#1. King

The King energy is primal in all men.
In old civilizations and traditions, the king provides order, fertility, and blessing.

It bears the same relationship to the other three mature masculine potentials as the Divine Child does to the other three immature masculine energies.
It comes first in importance, and it underlies and includes the rest of the archetypes in perfect balance. The good and generative King is also a good Warrior, a positive Magician, and a great Lover. And yet, with most of us, the King comes on line last.
We could say that the King is the Divine Child, but seasoned and complex, wise. and in a sense as selfless as the Divine Child is cosmically self-involved.

The king is:

Centered
Decisive
A man of integrity
A protector of his realm
A provider

This is how the authors describe the king:

It stabilizes chaotic emotion and out-of-control behaviors. It gives stability and centeredness. It brings calm. And in its “fertilizing” and centeredness, it mediates 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. 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, in its own worth. It rewards and encourages creativity in us and in others.

The King also embodies all the other masculine archetypes:

In its central incorporation and expression of the Warrior, it represents aggressive might when that is what is needed when order is threatened. It also has the power of inner authority. It knows and discerns (its Magician aspect) and acts out of this deep knowingness. It delights in us and in others (its Lover aspect) and shows this delight through words of authentic praise and concrete actions that enhance our lives.

The King Shadows

Tyrant: He is only destructive. He does so because. as we’ve said. he lacks inner structure. and he is afraid and terrified of his own hidden weakness and his underlying lack of potency.
He 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 hidden behind the rage is a sense of worthlessness, of vulnerability and weakness.
The tyrant hates. fears, and envies new life, because he feels the new life is a threat to his slim grasp on his own kingship.
Weakling: The hidden presence of this passive pole explains the hunger for mirroring -for “Adore me!” “Worship me!” “See how important I am!”- that we feel from so many of our superiors and 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.

General Patton was a closeted weakling, say the authors.

Watch this scene:

Instead of reacting with the compassion of the life-giving King who knows what his men are up against, Patton flies into a rage and slaps the soldier across the face, calls him a coward. humiliates and abuses him, and sends him from the hospital to the from lines.
Though he does not know it. what he has seen is the face of his own hidden fear and weakness projected onto another. He has glimpsed the Weakling within.

And again, say the authors:

The heroic General Patton.
Though immensely imaginative, creative, and inspiring to his troops, at
least at times sabotaged himself with his risk-taking, his immature
competition with the British General Montgomery, and his insightful
but boyishly brash remarks.
Rather than being assigned a mission for which his true talent qualified him {to head the Allied invasion of Europe, for instance). He was sidelined precisely because he was a hero and not fully a warrior.

My Note: Eye-opening, stay away from gratuitous meanness
This was truly deep and insightful.
Be careful of men who are too mean and aggressive towards other people’s faults and weaknesses. Not only are they potentially hiding insecurities, but they are often poor leaders.

I often felt the same about general Mattis, who always loved to sound tough:

James Mattis: When you men get home and face an anti-war protester (..) shake his hand. Then, wink at his girlfriend because she knows she’s dating a pussy

#2. Warrior

The warrior:

Is efficient because he realizes how fragile and mortal he is

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.

The Warrior Shadows

Warriors that are completely unemotional or only destructive are poor and underdeveloped archetypes of masculinity.

The movie “The Great Santini” is an example of the shadow Warrior with too much aggression and too little emotional depth:

Say the authors:

Most of his remarks and behavior toward his wife and children are depreciating, critica, commanding, and designed to put distance between him and the family members, who keep trying to relate to him lovingly.
The destructiveness of this way of “relating” eventually becomes so obvious to everyone, especially to the older son, that there can no longer be any hiding from the fact that Santini’s sometimes violent behavior results from his own inability to be tender and genuinely intimate.

Many young men these days admire the wrong kind of warriors. Say the authors:

A contemporary image of the Warrior turned passionless killing machine is, of course, Darth Vader from the Star Wars saga. It is alarming how many boys and adolescents identify with him. In this same connection, it is also alarming how many of these young men become members of survivalist and neo-Nazi groups.

