursed humans . The Pax Magellanic draws the parallel herself, and plays the opera music frequently, considering it her theme song.
The Doctor Who story " Mawdryn Undead " involves a band of alien scientists mutated into horrible pain-wracked forms and unable to die. The scientists sabotage the TARDIS, leaving it stuck in orbit around the Earth and unable to travel forward or backward in time without killing Nyssa and Tegan, unless the Doctor agrees to sacrifice his life energy to help them end their wretched existence, at the cost of his ability to regenerate. Luckily, there are two Brigadiers wandering around, one from the past and one from the (then) present (it's a long story), and when they meet, they touch hands, causing a discharge of temporal energy at precisely the right instant, which ends the scientists' immortality and allows the Doctor to remain a Time Lord .
Xena: Warrior Princess : In "Lost Mariner", Gabrielle gets stuck on the ship of the legendary Cecrops (played by Tony Todd ), who is cursed to sail the sea by Poseidon "until love redeems him." The curse began 300 years earlier when Cecrops ruled that Athena had beaten Poseidon in the contest for Athens. The reason Cecrops has been alive ever since is because of Athena; she sympathized with his situation, so she granted him immortality and gave him the clue to how to break the curse. Of course, being left sailing for 300 years has left him quite bitter and resigned to it all. His crew isn't so lucky; they're stuck on the ship until they grow old and die, and they'll be struck dead if they attempt to abandon ship. Cecrops hunts down pirate ships and press-gangs their crews to replenish his own. Xena gets involved, and manages to figure out how to break his curse and get them all off the ship. Cecrops breaks the curse by attempting to sacrifice himself to save his crew, proving he loved them. When it's all over, viewers see the curse has been passed on to a Villain of the Week that had been pursuing Xena.
Night Gallery had a slight inversion of this in the episode "Lone Survivor". It involved a ship rescuing a man in a "Titanic" lifeboat, several years after the disaster. The rescuing ship turned out to be the Lusitania. The real curse was for any ship that would try to rescue him. He was cursed because he cowardly disguised himself as a woman to get on the lifeboat, but when he jumped in, the lifeboat came loose and fell into the water, then everybody else fell out and died.
The River gives us the Exodus , which also turns its crew into... something.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World : The episodes "Into the Fire" and "Out of the Blue" had Captain Mark Askwith, who was cursed to stay on a zeppelin that crashes and explodes every day, only for him and the zeppelin to reappear good as new the next day (due to having shot and thrown his own crew overboard in an attempt to save his own skin). He is able to leave it for short periods, but is inevitably forced to return, and is immortal, preventing escape by suicide. Askwith managed to trick the heroes into taking his place, but after a day they then tricked him into taking it back. The heroes determined that Askwith was irredeemably evil and deserved to be cursed.
Star Trek: Voyager : The Doctor once refers to Voyager as "The Voyage of the Damned". The episode " Night " implies that life on Voyager is beginning to feel like this trope for Captain Janeway, as well.
Babylon 5 : At the end of " Babylon Squared ", Sinclair compares to the situation (a previous station, Babylon 4, has begun drifting back and forth through time) to the Flying Dutchman. Sinclair: It's a legend. An ancient sailing vessel that vanished while trying to sail the Cape of Good Hope. According to the story, it's reappeared again and again over the centuries trying to find a way home. Susan Ivanova: Did the Flying Dutchman ever make it home? Sinclair: No.
In Sinbad , Sinbad is cursed so he will die if he stays on land for more than 24 hours at a time, so he's always on the move.
The Ghost Busters plays it for laughs with the ghosts of the Dutchman's oddly small crew, consisting of Capt. Aloysius Beane and his first mate.
In the final scene of " The Odyssey of Flight 33 ", it appears that Flight 33 is destined to become a time traveling Flying Dutchman as it is uncertain whether its next attempt to return to 1961 will be successful, especially since its fuel is running low.
In " The Arrival ", Flight 107 mysteriously disappeared in a thick fog in the early 1940s. In his closing narration, Rod Serling describes it as an airborne Flying Dutchman.
In the closing narration of " Death Ship ", Rod Serling refers to the spaceship E-89, whose crew is destined to relive the same few hours over and over again , as a latter-day Flying Dutchman.
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir : In "The Great Power Failure", the cursed ghost ship Sea Vulture drifts into the area of Schooner Bay and while it remains there, the captain loses most of his powers, so he can do nothing about the women's PTA meeting held at the cottage.
Invoked in the Jethro Tull song of the same name, which compares Vietnamese refugees and the homeless to the Dutchman.
Iron Maiden 's "Ghost of the Navigator."
Insomnium's "The Wanderer."
Fridge logic: The song says that "every day at a quarter past two" Charlie's wife hands him a sandwich through an open window. If it is too difficult to hand him a nickel on its own, she could put it in the sandwich! Not to mention the much simpler solution that another rider could take pity on Charlie and give or lend him a nickel.
Used a few times in the Ravenloft setting, most notably with Captain Pieter van Reise, the darklord of the Sea of Sorrows (a Dutchman Expy ) and the cursed Captain Garvin from the Ship of Horror adventure.
Warhammer : Wulfrik the Wanderer sails the world in his flying longship, killing mortal champions, hideous monsters and enormous beasts. He'd boasted that he was the best warrior in the world and was cursed by the gods to prove it and die trying. He eventually realized that he'd been Cursed with Awesome (fame, purpose, wealth, immortality), and in trying to escape his curse he only lost things that he'd never have been able to enjoy anyway.
In the Traveller universe there is a Mythopoeia in-verse myth about the starship Robert-the-Bruce. At the founding of the Sword Worlds the ship had disappeared on a return trip to invite further settlers. According to Sword Worlds legend it wanders the stars forever and wherever it goes disaster follows behind.
The Flying Dutchman : In Richard Wagner 's opera adapting the legend, the title character can be saved by The Power of Love coming from the local weird girl. Wagner lifted the plot from Heinrich Heine's Aus den Memoiren des Herrn von Schnabelewopski (From the memoirs of Mr. Schnabelewopski, 1838), where there is an at the time entirely fictional play the protagonist sees in Amsterdam. He helpfully ends up the summary: "The moral of the play for women is to watch out not to marry a Flying Dutchman; and we men see from this play that women in the best case cause us to perish."
Suikoden IV takes place in an archipelago, so naturally, there's an optional encounter with a particularly creepy-looking Flying Dutchman.
The ghost ship in the third expansion of Final Fantasy XI , known as both The Black Coffin by the populace, and the Ashuu Talif by its crew and those who know the truth, is manned by a crew who had been killed when their nation was absorbed by the expansion's eponymous empire. Captain Luzaf's plot for revenge against the Empire is central to the expansion's plot.
In Silent Hill 2 , a magazine tells the story of a ship that disappeared on Toluca Lake, leaving the ghosts of the crew to reach up to boats that pass overhead. In Silent Hill 3 , the Sinister Subway is haunted by the wandering ghost of a train suicide, which pushes unsuspecting people onto the tracks.
In Alone in the Dark 2 , the antagonists are gangsters who actually are the undead crew of the Flying Dutchman.
In Faery: Legends of Avalon , one of the realms that players are sent to is the ship on which the human legends of the Flying Dutchman are based. The ship is currently immobile for reasons that players have to sort out. (They involve a mutiny, a sea monster, and mermaids).
The Saint Louvia from Legend of Dragoon . While transporting Princess Louvia of Mille Seseau, it was attacked by the Black Monster, who slaughtered everybody on board, including the infant princess. The ship is now a cursed wreck haunted by the ghosts of the former crew.
The Fonferrus is this in Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire . Its captain was a Paladin of Old Vaillia who refused to break her oath to uphold the old nation when it fell apart. Defeating her for good and stealing the ship is a possible resolution of the Watcher sides with the Principi sen Patrena (specifically, the new blood).
In Terraria , one appears as a miniboss in the Pirate Invasion event. Defeating it requires destroying the four cannons it uses to attack.
In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! Coney the Island is an alien who subjected himself to a procedure transforming him into a vastly powerful Living Ship . He then traveled between galaxies, at sublight speed, alone, and went half-mad from the eons of isolation.
SpongeBob SquarePants 's version of the Flying Dutchman is more a Peek A Bogey Man Ghost Pirate than anything else, but there is one episode that gives him a similar backstory: his body was used as a window display, and thus never got a proper burial, cursing his spirit to forever wander the seas. In another episode, aptly named "Shanghai'd!", SpongeBob and Patrick are pressed into joining him as " ghostly ghost pirates ." He also seems to serve as the Grim Reaper of the seas, in the episode where Mr. Krabs's thriftiness goes overboard with the consumption of an extremely old Krabby Patty found on the kitchen floor, and he has had episodes that give him Deal with the Devil tendencies.
The sports teams at Hope College of Holland, Michigan, USA are known as the "Flying Dutchmen" or "Flying Dutch" (as both the nickname and the name of the town suggest, both were founded by people with roots in the Netherlands; the college is still linked with the Reformed Church in America, a.k.a. the Dutch Reformed Church).
Some sailing ships had their entire crew wiped out by disease outbreaks.
Legend has it that around the end of the Cold War , formerly Soviet airline Aeroflot split into different organizations so chaotically that one passenger flight was advised it would need to pay landing charges at its destination airport... during final approach to said airport. The stewardesses had to go down the aisles collecting money from the passengers to pay it.
The Dutch airline KLM used as its slogan "The Flying Dutchman". It's also possible to see it printed on its planes.

