Male Archetypes
It’s challenging for a man or woman to develop to his or her full potential. One useful approach to becoming the fullest possible version of ourselves is to gradually develop mature versions of the male archetypes of King, Warrior, Magician, and Lover. But what do these words actually mean, and what relevance do they have to the life that each of us is leading?
In effect, your male archetypes are psychological components of you, each of which can be thought of as a discrete entity, or a composite of energy, which represents the characteristics, thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of a particular part of who you were, and are, at every stage of your life.
There’s a saying in psychology that “we have to take responsibility for what we are not responsible for“. This means that even though, as young children, we were not responsible for what happened to stunt us and fixate us at immature levels of masculinity, as adults we must take responsibility for who we are now, and for who we wish to become.
Many men have chosen to do work with the ManKind Project to help themselves overcome these immature emotional blocks and develop a strong Inner King and truly balanced male archetypes.
What Is The Inner King?
It’s a primal energy that underlies the rest of the male archetypes, for a good King is also good Warrior, a positive Magician, and a great Lover. And yet the truth is that for most of us, our King comes “online” last.
That’s not too surprising: the basis of the emotional wound in the King Quarter is the belief that “I am not good enough”. By definition, how could you possibly bring your King online fully when you haven’t dealt with the emotional wounds in the other quarters?
And yet some aspects of kingship develop throughout our lives. In fact, several lines of emotional development can take place at the same time, but there are certain emotional and psychological sequences of development which have to take place in all of us.
Male archetypes – video with the late Robert Moore
Developing the fullness of the Inner King
Kings have always been sacred because King energy has always been incredibly important to the human race: the King has been immensely organising, ordering, and creatively healing. (At least, that is, when the male archetype of the King is in balance, and not inflated into a tyrant, or deflated into a weakling King – corrupted male archetypes which are both symptoms of severe emotional wounding.)
Indeed, it’s the functions of King energy which make the transition from boy psychology to man psychology possible. The good King sits at the centre of his world, and his being, his values, his energy, and his essence spread out to the very frontiers of his world. For you, for me, for every man, no matter what we see as our kingdom or realm, our Inner King is the one responsible for ordering and directing, for making things happen, and for choosing what is best for all of the people within our realm, including ourselves.
You can see the importance of the male archetypes approach to human psychology: your Inner King must guide all “your” people, and all the other archetypal parts of yourself, where they need to go. That’s when the kingdom flourishes.
But when your Inner King isn’t in balance, nothing will go right for your people, or for your kingdom as a whole. The realm will languish, and the centre, which your King represents , will not hold – the kingdom will be ripe for rebellion, invasion or destruction. This book offers a lot more information on the male archetype of the King. This book provides much more information on all of the male archetypes.
The Power of Past Experience in Forming Male Archetypal Energy
Many of us probably grew up in dysfunctional families where there was an immature, weak, or an absent father – and as a result our mature King energy is not sufficiently present: in situations like this, our own families may succumb to disorder and chaos.
And even if a woman brings her own sovereign archetypal Queen energy, which can substitute to some degree for Kingly energy, at some level the boys in the family suffer because they have no role model to teach them how to develop their own inner King.
(Most civilisations have seen the highest manifestation of kingly energy as a creative partnership with the Queen – and indeed, it has usually been seen as the royal couple’s duty to pass their creative energies on to the kingdom in the form of children.)
The Male Archetype of The King and His Role in Blessing
Perhaps one of the most critical roles of the King throughout history has been to bestow blessing. The truth is that being blessed has enormous psychological consequences for us. (Our bodies change chemically when we feel valued, praised, and blessed.)
And young men today are starving for the archetypal blessing from older men – starving for blessing from older men’s King energy. Indeed, this lack of elder male energy in general, and blessing in particular, is probably one of the reasons why so many young people can’t make their lives work. Yet they shouldn’t be in this place – what they need is to be blessed; they need to be seen by the King, and when they are, something inside them comes together and “switches on”.
Ask yourself: how much blessing did you receive from your father or other Kings during your childhood? Most likely none. Perhaps a little. But never enough to make you believe that you were good enough – giving you a lifetime’s personal work of reparation and self-exploration.
This is the work you need to do to recover who you were always meant to be.
The Male Archetypes of the Tyrant and the Weakling King
As we know, things don’t always go according to plan. It’s certainly true that most of us have experienced at least moments of Kingly qualities such as integration, calmness, and centredness – and perhaps we’ve even experienced blessing from a kindly uncle or grandfather, a boss, teacher, a priest, a therapist.
But the truth is most of us have very little experience of the male archetypal energy of the King in his fullness. This is why this gracious and graceful energy is sadly lacking in most men. (You may think of the male politicians we see around the world at this point.) Instead, what we experience is what has been called the Shadow King.
The tyrant shadow king, one aspect of the wounded and undeveloped King, is not generative. He is destructive. He exploits and abuses the world and the people in it to boost his own sense of grandiosity, and he behaves ruthlessly, mercilessly, and without feeling. He pursues what he thinks of as his own self-interest but takes from others as he does so. He takes dignity, courage, vitality. He sucks people dry. He does not respect beauty or innocence or strength or talent or life energy.
