The Jester, called the Fool in Pearson's earlier version, belongs with the Lover and the Orphan under the motivation toward belonging and enjoyment. Its aim is to live in the moment and to enjoy it; its fear is of boredom and of being boring; its strategy is play, joking and the refusal of solemnity; its shadow is frivolity, cruelty disguised as humour and the wasting of a life. In Pearson's sequence the Fool is one of the final self archetypes, alongside the Ruler, the Magician and the Sage, and she reads it as the figure who has come through the whole journey and can now take it lightly, which is a considerably richer reading than the brand book's cheerful mascot.
The Jester's more immediate historical ancestor is the licensed court fool of medieval and early modern Europe, a figure permitted, within limits, to speak uncomfortable truths to a monarch that no one else at court could safely voice, a social role Shakespeare dramatised repeatedly, in Feste's songs and riddles in Twelfth Night and, most searchingly, in the Fool's bitter, clear-sighted commentary alongside the collapsing king in King Lear. That licensed-truth-teller function, humour as a permitted channel for dissent, is a documented historical and literary institution considerably older and more specific than Pearson's developmental gloss.