Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” is a book on the psychological mature development of the self using Jungian psychology and theology as a framing device. It is a wonderful and succinct introduction to Jungian psychology, of which there is much to read, and is important for healthy psychological development. It is important to let a key section from the introduction to the book speak for itself, with our own emphasis.
What is missing is not, for the most part, what many depth psychologists assume is missing; that is, adequate connection with the inner feminine. In many cases, these men seeking help had been, and were continuing to be, overwhelmed by the feminine. What they were missing was an adequate connection to the deep and instinctual masculine energies, the potentials of mature masculinity. They were being blocked from connection to these potentials by patriarchy itself, and by the feminist critique upon what little masculinity they could still hold onto for themselves. And they were being blocked by the lack in their lives of any meaningful and transformative initiatory process by which they could have achieved a sense of manhood.
We found, as these men sought their own experience of masculine structures through meditation, prayer, and what Jungians call active imagination, that as they got more and more in touch with the inner archetypes of mature masculinity, they were increasingly able to let go of their patriarchal self- and other-wounding thought, feeling, and behavior patterns and become more genuinely strong, centered, and generative toward themselves and others – both women and men.
What the book describes is a psychological deconstruction of what it means to be a man, putting forward that a mature masculine man does not display harmful behaviors that will in the modern day be attributed to toxic masculinity, but instead is able to show positive traits such as love, empathy, and compassion. Importantly, it is important to understand that the ideas in this book can apply to the psychological development of both men and women. In our view, the book uses masculinity to describe mature psychological development, and the positive message and developmental habits described in the book can apply universally to all people once you have understood its meaning through its own language.
The book describes four archetypes that must be kept in balance in order to maintain a healthy psyche. Each of these archetypes, their progressions from the immature masculine to the mature masculine, and their shadows, are described in detail in the book. In our summaries below, we will describe the book in short as “KWML” for “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.”
You can obtain a copy of “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” here: https://www.amazon.com/King-Warrior-Magician-Lover-Rediscovering/dp/0062506064 (ISBN 978-0062506061).
The Four Archetypes of the Mature Masculine – A Dense Summary
We describe briefly the general philosophy KWML. Mature masculine development is broken down into four archetypes, as can be seen below.
Every masculine archetype described has a triune, or three-part structure in both their immature and mature forms. The goal of the KWML philosophy, which is a simple explanation of Jungian psychology, is to fully integrate each of the four archetypes into the psyche. An archetype can be said to be fully integrated when it is progressed from the immature, or boy psychology, to the mature, or man psychology. Across the bottoms of the three-part structure are bipolar dysfunctions, or shadows, of the archetype. We will focus on a short description of what the shadow is, the attributes of the four archetypes with their dysfunctional poles in man psychology, and the progressions one must make to move from the immature to the mature forms of the archetypes.
The Shadow
It is important to have a basic understanding of the shadow, which is key to Jungian psychology. Carl Jung had too much to say about the shadow to name. Here are some choice quotes.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge.
– C.G. Jung, Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
Man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.
– C.G. Jung, Man and His Symbols
Bipolar dysfunction psychologically represents a lack of cohesion in the psyche, and thus it is possible for a boy or man to succumb to the positive or negative poles of bipolar dysfunction, which are described as shadows of the archetypes.
The Four Archetypes in the Mature Masculine, and Their Poles
Below we offer short descriptions of the mature masculine and the positive and negative poles of bipolar dysfunction, which will be described in greater detail by quoting the source material below.
- The King — First in importance, the central archetype, keeping us
centered and calm. The King energy honors and promotes people, and guides and
nurtures them.
+The Tyrant — The Tyrant is selfish, self-serving, exploits and abuses others. He demands adoration and is very hostile to criticism.-The Weakling — The Weakling lacks center and calm, and fears disloyalty from those around him.
- The Warrior — An aggressive energy, but focused, clear, and discerning.
Forward-thinking and able to take action.
+The Sadist — Those who endure much pain and inflict it on others, and spend their time attacking both tasks and those around them.-The Masochist — A pushover who allows themselves to be attacked and pushed around.
- The Magician — A knower and master of technology, guiding the process
of transformation.
+The Detached Manipulator — A trickster, he lords his cleverness over others and withholds key information to maintain his edge over others. Focused on being clever in a harmful way. (As often seen on 4chan and Reddit.)-The Denying “Innocent” One — A victim of envy of others, detached from reality and uses his expertise to shroud his lack of responsibility.
- The Lover – An energy adopting the sensation function, experiencing life
through the senses, and feeling love for others. The Lover can also feel and
endure the pain of others, as he must do.
+The Addicted Lover — Someone totally overcome by the senses and becomes addicted to the feeling of love and the feeling of sensation.-The Impotent Lover — Someone who is depressed and detached from love, unable to express their own feelings appropriately.