He behaves in this way because he lacks any sense of true self-worth, and at heart he is terrified of his own hidden weakness, inadequacy and, above all, his complete lack of potency and strength.
Worse, he fears anyone who is a true King, who embodies the true values of the male archetype of the King. in some way, in fact, he seeks to persecute and even kill men who embody true Kingship. He is a demagogue, a tyrant, the epitome of the imbecilic leader.
A tyrant king uses many weapons: verbal assaults, deprecation of other Kings’ values, standards, skills, talents and qualities. He may ignore them when they offer counsel, or show no interest when they offer their knowledge and skills to him. And of course his attacks aren’t always verbal or psychological: they often include physical abuse.
David Starkey on the Tyrant King
Any man who is possessed by the tyrant is very sensitive to criticism – and will, at the slightest remark, feel weak and deflated. But while he may not show this, you will experience his rage, his rage which covers his sense of worthlessness, vulnerability and weakness. For behind the tyrant lies the other pole of the King’s shadow – the weakling.
And when the weakling cannot identify with King energy, or doesn’t feel it, he believes he is nothing. And then he projects his own inner weakling King upon those who he sees as weak.
Of course the inner weakling lacks centredness and calmness and security within himself. This can lead him into paranoia. He sees threats where they do not exist, he is tormented by fears of disloyalty. And in some ways he does have much to fear, because his oppressive behaviour, including cruelty, are powerful provocations which may lead to a similar response from other people.
Such thoughts and feelings lead to increasing tyranny and dictatorial behaviour, the accumulation of more and more power around an individual.
The Development Of The Tyrant
It’s so hard for parents who were not blessed themselves to bless their children in the right way. Moore and Gillette point out in their book that to offer a child just the right amount of adoration and affirmation is difficult. Perhaps the parents mollycoddle them, and adore them, producing a “highchair tyrant”. As they say, a parent needs to allow the child down off the “highchair” easily and gradually into the real world, where gods cannot live as mortal humans.
Because if parents adore a boy too much and don’t help the boy’s ego form, then he may never get down from his high chair, and remain inflated with the power of his infantile grandiosity. That’s one way that the Shadow King is formed – and the other is when the parents abuse the baby or the boy, and attack his grandiosity and gloriousness from the beginning.
In these cases, as Moore and Gillette put it, the grandiosity gets “split off and dropped into the boy’s unconscious for safekeeping”. When this happens, the boy will come under the power of his own weakling Prince. Later, in “adulthood”, functioning primarily from the place of the weakling King, his repressed grandiosity may explode to the surface, raw and primitive, unmodulated and very powerful.
Sometimes a man seems very nice and rational, but when promoted, let’s say, explodes into a different personality, a little Hitler. This is the Shadow King – a man for whom the saying “power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely” is entirely correct. (Here, I think again of some of the so-called “politicians” in our World.)
So on the one hand, where a boy was badly treated in childhood and disassociated from his King energy, he can become caught in his own King’s dysfunctional shadow and feel starved of King energy. This is the man who has no ability, no control, no power – or so it seems – to change his life.
On the other hand, a man may come to identify completely with kingly energy – but of an immature kind. He identifies completely with King energy, and has no commitment to others. He is his own priority. The true centre of the system is lost: and grandiosity rules, along with tyrannical kingship.
Projecting the King Outwards
Of course, as men who go through the ManKind Project weekend learn, what we don’t experience in ourselves, we project outwards onto others. And so it’s possible that anyone who has lost contact with his own inner king may seek it out in others. He might experience himself as impotent, as incapable of acting, as incapable of feeling calm, without the presence and the loving attention of another person who carries his King energy projection.
This can happen with children when their parents don’t allow them to develop sufficient independence of will and action and purpose, and the children remain forever bound to their parents. It can happen at work, when we become too dependent upon the power of the boss.
And it can happen on a national scale too. In the 20th and 21st centuries we’ve seen many examples of countries where people saw themselves as peasants and turned all of their King energy over to some kind of Fuhrer. This abdication of one’s own power is just as damaging as the tyranny that it fosters.
Another way in which men can deal with their own lack of King energy is to become “King killers”. This means a man attacks and tries to bring down the people who he sees as Kingly and successful. Maybe it represents an attack on their own inner King energy, which they repress, fearful of expressing it in the world.
The Male Archetype of the King Brings the Other Male Archetypes Into Order
Even if the mature masculine energy within you is a potential rather than a reality, at some level you can still make a choice to step into your Inner King. (Discover how you can do this by listening to this audio recording.)
When we embody our King energy correctly, we will manifest the qualities of the Inner King in his fullness. Then, the Warrior will wish to obey the King. The Magician lets go of anxiety and relinquishes control. Our Lover is safe and free to express himself. And we feel centred and calm, and we speak from our inner authority.
We can bless ourselves and others, and care for others deeply and genuinely. We see others as the complete persons they really are. We have a sense of being a centred participant in the world, creating a more just, calm, and creative world.