This deck is a symbolic, metaphorical tool for reflection. These are the ideas it builds on.

• C. G. Jung: the foundation of the deck. Archetypes and the collective unconscious; the persona (“As a mask”); the Shadow and projection (“In other people”); complexes, the basis of the threads; holding the tension of opposites, the transcendent function (Collected Works vol. 8), behind every Middle Path; the Self as both the center and the whole circumference (Psychology and Alchemy, Collected Works vol. 12) and individuation, behind the outer rim; his morning mandala drawings of 1918 and 1919 (Memories, Dreams, Reflections); inflation and possession, behind The Possessed. The check-in quotes “Everyone carries a shadow” from “Psychology and Religion” (1938, Collected Works vol. 11, para. 131). Later Jungians, including C. A. Meier, describe the archetypal core of a complex.
• Carol S. Pearson, Awakening the Heroes Within (1991): the twelve archetypes, the Ego, Soul and Self families, and the three stages of the journey (preparation, the journey itself, the return). “Called up by”, “Meets trouble by” and “Its task” paraphrase her descriptions. Pearson builds on Jung. The check-in’s statements were written for this deck from her published descriptions; none is taken from the Pearson-Marr Archetype Indicator (PMAI) or the Heroic Myth Index, and the check-in hasn’t been tested as a psychological measure. Its “quiet one” follows the PMAI’s idea of a lowest-scoring “blind spot” (PMAI Manual, Blandin and Marr, 2021). The quote after the archetypes part is from her opening line.
• Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990): the idea that every archetype has an overblown and a weakened shadow, which shaped some of the Middle Path descriptions.
• Stanislav Grof: archetypal and mythological figures in non-ordinary states (LSD: Doorway to the Numinous), behind the “In a journey” notes, which are this deck’s own symbolic reading; COEX systems, close relatives of Jung’s complexes, which add the nourishing resource threads; the word holotropic, “moving toward wholeness”, quoted after the last part of the check-in (The Way of the Psychonaut, vol. 1, 2019), and the inner radar; the four basic perinatal matrices (Realms of the Human Unconscious, 1975), the bands inside the rim, used without his claim that they are memories of birth; his observation that sessions which completed the sequence tended to bring lasting change (LSD Psychotherapy, 1980); and, with Christina Grof, inflation after a spiritual opening (Spiritual Emergency, 1989). Which cards each matrix covers is this deck’s own reading. His models come from clinical work with thousands of sessions and haven’t been tested in controlled studies, so they’re used here as symbolic tools.
• John Welwood (1984): the term “spiritual bypassing”.

The shadow names, the messages, the practices, the prompts and the layout of the wheel were written for this deck.