King Warrior Magician Lover by Robert Moore & Douglas Gillette

The Book in a Few Sentences

Born within every man are the Jungian masculine archetypes—king, warrior, magician, and lover—that transcend time and space. Many men received parenting that keeps them stuck in boy psychology. King Warrior Magician Lover will teach you how to harness and manifest the mature masculine archetypes for the benefit of all beings.

King Warrior Magician Lover summary

This is my book summary of King Warrior Magician Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette. My summary and notes include the key lessons and most important insights from the book.

Introduction

Why is there so much gender confusion today, at least in the United States and Western Europe?
In our view, patriarchy is not the expression of deep and rooted masculinity, for truly deep and rooted masculinity is not abusive.
Patriarchy is the expression of the immature masculine.
The more beautiful, competent and creative we become, the more we seem to invite the hostility of our superiors, or even our peers.
What we are really being attacked by is the immaturity in human beings who are terrified of our advances on the road toward masculine or feminine fullness of being.
Our dangerous and unstable world urgently needs mature men and mature women if our race is going to go on at all into the future.
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 all of us.

Part 1: From Boy Psychology to Man Psychology

1: The Crisis in Masculine Ritual Process

A man who “cannot get it together” is a man who has probably not had the opportunity to undergo a ritual initiation into the deep structures of manhood.
He remains a boy—not because he wants to, but because no one has shown him the way to transform his boy energies into man energies.
It can be said that life’s perhaps most fundamental dynamic is the attempt to move from a lower form of experience and consciousness to a higher (or deeper) level of consciousness, from a diffuse identity to a more consolidated and structured identity.
Boy psychology, which we’ll look at in more detail in chapter 3, is charged with the struggle for dominance of others, in some form or another.

2: Masculine Potentials

We, like the duckling that mistakes a cat for its mother, mistake our actual parents for the ideal patterns and potentials within us.
If our parents were, as the psychologist D. W. Winnicott says, “good enough,” then we are enabled to experience and access the inner blueprints for human relations in a positive way.
Sadly, many of us, perhaps the majority, did not receive good enough parenting.

3: Boy Psychology

As we have suggested, the adult man does not lose his boyishness, and the archetypes that from boyhood’s foundation do not go away.
Since archetypes cannot disappear, the mature man transcends the masculine powers of boyhood, building upon them rather than demolishing them.
New life, including psychological life, is always fragile. When we feel this energy manifesting in us we need to move to protect it.
For Jungians, this Divine Child within us is the source of life. It possesses magical, empowering qualities…

The High Chair Tyrant

The High Chair Tyrant is epitomized by the image of Little Lord Fauntleroy sitting in his high chair, banging his spoon on the tray, and screaming for his mother to feed him, kiss him, and attend him.
Characteristics of the High Chair Tyrant include arrogance (what Greeks called hubris, or overwhelming 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 why psychologists call inflation and pathological narcissism.
The unfortunate man becomes the slave (as the mother was) of the grandiose two-year old inside of him.
He has to have more material things. He can’t make mistakes.
And because he can’t possibly meet the demands of the inner tyrant, he develops ulcers and get sick.

The Weakling Prince

The other side of the bipolar shadow of the Divine Child is 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.

Accessing the Divine Child

Whether activist, artist, administrator, or teacher, everyone in a leadership capacity needs to be connected with the creative, playful Child in order to manifest his full potential and advance his cause, his generatively and creativity in himself and others.

The Precocious Child

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.
This boy (and later, the man) wants 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. He causes us to wonder at the world around us and the world inside us.

The Know-It-All Trickster

The Know-It-All Trickster is, as the name implies, that immature masculine energy that plays tricks, of a more or less serious nature, in one’s own life and on others.
But he also has a positive side. He is very good at deflating Egos, our own and those of others.
For the negative side of this immature masculine energy is really hostile and deprecating of all the real effort, all the rights, all the beauty of others.
The less a man is in touch with his true talents and abilities, the more he will envy others.
We can only admire others if we have a sense of our own worthiness.

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.
He is warm, related, and affectionate.

The Mama’s Boy

The Oedipal Child’s Shadow consists of the Mama’s Boy and the Dreamer.
He can never be satisfied with a woman, because what he is seeking is the immortal Goddess.

The Dreamer

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.

The Hero

The Hero is, in fact, only an advanced form of Boy psychology—the most advanced form, the peak, actually, of the masculine energy is of the boy, the archetype that characterizes the best in the adolescent stage of development.

