Your Inner King archetype is the foundation of your personality and way of being in the world.
He is (or should be) the leader in your life, a visionary, who is planning your future, keeping you on track in pursuit of your life purpose, and helping you to see the world from a perspective of wisdom, acceptance, joy, and blessing.
Video – the Archetype of the King
Is Your Inner King Archetype Serving You?
The unfortunate truth is that for most of us, our King comes “online” after all the other archetypes, often in our forties and fifties. And that could be the way it is meant to be (in terms of our psychological development), or it could be because we are not taught how to be Kings as children. But that isn’t too surprising: the emotional wound in the King archetype is the self-belief that “I am not good enough”, and children have plenty of opportunity to learn they are not good enough as they grow up.
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Many are directly told or shown, with greater or lesser degrees of force, that they are not good enough, that they are not worth much. And even when Kingship is bestowed up on us by benevolent parents and teachers, it only fully develops into a mature expression of Kingship when we have gained enough life experience, the kind of experience which teaches us about wisdom and sound judgement.
It’s no wonder that becoming a mature, balanced King takes time! This is one reason why balanced King energy has always been extremely important to the human race. That’s because the King that can be immensely organizing, ordering, and creatively healing.
(At least, that is, when the King is in balance, and not inflated into a tyrant, or deflated into a weakling King – both distortions being the outcome of emotional wounding in childhood.)
Indeed, it’s the functions of King energy which make the transition from boy psychology to man psychology possible. The good King sits at the centre of his world, and from this central place all of creation radiates his being, his values, his energy, and his essence out to the very frontiers of his world.
It’s no different for each of us: no matter what we see as our world, our realm, our inner King is the one responsible for ordering and directing, for making things happen, and for choosing what is best for all of the citizens of our realm – including ourselves.
In fact, this is the function of the King: to receive and to take all his people, including all the other parts of yourself, where they need to go. That’s when the kingdom flourishes.
But when the King doesn’t live in balance, nothing will go right for his people, or for the kingdom as a whole. The realm will languish, and the centre, which the King represents, will not hold – the kingdom will be ripe for rebellion, invasion or destruction.
Many of us probably grew up in dysfunctional families where there was an immature, weak, or absent father, and as a result mature King energy is not sufficiently present. In situations like this, families very often succumb to disorder and chaos.
Even when the mother takes over with her own sovereign energy, which can substitute to some degree for the King energy of a father, at some level the boys in the family suffer because they have no role model to teach them how to develop their own inner King.
(In passing, let’s remark on the fact that civilisations have always seen the culmination of kingly energy as a creative partnership with the Queen – and indeed, it has usually been seen as the royal couple’s duty to pass their creative energies on to the kingdom in the form of children.)
Video – the Archetype of the King
The Inner King and The Power Of Blessing
One of the most important roles of the King throughout history has been to bestow blessing. Being blessed has enormous psychological consequences for us. Research has actually shown that our bodies change chemically when we feel valued, praised, and blessed.
And young men today are starving for blessing from older men. In other words, they are starving for blessing from the place of older men’s King energy. Indeed, this lack of blessing, of guidance and mentorship, is one of the reasons why so many young people can’t make their lives work. (You can read all about the King archetype in Rod Boothroyd’s book on male archetypes. In the UK, buy it from Amazon on this link Warrior Magician Lover King: A Guide to the Male Archetypes Updated for the 21st Century . In the USA, you can buy Rod’s book from Amazon by following this link.)
Yet they should not be in this place. What they need is to be blessed: to be seen and recognized by a mature King. When they are seen in this way, something inside them changes. Their Kingship somehow “switches on”, after which they can evolve into mature adult men.
So a question comes up at this point. How much blessing did you receive from your father or other Kings during your childhood?
Most likely none. Perhaps a little. But most of never received enough blessing to make us believe that we were good enough, and this absence of blessing gives us a lifetime’s personal work of reparation and self-exploration.
This is the emotional work we must do to recover who we were always meant to be, before the world got in the way.
To quote from Moore and Gillette: “The King archetype in its fullness possesses the qualities of order, of reasonable and rational patterning, of integration and integrity in the masculine psyche. It stabilises chaotic emotion and out-of-control behaviours. It gives stability and centeredness. It brings calm. And in its centeredness, it mediates vitality, life force and joy.
“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 stability 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 honours them and promotes them.
“It guides them and nurtures them towards 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 others. In its central expression of the Warrior, it represents aggressive might when that is needed when order is threatened.
“It also has the power of inner authority. It knows and discerns from its Magician aspect, and acts out of this deep knowingness. It delights in us and in others from its Lover aspect and shows this delight through words of authentic praise and concrete actions that enhance our lives.”
This is the energy that allows you to serve your kingdom from a place of strength. In fact, it’s the energy that allows you to express yourself calmly when everyone else is losing their heads in times of chaos and struggle.
This is the place from which you can make clear decisions that cut through the mess in the family, at work, even in the nation and the world. And it’s the energy of blessing that seeks joy, growth and nurturing for all people, and for the environment and the natural world.
The King Archetype In His Fullness
When we access our King energy correctly, we will manifest the qualities in our lives of the good and rightful King, the King in his fullness.
Our Warriors will obey the King within with pleasure and gratitude. they will come to serve the Kingdom. Then, we feel our anxiety level drop. We feel centred and calm, and we speak from an inner authority.
We have the capacity to bless ourselves and others, and care for others deeply and genuinely. We see others as the full persons they really are. We have a sense of being a centred participant in the world, creating a more just, calm, and creative world.
We have a heart centred quality that allows to act with devotion to our families, our friends, our companies, our causes, our religions, and indeed to the world. And along with this we have our own spiritual belief system, and we can then truly “love our neighbours as ourselves”.