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The Lover Archetype

Nate Rox
December 4, 2024
10
 min read
Written by
Nate Rox
Published on
December 4, 2024

Introduction

This is the third part of a series on the masculine archetypes based on Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s King, Warrior, Magician, Lover. Before diving head first into the Lover Archetype, I want to share an introductory piece to the masculine archetypes that I highly recommend reading first. Links to the other articles within this series will be at the bottom. 

Welcome to the blog! Make sure to subscribe so you can get the latest articles delivered directly to you. The intention of this blog is to educate about the topics that will encourage your physical, mental, and spiritual growth. I share nuggets of wisdom sourced from alchemical formulas, archetypal processes, and holistic healing modalities. This blog is the end result of that distillation process. 

How To Use the Lover Archetype

Before we get into the Lover Archetype, I want to provide guidance on how to use this information. Because after all, knowledge is useless if not applied. On this site, we’re in the business of inner and outer alchemy. What is alchemy? Alchemy is turning lead into gold. We are the lead becoming gold. We use our various faculties to learn and apply this in order to enrich our lives.

When exploring the male archetypes, remember to connect them to your personal life. Remember the movies you’ve watched, the books you’ve read, the people you’ve met, your father, your brother, your coworkers, and all of those that come to mind when the material touches a chord in your mind or your heart. 

Start seeing patterns within your life, such as your tendencies when you are stessed and tendencies when you are at your best. What does that look like?

Another angle is to observe your favorite characters. What archetype(s) do they exhibit strongest? Do you see a pattern forming? Why do these characters stand out to you?

Even better yet, who are your favorite people? Do men like Winston Churchill or David Goggins inspire you? Or do you gravitate towards the wizardry of Nikola Tesla?

These questions will steer you into the inner depths of your psyche when connecting to the masculine archetypes. At the crux of it, which archetypes are strongest in your life? For many men, the Lover can be a difficult one to master. I’d even argue it might be the most difficult one, it’s very easy to be in the unhealthy shadow aspects of the Lover archetype. Yet it is vital this love energy is present in every man. 

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What Is The Lover Archetype?

What is thought of as passion, life force, and aliveness is the primal energy pattern of the Lover Archetype. The senses, sensory information, sensuality all dominate this love archetype. 

“It lives through the great primal hungers of our species for sex, food, well-being, reproduction, creative adaptation to life’s hardships, and ultimately a sense of meaning, without which human beings cannot go on with their lives.” (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover p. 108)

Beyond just seeing the world bound together, existing as consciousness, he feels the world in a grain of sand. It is the feeling of connectedness with the world and God. To him, the world and God are one. His boundaries with the world become blurred. 

Robert Moore believed that men who access the Lover are open to what is called the “collective unconscious”. The collective unconscious is the unconscious memories of all that has ever happened in the lives of all the people that have ever lived. 

Representation of Jung’s model of the psyche with three layers of consciousness: Consciousness, Personal Unconscious, Collective Unconscious 

Being able to access this collective unconscious is what gives the lover that ability to connect to all deeply, both within and outside of himself. His desire is to experience the world so strongly he merges with it. This can be felt in the form of intuition

The Lover archetype is strongly associated with mysticism, which is present in all spirituality. This mysticism is what brings an experience into a feeling of Oneness, completely bypassing the intellectual. 

The sensate is supreme to the Lover, it is the man in all of his senses enjoying the groove and thrum of a guitar melody, it is the man enveloped by the aroma of a steaming pu’er tea, or the man engrossed by the imagery of a romantic style painting. 

The Lover is involved in all sorts of sensing ordeals, which includes those that are even painful. Life in all of its aspects is both joyful and painful, like the polarity between infatuation and heartbreak. The Lover embraces all aspects of feeling, including those that are deeply penetrating such as pain and loss. 

Two main avenues of expression for the Lover are seen in “the artist” and “the psychic”. The artist in the form of painters, musicians, poets, sculptors, writers, etc., accesses the Lover directly. As Robert Moore puts it, “they live very close to the fiery power of the creative unconscious”. It can be why many artists tend to have chaotic personal and romantic lives. Psychics have a similar dilemma,

“Their conscious awareness, like that of the artist, is extraordinarily open to invasion from other people's thoughts and feelings and from the murky realm of the collective unconscious. They seem to move in a world behind or beneath the world of daylight common sense. From this hidden world they receive, often in the form of almost audible words, gusts of strong feelings, unaccounted-for smells, sensations of heat and cold not accessible to others, images of great horror and beauty, and clues about what is really going on with people.” (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover p. 116)

In the day to day, we access the Lover even as far as the businessmen who have “hunches”, or intuition about people or situations. The moment of knowing without actually knowing, when to pull out of a bad business deal or go all in on a successful opportunity. In our lives, it can be seen in our own professions when we draw upon this energy as a source of creativity. Coffee and wine connoisseurs, car lovers, vintage collectors, tobacco aficionados, are all examples of the Lover functioning in men. When we stop doing and start feeling is when we connect to the Lover. 

A more obvious connection to the Lover is in our romantic lives. Falling in love is falling into the power of the Lover. When we come into union with her, both physically and emotionally, we are transported into a world away from logic and boundaries. We become united with the Divine, both ecstatic and potentially painful. When in the throes of love, life is more vivid and meaningful. The Lover is what brings deep meaning to us. 

The Addicted Lover

The Lover in his active shadow pole, the Addict archetype, becomes a victim of his own sensitivity. The world of senses overwhelms him, ranging from the sensuous world of music or a fixating love for cars. The Addicted Lover lives for the pleasure of the moment, not able to create any boundaries between him and his fixation. This man is unable to detach from his own feelings, he is lost in his search for eternal ecstasy. It’s easy to see how this becomes actual addiction to substances. But this goes beyond substance abuse, although that is the easiest destructive form to see in our current world. 

