Moore and Gillette observed that the Precocious Child in a man “keeps his sense of wonder and curiosity alive, stimulates his intellect, and moves him in the direction of the mature Magician”. You see, there is nothing wrong with the idea of the Precocious Child in itself. Difficulties arise when a child puts this innocent, wondrous boyhood archetype into shadow.
The Shadows of The Precocious Child
Like all archetypes, the Precocious Child has his own shadows.
The Inflated Trickster
This archetype trips us up, trips others up, misleads us, fools us, and ultimately betrays us. It’s a manipulative energy which precedes and prefigures the manipulative and controlling energy of the inflated shadow Magician in adulthood.
Trickster plays out in a boy who wants everybody to know how clever he is. He is a “show off”, he knows all the answers, he may be scathing of others, and he is always eager to prove how knowledgeable and intelligent he is.
A man still possessed by this immature shadow form of the Precocious Child archetype may alienate everybody else with his cocky attitude and his superior bearing. He knows all the answers; in fact he needs to know all the answers to feel good, and if he doesn’t, well, there’s no harm in making them up to fit. He tries to dominate others in discussion. He can be dismissive and disrespectful of those who don’t know the answers or have a different opinion to him.
This is a juvenile energy which is about deceiving others, and perhaps deceiving oneself as well. What’s that deceit about? About the depth of the knowledge you possess and your importance. This sounds painful, and it is, yet there is a function here: the Trickster can make trouble simply for the sake of exposing the fraudulent and deluded nature of those who live in their inflated egos. In a way he’s determined to expose the shadow side of everything which looks too good to be true. And true to form, the Trickster is quite capable of doing this to you as well as to others.
We’ve all had experiences such as leaving only just enough time to make the journey from home to friends, office or appointment – and suddenly finding the car keys are missing. Or finding the ink on the printer runs out half way through an important document, no matter how well-prepared we thought we were. This is how Trickster shows himself.
Trickster is certainly a powerful archetype, and on the face of it an unhelpful one. Anybody in the grip of the Trickster tends to curse him every time he plays his tricks. But he is good at puncturing hubris and bringing us down-to-earth by showing us reality, clear and simple.
The problem with Trickster energy is that it can become destructive of you and everyone around you. The Trickster doesn’t want any responsibilities. In fact he doesn’t really want anything, except perhaps to create mischief. And even if there is a function to this – puncturing our hubris and grandiosity – it can be very unhelpful, upsetting and tedious.
The Trickster arises because we’ve been emotionally abused by our parents or siblings. We’ve been denigrated, attacked, told or shown, somehow, that we count for nothing, and as a result we’ve naturally forgotten our very special, even divine, nature, which is every child’s gift to the world. So where there is an absence of appreciation accompanied by a need to hide who we really are, we come under the influence of the Trickster. His aim is to bring everybody down to the same level. And so we start to attack others who seem to be special; that way, we can deflate them to our own level. (Or, more accurately, the level to which we have been brought by others telling us untruths about who we are.)
Certainly the Trickster admires no-one. To admire someone is to have a hero. But Trickster wants to destroy the heroes who stand out, not celebrate them. The point is this: we can only admire others if we have a strong sense of our own worth.
So the way to disempower this polarity of the shadow Precocious Child is to get in touch with our own magnificence, our own special uniqueness, our own beauty, and our own creativity. Trickster needs a blessing to see his own beauty!
Formed as he was out of the devastation inflicted by our parents or siblings, who taught us that we were worth nothing, the qualities that defeat the Trickster are appreciation, love and acceptance.
The Deflated Unknowing One
The opposite, deflated, pole of the Precocious Child is the naïve, deflated “Unknowing One”. This is the child who seems slow, unresponsive, or dull. He can’t learn what other children learn as quickly or as easily as they can. He misses the point of jokes and is often physically uncoordinated. He is always the last one to learn about anything important and is usually a figure of fun for the neighbourhood boys. But this appearance may disguise real cleverness.
What seems to be happening here is that the boy has a hidden special quality, even a grandiosity, perhaps, that he knows is too important to be shown to the world. To reveal it would make him vulnerable. Acting dumb becomes a way to stay safe, or at least a way not to expose his magnificence, even though the pain of being the scapegoat in his family or the victim of other boys’ taunts may be hard to bear.
As with all archetypes, the two polarities of inflation and deflation here, the Trickster and the Unknowing One, offer two places to hide. A boy may switch between them but one way or another the deeply wounded Precocious Child always seeks to hide his special qualities.
The problem is that he’s never been encouraged to show how clever he truly is by his parents who, instead, have probably spent a great deal of time abusing and shaming him and denying his abilities rather than celebrating and honouring him.
In Summary
The Magician is the powerhouse of our intellect, the part of us which works out possibilities, the agent of safety in our lives, and a creative archetype which seeks ways to get what we want.
