Over the centuries of civilization in the West, almost all these ritual processes have been abandoned or have been diverted into narrower and less energized channels—into phenomena we can call pseudo-initiations. We can point to the historical
In our view, patriarchy is not the expression of deep and rooted masculinity, for truly deep and rooted masculinity is not abusive. Patriarchy is the expression of the immature masculine.
Boys fear women. They also fear real men.
The more beautiful, competent, and creative we become, the more we seem to invite the hostility of our superiors, or even of our peers. What we are really being attacked by is the immaturity in human beings who are terrified of our advances on the road toward masculine or feminine fullness of being.
He is fragmented; various parts of his personality are split off from each other and leading fairly independent and often chaotic lives. A man who “cannot get it together” is a man who has probably not had the opportunity to undergo ritual initiation into the deep structures of manhood. He remains a boy—not because he wants to, but because no one has shown him the way to transform his boy energies into man energies.
Submission to the power of the mature masculine energies always brings forth a new masculine personality that is marked by calm, compassion, clarity of vision, and generativity.
This space must be sealed from the influence of the outside world, especially, in the case of boys, from the influence of women. Often, the initiates are put through terrifying emotional and excruciatingly painful physical trials. They learn to submit to the pain of life, to the ritual elders, and to the masculine traditions and myths of the society.
They are taught all the secret wisdom of men. And they are released from the sacred space only when they have successfully completed the ordeal and been reborn as men.
that on the level of the deep unconscious the psyche of every person is grounded in what Jung called the “collective unconscious,” made up of instinctual patterns and energy configurations probably inherited genetically throughout the generations of our species.
In addition, Jungians have found that in every man there is a feminine subpersonality called the Anima, made up of the feminine archetypes. And in every woman there is a masculine subpersonality called the Animus, made up of the masculine archetypes.
We are just beginning to sort out in a systematic way the inner human world that has always manifested itself to us in myth, ritual, dreams, and visions.
Roman birthday parties were held not so much to honor an individual as to honor that person’s genius, the divine being that came into the world with him or her. The Romans knew that it was not the man’s Ego that was the source of his music, his art, his statecraft, or his courageous deeds. It was the Divine Child, an aspect of the Self within him.
The Precocious Child is the origin of our curiosity and our adventurous impulses. He urges us to be explorers and
pioneers of the unknown, the strange and mysterious.
His energy comes from envy. The less a man is in touch with his true talents and abilities, the more he will envy others. If we envy a lot, we are denying our own realistic greatness, our own Divine Child. What we need to do, then, is to get in touch with our own specialness, our own beauty, and our own creativity. Envy blocks creativity.
The “death” of the Hero is the “death” of boyhood, of Boy psychology. And it is the birth of manhood and Man psychology. The “death” of the Hero in the life of a boy (or a man) really means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself. He has met his own dark side, his very unheroic side. He has fought the dragon and been burned by it; he has fought the revolution and drunk the dregs of his own inhumanity.
True humility, we believe, consists of two things. The first is knowing our limitations. And the second is getting the help we need.
It is enormously difficult for a human being to develop to full potential. The struggle with the infantile within us exerts a tremendous “gravitational” pull against achieving that full adult potential. Nevertheless, we need to fight gravity by dint of hard labor and to build the pyramids of first boyhood and then manhood that constitute the core structures of our masculine Selves.
Analysis of dreams, the re-entering and changing of our dreams, active imagination (in which the Ego, among other things, dialogues with the energy patterns within, thereby achieving both differentiation from and access to them), psychotherapy in a variety of forms, meditation on the positive aspects of the archetypes, prayer, magical ritual process with a spiritual elder, various forms of spiritual discipline, and other methods are all important to the difficult process of turning boys into men. The four major forms of the mature masculine energies that we have identified are the King, the Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover. They all overlap and, ideally, enrich one another.
5. The KING
We could say that the King is the Divine Child, but seasoned and complex, wise, and in a sense as selfless as the Divine Child is cosmically self-involved. The good King is wise with “the wisdom of Solomon.”
Two functions of King energy make this transition from Boy psychology to Man psychology possible. The first of these is ordering; the second is the providing of fertility and blessing.
