archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

King (Moore & Gillette)

Order held for others, and the fear of the one who holds it.

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s name, from 1990, for the ordering and blessing energy they placed at the head of their four archetypes of the mature masculine, with a boy form, the Divine Child, and a two-poled shadow, the Tyrant and the Weakling.

The King, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of right order and generativity in a man’s psyche: the capacity to hold a centre, to set things in their places, to make a realm fertile and to bless the people in it. It is the first of their four archetypes of what they call the mature masculine, and the one they rank above the others, because in their account it is the King that keeps the Warrior, the Magician and the Lover in balance. A woman, they say, carries the same structure with a Queen in the King’s place.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy reposeTo the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,And in the calmest and most stillest night,With all appliances and means to boot,Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Public domain · Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, Act 3, scene 1 (1600)

A sleepless king, envying the ship-boy who can sleep, meets the sovereign’s weight before any of the glory.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 6 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    King David

    Moore & Gillette (1990), King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/, c. 1000 BCE

    Named in a summary of the book as a king whose many children and abundance show the King’s function of fertility and blessing.

  2. Jung’s example

    Saul

    Moore & Gillette (1990), as reported at https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/21234645-archetypal-character-arcs-pt-12-the-king-s-shadow-archetypes, c. 1050 BCE

    Cited in a commentary as the authors’ Tyrant: a king whose ego stays fixed on the throne after the prophet says it should be given up.

  3. Jung’s example

    King Herod

    Moore & Gillette (1990), King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/, c. 4 BCE

    The slayer of the newborns, offered as the model Tyrant who attacks wherever new life appears and threatens his place.

  4. Jung’s example

    Caligula

    Moore & Gillette (1990), King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/, 37

    Listed among the Tyrants in their extreme form, the King’s active shadow loosed from any restraint.

  5. Jung’s example

    Abraham Lincoln

    Moore & Gillette (1990), King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, as summarised at https://auresnotes.com/king-warrior-magician-lover-summary-robert-moore-douglas-gillette/, 1861

    Recommended in the same summary as a man whose life one can read to meet the King’s steadiness.

  6. a later reading

    Aragorn

    The Culturist, The 4 Types of Men, 1955

    Offered as the foremost example of a healthy King, acting without self-assertion or ambition.

The wider sky

Where the King (Moore & Gillette) has been seen

24 exemplars across 8 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

I met a traveller from an antique landWho said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desert...Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:And on the pedestal these words appear:‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal wreck, boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away.

Public domain · Shelley, Ozymandias (1818)

The ruler who commands despair from the pedestal is left as a wreck in the sand, the tyrant’s end that the King’s second pole always risks.

He does not win the room; he makes it fertile and steady and then blesses it.

The throne asks for a self large enough to be generous and small enough to be corrected.

Too much and it grips; too little and it hands the crown to whoever shouts.

The deep layer · what was written

King (Moore & Gillette): the entry

Definition

The King, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of right order and generativity in a man’s psyche: the capacity to hold a centre, to set things in their places, to make a realm fertile and to bless the people in it. It is the first of their four archetypes of what they call the mature masculine, and the one they rank above the others, because in their account it is the King that keeps the Warrior, the Magician and the Lover in balance. A woman, they say, carries the same structure with a Queen in the King’s place.

The figure comes with a structure of its own, and that structure is Moore and Gillette’s, not Jung’s. Each mature archetype has an immature boyhood form, and for the King it is the Divine Child. Each also has a shadow split into two opposite poles, one active and one passive. The King’s are the Tyrant, who grips and attacks whatever threatens his place, and the Weakling, who gives his authority away to whoever claims it; at the boyhood level the same split appears as the High Chair Tyrant and the Weakling Prince. Maturity, in their terms, is neither pole but a third position above them that holds what is true in both. The King is not a type of person but one face of a model of the whole male psyche, offered as a programme of growth.

History

The King first appears in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), a short book in which Moore, a Jungian analyst teaching at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and Gillette, a mythologist and men’s-group leader, set out the four archetypes and their boyhood forms. Its thesis is that the men of patriarchal culture are boys rather than men, and that maturity means gaining access to the four mature energies. The book grew out of Moore’s teaching to men’s gatherings in the 1980s; Robert Bly, in the preface to Iron John (1990), lists Moore among the men he had taught with for eight years, and in chapter 4 credits him with the King’s power to encourage creativity in a realm (p. 108) and with the picture of a darker King who curses it.

The sequel The King Within (William Morrow, 1992) gives the figure a book of its own. It opens with chapters on gender difference and on the authors’ structural model, where the dominant male of a chimpanzee troop is offered as a forerunner of the sacred king, moves through images of sacred kingship from Egypt to the Maya, and gives a chapter to each shadow pole, now called the Tyrant Usurper and the Weakling Abdicator. The authors map these poles onto Theodore Millon’s active and passive personality disorders, and describe the two together as a usurpation syndrome and an abdication syndrome that form one shadow system. The book also states the King’s rank in the scheme:

[…] he is the archetype that (properly accessed) regulates the other three archetypes of the mature masculine. — Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, The King Within (1992), ch. 8

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Moore and Gillette say where they drew the structure from. They took the idea of a bipolar archetype from the senex–puer pairing of the Jungians, and its active and passive dimensions from Millon. Their appendix “Decoding the Diamond Body: Beyond Jung” presents their fourfold model as a decoding of the double quaternio of the self that Jung set out in Aion (1951), and claims it confirms Jung’s assumption that the psyche is built as a double pyramid; it also discusses John Layard and Toni Wolff as earlier attempts at a fourfold structure. A second appendix places the archetypes in the limbic system, after Paul MacLean. Moore returned to the King’s shadow late in his career in Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity (2003, with Max Havlick), whose subject is the grandiosity the Tyrant pole acts out.

The debate

Jung named no King archetype. Kings appear in his work as alchemical images, the old king who must die and be renewed in Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW 14), not as one member of a masculine quaternity. The nearest of the classical ten is the self, as an ordering centre and a symbol of wholeness, and Moore and Gillette themselves invite the comparison. But their model does not make the King the self. In their scheme the masculine self is the whole four-sided pyramid, its capstone the four archetypes in unity, and the King is one face of it; the claim that this decodes Jung rests on their reading of Aion’s double pyramids (CW 9ii ¶384–385), which Jung built from Gnostic and alchemical material, not from a theory of masculinity. The King also stands near Hillman’s senex and Jung’s father imago, and overlaps Pearson’s Ruler (1991), a separate lineage with a different claim.

The scheme was criticised from inside Jungian psychology almost at once. Andrew Samuels, discussing the mythopoetic men’s movement, cited Moore and Gillette in a note to this sentence:

I want openly to dissociate myself from seductive and simplistic conceptions of male (or female) development that involve precise numbers of archetypes, usually four […] — Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (1993), ch. 8, p. 183

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Samuels added that the movement had hijacked Jungian psychology, and that calling the patriarchy a “puerarchy”, a rule of boys, settles nothing (p. 185, again with a note to Moore and Gillette). The point bears directly on the King, since the authors’ diagnosis is that patriarchal rulers are Tyrants and boys, not Kings. Other Jungian readers were more sympathetic. James Hollis (1994) summarised the King as a man’s executive power and its shadow as the compensating will to control of a man who feels impotent (pp. 94–95), and Anthony Stevens (2002) listed the book among welcome additions to Jungian writing on masculine and feminine psychology (p. 245). The profeminist critique gathered in Michael Kimmel’s The Politics of Manhood (1995) was aimed chiefly at Bly. Abby Ferber (2000) charged mythopoetic writing as a whole with treating gender as an essence, a charge that fits a sequel whose first part is called “Hard Wiring”.

Empirical status

None. Moore and Gillette published no instrument and no study of the King, and their claims for a biological basis, the limbic system and primate dominance, are argued from analogy rather than tested. The nearest research use is qualitative: Ben Laws and Elinor Lieber (2020) used the four archetypes as a typology for kinds of care among men in two English prisons, which applies the scheme as a lens and does not test it.

Appearances

The authors’ own examples are sacred kingship, the Egyptian pharaoh and the Maya kings, and the dominant male of a chimpanzee troop (The King Within, chapters 2–3). Bly’s Iron John sets Herod, who kills the young to protect his throne, against Arthur (ch. 4). The King became a staple of men’s self-help: The Art of Manliness ran a series on the four in 2011, and Tracy Clark-Flory (2020) reported, and criticised, the book’s revival among online masculinity coaches. Laws and Lieber (2020) report a King among their prisoners’ forms of care. Beyond the authors’ own examples, every King is a reading.

Sources

  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1990). King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250597-2.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The King Within: Accessing the King in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09591-8. Chapters 1–8; appendices A–C.
  • Moore, R. L. (1991). The Magician and the Analyst: Ritual, Sacred Space, and Psychotherapy. Center for the Scientific Study of Religion (as credited in The King Within, appendix A, fig. 4); Xlibris edition 2002, ISBN 978-1-4010-2357-7.
  • Moore, R. L., & Havlick, M. J. (2003). Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity. Chiron Publications. ISBN 978-1-888602-21-0.
  • Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii, ch. 14, ¶347ff.; double pyramids ¶384–385. Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. G. (1955–56). Mysterium Coniunctionis. CW 14, chapter “Rex and Regina”. Princeton University Press.
  • Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0. Preface; ch. 4, p. 108.
  • Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 8, “Reflecting on men”, pp. 183–185 and notes 14, 18.
  • Hollis, J. (1994). Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-64-9. Pp. 94–96.
  • Stevens, A. (2002). Archetype Revisited: An Updated Natural History of the Self. Brunner-Routledge. ISBN 978-1-58391-109-9. P. 245.
  • Collins, A. (1993). Men within [review of Bly, Iron John; Moore & Gillette, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover and The King Within]. The San Francisco Jung Institute Library Journal, 11(4), 17–32. https://doi.org/10.1525/jung.1.1993.11.4.17
  • Kimmel, M. S. (Ed.). (1995). The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement (and the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer). Temple University Press. ISBN 978-1-56639-366-9.
  • Ferber, A. L. (2000). Racial warriors and weekend warriors: the construction of masculinity in mythopoetic and white supremacist discourse. Men and Masculinities, 3(1), 30–56. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X00003001002
  • Laws, B., & Lieber, E. (2020). ‘King, Warrior, Magician, Lover’: understanding expressions of care among male prisoners. European Journal of Criminology, 19(4), 469–487 (issue 2022). https://doi.org/10.1177/1477370819896207
  • Clark-Flory, T. (2020, 8 October). King, Warrior, Magician, Revisionist: the enduring ‘masculine’ book that romanticizes Cro-Mags. Jezebel. https://jezebel.com/king-warrior-magician-revisionist-the-enduring-masc-1845215969
  • The Art of Manliness (2011, 23 August). The four archetypes of the mature masculine: the boyhood archetypes, part I. https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/the-four-archetypes-of-mature-masculinity-the-boyhood-archetypes-part-i/
  • Kirkus Reviews (1992). Review of The King Within. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-moore/the-king-within/

Leaving

“The old order changeth, yielding place to new,And God fulfils Himself in many ways,Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Public domain · Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur (1842)

A dying king tells his last knight that the old order yields to the new, a sovereign’s parting that blesses what comes after him.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey✺ SelfThe centre and the whole circumference.Return to the void