More Interested In The Ends Than The Means
Magicians tend to detach, to take a higher or more distant perspective, at least emotionally, from what’s going on in the world. Indeed, they often find solutions to problems without referring much to human feelings and emotions.
So while we can see technology all around us working for our benefit, we can also see how magician energy has led to the development of ever more complex technology used simply to kill and destroy each other all the way through our history to the present day.
Each war has driven the development of killing technology, so much so that we now have wars conducted remotely by drones piloted from bases deep inside countries far away from the killing fields. Previous generations of Magicians created gunpowder, cannons, machine guns, the concentration camps, nuclear weapons, and the neutron bomb, among other atrocious weaponry.
Advances in technology have also brought about progressively more ingenious ways to exploit natural resources: mountain top removal for coal, tar-sand extraction for oil, deforestation for timber and agriculture, and fracking for fuel, among many others. These technologies all carry their own consequential damage to our planet. They involve the production of evermore toxic waste without finding ways to dispose of it, oil spills in pristine wilderness areas, and other environmental catastrophes.
These are representative examples of how the energy of the Magician can manifest without conscience, awareness, or even much interest in the human consequences of what he produces. Mind you, Magicians can have a great time finding ways to clean up the messy consequences of their clever ideas.
Yet the deeper truth is that “solving the problem” seems to be enough for many Magicians. For example, the problem of coming up with cheap, reliable and strong packaging material for consumer goods was solved in the 1950s by the development of plastics. This has manifested in the production of around 300 million tonnes of plastic every single year at the time of writing, all of which is indestructible or practically indestructible.
Knowing this, you may wonder how the Magician can be so – well, let’s call it uncaring – about the way his creations can cause such devastation and destruction. But to ask this question is to misunderstand his nature, for he is not at heart an emotional being. As an archetypal character, he is more interested in the means than the ends.
We see this in occupations where exclusive knowledge or a large element of privilege are essential. The financial traders who brought the banking system to its knees in the early years of this century could be said to embody magician energy. Without strong Sovereigns to guide them in the pursuit of benefits for the whole Kingdom, these magician-traders used their special access to “secret” knowledge for their own ends. The rest of us suffered the consequences.
It seems as though the line between employing unearned power and knowledge for the good of all and using it for personal benefit and profit is an easy one for the Magician to cross. The temptation to use magician energy for one’s own ends, for example to boost the ego, or gain a reputation, or get what one wants (power, prestige, even sexual favours, perhaps) can be considerable.
The Safety Officer or Risk Manager
Fear resides very much within the Magician’s area of influence. This is because fear arises in response to a threat to your safety or security, whether perceived or real. Often such fear signals the need for transformation or change; often it means that protective strategies are needed to keep you safe – and quickly! And both transformation and protection depend on the Magician’s creativity and capacity to find solutions to problems.
So fear is a signal that something is about to change, either by choice or by force from outside you, and it can trigger your Magician, who is a master of transformation, into action.
If you had a difficult or challenging childhood, which would mean you felt a lot of fear, your Magician was most likely very active and creative in finding protective strategies for you from a very young age. These strategies could have included helping you to adopt particular ways of behaving in the world, the creation of a false persona to hide behind, or dissociation. In cases of very severe childhood wounding, the internal Magician uses Dissociative Identity Disorder as a protective mechanism.
Your Magician is especially likely to have produced such strategies to keep you safe if you faced physical, emotional or sexual abuse, or a violent, unpredictable or unstable environment as a child. This part of the Magician is known as the Risk Manager or Safety Officer.
However, the protective function of the Risk Manager is not limited to violent or abusive environments in childhood. A child’s Risk Manager will grow in any environment where a child is subject to some kind of assault on his sense of self.
This might come from shaming or humiliation by family or peers, a lack of respect from relatives, or an unstable or unpredictable parent. It might come from being around family members who weaken a child’s sense of self-esteem or self-respect, or who launch overt or covert attacks on his emotional or physical well-being. All of these threats, and many more, activate this part of the Magician archetype.
The Risk Manager’s job is to come up with protective strategies, create defences against feeling shame, and find ways for a child to avoid being singled out as the neighbourhood victim or scapegoat. These strategies can be very creative, they can form very early on in life, and they can take many forms. Some of the more common ones include people pleasing, hiding yourself, avoiding being seen, never getting emotionally close to people, avoiding vulnerability, and lacking assertiveness.
The Risk Manager forms most of his strategies during childhood, so when he kicks in there can be a sense of regression in the air. For example, a man may once again “become” a little boy with no autonomy or Sovereign energy in the presence of a woman who seems to have some kind of power over him.
