The mentor teaches and protects the hero and often gives him or her gifts that can be special objects, weapons or valuable knowledge. Examples are Athena who helps Perseus, the Fairy Godmother who helps Cinderella or Jiminy Cricket who advises Pinocchio to be honest.
The threshold guardian is a person, a physical obstacle, or often a fearsome monster placed as an obstacle in the path of the hero. The threshold guardian is not really there to stop the hero, but to test his or her courage, to make sure that only worthy individuals proceed on with the adventure. The hero must face the fear and go on. By doing so, he or she becomes stronger. This is what the threshold guardian is all about. Like when Harry Potter faces, Fluffy, the three headed dog in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
The trickster embodies the psychological energy for change and growth. The trickster appears most often when people have become rigid and uncompromising in their habits and ideas. Some scholars describe the Holy Spirit as this type of energy, causing people to give up settled, comfortable religious habits for the challenge of true compassion and service. But, usually tricksters are portrayed as humorous and annoying to people in authority. The best example might be Ferris Bueller in his famous day off. Why do we like Ferris so much? What good does he accomplish with his rule breaking? This is the paradox of the trickster: by disrupting order and control in our lives, he/she causes new creativity. We may resist the disruption, but in the end we benefit.
The shadow is the energy of the “dark side.” It is dark because it is the part of us that is forbidden, repressed, unacceptable, rejected, unwanted and unacknowledged. It is often the dangerous, even evil, part of people, but just as often it is some good part that the person has not been allowed to express. An example of a good shadow might be a talent, perhaps for art or music, that the person’s parents did not approve of as a career and so prevented the child from learning. A familiar example of the evil shadow is Darth Vader. Everyone has a shadow and it is the source of much of our psychological energy. One of our life tasks is to become aware of what is hidden in our selves so we can acknowledge it and control it. One of the ways we can see our shadows is to watch for when we project our own shadow onto someone else. Often what we don’t like in another person is really something we don’t like in ourselves.