What are Magician and Lover archetypes?

So now we move on to the archetypes of the lover and the magician. These are archetypes which enable us to relate to other people and to protect ourselves from danger.

To be more exact, the lover archetype is all about relationship. Work here, in the form of shadow work, is about the healing of emotional wounds suffered in early childhood, which prevent us from forming relationships in a wholesome and mature way in adulthood.

Think about it this way: suppose for a moment that as a child you didn’t receive the attention that you needed to satisfy your need for attachment. Perhaps your mother was wounded in some way emotionally or spiritually. Perhaps your parents were busy, preoccupied, earning money and trying to keep the household going, or perhaps hey were just simply inadequate parents because they themselves had been parented inadequately in turn. But whatever the reason, you did not get enough attention as a child, and therefore later in life you find yourself with a weak lover archetype.

THE MEANING OF A WEAK INNER LOVER

Just what does this mean? Well, it basically means a lover archetype inside you that isn’t fundamentally equipped to cope with the difficulties and tribulations of attachment, of connection, of love. You see, the simplest explanation of the lover archetype is that it holds your capacity to love anything, whether that’s self, others, the world around you, the creation of the world, whatever.

So if you are deficient in lover archetypal energy, you’re more likely to find difficulty forming wholesome, long lasting, sound, satisfying relationships. Indeed, you may even be avoidant, which means that you find loving relationships threatening and avoid them; or you may be anxious in a relationship. You see, the archetype of the lover is the primal archetype of all us. It forms at a very early age, probably even before birth, and manifests soon after birth, where the bonding of mother and baby is so fundamental to the development of our humanity.

When baby and mother look at each other with a loving gaze, the baby is reassured that he or she is lovable, wanted and a precious being. But if the baby’s handled roughly, or lives without much attention or love, then s/he’ll form a different opinion of himself: that s/he isn’t worthy of love or that s/he can’t be loved, and her/his life will be blighted….. most likely by a string of failed relationships, or worse, perhaps no relationships at all.

By now you may have realised that, since this is a website about love and relationships, the lover archetype is absolutely fundamental to your success in achieving a happy and loving relationship in life as an adult. Whether you can have such a relationship depends, at least to start with, on how your experience of loving relationships was during your childhood. If they were good, you probably have little difficulty in forming a relationship; if your relationships in childhood were difficult, you probably find it harder to establish a loving relationship as an adult.

Feeling Body and Lover Archetype

The feeling body (as the lover archetype is sometimes called), is fundamental to our humanity. Indeed, it’s probably the foundation of our humanity, and if you have any difficulties with it, you may well find solace and reassurance in doing some shadow work. You need   a practitioner who’s sensitive enough to cope with the pain of loss, and who is sensitive enough to work with the damaged younger parts of yourself, the ones which have difficulty forming attachments.

I always recommend shadow work to people who have difficulty in forming relationships because it’s a therapy that’s focused fundamentally on the wounded inner child (that is, the combination of all the parts of us that were damaged in childhood in one way or another, or did not get the love that they required).

Shadow work

Shadow work takes you through a process: first, exploring how the archetypes came to be inadequately developed in your psyche; second, working with a therapist or shadow work coach to find a way of healing these deficits. This will involve applying certain techniques and methodologies designed to strengthen and build the inner lover and put you more in touch with your own self. If you want to know more about this, you can go to this website for full information.

The Magician Archetype

The magician archetype is the part of us that’s concerned with thinking and feeling and strategizing. It often manifests in childhood when we are faced with difficulties in our environment which require us to be clever and strategic in coming up with ways to stay safe, or in the worst possible case, to actually survive.

Alice Miller made the observation that even in our modern society, there are millions of children whose experience in childhood is far from adequate, let alone satisfactory. And these children may go through life feeling unwanted, unloved, or have difficulty in forming adult mature relationships. The archetype that comes into play in childhood in such situations is often the magician, which seeks all the ways it can think of to defend the wounded lover archetype inside a child.

Inner Magicians come up with strategies which are extraordinarily creative, but often we pay the price of losing some aspect of ourselves: simply because some aspect of the self has to be hidden to enable the protective strategy to come into force. A child might hide his boisterousness nature or his desire to explore the world, say, to avoid being made to be quiet and “nice”. Or a child might hide his or her need for love in an environment where love was hard to find.

But of course, as you can well imagine, these deficits in childhood, and the strategies that were originally designed to overcome these various difficulties in childhood, can lead to an adult who has a difficult time expressing their full humanity.

And there is the essence of shadow work: to make somebody into the person they were always meant to be before the world got in the way.  If you feel that you like never wholly developed your magician or lover archetype, or for that matter, king or warrior, then please try shadow work. It might make the difference between you enjoying a wholesome and satisfying human relationship or living with  a series of inadequate, short-term, and ultimately unsatisfying relationships.