Takeaway

• The disappearance of the father from the home, the end of male initiation rites, and the mainstream idea of toxic masculinity have prevented men from evolving from boyhood to manhood.
• In this day and age, men cannot count on anyone but themselves to do the work tribes and rituals used to do: the initiation into manhood.
• Manhood can be accessed within. There exists inside the mind four archetypes (universal images) that embody the ultimate masculine identity.
• These are the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover.
• The King orders his kingdom, blesses his people, and gives it children.
• The Warrior pushes forward aggressively.
• The Magician learns a great deal about everything.
• The Lover seeks sensation and connectedness with all things in life.
• You can access these images through inner dialogue with the “voices” in your head, invocation, mimicking great men, or acting “as if”.

What King, Warrior, Magician, Lover Talks About

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover is a book written by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. It details the roots of the current gender identity crisis Western society is going through and explains how men can reconnect with their inner Masculine identity. By connecting to the archetypal images of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover that live inside their minds, men can draw on these life forces and examples that will help them be masculine men.

GREAT BOOK!

The authors did a good job of explaining what archetypal images are, where they live in the mind, and how to access them.

You realize how true the book is when you see your own (crappy) behavior detailed by the authors.

While Models and No More Mr. Nice Guy are great books too, they never explain how men can change their behaviors and become who they are.

They remain superficial: dress well, talk to girls. It won’t be enough for most people.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover does the job these books didn’t do.

9/10.

I give it a 9 because the explanation of how to access the images could have been more elaborated.

Get the book here!

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Short Summary of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

We no longer know what it means to be masculine and feminine for three reasons:

1. The father has disappeared (divorce, etc) which prevents the sons from becoming men and the daughters from learning how to relate to men.
2. There are no longer any rituals that transform boys into men.
3. The patriarchy has been an abusive system because operated by boys, not men.

The path from boyhood to manhood consists of integrating various parts of one’s personality, culminating with a ritual event guided by an old wise man. The boy’s Ego dies and he becomes a man.

Lack of mentors on the one hand and rituals on the other, make it difficult for boys to become fully integrated men.

Luckily, all men have inside their psyche an archetypal image of the masculine. By reconnecting to these images, men can draw on the healthy masculine energy that makes them fully masculine men.

There are four healthy boy archetypes that each have their Shadow active and passive poles; and four healthy men archetypes that each have their Shadow active and passive poles.

The boy archetypes cannot be erased; rather, they provide a base to transcend to access the adult archetypes.

The boy archetypes are:

• The Divine Child: like Jesus, he’s powerful and fragile. He needs protection from the armies that want to kill him.
  • The High Chair Tyrant: the love and care he receives are never enough, so he rejects them, thereby destroying the very thing he needs. Icarus’ story, pathological narcissism.
  • The Weakling Prince: overprotected, he needs constant care and everything is too much for him.
• The Precocious Child: he wants to know everything.
  • The Trickster: envious, he wants to destroy those he sees as better than him. He pretends he is better than he actually is, tricks people then laughs about it.
  • The Dummy: he pretends he doesn’t understand anything while in fact, he just thinks of himself as too good to reveal who he is.
• The Oedipal Child: he seeks connection to the Great Mother whose love and nurture he needs.
  • The Mama’s Boy: obsessed with getting women’s love, he suffers from Don Juan’s syndrome.
  • The Dreamer: he dreams of love and relationships with real people but doesn’t go and get them and as a result, develops relationships with intangible things.
• The Hero: he conquers and thinks of himself as invincible and immortal, but he doesn’t know what to do with what he conquered. The function is to break the bond with the mother and become courageous enough to fight off the villains of life.
  • The Grandstander Bully: he gets enraged when his “rightful” place at the center gets challenged. He mainly seeks to impress others.
  • The Coward: he doesn’t stand up for himself and lets himself be abused until he snaps and moves to the Grandstander Bully.

