King Warrior Magician Lover

KING WARRIOR MAGICIAN LOVER: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

by Robert Moore, Douglas Gilette

From Boy Psychology to Man Psychology

This book is a guide to help one understand the strengths and weaknesses as a man and provide “a map to the territories of masculine selfhood which you still need to explore.”

Ritual and rites of passages are no longer a corner stone of masculine development. “we are left with what Victor Turner has called ‘mere ceremonial,’ which does not have the power necessary to achieve genuine transformation of consciousness. By disconnecting from ritual we have done away with the processes by which both men and women achieve their gender identity in a deep, mature, and life enhancing way.” Ceremonies lack the psychic charge to blast a child into the mature masculine. 

“Patriarchy is the expression of the immature masculine. It is the expression of Boy psychology, and, in part, the shadow—or crazy—side of masculinity. It expresses the stunted masculine, fixated at immature levels. Patriarchy…is an attack on masculinity in its fullness as well as felinity in its fullness. Those caught up in the structures and dynamics of patriarchy seek to dominated not only women but men as well. Patriarchy is based on fear—the boy’s fear, the immature masculine’s fear—of women, to be sure, but also fear of men. Boys fear women. They also fear real men.”

“We need more Man psychology. We need to develop a sense of calmness about masculine power…” 

“Because there is little or no ritual process in our society capable of boosting us from Boy psychology into Man psychology, we each must go on our own (with each other’s help and support) to the deep sources of masculine energy potentials that lie within us all.”

“Man psychology is…nurturing and generative, not wounding and destructive. In order for Man psychology to come into being for any particular man, there needs to be a death. Death—symbolic, psychological, or spiritual—is always a vital part of any initiatory ritual. In psychological terms, the boy Ego must ‘die.’ The old ways of being and doing and thinking and feeling must ritually ‘die,’ before the new man can emerge.”

“Jungians have found that in every man there is a feminine sub personality called the Anima, made up of the feminine archetypes. And in every woman there is a masculine sub personality called the Animus, made up of the masculine archetypes.”

Boy Psychology

“The truth is that the boy in each of us—when he is in his appropriate place in our lives—is the source of playfulness, of pleasure, of fun, of energy, of a kind of open-mindedness, that is ready for adventure and for the future. But there is another kind of boyishness that remains infantile in our interactions within ourselves and with others when manhood is required.”

“The first archetype of the immature masculine to ‘power up’ is the Divine Child. The Precocious Child and the Oedipal Child are next; the last stage of boyhood is governed by the Hero.”

“Interestingly, each of the archetypes of Boy psychology gives rise in a complex way to each of the archetypes of mature masculinity; the boy is father to the man. Thus, the Divine Child, modulated and enriched by life’s experiences, becomes the King; the Precocious Child becomes the Magician; the Oedipal Child becomes the Lover; and the Hero becomes the Warrior.”

“Since archetypes cannot disappear, the mature man transcends the masculine powers of boyhood, building upon them rather than demolishing them.”

Man Psychology: The King in His Fullness +The Tyrant -The Weakling — Boy Psychology: The Divine Child +The High Chair Tyrant -The Weakling Prince

Man Psychology: The Warrior in His Fullness +The Sadist -The Masochist — Boy Psychology: The Hero +The Grandmaster -The Coward

Man Psychology: The Magician in His Fullness +The Detached Manipulator -The Denying “Innocent” One — Boy Psychology: The Precocious Child +The Know-It-All Trickster -The Dummy

Man Psychology: The Lover in His Fullness +The Addicted Lover -The Impotent Lover — The Oedipal Child +The Mamma’s Boy -The Dreamer

The Divine Child [The King in Boy]

“The first, the most primal, of the immature masculine energies is the Divine Child.”

Jesus as the example of the Divine Child. 

“The important thing is to see that the Divine Child is built into us as a primal pattern of the immature masculine. Fried talked about it as the Id, the ‘It.’ He saw it as the ‘primitive’ or ‘infantile’ drives, amoral, forceful, and full of God-like pretensions. It was the underlying push of impersonal Nature itself, concerned only with satisfying the unlimited needs of the child.”

“For Jungians, this Divine Child within us is the source of life. It possesses magical, empowering qualities, and getting in touch with it produces an enormous sense of well-being, enthusiasm for life, and great peace and joy…”

“At the top of the triangular archetypal structure, we experience the Divine Child, who renews us and keeps us ‘young at heart.’ At the base of the triangle, we experience what we call the High Chair Tyrant and the Weakling Prince.

