Jordan Peterson is a student of mythology, so it’s not surprising that he presents his intellectual trajectory as a story of death and resurrection. As the Canadian psychologist recounts in his first book, 1999’s Maps of Meaning, his disillusionment as a young man brought him to almost suicidal despair. He had abandoned the Christian faith of his mother while still a teen but found no adequate replacement to give meaning to life. Later as a teen, he dabbled briefly with socialist politics, but became bitter when he concluded that left-wing activists were motivated more by hatred of the rich than empathy for the poor. In the early 1980s as an undergraduate, against the backdrop of the Cold War, the prospect that humanity could be destroyed by nuclear war gave the young Peterson recurring nightmares.

Peterson grandly refers to this personal hell as a “descensus ad inferos,” comparable to Christ’s time in Hades and to the journeys of Faust and Dante. Like these earlier explorers of perdition, Peterson found wisdom through his harrowing trek. He was saved by the writings of Carl Jung, which taught that the world was not meaningless but made intelligible by recurring cultural patterns: myths. Like Jung, Peterson came to believe that studying “comparative mythological material” was the path not just to understanding human psychology, but to finding personal peace and social harmony.

Myths are not mere stories to Peterson; they’re formative archetypes that shape human perception, teaching us how to move from the chaos of raw existence to the order of productive individualism. In Maps of Meaning, a dense academic tract, he refers to myths as “the distilled essence of the stories we tell ourselves about the patterns of our behavior”:

The myth, like the dream, may be regarded as the birthplace of conscious abstract knowledge, as the matrix from which formed ideas spring. Every concept, no matter how new or modern it appears, emerges from ground prepared by centuries of previous intellectual activity. Myth prepares the ground for explicit understanding by using what is presently comprehended ... to represent that which remains unknown.

Like many prophets before him, Peterson was initially ignored: Maps of Meaning got a modest reception. But the world is starting to catch up to Peterson. His second book, this year’s 12 Rules for Life, has become an international bestseller and turned Peterson into one of the world’s most famous, and polarizing, public intellectuals. The book takes the basic message of Maps of Meaning and recasts it as self-help.

Myths remain as central to his analysis as ever. In an acerbic profile last week, New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles wrote that Peterson “illustrates his arguments with copious references to ancient myths—bringing up stories of witches, biblical allegories and ancient traditions. I ask why these old stories should guide us today.” Peterson proceeds to argue for the existence today of witches and dragons: