King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990) is a classic manosphere staple for men looking into self-development.
The book mixes solid psychology with religion, myth, and self-development practices to teach men how to find their own highest version of masculinity.

Key Insights

One picture is worth a thousand words:

Source: https://stottilien.com/

And to understand what those triangles actually mean, keep on reading.

It’s worth it, I promise.

About the Authors

Wikipedia describes Robert Louis Moore as an American Jungian analyst and consultant (??) in private practice in Chicago, as well as Professor of Psychology, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary (that’s an educational institution for pastors and ministers). 

Douglas Gillette describes himself as holding a B.A. in Theater and Communications and a Master of Arts of Religious Studies from the University of Chicago (emphasis in Religion and Literature), and a Master of Divinity from Chicago Theological Seminary (emphasis in Religion and Psychology). He also engages in artistic pursuits such as painting, sculpting, and interior design.

Both authors are at the intersection of (depth) psychology (psychoanalysis and the unconscious), religion, mysticism, and myth.

The Four Major Forms of Masculinity

The four major forms of the mature masculine energies that the authors have identified are the King, me Warrior, the Magician, and the Lover.

They all overlap and ideally enrich one another. A good King is always also
a Warrior, a Magician, and a Lover.
And the same holds true for the other three. 

#1. King

The King energy is primal in all men.
In old civilizations and traditions, the king provides order, fertility, and blessing.

It bears the same relationship to the other three mature masculine potentials as the Divine Child does to the other three immature masculine energies.
It comes first in importance, and it underlies and includes the rest of the archetypes in perfect balance. The good and generative King is also a good Warrior, a positive Magician, and a great Lover. And yet, with most of us, the King comes on line last.
We could say that the King is the Divine Child, but seasoned and complex, wise. and in a sense as selfless as the Divine Child is cosmically self-involved.

The king is:

• Centered
• Decisive
• A man of integrity
• A protector of his realm
• A provider

This is how the authors describe the king:

It stabilizes chaotic emotion and out-of-control behaviors. It gives stability and centeredness. It brings calm. And in its “fertilizing” and centeredness, it mediates vitality, life-force, and joy. It brings maintenance and balance. It defends our own sense of inner order, our own integrity of being and of purpose. our own central calmness about who we are, and our essential unassailability and certainty in our masculine identity. It looks upon the world with a firm but kindly eye. It sees others in all their weakness and in all their talent and worth. It honors them and promotes them. It guides them and nurtures them toward their own fullness of being. It is not envious. because it is secure, as the King, in its own worth. It rewards and encourages creativity in us and in others.

The King also embodies all the other masculine archetypes:

In its central incorporation and expression of the Warrior, it represents aggressive might when that is what is needed when order is threatened. It also has the power of inner authority. It knows and discerns (its Magician aspect) and acts out of this deep knowingness. It delights in us and in others (its Lover aspect) and shows this delight through words of authentic praise and concrete actions that enhance our lives.

The King Shadows

• Tyrant: He is only destructive. He does so because. as we’ve said. he lacks inner structure. and he is afraid and terrified of his own hidden weakness and his underlying lack of potency.
  He is very sensitive to criticism and, though putting on a threatening front, will at the slightest remark feel weak and deflated. He won’t show you this, however. What you will see, unless you know what to look for. is rage. But hidden behind the rage is a sense of worthlessness, of vulnerability and weakness. 
  The tyrant hates. fears, and envies new life, because he feels the new life is a threat to his slim grasp on his own kingship.
• Weakling: The hidden presence of this passive pole explains the hunger for mirroring -for “Adore me!” “Worship me!” “See how important I am!”- that we feel from so many of our superiors and friends. This explains their angry outbursts and their attacks on those they see as weak that is those upon whom they project their own inner Weakling. 

General Patton was a closeted weakling, say the authors.

Watch this scene:

Instead of reacting with the compassion of the life-giving King who knows what his men are up against, Patton flies into a rage and slaps the soldier across the face, calls him a coward. humiliates and abuses him, and sends him from the hospital to the from lines.
Though he does not know it. what he has seen is the face of his own hidden fear and weakness projected onto another. He has glimpsed the Weakling within.

And again, say the authors:

The heroic General Patton.
Though immensely imaginative, creative, and inspiring to his troops, at
least at times sabotaged himself with his risk-taking, his immature
competition with the British General Montgomery, and his insightful
but boyishly brash remarks.
Rather than being assigned a mission for which his true talent qualified him {to head the Allied invasion of Europe, for instance). He was sidelined precisely because he was a hero and not fully a warrior.