The kingdom will flourish. If the king does not live “in the Tao” then nothing will go right for his people, or for the kingdom as a whole.
The sacred king in ancient times became the primary expression for many peoples of the life-force, the libido, of the cosmos.
The tyrant hates, fears, and envies new life, because that new life, he senses, is a threat to his slim grasp on his own kingship. The tyrant king is not in the Center and does not feel calm and generative.
He is not creative, only destructive.
This is the CEO who negotiates, for his own financial benefit, to sell his company, to see it dismembered and rendered impotent, who is willing to see his friends and loyal employees fired as excess baggage in the now popular “lever-aged buy-out.”
completely raw and primitive, completely unmodulated and very powerful. This is the man
who seemed coolheaded and rational and “nice” but who, once he’s been promoted, suddenly becomes “a different person,” a Little Hitler. This is the man for whom the saying “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” is entirely accurate.
We will “recognize” others; we will behold them as the full persons they really are. We will have a sense of being a centered participant in creating a more just, calm, and creative world. We will have a transpersonal devotion not only to our families, our friends, our companies, our causes, our religions, but also to the world.
We live in a time when people are generally uncomfortable with the Warrior form of masculine energy—and for some good reasons. Women especially are uncomfortable with it, because they have often been the most direct victims of it in its shadow form.
The characteristics of the Warrior in his fullness amount to a total way of life, what the samurai called a do (pronounced “dough”). These characteristics constitute the Warrior’s Dharma, Ma’at, or Tao, a spiritual or psychological path through life.
Aggressiveness is a stance toward life that rouses, energizes, and motivates.
The samurai advice was always to “leap” into battle with the full potential of ki, or “vital energy,” at your disposal. The Japanese warrior tradition claimed that there is only one position in which to face the battle of life: frontally. And it also proclaimed that there
was only one direction: forward.
How does the man accessing the Warrior know what aggressiveness is appropriate under the circumstances? He knows through clarity of thinking, through discernment. The warrior is always alert. He is always awake. He is never sleeping through life. He knows how to focus his mind and his body. He is what the samurai called “mindful.”
He is a “hunter” in the Native American tradition. As Don Juan, the Yaqui Indian warrior-sorcerer in Carlos Castañeda’s Journey to Ixtlan, says, a warrior knows what he wants, and he knows how to get it. As a function of his clarity of mind he is a strategist and a tactician.
The Warrior traditions all affirm that, in addition to training, what enables a Warrior to reach clarity of thought is living with the awareness of his own imminent death.
This means that he has an unconquerable spirit, that he has great courage, that he is fearless, that he takes responsibility for his actions, and that he has self-discipline. Discipline means that he has the rigor to develop control and mastery over his mind and over his body, and that he has the capacity to withstand pain, both psychological and physical. He is willing to suffer to achieve what he wants to achieve. “No pain, no gain,” we say. Whether you are literally a hunter, crouched for hours in the same position in the chill early morning of the Kalahari waiting for your prey to come within range, or whether you’re a triathlon trainee, a medical school student, an executive enduring the misguided attacks of your board members, or a husband trying to work out difficulties with your wife, you know that discipline of your mind and perhaps your body is essential.
As we have said, the Warrior in his pure form is emotionally detached; his transpersonal loyalty radically relativizes the importance of a man’s human relationships. This is apparent in the Warrior’s attitude toward sex. Women, for the Warrior, are not for relating to, for being intimate
with. They are for fun. We’ve all heard the marching chant, “This is my rifle and this is my gun.
The Shadow Warrior: The Sadist and the Masochist
Compulsive personalities are workaholics, constantly with their noses to the grindstone. They have a tremendous capacity to endure pain, and they often manage to get an enormous amount of work done. But what is driving their nonstop engines is deep anxiety, the Hero’s desperation. They have a very slim grasp on a sense of their own worthwhileness. They don’t know what it is they really want, what they are missing and would like to have.
In the process, they are eaten alive by the Sadistic Warrior and soon reach “burnout.”
In the course of his therapy he discovered the self-destructive power of his compulsiveness and how it worked to alienate him from others. And he resolved to turn over a new leaf.
