Meeting the Archetypes
An introduction to the archetypes of the mature masculine psyche
I can’t remember exactly when I first read King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette—only that it was years before I read it again inside my men’s group.
What I do remember is the fascination.
The idea that a man could embody the mature masculine psyche through archetypes felt mythic and powerful:
The King — steadiness, vision, blessing
The Warrior — discipline, clarity, consequence
The Magician — insight, intuition, pattern-seeing
The Lover — aliveness, eros, connection
On my first read, I consumed these archetypes with my mind. It was invigorating, but mostly theoretical. Exciting, but not integrated. Inspiring, but disembodied.
Because you don’t understand archetypes. You inhabit them. And inhabiting them requires right relationship with the body, with the breath, with the nervous system, with the shadow, and with all the places where your life is still out of alignment.
My second read came years later, inside the container of my men’s group.
By then I had lived enough, fucked up enough, grieved enough, and grown enough that the archetypes no longer felt like ideas.
They feel alive.
I can feel it when I step into a food event as the Devotional Chef—a Lover-archetype offshoot that has become part of my personal mythos.
Moore and Gillette’s book is built on Carl Jung’s original twelve archetypes. They distilled them into four primary expressions of the mature masculine. And while the language of the book is dated, the wisdom underneath it is timeless.
Archetypes are not characters. They are patterns of energy. Blueprints. Primordial postures the psyche recognizes immediately, in the same way the body recognizes heat or gravity.
I lean on my archetypes for guidance, and though I’ve taken creative liberties that suit my psyche, the essence remains unchanged.
Archetypes are useful models with distinct energetic signatures, each with its own posture, its own gifts, its own shadows. And when we intentionally embody them—through breath, through movement, through ritual, through somatic practice, we tap into a version of ourselves that is moving toward fullness.
Not perfection. Not performance. Fullness. The point isn’t to impersonate an archetype. It’s to let it animate you.
To let the King straighten your spine and widen your perspective.
To let the Warrior clarify your boundaries and sharpen your integrity.
To let the Magician steady your breath and reveal the unseen patterns.
To let the Lover soften your chest, awaken your senses, and remind you why any of this matters.
Archetypes became most useful to me when I stopped looking at them as fixed identities and started treating them as a council. Each with distinct energies I can call on depending on what the moment requires. Not fantasies. Not personas. Just functional, reliable patterns that sharpen how I move through the world.
This is the frame that eventually became what I now call my Inner Council.