My Note: Eye-opening, stay away from gratuitous meanness
This was truly deep and insightful. 
Be careful of men who are too mean and aggressive towards other people’s faults and weaknesses. Not only are they potentially hiding insecurities, but they are often poor leaders.

I often felt the same about general Mattis, who always loved to sound tough:

James Mattis: When you men get home and face an anti-war protester (..) shake his hand. Then, wink at his girlfriend because she knows she’s dating a pussy

#2. Warrior

The warrior:

• Is efficient because he realizes how fragile and mortal he is

In addition to training, what enables a Warrior to reach clarity of thought is living with the awareness of his own imminent death. The Warrior knows the shortness of life and how fragile it is. A man under the guidance of the Warrior knows how few his days are. Rather than depressing him, this awareness leads him to an outpouring of life-force and to an intense experience of his life that is unknown to others. Every act counts.

Also read:

The Power of Accepting & Leveraging Death to Live Fully

• The warrior raises above pettiness

The true Warrior rises above pettiness. 
Says the authors:

Living in the light of lofty ideals and spiritual realities such as God. democracy, communism, freedom, or any other worthy transpersonal commitment so alters the focus of a man’s life that petty squabbling and personal. Ego concerns no longer matter much.

• The warrior can be a destructive force. But it’s a destructive force for good

Say the authors:

The Warrior is often a destroyer.
But the positive Warrior energy destroys only what needs to be destroyed in order for something new and fresh, more alive and more virtuous to appear. Many things in our world need destroying-corruption, tyranny, oppression, despotic systems of government, corporate hierarchies may get in the way of the company’s performance (…).
And in the very act of destroying, often the Warrior energy
is building new civilizations,  new commercial, artistic, and spiritual ventures for humankind.

• For the warrior, women are just there to fulfill sexual needs

When the warrior is disconnected from the lover, women are just for fun, or to fulfill sexual needs.

Even the positive Warrior (the Warrior in his fullness) can be disastrous. As we have said the Warrior in his pure form is emotionally detached; his transpersonal loyalty radically relativizes the importance of his human relationships. This is apparent in the Warrior’s attitude toward sex.
Women, for the Warrior, are not for relating to, for being intimate with.
They are for fun. 
(…)
Even if he has a family, the human warrior’s devotion to other duties often leads to marital problems.

• Businesspeople consumed by work are also warriors

Say the authors:

This same thing occurs outside the military as well.
In the relationships and families of men whose professions call for a great deal of transpersonal devotion and long hours of disciplined work and self-sacrifice. Ministers, doctors. lawyers, politicians, dedicated salespeople, and many others often have emotionally devastating personal lives.
Their wives and girlfriends often feel alienated and rejected, competing hopelessly with the man’s “true love,” his work.
In addition these men, true to the Warrior’s sexual attitudes, often have affairs with their nurses, staffers, receptionists, secretaries, and other women who admire from a safe (sometimes not so safe) distance their masculine Warrior proficiency and dedication.

My Note: Great analysis, but flawed on the sexual side
Very, very good analysis. 
Yet, it’s also flawed when it comes to sexual dynamics. The authors fail to realize that those men developed a drive to hard work because of the more sexual opportunities that the fruit of their work awarded them with.

• But our society isn’t very welcoming of warriors

Say the authors:

We live in a time when people are generally uncomfortable with the
Warrior form of masculine energy, and for good reasons.
Women especially are uncomfortable with it since they have often
been the most direct victims of its shadow expressions.

The Warrior Shadows

Warriors that are completely unemotional or only destructive are poor and underdeveloped archetypes of masculinity.

The movie “The Great Santini” is an example of the shadow Warrior with too much aggression and too little emotional depth:

Say the authors:

Most of his remarks and behavior toward his wife and children are depreciating, critica, commanding, and designed to put distance between him and the family members, who keep trying to relate to him lovingly.
The destructiveness of this way of “relating” eventually becomes so obvious to everyone, especially to the older son, that there can no longer be any hiding from the fact that Santini’s sometimes violent behavior results from his own inability to be tender and genuinely intimate.

Many young men these days admire the wrong kind of warriors. Say the authors:

A contemporary image of the Warrior turned passionless killing machine is, of course, Darth Vader from the Star Wars saga. It is alarming how many boys and adolescents identify with him. In this same connection, it is also alarming how many of these young men become members of survivalist and neo-Nazi groups.

