Character Archetypes, From Jung to Vogler

Character archetypes are recurring roles that characters play in stories, such as the hero, the mentor, the herald, the shadow and the trickster, each defined by the job it does for the story rather than by a personality. The word comes from Carl Jung's psychology. The list most writers use comes from Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, a guide for screenwriters built on Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949).

Lists online give anything from seven archetypes to several dozen, and many credit Jung with a set of twelve he never wrote. What follows goes back to the books themselves: Jung, Propp, Campbell, Vogler, and the 2001 branding book where the "12 Jungian archetypes" really come from. Every quote was checked in the original text.

What Is a Character Archetype?

A character archetype is a role that turns up across many stories, recognisable whatever the setting: the wise teacher, the gatekeeper, the dark double, the joker who deflates everyone. Readers know the role before the character has said much, which is why archetypes work as shorthand.

In literary criticism, the word belongs to Northrop Frye. In Anatomy of Criticism (1957) he calls an archetype "a typical or recurring image", and goes on: "I mean by an archetype a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience." For a writer, that is the practical meaning. An archetype is what one story's character has in common with characters in a hundred other stories.

The term came into criticism from psychology. Merriam-Webster gives the plain sense, "the original pattern or model of which all things of the same type are representations or copies", and a separate sense for Jung's use of the word.

Where Do Character Archetypes Come From?

Carl Jung. In "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious", the first essay in volume 9, part 1 of his Collected Works, Jung separates the personal unconscious from a shared one: "The contents of the collective unconscious, on the other hand, are known as archetypes." The figures he wrote about in that volume include the mother, the child, the maiden, the trickster and "the figures of the shadow, anima, and wise old man". He did not mean characters in a story. He meant patterns in the mind that show up in dreams, myths and fairy tales.

Jung was firm that an archetype is a shape, not a fixed character. In "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" he writes: "Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression be admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree." That is useful to a writer. The archetype gives you the outline. You fill it in.

Vladimir Propp. In Morphology of the Folktale (1928), Propp studied a hundred Russian fairy tales (numbers 50 to 151 in the older editions of Afanasyev's collection) and found that the same few roles kept doing the same jobs. He grouped the tales' actions into "spheres of action": "These spheres in toto correspond to their respective performers." There are seven: the villain, the donor (provider), the helper, the princess (a sought-for person) and her father, the dispatcher, the hero, and the false hero. "Consequently, the tale evidences seven dramatis personae." Propp defined his characters by what they do in the plot, two decades before Campbell.

Joseph Campbell. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949) traces one pattern, the hero's adventure, through world mythology. Several of the roles writers now call archetypes are named there: the hero meets "a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man)", passes the "threshold guardian" who stands "at the entrance to the zone of magnified power", and is called by a herald who "is often dark, loathly, or terrifying, judged evil by the world". Campbell gives no list of archetypes. The roles appear along the road of the hero's journey.

Christopher Vogler. Vogler turned all of this into a working list for writers.

What Are Vogler's Eight Character Archetypes?

Vogler, a Hollywood story consultant, introduces the archetypes in The Writer's Journey by crediting Jung: "Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung employed the term archetypes, meaning ancient patterns of personality that are the shared heritage of the human race." He then names the ones that "seem to be the most useful for the writer to understand". In the second edition (1998) there are seven. The third edition (2007) added "a new section on the archetype of the Ally", in the publisher's words, which is why most lists today give eight.

Vogler takes several names straight from his sources. The Mentor's subtitle, Wise Old Man or Woman, is Jung's wise old man. The Shadow and the Trickster are Jung's too. The Threshold Guardian and the Herald are Campbell's. Vogler's list is not exhaustive, and he says so: "There are, of course, many more archetypes; as many as there are human qualities to dramatize in stories."

Are Archetypes Roles or Personalities?

Roles. This is the most useful idea in Vogler's chapter, and the one most lists leave out. He credits Propp's study of "hundreds of Russian tales", then writes: "Looking at the archetypes in this way, as flexible character functions rather than as rigid character types, can liberate your storytelling. It explains how a character in a story can manifest the qualities of more than one archetype. The archetypes can be thought of as masks, worn by the characters temporarily as they are needed to advance the story."

He gives an example of how far this goes: "A character might enter the story performing the function of a herald, then switch masks to function as a trickster, a mentor, and a shadow."

So the question to ask of a character is not "which archetype is she?" but "which job is she doing in this scene?" A best friend can be the herald in chapter one and the threshold guardian in chapter five, begging the hero not to go. The villain can spend half the book as a shapeshifter before the shadow's mask comes off.

Are There 12 Jungian Archetypes?

No. Jung never published a list of twelve. The twelve that appear on most websites as "the 12 Jungian archetypes" (Innocent, Explorer, Sage, Hero, Outlaw, Magician, Regular Guy/Gal, Lover, Jester, Caregiver, Creator, Ruler) come from The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes (McGraw-Hill, 2001), a marketing book by Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson. It sorts the twelve into four groups, such as "The Yearning for Paradise: Innocent, Explorer, Sage" and "Leaving a Thumbprint on the World: Hero, Outlaw, Magician", and applies them to brands. Websites often rename two of them, Everyman for Regular Guy/Gal and Rebel for Outlaw.

Pearson had published a different twelve ten years earlier, in Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991): Innocent, Orphan, Warrior, Caregiver, Seeker, Destroyer, Lover, Creator, Ruler, Magician, Sage and Fool. That was a book of personal development.

