King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine

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.

His energy comes from envy. The less a man is in touch with his true talents and abilities, the more he will envy others. If we envy a lot, we are denying our own realistic greatness, our own Divine Child. What we need to do, then, is to get in touch with our own specialness, our own beauty, and our own creativity. Envy blocks creativity.

The Magician, then, is the archetype of thoughtfulness and reflection.

Words make our reality and make our universe real.

Patriarchy is the expression of the immature masculine.

Our own culture has pseudo-rituals instead. There are many pseudo-initiations for men in our culture. Conscription into the military is one. The fantasy is that the humiliation and forced nonidentity of boot camp will “make a man out of you.” The gangs of our major cities are another manifestation of pseudo-initiation and so are the prison systems,

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, “in

The characteristics of the Warrior in his fullness amount to a total way of life, what the samurai called a do (pronounced “dough”).

One of the hardest things to do as a counselor or therapist is to get clients to separate their Egos from their emotions without at the same time repressing the emotions. There is a really good psychological exercise for doing this that can help; it’s called focusing, originated by Eugene Gendlin. We ask our clients, when they sense the onset of st