The Warrior as a destructive can overcome us when we are frightened or very angry, like in this scene from Apocalypse Now reference by the authors themselves:

And that’s the importance of inner mental control to be an effective and value-adding warrior.

• Sadist: Though detachment in itself is not necessarily bad. as we’ve said. it does leave the door open to the “demon” of cruelty. Because he is so vulnerable in this area of relatedness. the man under the influence of the Warrior needs urgently to have his mind and his feelings under control-not repressed. but under control. Otherwise. cruelty will sneak in the back door when he’s not looking. 
  Far too often We see this same kind of sadism displayed in boot camp in the name of supposedly necessary “ritual humiliation” designed to
  deprive recruits of their individuality and put them under the power of a transpersonal devotion. Far too often, the drill sergeant’s motives are the motives of the sadistic Warrior seeking to humiliate and violate the men put in his charge.
• Masochist: the masochist is the “pushover” and “whipped puppy” that lies just beneath the Sadist’s rageful displays. The Masochist
  projects Warrior energy onto others and causes a man to experience
  himself as powerless. The man possessed by the Masochist is unable to
  defend himself psychologically; he allows others (and himself) to push
  him around.

Finally, say the authors:

If we are accessing the Warrior appropriately, we will be energetic, decisive, courageous, enduring, persevering, and loyal to some greater good beyond our own personal gain.
We will light good fights in order to make the world a better and more fulfilling place for everyone and everything. Our war making will be for the creation of the new, the just, and the free.

#3. Magician

The Magician is the knower, the one with technical expertise and knowledge of all kinds.

Write the authors:

The energies of the Magician archetype, wherever and whenever we encounter them, are twofold. The Magician is the knower and he is the master of technology. Furthermore, the man who is guided by the power of the Magician is able to fulfill these Magician functions in part by his use of ritual initiatory processes. He is the “ritual elder” who guides the processes of transformation.

This is the magician era, in a way, since it’s an era where technology is put to use to control our environment. 
But it’s the other form of Magician energy that is in short supply, the one based on psychological and spiritual initiatory processes.

The Magician Shadows

• Detached manipulator: more details on manipulation here, and more information on dark psychology here
• Denying “innocent” one: using guilt-tripping and covert power moves to control others

Dark Psychology: 7 Ways to Manipulate People

#4. Lover

The lover enjoys life’s pleasure and is comfortable in his own skin and own body.

But there is also something deeper about the lover and about his interconnectedness with the world.
Say the authors:

The Lover is deeply sensual-sensually aware and sensitive to the physical world in all its splendor. The Lover is related and connected to them all, drawn into them through his sensitivity.
His sensitivity leads him to feel compassionately and empathetically united with them. For the man accessing the Lover. all things are bound to each other.

But he is also a rebel:

The man under the influence of the Lover does not want to stop at socially created boundaries.
He stands against the artificiality of such things. His life is often unconventional and “messy”.

The major religions have always prosecuted the lover, say the authors.

The Lover Shadows

• Addicted lover: the addictive personality that gets lots in short-term pleasure
• Impotent lover: feel nothing, live in a muted world, and are chronically depressed

The Lover needs the Warrior in order to be able to act decisively, in order to detach from the web of immobilizing sensuality, and he needs the Magician to help him back off from the ensnaring effect of his emotions.

Boyhood Archetypes

Like for the masculine energies, the boy energies also overlap and inform each other.

All the shadow forms of the immature masculine can be carried over adulthood if they are not fixed.

Divine child

The divine child is the future king.

The shadows are:

• High-chair tyrant: needs to learn that he’s not the center of the universe, and the people and the world do not exist to serve and glorify him
• Weakling prince: the polar opposite of the high-chair tyrant. The  Weakling Prince appears to have very little personality, no enthusiasm for life, and very little initiative. This is the boy who needs to be coddled, who dictates to those around him by his silence or his whining and complaining helplessness. He needs to be carried around on a pillow. Everything is too much for him. He rarely joins in children’s games: he has few friends; he doesn’t do well in school; he is frequently hypochondriacal; his slightest wish is his parents’ command; the whole family system revolves around his comfort. He reveals the dishonesty of his helplessness, however, in his daggerlike verbal assaults on his siblings, his biting sarcasm directed against them, and his patent manipulation of their feelings. Because he convinced his parents that he is a helpless victim of life and that others are picking on him, when a controversy arises between himself and a sibling, his parents tend to punish the sibling and excuse him. 
  Later, when he is an “adult” and functioning primarily under the dominance of the Weakling, his repressed grandiosity may explode to the surface, completely raw and primitive, completely unmodulated and very powerful. This is the man who seemed coolheaded and rational and “nice” but who, once he’s been promoted, suddenly becomes “a different person, “a little Hitler”. This is the man for whom the saying “Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely” is entirely accurate.