The King — In Their Own Words
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. 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 Tyrant — In Their Own Words
The Tyrant exploits and abuses others. He is ruthless, merciless, and without feeling when he is pursuing what he thinks is his own self-interest. His degradation of others knows no bounds. He hates all beauty, all innocence, all strength, all talent, all life energy. He does so because, as we have said, he lacks inner structure, and he is afraid – terrified, really – of his own hidden weakness and his underlying lack of potency.
The Weakling — In Their Own Words
The man possessed by the Weakling lacks centeredness, calmness, and security within himself, and this also leads him into paranoia. We see this in Herod, Saul, and Caligula as all of them, unable to sleep at night, pace the palace, tormented by fears of disloyalty from their subordinates – in Saul’s case, even from his children – and disapproval from God, the True King. The man possessed by the bipolar Shadow King has much to fear, in fact, because his oppressive behaviors, often including cruelty, beg for an in-kind response from others. We laugh at the saying, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they are not out to get you.” They may be. A defensive, hostile “get them before they get you” paranoia is destructive of one’s own sense of calmness and orderliness, works to destroy one’s own character and that of others, and invites retaliation.
The Warrior — In Their Own Words
We have already mentioned aggressiveness as one of the Warrior’s characteristics. Aggressiveness is a stance toward life that rouses, energizes, and motivates. It pushes us to take the offensive and to move out of a defensive or holding position about life’s tasks and problems. The samurai advice was always to “leap” into battle with the full potential of ki, or vital energy, at your disposal. The Japanese warrior tradition claimed that there is only one position in which to face the battle of life: frontally. And it also proclaimed that there was only one direction: forward.
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How does the man accessing the Warrior know what aggressiveness is appropriate under the circumstances? He knows through clarity of thinking, through discernment. The warrior is always alert. He is always awake. He is never sleeping through life. He knows how to focus his mind and his body. …
The Sadist — In Their Own Words
Although we may all become vulnerable to the Sadistic Warrior at some time or another, there is a particular personality type that has this energy in spades, as we say. This is the compulsive personality disorder. Compulsive personalities are workaholics, constantly with their noses to the grindstone. They have a tremendous capacity to endure pain, and they often manage to get an enormous amount of work done. But what is driving their nonstop engines is deep anxiety, the Hero’s desperation. They have a very slim grasp on a sense of their own worthwhileness. They do not 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.
The Masochist — In Their Own Words
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. Men are right to fear the Coward within them, even if they do not have the sense to fear their macho exteriors. 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, to exceed the limits of what he can tolerate and still keep his self-respect, not to mention his psychological and physical health. All of us, no matter what our walk of life, can fall under the power of the Warrior’s bipolar Shadow in any area of our lives. It may be that we do not know when to quit an impossible relationship, a circle of friends, or a frustrating job. We all know the saying “Quit while you are ahead,” or “Learn to cut your losses.” The compulsive personality, no matter what the danger signs, no matter how impossible the dream and unbeatable the foe, digs in and works harder, trying to get blood from a turnip and watching his gold turn to ashes in the end. If we are under the power of 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. This kind of oscillation between the active and passive poles of archetypal Shadows is characteristic of these dysfunctional systems.
The Magician — In Their Own Words
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 process. He is the ritual elder who guides the processes of transformation, both within and without.
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The Magician is a universal archetype that has operated in the masculine psyche throughout history. It can be accessed today by modern men in their work and in their personal lives.
The Detached Manipulator — In Their Own Words
The active pole of the Shadow Magician is, in a special sense, a power Shadow. A man under this Shadow does not guide others, as a Magician does; he directs them in ways they cannot see. His interest is not in initiating others by graduated degrees – degrees that they can integrate and handle – into better, happier, and more fulfilled lives. Rather, the Manipulator maneuvers people by withholding from them information they may need for their own well-being. He charges heavily for the little information he does give, which is usually just enough to demonstrate his superiority and his great learning. The Shadow Magician is not only detached, he is also cruel.
The Denying “Innocent” One — In Their Own Words
The “Innocent” One’s underlying motivations come from envy of those who act, who live, who want to share. Because the man possessed by the “Innocent” One is envious of life, he is also afraid that people will discover his lack of life energy and throw him off his very wobbly pedestal. His detachment and his “impressive behavior,” his deflating remarks, his hostility toward questions, even his accumulated expertise, are all designed to cover his real inner desolation and hide his actual lifelessness and irresponsibility from the world.
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The man possessed by the “Innocent” One commits both sins of commission and sins of omission but hides his hostile motives behind an impenetrable wall of feigned naivete. Such men are slippery and elusive. They do not allow us to engage them frontally with our Warrior energy.
The Lover — In Their Own Words
The Lover archetype is primary to the psyche also because it is the energy of sensitivity to the outer environment. It expresses what Jungians call the sensation function, the function of the psyche that is trained in on all the details of sensory experience, the function that notices colors and forms, sounds, tactile sensations, and smells. The Lover also monitors the changing textures of the inner psychological world as it responds to incoming sensory impressions.