Men who are addicted to women, moving from relationship to relationship, are victims of this Shadow Lover. 

“But the man moving from one woman to another, compulsively searching for he knows not what, is a man whose inner structures have not yet solidified. Because he himself is fragmented within, and not centered, he is pushed and pulled around by illusory wholeness he thinks is out there in the world of feminine forms and sensual experiences.” (King, Warrior, Magician, Lover p. 121)

Silenus, companion and tutor of Dionysius the God of wine and debauchery

The man in this form of Love energy is constantly seeking, he is looking for the ultimate continuous “orgasm”. It’s why he is in a constant chase with women, he falls in love with the idea of that woman, but when is met with her real self, it shatters his illusion of the perfect union with her. Her flaws, limitations, her mortality, all scare away the Addict, so he runs away and continues this cycle with another woman. 

The Addict archetype believes that in order to experience Oneness and wholeness, he must go deeper into his sensuous “spiritual” experiences. He’s looking for a way out, yet ironically, deepens his predicament. His overconnected must be slain with boundaries, detachments, and distance. An Addict is an older version of the boy psychology, “Mama’s Boy”. I’m sure we can all think of a certain friend, family, or colleague that hasn’t disconnected from this over-mothering deep Unconscious energy and indulges in all life’s pleasures selfishly. Because he is so enmeshed with this feminine Unconscious force, he needs to detach and contain this chaotic power. 

Without these boundaries and psychic structures in place, a man possessed by the Addicted Lover will inevitably get himself in deep trouble. It’s why we sometimes see men fired from their jobs for their irresponsibility or why a woman leaves her man, because he prioritizes his “addictions” over her and anyone else.

The Impotent Lover

On the other side of this archetype, is the passive shadow pole called the Impotent Lover. Much like the name the Impotent is disconnected from the Lover energy and feminine essence. The opposite of this Lover vitality is a person who lacks enthusiasm and passion in life. He goes through life in a rote way which causes chronic depression. Ultimately they feel cut off from themselves and the world around them.

What can show up in the Impotent Lover is a lack of sexual libido. The zest for life has gone and also the drive for sex with it. This sexual inactivity could be a variety of reasons, either from depression, stress, financial woes, or emasculation. According to Moore, “this man is either regressed into a presexual Boy or he is mainlining either the Warrior or the Magician, or a combination of the three. His sexual and sensual sensitivity has been overwhelmed by other concerns.”

This rejection of the sensual can arise from too much structure, too much discipline. As Moore notes, if a man is primarily in his Warrior or Magician archetype, his focus is entirely on the mission not “feelings”. Because of this repression the Impotent Lover often slides into the Addict’s shadow, he might substitute real connection and sexual activity with pornography instead. His outlet goes somewhere dysfunctional to compensate for the lack of real Love energy. 

The Lover In His Fullness

While you’re reading this maybe you noticed how different the Lover is to the other three masculine archetypes. It is as if the Lover were opposing the central values of mature masculinity so far. Instead of valuing order and boundaries like the King, this energy values flow and freedom. The containment of the Magician is rebuffed by the Lover’s dissolution of conventional borders. The Warrior’s vise grip on discipline slips into a symphonic flow state when in the Lover archetype. 

Diagram of the Lover Archetype Activation Energy

However, despite the pattern of tension between the Lover and the other archetypes, the Lover isn’t opposed to mature masculinity and is integrated within us through numerous channels.

Ultimately the Lover is what gives us a sense of meaning. The Lover is the fuel for the other three archetypes, without the Lover life would be meaningless. He keeps the other archetypes loving, he keeps them connected. Without the Lover, the Warrior, the Magician, and the King would be detached from life. The Lover provides their ultimate purpose of love. 

The Lover becomes the essential balancing force of the archetypes— he keeps them humane. 
The Lover in His Fullness is a man who channels his creativity, who can create healthy boundaries from his sensuality, who reflects on his emotions and sees the big picture of reality. The Lover finds joy in his life and enables others to live vivaciously in their lives as well. 

Conclusion

With that, we answer the question “what is the lover archetype”, and conclude this part of the King, Warrior, Magician, Lover series. Earlier I mentioned that this might be the most challenging archetype of the four masculine energies to master. The reason for that is this Love energy is difficult to control in any direction. By definition the male Lover experiences a blurring of boundaries which can push a man into full blown hedonism. On the other side of it the other three archetypes, particularly the Warrior and the Magician, are the archetypes of detachment. The male psyche contains those two archetypes which fuel detachment, making it easy for the Lover to become repressed. It doesn’t take much to see how this reflects on our modern society, as Nietzche puts it, “God is dead.” This reduction in religious and spiritual practice can be seen as a direct reflection of the Lover’s values under fire. 

Thankfully I have seen a resurgence in spirituality and heart-based “thinking”, which connects us back to the Lover. If you’re reading this now, that means you as well. 

P.S.

If you haven’t already, sign up to the mailing list so you don’t miss the upcoming masculine archetypes. 

Also make sure to check the other archetypes out so you can deepen your understanding of yourself and humanity as a whole. 

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover Series:

Introduction to the Archetypes

The Warrior 

The Lover

The Magician

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Welcome to my blog!
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Nate Rox

I’m Nathan and I am in the holistic healing space. I specialize in sacred masculine embodiment and holistic lifestyles. I do the dirty work, ranging from shadow work to subconscious reprogramming, and share my lessons here.

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