The Warrior as a destructive can overcome us when we are frightened or very angry, like in this scene from Apocalypse Now reference by the authors themselves:

And that’s the importance of inner mental control to be an effective and value-adding warrior.

Sadist: Though detachment in itself is not necessarily bad. as we’ve said. it does leave the door open to the “demon” of cruelty. Because he is so vulnerable in this area of relatedness. the man under the influence of the Warrior needs urgently to have his mind and his feelings under control-not repressed. but under control. Otherwise. cruelty will sneak in the back door when he’s not looking.
Far too often We see this same kind of sadism displayed in boot camp in the name of supposedly necessary “ritual humiliation” designed to
deprive recruits of their individuality and put them under the power of a transpersonal devotion. Far too often, the drill sergeant’s motives are the motives of the sadistic Warrior seeking to humiliate and violate the men put in his charge.
Masochist: the masochist is the “pushover” and “whipped puppy” that lies just beneath the Sadist’s rageful displays. The Masochist
projects Warrior energy onto others and causes a man to experience
himself as powerless. The man possessed by the Masochist is unable to
defend himself psychologically; he allows others (and himself) to push
him around.

Finally, say the authors:

If we are accessing the Warrior appropriately, we will be energetic, decisive, courageous, enduring, persevering, and loyal to some greater good beyond our own personal gain.
We will light good fights in order to make the world a better and more fulfilling place for everyone and everything. Our war making will be for the creation of the new, the just, and the free.

#3. Magician

The Magician is the knower, the one with technical expertise and knowledge of all kinds.

Write the authors:

The energies of the Magician archetype, wherever and whenever we encounter them, are twofold. 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 these Magician functions in part by his use of ritual initiatory processes. He is the “ritual elder” who guides the processes of transformation.

This is the magician era, in a way, since it’s an era where technology is put to use to control our environment.
But it’s the other form of Magician energy that is in short supply, the one based on psychological and spiritual initiatory processes.

The Magician Shadows

Detached manipulator: more details on manipulation here , and more information on dark psychology here
Denying “innocent” one: using guilt-tripping and covert power moves to control others

Dark Psychology: 7 Ways to Manipulate People

#4. Lover

The lover enjoys life’s pleasure and is comfortable in his own skin and own body.

But there is also something deeper about the lover and about his interconnectedness with the world.
Say the authors:

The Lover is deeply sensual-sensually aware and sensitive to the physical world in all its splendor. The Lover is related and connected to them all, drawn into them through his sensitivity.
His sensitivity leads him to feel compassionately and empathetically united with them. For the man accessing the Lover. all things are bound to each other.

But he is also a rebel:

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. His life is often unconventional and “messy”.

The major religions have always prosecuted the lover, say the authors.

The Lover Shadows

Addicted lover: the addictive personality that gets lots in short-term pleasure
Impotent lover: feel nothing, live in a muted world, and are chronically depressed

The Lover needs the Warrior in order to be able to act decisively, in order to detach from the web of immobilizing sensuality, and he needs the Magician to help him back off from the ensnaring effect of his emotions.

Boyhood Archetypes

Like for the masculine energies, the boy energies also overlap and inform each other.

All the shadow forms of the immature masculine can be carried over adulthood if they are not fixed.

Divine child

The divine child is the future king.

The shadows are:

High-chair tyrant: needs to learn that he’s not the center of the universe, and the people and the world do not exist to serve and glorify him
Weakling prince: the polar opposite of the high-chair tyrant. 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 silence 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 whole family system revolves around his comfort. He reveals the dishonesty of his helplessness, however, in his daggerlike verbal assaults on his siblings, his biting sarcasm directed against them, and his patent manipulation of their feelings. Because he convinced his parents that he is a helpless victim of life and that others are picking on him, when a controversy arises between himself and a sibling, his parents tend to punish the sibling and excuse him.
Later, when he is an “adult” and functioning primarily under the dominance of the Weakling, his repressed grandiosity may explode to the surface, completely raw and primitive, completely unmodulated and very powerful. This is the man who seemed coolheaded and rational and “nice” but who, once he’s been promoted, suddenly becomes “a different person, “a little Hitler”. This is the man for whom the saying “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” is entirely accurate.

