Masculine Archetypes: The Warrior At Mabon

Over the this turn of the “Wheel of the Year”, we are investigating and paying respect to eight archetypes of mature, sacred masculinity. The Warrior At Mabon is the seventh installment in this series.

Context

(If you’ve been reading this series, you can skip this repeating section.)

Men’s mysteries matter. Today, young men are confronted on one hand with reactionary voices who advocate gender roles decades or centuries out of date, and on the other with professional-managerial class “progressive” voices who seem to think the answer to the reactionaries is to eliminate masculinity.

The transition to manhood is dangerous. Men are both more likely than women to be murdered and to commit murder. We’re more likely to be in prison, to be killed on the job, or to commit suicide. We’re less likely to finish high school or earn college degrees.

Boys who fail to make a successful transition to manhood end up at best being a drag on society, and at worst an active threat to people’s lives. And we will not help them make the transition by denying that manhood even exists.

To help young men through the transition, a system of archetypes can be a useful guide. No such system will be complete, of course. What I’m going to talk about in this series of posts is inspired by the book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, and also by Robert Bly’s work, but it’s my own thing. Anything smart is probably copied from those others and anything dumb here is probably my own fault.

By considering these archetypes I am not claiming that these roles are unavailable to women or nonbinary folks. Nor am I claiming that this is the only way to be a man. I’m offering some ideas that have helped me come to terms with my own existence as an adult male human being. (And cognizant that that is as a “white” heterosexual American male, though still believing there’s enough universality in the way androgens shape our brains for the exercise to be useful). If they don’t work for you, fine, please tell us your secrets! If you’re not a man and find that they work for you, great!

For each of these archetypes, we’re going to discuss a balanced version, an excess version, and a shadow version.

Visualize us going around a mountain: at the top is the Wild Man and the realm of excess, up where the air is thin. It’s exhilarating but we can’t stay there. At the bottom is the shadow realm of fear. The healthy mature man moves around the middle heights of the mountain, in neither shadow not excess, moving between the archetypes as needed. Over this series, we will visit eight points around the mountain: the Magician, the Healer, the Lover, the Preacher, the King, the Captain, the Warrior, and the Trickster.

The Warrior

Of all the archetypes we’re considering, the Warrior may be both the most problematic and the most promising. Let us take care as we grapple with this archetype.

Why is the Warrior so fraught? Because the Powers That Be have always needed men to fight their wars. (Thanks to modern weaponry, these days they’ll take women, and often children, too, but still prefer men.) From the ancient world to modern geopolitics, to conquer or rule or merely “intervene to uphold human rights” or whatever excuse contemporary war mongers use, the Masters of War do not do the fighting themselves. They coerce or convince other men to do it for them.

But they know the more they enable men to fight The Great Enemy (whoever that may be this month), the more they enable those men to fight the Powers That Be. For example, consider the way that black veterans of WWII started resisting American segregation after they’d been taught to shoot at white men in Germany.

So would-be conquerors must present to their soldiers a limited or twisted version of the Warrior. (We’ll use “soldier”, lower case “s”, to speak of these actual men and the model they are given, in contrast with the archetype of the Warrior, capital “W”.) The solider is carefully taught what Wilfred Owen called “The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” — “It is sweet and proper to die for the country of one’s fathers.” Or as Thoreau put it,

A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a ﬁle of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed, and produces a palpitation of the heart. They have no doubt that it is a damnable business in which they are concerned; they are all peaceably inclined. Now, what are they? Men at all? or small movable forts and magazines, at the service of some unscrupulous man in power? Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts- a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments”.

Kusakabe Kimbei, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Mission and Boundaries

There are two words that we must focus on to understand the Warrior: “mission” and “boundaries”.

The Warrior’s essence is his Mission — his task, his purpose, his duty. To accomplish that mission the Warrior will pay any price, lay down his life; and there is a nobility in that. But he will also pay the price of laying down the lives of any innocents in the way. If the Mission is to drop bombs on a target, the Warrior, if not tempered by the other archetypes, will get it done.

A man who is all pure Warrior is all blade and no handle, the “small movable fort” that Thoreau speaks of. He must have access to the other archetypes in order to determine and understand if those bombs should be dropped, to be able to judge whether the Mission is worthy of him and worth the cost.

In the classic film Apocalypse Now, right near the beginning Captain Willard ruminates, “I wanted a mission, and for my sins, they gave me one.” The Warrior without a mission is restless, useless, frustrated.