Wandering Jews

Male Tsubasa (a.k.a. Syaoran Jr.) of the eponymous Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- becomes this at the end of the story. As payment for continuing to exist after the paradox that is his parentage resolves itself, he may never remain for long in any one dimension, and will wander the multiverse until the payment is complete (whenever that is). He can, however, stop by in his girlfriend's dimension for a booty call any time he wants, as long as he doesn't stay too long.
His time-travel duplicate, Watanuki , has it worse, having inverted the trope hard . Rather than being cursed to wander, he's cursed to be trapped in a single Inn Between the Worlds -type mysterious shop for the rest of his life, although to be fair it is anchored in one place and dimension. He just can't leave . In the latest chapters, it appears he might be able to travel to certain places he's traveled to before, as a sort of dream travel/spirit/what have you. By the end after 100 years have passed, it's revealed that Watanuki's magic powers have grown strong enough for him to be capable of physically leaving the shop. That being said, he will still choose against leaving for now, because he'd also promised he'd wait for Yuuko.
The man himself shows up in Franken Fran , his body so far gone that masses of insects have replaced his organs . Because he's an immortal bug-man, Fran & Co. think he might be a Nosferatu note You know how The Nightmare Before Christmas 's Oogie-Boogie is actually a mass of bugs and Dracula turns into a mass of bats? German vampires traditionally can do that to escape being burned . They figure out who he is after he explains that his condition happened after he "mistreated a certain man " and Fran kindly restores his body and is excited at the fact that she can experiment as much as she likes on an apparent immortal; Veronica is less then thrilled, especially after the Wandering Jew says that he's "very tired and wants to rest" . They both get their wish when, just as Fran gives him a clean bill of health, he sees a crucifix and a vision of Jesus and begs for forgiveness. Jesus says something along the lines of "There is always forgiveness." And he dies by liquefying . Veronica notes that he was very glad to see Jesus (he was staying as far from humans as possible and probably never seen a crucifix before) and finally rest. This is one of the few cases of Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane that appear in the series.
Some people in Mushishi have a variation of this: they tend to unconsciously draw mushi to their location, and the only real way to keep it under control is to never stay in any one place for too long. For obvious reasons, most of them become travelling mushi masters. Apart from explaining why Ginko is Walking the Earth , it also serves as a major plot point in the eleventh episode.
Considering that the appendix to the manga version pretty much explicitly states that that's the case, Sadamoto clearly intended that, even if Anno didn't. (Anno wasn't involved in the manga version.)
Kurumi of Presents is cursed to wander the Earth without aging because she didn't receive any presents on her tenth birthday. Until she finally finds her present, she fills the time by giving other people the presents they deserve , or watching what ensues when they receive other presents.
The Ancient Magus' Bride has the Biblical Wandering Jew, usually referred to as Cartaphilus in-story (though he really doesn't like being called that and would prefer to be called Josef), who serves as the Big Bad for the initial stages of the story. His main goal is to create a body for himself that feels no pain, because he has a form of Age Without Youth that means his body is actively and eternally decomposing, and he doesn't care who or what has to pay the price to obtain it. Eventually, it is revealed that the current incarnation of Cartaphilus came to be when a young gravedigger named Josef fused with the original Cartaphilus .
In Midnight Nation , Lazarus, after being resurrected by Christ, found himself without purpose. Finally, Jesus tells Lazarus to await his return, then goes off to the Last Supper. Lazarus, now a wandering homeless man, is still waiting. David Grey: Jesus Christ! Lazarus: Where?
One of The Phantom Stranger 's purported origins — he has four, and DC will never say which if any of them is the real one — is that he is the Wandering Jew. (The other three also involve him being some kind of Flying Dutchman, but not the Wandering Jew. Clear?)
The New 52 showed us "The Trinity of Sin", three figures who were cursed to be Wandering Jews: the Phantom Stranger (revealed to be Judas Iscariot himself ) who was cursed to "walk the Earth as a stranger to man. As a witness of what greed can do"; the mythological Pandora; and The Question , cursed to "forever question [his] identity and forever search for answers [he will never find]".
The immortal Hob Gadling in The Sandman (1989) was once accused of being the Wandering Jew. Johanna Constantine: They tell a tale, in these parts of London, that the Devil and the Wandering Jew meet, once in every century, in a tavern. [...] Morpheus: I am no devil. Hob: And I'm not Jewish.
In Alan Moore 's one-shot Majestic , set in the WildStorm Universe, Superman Substitute Mr. Majestic is one of the last surviving beings at the end of the universe along with the Wandering Jew himself, who's lived so long he's forgotten his name, his species, his planet of origin (he does remember he and Majestic both spent a while on it, though)...
Jack from Fables and Jack of Fables is apparently of the Jack O'Lantern variant, except his deal with the devil will eventually expire — so he needs to find a different version of the devil every few hundred years in order to make a deal for more time.
The Angels of Dogma have been cast out of heaven and banished to Wisconsin for all of human existence.
In Dracula 2000 , Dracula himself is one. He is Judas Iscariot, and only dies when the heroes discover who he is, and that the rope broke when he tried to kill himself. They hang him and he dies .
Though it was suggested that he isn't actually immortal. He will die eventually, just at an unusually old age, and long after everyone he knows is gone.
At least he's not alone. Mister Jingles, a mouse who was also healed by the Magical Negro , is under the same effects.
He's actually cursed to wander the Earth until the end of days, which will come when there are no more souls to be born. There's a way to replenish the supply of unborn souls, and that is what he wants to prevent. Christ is already back, and is trying to stop him.