The High Chair Tyrant

“Characteristics of the High Chair Tyrant include arrogance (what the Greeks called hubris, or overweening pride), childishness (in the negative sense), and irresponsibility, even to himself as a mortal infant who has to meet his biological and psychological needs. All of this is what psychologists call inflation or pathological narcissism.”

“The High Chair Tyrant who attacks his human host is the perfectionist; he expects the impossible of himself and berates himself…when he can’t meet the demands of the infant within.”

The Weakling Prince

“The boy (and later, the man) who is possessed by the Weakling Prince appears to have very little personality, no enthusiasm for life, and very little initiative. This is the boy who needs to be coddled, who dictates to those around him by his silent or his whining and complaining helplessness. He needs to be carried around on a pillow. Everything is too much for him. He rarely joins in children’s games; he has few friends; he doesn’t do well in school; he is frequently hypochondriacal; his slightest wish is his parents’ command; the entire family system revolves around his comfort. He reveals his dishonesty of his helplessness, however, in his dagger-like verbal assaults on his siblings, his biting sarcasm directed against the,, and his parents manipulation of their feelings.”

“In order to access the Divine Child appropriately, we need to acknowledge him, but not identify with him. We need to love and admire the creativity and beauty of this primal aspect of the masculine Self, because if we don’t have this connection with him, we are never going to see the possibilities in life. WE are never going to seize opportunities for newness and freshness.”

“We need to ask ourselves two questions. The first one is not whether we are manifesting the High Chair Tyrant or the Weakling Prince but how—because we are all manifesting both to some extend and in some form. At the very least, we all do this when we regress into our Child when we are fatigued or extremely frightened. The second question is not whether the creative Child exists in us but how we are honoring him or not honoring him.”

The Precocious Child [The Magician in boy]

“The Precocious Child manifests in a boy when he is eager to learn, when his mind is quickened, when he wants to share what he is learning with others. There’s a glint in his eye and an energy of body and mind that shows he is adventuring in the world of ideas. The boy…wants to know the ‘why’ of everything…He wants to know the ‘how’ of things, the ‘what’ and the ‘where.’”

“The Precocious Child is the source of so-called prodigies…He urges us to be explorers and pioneers of the unknown, the strange and mysterious.”

“The Precocious Child in a man keeps his sense of wonder and curiosity alive, stimulates his intellect, and moves him in the direction of the mature magician.”

The Know-It-All Trickster

“He is expert at creating appearances, and then ‘selling’ us on those appearances. He seduces people into believing him, and then he pulls the rug out from under them.”

The Dummy

“The boy (or man) who is under the power of the other pole of the dysfunctional Shadow of the Precocious Child, the naive Dummy, like the Weakling Prince, lacks personality, vigor, and creativity. He seems unresponsive and dull…The Dummy’s ineptitude, however, is frequently less than honest. He may grasp far more than he shows, and his dunce-like behavior may mask a hidden grandiosity that feel itself too important to come into the world Thus, intimately intertwined with a secret Know-It-All, the Dummy is also a Trickster.”

The Oedipal Child [The Lover in Boy]

“All the immature masculine energies are overly tied, one way or another, to Mother, and are deficient in their experience of the nurturing and mature masculine.”

“…through his experience of connectedness to Mother (the primal relationship for almost all of us), the origins of what we can call spirituality. His sense of the mystic oneness and mutual communion of all things comes out of this deep yearning for the infinitely nurturing, infinitely good, infinitely beautiful Mother.”

“This Mother is not his real, mortal mother. She is bound to disappoint him much of the time in his need for connectedness and perfect, or infinite, love and nurturing. Rather, the Mother that he is sensing beyond his own, beyond all the beauty and feeling (what the Greeks called eros), in the things of the world, and that he is experiencing in the deep feelings and images of his inner life is the Great Mother—the Goddess in her many forms in the myths and legends of many peoples and cultures.”

The Mama’s Boy

“The Oedipal Child’s Shadow consists of the Mama’s Boy and the Dreamer. The Mama’s Boy is, as we all know, ‘tied to Mama’s apron strings.’ He causes a boy to fantasize about marrying his mother, about taking her away from his father. If there is no father, or a weak father, this so-called Oedipal urge comes on all the stronger, and this crippling side of the Oedipal Child’s bipolar Shadow may possess him.”

“For every child, from a developmental point of view, Mother is the goddess and Father is the god. Boys who are too bound to the Mother get hurt.”

“…the boy under the power of the Mama’s Boy is what is called autoerotic. He may compulsively masturbate. He may be into pornography, seeking the Goddess in the nearly infinite forms of the female body. Some men under the infantile power of the Mama’s Boy aspect of the Oedipal Child have vast collections of pictures of nude women…He is seeking to experience his masculinity, his phallic power, his generatively. But instead of affirming his own masculinity as a mortal man, he is really seeking to experience the penis of God—the Great Phallus—that experiences all women, or rather, that experiences union with the Mother Goddess in her infinity of female forms.”