Precocious child

He is the future magician.

The Precocious Child manifests in a boy when he is eager to learn, when his mind is quickened. when he wants to share what he is learning with others. 

The shadows are:

• Know it all trickster: verbally abusive of others whom he regards as inferior. Carried over into adulthood, the man is cocky and smug, with a superior grin. But he can be good at pricking the bubbles of other big inflated egos. Also see the “smart alec” in the “archetypes of dominance“. 
• Dummy: like the Weakling Prince, lacks personality, vigor, and creativity. He seems unresponsive and dull. He can’t seem to learn his multiplication tables, count change, or tell time. The Dummy’s ineptitude, however. is frequently less than honest.
  He may grasp far more than he shows, and his dummy behavior may mask a hidden grandiosity that feels itself too important (as well as too vulnerable) to come into the world. Thus, intimately intertwined with a secret Know-It-All, the Dummy is also a Trickster. 

Oedipal Child

He is hte future lover.

He is passionate and has a sense of wonder and a deep appreciation for connectedness with his inner depths, with others, and with all things.
He is warm. related. and affectionate. He also expresses. through his experience of connectedness to Mother (the primal relationship for almost all of us), the origins of what we can call spirituality. T

his Mother is not his real, mortal mother.
She is bound to disappoint him much of the time in his need for connectedness and perfect or infinite, love and nurturing. Rather, the Mother that he is sensing beyond his own, beyond all the beauty and feeling (what the Greeks called eros) in the things of the world. 

The shadows are:

• Momma’s boy: tied to Mama’s apron strings.” He causes a boy to fantasize about marrying his mother, about taking her away from his father. in adulthood, he often gets caught up in chasing the beautiful, the poignant, the yearning for union with Mother from one woman to another. He can never be satisfied with a
  mortal woman, because what he is seeking is the immortal Goddess. Here we have the Don Juan syndrome, The Oedipal Child, inflated beyond mortal dimensions, cannot be bound to one woman.
• Dreamer: while other children are playing, he may sit on a rock. dreaming his dreams. He accomplishes little and appears withdrawn and depressed. Often his dreams rend to be melancholy, on the one hand, or highly idyllic and ethereal 
  on the other. 

All the immature masculine energies are overly tied to Mother, and are deficient in their experience of the nurturing and mature masculine. But especially so is the Oedipal Child.

The Hero

He is the future warrior.

The “death” of the Hero in the life of a boy (or a man) really means that he has finally encountered his limitations. He has met the enemy, and the enemy is himself. He has met his own dark side, his very unheroic side.

The “death” of the Hero signals a boy’s or man’s encounter with true humility.

The shadows are:

• Grandstander bully: The boy (or man) under the power of the Bully intends to impress others. His strategies are designed to proclaim his superiority and his right to dominate those around him. He claims center stage as his birthright. If ever his claims to special status are challenged, watch the ensuing rageful displays!  is not a ream player. He is a loner, a hot-shot junior executive, salesman, revolutionary, stock market manipulator. He’s the soldier who takes unnecessary risks in combat and, if he’s in a position of leadership, requires the same of his men (these are the officers who get “dragged“). 
• Coward: shows an extreme reluctance to stand up for himself in physical confrontations. He will usually run away from a fight. perhaps excusing himself by claiming that it is more “manly” to walk away. But he will feel wretched in spite of his excuses. It is not only physical fights he will avoid. however. He will tend to allow himself to be bullied emotionally and intellectually as well.

Say the authors:

And all three energies give rise to the Hero, which breaks them free of the domination of the “feminine” unconscious and establishes the boy’s identity as a separate individual. The Hero prepares the boy to become a man.

But the Hero still needs to grow and mature:

The Hero is, in fact. only an advanced form of Boy psychology-the most advanced form. The peak, actually, of the masculine energies of the boy, the archetype that characterizes the best in the adolescent stage of development. Yet it is immature. and when it is carried over into adulthood as the governing archetype, it blocks men from full maturity.

Criticism

“King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” is a great book.
But there is some important criticism to be raised.