The Man from Earth is about a man, John Oldman, who claims to be 14,000 years old. His Walking the Earth began when his home tribe of cavemen noticed that he didn't age, and believed that he was stealing their life force. The Wandering Jew epithet is particularly ironic, considering that he accidentally became Jesus while trying to spread the teachings of Buddha in Judea.
Older Than Feudalism : The Biblical Cain was cursed by God to Walk the Earth for killing his brother. The Mark Of Cain that goes with this immortal (although the Bible doesn't say anything about him being immortal) homelessness is supposed to show that he's under God's protection and any harm done to him will be avenged. The term "Wandering Jew" is sometimes used to refer to Cain himself.
In Homer 's The Odyssey , Odysseus is cursed to never be able to go home (though the gods later relent). Apart from being stuck on one island for a long while, he spends most of his ten years on boats. Which keep sinking. Making him a hybrid Ahasuerus-Dutchman thing, though of course older than either.
In Chaucer's The Pardoner's Tale , the three rioters are approached by an old man doomed to wander the Earth — he is frustrated that Death has not come for him. One interpretation is that he was the Wandering Jew.
His autobiography: Paul Eldridge & George Sylvester Viereck wrote a trilogy from 1928 to 1932, My First Two Thousand Years : the Autobiography of the Wandering Jew , followed by Salome:the Wandering Jewess and The Invincible Adam .
As Hyperion is pretty much The Canterbury Tales IN SPACE! !, there is a man called the Wandering Jew by many people. However, that man, Sol Weintraub, is not an actual example; while he does search for a cure to his daughter's temporal illness, his wandering comes to an abrupt end when he finally meets the Shrike.
Illium also features a character called the Wandering Jew: her name is Savi and she's the last human left after the rest of the race was either wiped out by a virus, transformed into godlike "post-humans", trapped in a beam of blue light, or engineered into placid "eloi" and left behind.
Baron Parok in David Eddings ' The Tamuli is subjected to an interesting variant, where he is not only put into an alternative, eternal time-frame, where he will wander forever in an unchanging world, but also set on fire with a flame that will never go out.
For that matter, Macros himself is a Wandering Jew figure, as most of the origins he gives for himself and most of the evidence to back them up suggest divine influence upon his life and wanderings.
A variant seen on occasion has the Wandering Jew as Judas Iscariot, cut down after his hanging and resurrected by Christ with the promise of redemption once He returns. For an example of this, see Angels of Light and Darkness by Simon R. Green .
At one point he scrawls the Hebrew letters for (at least the beginning of) the name "Lazarus" into the ground, indicating that perhaps what Jesus raised up was hard to put down. He apparently will make it to the stars with the surviving remnant of Mankind.
In both Cryptonomicon (WWII to present) and The Baroque Cycle (Baroque period) by Neal Stephenson , a character named Enoch Root appears. This is a subversion, however, because he's actually a Jesuit. In The Baroque Cycle we learn that he was an alchemist before becoming a Jesuit, and there are hints that he may have found the Philosopher's Stone, which grants eternal life... then again, there are also hints that he was just that way all along. His name is a pun on the * NIX command "chroot" and the man Enoch in the Bible, who never died.
The death of the Wandering Jew is an incidental part of Eugene Sue's massive potboiler, Le Juif Errant (1844-45).
The Wandering Jew is the star of clergyman George Croly's Salathiel (1829).
Nathan Brazil, the immortal guardian of the universe in Jack Chalker 's Well World series, is said (in-story) to be the likely inspiration for both the Flying Dutchman and wandering Jew legends since he is Jewish and his favorite occupation is ship captain.
The drifter Elijah in The Yiddish Policemen's Union is representative of all the Sitka Jews' imminent exile. He is even described as speaking his Yiddish with a slight Dutch accent.
In " A Terrible Vengeance ", by Ukrainian author Nikolai Gogol , a Cossack named Petro murders his brother, Ivan , and Ivan's young son. When Petro finally dies, God summons the souls of both brothers together and commands Ivan to choose his brother's punishment. Ivan decides that Petro should be sealed under the mountains and forced to gnaw at his own bones; once he has been punished sufficiently, he will rise up from the earth for a climactic brother-to-brother throw down. God, displeased, decrees Ivan will not be allowed to enter the Kingdom of Heaven either until their final duel. Ivan — with his son tied behind him — is forced to wander eternally on horseback, waiting for Petro's punishment to be completed.
The Mike Resnick short story How I Wrote the New Testament, Ushered in the Renaissance, and Birdied the 17th Hole at Pebble Beach goes for a humorous take on the story.
The speaker of the Anglo-Saxon poem The Wanderer laments his roamings over the earth and sea as an exile, having lost his lord and his companions to war and fate. The images and devices of the poem invoke not only the Wandering Jew story, but also the lore of Wodan, suggesting archetypal similarities between the Germanic god and this trope. The similarity is not unprecedented: German philologist Karl Blind discusses the correlation in his paper, "Wodan, the Wild Huntsman, and the Wandering Jew."
In the Simon Ark series, Simon claims to be over 2000 years old and says that he was cursed by God for refusing to allow Jesus to rest while he was carrying the Cross. Another story suggests Ark was instead the author of a fraudulent gospel so pious that God was unable to punish him with hell or reward him with heaven, and so left him on the Earth instead. Whether any of this is true, a delusion, or an elaborate deception on Simon's part is left as an exercise for the reader.
He appears as the main character of the short story titled "King of the Planet" by Wilson Tucker.
The title character of the Indigo series, on account of having let the sealed evil out of its can . Of course, it ends up being more complicated than that.
Casca: The Eternal Mercenary , a series by Barry Sadler , centers on Casca Rufio Longinus, the Roman legionary who thrust his spear into Jesus' side on the cross. He's cursed by Jesus to not only walk the earth til the Last Judgement, but to always be a soldier as well. While he can't be killed, he still feels pain when injured. Jesus: "Soldier, you are content with what you are. Then that you shall remain until we meet again. As I go now to my Father, you must one day come to me."