The Dreamer

“The Dreamer causes a boy to feel isolated and cut off from all human relationships. For the boy who is under the spell of the Dreamer, relationships are with intangible things and with the world of the imagination within him.” “Often his dreams tend to be melancholy, on the one hand, or highly idyllic and ethereal, on the other.” “His grandiosity in seeking to possess the Mother lies hidden under the Dreamer’s depression.”

The Hero [The Warrior in Boy]

“There is much confusion about the archetype of the Hero. It is generally assumed that the heroic approach to life, or to a task, is the noblest, but this is only partially true. The Hero is, in fact, only an advanced form of Boy psychology—the most advanced form, the peak, actually, of the masculine energies of the boy, the archetype that characterizes the best in the adolescent stage of development. Yet it is immature, and when it is carried over into adulthood as the governing archetype, it blocks men from full maturity. 

The Grandstander Bully

“The man still under the influence of this negative aspect of the Hero is not a team player.” “Another example is the character played by Tom Cruise in the movie Top Gun. Here was a young fighter pilot, highly motivated, who would listen to no one, a young man who had something to prove, a grandstander, who, though creative, took dangerous risks with his plan and his navigator.”

“As is the case with the other immature masculine archetypes, the Hero is overly tied to the Mother. But the Hero has a driving need to overcome her. He is locked in mortal combat with the feminine, striving to conquer it and to assert his masculinity.” 

“Our modern worldview has serious difficulties facing human limitations. When we do not face our true limitations, we are inflated, and sooner or later our inflation will be called to account.”

“What the hero does is mobilize the boy’s delicate Ego structures to enable him to break with the Mother at the end of boyhood and face the difficult tasks that life is beginning to assign to him. The Hero energies call upon the boy’s masculine reserves, which will be refined as he matures, in order to establish his independence and his competence, for him to be able to experience his own budding abilities, to ‘push the outside of the envelope’ and test himself against the difficult, even hostile, forces in the world.”

“The Hero…encourages him to dream the impossible dream that might just be possible after all, if he has enough courage. It empowers him to fight the unbeatable foe that…he might just be able to defeat.”

“Our is not an age that wants heroes. Ours is an age of envy, in which laziness and self-involvement are the rule. Anyone who tries to shine, who dares to stand above the crowd, is dragged down by his lackluster and self-appointed ‘peers.’”

“The ‘death’ of the Hero is the ‘death’ of boyhood, of Boy psychology. And it is the birth of manhood and Man psychology.”

Man Psychology

“They all overlap and, ideally, enrich one another. A good King is always also a Warrior, a Magician, and a Lover. And the same holds true for the other three.”

“Man psychology…has perhaps always been a rare thing on our planet. It is certainly a rare thing today. The horrible physical and psychological circumstances under which most human beings have lived most places, most of the time, are staggering. Hostile environments always lead to the stunting, twisting, and mutating of an organism. “

“There’s a saying in psychology that we have to take responsibility for what we’re not responsible for.”

The King

“The King energy is primal in all men.”

“the King is, in fact, what he calls ‘the central archetype,’ around which the rest of the psyche is organized.”

“He sits on his throne on the central mountain, or on the Primeval Hill…And from this central place, all of creation radiates in geometrical form out to the very frontiers of the realm. ‘World’ is defined as that part of reality that is organized and ordered by the King. What is outside the boundaries of his influence is non creation, chaos, the demonic, and nonword.”

“What this function of the King energy does, through a mortal kind, is embody for the people of the realm this ordering principle of the Divine World.”

“The mortal king’s first responsibility is to live according to Ma’at, or Dharma, or the Tao. If he does, the mythology goes, everything in the kingdom—that is, the creation, the world—will also go according to the Right Order. The kingdom will flourish. If the king does not live “in the Tao” then nothing will go right for his people, or for the kingdom as a whole. The realm will relinquish, the Center, which the king represents, will not hold, and the kingdom will be ripe for rebellion.”

“On a more immediate note, we see in modern dysfunctional families that when there is an immature, a weak, or an absent father and the King energy is not sufficiently present, the family is very often given over to disorder and chaos.”

“In conjunction with his ordering function, the second vital good that the King energy manifests is fertility and blessing.” “The sacred king in ancient times becomes primary expression for many people of the life-force, the libido, of the cosmos.”

