Men as Kings, Warriors, Lovers, and Magicians

My Scandinavian friend Eivind Figenschau Skjellum, is the host of masculinity-movies.com/. On his home page it says, "Masculinity. Movies. Men. Growth." That pretty much sums up the nature of the films he is reviewing on the site. The "Suggest movie" tab has fifty-seven responses with movie ideas from his readers, and to date, Eivind has reviewed almost thirty films. Probably some of your favorite "guy" movies on the list.

But this post is more about Eivind's blog where he has posted some of his writing. I especially liked his article, "King, Warrior, Magician, Lover - archetypes of the mature masculine." The article is Eivind's take on what is described in the book by Douglas Gillette and Robert Moore titled, King, Warrior, Magician, Lover – Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.

In his article, Eivind does a good job of introducing you to each of the archetypes and divides them into, "immature archetypes – boy psychology – and mature archetypes – man psychology." Eivind suggests, according to this view of masculinity, "healing and integration happens when we recognize that one archetype dominates too strongly in our psyche, and must be balanced by another, or when we recognize that the archetypes we animate are sourced in the active or passive shadow poles, as opposed to the integrated and mature aspect."

I know a number of Boys to Men groups using a simplified model of KWML archetypes to introduce and hold up a positive vision of mature masculinity for young males. The boys seem to resonate with each of the quadrants and have no trouble finding parallels in contemporary media.

If you've never been exposed to the idea of masculine archetypes, Eivind's article is a great short course on the topic.

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