Peterson began to write Maps of Meaning in the mid-1980s, and used text from it (then titled as The Gods of War) during his classes teaching as an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University.

[5] According to Craig Lambert, writing in Harvard Magazine, the book is influenced by Jung's archetypal ideas about the collective unconscious and evolutionary psychology.

It includes theories of religion and God, natural origin of modern culture, and the bibliography includes Dante Alighieri, Hannah Arendt, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Northrop Frye, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Brothers Grimm, Stephen Hawking, Laozi, Konrad Lorenz, Alexander Luria, John Milton, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Piaget, B. F. Skinner, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Voltaire, and Ludwig Wittgenstein among many others.

[1] In that sense, the "myth represents the eternal unknown … known … knower", the latter being the hero who "slays the dragon of chaos" like Saint George, resulting in "maturity in the form of individuality".

[4] Throughout the book, Peterson attempts to explain how the mind works, while including illustrations with elaborate geometric diagrams (e.g. "The Constituent Elements of Experience as Personality, Territory, and Process").

Harvey Shepard, writing in the religion column of the Montreal Gazette (2003), stated:[18]To me, the book reflects its author's profound moral sense and vast erudition in areas ranging from clinical psychology to scripture and a good deal of personal soul searching … Peterson's vision is both fully informed by current scientific and pragmatic methods, and in important ways deeply conservative and traditional.Psychologists Ralph W. Hood, Peter C. Hill, and Bernard Spilka, in their book The Psychology of Religion: An Empirical Approach (2009), state concerning the relationship of the five-factor model to religion, that the "dynamic model for the tension between tradition and transformation has been masterfully explored by Peterson (1999) as the personality basis for what he terms the architecture of belief.

"[20] Nathan J. Robinson, in an article in his left-wing publication Current Affairs, described the book as "an elaborate, unprovable, unfalsifiable, unintelligible theory.