archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Warrior (Moore & Gillette)

Force with a master: the edge drawn for something larger than the hand that holds it.

Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s name, from 1990, for the energy of disciplined aggression in the service of something beyond the self, second of their four archetypes of the mature masculine, with the Hero as its boy form and the Sadist and the Masochist as its shadow poles.

The Warrior, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of aggression made disciplined and put to use. It is what lets a man set and hold boundaries, organise himself, act decisively, persevere in a vocation and stay loyal to a cause. Its marks, as they describe it, are clarity under pressure, trained skill, a readiness to face death, and a certain detachment from personal fear and from personal ties while the work is being done. The defining condition is service: the Warrior’s aggression is meant to be dedicated to something larger than the ego, which in their model means the King. A Warrior with no King to serve becomes merely destructive. Women, they add, carry a Warrior of their own.

Go deeper

At the threshold

Therefore, arise, thou Son of Kunti! braceThine arm for conflict, nerve thy heart to meet--As things alike to thee--pleasure or pain,Profit or ruin, victory or defeat:So minded, gird thee to the fight, for soThou shalt not sin!

Public domain · Gita), The Song Celestial, Chapter II, trans. Edwin Arnold (1885)

A charioteer tells a reluctant prince to fight with a heart held level between victory and defeat, the detached, dedicated action that Moore and Gillette ask of the Warrior.

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

    Patton

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5, pp. 91–92, 1970

    The authors read the film’s general, exulting in battle and longing to meet his rival tank for tank, as the Warrior’s ecstasy and his need for a worthy enemy.

  2. Jung’s example

    The Jedi Knights

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5, p. 150, 1977

    Offered by the authors as a popular picture of the “mysteries of the sword”: a sacred warrior order whose light is the light of awareness and will.

  3. Jung’s example

    Chris, the gunfighter played by Yul Brynner

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5, p. 155, 1960

    In The Magnificent Seven he lets a raging young man spend himself, then takes him on the mission, which the authors read as the mature Warrior initiating an immature hero.

  4. Jung’s example

    Captain Kirk split in two

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5, p. 124, 1966

    The Star Trek episode in which Kirk divides into a weak ‘good’ half and a brutal ‘bad’ half is the authors’ picture of the Warrior’s shadow split into Masochist and Sadist.

  5. Jung’s example

    The samurai

    Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5, ch. 9, p. 153; Moore & Gillette (1990), as noted at https://www.ryandelaney.co/book-notes/king-warrior-magician-lover-robert-moore-douglas-gillette, 12th–19th century

    Their codes of conduct and rituals of the sword are the authors’ example of a whole way of life given to disciplined service.

  6. a later reading

    Luke Skywalker

    The Art of Manliness (2011), https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/the-four-archetypes-of-mature-masculinity-the-boyhood-archetypes-part-ii/, 1977

    A later reading takes him as the boy Hero, the stage the authors say must give way before the Warrior can appear.

The wider sky

Where the Warrior (Moore & Gillette) has been seen

28 exemplars across 9 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

"Forward, the Light Brigade!"Was there a man dismay'd?Not tho' the soldier knewSome one had blunder'd:Theirs not to make reply,Theirs not to reason why,Theirs but to do and die:Into the valley of DeathRode the six hundred.

Public domain · Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade (1854)

Courage and obedience ride on after the order is known to be a blunder, the cost of a Warrior whose service has no sound King behind it.

He knows what he is fighting for before he knows how much it will cost.

The same blade that keeps the gate can be turned on the weak, or turned inward.

With no king above him, the fiercest bird on the pond eats everyone in it.

The deep layer · what was written

Warrior (Moore & Gillette): the entry

Definition

The Warrior, in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s scheme, is the energy of aggression made disciplined and put to use. It is what lets a man set and hold boundaries, organise himself, act decisively, persevere in a vocation and stay loyal to a cause. Its marks, as they describe it, are clarity under pressure, trained skill, a readiness to face death, and a certain detachment from personal fear and from personal ties while the work is being done. The defining condition is service: the Warrior’s aggression is meant to be dedicated to something larger than the ego, which in their model means the King. A Warrior with no King to serve becomes merely destructive. Women, they add, carry a Warrior of their own.

The figure sits inside a structure that is Moore and Gillette’s, not Jung’s. Its boyhood form is the Hero, whose own shadow splits into the Grandstander Bully and the Coward. The adult Warrior’s shadow splits into two poles: the Sadist, the active pole, cruel and detached, and the Masochist, the passive pole, the “nice guy” who absorbs abuse and swallows his rage. The two feed each other, and a man identified with one tends to find the other in the people around him. The full Warrior is described as a third position that integrates both poles rather than a midpoint between them.

History

The Warrior is one of the four set out in King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), the book in which Moore, a Jungian analyst at the Chicago Theological Seminary, and Gillette, a mythologist, argued that modern men are stuck in boy psychology for want of initiation. In that scheme the Hero is the Warrior’s boyhood form, and its task is to give way.

