Methodology

This page is the long-form account of how the resonance map was built - the pipeline that produced it, the anatomy of a single mapping, the counter-canon that corrects it, and the five different theories of shadow it refuses to flatten.

What the map is

A comparative hermeneutic atlas. Six vocabularies side-by-side - not an empirical map of a universal psyche. Convergence is partly shared intellectual descent, not independent corroboration.

This site is a comparative hermeneutic atlas. It sets six archetypal vocabularies side by side - Jungian (Pearson-Marr), Enneagram (Riso-Hudson), KWML (Moore & Gillette), Myers-Briggs, Hero's Journey (Campbell / Vogler), and Tarot (Major Arcana) - and maps resonances between them. It does not claim that these six traditions describe the same underlying psyche. It claims only that reading them together is sometimes more illuminating than reading any one alone.

The problem we started with

The first version of this map was hand-coded from general reading. Every cluster felt obvious, which is itself a warning: when six traditions seem to converge effortlessly on twenty tidy themes, what you are likely seeing is not convergence but shared intellectual descent. Jung is upstream of most of it. Campbell read Jung; Pearson built on Campbell; Moore & Gillette cite Jung; Riso and Hudson borrowed structure from Ichazo who borrowed from Gurdjieff; Jungian Tarot is a twentieth-century overlay. Agreement between downstream readers of the same source is not independent corroboration.

The pipeline below was designed to test the hand-coded map against primary literature, academic scholarship, and cultural critique - then attack every surviving mapping before letting it into the final atlas.

The pipeline

Eleven missions across four phases. Each mission wrote one structured JSON file to /research/ so the work is independently resumable and the evidence is auditable.

Phase 1 - Deep Research

Seven missions of web search and synthesis, one per tradition plus a seventh for cultural and gender critique. Each mission asked the same questions: who is the primary source, who are the scholarly receivers, what lineage does the author actually claim, and what does the academic literature dispute? The goal was to catch Jungian assumptions that had been laundered into apparent consensus.

Phase 2 - Structural Analysis

Two missions with no web access, reading only Phase 1 outputs and the site's own archetype corpus. Mission 8 extracted semantic feature vectors (motivation axis, emotional core, relational stance, shadow pattern, developmental stage) and built a similarity matrix. Mission 9 named the meta-patterns that survived the matrix: isomorphic structures, developmental sequences, and - critically - the energies every system leaves out.

Phase 3 - Adversarial Debate

A single ruthless mission whose job was to attack every proposed mapping: over-fits, false equivalences, cherry-picked evidence, category errors, and the question of whether the comparative project itself is flawed. The output is preserved at research/10-adversarial.json and fed directly into synthesis.

Phase 4 - Editorial Synthesis

Mission 11 triangulated everything: confidence assigned per entry, every adversarial critique either modified, caveated, or rebutted (never ignored), citations attached, dissent preserved on the record. The output is src/data/grounded-resonance-map.json, which is what this site renders.

Anatomy of a grounded entry

Every mapping on the atlas carries its evidence and its dissent on its own back. A single entry looks like this:

Primary source is the tradition's own text. Scholarship is academic reception. Dissent records where the literature disagrees. The adversarial note preserves the strongest counter-argument from Mission 10. The editorial note is where the site's own judgement is shown rather than hidden. When a field is empty, its absence is also data.

Source triangulation

No tradition is read from primary sources alone. Each system was worked through three passes: the authors' own text, the academic reception of that text, and the cultural critique that names what the text excludes. Where these three disagree - and they often do - the disagreement is recorded rather than resolved.

Five confidence tiers

Every mapping on this site carries one of five labels:

• canonicalAuthor-cited within the system's published primary literature.
• strongCredentialed secondary scholarship (Nichols, Pollack, Vogler-on-Campbell, etc.).
• moderateDefensible by structural similarity + hermeneutic convergence, but not author-endorsed.
• speculativeSite-original inference.
• contestedMapping is actively disputed in the scholarship.

A mapping marked canonical is one the tradition's own author would endorse. Strong and moderate describe degrees of academic support. Speculative and contested are live on the map because suppressing them would misrepresent where the conversation actually is. Confidence is a first-class property of every claim, not a footnote.

What the map does not claim

The strong form of the project - that these six traditions co-describe the universal structure of psyche - fails. Convergence is partly shared intellectual descent, not independent corroboration. We do not claim to have discovered an underlying grammar. We claim only to have aligned vocabularies carefully enough that a reader can recognise the same territory being walked by different feet, and that the differences between the walks are often more instructive than the apparent agreements.

The counter-canon

Not footnotes. First-class parallel maps. Where the canon was partial, these writers supplied what was missing - sometimes by building an entirely different structure rather than correcting the old one.

Honest about the canon

• - Moore & Gillette restricted KWML to mature men by their own declaration; gender-neutral readings of the book erase the authors' stated scope.
• - Campbell's Jungian credentials are contested (Segal, Rensma, IAJS) and documented antisemitism in his private papers (Gill 1989, Segal 1992) complicates any uncomplicated reception.
• - The Pearson-Marr twelve-archetype wheel was commercially adapted into OCA/PMAI after 2001; The Drum (2025) has called the branded wheel pseudoscience when marketed as Jungian.

Shadow structures

Five traditions - five different theories of what shadow is. The original Shadow cluster on this site mixed a grammar (KWML), a transit-state (Enneagram), an event-symbol (Tarot Devil), and a dramatic mask (Hero's Journey Shadow) as though they were instances of one thing. They are not, and the cluster has been dissolved.

Why it matters

A KWML shadow pole and a Hero's Journey Shadow mask share only a word. The map uses the Antagonists cluster for figures whose primary narrative function is opposition, and reserves shadow-as-typology for the five-part reading above.

Per-system critical profiles

Each of the six traditions has its own page summarising its lineage, what it actually maps, its empirical status, and the blind spot it carries into this atlas.

• Jungian (Pearson-Marr)
• Enneagram
• KWML
• Myers-Briggs
• Hero's Journey
• Tarot

What's in the repo

The eleven mission outputs live under /research/. The synthesised atlas is src/data/grounded-resonance-map.json. Citations are collected at /about/bibliography.