1. Somewhat weaker in hard science

Take this example:

Jungians have found that in every man there is a feminine subpersonality called the Anima, made up of the feminine archetypes (…) All human beings can access the archetypes

Not true. 
Jungians didn’t find out.
Jungians speculated and theorized that in every man there is feminine subpersonality.
Big difference.

The same superficial approach in mixing theory and science can be found elsewhere:

Jung and his successors have found that on the level of the deep
unconscious the psyche of every person is grounded in what Jung
called the “collective unconscious”

Again, these folks didn’t “found that”, they “speculated that… “.

Those speculations might be intelligent, thoughtful, and even correct. But they might not.
Personally, I’m not too sold on this “collective unconscious” sitting in the “deep unconscious psyche” (that name also gives away the scientific flimsiness).

Sometimes it’s very Freudian, too (see next point).
For example, it gives for granted that the subconscious in men is feminine (the mother).
But there’s no evidence for that.

2. At times, highly Freudian

Freudian was a genius.
And, at the same time, also an unscientific idiot who believed too much in his own speculations.

So to me, “Freudian” isn’t always a compliment.
And some Freudian lines and explanations didn’t convince me. For example:

The man under the influence of the Shadow Warrior’s bipolarity, unsure of his legitimate phallic power, is still battling against what he experiences as the inordinately powerful feminine and against everything supposedly “soft” and relational. Even in adulthood, he still feels terrified that he will be swallowed up by it. His desperate fear of this leads him to wanton brutality.

So some men are brutal because are “battling the feminine side”? 
Hmmm, there might be something there, in some cases. But when I see these sweeping generalizations, I get angry.
Some individuals are brutal because they wired that way and because they have low morals, and they are unworthy of being alive. And not because they are “battling their feminine side”.

Or:

In addition, the boy under the power of the Mama’s Boy is what is
called autoerotic. He may compulsively masturbate. He may be into
pornography, seeking the Goddess in the nearly infinite forms of the
female body.

So wait a second, a child who masturbates a lot and is into pornography is not high in sex drives and hormones, but he is “seeking the Goddess”?

Somebody once said something like this: “don’t look for a convoluted explanation when there is a far simpler one that more accurately explains it”.

3. Sometimes forgets that human nature exists before “archetypes” and is valid across archetypes

The author says that the warrior ethos:

“explains the prevalence of prostitutes around military camps. It also explains the horrific tradition of the raping of conquered women.”

No man, military camps have prostitutes because men want to have sex. And men raping women has little to do with the warrior ethos and more to do with general human nature. Most men who are recruited as soldiers during wars weren’t even warriors by choice anyway.

Little later he says that businessmen with a warrior ethos have sex with their staff supposedly because warriors see women as fun.
Again, the authors fail to see and understand general evolutionary psychology. 

Men have probably developed conscientiousness and a drive for hard work because that allowed them to bed more women.

4. Misleading on genders and homosexuality

The authors seem to imply that homosexuality and “gender identity” chaos stem from not growing well into the archetypes.

For example, write the authors:

Some men under the infantile power of the Mama’s Boy
aspect of the Oedipal Child have vast collections of pictures of nude
women, alone or making love with men
(…)
But instead of affirming his own masculinity as a mortal man, he is really seeking to experience the penis of God-the Great Phallus-that experiences all women, or rather that experiences union with the Mother Goddess in her infinity of female forms.

So a kid who makes love to men is not gay, but lost in the Oedipal child?

And:

Ours is an age, as we’ve said, of personal and gender identity chaos. And chaos is always the result of inadequate accessing of the Magician in some vital area of life.

I loved this book and this model, but… Do the authors really believe that this model can fix everything?
How is gender identity exactly tied to the “Magician”? That made little sense to me and, at the very least, was poorly explained.

5. Some new-age woo-woo

Say the authors:

Modern subatomic physics, it has been said, looks very much like Eastern mysticism as it approaches the intuited insights of Hinduism and Taoism.
This new physics is discovering a microworld beneath our seemingly solid macroworld of sense perceptions. 

Wait, who said that?
And then trying to tie that woo-woo to psychology.

The same is true of depth psychology.
Jung, as he was making his first maps of the unconscious, was struck by the similarities between what he was discovering about the energy flows and the archetypal patterns in the human psyche and the quamum physics

6. “Back then when it was great” rose-tinted glasses

There is an element of the “back then when it was great syndrome”.
Say the authors:

At least there were at one time sacred kings, upon whom the men in the realm could project their inner King

I think the authors would change their minds in a heartbeat if he could live some years in the reign of some despotic, petty, ignorant Middle Age king as a poor peasant.