The Grandstander Bully

The man who is possessed by the Grandstander Bully pole of the Hero’s Shadow has an inflated sense of his own importance and his own abilities.
Denial of death—the ultimate limitation on human life—is his specialty.

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 and physical confrontations.
He will tend to allow himself to be bullied emotionally and intellectually as well.
What the Hero does his mobilize the boys 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 him.

4: Man Psychology

It is enormously difficult for a human being to develop to full potential.
The four major forms of the matured masculine energy is that we have identified are the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. They all overlap and, ideally, enrich one another.
The Hero prepares the boy to become a man.
Hostile environments always lead to the stunting, twisting, and mutating of an organism.

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

5: The King

The moral 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.
Is the king does not live "in the Tao” then nothing will go right for his people, or for the kingdom as a whole. The room will languish, the Center, which the king represents, will not hold, and the kingdom will be ripe for rebellion.
The good king always mirrored and affirmed others who deserved.
He did this by seeing them—in a literal sense, in his audiences at the palace, and in the psychological sense of noticing them, knowing them, in their true worth.
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.
That is the effect of blessing; it heals and makes whole.
That’s what happens when we are seen and valued and concretely rewarded for our legitimate talents and abilities.
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 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.
And it's 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 no that enhance our lives.

The Shadow King: The Tyrant and the Weakling

The tyrant hates, fears, and envies new life, because that new life, he senses, is a threat to his slim grasp of his own kingship.
Human tyrants are those in kingly positions (whether in the home, the office, the White House, or the Kremlin) who are identified with the King energy and fail to realize that they are not it.
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 does this with open verbal assaults and deprecation of their interests, hopes, and talents; or he does it, alternately, by ignoring their accomplishments, turning his back on their disappointments, and registering boredom and lack of interest, when, for instance they come home from school and present him with a piece of artwork or a good grade on a test.
The man possessed of the Tyrant is very sensitive to criticism and, through 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 behind 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 man possessed by the Weakling lacks centeredness, calmness and security within himself, and this also leads him into paranoia.

Accessing the King

The other problem in accessing this energy, we’re suggesting, arises when we feel what we have lost effective touch with the life-giving King altogether.
In this case, we may fall into the category of the so-called dependent personality disorder, a condition in which we project the King energy within (which we do not experience as within us) onto some external person.
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.
This happens in family systems when husbands become too attentive to their wives’ moods and fear to take initiative because of the attacking anger their actions may bring.
It happens, too, with children when their parents do not allow them to develop sufficient independence of will and taste and purpose and the children remain under their wing.
But when we are accessing the King energy…
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 care for others deeply and genuinely.
We will “recognize” others; we will behold them as the full persons they really are.

6: The Warrior

We live in a time when people are genuinely uncomfortable with the Warrior form of masculine energy—and for good reasons.
Women especially are uncomfortable with it, because they have often been the most direct victims of it in its shadow form.
What is interesting to notice, however, is that those who would cut off masculine aggressiveness at its root, in their zeal, themselves fall under the power of this archetype.
We can’t just take a vote and vote the Warrior out.
Like all archetypes, it lives on in spite of our conscious attitudes toward it.
And like all repressed archetypes, it goes underground, eventually to resurface in the form of emotional and physical violence.
We see great Warrior traditions in nearly ever civilization.
It is also true that this Warrior energy often goes awry.

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”).
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.
He is what the samurai called “mindful.”
Here is a difference between the Warrior and the Hero. The man (or boy) accessing the Hero, as we’ve said, does not know his limitations; he is romantic about his invulnerability.
The Warrior, however, through his clarity of thinking realistically assesses his capacities and his limitations in any given situation.
…what enables a Warrior to reach clarity of thought is living with awareness of his own imminent death.
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.
The samurai swordsmen were taught to live their lives as if they were already dead.
Castaneda’s Don Juan taught that there is “no time” for anything but meaningful acts if we live with death as “our eternal companion.”
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 Warrior energy is concerned with skill, power, and accuracy, and with control, both inner and outer, psychological and physical.
The Warrior never spends more energy than he absolutely has to. And he does’t talk too much.
His control is, first of all, over his mind and his attitudes; if these are right, the body will follow.
This means that he has an unconquerable spirit, that he has great courage, that he is fearless, that he takes responsibility for his actions, and that he has self-discipline.
He is willing to suffer to achieve what he wants to achieve.
His loyalty is to something—a cause, a god, a people, a task, a nation—larger than individuals, though that transpersonal loyalty may be focused through some important person.
First, it [transpersonal commitment] makes all personal relationships relative, that is, makes them less central than the transpersonal commitment.
Thus the psyche of the man who is adequately accessing the Warrior is organized around his central commitment.
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 looks at his tasks, his decisions, and his actions dispassionately and unemotionally.
The warrior is then able to act with less regard for his personal feelings; he will act more forcefully, swiftly, and efficiently with himself out of the way.
The Warrior’s interface with the Magician archetype is what enables a man to achieve such mastery and control over himself and his “weapons.”
His admixture with the Lover energy gives the Warrior compassion and a sense of connectedness to all things. The Lover is the masculine energy that brings a man back into relatedness with human beings, in all their frailty and vulnerability.
Their wives and girlfriends often feel alienated and rejected, competing hopelessly with the mans’ “true love,” his work.

