If you’ve seen the movie Top Gun, you may recognize the immature Hero in the character played by Tom Cruise. He refuses to recognize the danger he’s creating for himself and everyone around him. Only when he contributes to the death of his navigator and friend and later fails to win the competition for “Top Gun” does he begin to sense that he needs to move from adolescence to maturity.
The difference between Cruise’s character and the more mature flyer called Iceman in the movie is the difference between Hero and mature Warrior.
The grandstanding bully is the inflated pole of the Hero’s shadow. The mentality that goes along with this inflation is one of invulnerability, fighting the impossible fight, winning the unwinnable battle, dreaming and realizing the impossible dream.
No matter what the sense of invulnerability and the godlike pretensions of the boy-man with this immature energy may be, the truth is simple. Life will always have a cruel lesson for him: he cannot win against the world. Not in the end, anyway.
The Hero archetype has an overly close connection with mother or the feminine. In fact Moore and Gillette suggested that the Hero archetype was “locked in mortal combat” with both the inner feminine, the Anima, and the outer feminine, the Mother, in an attempt to escape and assert masculinity. Maybe so.
What’s certain is that any boy or man under the power of the Hero archetype or its shadows does not fully understand he is a mortal being who is destined to meet the reality of the world head-on. Nor does he grasp that he will then inevitably suffer some kind of death, either spiritually, physically or emotionally. Some men reach their death-beds before they wake up to this unavoidable fact. Some don’t wake up to it even then, and die fighting against death itself.
Heroic immaturity is rarely challenged in our society. Moore and Gillette said: “When we do not face our true limitations, we are inflated, and sooner or later our inflation will be called to account.” Perhaps we now lack the Sovereigns who can call the Heroes to account.
What of the opposite shadow polarity, the deflated Coward?
Sadly, this is just as common in grown men as it is in adolescent boys. The Coward, as you might expect, will run away from the fight. In fact he probably runs away from anything and everything.
He may justify his refusal to fight by saying it’s more manly to turn the other cheek or he may just live quietly with the humiliation of knowing he is a coward. Whatever, he usually allows himself to be bullied emotionally, intellectually and physically.
He caves in easily, he acquiesces to pressure from others, and his opinions are flexible. Of course he feels invaded and disrespected, and so, when he’s had enough of being a doormat and can take no more, he may launch a verbal or even physical assault upon his opponent – which usually takes the opponent by surprise since this behaviour is so out of character.
Boys and men under the influence of this shadow lack the drive to achieve anything. But, as Moore and Gillette observed, “If we access the Hero energy appropriately, we will push ourselves up against our limitations. We will adventure to the frontiers of what we can be as boys, and from there, if we can make the transition, we will be prepared for our initiation into manhood.”
In Summary
The Warrior is the part of us which goes out into the world and gets things done – on the orders of the King. He’s an action taker, but a principled one, and he serves his King in support of a cause he believes in.
His internal discipline controls his rage. His anger is channelled appropriately for the situation he is in. That may be simply presenting the energy of action in the world, it may be showing assertiveness, or it may be establishing clear boundaries.
When necessary, the Warrior acts with clean anger to provide the energy of offensive or defensive action when that is needed to protect the things and people for whom he is responsible.
He may feel fear, but that will not prevent him from executing the King’s Mission in the world, nor from bringing to an end those things which no longer serve the Kingdom.
With a clean, clear Warrior around, women, children and all the other citizens of the Kingdom feel much safer.
Chapter 3
The Magician Archetype
Look around you right now, and you’ll see how archetypal magician energy influences every area of our lives.
Our amazing technology, every advance in our civilization, our capacity to dominate the world around us – all are the product of humanity’s magician energy. Unfortunately this has both positive and negative aspects.
On the one hand we have the modern technology which serves us and can make our lives easier and more enjoyable. On the other hand there is a darker side which threatens our very existence. For example, think of the inhumanity of modern weapons of war and the insane amount of money spent on their development – money which, if put to constructive use, could probably solve all the world’s problems.
So you can see immediately that there are some interesting paradoxes to the Magician. Is he good or bad? Moral or amoral? Helpful or unhelpful? The answer is a paradox: he can easily be both. But as we shall see, no matter what he’s like in your life now, one of his earliest intentions was to protect you from harm as best he could.
Magician energy takes many forms, but the basis of them all is thinking rather than feeling. Your Magician archetype is the one which answers your questions. He knows how to find solutions to problems, how to create and master technology, and how to access and use your powers of creativity, reasoning, introspection, logic and intuition.
And the Magician is also the gatekeeper to altered states of consciousness, being a true master of ceremonies and rituals such as Rites of Passage. He controls our connection to a deeper level of consciousness, intuition, understanding and knowledge, a function of our brain which may go way back in history to a time before our thinking brain, the neocortex, evolved.
