This is K.M. Wyland and you are listening to the 540th episode of the Helping Writers Become Authors Podcast.

I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, Arcotypeal Character Arks Part 7, The Mage Arc.

The Final 2 archetypal character arcs in the life cycle deal primarily with questions of mortality

and thus inevitably with the ultimate questions about the meaning of life.

Throughout this series, we viewed the six life arcs as part of a unified story structure or three acts.

The first act, featuring the maiden and the hero focused

on overcoming challenges of fear in integrating the parts of oneself and

individuating. The second act, the Queen and the King, focused on challenges of power and on integration within relationship to others.

Finally, the third act, the Kronen and the Mage, turns its attention to mortality and to the integration of soul and spirit.

As we discussed in last week's episode, the Crone arc represented the complete transition of the character from the

quote-unquote outer world struggles with oneself and other people into the inner

world struggles with more existential and spiritual crises.

Although anyone who lives long enough well reach the Crone Act,

at least chronologically, not everyone will accept her challenge and fulfill her difficult arc of embracing her own mortality.

Therefore, even fewer among us will even get the opportunity to truly take on the deep mysteries of the powerful Mage Arc.

In part because of that fact itself, the Mage Arc is mysterious.

We see it most plainly in the metaphor of fantasy stories that offer up a supernatural

mentor to a world in need. But rarely is this character the protagonist, perhaps because almost all of us relate more obviously to the younger

archetypes who mirror our own positions in the cycle.

Even more rarely is the mage fully embodied in a realistic story.

Although to my mind Atticus Finch in to kill a mockingbird seems a possible example

from a symbolic viewpoint.

...