These archetypal characters, according to Peterson, are the Great Mother, the Great Father, and the Explorer.
(Note that Peterson doesn't really settle on a name the third character, but I'll call it the "the Explorer." Basically, this character is You--the Ego, the Self.)
The Great Mother archetype symbolizes the unknown, the Great Father symbolizes the known, and the Explorer represents the knower.
As Peterson describes it, myths display great diversity in invoking these archetypes, and the list of associated images and symbols is a bit dizzying. For example, Great Mother imagery associated with the Unknown encompasses chaos, the dragon, the dark, witches, caves, valleys, the moon, the unconscious, the uncanny, the queen, the deep, and the earth. Great Father imagery associated with the Known can include the king, the superego, the wise old man, authority, giants, the sky, daytime, territory, and culture. Finally, the Explorer is the hero, the child, consciousness, the eye, and illumination.
Backing up, think of a map of the world, with explored and unexplored areas. The Unknown is the unexplored areas of life, the Known are the settled areas of life, and the Explorer can move around and explore this map as they choose. Myths invoking imagery about these three characters are describing the various threats and challenges faced when moving around this map. For example, moving from the Known to Unknown can be scary, but sometimes that's what you have to do. You can become too settled and comfortable behind the high castle walls in the Known, never venturing outside the gates. Myths and stories about kingdoms and castles, dragons and quests, are sharing, according to Peterson, the "behavioral wisdom of history" in how to navigate our life in facing the challenges of the Known and Unknown in our lives.
There is one more character, what Peterson calls "the Dragon of Chaos." The Dragon of Chaos is the surrounding and underlying primordial matrix from which the world emerges. For example, there is unknown and unexplored territory within the world, and then there is the Edge of the World. The Dragon shows up at the Edge of the World. Visually, imagine a large island surround by a sea. The island has Known and Unknown parts. The surrounding sea is the Dragon.
Now, you might be wondering, "I thought the Unknown, the Great Mother, was the Dragon?" And here we encounter what I think is an important issue in Peterson's thought, how the Great Mother and the Dragon become conflated. We can easily see the reason for the conflation. Both Chaos and the Unknown create anxiety, and both present us with both opportunity and threat. Entering the Unknown or falling into Chaos takes us into a place of unpredictability. Thus, Peterson observes, "It is useful to regard the Great Mother as the primary agent of the serpent of chaos...The serpent of chaos can be seen lurking 'behind' the Great Mother." This is because, as I mentioned, the Dragon of Chaos and the Great Mother "commonly overlap because the 'chaos comprising the original state' is hard to distinguish from the 'chaos defined in the opposition to established order.'"
The reason this conflation is important to notice, and potentially very problematic, is in how Peterson goes on to describe how we, as the Hero, have to bring order to the Chaos. In many ways, as we've noted, this is Peterson's central, defining piece of advice: Order the chaos. It's right there in the title of his best-selling book: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Ordering chaos is the logic behind Peterson's advice to young men "to make their bed."
I think "ordering chaos" is a very powerful insight. But I do have a concern here in how Chaos is symbolized in Peterson's scheme as feminine, as conflated with the Great Mother. You see the problem: disorder in life is encoded as feminine and the masculine hero has to take agentic action to control, defeat or dominate that source of disorder. The call to "slay the dragon" symbolically encodes sexist, misogynistic values. And you could argue that this highly agentic vision of how to "take action" in the world by "slaying the dragon" is the source of Peterson's appeal to young men.
Now, before you share your opinion about all that, a couple of caveats.
First, Peterson is very clear that the symbols of the Great Mother and the Dragon are bivalent. They embody both good and bad. As Peterson describes, feminine symbols within myth do pose threats but also are the sources of new birth, potential, possibility, and creativity. Ask any modern witch about the divine feminine, a power conceived as being both incredibility destructive and incredibly creative, the raw potentialities of the lifeforce itself. Peterson knows this, so his characterizations of Chaos display this bipolarity. He doesn't cast Chaos as evil or uniformly destructive. So it would be wrong to make a blanket accusation that Peterson's handling of feminine motifs in myth is misogynistic across the board and lacking nuance.
Second, a message to young men calling them to more agentic action in their own lives, like making their bed, isn't a bad thing. There are many who do see a real "crisis of masculinity" in the modern world, too many young men opting out of college, playing too many video games, watching too much porn, and failing to get off their parent's couch. So my concerns above about how Peterson arranges the masculine and feminine images in his scheme isn't necessarily a comment about how helpful he has been to many young men. A strong agentic call to proactive action, in launching their lives from childhood into adulthood, is exactly what many young men are needing to hear.
Lastly, Peterson is wanting to be descriptive with mythological symbols. For better or worse, ancient cultures gendered many of these symbols, and most of those societies were patriarchal. We might have wished they had gendered the symbols differently. But the deeper point isn't the shell of the symbol but its content. Chaos and facing the unknown are real adaptive challenges. And there's no real insight gained in thinking of those challenges as either male or female. Your bed still has to be made. You still have to walk out the door and face the unknown. It really doesn't matter if the Dragon is a boy or a girl.
Plus, these gendered symbols can be so slippery as to be pointless. Consider The Hobbit. Bilbo Baggins lives in a hole. That hole, obvious womb imagery, is a feminine symbol. So Bilbo's Known world is the The Great Mother. And Gandalf, the Great Father as the Wise Old Man, calls Bilbo out into the Unknown. The Hobbit totally reverses Peterson's scheme. But does any of that make any difference? I don't think so. Who cares how the gendered symbols are arrayed? The point about Bilbo's settled life in his hole is not that it's feminine imagery but that his life is comfortable and safe. Any interpreter of story, drama, or myth who gets overly rigid with a gendered scheme of unpacking these symbols is going to miss the forest for the trees.
But returning to and underlining my point, if I have a criticism and concern about Jordan Peterson it's right here, how he symbolically aligns Chaos with feminine imagery and how that sets up agentic advice to "order" that Chaos. Slaying the dragon, when the dragon is feminine, encodes, even if only symbolically, a worrisome dynamic.