Any profession that puts a great deal of pressure on a person to perform at his best all the time leaves us vulnerable to the shadow system of the Warrior. If we are not secure enough in our own inner structure, we will rely on our performance in the outer world to bolster our self-confidence.
The man who becomes obsessed with “succeeding” has already failed.
We will fight good fights in order to make the world a better and more fulfilling place for everyone and everything. Our war-making will be for the creation of the new, the just, and the free.
By sympathetic magic, the channeling of hidden energies, the aborigine Magician helps give Glenn strength and aids him on his way.
We often mistakenly think that we are very different from our ancient ancestors, with our great knowledge and our amazing technology. But the origins of our knowledge and our technology lie in the minds of men like the old aborigine. He, and all those like him in tribal and ancient societies were accessing the Magician energy.
Jung realized that he had stumbled onto a vast world that modern people had largely neglected, a world of living images and symbols that rose and fell like the waves of energy that seemed to account for our material universe.
The conclusion of both modern physics and depth psychology is that things are not what they seem. What we experience as normal reality—about ourselves and nature—is only the tip of an iceberg that arises out of an unfathomable abyss. Knowledge of this hidden realm is the province of the Magician, and it is through the Magician energy that we will come to understand our lives with a degree of profundity not dreamed of for at least a thousand years of Western history.
The power of the unconscious energies is so great that if they are not controlled, contained, and channeled, if they are not accessed at just the right moment and in just the right dose, they may blow the Ego structure to bits. Too much power without the proper “transformers” and the right amount of “insulation” to contain it will overload the analysand’s circuits and destroy him. The revelation of secret information must be measured out, because there are reasons for its having been hidden from the Ego in the first place.
It is the archetype that governs what is called in psychology “the observing Ego.”
While it is sometimes assumed in depth psychology that the Ego is secondary in importance to the unconscious, the Ego is in fact vital to our survival. It is only when it is possessed by, identified with, and inflated by another energy form—an archetype or a “complex” (an archetypal fragment, like the Tyrant)—that it malfunctions.
The Magician, then, is the archetype of thoughtfulness and reflection. And, because of that, it is also the energy of introversion. What we mean by introversion is not shyness or timidity but rather the capacity to detach from the inner and outer storms and to connect with deep inner truths and resources.
The Magician energy, in aiding the formation of the Ego-Self axis, is immovable in its stability, centeredness, and emotional detachment. It is not easily pushed and pulled around.
What we think he was reporting was sudden access to the Magician energy, an energy whose detached “knowledge” of various possible outcomes
and understanding of lines of force (of containment and channeling) could help him, through technical proficiency, make the best of a bad situation.
He was the one who restored wholeness and fullness of being to both individuals and communities.
the Magician energy today still has the same ultimate aim. The Magician, and the shaman as his fullest human vessel, aims at fullness of being for all things, through the compassionate application of knowledge and technology.
The Shadow Magician: The Manipulator and the Denying “Innocent” One
The man possessed by the “Innocent” One commits both sins of commission and sins of omission but hides his hostile motives behind an impenetrable wall of feigned naïveté. Such men are slippery and illusive. They do not allow us to engage them frontally with our Warrior energy. They parry our attempts to confront them, thus keeping us off balance by seducing us into an endless process of questioning our own intuitions about their behavior.
One of the hardest things to do as a counselor or therapist is to get clients to separate their Egos from their emotions without at the same time repressing the emotions. There is a really good psychological exercise for doing this that can help; it’s called focusing, originated by Eugene Gendlin. We ask our clients, when they sense the onset of strong emotions—strong fear, envy, anger, despair—to sit down in an “observation” chair and as the feelings come up imagine placing them in a stack in the middle of the room.
Each one should be placed on the stack carefully, and we can sit back and watch the feeling—its color,
its shape, and the nuances of its emotional tones.
What this exercise does is help the client strengthen his connection with the Magician energy. It is the Magician that watches and thinks. It is the Magician that enables the Ego to place the feelings in an orderly stack. The emotional energies, thus contained, eventually lose their power. Finally, the strengthened Ego may be able to take this raw emotive energy and transform it into useful and life-enhancing forms of Self-expression.