“Young men today are starving for blessing from older men starving for blessing from the King energy. This is why they cannot, as we say, ‘get it together.’ They shouldn’t have to. They need to be blessed. They need to be seen by the King, because if they are, something inside will come together for them. That is the effect of blessing; it heals and makes whole. That’s what happens when we are seen and valued and concretely rewarded (with gold, perhaps, dropped from the pharaoh’s hand) for our legitimate talents and abilities.”

“The King archetype in its fullness possesses the qualities of order, or reasonable and rational patterning, of integration and integrity in the masculine psyche. It stabilize chaotic emotion and out-of-control behaviors. It gives stability and centeredness. It brings calm. And in its ‘fertilizing’ and centeredness, it meditates vitality, life-force, and joy. It brings maintenance and balance. It defends our own sense of inner order, our own integrity of being and of purpose, our own central calmness about who we are, and our essential unassailability and certainty in our masculine identity.”

 The Shadow King: The Tyrant and the Weakling

“As in the case of all the archetypes, the King displays an active-passive bipolar shadow structure. We call the active pole of the Shadow King the Tyrant and the passive pole the Weakling.”

“The Tyrant exploits and abuses others. He is ruthless, merciless, and without feeling when he is pursuing what he thinks is his own self-interest. His degradation of others knows no bounds. He hates all beauty, all innocence, all strength, all talent, all life energy. He does so because he lacks inner structure, and he is afraid—terrified, really—of his own hidden weakness and his underlying lack of potency.”

“The Tyrant King manifests in all of us at some time or another when we feel pushed to the limit, when we are exhausted, when we are getting inflated.”

“The man possessed by the Tyrant is very sensitive to criticism and, though putting on a threatening front, will at the slightest remark feel weak and deflated. He won’t show you this however. What you will see, unless you know what to look for, is rage. But under the rage is a sense of worthlessness, of vulnerability and weakness, for being the Tyrant lies the other pole of the King’s bipolar shadow system, the Weakling. If he can’t be identified with the King energy, he feels he is nothing.”

“The hidden presence of this passive pole explains the hunger for mirroring—for ‘Adore me!’ ‘Worship me!’ ‘See how important I am!’”

“What parents need to so is give the Divine Child in their own child just the right amount of adoration and affirmation, so that they can let their human child down off the ‘high chair’ easily, gradually into the real world, where goes cannot live as mortal humans. The parents need to help their human baby boy learn gradually not to identify with the Divine Child. The boy may resist being dethroned, but the parents must persevere, both affirming him and ‘taking him down a peg’ at a time.”

“The Weakling…his repressed grandiosity may explode to the surface, completely raw and primitive, completely unmodulated and very powerful…This is the man for whom the saying ‘Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is entirely accurate.”

“The first task in accessing the King energy for would-be human ‘kings’ is to disidentity our Egos from it. We need to achieve what psychologists call cognitive distance from the King in both his integrated fullness and his split bipolar shadow forms.”

“The Ego feels starved for King energy. This sense if deprivation and lack of ‘ownership’ of the sources of motives for power are always features of the passive poles of the archetypes.”

“But when we are accessing the King energy correctly, as servants of our own inner King, we will manifest in our own lives the qualities of the good and rightful King, the King in his fullness. Our soldiers of fortune will drop to their knees, appropriately, before the Chinese emperor within. We will feel our anxiety level drop. We will feel centered, and calm, and hear ourselves speak from an inner authority. We will have the capacity to mirror and to bless ourselves and others…We will have a sense of being a centered participant in creating a more just, calm, and creative world. We will have a transpersonal devotion not only to our families, our friends, our companies, our causes, our religions, but also to the world. We will have some kind of spirituality, and we will know the truth of the central commandment around which all of human life seems to be based: ‘Thous shalt love the Lord they God [read ‘the King’] with all thy heart, with all they soul, and with all thy might. And they neighbor as thyself.”

The Warrior

“We also believe that this primarily masculine energy for (there are feminine Warrior myths and traditions too) persists because the Warrior is a basic building block of masculine psychology, almost certainly rooted in our genes.”

“Native American men lived and died with the Warrior energy informing even the smallest of their acts, living their lives nobly and with courage and with the capacity to endure great pain and hardship, defending their people against an overwhelming foe…”

“The Warrior energy, then, no matter what else it may be, is indeed universally present in us men and in the civilizations we create, defend, and extend. It is a vital ingredient in our world-building and plays an important role in extending the benefits of the highest human virtues and cultural achievements to all of humanity.”

“The Japanese warrior tradition claimed that there is only one position in which to face the battle of life: frontally. And it also proclaimed that there was only one direction: forward.”

“He knows through clarity of thinking, through discernment. The warrior is always alert. He is always awake. He is never sleeping through life. He knows how to focus his mind and his body.” “a warrior knows what he wants, and he knows how top get it. As a function of his clarity of mind he is a strategist and a tactician.”

