Table of Contents
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover is a book about masculine archetypes. A problem that Jung identified many years ago, was that absent an appropriate rite of passage from boyhood to manhood, many men will stay stuck with their boy psychology. This is often due to a lack of father figure, or a lack of examples of the mature masculine in their lives. In short, boys fail to become men.
The answer to the concerns of feminists is not less masculine power, but more. The patriarchy is infantile masculinity, it is undeveloped, it is the negative shadow of the positive archetype. The book explores what an undeveloped masculinity looks like, in terms of the Shadow of four masculine archetypes (of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, the Lover) and describes what the positive masculine looks like.
In life, the drug dealer, the corrupt politician, the wife beater, the tyrannical boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man”, the “holier than thou” minister”, and the absentee father all have one thing in common – they are all boys pretending to be men.
Below is a summary of the all the masculine archetypes and their shadows.
The King
The good King is wise. There are two functions that the King has in his fullness, the first is ordering and the second is the providing of fertility and blessing.
The Warrior
We live in an age when people are uncomfortable with the Warrior form of masculine energy, and for good reasons.
The Magician
The magician is always an initiate, and one of his tasks is to initiate others, onto knowledge that is hidden and unknown.
The Lover
The Lover is the primary energy pattern of aliveness and passion. It lives through our primal hungers as a species for sex, well-being, food, reproduction, and creative adaption to life’s hardships, and ultimately, a sense of meaning.
If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.
This is super interesting! Thank you for reviewing this – I am adding this to my read-list soon!
Always the best, Farah.
Great to hear, Adam! It’s a very good book. And thanks for your comment.