7. Too optimistic in granting grand and positive potential to anyone?

The king is “primal” in all men?

I disagree. 

I think some people are just crooked, or not born with the positive attributes to be a positive force in the world.

8. In rare cases, weak in psychological description

Say the authors: 

Though introverted and reflective. he is also extroverted and eagerly reaches out to others to share his insights and his talents with them

This felt a bit convoluted and like a description that was made up to fit the model, instead of the other way around.
So he is introverted, or extroverted? Because, barring ambiverts and introverts who learned to act more extrovertedly, introversion and extraversion are usually understood as mutually exclusive.

9. Do you need “initiation”?

Say the authors:

A man who “cannot get it together” is a man who has probably not had the opportunity to undergo ritual initiation into the deep structures of manhood

More recent authors have taken a leaf out of Moore and Gillette book on the “initiation” part and expanded on tribal belonging as “The Way of Men”.
For example, see Sebastian Junger and Jack Donovan.

I’m not too sold on the benefits of initiation, though.

I think that initiation at too early an age can easily be a form of oppression and, potentially, abusive. Initiation is about foisting and forcing values and culture into someone who is still too young to decide whether he wants to be part of that culture and way of living.

Me for one, I’d be super pissed if someone had initiated me into anything. Well, as a matter of fact, I have. I’ve been initiated into Christianity without anyone asking me. 
And I didn’t like that. 
Don’t f*cking force me into anything a**hole, I decide for myself.

Quotes

The drug dealer, the ducking and diving political leader, the wife beater, the chronically “crabby” boss, the “hot shot” junior executive, the unfaithful husband, the company “yes man,” the indifferent graduate school adviser, the “holier than thou” minister, the gang member, the father who can never find the time to attend his daughter’s school programs, the coach who ridicules his star athlete, the therapist who unconsciously attacks his clients’ “shining” and seeks a kind of gray normalcy for them, the yuppie – all these men have something in common.
They are all boys pretending to be men.

The know-it-all trickster:

Maybe you’re the practical joker. mercilessly hounding others with your pranks until someone does you one better and you are forced to realize how much it hurts.

On the trickster making enemies:

We once knew a graduate student who was really possessed by this aspect of the archetype. He couldn’t stop exposing others’ weaknesses through his charming, and not so charming, humor at their expense.
He laughed at his professors’ blunders in the classroom. He laughed when the president of the school stumbled over his words. He himself had political aspirations. hoping to create a student movement for his favorite cause.
But he alienated the very people he needed as supporters

On not making enemies, also read:

• Basic strategies of power

The 4 Fundamental Strategies of Power

On the trickster’s pleasure of ruining other without doing anything of his own:

This is the energy form that seeks the fall of great men. that delights
in the destruction of a man of importance. But the Trickster does not
want to replace the man who has fallen. He does not want to take up
that man’s responsibilities. In fact. he doesn’t want any responsibilities.
He wants to do just enough to wreck things for others.

On envy:

His energy comes from envy. The less a man is in touch with his true
talents and abilities. the more he will envy others. If we envy a lot. we
are denying our own realistic greatness. our own Divine Child. What
we need to do, then, is to get in touch with our own specialness. our
own beauty. and our own creativity. Envy blocks creativity.

On having heroes;

The Know-It-All Trickster has no heroes. because to have heroes is to admire others. We can only admire others if we have a sense of our own worthiness. and a developing sense of security about our own creative energies.

Review

Wow!

What a great, insightful, helpful book “King, Warrior, Magician, Lover” is.

Albeit I had to list the important criticism, that doesn’t cancel out the greatness that is to be found in the pages of this classic on masculinity.

Most eye-opening for me were the Warrior and King archetypes, together with their shadows.
Most of all, I was wowed because this book reflected some of the values and ideals of this website, and it helped expand on them.
One of the values of this website said:

• Do your diligence, based on healthy individualism, on when it’s time to take up arms: Some of us have natural drives in wanting to form bands, taking up arms, and fighting “the other”. If you’re a man, this is a reality of our nature. I know it is for me, too. Denying that drive is pointless, and even harmful.
  Plus, that drive can be a good thing.

What I was talking about there was the “Warrior” in its mature and value-adding form. 
So the authors helped me expand on that concept.

I can highly recommend this book to men who want to grow into being the best, most powerful, and at the same time most value-adding version of themselves.

Check the:

• Best manosphere books: the must-read for men