The tremendous energy of his raw childhood rage, now contained and channeled into the “lights” and “factories” of his present life, was acting as a power station for his new way of living.
8. The LOVER
They also use the Latin term libido. By these terms they mean not just
We believe that the Lover, by whatever name, is the primal energy pattern of what we could call vividness, aliveness, and passion. It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, well-being, reproduction, creative adaptation to life’s hardships, and ultimately a sense of meaning, without which human beings cannot go on with their lives. The Lover’s drive is to satisfy those hungers.
sexual appetites but a general appetite for life.
The Lover is the archetype of play and of “display,” of healthy embodiment, of being in the world of sensuous pleasure and in one’s own body without shame.
His sensitivity leads him to feel compassionately and empathetically united with them. For the man accessing the Lover, all things are bound to each other in mysterious ways.
This is the consciousness that knew long before the invention of holography that we live, in fact, in a “holographic” universe—one in which every part reflects every other in immediate and sympathetic union. It isn’t just that the Lover energy sees the world in a grain of sand. He feels that this is so.
We believe that the man accessing the Lover is open to a “collective unconscious,” perhaps even vaster than that which Jung proposed.
This idea that there is a universal consciousness is reflected in Obe Wan Kanobe of the Star Wars series, who is deeply sensitive to and empathic toward the whole of his galaxy and feels any subtle changes in “the Force.” Eastern philosophers have said that we are like waves on the surface of this vast sea. The Lover energy has immediate and intimate contact with this underlying “oceanic” connectedness.
He wants to live out the connectedness he feels with the world inside, in the context of his powerful feelings, and outside, in the context of his relationships with other people. Ultimately, he wants to experience the world of sensual experience in its totality.
The Lover is not, then, only the archetype of the joy of life. In his capacity to feel at one with others and with the world, he must also feel their pain.
He feels the painfulness of being alive—both for himself and for others.
The man under the influence of the Lover does not want to stop at socially created boundaries. He stands against the artificiality of such things. His life is often unconventional
we see enacted in his life of confrontation with the conventional the old tension between sensuality and morality, between love and duty, between, as Joseph Campbell poetically describes it, “amor and Roma”—“amor” standing for passionate experience and “Roma” standing for duty and responsibility to law and order.
This was a revelation to him, and he began to access, with great benefit to himself and his sexual partners, the mature masculine energies of the Lover.
The Shadow Lover: The Addicted and the Impotent Lover
The most forceful and urgent question a man identified with the Addicted Lover asks is: “Why should I put any limits on my sensual and sexual experience of this vast world, a world that holds unending pleasures for me?”
it. He became lost. One man had a love for vintage cars that exceeded his income. He was lured on and on—“lost” in their glistening beauty, oblivious to the drain on his finances until the day “harsh reality” came knocking, and he discovered he was bankrupt.
But, as he said, he felt absolutely compelled to express his art. He got lost in it; finally, he lost his family.
There are stories of so-called addictive personalities—people who can’t stop eating, or drinking, or smoking, or using drugs.
And it’s what the Hindus talk about as maya—the dance of illusion, the intoxicating (addictive) dance of sensuous things that enchants and enthralls the mind, catching us up in the cycles of pleasure and pain.
This is the man who is always searching for something. He doesn’t know what it is he’s looking for, but he’s the cowboy at the end of the movie riding off alone into the sunset seeking some other excitement, some other adventure, unable to settle down.
Caught in the “myriads of forms,” as the Hindus say, he can’t find the Oneness that would bring him calm and stability. Living on the finite side of the prism, he can only experience light in its dazzling but fractured rainbow hues.
it. He must destroy the alluring and enchanting “feminine” beauty that would keep him from his manhood. And he does so.
We will “feel” the sterility and flatness the accountant reported. We will describe symptoms that psychologists call “flattened affect”—lack of enthusiasm, lack of vividness, lack of aliveness.
His life may seem like a movie that he is watching. These men are seriously, and dangerously, possessed by the Impotent Lover.