The Hero dies when he encounters humility (knowing one’s limits + asking for help)

• The King: he has two functions: order, and fertility and blessing. The King brings order to his kingdom through the Word. He gives blessing (aka validation) and fertility (children) to the land of his kingdom (the Queen). When the King falls ill, so does his kingdom.
  • The Tyrant: he identifies with the archetype and refuses to give up power. He fears the youth and vigor of his children that he keeps on belittling.
  • The Weakling: Uncentered, and dependent on attention, he underlies the Tyrant who attacks anyone he projects his weakness on.
• The Warrior: aggressive, aware of his death, and with a clear mind, the Warrior trains for skill, power, and accuracy. He pushes things forward, he’s courageous and takes responsibility. His loyal to someone and doesn’t commit to women.
  • The Sadist: he is afraid of being swallowed by the feminine as he does not yet trust his own abilities. He enjoys destroying what he sees as soft and feminine because he’s scared of it.
  • The Masochist: they abuse themselves hoping this will increase their sense of self-worth. They’re not confident so they seek confidence in something external (work -> workaholics, women -> sex addicts, etc). They project their warrior energy onto other people and rely on them for everything.
• The Magician: he knows what others don’t, and can exploit knowledge and technology.
  • The Detached Manipulator: he plays with information for personal gains and manipulates others without them knowing.
  • The Denying Innocent One: he wants the power of the Magician without making the effort of learning. He’s envious of people better and will sabotage them.
• The Lover: he realizes everything is connected to everything and connects to them too. He rejects boundaries and seeks passion in life. He wants to experience the world and all of its senses. He gives meaning to life.
  • The Addicted Lover: he seeks the love of the Great Mother which is never enough for him. He has no boundaries and won’t accept any.
  • The Impotent Lover: he lacks liveliness and becomes depressed, alienated from everyone.

You can access these archetypes with four different techniques:

1. Active imagination dialogue: engage those “voices” in your head live or through writing. Understand they just want to be noticed and understood, and that they won’t bother you anymore after that.
2. Invocation: choose an image representing an archetype and asks it to give you the power of the archetype within you.
3. Admiring Men: read biographies of great men that embodied one or several archetypes well.
4. Acting “as if”: fake it till’ you make it.

Table of Content

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Summary of King, Warrior, Magician, Lover Written by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette

Introduction

In the late twentieth century, we face a crisis in masculine identity of vast proportions.

We’ve lost what it means to be feminine and masculine and so people are confused regarding their own gender.

Three reasons explain this.

1. The disappearance of men

The disappearance of the father is traumatic for both women and children.

The weak or absent father cripples both his daughters’ and his sons’ ability to achieve their own gender identity and to relate in an intimate and positive way with members both of their own sex and the opposite sex.

2. The disappearance of ritual processes to initiate boys into manhood

These rituals have disappeared partly due to the Protestant reform and the Enlightenment, and have led to pseudo-initiations that fail to initiate boys into manhood. As a result, they remain boys.

Boy psychology is everywhere around us, and its marks are easy to see.

• Abusive and violent behaviors.
• Passivity and weakness
• Both at once

3. The bad reputation of the patriarchy

The patriarchy is the social and cultural organization that has been ruling over the world from at least the second millennium B.C.E. to the present.

The feminists saw the patriarchy as an abusive system to women that subsequently needed to be deconstructed. In their eyes, the masculine identity is necessarily abusive.

However, this is incorrect. The patriarchy (defined as an abusive system to women) isn’t the expression of the male psychology but of the boy psychology – the immature masculine.

The boy fears both women and adult men.

The patriarchal male does not welcome the full masculine development of his sons or his male subordinates any more than he welcomes the full development of his daughters, or his female employees.

This is the manager at the office that cannot handle when someone is better than he is.

Men don’t struggle to connect to their inner feminine: they struggle to connect to their inner masculine, partly because of the patriarchy, partly because of the feminist’s criticism, and partly because of the lack of a masculine transformative rite.