Unfortunately the boyhood Risk Manager will go on playing out the same defensive strategy for the rest of a man’s life unless he seeks out someone who can help him with his emotional healing work. Since most boyhood strategies don’t work to well in an adult relationship, achieving maturity as a man is important!
Sometimes these strategies appear as a pattern of offensive rather than defensive behaviour. Some Magicians clearly believe that “attack is the best form of defence.” You know when you meet a Magician attached to this way of being – the verbal barbs come flying instantly, though you may not feel them until later.
I’m sure you can imagine that a strategy devised by a boy’s Magician to help him feel safe and secure at the age of one, five, ten, fifteen, or even twenty is not necessarily in any way appropriate in a man aged forty, fifty or sixty. But unless the adult man does some relevant emotional process work to heal his shadow, his ever-active Risk Manager tends to remain stuck developmentally in childhood. He’s still doing the same things he came up with decades ago to keep the boy as safe as possible, even though he now lives in a man’s body.
So the Risk Manager may prevent change by inculcating a kind of paralysis around risk. This can inhibit the normal processes of emotional development which should happen as a boy grows into a man. This paralysis, this lack of change, is based on running the old strategies which developed for very good reasons when the man was a little boy faced with a specific threat to his well-being.
This is why the initial stages of both one-to-one and group work using the archetypal model so often involve work with the Risk Manager. The aim is to get him to drop his defences, hopefully quickly and gracefully, so he can take on a new role which is much more appropriate to the man’s life in the adult world.
That said, we must not underestimate the power and importance of the Risk Manager to a child who’s now in, or has been in, a difficult environment. This part of the Magician can literally mean the difference between life and death for a child, whether that death would have been emotional, spiritual, or even physical.
So Risk Managers are one of the most vital manifestations of the Magic
ian archetype. They can literally keep men and women alive and functioning. Unfortunately, as you can imagine, the price of the Risk Manager’s risk management strategy can sometimes be very high for the adult man because it prevents him from achieving anything like his full potential.
Delicate and careful work with a man may be needed to reverse a lifelong strategy of fear-based behaviour now embodied in the energy of the Risk Manager. Fortunately, in shadow work and emotional process work, where we work on the shadow unconscious, we have tools and techniques which can update the Risk Manager’s job description without further threat to either the security of the adult man or the security of the little boy who still lives inside the adult man.
Accessing Deeper Consciousness
When we enter a deeper level of consciousness, we also access a deeper part of our mind. This might be the altered state of consciousness an artist uses to give birth to a masterpiece, a musician needs to give a spellbinding performance, or a student uses to memorize material before an examination. It might be the altered state produced by hypnosis in which self-transformation can take place. All these states of mind, and many more, are the province of the Magician.
The Magician and Other Archetypes
Your Magician works things out; he is a source of information and he provides solutions to problems. And just like the other archetypal figures he should not exist in isolation. In fact his role is to serve the King as his King’s counselor. But in the absence of a strong King, a manipulative Magician may take control of the Kingdom and start running the show, perhaps issuing orders to the Warrior.
If your Magician influences your Warrior without your King’s oversight or control, two things can happen. First, your Warrior can be empowered with strategic and tactical skills to take action in the service of the realm. Though not perfect, because the King is missing from the loop, this can sometimes be good enough. Second, your Warrior can be influenced to take action in the service of your Magician. Unfortunately that usually means doing something for the Magician’s benefit, not the Kingdom’s. This is a route to chaos. This is the way Kingdoms fall.
The way the system should work is this: your Sovereign has a problem. He asks your Magician to collect relevant information and advice. When he gets this, when he feels fully informed, your King can make a decision on what to do next. He then issues instructions to your Warrior to get out into the world and actually do something.
The kind of information you need might includes finding out how to solve a particular problem in your life, how to support your children in their difficulties, how to overcome some limitation in your knowledge and understanding of the world, how to get a failing business back on track, how to finish the book which has been sitting partly written on the shelf for several years, how to talk to a business client about a contract, how to get a new project off the ground, and so on. Anything, in fact. Anything at all.
There are many possible ways to do this, but they all centre on you taking on the role of Sovereign in your world and asking a part of yourself – your Magician – to do what he does best: coming up with solutions to problems.
When he’s given a clear request with obvious intention on your part, your Magician will discover some way to get the necessary information. You might find yourself doing some research on the internet, speaking to an expert, talking to other people, and so on. Later you have a moment of clarity, an “aha” moment, when you suddenly see what options are available to you and feel able to choose between them.
The point about this practice is that it makes your desires and intentions much more conscious. You are taking control of your mind by using these powerful archetypal metaphors. With that control, you can establish clarity about what is needed, and then decisions become easier and quicker – all because the different parts of your internal system know what they are doing, and why.