He can provide a way to connect with others through mutual understanding or shared interests, but at the same time he may be lacking in feeling and more concerned with the ends rather than the means. What he does feel is fear; accepting fear as a symbol of transformation and the need for things to change, he can create strategies and options from which the King can choose the best way forward.
Fear comes from the same roots as our feelings of excitement, so an intellectual reframe of fear, which lets us experience it instead as the excitement associated with new possibilities, can provide the Risk Manager, who lives in the Magician quarter, with enough motivation to change his old patterns of protection and explore new ways of being in the world.
Chapter 4
The Lover Archetype
Mention the Lover archetype, and thoughts of love and sex may come to mind. And it’s true: love and sex are important aspects of Lover energy, but what really lies at the heart of the Lover archetype is a desire for connection. That is, connection with others, connection with ourselves, and connection with the planet on which we live.
The Lover archetype also serves as the container for our great primal hungers around sensuality, food, and emotional well-being. In fact the Lover is the most primal archetype for it springs into life the moment we are born.
Under the influence of the Lover we do our best to bond with our mothers after birth to ensure our protection and survival. And then we spend the rest of our lives trying to connect with other people in one way or another. If we cannot connect for any reason, we suffer; to be alone is not the natural destiny of the human animal.
Because it’s so primal the Lover archetype continues to play a profoundly significant role in each of our lives for as long as we may live.
The Lover In His Fullness
The Lover in his fullness is all about feeling, not thinking. Some people think of the inner child as living here, but this is not completely accurate. Every archetype has childlike parts as well as older parts. Indeed, every archetype contains thoughts, feelings and behaviours all the way from birth to adulthood.
But it is true that the Lover archetype is the domain of the “free child”, a state of innocence unencumbered by the demands of life. Many qualities associated with this idealize
d experience of childhood reside here, particularly innocence, pure love, unfettered attachment, idealization, spontaneity, sadness and tears.
The main qualities of this archetype in its fullness, its most mature form, are described below.
Sensuality
Because the Lover archetype is so much about sensuality and sensory experience in the body, much of the Lover’s archetypal energy is inevitably associated with the body.
Our body is the first means of communication we have with our parents: immediately after birth our skin to skin connection with mother affirms our existence. Many other sensuous pleasures make up our world: feeling warm and safe, being held, experiencing a loving touch, and the pleasure of mother’s milk.
And to reinforce the connections we are gradually forming, we have an instinct to gaze into the eyes of our carers so we connect and bond with each other. (Looking deeply into the eyes of our sexual partners in adulthood can reconnect us with the loving vulnerability of our inner child, who desires to connect with another more than anything else.)
Connection and Contact
When you hold a young baby who is being well cared for and whose needs are being met you can sense the innocent energy of the Lover archetype in its purest form. And when you see the steady, trusting look of a baby as he connects with his carers through mutual eye gazing, you see lover energy at work in one of its most profound ways.
All these needs for connection and contact remain with us as we move through life and grow and develop, though they become more expansive and take different forms.
Our desire for sexual connection with another human being is a fundamental element of the Lover archetype, but it may not be as important as simple non-sexual social and physical contact with other humans. Harlow’s experiments with monkeys in the 1950s showed how baby monkeys deprived of physical contact with their mothers failed to thrive even though they had all the food and water they needed.
Failure to thrive in the absence of maternal contact is a human condition, too. But failure to thrive is not only about what happens in infancy. As primates, we are social animals. We are designed to be in a group, and to be a part of the social dynamics of that group. Maybe that’s what helps to keep us sane, helps to preserve our humanity. Prisoners put into solitary confinement for extended periods soon develop mental and emotional problems, if not outright madness.
Sensitivity
The Lover holds our sense of connection with other people as well as our sense of connection with ourselves and with the Natural World.
You know that special feeling you get when you pause to really see and appreciate a beautiful sunrise or sunset, or when you’re standing in the middle of an ancient forest hearing the sounds of the birds and sensing the energy of an unspoiled place which has existed for thousands of years? Both are a product of your archetypal Lover’s capacity for feeling.
So both sensuality (feeling something which stimulates or delights the senses) and sensitivity (the quality of being sensitive to what’s around you) are qualities of the Lover archetype. Sensitivity can take the form of heightened awareness of all things, both internal and external. Sensitivity is not an intellectual experience; it’s more a felt experience, an emotional experience. When you’re in your Lover, you want to touch and to be touched, both physically and emotionally.
Lack of Boundaries
The earliest expression of the Lover archetype is the bonding of mother and baby after birth. This union appears to be a state of existence for the baby in which he and mother are experienced as one and the same; there’s no sense of separation between them in the baby’s consciousness. Child psychologists tell us that a baby only becomes aware of itself as a separate being after a few months of life.