By reconnecting with these strong masculine archetypes, many men are stuck in boy psychology managed to enter adult man psychology.

We don’t need less masculinity. We need more.

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.

That’s what this book is about.

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Part I: From Boy Psychology to Man Psychology

1. The Crisis in Masculine Ritual Process

Sometimes we see men who “can’t get themselves together.” They’re fragmented; various parts of their personality are split off from one another and lead independent and chaotic lives.

No one has led him into direct and healing experiences of the inner world of the masculine potentials.

The evolution from boyhood to manhood can be understood as the attempt to move from a lower form of life experience and consciousness to a higher (deeper) level of consciousness; from a diffuse identity to a more consolidated and structured identity.

Our society has pseudo-rituals called pseudo-events. The “pseudo” comes from the fact that the type of masculinity the boy is taught is false and skewed (military, gang initiation, etc).

If the boy wants to become a man, there needs to be a symbolic death.

Death—symbolic, psychological, or spiritual—is always a vital part of any initiatory ritual.

The Boy Ego (the boy’s way of doing, thinking, and being) must die.

The second reason why our rituals are pseudo is that there is neither a sacred space nor an old wise man in which trust is total and who can guide the boy.

As a result, it’s every man for himself today, and most of us, ignorant about what to do and how, fail.

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2. Masculine Potentials

According to Jung, the masculine essence exists in every man. They’re called “primordial images.”

The psyche of every person is grounded in what’s called “the unconscious collective”, made up of patterns and energy inherited from our ancestors. These archetypes provide the foundation of our behavior.

Eg: ducks instinctively bond with whoever is near them when they hatch. This is the caretaker archetype.

We have similar archetypes for “mother” and “father”. When our actual parents don’t fulfill their archetypal roles well, we end up with psychological problems.

The existence of archetypal images has been documented and proven. We can find them in mythologies and religions across all people.

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3. Boy Psychology

Consider the following people:

• The drug dealer
• The wife beater
• The “crabby” boss
• The company “yes-man”

All these people are boys pretending to be men because nobody showed them how to become men. They’re governed by the boyhood blueprints, not the manhood ones.

Each of the archetypal energy potentials (both mature and immature) in the male psyche is made out of three parts.

At the top, the archetype is in its fullness. At the bottom, the archetype is experienced in a bipolar dysfunction, also called shadow form. This form is immature because the psychological condition has not well been integrated.

Lack of cohesion in the psyche is always a symptom of inadequate development.

Growing up means integrating the poles of these shadow forms (Aure’s Note: read Meeting the Shadow).

When you stand at the bottom of the pyramid, you can easily switch to the other side. As a result, men rarely suffer from the active or passive pole: they switch from one to the other.

Eg: A High Chair Tyrant can quickly become a Weakling Prince and the other way around.

Different archetypes come at different stages of life. The first archetype of the immature masculine is the Divine Child. The Precious and Oedipal children are next, followed by the Hero.

Each of these archetypes gives rise to the mature archetypes.

• The Divine Child -> the King
• The Precocious Child -> the Magician
• The Oedipal Child -> the Lover
• The Hero -> the Warrior

The boyish archetypes do not disappear – they’re transcended and built upon.

The Divine Child

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

Image: Jesus being born, worshipped by the angels and the Magi. He is extremely powerful (he’s the awaited King) yet extremely fragile – and needs protection.

Such a story exists in most mythologies.

• Moses, for the Jews
• Zoroaster, for the Persians
• Sargon of Akkad, in Mesopotamia
• Baby Buddha, in India-Nepal
• Baby Krishna, in India
• Baby Dionysus, in Greece

These stories are universal because the Divine Child is a psychological archetype living inside ourselves.

When men get better, they often dream of a newly born baby. And as in the stories, the current King (Herod, for Jesus) wants to kill the new King -> change is hard and the beginning of change should be protected because it is threatened!

The High Chair Tyrant

Image: the baby in his high chair screaming and crying for food and attention.

