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

I hope you enjoy this week's episode, Arctypal Antagonists for the Mage Arc,

Evil and the weakness of humankind.

It is appropriate that the final archetypal character arc of the life cycle, the Mage

arc, should be the one to finally confront the ultimate antagonist within the human experience.

This is of course evil in all its abstraction.

As the final arc, the Mage symbolizes the end of life

and presumably its fulfillment.

Because the Mage is such a powerful and rare personage, the mysteries of his

arc are ones few writers ever personally embody, but still ones we instinctively speculate about.

And it is in the speculating that we sometimes are fortunate enough to offer to ourselves and

perhaps to our readers a glimpse into greater truths and possibilities.

By its very numinosity and mysteriousness, the Mage arc offers the opportunity for its archetypal

antagonists to be personified in many different ways.

As we've noted throughout this supplementary series, the archetypal

antagonists faced within the successive life arcs grow increasingly less

dualistic and more abstract as we go.

In the first act of life, the maidens and the heroes necessarily define evil as the

other whom they are resisting and from whom they need to

individuate. Indeed they are therefore inclined to then insist that the very

nature of otherness must indicate evil.

By the time the crone makes peace with death,

...