We may feel that experience of unity again during adulthood, at least to some degree, during the moment of orgasm when there seems to be a loss of self, a loss of the boundaries between lovers.
Insights such as these might make you think that the ultimate desire of the Lover archetype is to experience unification with everything around us – and you could well be right.
Some people, especially sensitive, spiritually inclined men and women with strong Lover energy, report an experience of touching a universal consciousness where they feel a sense of connection to the world beyond the boundaries of their own being. You may know of this experience yourself. So perhaps the mind really does have no boundaries. Mystics, clairvoyants, spiritual gurus, and “sensitive” people have believed this throughout history, and in many societies mystics have been accorded a special place because of their apparent ability to connect with a higher power.
As you see, our sense of spirituality lies firmly in the preserve of the Lover. Unfortunately, in my experience, many people use their spiritual practice as a defence against looking at what may be in shadow in all the archetypal quarters. The words “I’ve evolved beyond all that” or something similar have been offered to me on more than a few occasions by people unwilling to look into their shadow!
Most of us experience the Lover archetype in more subtle ways than a sense of universality. We experience it in our appreciation of the world around us, our appreciation of beauty, and in our joy and delight in sensory experiences of all kinds – the touch of a lover during sexual connection, the taste of exquisite food, the sound of soulful music, the sight of a powerful piece of art.
Those who live more in a Magician space can find it challenging to understand the feeling world of the Lover. The Magician relies on logic, on intellect, on reasoning; the Lover relies on sensation, insight, and feeling, and has no need to explain what is known and unknown. To feel is enough.
Grief
The Lover has a close relationship with the Sovereign because access to the joy of the Sovereign is only possible when the shadow grief of the Lover has been mostly brought into consciousness. But where does that grief come from and what is its purpose?
Quite simply this: we are genetically “programmed” to experience grief when we lose something of value or when an emotional connection is broken. And the hard truth is that you will inevitably lose everything you love, everything to which you are connected, sooner or later. These are the losses which will cause you grief.
So sensitive are we, in the Lover archetype, that we also feel grief around the loss of things we should have had but which we never experienced. That might include, for example, good parenting, a childhood full of innocence and wonder, the caring love of our parents, or the support and attention of wise elders.
So all love and all connections can bring us both joy and grief: joy when we have them and grief when we lose them. We even feel grief when we do not get the love and connections which we have a right to expect simply because we’re alive. Our grief then is about the absence of what should have been ours yet never was.
For some reason, in our society we characterize grief as being “painful”. Yet this pain is really the pain of grief which is not expressed – perhaps grief in response to the loss of a loved one, or the threat of the loss of a loved one, or a breaking of connection with a loved one, or the loss of objects and experiences which were valuable to us in some way. We can also feel a sense of loss and grief when we wanted something passionately but never had it.
When grief is finally expressed, when tears flow, the pain of loss diminishes and ease and grace take its place. When enough tears have flowed, joy appears and the gateway to the Sovereign begins to open naturally. After all, if you shut yourself off from your grief how can you expect to experience your joy?
Moving Beyond Love
Let’s return for a moment to the concept of the Lover as an archetypal energy which goes well beyond love.
Somebody who lives mostly from the archetype of their Lover is not interested in boundaries, particularly socially created boundaries. The Lover, with his desire to merge and his disdain for boundaries, takes up a natural position against such things. And this manifests in his lifestyle: often messy, unconvention
al, even chaotic!
You can see, perhaps, how the energy of the Lover is so different to the Warrior’s desire for boundaries and discipline, to the Magician’s desire for logic and order, and to the King’s desire for clarity, purpose and mission.
Yet the Lover archetype is essential to our humanity. He or she may flow around our psyche and energize our bodies, swirling out into the world around us in everything we do. We feel our sexual urges when we would rather not. We experience our desire for sensual satisfaction and immediate gratification more often than we would like. When unbounded these desires lead us to over-indulge in food, drink, drugs, sex, pornography, and our own particular addictions, about which we will talk more in a little while.
Many men project the energy of their Lover archetype out onto the feminine in general and a specific woman in particular. Others suppress and deny it. But by projecting, denying, or pushing this part of ourselves into shadow we create an energetic tension within our being which then needs to be soothed with sensuous and sensual pleasures. For the sake of our emotional wholeness each of us needs to fully embrace the Lover archetype within and allow the expression of its sensitive and sensual nature in the way that suits it best.
Embracing Love
In our society men are traditionally more focused on the energy of the Warrior and women more on the energy of the Lover. Yet there is a false dichotomy here, because we all carry Lover energy within us; it springs from the roots of connectedness between baby and mother or baby and father, and it helps us develop a wider social network as we grow older.
Warrior, Magician, Lover, King Page 10