Like Jesus, he’s powerful and needs care, but the care he receives is never enough. As a result, he hurts himself by rejecting the very things he needs.

Characteristics of the High Chair Tyrant:

• Arrogance
• Childishness
• Irresponsibility

Psychologists call this pathological narcissism. The boy needs to learn he is not the center of the universe.

The HCT archetype can still rule through the Shadow King in adulthood. Eg: the promising CEO who shoots himself in the foot. It’s Icarus’ story.

The more we rise in a hierarchy, the likelier we are to fall due to arrogance.

Then there’s the perfectionist.

The Perfectionist is the High Chair Tyrant who attacks his human host.

He gets angry at himself (just like his mother did) when he cannot meet his unrealistic demands.

The Tyrant pressures a man for more and better performance and is never satisfied with what he produces. The unfortunate man becomes the slave (as the mother was) of the grandiose two-year-old inside of him.

The pressure is such that the perfectionist eventually gets sick and dies, death being his only way out.

When the Tyrant cannot be controlled, he becomes Hitler, Stalin, or Caligula.

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.

He needs constant care, and everything is too much for him.

He tends to be the overprotected one in the family.

He’s the polar opposite of the HCT.

Accessing the Divine Child

In order to access the Divine Child appropriately, we need to acknowledge him, but not identify with him.

We need to love and accept his creativity and the beauty of his primal aspect to utilize them. Unfortunately, many therapists depreciate the Divine Child which is too bad as what the patients really need is to get in touch with him.

Grandiose is good as it implies success. Failure, indeed, is often “normalcy” aka “average” -> the need to honor the Divine Child.

The Precocious Child

The Precocious Child manifests in a boy when he is eager to learn.

The boy (and later the man) want to know the “why” of everything.

The Precocious Child is the origin of our curiosity and our adventurous impulses. He urges us to be explorers and pioneers of the unknown, the strange and mysterious.

The Know-It-All Trickster

He is expert at creating appearances, and then “selling” us on those appearances.

He makes you trust him then betrays you and laughs at you for it.

The Know-It-All man who is still possessed by this infantile shadow form of the Precocious Child wears his superiority (…) and displays it in his “I’m too busy and too important to talk with you now” attitude.

The man caught in this persona deceives himself and others about the depth of his knowledge and his level of importance.

His only positive side is that his arrogance enables him to deflate the ego of other people. He’s the Fool in the king’s court who reminds everyone of their own mortality.

The Trickster has no friends, as he alienates the very people he needs the support of.

Though its purpose in its positive mode seems to be to expose lies, if it is left unchecked, it moves into its negative side and becomes destructive of oneself and others.

The Trickster doesn’t want to do anything, he just wants to be. He’s passive-aggressive.

This is the energy form that seeks the fall of great men, that delights in the destruction of a man of importance.

But the Trickster doesn’t want this man’s responsibilities. He just wants to destroy him. This is why he doesn’t like authority. He is condemned to forever be on the outskirts of life, never taking responsibility.

His energy comes from envy.

The less a man is in touch with his true talents and abilities, the more he will envy others.

When we envy a lot, we are denying our own greatness. We need to get more in touch with ourselves as envy kills creativity.

The Trickster is the archetype that fills the space left due to the lack of connection to the Divine Child.

It gets activated when we are attacked or depreciated for who we are.

The Know-It-All Trickster has no heroes, because to have heroes is to admire others.

We can only admire others if we have a sense of our own worthiness.

The Dummy

The naive Dummy lacks personality, vigor, creativity, and energy. He can’t learn anything and doesn’t understand jokes.

His ineptitude, however, is often faked. He understands more than he shows. He may feel himself as too important to reveal who he is to the world. As a result, he is also a Trickster.

The Oedipal Child

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.

While the Oedipal Child may lack the nurturing of the masculine, he can access its qualities.

He is passionate and has a sense of wonder and a deep appreciation for connectedness with his inner depths, with others, and with all things.