The Shadow Warrior: The Sadis and the Masochist

The Warrior energy’s detachment from human relationships leads to real problems, as we’re suggesting.
The Warrior as avenging spirit comes into us when we are very frightened and very angry.
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 Shadow Warrior carries into adulthood the adolescent insecurity, violent emotionalism, and the desperation of the Hero as he seeks to make a stand against the overwhelming power of the feminine, which always tends to evoke the masochistic, or cowardly, pole of the Hero’s dysfunctional Shadow.
Compulsive personalities are workaholics.
But what is driving their nonstop engines is deep anxiety, the Hero’s desperation. They have a very slim grasp on their own worthiness.
All of us, no matter what our walk of life, can fall under the power of the Warrior’s bipolar Shadow in any are of our lives.
It may be that we don’t know when to quit an impossible relationship, a circle of friends, or a frustrating job.
The compulsive personality…digs in and works harder…
If we are under the power the Masochist, we will take far too much abuse for far too long and then explode in a sadistic outburst of verbal and even physical violence.

Accessing the Warrior

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.

7: The Magician

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

Historical Background

It is him that people go to with their questions, problems, pains, diseases of the body and the mind.
He is the one who can think through the issues that are not obvious to other people.
He is a seer and a prophet in the sense not only of predicting the future but also of seeing deeply.
The secret knowledge, of course, gives the magician an enormous amount of power.
The Magician archetype in a man is his “bullshit detector”; it sees through denial and exercises discernment.
He sees evil for what and where it is when it masquerades as goodness, as it often does.
They taught their initiates how to discover their own unconscious motives and drives, how to thread their way through the treacherous darkness of human delusions, and how, finally, to reach ones with the Center that lies deep within.
Acquiring knowledge of whatever kind, but especially of the hidden workings of the psyche, is difficult and painful work that most of us have never wanted to do.
And chaos is always the result of inadequate accessing of the Magician in some vital area of life.

The Magician in His Fullness

The magician energy is the archetype of awareness and of insight, primarily, but also of knowledge of anything that is not immediately apparent or commonsensical.
…the ego is in fact vital to our survival.
It is only when it is possessed by, identified with, and inflated by another energy form—an archetype or a “complex” (an archetypal fragment, like the Tyrant)—that it malfunctions.
Its proper role is to stand back and observe, to scan the horizon, to monitor the data coming in from both the outside and the inside and then, out of its wisdom—its knowledge of power, within and without, and its technical skill in channeling—make the necessary life decisions.
The observing Ego is detached from the ordinary flow of daily events, feelings, and experiences.
In a sense it doesn’t live life. It watches life, and it pushes the right buttons at the right times to access energy flows when they are needed.
The Magician energy is present in the Warrior archetype in the form of his clarity of thinking…
The Magician alone does not have the capacity to act. That is the Warrior’s specialty.
That primordial Magician in men has manifested itself most fully in what anthropologists refer to as the shaman.
The Magician, and the shaman as his fullest human vessel, aims at fullness of being for all things, through the compassionate application of knowledge and technology.

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

It was the Shadow Magician that handed us the darkest days of World War II…
Mastery over nature, a proper function of the Magician, is running amuck…
Behind the propaganda ministries, the controlled press briefings, the censored news, and the artificially orchestrated political rallies lies the face of the Magician as Manipulator.
The man under the power of the Manipulator not only hurts others with his cynical detachment from the world of human values and his subliminal technologies of manipulation, he also hurts himself.
This is the man who things too much, who stands back from his life and never lives it.
He is caught in a web of pros and cons about his decisions and lost in a labyrinth of reflective meanderings from which he cannot extricate himself.
He is afraid to live, to “leap into battle.” He can only sit on his rock and think.
The years pass. He wonders where the time has gone. And he sends by regretting a life of sterility. He is a voyeur, an armchair adventurer.
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 role of the Precocious Child’s Shadow—the Dummy.
The man possessed by the by the “Innocent” One wants the power and status that traditionally come to the man who is a magician, at least in the societally sanctioned fields.
But he doesn’t want to share and to teach.
Because the man possessed by the “Innocent” One is envious of life, he is also afraid that people will discover he lack of life energy and throw him off his very wobbly pedestal.