The Warrior Within (William Morrow, 1992) gives the figure a book of its own. Its preface calls the Warrior the most controversial of the four, feared for the cruelty of its shadow, and argues that archetypes cannot be wished away and so must be faced. The book moves from the evolution of human aggression, through the war gods and warrior castes of Assyria, Egypt, Japan and medieval Europe, to a chapter on each shadow pole, “The Masochist: A Dishonest Warrior” and “The Sadist: Possession by the Warrior Within”. Its last part, “Becoming a Knight”, treats initiation, the mastery of Warrior energy and what the authors call the EarthKnight, whose potentials are stewarded for “the real war” on behalf of community and planet. The book is dedicated to Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. and to all warriors who fought for justice. The relation between the boy form and the man is put plainly:

Through masculine initiation the hero becomes a warrior in the service of the King. — Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, The Warrior Within (1992), ch. 9, p. 153

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

The sources the authors name are mixed. The idea of a two-poled shadow comes, they say, from the Jungians’ senex–puer pairing and from Theodore Millon’s active and passive personality disorders; the warrior codes come from the samurai, the medieval knights and Carlos Castaneda’s don Juan, whose saying on the hunter opens the book; the evolutionary chapter leans on primate ethology and Julian Jaynes. Moore’s later The Archetype of Initiation (2001) generalised the theme of ritual passage on which the Warrior chapters depend.

The debate

Jung named no Warrior archetype. The nearest of the classical ten is the hero, and here the two schemes part. Jung’s hero, first set out in 1912, is a personification of psychic energy and of the ego’s struggle to win consciousness from the unconscious; it is the central figure of his account of development. For Moore and Gillette the Hero is an immature stage, the adolescent’s grandiose bid for independence, which must die in initiation before the mature Warrior can appear. The same word therefore names a goal in Jung and a phase to be outgrown in Moore and Gillette. The Warrior also shares its name with Pearson’s Warrior (1986), a separate lineage whose figure is a stance of courage on a life journey for anyone; the brand version of 2001 renamed it the Hero. Its shadow poles are a version of Jung’s shadow, split into two by the authors’ own theory.

The Warrior drew the sharpest public criticism of the four, because it was the face of the movement that took men into the woods. Michael Kimmel and Michael Kaufman titled their critique “Weekend Warriors” (in Kimmel, 1995), and Abby Ferber (2000) set mythopoetic writing beside white supremacist writing and found in both an essentialist account of gender and a picture of men as victims of a lost masculinity. Andrew Samuels, writing as an analyst, noted that Bly had disowned the “warrior weekends” and went further on the Jungian question:

The way in which Jungian psychology has been hijacked by the mythopoetic movement is a disaster that stifles its progressive potentials. — Andrew Samuels, The Political Psyche (1993), ch. 8, p. 183

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Not every reader saw a departure from Jung: the Publishers Weekly reviewer (1992) found that the authors “hew closely to the Jungian party line”. Sympathetic Jungian readers also simplified the scheme as they passed it on. James Hollis (1994) described the Warrior as the imperative to fight for one’s integrity or a cause, and gave it a single shadow, the destroyer (p. 95), not Moore and Gillette’s pair of poles.

Empirical status

None. No instrument measures the Warrior, and Moore and Gillette’s argument from primate aggression and brain structure is an analogy, not a test. Ben Laws and Elinor Lieber (2020) used the four archetypes as a typology of care among men in two English prisons; the study applies the scheme as a lens and does not test it.

Appearances

The authors’ own examples are unusually concrete. They read the film Patton (1970) for the Warrior’s ecstasy and his longing for a worthy enemy (pp. 91–92), the Jedi of Star Wars for the “mysteries of the sword” (p. 150), and Yul Brynner’s gunfighter in The Magnificent Seven (1960) for the mature Warrior who initiates a raging young man (p. 155). For the split shadow they use the Star Trek episode in which Kirk is divided into a weak good half and a brutal bad one, and Superman III (1983), in which the evil Superman fights Clark Kent (p. 124). Assyrian palace reliefs illustrate the Sadist. The Art of Manliness (2011) took Luke Skywalker as its example of the boy Hero, and Tracy Clark-Flory (2020) reported one-day “warrior trainings” among online masculinity coaches. Beyond the authors’ own examples, every Warrior 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.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. Preface; chapters 2, 7–11; pp. 91–92, 124, 150, 153, 155.
  • 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 and appendix A.
  • Moore, R. L. (2001). The Archetype of Initiation. Xlibris. ISBN 978-0-7388-4765-8.
  • Jung, C. G. (1912). Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido; English as Psychology of the Unconscious (B. M. Hinkle, Trans., 1916). Gutenberg #65903.
  • Kimmel, M. S., & Kaufman, M. (1995). Weekend warriors: Robert Bly and the politics of masculine retreat. In M. S. Kimmel (Ed.), The Politics of Manhood. Temple University Press. ISBN 978-1-56639-366-9. Chapter 1.
  • 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
  • Samuels, A. (1993). The Political Psyche. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-08102-3. Chapter 8, “Reflecting on men”, pp. 180–183.
  • 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
  • The Art of Manliness (2011, 13 September). The four archetypes of the mature masculine: the boyhood archetypes, part II. https://www.artofmanliness.com/character/behavior/the-four-archetypes-of-mature-masculinity-the-boyhood-archetypes-part-ii/
  • 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
  • Publishers Weekly (1992). Review of The Warrior Within. https://publishersweekly.com/9780688095925

Leaving

Tell me not, (sweet,) I am unkinde,That from the nunnerieOf thy chaste breast and quiet mindeTo warre and armes I flie.True: a new Mistresse now I chase,The first foe in the field;And with a stronger faith imbraceA sword, a horse, a shield.Yet this inconstancy is such,As you too shall adore;I could not love thee, dear, so much,Lov'd I not Honour more.

Public domain · Lovelace, To Lucasta. Going to the Warres (1649)

A soldier leaves his beloved for a cause he ranks above her, the Warrior’s loyalty to something beyond personal ties, with the lover left to weigh the cost.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey⚔ HeroConsciousness, fighting its way out of the dark.Return to the void