This is part of the Mystical Journey series. If you’re new to the journey, you can begin here.
Why, hello there. Come on in, make yourself comfy. I’m your friendly narrator, here to help make sense of things. Coral reefs, magical keys, bizarre dreams. There’s a lot to take in!
You might be wondering what you’re supposed to do with these Jungian Magic keys. Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about today. Care for some tea?
Let’s begin with a little refresher on the keys.
The first is the Key of Archetypal Attunement.
Remember your astral travel to the fabric forest–the one with the little choo choo train? These carefully structured meditations, a combination of magical storytelling and psychic journeying, are designed to help you unlock divine guidance and shift deep-rooted patterns in ways that run counter to ego-based logic.
Then we have the Key of Dreamwork, which grants you access to the hidden themes and matrices governing your existence. You’ll unearth relevant clues from your past, present…and even your future in this magical realm. The Blueprint of You contained within your dreams can be altered, initiating profound change in your waking life, once you learn how to wield this key wisely.
And finally, the Key of Magical Journaling. This will be one of your most potent tools on the grand journey of self-evolution. Far from random scribblings, when you learn how to use this key, your journal becomes an alchemical container allowing you to gather energy, study its patterns, and cast spells of change. There’s a reason so many of the ancient gods of magic were closely tied to the art of writing!
Now that we’re up to speed on the keys, we need to learn how to use them, and this is where the Hero’s Journey comes in.
This map is the distillation of eons of human storytelling. As our brains gave rise to these stories, over time, some stories had more staying power than others. They were retold, refined, and retold again, all the while shaping our consciousness, just as our consciousness shaped the stories.
The snake biting its own tail, the ouroboros, around and around the stories turned.
The Hero’s Journey helps us to understand the most fundamental layers of our psyche, layers that exist far beyond the limits of our conscious grasp. We can’t shine the flashlight directly into these rooms, and thus the map helps us find our footing where we cannot see.
The Keys are how we travel the map; the map is the territory we’re traversing.
For instance, perhaps you do an Astral Attunement (Key One), after which you journal about your experience (Key Three). This then leads to a significant dream (Key Two), which you add to your journal the following morning (back to Key Three). Your journaling reveals a theme at play: both the Attunement and your dream featured a feral cat from your waking life.
You hadn’t been sure of its significance in the Archetypal Attunement, but when it made a second appearance in the Dreamscape, more clues emerged. In the dream, the cat was surprisingly tame, so you chose to bring it with you on a visit–a visit you were dreading but felt compelled to make to a woman who was a chimera of your grandma + dad.
The woman lived in a retirement community, and as soon as you set foot in her apartment, your faithful feline companion disappeared. You spent the rest of the dream searching for the cat, anxiety soaring, the thought of abandoning her here too terrible to contemplate. It would be a massive betrayal after she had trusted you enough to come in the first place.
Using Key Three, magical journaling, connections begin to form, and you see the cat as your instincts, instincts which fled as soon as you went to the woman’s apartment (a significance you’ll unpack more another Archetypal Attunement). You recognize this feeling in waking life around certain people. It’s as if the pressure to people please grows so strong, your natural inclinations fly away, leaving you a contorted husk, unsure what to say or how to be.
After these interactions, it’s difficult to regain your sense of self, to rekindle the feeling of inhabiting your body with any semblance of ease or naturalness. You feel like a robot in your own skin, betrayed by yourself.
Wielding the Three Keys has brought you this far, but where, exactly, are you?
Now it’s time to consult the map of the Hero’s Journey, and there are different ways to do this, ways that you’ll learn as you become more adept at Jungian Magic.
In this instance, you feel called to consult the map through the practice of Archetypal Resonance. This is where you seek a fairy tale, myth, song, movie, etc., that mirrors elements of your situation. This is less about finding a perfect match on paper and more about feeling that intuitive tug within.
How has your story been told before?
Perhaps something about your dream reminds you of Bluebeard, so you track down the fairy tale, reading it through the lens of magical sight, i.e. with the assumption that it has a valuable message for you. This time, you’re struck by how the young bride was fooled into thinking Bluebeard had something of value to offer her, how she was taken in by his wealth and charm.
Further use of the Three Keys allows you to connect this insight with your feelings around certain family members. They promise a life within the chosen inner circle, a life of acceptance, stability and safety, but in fact, these baubles are mere artifice, designed to keep you in line, following the rules, disconnected from your wild, instinctual nature.
You’re being called to venture beyond the inner circle…
…to return to sender the trinkets for which you’ve sacrificed so much.
Standing at this precipice, your location on the map comes into focus: you’ve been beckoned from the Ordinary World. The Call to Adventure has sounded…and it’s time to respond.
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