And he has a lot of company, whom Scrooge is briefly enabled to see. All of them are also cursed with greater than human empathy, so they are eternally tormented by their inability to lessen the suffering of others.
The legend of the Wandering Londoner in The Caves of Steel : a murderer who got lost trying to escape through the abandoned emergency highways of the cities. After he made the mistake of saying that "the Trinity and all the saints" wouldn't stop him from reaching his hideout , his fate was sealed ; visitors in the tunnels are said to see his ghostly figure in the distance, disappearing before it can reach them or any exit.
In George R. R. Martin 's s-f novella "The Way of Cross and Dragon," a controversial faith of the distant future identified the Wandering Jew as a repentant Judas.
Played for laughs in The Little Golden Calf with Ostap telling a humorous story about the Wandering Jew's final death. He was shot by Red October era Ukrainian nationalists, who were hugely antisemitic and hugely ignorant about Christian folklore, so when the Jew complained and tried to tell them he was immortal, they didn't listen and shot him anyway.
In the Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel "Matrix", the Seventh Doctor crosses paths with a man called Joseph Liebermann, who's heavily implied to be the Wandering Jew.
In Time Enough for Love Lazarus Long claims to have met the Wandering Jew, and that all immortals know one another at some point. Of course, his descendants consider him to be something of an Unreliable Narrator . Lazarus himself almost counts, what with his tendency to wander off somewhere else at least once per century, though not cursed per say, unless one counts a family of millions who won't let him die whenever he's feeling suicidal.
The Wandering gives us the Wandering Space Traveling Jew, as Neshi is made to fly through the universe in search of a world where he could settle down, only to find worlds that were either (supposedly) destroyed by the Natasians or corrupted by their influence.
Parodied in two separate Michael Moorcock works. In one of the stories collected in Fabulous Harbours , a angsty later-created immortal hunts down the Wandering Jew and is disgusted to discover that he's now a rich, cultured man living on a private island in the Med and utterly untormented by immortality angst. It also turns out that the "refused to give water to Christ" thing was a misunderstanding. Another story, "The Sedentary Jew", depicts the Wandering Jew's opposite, who was cursed with immortality and the inability ever to leave London after shagging Joseph of Arimathea's wife. Being a proud Londoner, he's equally happy .
In the Malazan Book of the Fallen K'rul, Draconus and the Sister of Cold Nights cursed Kallor to live forever, but never ascent to godhood or become the leader of an empire. Kallor is forced to seek out magic candles that keep him somewhat young and functional and wander the earth, knowing that his dearest wish is unreachable for him.
In The Silmarillion , Maglor, the last remaining son of Fëanor. He is the only noldo elf barred from returning to Valinor and cursed to wander the shores of Middle-Earth, singing laments from agony and regret due to the evil deeds arosen from the Oath of Fëanor. It is assumed he is still around somewhere.
In The Jeremiah School , Wesley Ronell hints that Jeremiah Xavier, the founder of the school, may really be John the apostle, according to what Jesus said about some standing among Him during His first coming that won't taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in His Kingdom.
Doctor Who : Rory Williams in " The Pandorica Opens ". After he volunteers to guard the eponymous Pandorica containing his girlfriend until it could be opened again, it takes almost 2000 years of him wandering the Earth with the box. Although he was technically an Auton copy at the time, the memories of his life as the Last Centurion were somehow "merged" back in the original after the reboot of the universe , as revealed in a conversation in " Day of the Moon ": Doctor: Do you ever remember it? Two thousand years, waiting for Amy ? The Last Centurion . Rory: No. Doctor: You're lying. Rory: Of course I'm lying. Doctor: Of course you are. Not the sort of thing anyone forgets. Rory: But I don't remember it all the time. It's like this door in my head. I can keep it shut.
In The Incredible Hulk (1977) , Doctor David Banner is forced to Walk the Earth because he is wanted by the federal government and military, whereas, in the comic, most of the wandering was done by his alter ego leaping from one location to another.
Dr. Sam Beckett in Quantum Leap . A botched time-travel experiment is the "curse" here. In the last episode, he decides to keep wandering for the rest of his life.
The Big Bad of the mid-90s adventure show Roar was Longinus, the Roman Centurion who stabbed Jesus with The Spear of Destiny , and who was therefore condemned to remain alive until he could be stabbed by the Spear again.
Thomas Veil in Nowhere Man . A documentary photographer has his entire life erased by... we don't know , after he takes an incriminating photo, and must evade capture while trying to find out who is responsible. Veil (subtle, that) meets many different people whom he petitions for help, though he's never sure who he can trust , as he tries to stay one step ahead of whoever is pursuing him .
Merlin himself. After Arthur dies , Merlin is told that when Albion's need is greatest, he (Arthur) will one day rise again . This, combined with the fact that Merlin is immortal, are what literally force him to Walk the Earth alone for over a millennium. Merlin's situation is a strange combination of Flying Dutchman and Purpose-Driven Immortality , since there is an end purpose, but it's very ambiguous as he isn't told when, why, or how it will happen. All he can do till then is wait.
Lancelot also Walks The Earth earlier in the show after telling the truth about his faked seal of nobility, and being exiled from Camelot because of it . He also could fit under the Knight Errant category.
The Storyteller : At the end of "The Soldier and Death", the soldier has been Barred from the Afterlife : Death refuses to claim him, Heaven will not take him because of his sins, and Hell will not admit him for fear he will take over. After he attempts to trick his way into Heaven and fails, the soldier is left to walk the earth for all eternity.
Lupe Fiasco's character Michael Young History. After being killed, he was denied entry into Heaven for how he lived his life. Since he didn't want to go to Hell, he came back as The Cool, who haunts The Streets.