Both lists draw on Jung's idea. Neither is Jung's list, and neither was written for fiction. They describe what a person or a brand wants, which is closer to a personality type than to a story role. They can still help you find a character's motive. They won't tell you what job the character does in the plot. Vogler's list does that.

What Is the Difference Between an Archetype, a Stereotype and a Stock Character?

• An archetype is a role defined by its job: the mentor equips the hero. The role is fixed. The person filling it is not.
• A stock character is a familiar type with a fixed surface: the absent-minded professor, the tart-tongued landlady. Readers recognise the costume, not the job.
• A stereotype is a stock character built on an assumption about a group of people. It is the one to avoid.

The test is how much of the character the type decides. An archetype decides only what the character does for the story. If the type also decides how they talk, look and think, you have written a stock character.

A Worked Example

The Stopped Clocks. Every clock in the city of Harrow stopped at midnight. Nell, a clockmaker's apprentice, wants to find out why.

1. The clocks stop. Kit, a pickpocket, brings Nell a stolen watch that is still ticking. Kit wears the Herald's mask: he brings the news that starts the story.
2. The workshop. Master Ambrose shows Nell how to open the watch, and gives her his loupe. The Mentor: training and a gift for the journey.
3. The tower door. The tower warden will not let Nell in without the mayor's seal. The Threshold Guardian: a test, not an enemy.
4. The mayor's help. Lady Varne gives Nell the seal, all warmth. Kit doesn't trust her. Varne wears the Shapeshifter's mask, and Kit switches to the Trickster's, mocking the hero's trust.
5. The clock tower. Varne stopped the clocks herself, to stop the hour of the vote that would remove her. The mask comes off. She was the Shadow all along.

Five archetypes, but only four named characters doing the work, and two of them change masks. That is Vogler's point in practice. For how Nell and Varne line up as protagonist and opposition, see protagonist vs antagonist.

How Do You Give Characters Archetype Roles in Deckle?

Deckle is a novel-writing app. Its Codex keeps an entry for each character, with a Role you can extend with your own values, and its Outliner is a board of cards, one for every document in the book, each with a synopsis.

1. Open the Codex, click the + beside the Characters section, then Character, to start an entry from the built-in Character template. Name the character.
2. Open the entry's Role menu and choose Edit roles…. In Character Roles, type an archetype such as "Mentor" into Add new…, click Add, and give it a colour with its swatch. The built-in roles (Protagonist, Antagonist, Supporting and Minor) stay in the list beside yours.
3. Pick the new role from the Role menu. In the line under the name ("One line: who or what this is"), write the job the character does for the hero. Every character in the Codex list is now tinted by its archetype.
4. Open the Outliner on the Draft and add a card for each scene with Add › Scene. In each synopsis, write who acts and what they do.
5. Make a label for each mask, each in a colour of its own (the pencil beside Status in the Inspector's Properties opens Edit labels & statuses), and set on each scene the archetype at work in it.
6. Switch the Outliner to its list and read the label column, where each mask shows as a dot in its own colour (hover a dot to see its name). A Codex role says who a character mostly is. The labels show which mask they wear scene by scene, and where a role you planned, such as the mentor, has gone missing from the book.

Keeping the cast in the Codex also helps you keep each character consistent when their masks change. An archetype says what a character does. How they change is a separate question, which character arc types covers.

Common Mistakes

• Treating archetypes as boxes. Vogler calls them "flexible character functions rather than rigid character types". A character can change masks.
• Filling every role. Not every story needs a mentor or a trickster. Use the roles your plot needs.
• Crediting Jung with twelve archetypes. That list is Mark and Pearson's, from a 2001 branding book.
• Crediting Campbell with Vogler's list. Campbell names a herald, a threshold guardian and a protective figure along the hero's road. The list of archetypes is Vogler's.
• Letting the archetype write the character. The archetype gives the job. The voice, history and wants are yours to invent, or you get a stock character.
• Confusing archetype with arc. A mentor can change or stay the same. The role and the arc are separate choices.

Sources

Retrieved 30 October 2026.

• C. G. Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Collected Works vol. 9, part 1, tr. R. F. C. Hull (Princeton University Press, 2nd ed., 1968), "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious", including the note on the shadow, anima and wise old man (archive.org). "Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype" and "On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure" read in Four Archetypes: Mother, Rebirth, Spirit, Trickster (Princeton University Press, 1973), which reprints them from that volume (archive.org).
• Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, tr. Laurence Scott, 2nd ed. rev. Louis A. Wagner (University of Texas Press, 1968), chapter 6, "The Distribution of Functions Among Dramatis Personae" (archive.org).
• Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton University Press, 1968; first published 1949), part I, chapter 1, "Departure" (archive.org).
• Christopher Vogler, The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers (Michael Wiese Productions, 2nd edition, 1998), "The Archetypes" and the chapters on each (archive.org). The third edition's new Ally section is from the publisher's announcement, reprinted by the Greater Los Angeles Writers Society.
• Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton University Press, 1957), second essay, "Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols", "Mythical Phase: Symbol as Archetype" (archive.org).
• Margaret Mark and Carol S. Pearson, The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes (McGraw-Hill, 2001), contents (archive.org).
• Carol S. Pearson, Awakening the Heroes Within: Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991) (archive.org).
• Merriam-Webster, archetype.