Or as Tennyson’s “Ulysses” says, “How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use!” The Warrior knows that rust never sleeps. He is a man of action, he needs action to keep him bright and sharp, and needs a mission to give him purpose for that action.

Because the Warrior’s essence is tied up with the mission, he can even come to respect his opposing Warriors and their dedication to their mission. The mythology around men like Rommel and Robert E. Lee, who fought for utterly abhorrent causes yet — at least in the myth — did so with dedication and honor, illustrates this.

The Warrior’s Mission is very often a matter of maintaining boundaries. Even when it is a matter of expanding those boundaries, of aggressive invasion, it is presented to the soldier as a matter of restoring them to their rightful state.

The Warrior’s concern with boundaries is the yang to the Lover’s yin attitude toward them. The Lover desires to extend boundaries, to blend with what is on the other side. The Warrior seeks to protect what is on his side of the boundary. This is not a selfish grasping: he is selflessly protecting what lies behind him as he looks out over the boundary. He is acting out of love, though it is a different facet of love than the archetypical Lover we’ve discussed.

Sometimes it is through the actions of the Warrior that a man is best able to show love. A lovely expression of this is found in Robert Hayden’s poem “Those Winter Sundays”. The narrator of the poem speaks of how his father rose early in winter, even on Sunday mornings, to make a fire to warm the house, and polish the narrators good shoes (likely in preparation for church). “No one ever thanked him,” the narrator recalls, and ends the poem with the rhetorical question:

What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

While the father here is fighting the elements and the disorder of dirty shoes rather than an opponent, this is the Warrior in action, pursuing a Mission to care for those within the boundary of his family.

Training

The Warrior may wield many weapons and tools to accomplish his mission, but his most important tool is himself. He trains dilligently to build and maintain his capability for action.

Honor

The utter destruction of an enemy is, even putting ethical issues aside, a costly undertaking. In many cases the Warrior’s goal is not the annihaltion of the enemy, but to cause his enemy to lay down his arms and surrender.

But the enemy is not going to do that unless he trusts the Warrior’s word about being treated mercifully. The Warrior must therefore cultivate a reputation for ethical and honest behavior, for trustworthiness — even under the life and death conditions of war.

This is the Warrior’s honor: virtuous behavior under pressure, such that even one’s enemy can rely on it.

Shadow: The Bully

We all understand the Bully. He acts for self-aggrandizement and for delight in harming others. While the Warrior in his fullness is about the defensive warfare of Athena, the Bully is all about the aggressive spear of “bloody, man-slaying Ares”.

Excess: the Berzerker

Many of our mythological warriors — Hercules, Thor, Worf — straddle the Warrior and the Wild Man, a powerful but dangerous combination. The berserkers, “tasters of blood”. Or in today’s mythology, the Incredible Hulk.

Cuchulainn’s “Warp-Spasm”, as Thomas Kinsella translated it, is a vivid illustration:

The first warp-spasm seized Cuchulainn, and made him into a monstrous thing,
hideous and shapeless, unheard of.

His shanks and his joints, every knuckle and angle and organ from head to foot,
shook like a tree in the flood or a reed in the stream.
His body made a furious twist inside his skin,
so that his feet and shins and knees switched to the rear
and his heels and calves switched to the front.

The balled sinews of his calves switched to the front of his shins,
each big knot the size of a warrior’s bunched fist.
On his head the temple-sinews stretched to the nape of his neck,
each mighty, immense, measureless knob as big as the head of a month-old child.

His face and features became a red bowl;
he sucked one eye so deep into his head that a wild crane could not probe it onto his cheek out of the depths of his skull;
the other eye fell out along his cheek.

His mouth weirdly distorted:
his cheek peeled back from his jaws until the gullet appeared;
his lungs and liver flapped in his mouth and throat;
his lower jaw struck the upper a lion-killing blow,
and fiery flakes large as a ram’s fleece reached his mouth from his throat.

…

In that style, then,
he drove out to find his enemies
and did his thunder-feat
and killed a hundred,
then two hundred,
then three hundred,
then four hundred,
then five hundred…

The Warrior at Mabon

The equinoxes, standing at the balance of light and dark, are good times to consider these archetypes who stand at the boundaries: the Lover, whom we focused on six months ago, and the Warrior.

So take some time this season to consider your relationship with this important but hazardous archetype of the Warrior.

What is your Mission? What boundaries will you protect? Are you balancing your Warrior with the other archetypes, in order to best consider those questions and not be merely a “small movable fort” in the service of some despotic power? Are you cultivating honor so that even those who oppose you can trust your word?