“Here is a difference between the Warrior and the Hero. The man (or the boy) accessing the Hero, as we’ve said, does not know his limitations; he is romantic about his vulnerability. The warrior, however, through his clarity or thinking realistically assess his capacities and his limitations in any given situation.”

“The Warrior traditions all affirm that, in addition to training, what enables a Warrior to reach clarity of thought is living with the awareness of his own imminent death. The Warrior knows the shortness of life and how fragile it is. A man under the guidance of the Warrior knows how few his days are. Rather than depressing him this awareness leads him to an outpouring of life-force and to an intense experience of his life that is unknown to others. Every act counts. Each deed is done as if it were the last.”

“he engages life. He never withdraws from it. He doesn’t ‘think too much’ because thinking too much can lead to doubt, and doubt to hesitation, and hesitation to inaction. Inaction can lead to losing the battle. The man who is a Warrior avoids self-consciousness, as we usually define it. His actions become second nature. They become unconscious reflex actions. But they are actions he has trained for through the exercise of enormous self-discipline.”

“The Warrior energy is concerned with skill, power, and accuracy, and with control, both inner and outer, psychological and physical. The Warrior energy is concerned with training men to be ‘all that they can be’—in their thoughts, feelings, speech, and actions.”

“His control is, first of all, over his mind and his attitudes; if these are right, the body will follow…he takes responsibility for his actions, and that he has self-discipline. Discipline means that he has the rigorous to develop control and mastery over his mind and over his body, and that he has the capacity to withstand pain, both psychological and physical. He is willing to suffer to achieve what he wants to achieve.”

“The Warrior energy also shows what we can call a transpersonal commitment. His loyalty is to something—a cause, a god, a people, a task, a nation—larger than individuals, though that transpersonal loyalty maybe focused through some important person, like a king.” “The psyche of the man who is adequately accessing the Warrior is organized around his central commitment.”

“the man accessing the Warrior is ascetic. He lives a life exactly the opposite of most human lives. He lives not to gratify his personal needs and wishes or his physical appetites but to hone himself into an efficient spiritual machine, trained to bear the unbearable in the service of the transpersonal goal.”

“He is emotionally distant as long as he is in the Warrior.”

“Samurai training involved the following kind of psychological exercise. Whenever, the teaching went, you feel yourself frightened or despairing, don’t say to yourself, ‘I am afraid,’ or ‘I am despairing.’ Say ‘There is someone who is afraid,’ or ‘There is someone who is despairing. Now, what can he do about this?’ This detached way of experiencing a threatening situation objectifies the situation and allows for a clearer and more strategically advantageous view of it.”

The Shadow Warrior: The Sadist and the Masochist

“The Warrior energy’s detachment from human relationships leads to real problems.”

“There are two kinds of cruelty, cruelty without passion and cruelty with passion.”

“Along with this passion for destruction and cruelty goes a hatred of the ‘weak,’ of the helpless and vulnerable (really the Sadist’s own hidden Masochist).”

“The Warrior as avenging spirit comes into us when we are very frightened and very angry.”

The Magician [alchemy is the province of the Magician]

“The Magician is the knower and he is the master of technology. Furthermore, the man who is guided by the power of the Magician is able to fulfill Magician functions in part by his use of ritual initiatory process. He is the ‘ritual elder’ who guides the processes of transformation, both within and without.” 

“The human magician is always an initiate himself, and one of his task is to initiate others.” 

“All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy.”

“Whatever his title, his speciality is knowing something that others don’t know.” [What do you know that others don’t?]

“He understands the hidden dynamics of the human psyche and so can manipulate other human beings, for good or ill. He is the one who can effectively bless and curse. He understands the link between the unseen world of the spirits—the Divine World—and the world of human beings and nature. It is to him that people go with their questions, problems, pains, and diseases of the body and the mind.”

“The Magician archetype in a man is in his  ‘bullshit detector’; it sees through denial and exercises discernment. He sees evil for what and were it is when it masquerades as goodness as it so often does.”

“It is interesting to realize that our modern science, like the work of the ancient magicians, is also divided into two aspects. The first, ’theoretical science,’ is the knowing aspect of the Magician energy. The second, ‘applied science,’ is the technological aspect of the Magician energy, the applied knowledge of how to contain and channel power.”

“Our is, we believe, the age of the Magician, because it is a technological age. It is an age of the Magician at least in his materialistic concern with understanding and having power over nature. But in terms of nonmaterialistic, psychological, or spiritual initiatory process, the Magician energy seems to be in short supply.”

“Chaos is always the result of inadequate accessing of the Magician in some vital area of life.”