The country song "(Ghost) Riders in the Sky", covered by Johnny Cash among others, concerns a cowboy who sees a group of men on horseback chasing a herd of demonic cattle across the horizon. Apparently, cowboys who sin in life are condemned to ride after the Devil's herd unto eternity. This song was updated by the Blue Öyster Cult in their track "Feel The Thunder". In this take, a group of impious Hell's Angels tank up on beer and cocaine and go for a fatal ride on the night of October 31st. Satan judges their souls and condemns them to haunt the California Coast road in perpetuity.
Played for laughs with Phil Harris's novelty song "The Thing", featuring a man who discovers a mysterious object on the beach which he tries to take to a pawnshop, only to be chased out, with the owner threatening to call the cops. He later tries to give it to his wife, who kicks him out, and not even a hobo would take the thing. When he dies and meets St. Peter at the gates of Heaven, Peter tells him to take his thing and go, sending him "down below".
Of course, given that the last verse explains that his wife comes to the station and passes him a bag lunch through the window every day so he doesn't starve, one has to wonder why she doesn't pass him a nickel so he can go home. When the MBTA adapted smart cards for fare payment in 2006 to replace tokens, they named it the " CharlieCard " in honor of the song's Charlie.
Again, this has older ancestry — it's based on an 1830 song "The Ship that Never Returned" which, in some versions, has the ship unable to return because it can't pay the docking fees.
The Irish punk band Dropkick Murphys play an adaptation that replaces Charlie with " Skinhead On The MBTA" — When the conductor asks the skinhead to pay the exit fare, he responds by knocking the conductor out and stealing the train . A variation of this can be found in They Might Be Giants ' Shoehorn with Teeth : "He toured the world, with a heavy metal band/But they run out of gas/The plane can never land" which also owes a lot to Chico's speech as an Italian aviator, ending with and that's how we flew to America in A Night at the Opera .
Saxon's "Midas Touch" (from the album Power & the Glory ) is about a man who has to fight against evil until the time of armageddon.
Rush 's "Xanadu" (from A Farewell to Kings ) is inspired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan"; the protagonist achieves immortality and, well, lives to regret it.
Other versions have it as some random guy who was present when Jesus said the second coming would be in the lifetime of at least one of his audience.
It's also implied that the Wandering Jew's Ur-Example is the Book of Genesis 's Cain, with the book of Genesis noting that after murdering Abel, Cain says to God "Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face I shall be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass that every one that findeth me shall slay me" (Gen. 4:14). Afterwards, Cain settled in the now-lost land of Nod, whose name means "wandering exile" in Hebrew. Cain's roaming the earth could also be possibly interpreted as living a nomadic life.
In the Mormon tradition, they believe that there are three disciples of Jesus Christ, otherwise known as "The Three Nephites", who were chosen to wander the Earth until his second coming. However, their purpose is benevolent, as there have been folklore about their appearances, helping dozens of people along their journey.
In medieval legend, King Herla and his court visited The Fair Folk . He was given many gifts, including a dog, with just one condition — he couldn't touch the earth again until the dog died. Naturally, that never happened. Herla and his court were doomed to spend the rest of eternity on horseback, eternally wandering as The Wild Hunt .
This is similar to the old one-liner, "Heaven won't have him, and Hell is afraid he'd take over."
Count Saint Germain allegedly discovered the alchemical formula for immortality, and still walks the Earth today. This is presented as a blessing rather than a curse.
Classical Mythology : Dionysus, for a bit. Hera curses him with insanity after the death of his lover Ampelus, and he wanders through Egypt and Asia Minor for a bit. Then he gets better, but he keeps wandering around , presumably just for kicks.
In the folklore of Mecklenburg, Frau Gauden was a woman who loved hunting more than life itself, and foolishly declared it was better than Heaven. For this blasphemy, she was cursed to ride around the world in a chariot pulled by her hounds, eternally hunting until judgment day.
Italian folklore has a figure called the Befana, who is an unusual example in that she's this largely of her own volition. According to legend, the Befana let the Three Wise Men stay in her house on their way to meet the infant Jesus, but declined their offer to come along. She later had a change of heart and set out to visit Him, packing a bag of sweets for the infant Savior and a broom to help the new mother clean, but found herself unable to actually find her way to Bethlehem. As such, she continues searching to this day, visiting every house in hope to finally meet the baby Jesus at Christmastime, but is always a little too late to do this (her visits fall during the Epiphany, a minor religious holiday about a week after Christmas), and instead gives her offering of sweets to the other children she meets along the way before resuming her search the next year.
The eponymous character of the BBC radio show Pilgrim , named William Palmer, is cursed by the Faerie King for not believing in the 'other world' to forever wander Britain sometime when The Fair Folk were still talked about by the common people. The show itself is set in the modern day, but the King has yet to lift the curse despite the favours Palmer keeps doing for him and despite Palmer's own desperate wish to die .
Ravenloft : The Vistani, a gypsy-like folk, are unable to reside in one place for more than a few nights without losing their supernatural powers . Averted in the case of the Zarovan tribe, darklings (outcast Vistani), and occasional exceptions like Hyskosa.
Warhammer : Richter Kreugar was cursed to never be able to die by a necromancer he betrayed. He's doomed to wander the land until the end of days, and seeks out battle in the hope that one day he'll find some foe powerful enough to make death stick.
Changeling: The Lost : Grim Fears: Night Horrors has Jack of the Lantern, who is pretty much a straight retelling of the folk figure of the same name.
Promethean: The Created : It's difficult to play a character who isn't a Wandering Jew on account of a curse that all Prometheans share that gradually spoils the land and turns the locals against them.