He is also in touch with spirituality, which comes from his yearning for mother. Not his real mother – she will disappoint him many times – but the Great Mother from the beyond (what the Greeks call eros).

Men should relieve their actual mothers from the role of the Great Mother that they cannot fulfill, and connect to the Great Mother instead.

The Mama’s Boy

The Mama’s Boy fantasizes about marrying his mother and taking her away from the father, especially when the father is absent or weak.

Freud came up with the term Oedipus complex.

Oedipus was the child of King Laius and Jocasta. A prophecy said he would kill his father, so the couple abandoned the baby in the forest where he was expected to die. Obviously, he was rescued by a shepherd.

He grew up and as he was walking on the road one day, he got into a fight with a chariot driver and killed him, without knowing that the victim was his father.

He went to Thebes and learned that the queen (his mother) was looking for a new husband. He married her. The truth was only uncovered years later, and Oedipus was cast out by the gods for his pretension to godhood. Moral of the story: Boys who are too bound to the Mother get hurt.

The Mama’s Boy is seeking the union with the Great Mother hence no mortal woman will ever satisfy him -> Don Juan syndrome.

These men often masturbate compulsively, using pornography in their search for the Great Mother.

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 Mama’s Boy just wants to be, he doesn’t want to do the required sacrifice to have an actual relationship with a woman.

He doesn’t want to take responsibility.

The Dreamer

The Dreamer causes a boy to feel isolated and cut off from all human relationships (…) relationships are with intangible things and with the world of the imagination within him.

While other boys play, he sits on a bench and dreams. While the Mama’s Boy seeks the Great Mother, the Dreamer shows he’s failing at finding her.

The Hero

It is generally assumed that the heroic approach to life, or to a task, is the noblest, but this is only partly true.

The Hero is the most advanced form of boy psychology usually expressed in teenagehood.

However, it remains immature and will prevent men from reaching maturity in adulthood.

The Grandstander Bully

The boy (or man) under the power of the Bully intends to impress others. His strategies are designed to proclaim his superiority and his right to dominate those around him.

If his “rightful” place centerstage is challenged, he gets enraged. As a result, he’s a loner.

He’s a hot-shot junior executive, salesman, revolutionary, stock market manipulator. He’s the soldier who takes unnecessary risks in combat and, if he’s in a position of leadership, requires the same of his men.

He has an inflated sense of his skills and importance. He thinks he can do the impossible but he eventually shoots himself in the foot.

The Hero is tied to the mother; he needs to overcome her.

He is locked in mortal combat with the feminine, striving to conquer it and to assert his masculinity.

Fairytales never talk about what happens when the hero marries the princess because he doesn’t know what to do with her. He’s incapable of admitting that and fails as a result. This echoes the nature of Western Culture.

The only thing we know how to do is conquer; we don’t know what to do when everything has been conquered.

Our modern worldview has serious difficulty facing human limitations.

Sooner or later, we pay the price of playing god.

The Coward

The boy possessed by the Coward, the other pole of the Hero’s bipolar Shadow, shows an extreme reluctance to stand up for himself in physical confrontations.

He will also tend to let himself be bullied emotionally and intellectually.

When someone insists, the boy caves in.

He will feel invaded and run-over, like a doormat.

Once he’ll have had enough, he’ll switch to the Grandstander Bully.

What’s the Hero’s function? The Hero mobilizes the ego to help it break up with the Mother and face the difficult tasks that life assigns him.

The Hero calls on the masculine energies to face off against the villains of the world.

The Hero enables the boy to begin to assert himself and define himself as distinct from all others, so that ultimately, as a distinct being, he can relate to them fully and creatively.

The Hero pushes the boy beyond his limits.

We live in a world where sadly, the manifestation of the Hero is attacked by friends, family, etc due to pure envy.

We need a great rebirth of the heroic in our world. Every sector of human society, wherever that may be on the planet, seems to be slipping into an unconscious chaos.

