The key ideas

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

Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette, 1990

He manages people but loses his temper over trifles and secretly fears being exposed. Jungian analyst Robert Moore and mythologist Douglas Gillette believe many boys inhabit adult bodies. Their book describes four mature masculine energies, the King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover, their shadows, and how to find these forces within yourself.

Who it is for

For men who feel they have grown older without growing up, and for anyone who wants to understand how mature masculine strength differs from pressure and shouting.

Young men today are starving for the blessing of older men, for the blessing of King energy.

Boys in adult bodies

Imagine Igor. He is forty, manages twelve people, has a mortgage and two children. In meetings, he cannot tolerate objections and snaps at subordinates. At home, he spends the evening silently looking at his phone. From outside, he is an adult man with authority. Inside, if asked honestly, he often feels like a boy afraid of being exposed at any moment.

Robert Moore, an analyst in the school founded by Carl Jung, and mythologist Douglas Gillette wrote this book in 1990 about men like him. Their central point is sharp: what passes for masculine strength often turns out to be immaturity. Shouting, pressure, and the need to win constantly belong, they argue, to boy psychology rather than man psychology. They even call patriarchy an expression of immature masculinity, because truly deep masculinity humiliates nobody.

Why are there so many boys in adult bodies? The authors believe initiation has disappeared from our lives. In traditional societies, elders guided a young man through a ritual in which his childhood symbolically died and he returned to the tribe as a man. Today, such rituals are almost absent, leaving everyone to grow up alone without elders showing the way.

Moore and Gillette map this path using Jung’s psychology, different cultures’ myths, and their practice. In their model, four mature energies live within every man: King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover. Each is an archetype, an innate pattern of feelings and behavior shared by all people. Each has a bright side and a shadow. This book is about recognizing them within yourself and those around you. Let us begin with the boy from whom they grow.

Four boys from whom a man grows

Moore and Gillette start with childhood rather than adulthood. In their model, a boy also has four energies, each later becoming a mature one. The Divine Child, who feels at the center of the world, grows into the King. The Precocious Child, curious and hungry for knowledge, grows into the Magician. The Oedipal Child, full of tenderness and longing for his mother, grows into the Lover. The Hero, eager to prove his strength, grows into the Warrior.

Each childhood energy has a twofold shadow. Take the Divine Child. The authors call its active shadow the High Chair Tyrant: a toddler who bangs his spoon and demands something, then pushes it away once received. The passive shadow is the Weakling Prince: everything is a burden, and he must constantly be carried. When Igor loses his temper over a trifle in a meeting, that never-satisfied tyrant in the high chair rules him.

The shadow works like a seesaw. Someone stuck at one pole easily swings to the other. The Hero’s poles are the Grandstander Bully and the Coward. The Coward endures silently for years, then explodes and becomes a bully. After a first serious failure, the bully collapses into helplessness.

The Hero has a special place in the book. He represents the best in a boy: courage and readiness to challenge. But he considers himself immortal and does not know his limits. The authors believe he is destined to “die,” which is good news. The Hero’s death means encountering your own limits. In practice, that means two simple things: acknowledge where your strength ends and ask for help where it is insufficient.

Growing up does not mean tearing the boy out of yourself. The mature man, the authors write, builds on childhood strengths as a foundation rather than demolishing them. Curiosity, tenderness, and courage remain. They simply stop controlling him as a demanding child controls an entire family.

Read in Livria

About the author

Robert Moore (1942–2016) was a Jungian analyst who taught for many years at Chicago Theological Seminary. Douglas Gillette is a mythologist and his coauthor of a series on male psychology.

All books by this author: Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette

Terms from the book

  • Lincoln
  • archetype
  • Masochist
  • Ego
  • Jung
  • Initiation
  • Shadow
  • Samurai
  • Divine Child: An image in the authors’ model: childhood energy through which a child feels at the center of the world. They believe the mature King develops from it.
  • Oedipal Child: An image in the authors’ model: childhood energy of tenderness and longing for the mother, named after the Oedipus myth. The Lover develops from it.
  • High Chair Tyrant: The authors’ name for the Divine Child’s active shadow: a toddler who never has enough and pushes away what he demanded.
  • Herod: Herod the Great, king of Judea in the first century BCE. According to the Gospel account, he ordered Bethlehem’s infants killed, fearing a newborn king.
  • Sadist: In the authors’ model, the Warrior’s active shadow: someone who destroys what is weak and soft. The name of an image rather than a medical diagnosis.
  • Shaman: An intermediary between people and the spirit world in traditional cultures, keeper of secret knowledge and rituals.
  • Alchemist: A practitioner of the medieval science of transforming substances. Many alchemists also understood their work as self-transformation.
  • Detached Manipulator: The authors’ name for the Magician’s active shadow: someone who uses knowledge as a weapon and conceals what could help others.
  • Impotent Lover: The authors’ name for the Lover’s passive shadow: life loses flavor and color, and the person is detached and depressed.
  • Usurpation: Seizing another’s power. The authors use this for a state in which the ego mistakes itself for the archetype itself, such as the King.
  • Active imagination: Jung’s method of consciously entering a conversation with images and voices from the unconscious, aloud or on paper.

All terms

Similar books