archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Magician (Moore & Gillette)

Knowledge that can heal or harm, and the hand that keeps the circle while it works.

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s name, from 1990, for the energy of knowledge, technique and initiation in their four archetypes of the mature masculine, with the Precocious Child as its boy form and the Detached Manipulator and the denying Innocent as its shadow poles.

The Magician, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of knowing and of mastery over technique. It is the part of a man that understands how things work, inside and out, and can use that understanding to contain power and to guide change. Its human forms, as they describe them, are the shaman, the ritual elder and the initiator, and their modern heirs, the scientist, the physician, the analyst and the engineer. Two functions are central. The Magician is the keeper of hidden knowledge, which can heal or harm; and it is the guide through transformation, the one who builds and guards the sacred space in which a person can die to an old self and be reborn. In the psyche it supplies reflection, the capacity to step back, see clearly and choose.

Go deeper

At the threshold

For Merlin had in Magicke more insight,Then euer him before or after liuing wight.For he by words could call out of the skyBoth Sunne and Moone, and make them him obay:The land to sea, and sea to maineland dry,And darkesome night he eke could turne to day:Huge hostes of men he could alone dismay,And hostes of men of meanest things could frame,When so him list his enimies to fray:That to this day for terror of his fame,The feends do quake, when any him to them does name.

Public domain · Spenser, The Faerie Queene, Book III, Canto iii, stanzas 11–12 (1590)

Merlin’s word commands sun, sea and armies, the Magician’s mastery at its height, with the fear that such knowledge always draws.

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

    Imhotep

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9, chapter ‘Images of the Magician in Myth and History’, c. 2650 BCE

    Named by the authors as the first historical Magician: vizier, healer and builder of the step pyramid’s sacred precinct.

  2. Jung’s example

    Merlin

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9, chapter ‘Images of the Magician in Myth and History’, c. 1136

    The wizard credited in legend with raising Stonehenge, whom the authors take as a composite of Druid shamans and the Magician of chivalry.

  3. Jung’s example

    Black Elk

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9, chapter ‘Images of the Magician in Myth and History’, 1932

    The Oglala holy man whose great vision, recorded by John G. Neihardt, is the authors’ record of a shaman’s calling in his own words.

  4. Jung’s example

    The Lascaux birdman

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9, preface, c. 20,000–18,000 BCE (as dated by the authors)

    The bird-headed figure in the cave painting opens the book as the first image of the Magician, a man refashioned by inner vision.

  5. Jung’s example

    Jacob, who tricks Esau

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9, ch. 8, ‘The Trickster: The Detached Manipulator’, Genesis 25

    The brother who buys a birthright for a bowl of soup illustrates the authors’ Trickster, the active pole of the Magician’s shadow.

  6. a later reading

    Odysseus

    The Art of Manliness (2011), https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/the-four-archetypes-of-mature-masculinity-the-boyhood-archetypes-part-i/, c. 8th century BCE

    A later reading offers the cunning wanderer for the boy form, the Precocious Child, and its Know-It-All Trickster shadow.

The wider sky

Where the Magician (Moore & Gillette) has been seen

28 exemplars across 12 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'll go beyond: there 's a real love of a lie,Liars find ready-made for lies they make,As hand for glove, or tongue for sugar-plum.At best, 'tis never pure and full belief;

Public domain · Browning, Mr. Sludge, “The Medium” (1864)

A fraudulent medium explains that his dupes want the lie as much as he wants to tell it, the Manipulator and the denying Innocent fitted together like hand and glove.

He sees how the thing works, and that seeing is already a kind of power.

He keeps the circle where the old self is allowed to die.

Turn the same knowing cold and it learns to sell people what they want to believe.

The deep layer · what was written

Magician (Moore & Gillette): the entry

Definition

The Magician, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of knowing and of mastery over technique. It is the part of a man that understands how things work, inside and out, and can use that understanding to contain power and to guide change. Its human forms, as they describe them, are the shaman, the ritual elder and the initiator, and their modern heirs, the scientist, the physician, the analyst and the engineer. Two functions are central. The Magician is the keeper of hidden knowledge, which can heal or harm; and it is the guide through transformation, the one who builds and guards the sacred space in which a person can die to an old self and be reborn. In the psyche it supplies reflection, the capacity to step back, see clearly and choose.

As with the other three, the figure comes inside a structure that is Moore and Gillette’s, not Jung’s. Its boyhood form is the Precocious Child, the gifted and curious boy, whose shadow in the 1990 book splits into the Know-It-All Trickster and the Dummy. The adult Magician’s shadow splits into two poles: the Detached Manipulator, who uses knowledge coldly for advantage, and the Denying “Innocent” One, who wants the Magician’s standing without its responsibility and refuses to know what he knows. As with the other archetypes, maturity is a third position that holds both poles.

History

The Magician is one of the four set out in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990) by Moore, a Jungian analyst at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and Gillette, a mythologist. Moore had already written about the analyst as a ritual elder who keeps sacred space, in The Magician and the Analyst: Ritual, Sacred Space, and Psychotherapy (Center for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1991), the work credited as the source of the authors’ structural diagram in The King Within (1992).