Only a massive rebirth of courage in both men and women will rescue the world.

The end of the Hero is death followed by resurrection and access to heaven (Eg: Jesus).

His death, really, is the death of boyhood and the birth of manhood.

The “death” of the Hero (…) means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself.

Death is the Hero’s encounter with true humility, that is:

1. Knowing his limits
2. Getting the help he needs

Being possessed by the hero means living the Grandstander Bully.

We will walk over others in our insensitivity and arrogance, and eventually we will self-destruct, ridiculed and cast out by others.

But if we access the energies of the Hero in the right way, we will be able to transition to manhood.

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4. Man Psychology

It is enormously difficult for a human being to develop to full potential.

The boy within us exercises gravity to keep us in infancy, making it hard to “fly” to manhood.

We need (…) to build the pyramids of first boyhood and then manhood that constitute the core structures of our masculine Selves.

We need to build manhood on the structure of boyhood.

The four major forms of mature masculine energies are the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. They overlap and enrich one another.

Eg: a good King is also a good Warrior, Magician, and Lover.

They’re all archetypes that live in every man’s psyche.

The archetypes are mysterious entities or energy flows. They have been compared to a magnet beneath a sheet of paper.

They’re hidden, but we experience them. The myth, songs, paintings, etc always give a hint of their existence.

These archetypes act a bit like board members from a board chaired by our Ego.

We need to listen to them and then make a decision.

Man psychology is rare. The tough context in which people have grown (abuse, trauma, etc) stunted their growth. Most remain stuck in boy psychology. The role of philosophy and theology is to explain why that is so.

Psychologists have the following saying: “take responsibility for what you are not responsible for”.

That is, whatever traumas you got which weren’t your faults, will have to be fixed by you.

Institutions used to take care of these through rituals and ceremonies. Since it no longer is the case, we need to take care of it ourselves -> we live in the psychological age.

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Part II: Decoding the Male Psyche—The Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

5. The King

The King energy is primal in all men (…) It comes first in importance, and it underlies and includes the rest of the archetypes in perfect balance.

The King is also a good Warrior, Lover, and Magician. He’s a bit like the Divine Child, just more selfless.

While the Divine Child (especially the HCT) has godhood ambitions, the King is closer to being God.

He is the primordial man, embodying the Father energy.

However, he is more extensive and basic than the Father.

Historically, the King was sacred, but the man who embodied him was not. Function ≠ man.

He was often killed when his ability to embody his role was failing, and a new one came -> death and resurrection of Christ -> those who become possessed by the King energy will die prematurely.

The King is the central archetype around which the psyche is organized.

He is the one who grants the boy access to manhood.

The Two Functions of the King in His Fullness

Two functions of the King help the boy become a man:

1. Order
2. Fertility and blessing

Order

The King sits in his realm where he transforms chaos into order.

In religion (Egyptian, Judaism, Christianity, etc), Kings transform chaos into order using the Word -> words define our reality.

In this sense, at least, words make our reality and make our universe real.

The King gives a structure to the world through the map (all maps across cultures were divided into four parts) and through the law.

To become King, the man must first live according to the order (the law) before seeking to enforce it onto his people.

As long as the King respects the law given to him by the Gods, all go well in his kingdom. If he does not, the kingdom will be in trouble.

Practically, this translates to fatherless families, confronted with chaos.

Blessing and Fertility

Ancient peoples always associated fertility with the creative ordering of things by the gods.

Before that, fertility was associated with the feminine, but as the patriarchy developed, it came to be associated with the masculine. This was not an easy shift, and it never completely worked out.

Ancient cultures recognized that technically, fertility was the result of the association of male and female. But culturally, it was mostly given by the masculine.

In Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, the world comes from God, a masculine god. In mythology, male gods proactively engage in sexual relations with goddesses, and mortals.

King David had many children from many women.

The point is that as these men prospered physically and psychologically, so did their tribes and their realms. The mortal king, so goes the mythology, was the embodiment of the King energy.