Vampires of the Ravnos Clan, in 5th edition, have gained this as their new Clan Curse: after the events with their Antediluvian at the end of the previous edition, all ( remaining ) Ravnos are forced to be on the move; after they spend a day sleeping somewhere, they physically can't sleep within a mile of that spot the for at least a week, or they start burning from the inside out, forcing them to constantly migrate from one place to the next to keep ahead of the curse. That said, many players naturally figured out ways around this, such as owning seven different shelters strategically placed around a city that they can alternate between each day, which somewhat lessens the effect.
Vampire: The Requiem has the Lancea Sanctum , who revere Longinus as Vampire Jesus. The story goes that Longinus was turned into a vampire when he stabbed Christ's side and the savior's blood dripped onto his lips; after that, he wandered for years until God revealed the purpose of vampires — to harrow humanity back into righteousness .
Underneath the Lintel features one character — the Librarian — who receives a book that is 113 years overdue, laying a path through a series of clues and items that eventually lead the audience to believe the mysterious man he has been pursuing is the Wandering Jew of legend.
Besides the Flying Dutchman, another Wagner character based on the Wandering Jew is Kundry in Parsifal , who like Ahasuerus, mocked Jesus as he was being crucified and was cursed with immortality. In the end, her curse is lifted and she is finally allowed to die after she helps Parsifal get the Holy Grail.
Pokemon Xand Y : The mysterious Pokémon Trainer AZ. He was once the king of Kalos from 3000 years ago. His immortally was caused by using the ultimate weapon to bring his Floette back to life and to end the war that killed his Floette in the first place, killing thousands in the process. When it found out what its trainer had done, it left him. He had been wandering Kalos searching for it ever since.
Lost Odyssey : While there are a number of immortals , the best example is Kaim Argonar . For a thousand years, he has wandered the earth with nowhere to go and nowhere to return to. Many of the short stories in the game's "One Thousand Years of Dreams" go into just how tragic this can be. It gets better for him in the end , when he reunites with and is ultimately able to settle down with his (also immortal) wife, Sarah.
At the end of Tales of Destiny 2 , when time is being reset, Judas hypothesizes that he might become one, wandering throughout all of time without a time or place to call home since he'd been revived by one who'd just been retconned out of time . No official word on whether this happened or whether he was erased from time completely, though the game implies he did somehow survive.
Assassin's Creed : The Sage is a human being reincarnated throughout history, always picking up Past-Life Memories all the way back to prehuman times when he reaches a certain age (and manifesting heterochromia). He's strongly implied to be the origin of the Wandering Jew story, and one of his incarnations is the Real Life Count of St. Germain, who claimed to be this trope. His purpose seems to be to bring back the extinct Abusive Precursors , since he himself used to be one of them.
At the end of the sixth singularity of Fate/Grand Order , it is revealed that Bedivere isn't a Servant but actually a human that has been wandering for centuries after refraining from returning Excalibur to the Lady of the Lake, preventing Altria from dying . Bedivere has been made to wander for centuries thanks to holding onto Excalibur while trying to find his king, and in the 13th century he ends up in Avalon. There, Merlin sends him to the sixth singularity in Jerusalem, and Bedivere is able to return Excalibur to the Goddess Rhongomyniad, the distorted version of Altria after holding onto the sacred Lance for too long, returning her to her senses while his body breaks apart from age .
In Gabriel Knight 3 , Emilio Baza is revealed in the end to be the Wandering Jew.
Girl Genius : Embi swore an oath to his gods when he was young to see the world before he died. He's now 130, at the least . This is mostly played for laughs, though. Embi: When I was young and rash, I made a sacred vow to see the world before I died. Frankly, I didn't know how big it was at the time. Agatha Clay: ...But what has that got to do with your long life? Embi: One of the problems with people here is that they do not take sacred vows at all seriously!
In Zebra Girl , Jack curses vampiric mage Harold DuVase to become a Wandering Jew with a twist. This is more of an And I Must Scream , since DuVase is teleported to a series of increasingly worse hells and doesn't actually do much wandering. Jack: He'll move around. Wherever he doesn't want to be... that's always where he'll go.
In Sluggy Freelance , in "Mohkadun", the King Of Gods of Mohkadun curses the traitorous god Symachus to lose his powers and become blind and feeble and live either forever or at least a long time. This backfires when Symachus uses all his time to Take a Level in Badass and become an immortal lich who manipulates the entire course of history to get revenge — which is also why it's hard to say whether he was cursed with immortality or long age in the first place, because maybe he's just continuing in undeath.
In the Whateley Universe , a character named Arturo Mucro Cursor shows up in Merry's stories, and carries with him a business card saying, 'AKA: The Guy Who Nailed Christ To A Tree; Rank: I don’t need no stinkin’ rank... I was there.' Sure enough, he's the Wandering Jew.
Puffin Forest : Gouda of the " Curse of Strahd " module struck a deal with a Death Tyrant so that she would always be "the hero". This granted her Resurrective Immortality by way of gaining a new and different body each time she died but she was also cursed to constantly by distracted and sidetracked by new "adventures", preventing her from returning home. As a result she was destined to spend eternity wandering the Demiplanes of Dread spreading chaos in her wake.
In Ewoks , the Traveling Jindas are a culture of Humanoid Aliens cursed by an erratic Force-user known as the Rock Wizard to forever roam Endor; if they stay in one place for too long, boulders propelled by the Rock Wizard's curse animate and begin physically attacking the Jindas, their belongings, and anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby, until the Jindas are compelled to move on. When the Ewoks find the Rock Wizard's missing tooth, he breaks the curse and invites the Jindas to return to their homeland on the plains around his castle again.