Accessing the Magician

It is the Magician that watches and thinks.
It is the Magician that enables the Ego to place the feelings in an orderly stack. The emotional energies, thus contained, eventually lose their power.
As we access the Magician, we need to regulate this energy with the other three archetypes of mature masculine patterns.
None of them, as we’ve suggested, works well alone; we need to mix with the Magician the Kings concern for generatively and generosity, the Warrior’s ability to act decisively and with courage, and the Lover’s deep and convinced connectedness to all things.

8: The Lover

The erect penis is, of course, a sexual symbol. But it is also a symbol of the life-force itself.
We believe that the Lover, by whatever name, is the primary energy pattern of what we could call vividness, aliveness, and passion.
It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, wellbeing, reproduction, creative adaptation to life’s hardships, and ultimately a sense of meaning, without which human beings cannot go on with their lives.
The Lover’s drive is to satisfy those hungers.
…the function of the psyche that is trained in on all details of the sensory experience, the function that notices colors and forms, sounds, tactile sensations, and smells.

The Love in His Fullness

The Lover is the archetype of play and of “display,” of healthy embodiment, of being in the world of sensuous pleasure and in one’s own body without shame. Thus, the lover is deeply sensual…
For the man accessing the Lover, all things are bound to each other in mysterious ways.
It isn’t just that the Lover energy sees the world in a grain of sand. He feels that this is so.
The Lover’s connectedness is not primarily intellectual. It is through feeling.
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.
While feeling the pain and the poignancy of the world, he feels great joy as well. He feels joy and delight in all the sensory experiences of life.
Languages—the different sounds and the subtle meanings of words—will be approached through the Lover’s emotional appreciation. Other people may learn languages in a mechanical way, but men accessing the Lover learn them by feeling them.
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.
He feels the painfulness of being alive—both for himself and for others.
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 artist’s studio, the creative scholar’s study, the “go for it” boss’s desk.
His interests are the opposite of the Warrior’s, the Magician’s, and the King’s concerns for boundaries, containment, order, and discipline.

Cultural Background

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—what are called moral, or ethical, religions—have all persecuted the Lover.
At the same time that Hinduism celebrates the Oneness of all things (in Brahman) and the human oneness with God (in Atman) it also rejoices in the world of forms and delights in the realm of the senses.
Artists’ personal lives are typically, perhaps stereotypically, stormy, messy, and labyrinthe—full of ups and downs, failed marriages, and often substance abuse.
They live very close to the fiery power of the creative unconscious.
The businessman who has “hunches” is also accessing the Lover.
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

The most forceful and urgent question a man identified with the Addicted Lover asks is: “Why should I put any limits on my sensual and sexual experiences of this vast world, a world that holds unending pleasures for me?”
Pulled first one way and then another, he not the master of his own fate. He becomes the victim of his own sensitivity.
This lostness shows up, too, in the way that the Addict lives for the pleasure of the moment only and locks us into a web of immobility from which we cannot escape.
And it’s what the Hindus talk about as Maya—the dance of illusion, the intoxicating (addictive) dance of sensuous things that enchants and enthralls the mind, catching us up in cycles of pleasure and pain.
Whenever we feel ourselves caught in an addictive relationship, we had better beware, because the chances are very good that we have become victims of the Shadow Lover.
In his lostness—within and without—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.
Monogamy (though not in a simple way) 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 wellbeing and calm, and his own inner joy.
But the man moving from one woman to another, compulsively searching for he knows not what, is a man whose inner structures have not yet solidified.
Because he himself is fragmented within, and not centered, he is pushed and pulled around by the illusory wholeness he things is out there in the world of feminine forms and sexual experiences.
What the Addict is seeking (though he does’t know it) is the ultimate and continuous “orgasm,” the ultimate and continuous “high.”
He ends by looking for his “spirituality” in a line of cocaine.
For the man possessed by the Addict, there are no boundaries.
A man possessed by the Addicted Lover is really a man possessed by unconscious—his own and the collective unconscious.
But 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.
He must learn that his lack of masculine structure, his lack of discipline, his resulting affairs, and his authority problems will inevitably get him into trouble.
He will be fired from his jobs, and his wife, who loves him dearly, will eventually leave him.
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…
We will describe symptoms that psychologists call “flattened effect”—lack of enthusiasm, lack of vividness, lack of aliveness. We will feel bored and listless.
In short, we will become depressed.
People who are habitually possessed by the Impotent Lover are chronically depressed. They feel a lack of connection with others, and they feel cut off from themselves. We see this in therapy often.
But if we ask that client what he is feeling, he will have absolutely no idea.
But it isn’t just the lack of vision that signifies the oppressive power of the Impotent Lover in a man’s life. It is also the absence of an erect and eager penis.

