More About The Lover Archetype

Touch is a very important aspect of your Lover archetype’s experience of the world. I don’t necessarily mean physical touch, though. Your Lover wants to feel touched by everything; he or she is ready to feel the glory of all creation.

The twin themes of feeling and connection run through the Lover archetype’s very being. Your Lover is how you feel empathy with another human being. How you feel your own grief and joy. More than anything else your Lover carries your desire to feel connected in some way to the world around you and to the people in it.

The Lover’s world is the world of kinesthetic experience, of sensitivity, of opening up to the sensations felt and stored in your body. His or her world is all about appreciating the beauty of life, the subtlety of art, and the magnificence of the world around you. It’s about appreciating that you, and I, and all of us, are just part of a greater whole. Your Lover feels this when you look up into the night sky and see the billions of stars shining down on us.

Lover Archetype on Video

Your Lover archetype is the source of your spirituality and mysticism. (You can read about this in Rod Boothroyd’s book King Warrior Magician Lover, or alternatively you can explore the relationship between the Lover and King archetypes in his book Finding the King Within.) The Lover is the part of you which responds to religious ceremony and recognises the existence of something greater than yourself – and also the possibility of union with that greater whole.

This recognition, this awareness, may come through spiritual ceremony, meditation, or the use of psychoactive drugs. But it may also come unexpectedly when sitting quietly in a forest on a summer’s day. It may come unexpectedly during a fisherman’s battle with a cock salmon on a thin tight line. It may come without warning during a hunt when the prey turns and looks you in the eye.

Origins Of The Desire For Feeling

This desire, this urge, this hunger, to be at one with the world around us may come from a primal aspect of our psyche.

For the first few months of life, a baby isn’t able to distinguish between itself and its mother. Indeed, a baby is born of its mother’s flesh, and so it remains for some weeks after birth: a glorious union, a safe sense of oneness. (Well, that’s how it should be in an ideal world.)

And so perhaps our desire for oneness, our desire to let go and just “be”, our desire to be part of a bigger whole,  originates in this very primal state of unity with mother. And perhaps if we did not experience it then, right after birth, we crave it all the more intensely later in life.

But We Are Also A Part Of The Cosmos

Our felt sense, our knowing, that we came from the  cosmos, the boundless universe, and our belief that we return there in spirit when we die is certainly representative of the Lover’s view of the world. And who is to say if this is right or wrong?

In the Lover’s view of the world, feeling is everything. Moments of unity with others during sexual intimacy, moments of transcendent pleasure or peace during mediation, moments of insight and intuition – they are all part of the Lover’s world view.

And so are pain and grief and tenderness, poignancy and empathy, happiness and joy.

The Lover archetype may feel deep satisfaction and pleasure in seductive, complex tastes and aromas, beautiful art, or exquisite musical performances, as well as in strong emotions, felt responses to great music or literature. All of these reactions have the power to “transport” us to another world.

Much of what the Lover knows about the world has been learned through feeling. (By the way, even some highly intellectual magicians can be oriented around feeling: they may “feel” their way into the meaning of language, words and intellectual concepts.)

Perhaps people with an advanced kinesthetic sense of the world spend more time in their Lover archetype than any other. They connect to the world and its meaning by exploring their feelings. They may be extremely sensitive to the shifts in mood of others, and they may sense intention or hidden motives in people who live primarily in their Magician energy.

The Lover archetype is the part of us that enables us to feel our own pain and the pain of others – both physical and emotional pain.

The burden of feeling the pain of the world around can be so much that being in the Lover archetype can be painful. And at the same time, the Lover can feel joy. And, sadly, if you cut your Lover off from pain, you also cut it – and yourself – off from joy.

The point is that to be human and to love others, to love anything, in fact, can bring both pain and joy because most of what we love in our lifetimes, we will most likely lose at some point.

And when we are in our Lover archetype we feel the grief of that loss most acutely. Often we suppress these feelings: we are taught to do that by society, by our parents, by siblings and by teachers, because it suits the world not to be burdened by the display of deep feelings.

Have you noticed how there is so often a sense of awkwardness around people who are emoting? Have you ever seen how people who are in connection with pain of their Lover archetype appear almost to be a problem, an embarrassment to others?

Sometimes even the Lover’s joy can be embarrassing to the people around him or her. After all, a human being in the grip of great joy may laugh and cry uncontrollably. God forbid we should show our feelings! You can read more about liberation from repression in Marianne Hill’s book about Deep Process Psychotherapy and Shadow Work.

Perhaps the problem here is that people crying or jumping with joy show the rest of us all too clearly how we have suppressed our  feelings! And that can be a painful recognition indeed.

The Lover knows that boundaries exist, but has little respect for them. After all, the Lover is intuitive and emotional, his experience of the world is based on feeling, and his hope is always to establish unity or connection with somebody or something.