Men Without a Country

Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE- and ×××HOLiC : Syaoran Li and his "progeny" Watanuki are men without/outside the time-space continuum due to a magician creating clones of Li and his girlfriend Sakura that eventually became Li's own parents . When Li left his "home" dimension (where his parents lived) his absence created Watanuki , who subconsciously knew he shouldn't be alive. Eventually they defeated the magician but that didn't resolve the fact that Li and Watanuki shouldn't even exist. In the end, they paid a price to be able to live: Li would dimension-hop until he found a world where he, Sakura , and the clones could live while Watanuki would remain in a small but interdimensional space until Yuuko returned — unlike most of the examples their fates are presented as choices rather then punishments or unfortunate side-effects. At least they'll be able to visit each other/have visitors often, respectively.
Laurel and Hardy made their last movie in France, with a supporting cast of French actors. The movie has been distributed in English under several titles, including Utopia and Atoll K . One of the characters in the movie is a stateless refugee without a passport, whom no country will accept. When Stan and Ollie start their own nation on an obscure island, they are forced to accept this man as an immigrant because they lack the resources to deport him and there's no country they can deport him to. As the movie ends, he gets eaten by a lion: the fade-out gag in the very last Laurel & Hardy film.
The Terminal is a Tom Hanks film about a man being detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport because while he was in flight his home country fell to a civil war and effectively ceased to exist. He can't leave the airport to go to New York, and he can't fly home, since his country technically doesn't exist anymore. So he starts living in the airport terminal, making friends with various workers, and developing feelings for a flight attendant named Amelia. Very Loosely Based on a True Story about a guy who was stuck in a French airport for 18 years (see the Real Life section).
The Voyage of the Damned , a 1976 film based on the 1974 novel of the same name, documents the German M.S. St. Louis ocean liner attempting to transport Jewish refugees from Germany in 1939 several months prior to the Nazi Germans' September 1939 invasion of Poland and World War II , only to have the Cuban government refuse them, and to make matters worse, the U.S.A. won't accept them either. Belgium, France, the U.K. and the Netherlands each agree to accept a number of refugees; unfortunately Belgium, France, and the Netherlands would eventually be invaded by Nazi Germany, and roughly one-fourth of them would die in concentration camps. This would also double as a literal Wandering Jew case, due to the Jewish refugees involved.
"The Ship that Never Returned" (because it couldn't pay the docking fees) (1830) straddles the line between this variant and the Flying Dutchman one.
Edward Everett Hale's short story " The Man Without a Country " (1863) is probably the earliest unambiguous version of the modern variant of the trope. In it, a man is exiled from America due to his expressed hatred of it, and is forced to live on U.S. Navy ships for the rest of his life, without ever hearing about his home country. At least, not directly . There is one point where, upon receiving some news from another ship, the Captain tells the man " You may now remove Texas from your atlas. "
In Jules Verne 's 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea , Captain Nemo claims the sea (and a tiny, uncharted island or two) as his only country.
In the Doctor Who revival, the Doctor has become one of these: his home planet has been destroyed, and, although he tries to be upbeat about it, he's weary of traveling. In fact, given that in a Romani variant, the Wandering Jew is the blacksmith who forged the nails that crucified Christ, and wanders in expiation for his sin, the Doctor fits the trope even better in his later incarnations. Slightly subverted in that he was recently able to saves his planet with a Tricked Out Time gambit. However, it is in another Universe and if it returned it would restart the Time War, which could destroy the Universe. But, as he said, he now feels like the Doctor again.
Mega Man Zero : Dr. Weil was locked into a biomechanical suit that made him immortal for his crimme of starting the Elf Wars. He also had his memories converted into data so that he would never forget his crimes. He was then exiled to the wastelands. This backfired spectacularly a hundred years later.
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain : Big Boss learned the horrible truth about his country, and never recovered from it (or the execution he carried out on his mentor for said country, which wasn't for peace or even World Domination, but the victorious enslavement of the masses for the benefit of a few). As a result, he spent five years wallowing in regret, found hope in his charisma as a military leader, then spent another five years training an army of professional mercenaries, and even built a nation-state made out of oil rigs and loose parts. Only to lose these a few months later. He rebuilds yet again only to flee to Zanzibar when his successor blows it all to hell. In the end, Outer Haven is just a really good base, but Big Boss is a soldier through and through: Go somewhere, do a job, leave. Nothing else matters, home is the battlefield itself.
Iranian Mehran Karimi Nasseri was stuck in Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years after a mugger took the papers proving his refugee status.
American whistleblower Edward Snowden had his passport revoked, forcing him to wait in the airport in Moscow. His status was in limbo until Russia granted him an asylum.
Gothic Times : "Shipping Leviathan — Ark of Apocalypse" is a giant decrepit monstrosity built from the ground up with a Skeleton Motif and manned by a Skeleton Crew of monsters.
In the published (by Christopher Tolkien, a son of J.R.R. Tolkien) version of The Silmarillion , Maglor, one of the sons of Feanor, threw the Silmaril he has stolen into the sea and possibly wanders till today singing. In the latest version by J.R.R., Maglor jumped into the sea together with the Silmaril.
Parodied in Terry Pratchett 's The Unadulterated Cat , in reference to the "Travelling Cat" so beloved of local newspapers (as in "this unlucky cat was rescued from a car's engine compartment, having accidentally hitched a lift..."). The book alleges that St. Eric, 4th century Bishop of Smyrna, may have unintentionally cursed a small black-and-white tomcat to an eternity of wandering when he yelled for it to go away after he'd tripped over it.
This tends to happen to victims of the Slender Man, usually with said victims becoming Runners, people who were forced to leave their home and, well, run from the Slender Man. note "Runner" is also a term that refers to Slender Man's victims in general. It's so common it's an entire category of slenderblogs.
In Malê Rising , Andras Weisz and his men were captured by the Ottomans during the Great War and sent to the Upper Nile. However, they escaped and for three years traversed across war-torn Africa to find a way back home to Hungary. Along the way, the met the Lost Hungarians of Nubia, fought for native kings, and gathered a following of locals before finally reaching to Luanda and discover that Austria-Hungary had collapsed in the interim .

