Ongoing Process

I am, once again, examining what it means to be male.  I’ve just read through King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette and my first impression is favorable.  Even though this is in the mythopoetic school of thought, which I generally don’t care for, I feel like this probably has some pretty useful stuff in it.

However, of the four archetypes covered, I’m finding the Warrior to be problematic.  Their image of the Warrior is essentially one of disciplined aggression in service to a larger cause.  Basically, when something needs to be killed, the Warrior is the guy to get it done.  I don’t disagree with this in broad strokes, but I find the overt association of this basic pattern with the making of war to be both unsettling and inaccurate.  Indeed, in their descriptions and examples they make liberal use of war imagery without any examination at all of whether or not war is a good idea to begin with.  They seem to have a strong assumption that humans killing one another, when done correctly, is a great thing.

Now, obviously sometimes things do indeed need to be killed and there’s very clearly part of the male psyche that revels in this role.  But I think this archetype can be described more robustly by pushing even further back into human history.  Long before we had groups large enough to warrant warriors to battle other groups, males were already enacting this role: they were hunters.

The Hunter archetype holds all the essential qualities of the Warrior, but without the whole slaughtering-people-to-further-somebody-else’s-political-agenda thing.  The Hunter is focused, disciplined, and all his will is bent on ending a life in the service of his people.  But his mission is not to kill other human beings for the expansion of power (or defending against others’ expansion), his mission is to kill so that he may provide sustenance to his people.  And in every traditional culture, the Hunter always held both the hunt and his prey to be sacred.  It was carried out with the utmost respect and devotion.  When was the last time you heard of a warrior who held his enemy to be sacred?

I think a critical difference between these two perspectives can be found in modern psychology’s take on aggression.  It is largely divided into two types, affective aggression and predatory aggression.  Affective aggression is reactive and fear-based.  When something tries to bite you and you’re upset and bite back, that is affective aggression.  Predatory aggression is intentional and goal-oriented.  When there’s a fox in the hen house and you carefully hunt it down, that is predatory aggression.

(It’s worth noting that my very limited research seems to show psychology addressing predatory aggression primarily in terms of pathological behavior.  But any archetype which is repressed will always surface in shadow form, and the Hunter is no different.)

It seems to me that the Warrior is ultimately based upon affective aggression.  Wars are always fear-based.  Rulers hoard power out of their own fear and then lead their people to fear the "other".  Then the other (who is operating under the same dynamic) either attacks or is attacked and yet another senseless, reactive war ensues.

But the Hunter is ultimately based on predatory aggression.  He is, literally, the predator.  He knows he must kill to live and he carries out this task with intention and focus.  Instead of fearing or hating his prey, he holds it in the highest respect as the very sustainer of life.

So, based on my admittedly brief examination of the topic, I think it would be of value to explore the possibility that the Warrior is a shadow form of the Hunter.  This would place the Hunter as a primary human male archetype, and along with it a far more Life-oriented perspective on what it is to be a man.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 25th, 2008 at 8:58 pm and is filed under Life, Spirit. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.