“The conclusion of both modern physics and depth psychology is that things are not what they seem. What we experience as normal reality—about ourselves and nature—is only the tip of the iceberg that arises out of an unfathomable abyss. Knowledge of this hidden realm is the province of the Magician and it is through the Magician energy that we will come to understand our lives with a degree of profundity not dreamed of for at least a thousand years of Western history.” [Yogi’s and shaman’s rule this realm]

“The power of the unconscious energies is so great that if they are not controlled, contained, and channeled, if they are not accessed at just the right moment and in just the right dose, they may blow the Ego structures to bits. Too much power without the proper ‘transformers’ and the right amount of ‘insulation’ to contain it will overload the analysand’s circuit and destroy him. The revelation of secrete information must be measured out, because there are reasons for its having been hidden form the Ego in the first place.”

“For all ritual processes and for all deep knowing and controlling of energies of any kind, the issue of ‘sacred’ space arises. Sacred space is the container of raw power—the ‘step-down transformer’ that insulates and then channels the energies that are drawn into it. It is the reactor shield in the nuclear power plant. It is the sanctuary of the church. It is the hymns and the standard prayers, the invocations and blessings, used to invoke the Divine Power, and then to shield the believers from its raw intensity while at the same time providing them access to it.”

“The Magician energy is present in the Warrior archetype in the form of his clarity of thinking.”

“The Magician is the archetype of thoughtfulness and reflection. And, because of that, it is also the energy of introversion. What we mean by introversion is not shyness or timidity but rather the capacity to detach from the inner and outer storms and to connect with deep inner truths and resources. Introverts, in this sense, live much more out of their centers than other people do. The Magician energy, in aiding the formation of the Ego-Self axis, is immovable in its stability, centeredness, and emotional detachment. It is not easily pushed and pulled around.”

The Shadow Magician: The Manipulator and the Denying “Innocent” One

“Mastery over nature, a proper function of the Magician, is running amuck, and with incalculable results that we are already beginning to feel. Behind the propaganda ministries, the controlled press briefings the censored news, the artificially orchestrated political rallies lies the face of the Magician as Manipulator.”

“A man under this Shadow doesn’t guide other, as a a Magician does; he directs them in ways they cannot see.”

“The growing complexity of law and the coded language of legal proceedings and documents—whatever else they may be intended for—clearly proclaim to the general public, ‘We in the legal profession have access to hidden knowledge that can make or break you. And after we’ve charged you an outrageous fee for our service, you may, or may not, benefit from our magic.’”

“Whenever we are detached, unrelated, and withholding when what we know could help others, whenever we use our knowledge as a weapon to belittle and control others or to bolster our status or wealth at others’ expense, we are identified with the Shadow Magician as Manipulator. We are doing black magic, damaging ourselves as well as those who could benefit from our wisdom.”

“The passive pole of the Magician’s Shadow is what we are calling the Naive, or ‘Innocent’ One. The ‘Innocent’ One is a carryover from childhood into adulthood of the passive pole of the Precocious Child’s Shadow—the Dummy.” 

“Whereas the Trickster plays his tricks in part for the sake of revealing the truth, the ‘Innocent’ One hides truth for the sake of achieving and maintaining his own precarious status.”

“The man possessed by the ‘Innocent’ One commits both sins of commission and sins of omission but hides his hostile motives behind an impenetrable wall of feigned naïveté. Such men are slippery and elusive.”

The Lover

agape, “brotherly love”; eros, erotic love; amor, the union of body and soul with another body and soul

“We believe that the Lover, by whatever name, is the primal energy pattern of what we could call vividness, aliveness, and passion. It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, well-being, reproduction, creative adaption to life’’s hardships, and ultimately a sense of meaning, without which human being cannot go on with their lives. The Lover’s drive is to satisfy those hungers.”

“The Lover archetype is primary to the psyche also because it is the energy of sensitivity to the outer environment…the ‘sensation function,’ the function of the psyche that is trained in on all the details of sensory experience, the function that notices colors and forms, sounds, tactile sensations, and smells.”

“For the man accessing the Lover, all things are bound to each other in mysterious ways. He sees, as we say, ‘the world in a grain of sand.’ This is the consciousness that knew long before the invention of the holography that we live, in fact, in a ‘holographic’ universe—one in which every part reflects every other in immediate and sympathetic union. It isn’t just that the Lover energy sees the world in a grain of sand. He feels that this is so.”

“The man under the influence of the Lover wants to touch and be touched. He wants to touch everything physically and emotionally, and he wants to be touched by everything. He recognizes no boundaries. He wants to live out the connectedness he feels with the world inside, in the context of his powerful feelings, and outside, in the context of his relationships with other people. Ultimately, he wants to experience the world of sensual experience in its totality. He has what is known as an aesthetic consciousness. He experiences everything, no matter what it is, aesthetically.”