Video Example(s):

Origin of the flying dutchman.

SpongeBob SquarePants's version of the Flying Dutchman is more a Peek-a-Bogeyman Ghost Pirate than anything else, but there is one episode that gives him a similar backstory: his body was used as a window display, and thus never got a proper burial, cursing his spirit to forever wander the seas.

Alternative Title(s): Wandering Jew

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Why this Houseplant is Called the Wandering Jew

Have you watered your Wandering Jew? As you may know, the popular spiderwort ( tradescantia ) is a convenient and flexible houseplant—it can be planted in soil or set to hang in a pot, and it’s very patient with forgetful owners . Its name calls to mind Moses and the Israelites in the Sinai Desert, wandering for 40 years.

But the plant’s name actually refers to a more recent, and sinister, legend of a Jew who scoffed at Jesus en route to his crucifixion. The story isn’t actually canonical —the earliest versions appeared in the 13th century , and were popularizied in the 17th century in by a pamphleteer named Ahashver. (Interestingly, this name is derived from Ahasuerus, the Persian king of the Purim story .)

This motif of the wandering Jew also took form as an 1844 French novel , opera, and silent film which weren’t anti-Semitic so much as straight-up depressing: A Jewish man is separated from his sister by the Bering Strait and condemned to wander the Earth forever. A plague of cholera follows in his wake, and—spoiler alert—he never finds his sister.

Pretty heavy legacy for a houseplant.

__ Watch the silent film, The Wandering Jew :

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IMAGES

The Wandering Jew by Gustave Dore: Buy fine art print
The Wandering Jew V1: Buy The Wandering Jew V1 Online at Low Price in
The Legend of the Wandering Jew, 6: The end releases other men from
Eternally Wandering Jew Comes Home
Illustrations for 'The Legend of the Wandering Jew'
The Wandering Jew, Condemned Drawing by Mary Evans Picture Library

VIDEO

Wandering Jew # shorts #youtubeshorts #flower_daily #home #gardening #video #how #home
wandering Jew
#9 Круизная экскурсия по лайнеру Baltic Princess/Silja Line. Обзор кают
The Tale of the Wandering Jew
How to propagate Variegated wandering jew #shorts
#wandering Jew Plant Propagation #gardening #Indoreplant

COMMENTS

Wandering Jew
In the play Genboerne ( The Residents) by Jens Christian Hostrup (1844), the Wandering Jew is a character (in this context called "Jerusalem's shoemaker") and his shoes make the wearer invisible. The protagonist of the play borrows the shoes for a night and visits the house across the street as an invisible man.
Theory and Analysis:List of Common Misconceptions
The other is that when Keel appears in flashback in episode 21, he is visibly younger than in the series' present, and as has been noted, the Wandering Jew is supposed to be ageless. The Dummy Plug Plant is the Chamber of Guf. The Chamber of Guf is mentioned by Ritsuko in episode 23 when she, Misato, and Shinji are down in the Dummy Plug Plant ...
Flying Dutchman
The Wandering Jew is the star of clergyman George Croly's Salathiel (1829). Nathan Brazil, the immortal guardian of the universe in Jack Chalker's Well World series, is said (in-story) to be the likely inspiration for both the Flying Dutchman and wandering Jew legends since he is Jewish and his favorite occupation is ship captain.
Wandering Jew
The Wandering Jew, illustration by Gustave Doré, 1856. wandering Jew, in Christian legend, character doomed to live until the end of the world because he taunted Jesus on the way to the Crucifixion. A reference in John 18:20–22 to an officer who struck Jesus at his arraignment before Annas is sometimes cited as the basis for the legend.
Why this Houseplant is Called the Wandering Jew
This motif of the wandering Jew also took form as an 1844 French novel, opera, and silent film which weren’t anti-Semitic so much as straight-up depressing: A Jewish man is separated from his ...