First of all a quick sidenote: Just because you are practicing magic doesn't mean your archetype has to be the magician if the tarot arcana.
But anyway, in my personal opinion, the biggest challenge of every mages journey is dealing with his own madness - be it getting rid of it, turning it into something positive, embracing it or learning to control it, it is something every advanced mage has to deal with.
The journey definetly always starts with opening up towards something you believed impossible before, or didn't consider, often (but not always) because of a very strange event happening in your life.
But while I find those "typical" starting points and challenges quite obvious I think otherwise the journey is pretty different for each mage, simply because of how many different perspectives there are on magic. You could walk the path of mastering astral projection, channeling, tulpamancing, summoning, vampirism, bilocation, martial arts, prophecies, crystalmancy, sigils, drugs… and I could keep this list going for a while but you get the idea. They are just too different from each other.
>>111378
This is a fair point. The goal also plays a huge role for the journey, of course. But I'd argue that the journey of the mage is more defined by its goal than that of the hero. For the hero, the journey IS often the goal. But this just can't that often be said for the mage - in fact, it might even often be the opposite for him, the goal being the journey. Especially with goals like aquiring power or achieving astral projection, this goal becomes a journey in itself.