It is also the absence of an erect and eager penis. This man’s sex life has gone stale; he is sexually inactive. Such sexual inactivity may stem from any number of factors—boredom and lack of ecstasy with his mate, smoldering anger about his relationship, tension and stress on the job, money worries, or the sense of being emasculated by the feminine or by the other men in his life.
The Lover without boundaries, in his chaos of feeling and sensuality, needs the King to define limits for him, to give him structure, to order his chaos so that it can be channeled creatively. Without limits, the Lover energy turns negative and destructive. The Lover needs the Warrior in order to be able to act decisively, in order to detach, with the clean cut of the sword, from the web of immobilizing sensuality. The Lover needs the Warrior to destroy the Golden Temple,
fixated. And the Lover needs the Magician to help him back off from the ensnaring effect of his emotions, in order to reflect, to get a more objective perspective on things, to disconnect—enough at least to see the big picture and to experience the reality beneath the seeming.
Tragically, the unrelenting attacks on our vitality and on our “shining” begin early in our lives. Many of us may have so repressed the Lover in us that it has become very hard for us to feel passionate about anything in our lives.
Then we listen for their replies. Often, it is best to do this on paper, writing both the Ego’s thoughts
and feelings and the “opponent’s” thoughts and feelings just as they come, without censoring them. As in any successful board meeting, we at least need to agree to disagree. Under extremely hostile circumstances, we need to reach a simple truce, if possible, at least for the time being. At a minimum, this kind of exercise will help us to scope out the opposition and get most of the cards on the table. Forewarned is forearmed. This exercise may seem strange at first. But usually just a few moments of writing will reveal the reality of the other points of view within every man’s psyche. It may happen that you draw a blank at first. But if you persist in talking to yourself, eventually you will be answered. The answers you get may be startling. They may be reassuring. But they will come.
Most of us probably have inner persecutors, as well as inner helpers. But the persecutor may be so vicious that you will need support to continue dialoguing with it. If you suspect you will run into one of these, it is best to invoke a positive archetypal energy form before you even open the dialogue. (We talk about invocation in the next section.) One more note: you may get in touch with more than one other point of view. Treat the dialogue, then, as a board meeting, and listen to what everybody has to say.
Eros, especially the Cupid (Eros) and Psyche story, and then to pray to Eros to help him to feel sensual and attractive. Shortly after he began his invocations of this image of the Lover, he went on a cruise. There he met, quite unexpectedly, a beautiful woman who felt that he was the most handsome, manly man she’d ever seen. She was experiencing the newfound Eros within him, which was filling his whole personality with its force and radiance.
Admiring Men Along the same lines is the related technique of admiration. Mature men need to admire other men, living and dead. We need especially to have contact with older men whom we can look up to. If such men are not available to us personally, we need to read their biographies
There’s a saying in this connection: “Be careful what you wish for; you may get it!” The much-touted power of positive thinking is at least partially true, truer than most of us think.
start to feel like a king. It’s quite odd, but if you need to access more of the Lover, for example, and sunsets don’t interest you, go out and really look at a sunset. Act as if you appreciate it. Notice the colors. Force yourself to see the beauty. Even say to yourself, “Oh, yes, look at those oranges and reds, and the subtle transition from blue to purple.” Pretty soon, strange as it may seem, you really may find yourself becoming interested in the sunset!
In this book we have been concerned about helping men to take responsibility for the destructiveness of immature forms of masculinity. At the same time, it is clear that the world is overpopulated with not only immature men but also tyrannical and abusive little girls pretending to be women.
A final word of encouragement: any transformative process, like life itself, takes time and effort. We do our “homework” from the conscious side, and the unconscious, with its powerful resources, will, if approached in the right way, respond to our questions, our needs, and our woundedness in healing
and generative ways. The struggle for maturity is a psychological, moral, and spiritual imperative from the Chinese Emperor within every man. Joseph Campbell, in his last book, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, called for a worldwide awakening to a kind of initiation that would become a rallying point for a deepened human sense of responsibility and maturity. Initiation, as we talk about it, is really a matter of exploring the outer reaches of inner space.
contemporary men can take the task of their own initiation from Boyhood to Manhood as seriously as did their tribal forebears, then we may witness the end of the beginning of our species, instead of the beginning of
the end.