Accessing the Lover

If we are appropriately accessing the Lover, but keeping our Ego structures strong, we feel related, connected, alive, enthusiastic, compassionate, empathic, energized, and romantic about our lives, our goals, our work, and our achievements.
It is the Lover, properly accessed, ,that gives us a sense of meaning—what we have been calling spirituality.
It is the Lover who is the source of our longings for a better world for ourselves and others.
He it is who is the idealist, and the dreamer.
They [Kind, Warrior and Magician] 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 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.
And the Lover needs the Magician to help him back off from the ensnaring effect of his emotions, on order to reflect, to get a more objective perspective on things, to disconnect—enough at least to see the big picture and to experience the reality beneath the seeming.

Conclusion: Accessing the Archetypal Powers of the Mature Masculine

Let us nurture and welcome great individuals—individual men who will, with the benevolence of ancient kings, the courage and decisiveness of ancient warriors, the wisdom of magicians, and the passion of lovers, move energetically to take up the challenge of saving a world that has been cast down before us.
Our effectiveness in meeting these challenges is directly related to how we as individual men meet the challenges of our own immaturity.
How well we transform ourselves from men living our lives under the power of Boy psychology to real men guided by the archetypes of Man psychology will have a decisive effect on the outcome of our present world situation.

Techniques

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.
Let us recall that true humility consists of two things: the first is knowing our limitations, and the second is getting the help we need.

Active Imagination Dialogue

Two thousand years ago, Paul, in great frustration, asked himself the question, “Why do I do the things I don’t want to do; and the very things I want to do, I can’t?”

Admiring Men

Mature men need to admire other men, living and dead.
We need especially to have contact with older men whom we can look up to.

A Final Word

There has been a veritable blitzkrieg on the male gender, what amounts to an outright demonization of men and a slander against masculinity.
But women are no more inherently responsible or mature than men.
Men should never feel apologetic about their gender, as gender.
They should be concerned with the maturation and stewardship of that gender and of the larger world.
The enemy for both sexes is not the other sex but the infantile grandiosity of the splitting of the Self that results from it.

Selected Readings

Ethnology/Anthropology

‍African Genesis by Robert Ardrey
Manhood in the Making by David Gilmore
The Chimpanzees of Gombe by Jane Goodall
The Ritual Process by Victor Turner

Comparative Mythology and Religion

Cosmos and History by Mircea Eliade
Patterns in Comparative Religion by Mircea Eliade
The Sacred and the Profane by Mircea Eliade
The Golden Bough by James Frazer

Jung

The Portable Jung by Joseph Campbell
Ego and Archetype by Edward Edinger
Complex, Archetype, Symbol by Jolande Jacobi
‍Archetypes: A Natural History of the Self by Anthony Stevens

Boy Psychology

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller

Man Psychology

Iron John by Robert Bly
Gods in Everyman by Jean Shinoda Bolen
Generative Man: Psychoanalytic Perspectives by Don Browning

KING

Kingship and the Gods by Henri Frankfort
Lord of the Four Quarters by John Weir Perry
Roots of Renewal in Myth and Madness by John Weir Perry
A Forest of Kings by Linda Scheme

WARRIOR

Patton: Ordeal and Triumph by Ladislas Farago
Fighting to Win by David Rogers
The Roots of War: A Jungian Perspective by Anthony Stevens
The Art of War by Sun Tzu

MAGICIAN

The Myth of the Magus by E. M. Butler
The Magician and the Analyst by Robert L. Moore
Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt
Shamanism by Shirley Nicolson

LOVER

Love’s Body by Norman Brown
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Selected Poems by D. H. Lawrence
Art and the Creative Unconscious by Erich Neumann
The Axis of Eros by Walter Spink