The Magician
- First attested
- 1990Formalized as a primary archetype of the mature masculine by Moore and Gillette (1990).
Moore and Gillette's Magician is the mature archetype of the knower and master of technology.
The Magician is the third of four archetypes of the mature masculine in Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette's King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990), a book of the mythopoetic men's movement. The authors say it grows out of the boyhood Precocious Child and is paired with the King (or Queen) in one of two dialectical oppositions. Its human forms, they write, include shamans, witch doctors, inventors, scientists, doctors, lawyers and technicians, since all knowledge that takes special training falls to it. They illustrate it with Imhotep, Nathan and David, and Merlin and Arthur. They say the scheme builds on Jung's archetypal Self and goes beyond it; the Jungian scholar Darrell Dobson says Moore advanced archetypal theory with its two-poled shadow.
Light
Moore and Gillette say the Magician in his fullness is the "knower" and the "master of technology": observing, thoughtful and introverted in their sense of the word, able to contain and channel power, and using knowledge to guide others by degrees toward better lives.
Shadow
Moore and Gillette give the Magician two shadow poles: the Manipulator, a "power Shadow" who withholds what others need to know and uses knowledge to control them or raise his own status, and the Denying "Innocent" One, who wants a Magician's status but refuses its responsibilities and hides behind feigned naivete.