The Magician serves as our access point to all the mysterious connections between us and Planet Earth, and between us and all the other living creatures with which we share our planetary home. If you’ve ever asked the Universe for a sign, and received one, the Magician was your point of contact with the universal forces which responded to you.
No wonder, then, that when you access your Magician archetype, you’re accessing an archetype that has been present in the human psyche throughout history.
According to Moore and Gillette, some anthropologists believe that long ago in our history the energies of the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover were not so closely linked as we see them today. In fact, so the theory goes, they were found together in only one man or woman in every society – the Chief.
The Chief manifested all of these archetypes in a whole-istic way – a well-integrated way. As time passed, the ancient archetypal energies separated and became more defined, to the point where the energies and roles of Warrior, Magician, Lover and King are identifiable and separate parts within ourselves and indeed also in our society.
So now we have Sovereigns in the form of Kings, Leaders, and Chieftains. These Sovereigns have their Warriors (in the form of armies) and their Lovers (sometimes internal, sometimes externalized as a Queen or as the feminine energy in society). They have their Magicians, too, also known as “experts”, advisers, counsellors, Wise Men and Wise Women, Sages, Shamans, witch doctors, and wizards.
The same is true for each of us: we have a Leader or Sovereign archetype in our internal system, a sub-personality if you like, whose rightful job is to be in control of our lives.
We have a Warrior archetype which goes out and gets things done. We have a Lover archetype within us which is responsible for connection with ourselves, with others, and with the world. And we have a Magician, our own internal wise man.
The Magician In His Fullness
Let’s start by looking at some of the more notable qualities of the Magician archetype and seeing how these qualities manifest in our modern world.
The Holder Of Special Knowle
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The Magician archetype is traditionally the holder of secret or special knowledge which the other archetypes don’t possess.
In ancient times Magicians held the knowledge of how to access altered states of mind and levels of consciousness. They knew the best time to plant the crops and they knew which gods should be propitiated, and when, with the appropriate ceremonies.
These Magicians, Shamans, witch doctors, wizards and healers – call them what you will – also knew about medical herbs, healing potions and spells, and drugs that could access altered states. They knew how to bless and curse, and they understood the links between the unseen world of our ancestral spirits and the Earthly world we inhabit.
The Magician always was, and continues to be in some form or another, a source of information, guidance, support and instruction about this world and other-worldly matters. Nowadays you see him clearly in professional roles which require powers of analysis and divination: doctor, computer programmer, engineer, psychotherapist, architect, psychotherapist, clairvoyant.
Because of his ability to think so clearly, to solve problems, and the way he can hold knowledge which is not common to all, the Magician has an enormous amount of power. He lives in you, regardless of your job, as an internal problem solver, creator, logician, thinker; he is your own high-powered internal super-computer.
One of the Magician’s specialties is his understanding of how energy flows between and within individuals and societies. He’s especially proficient in his understanding of the deep unconscious forces within us all. Developed and deployed with skill, the Magician’s abilities to explore the unknown can be seen very clearly in his ability to access the unconscious mind. His wisdom and artistry always lies behind the skill of the best facilitators in counselling work, psychotherapy, emotional healing workshops, one to one archetypal coaching, and other forms of personal development work.
Master Of Technology
The Magician tends to be a master of technology. Throughout history, the creative force of the Magician archetype has propelled the development of all kinds of new knowledge and technology. He has brought us the extraordinary wonders of engineering, computing, science, music, literature and art we see around us today.
But the extraordinary thing is that the Magician is just as adept at building weapons of war as he is at building tools to encourage peace and harmony. He is just as good at planning destruction as building community. Here we see an important element of the Magician’s way of working: he is not concerned with feelings so much as with results and outcomes. He needs to be given clear instructions by a wise and clear-sighted King to use his talents to their best effect.
He is the thinker par excellence, yet the consequences of his thinking often seem to be less important to him than the process of creation. He loves to create, to master technology, whether this is a weapon of war that will kill millions of people more efficiently than the last one he developed or an engineering innovation that will make drinking water available to millions of people through a radical new design of desalination plant.
In short, it would seem he hasn’t got much emotional intelligence. Some people might call him lacking in conscience. And as we shall see, he can be exactly that and worse, for the sociopath and the psychopath are both shadows of the Magician archetype.
The Magician As Adviser To The King
Magicians help their Sovereigns, their Kings, make good decisions. They help Kings “think things through”, using information obtained with their intuition, their acquired knowledge, their reasoning, and their creativity. But they are certainly not subservient to the King. In fact they have a special relationship with him.
More accurately, in the ideal relationship they are not subservient. Yet when a King becomes a tyrant, his Magician may be cowed or even turned to the Dark Side.