The land was the symbol of feminine energy, to which the King was “married”

The King married the Queen to give his kingdom children. The kingdom mirrored the generativity of the royal couples. When the King became sick, the country weakened.

Blessing was the acknowledgment of the value of something. The King gave his people an audience and gave them his blessing. Blessing is extremely important. Our biology changes when we receive praise or feel valued.

Young men today are starving for blessing from older men, starving for blessing from the King energy.

Blessing heals and makes one whole.

The King archetype in its fullness possesses the qualities of order, of reasonable and rational patterning, of integration and integrity in the masculine psyche.

• It stabilizes chaotic emotions and out-of-control behaviors.
• It gives stability and centeredness.
• It brings calm.
• It mediates vitality, life, force, and joy.
• It brings maintenance and balance.
• It defends the sense of inner order, the integrity of being and of purpose, and the central calmness about who we are.
• It looks upon the world with a firm but kindly eye.
• It sees others in all their weakness and in all their talent and worth.
• It honors them and promotes them.
• It guides them and nurtures them toward their own fullness of being.
• It is not envious, because it is secure, as the King knows its own worth.
• It rewards and encourages creativity in us and in others.

The Shadow King: The Tyrant and the Weakling

We’ve all experienced a tiny bit of this King Masculine energy but most of what we have experienced was the Shadow King energy.

The Shadow King archetype has a bipolar active-passive structure: the Tyrant, and the Weakling.

The Tyrant

In the Bible, Herod sends his army to kill every newborn when he learns Jesus, a new King, was born. He’s the Tyrant. The Tyrant in us feels threatened by the new life that comes to “take our place”.

The Tyrant King is destructive rather than creative.

If he was secure in his position, he would understand his need to step aside and would have been happy to give the kingdom to Jesus.

It is the Shadow King as Tyrant in the father who makes war on his sons’ (and his daughters’) joy and strength, their abilities and vitality. He fears their freshness, their newness of being, and the life force surging through them, and he seeks to kill it.

He insults them or ignores them, both being a way to alter their development.

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 doesn’t show it though. Behind his rage lies weakness and vulnerability: the Weakling.

The Weakling

The presence of the Weakling explains the need for attention and validation that the Tyrant has.

We can often feel this from our bosses or friends.

This explains their angry outbursts and their attacks on those they see as weak, that is, those upon whom they project their own inner Weakling.

The man possessed by the Weakling lacks centeredness, calmness, and security within himself, and this also leads him into paranoia.

Paranoia destroys calmness, orderliness, and character, and invites retaliation.

The Shadow King is formed when parents give either too much attention and adoration to their child, or not enough by means of abuse and attack on his grandiosity.

The Tyrant King/Weakling are split in his subconscious. These men seem like nice guys at first then unexpectedly become tyrants.

Accessing the King

The relation to an archetype is the same as the relationship between a star and a planet. The planet needs the star and “serves” the star, it doesn’t identify with the star.

Likewise, you can access the King energy by disidentifying your ego from it.

The Ego of the mature man (…) needs to think of itself as a steward of the King energy, not for the benefit of itself, but for the benefit of those within its “realm,” whatever that may be.

If the ego identifies with the archetype, it inflates and becomes fixated, which prevents the person from growing. If it disidentifies too much, it cuts itself from access to the archetype.

Too much (dis)identification sends the person back and forth between the active and passive poles of the archetype.

Eg:

• The Shadow King rises when the ego identifies too much with the King (in myth, trouble arises when someone wants to take the place of a god). This is the Usurpation Syndrome: the ego takes the place of the god.
• The Weakling arises when we lose touch with the King energy within and project it onto other people. This is the dependent personality disorder.

We experience ourselves as impotent, as incapable of acting, incapable of feeling calm and stable, without the presence and the loving attention of that other person who is carrying our King energy projection.

When we are out of touch with our own inner King and give the power over our lives to others, we may be courting catastrophe on a scale larger than the personal.