“The man profoundly in touch with the Lover energy experiences his work, and the people on the job with him, through this aesthetic consciousness. He can ‘read’ people like a book. He is often excruciatingly sensitive to their shifts in mood and can feel their hidden motives. This can be a very painful experience indeed. The Lover is not, then, only the archetype of the joy of life. In his capacity to feel at one with others and with the world, he must also feel their pain. Other people may be able to avoid pain, but the man in touch with the Lover must endure it. He feels the painfulness of being alive—both for himself and for others. Here, we have the image of Jesus weeping—for his city, Jerusalem, for his disciples, for all of humanity—and taking the sorrows of the world upon himself as the ‘man of sorrows, one acquainted with grief,’ as the Bible says.”

“The man under the influence of the Lover does not want to stop at socially created boundaries. He stands against the artificiality of such things…Consequently, because he is opposed to ‘law,’ in this broad sense, we see enacted in his life of confrontation with the conventional the old tension between sensuality and morality, between love and duty, between, as Joseph Campbell poetically describes it, ‘amor and Roma’—‘amor’ standing for passionate experience and ‘Roma’ standing for duty and responsibility to law and order. The Lover energy is thus utterly opposed—at least at first glance—to the other energies of the mature masculine. His interests are the opposite of the Warrior’s, the Magician’s, and the King’s concerns for boundaries, containment, order, and discipline. What is true within each man’s psyche is true in the panorama of history and cultures as well.”

“psychics and mediums, people who along with artists and others live very close to the image-making unconscious, and, hence, to the Lover.”

“Any artistic or creative endeavor and almost every profession, from farming to stockbroking, from house painting to computer software designing, is drawing upon the energies of the Lover for creativity. So are connoisseurs, those men who really appreciate fine foods, wines, tobaccos, coins, primitive artifacts, and a host of other material objects. So are the so-called buffs. Steam train buffs have a sensuous, even erotic, affinity for these great, shining black ‘phalluses.’ The car-lover looking for just the right Corvette, the used-car appraiser who beings in touching and smelling the cars, in looking for the beauty and the defects beneath the rust and the soiled interiors, the ‘fan’ of a particular literary genre or rock group—all these are accessing the Lover. The connoisseur or rich coffees, of chocolates; the antique dealer who cherishes a Ming vase, turning it over and over in his hands—the Lover is expressing himself through them all…All of us, when we stop doing and just let ourselves be and feel without the pressure to perform, when we ‘stop to smell the roses,’ are feeling the Lover.”

The Shadow Lover: The Addicted and the Impotent Lover

“In his lostness—within and with“The Addicted Lover asks: ‘Why should I put any limits on my sensual and sexual experience of this vast world, a world that holds unending pleasures for me?’”

“A man possessed by the Shadow Lover becomes literally lost in an ocean of the sense, not just ‘in sunsets,’ or ‘in reverie.’ The slightest impressions form the outer world are enough to pull him off center…Pulled first one way and then another, he is not the master of his own fate. He becomes the victim of his own sensitivity. He becomes enmeshed in the world of sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations.”

“we are unable to disincarnate”

“out—the victim of the active pole of the Shadow Lover is eternally restless. This is the man who is always searching for something. He doesn’t know what it is he’s looking for, but he’s the cowboy at the end of the movie riding off alone into the sunset seeking some other excitement, some other adventure, unable to settle down. He has an insatiable hunger to experience some vague something that is just over the next hill. He is compelled to extend the frontiers not of knowledge (for that would be liberating for him) but of his sensuality, no matter what the cost to the mortal man who badly needs, as all mortal men do, merely human happiness. This is James Bond and Indiana Jobs loving and leading to love again, and leave again.”

“Monogamy can be seen as the product of a man’s own deep rootedness and centeredness. He is bounded, not by external rules but by his own inner structures, his own sense of his masculine well being and calm, and his own inner joy.”

“The restlessness of the man under the power of the Addict is an expression of his search for a way out of the spider’s web. The man who is possessed by the web of maya is twisting and turning, frantically struggling to find a way out of the world…What the Addict is seeking (though he doesn’t know it) is the ultimate and continuous ‘orgasm,’ the ultimate and continuous ‘high.’”

“…boundaries, constructed with heroic effort, are what a man possessed by the Addict needs most. He doesn’t need more oneness with all things. He’s already got too much of that. What he needs is distance and detachment.”