That’s why there was a court joker or Jester in ancient European Courts. He was yet another expression of the Magician archetype. His role was specifically to deflate any King who began to get ideas above his station. The problem with Kingship is that often people don’t dare to tell you when you’re getting inflated or becoming too big for your own boots. So the Jester was tasked with the deflation of a pompous King who’d lost sight of his own limitations.
Generally, though, the Magician was a wise advisor and counsellor to the King. This support allowed the King to grow into a fuller and more mature masculine energy so that he became a better King. Often a group of magicians would form the King’s Court – a group of King’s counsellors or advisers. But because Magicians know their own importance, every King needs to treat them with respect, for only then can he be sure of gaining the help of his Magicians and his King’s Court.
This is a very different dynamic to the one between the King and the Warrior. The Warrior takes orders and knows his place, but the Magician requires the King to treat him at least as an equal; he demands respect for the knowledge he holds and his ability to work with it.
If he doesn’t get it, he may take his secret knowledge and use it for his own benefit – perhaps to the detriment of the King. Or he may switch allegiance and use it for the benefit of another King altogether. Allegiances and alliances with a Magician depend on more than the King’s wishes; they also depend on the Magician’s loyalty. And that depends on him having the King’s ear.
Magicians who aren’t regularly consulted tend to go off and mix potions in their laboratories, create formulae, find things to amuse themselves, and even wreak havoc, just for the curiosity of seeing what happens when they try out a new idea.
Rites Of Passage & Master of Ceremony
The creative power of our intellect allows us to develop new technology that seems to give us “dominance” over the world around us. This is one obvious outlet of magician energy, but there are many other ways in which the Magician’s energy manifests in our world. Among them are some less obvious and less well-known processes which are very important in the human psyche.
One example is the creation of rites of passage and initiation rituals for men. Another way in which magician energy manifests is in the form of psychotherapy and other approaches to deep soul work such as Vision Quests and Shadow Work.
Access to the mysterious depths and complexity of such profound soul work is truly the province of the Magician. Contemporary Magicians who do deep work in psychotherapy understand that the forces and energies in our Shadow, in our unconscious, are so powerful that they must only be accessed to the right degree, at the right time. Without proper care, they can be too powerful for an individual man or woman to contain. In short, the Magician uses ceremony and ritual to establish control of energies which are beyond the understanding of the conscious mind.
The Magician: Doorkeeper To Our Unconscious
Every seeker after truth, every man or woman involved in the pursuit of self-development, is pursuing a quest for self-realization in some way. Certainly some of us are pursuing that path more intensely than others, but somewhere within each one of us the Magician archetype will be helping us work towards self-realization by offering the opportunity to look at our shadows.
While our ego, our sense of self, is essential for us to function in the real world, our archetypal shadows also control us and modify the expression of our ego. For us to grow as men into our full power these shadows need to be brought into the light and seen for what they really are – parts of ourselves which we suppressed into the unconscious a long time ago for some very good reason, and which now have the power to influence our behaviour.
However, your unconscious Shadows are only revealed to you at the rate at which you can handle them. Paradoxically, as soon as you achieve growth in your sense of self, more shadows pour out of your unconscious mind to challenge you. I think of it like this: once you’ve embarked on the path of personal development there’s no turning back; it’s a life-long commitment.
I was facilitating an emotional process workshop some years ago on which a young man came up to
me and asked me how old I was. I told him I was 54, and asked him how old he was. He told me he was 27, and went on to say something which seemed astonishing to me: “I can’t wait to be your age because by then I’ll have my life completely sorted out.”
Not many young men have ever said this to me! I tried to explain this isn’t how life works, at least not for anyone I’ve ever met. No matter how much sorting out we may have done there is always more to do. That’s because the Magician, who is the gatekeeper to our unconscious, will only allow parts of our Shadow to emerge when he knows we are ready to hold the energy of the unconscious, and to hold it well enough that we will not be destroyed by it. My young friend wasn’t having any of it, though: he was sure personal growth and development is a finite process. No doubt life will show him the truth in its own good time. The truth is our internal Magician is the real gatekeeper in our journey of personal development. He contains the enormous force of the unconscious and channels it at a rate we can cope with. And once he sees you are serious about your personal growth he will never stop offering you more challenges.
The Specialist
Doctors, lawyers, priests, businessmen, plumbers, therapists, computer programmers, designers, builders, electricians, in fact everyone who uses special or particular knowledge acquired by study and experience, all draw on the power of their Magician to convert their knowledge into a practical benefit for someone else.
On this level there is no difference between the technicians building the space shuttle, the computer programmers providing us with access to a vast array of technology on our smart phones and computers, the psychotherapist analyzing our complexes, and the Shaman with his rattles, herbs, and incantations. This specialist knowledge is one of the foundations on which the Magician’s influence rests, for it is knowledge which can be used to achieve a particular outcome.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 7