It’s helpful to establish clear communication between King and Magician simply to keep good order in your Kingdom. A Magician left to his own devices without much Kingly contact tends to amuse himself by working for his own ends, and this can lead to chaos in the Kingdom.
Despite his mischief-making, there are many positive sides to the Magician. He just needs a good and wise King to control his actions and ensure he works for the benefit of all. Yet I believe a very real challenge we all face today is the absence of powerful and wise Sovereigns in the world who can run their internal and external Kingdoms well and wisely.
The Emotional Wound In the Magician Quarter
The emotional wound in the Magician consists of a belief, conscious or unconscious, that you’re bad in some way.
This wound begins to grow in a child when people around him directly or indirectly convey the message “There is something wrong with you” or “You’re different, shameful or bad” or even “You are evil” during childhood. Of course, these messages do not have to be spoken. As with any other archetype, they can be communicated by behaviour, body language and attitude as well as words.
As a result a child comes to believe an internal voice which whispers (or shouts) “You are bad,” “You are useless,” or one of the endless variations of “There is something wrong with you.” This may evolve into a first person voice which is often very self-critical and harsh: “I am bad.” “I am useless.” “I can’t do it.”
As the child grows into a man, one or both of these internal voices may live on, constantly playing their harsh message of criticism and self-criticism. Unfortunately the adult man in whom they live may not recognize the harshness of the criticism and judgements. To him, it’s all normal. It’s always been normal. The internal dialogue here goes like this: “You are useless.” “Yes I am.”
Where there is emotional, physical or sexual abuse a child may internalize the energy of the abuser as though it were part of his own personality. At some level, the child may sense that energy within his own unconscious and believe it to be a part of him.
But why would a child absorb these beliefs about him or herself rather than simply rejecting them? The answer lies in the energy of shame. Some people call this toxic shame, an expression which sums up its impact very well: for shame really is poisonous to your soul and destructive of your well-being.
Shame is made up of both a bodily-based element and a cognitive element. It develops when a child is humiliated or judged negatively simply for being who he is or doing what he does. And it seems most of us carry shame at some level, because during childhood we’ve all somehow received the toxic message that we’re bad, to a greater or lesser degree.
Shame can hide in the body for decades, unsuspected, before it finally manifests, perhaps well into our adult lives, as a peculiar feeling of discomfort throughout the body. Often people do not know what this feeling is and mistake it for embarrassment, fear or guilt.
The cognitive element of shame is made up of the negative beliefs we hold about ourselves. In its simplest form the shaming message for a child in the Magician quarter is “You’re a bad boy.” Generally the message of badness is conveyed in more subtle or specific ways. Take religion, for example.
Time and again in my work I come across the shame carried by those born into “devout” Christian families. Christianity is a religion founded on the concept of original sin, so you’re damned from the moment you’re born, carrying this original sin. Men who were educated in certain Catholic schools, especially those administered by the Christian Brothers, tell me they were constantly reminded how bad they were, sometimes in the most brutal ways. The boys were told they were evil and treated accordingly, mostly by teachers trying to beat the badness out of them.
Such religious-based messages and sadistic behaviour carry a fundamental shaming based on the assumption of one’s essential worthlessness and badness. These cultural messages unequivocally tell you that you’re bad from the inside out.
Shaming comes in many other forms, though. In my work I meet a lot of men and women who were shamed for their sexuality and sexual
urges both before and after puberty. One client who I guided through his healing had been brought up in a puritanical religious family. When he was a young boy, every time his grandmother noticed him holding or playing with his penis, she told him he would go to hell. Being a bright child, he concluded that he really must be bad and that there must indeed be something fundamentally wrong with him. After all, in his child-like Magician’s mind, hell was where bad people were sent.
There are many more subtle ways in which children pick up a message of shame and badness about themselves. If a child is punished for simply being who he is, or “disciplined” in a way that conveys the clear message of “You’re bad” or “We don’t like you” or “We don’t like you when you behave in a certain way”, then a sense of inherent badness or shame can develop.
I also see this a lot in adults who were physically, emotionally, or sexually abused as children. The reasoning in a child’s mind is “This is happening to me because I am bad” or “This wouldn’t have happened to me unless I deserved it.” This logic reflects a child’s inability to see that his parents or carers are really responsible for what is happening to him, and that the fault does not lie with him.
When a child is given to understand that he’s bad, he’s likely to react by trying to change the way he behaves so that he regains his parents’ love. He might do this by making a mental adjustment to the way he sees the world. This can mean unconsciously detaching or slightly dissociating from himself; or, as I see it, stepping out of his soul so he can observe himself.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 8