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.

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6. The Warrior

The Warrior is a controversial form of energy because of the damage (wars) it has created.

The people that seek to cut themselves from this energy usually find it back in unexpected places at unexpected times (sudden rage, etc).

We can’t ever cut ourselves from an archetype, we can only bury it, which creates far worse consequences.

Violence is still very much prevalent in our society:

• Video games
• Movies
• Wars
• Crimes

The Warrior as an icon existed in all societies that ever walked the earth. They didn’t only fight; they achieved stuff by defending their kingdom or expanding it.

The Warrior energy 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 Warrior in His Fullness

The characteristics of the Warrior in his fullness amount to a total way of life, what the samurai called a do (pronounced “dough”). These characteristics constitute the Warrior’s Dharma, Ma’at, or Tao, a spiritual or psychological path through life.

The characteristics of the Warrior are clarity of mind, awareness of one’s death, and aggressiveness.

Aggressiveness is a stance toward life that rouses, energizes, and motivates.

It pushes us forward. The Japanese believed that there is only one way to face life’s battles (frontally) and one way to take: forward.

The Warrior knows the amount of aggressiveness to use because he knows his limitations, unlike the boy Hero.

The Warrior knows life is short,

This sense of the imminence of death energizes the man accessing the Warrior energy to take decisive action.

The Warrior trains for skill, power, and accuracy. He has a positive mental attitude. He’s courageous, takes responsibility for his actions, and has self-discipline.

He is loyal to someone or something (a people, a god, a king, etc).

Warriors don’t marry women for love, but for fun. Their true love is their work.

The Shadow Warrior: The Sadist and the Masochist

Detachment from the Warrior is dangerous as it usually happens as a result of repressing one’s feelings.

You want to have your mind under control, not detached. Otherwise, cruelty will sneak back in unexpected moments.

There are two types of cruelty: cruelty with passion and cruelty without.

The Nazis trained the SS to care for a puppy then to kill it at an arbitrary moment: it was cruelty without passion.

Then there is the passionate cruelty, like the God of the Old Testament that destroys civilizations.

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

This passion for destruction and cruelty accompanies a hatred of the “weak”, which is the Sadist’s own Masochist.

The Shadow Warrior is related to the Hero.

He carries into adulthood the adolescent insecurity, violent emotionalism, and desperation as he seeks to resist the overwhelming power of the feminine which evokes the masochistic (or cowardly) pole of the Hero’s dysfunctional Shadow.

The man under the influence of the Shadow Warrior’s bipolarity, unsure of his legitimate phallic power, is still battling against what he experiences as the inordinately powerful feminine and against everything supposedly “soft” and relational.

He’s terrified he will be swallowed by it.

People with compulsive personality disorder (workaholics) are often Shadow Warriors. Their addiction comes from deep anxiety, the Hero’s desperation.

They have a very slim grasp on a sense of their own worthwhileness. They don’t know what it is they really want, what they are missing and would like to have. They spend their lives “attacking” everything and everyone— their jobs, the life-tasks before them, themselves, and others. In the process, they are eaten alive by the Sadistic Warrior and soon reach “burnout.”

They can’t measure up to their own standards so they abuse themselves.

Soldiers, revolutionaries, and activists often fall into the sadistic pole of the Shadow Warrior.

We become what we hate.

Leaders of revolutions always become the tyrants they have ousted.

If we are not confident in ourselves enough, we will rely on some external proof to reinforce it.

The man who becomes obsessed with “succeeding” has already failed. He is desperately trying to repress the Masochist within him, yet he is already displaying masochistic and self-punishing behaviors.

The Masochist is the passive pole of the Warrior’s Shadow, that “pushover” and “whipped puppy” that lies just beneath the Sadist’s rageful displays.

The Masochist projects warrior energy onto other people and experiences himself as powerless.

The man possessed by the Masochist is unable to defend himself psychologically; he allows others (and himself) to push him around, to exceed the limits of what h