The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche (William Morrow, 1993) gives the figure a book of its own. It opens with a cave painting of a bird-headed shaman at Lascaux and an early Christian image of Jesus raising Lazarus with a wand, moves through the shamanic tradition and a chapter of historic magicians, and gives a chapter to each shadow pole. In this sequel the names shift. The immature Magician’s shadow is now given as the Trickster and the Innocent:

The bipolar Shadow of the immature Magician manifests as the Trickster, on the one hand, and the Innocent on the other. — Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, The Magician Within (1993), ch. 3, p. 74

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The adult poles become chapter 7, “The Master of Denial: The Innocent One”, and chapter 8, “The Trickster: The Detached Manipulator”, so that the word Trickster, a boyhood shadow in 1990, names the adult active pole in 1993. The book’s final part treats initiation, using Jung’s term “mana personality” for the inflation of a man flooded by the archetype he is learning to access, and ends with what the authors call the Earthshaman. It is dedicated to a list of healers and thinkers that runs from Imhotep, Socrates and Lao-tzu to Einstein, Jonas Salk and the anthropologist Victor Turner, whose account of liminal space and rites of passage the book uses for its idea of initiation. Moore’s taped lectures listed in its resources include a series on the trickster archetype as potential and pathology.

The debate

Jung named no Magician archetype in a fourfold scheme, but he used the word. In his 1934 Eranos lecture the magician is one of the guises of the wise old man, the personified figure through which the unconscious offers meaning, and in 1928 he had described the “mana personality”, the magician or hero whose power the ego is tempted to claim. Moore and Gillette’s Magician overlaps both and is neither. It is not old, not a dream figure and not a source of meaning from outside the ego; it is a capacity that every man is said to carry from boyhood, given a developmental history and a shadow. The wise-old-man entry dates the renaming to The Magician Within (1993); the figure itself is in the 1990 book.

The relation to the trickster is closer to an inversion. Jung’s trickster (1954) is a mythic figure in its own right, a collective shadow that keeps an earlier level of consciousness alive and that can also bring change. Moore and Gillette use the word only for a shadow: the boy’s showing-off and the man’s cold manipulation. The same name thus marks an archetype in Jung and a malfunction in Moore and Gillette. The Magician also shares its name with Pearson’s Magician (1986), a separate lineage whose figure is a catalyst of change on a life journey.

Criticism has focused less on the Magician’s place in Jung than on its sources. The sequel draws on shamanic practice from Siberia to the Lakota, and Tracy Clark-Flory (2020) counted its use of Native American cosmology among the book’s decontextualised borrowings. Andrew Samuels (1993) had made the general point against the mythopoetic movement’s appeal to earlier cultures, judging the “Eurocentric, pseudo-anthropology in Jung’s style” discredited and the assumed superiority of the exotic undemonstrated (ch. 8, p. 187). Sympathetic readers kept the moral edge: James Hollis (1994) called the Magician the shape-changer and wonder-worker whose shadow is control, manipulation and charlatanry (p. 95).

Empirical status

None. No instrument measures the Magician, and Moore and Gillette offer no study of it. Ben Laws and Elinor Lieber (2020) used the four archetypes as a typology of care in two English prisons, listing intellectual expertise and information sharing among the forms of care they found; the scheme is a lens there, not a hypothesis under test.

Appearances

The authors’ own examples come mainly from The Magician Within: the Egyptian vizier and builder Imhotep, given as the first historical magician; Merlin and the legend that he raised Stonehenge; the alchemists; the Lakota holy man Black Elk and his great vision; J. Robert Oppenheimer recalling the Bhagavad Gita at the first atomic test; and Freud, cast as a modern soul-guide who kept a figure of Imhotep on his desk, with Jung as the one who took the exploration further. Their Trickster is illustrated by Jacob tricking Esau out of his birthright, and their inflated Magician by rulers such as Noriega and Ceaușescu. The Art of Manliness (2011) offered Odysseus and the coyote of Native American story for the boy form. Beyond the authors’ own examples, every Magician named here 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. Pp. 27–33 on the Precocious Child, as cited in The Magician Within, ch. 3, n. 2.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1993). The Magician Within: Accessing the Shaman in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09594-9. Preface; chapters 3–4, 7–8; p. 74.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The King Within: Accessing the King in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09591-8. Chapter 2; appendix A.
  • Moore, R. L. (1991). The Magician and the Analyst: Ritual, Sacred Space, and Psychotherapy. Center for the Scientific Study of Religion; Xlibris edition 2002, ISBN 978-1-4010-2357-7.
  • Jung, C. G. (1928). The relations between the ego and the unconscious. CW 7, part two, on the mana-personality. Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. G. (1934/1954). Archetypes of the collective unconscious. CW 9i. Princeton University Press.
  • Jung, C. G. (1954). On the psychology of the trickster figure. CW 9i. Princeton University Press.
  • Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 8, “Reflecting on men”, p. 187.
  • Hollis, J. (1994). Under Saturn’s Shadow: The Wounding and Healing of Men. Inner City Books. ISBN 978-0-919123-64-9. P. 95.
  • 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/

Leaving

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

Public domain · Whitman, When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer (1865)

Knowledge ranged in columns gives way to wonder under the night sky, a parting reminder that the Magician’s knowing loses its life when it becomes only detachment.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey☿ Wise Old ManThe archetype of meaning.Return to the void