“What happens if we feel that we are out of touch with the Lover in his fullness? We are then possessed by the Impotent Lover. We will experience our lives in an unfeeling way. We will ‘feel’ the sterility and flatness the accountant reported. We will describe symptoms that psychologists call ‘flattened affect’—lack of enthusiasm, lack of vividness, lack of aliveness. We will feel bored and listless…Everything may begin to feel like the passage in the biblical book of Ecclesiastes that declares, ‘All is vanity, and a striving after wind,’ and ‘There is nothing new under the sun.’ In short, we will become depressed.”

Accessing the Lover: “The King, The Warrior, and the Magician…harmonize pretty well with each other. They do so because, without the Lover, they are all essentially detached from life. They need the Lover to energize them, to humanize them, and to give them their ultimate purpose—love. They need the Lover to keep them from becoming sadistic.”

“The Lover without boundaries…needs the King to define limits for him, to give him structure, to order his chaos so that it can be channeled creatively…The Lover needs the Warrior in order to be able to act decisively, in order to detach, with the clean cut of the sword, from the web of immobilizing sensuality…The Lover need the Magician to help him back off from the ensnaring effect of his emotions, in order to reflect, to get more objective perspective on things, to disconnect…”

Accessing the Archetypal Powers of the Mature Masculine

“At least there were at one time sacred kings, upon whom the men in the realm could project their inner King and thus activate this masculine energy form indirectly in themselves.[Enter fake kings like Andrew Tate, Liver King] Certainly, for both good and ill, there was a time when the Warrior energy was active and effective in shaping the lives of men and the civilizations they built. And, though always the prerogative of only a few, the Magician was available to help individual men with their problems and to gain for the society some control over the unpredictable world of nature. And the Lover was also held in high regard in the cultures that celebrated seers and prophets, cave painters and poets. All that is changed now, cashed in for personal wealth and self-aggrandizement, the current of the day.”

“It is a strange irony that at the very moment when all of civilization seems to be nearing its greatest initiation every—from a fragmented, tribal way of life to a more whole, more universal life—that just at this moment, the ritual processes for turning boys into men have all but disappeared from the planet.”

“The evolutionary process has placed the powerful resources of the four masculine archetypes within every man and has called upon them in different periods of human history to solve difficult problems and to dare the unthinkable—to organize law out of chaos, to stimulate enormous outpourings of creativity and generatively (like those that produced early civilizations), to gain some capacity to steward nature, both inner and outer, and to arouse tender appreciation and relatedness. Perhaps this growth process of our species has also arranged for the radical internalizing and psychologizing of these forces in modern men.”

“The first step in doing this, for each of us, is critical self-appraisal. We have said that there is no use asking ourselves if the negative or shadow sides of the archetypes are showing up in our lives. The realistic, honest question we need to ask is how they are manifesting. Let us remember that the key to maturity, to moving from Boy psychology to Man psychology, is to become humble, to be grasped by humility. Humility is not humiliation.”

Active Imagination Dialogue: “In the first of these techniques, called in psychology active imagination dialogue, the conscious Ego enters into dialogue with various unconscious entities, other consciousnesses, other points of view within us. Behind these different points of view, sometimes in obscure ways, lie the archetypes—in both their positive and their negative forms. We all dialogue with ourselves always, but usually inefficiently, when we ‘talk to ourselves.’ It’s a joke, of course, that says, ‘It’s OK to talk to yourself, as long as you don’t answer.’ But we do answer ourselves. And we do it all the time. We answer ourselves sometimes verbally, out loud, or in our heads. Often, though, we answer ourselves through the events and people that ‘happen’ into our lives without our conscious willing or intention. We answer ourselves too by acting out a point of view our an attitude that we consciously abhor.”

Invocation: “A second technique we call invocation. This time we access the masculine archetypes in their fullness as positive energy forms…We all live our psychological lives unintentionally, for the most part, invoking images and thoughts that may or may not be helpful to us. Our minds are cluttered with signs, sounds, and words, many of which are unwanted. To see the truth of this, just close your eyes for a moment. Images will present themselves in the darkness, and thoughts, barely audible to the inner ‘ear,’ will grow into your mind. If active imagination dialogue is a conscious, focused way of talking to yourself, invocation is a conscious, focused way of calling up the images you want to see. Imaging deeply affects our moods, our attitudes, the way we look at things, and what we do. It is therefore important what thoughts and images we are invoking in our lives.”

“It is often useful to spend some time looking for images of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, the Lover. Use those images in your invocations.” “Call up the King inside yourself. Seek to merge your deep conscious with him. Realize that you (as an Ego) are different from him. In your imagination, make your Ego his servant. Feel his calm and his strength, his balanced benevolence toward you, his watching over you.”