Precocious child

He is the future magician.

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.

The shadows are:

Know it all trickster: verbally abusive of others whom he regards as inferior. Carried over into adulthood, the man is cocky and smug, with a superior grin. But he can be good at pricking the bubbles of other big inflated egos. Also see the “ smart alec ” in the “ archetypes of dominance “.
Dummy: like the Weakling Prince, lacks personality, vigor, and creativity. He seems unresponsive and dull. He can’t seem to learn his multiplication tables, count change, or tell time. The Dummy’s ineptitude, however. is frequently less than honest.
He may grasp far more than he shows, and his dummy behavior may mask a hidden grandiosity that feels itself too important (as well as too vulnerable) to come into the world. Thus, intimately intertwined with a secret Know-It-All, the Dummy is also a Trickster.

Oedipal Child

He is hte future lover.

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 warm. related. and affectionate. He also expresses. through his experience of connectedness to Mother (the primal relationship for almost all of us), the origins of what we can call spirituality. T

his 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.

The shadows are:

Momma’s boy: tied to Mama’s apron strings.” He causes a boy to fantasize about marrying his mother, about taking her away from his father. in adulthood, he often gets caught up in chasing the beautiful, the poignant, the yearning for union with Mother from one woman to another. He can never be satisfied with a
mortal woman, because what he is seeking is the immortal Goddess. Here we have the Don Juan syndrome, The Oedipal Child, inflated beyond mortal dimensions, cannot be bound to one woman.
Dreamer: while other children are playing, he may sit on a rock. dreaming his dreams. He accomplishes little and appears withdrawn and depressed. Often his dreams rend to be melancholy, on the one hand, or highly idyllic and ethereal
on the other.

All the immature masculine energies are overly tied to Mother, and are deficient in their experience of the nurturing and mature masculine. But especially so is the Oedipal Child.

The Hero

He is the future warrior.

The “death” of the Hero in the life of a boy (or a man) really means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself. He has met his own dark side, his very unheroic side.

The “death” of the Hero signals a boy’s or man’s encounter with true humility.

The shadows are:

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. He claims center stage as his birthright. If ever his claims to special status are challenged, watch the ensuing rageful displays! is not a ream player. He is a loner, 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 (these are the officers who get “ dragged “).
Coward: shows an extreme reluctance to stand up for himself in physical confrontations. He will usually run away from a fight. perhaps excusing himself by claiming that it is more “manly” to walk away. But he will feel wretched in spite of his excuses. It is not only physical fights he will avoid. however. He will tend to allow himself to be bullied emotionally and intellectually as well.

Say the authors:

And all three energies give rise to the Hero, which breaks them free of the domination of the “feminine” unconscious and establishes the boy’s identity as a separate individual. The Hero prepares the boy to become a man.

But the Hero still needs to grow and mature:

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.

Source: King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: The 4 Archetypes of Masculinity | TPM (thepowermoves.com)

Photo by LOGAN WEAVER on Unsplash

#1. King

The King Shadows

#2. Warrior

The Warrior Shadows

#3. Magician

The Magician Shadows

#4. Lover

The Lover Shadows

Boyhood Archetypes

Divine child

Precocious child

Oedipal Child

The Hero

See Also

men

masculinity

manhood

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#1. King

The King Shadows

#2. Warrior

The Warrior Shadows

#3. Magician

The Magician Shadows

#4. Lover

The Lover Shadows

Boyhood Archetypes

Divine child

Precocious child

Oedipal Child

The Hero

See Also

men

masculinity

manhood

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Let’s work on it →

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