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The man profoundly in touch with the Lover energy experiences his work, and the people on the job with him, through this aesthetic consciousness. He can read people like a book. He is often excruciatingly sensitive to their shifts in mood and can feel their hidden motives. This can be a very painful experience indeed.
The Lover is not, then, only the archetype of the joy of life. In his capacity to feel at one with others and with the world, he must also feel their pain. Other people may be able to avoid pain, but the man in touch with the Lover must endure it.
The Addicted Lover — In Their Own Words
How does the Addict possess a man? The primary and most deeply disturbing characteristic of the Shadow Lover as Addict is his lostness, which shows up in a number of ways. A man possessed by the Shadow Lover becomes literally lost in an ocean of the senses, not just in sunsets, or in reverie. The slightest impressions from the outer world are enough to pull him off center. He gets drawn into the loneliness of a train whistle in the night, into the emotional devastation of a fight at the office, into the blandishments of the women he encounters on the street. Pulled first one way and then another, he is not the master of his own fate. He becomes the victim of his own sensitivity. He becomes enmeshed in the world of sights, sounds, smells, and tactile sensations. We can think here of the painter Van Gogh, who got lost in his paint and canvases and in the violent dynamism of the nighttime stars he depicted.
The Impotent Lover — In Their Own Words
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. The therapist will be able to tell from the expression on the client’s face or from his body language that some feeling is trying to express itself. But if we ask the client what he is feeling, he will have absolutely no idea. He may say something like, “I do not know. I just feel there is this kind of fog. Everything is just hazy.” This often happens when the client is getting too close to really hot material. What happens then is that a shield goes up between the conscious Ego and the feeling. That shield is depression.
Fluctuations in Bipolar Dysfunction
Positive poles of bipolar dysfunction are said to be active and negative poles are said to be passive. It is important to note that in bipolar dysfunction where the shadow of an archetype takes hold that individuals can fluctuate or oscillate between the poles. The Weakling may lash out as the Tyrant once cornered and afraid. The Masochist may explode into becoming the Sadist. The Denying “Innocent” One may become the Detached Manipulator. The Impotent Lover may through desperation in moments become the Addicted Lover. It is worth noting that the dysfunctions of the active poles may also become passive through their failings.
Psychological Development from Boy to Man
KWML describes and recommends psychological development from boy psychology to man psychology through primal masculine energies in the following order.
- The Divine Child (King) — A creative energy from within bringing peace and order, encouraging greatness within ourselves and others.
- The Precious Child (Magician) — The origin of our curiosity and adventurous impulses, wondering at the world around and inside us. Introverted and reflective, but also extroverted and eagerly reaching out to share insights and talents.
- The Oedipal Child (Lover) — An energy with a sense of wonder. Warm, related, and affectionate.
- The Hero (Warrior) — An advanced form of boy psychology, on a path to manhood. Tempered by humility, the Hero becomes the Warrior.
KWML notes that psychological progression does not always progress so neatly. It is important to understand that individuals who are stunted in their mature masculine psychological development should focus on fully integrating the four archetypes by building on their primal masculine energies through to complete development, while achieving psychological cohesion to avoid the bipolar dysfunctions of the shadows of the four archetypes.
Techniques for Accessing Archetypal Powers
KWML describes four techniques for accessing archetypal powers, or for helping yourself to realize the full potential of the four masculine archetypes.
- Active Imagination Dialogue — Thinking or writing a dialogue with aspects of your own personality, whether they be shadows of the archetypes or differing archetypes, to talk yourself into integration and cohesion of the psyche.
- Invocation — Invoking images in your mind, perhaps grand paintings or particular shapes, that help you imagine yourself as taking on the fullness of the four masculine archetypes. Invocation is essentially prayer.
- Admiring Men — Looking to other men for inspiration and as role models for the man you will try to become, as examples of the four masculine archetypes.
- Acting “As If” — Placing yourself in the role of the archetypes as an actor, pretending to portray those roles until you inhabit them within yourself. You may act more courageous as the Warrior, or act as if you have some keen insight as the Magician, and so on.
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover on Individualism and Collectivism
KWML has the following to say about individualism vs collectivism when it comes to development of the psyche.
Ours is a psychological age rather than an institutional one. What used to be done for us by institutional structures and through ritual process, we now have to do inside ourselves, for ourselves. Ours is a culture of the individual rather than the collective.
Our western civilization pushes us to strike out on our own, to become, as Jung said, individuated from each other. That which used to be more or less unconsciously shared by everyone – like the process of developing a mature masculine identity – we now must connect with consciously and individually. It is to this task that we now turn.
When framed within the PC System, KWML shows us that we must look inwards to develop our mature masculine identity, and that through doing so we can better engage with the collective world around us.
Conclusions and Recommendations
We highly recommend you read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, or if you prefer, consume it in audiobook form. By fully integrating all the four archetypes in your psyche you will be a more complete and mature person. You will treat others with a greater deal of kindness and respect, and invite into your life more positive outcomes, displaying a greater sense of calm and balance. The quality of your relationships will improve, be they in business, personal, or even romantic.