19 Nov KING – The Archetype of Sovereignty
The King Archetype is the aspect of your personality which reflects the measure of your Sovereignty as a man. Everyone of us has a Sovereign right to exist without apology or justification. However, the way in which you interact in this world will depend on the extent to which you realise this.
By using the word ‘realise’ italicised in the paragraph above I am highlighting the fact that there are many internal ‘parts’ of us which need to come to this realisation. Not to over complicate it; but sometimes we can understand something intellectually, however, this does not guarantee that this understanding is translated into our day to day way of living. Which begs the question, how much do we actually understand a thing we claim to understand, and are there dimensions to understanding in order for something we intellectually grasp to become embedded into our practical understanding?
In my lived experience, when I began to get a better intellectual understanding of what it meant to psychologically grasp that I had a Right to Exist unapologetically, for this truth to leave my head and operate in my body, my heart and Solar Plexus, to become a perspective that impacts my will, the way that I think and communicate, and the manner in which I express love, I had to address the fact that I had psychologically acquired an unresolved wound through a trauma experienced in childhood which first and foremost needed to be addressed for me to be able to operate from a Sovereign perspective.
My Sovereign wound, by way of illustration occurred when I was a child of 4 years old. The incriminating object – a simple biscuit. A biscuit that I wanted but that my mother had told me I could not have. However, I was disobedient to my mother in so much as when my father returned home, having internalised that my fathers word and authority trumped that of my mother I asked him if I could have the fateful biscuit. Knowing nothing of my mothers previous denial of the biscuit, my father simply said yes and willingly granted me the biscuit. When my mother entered the kitchen and saw me munching on the biscuit, her initial reaction was to state; ‘I told you you can not have a biscuit!’. My response, ‘dad said I could have a biscuit’ with a smug look on my little four year old face resulting in my mother taking umbrage and ordering my father to punish me, for my disobedience and dishonesty.
Now it was not the hiding I took which wounded me, but the message I internalised from my mothers anger as was evidenced in what I did afterwards to seek to rectify the situation and appease my mothers wrath. The story goes, I approached my mother tentatively as she sat in the dining room some moments afterwards, once the dust had settled, and asked her, ‘Mum, how do I be a good boy?’ On reflection I realise that for me to ask this question, I must have been terrified. Terrified at the prospect that my dear mother who I loved dearly and who I have depended on for my daily sustenance and the dolling out of treats like biscuits could potentially abandon me.
Of course the farthest thing from my mothers mind was to cast me out to fend for myself. On reflection, knowing more about that period in my parents life, many things occurring in my mothers life may have contributed to her angry reaction. Perhaps she was mad at my dad for coming back without a job. Maybe a million and one other potential things of which I had no ability to grasp at four years old were occurring in her world. However, not having elicited such a volatile reaction from my mother prior to this incident. Her reaction shook me to the core and caused me to supplicate in this manner to restore myself to my mothers good graces.
It took a lot of living and a Spiritual Awakening to enable me to come to the realisation that to apologise for existing was to give up my Sovereignty. That to surrender to an external entity albeit, an entity which for all intents and purposes could be described as an egregor ‘a thought form’, would enable this thought form to be enveigled initially by my mother and father in childhood, and later by the church in adulthood. Therefore, after years of wasting time, energy and money seeking to please the lord and be a good christian boy. The Divine eventually had mercy on me and enabled me to realise that in order to please Them the only imperative was to know and embrace my truth.
My mother being an evangelical born again christian woman seized the moment to tell me the gospel, envisioning in my question a parallel with the biblical question, ‘what must I do to be saved?’ Thus sitting me on her lap, my mother had me pray to invite Jesus to sit upon the throne of my heart, become my lord and saviour and help me to be an obedient and honest child. In order to do this I had to of course repent of being born as a sinner, and had to ask Jesus to save me from my sins.
Notwithstanding, it took a long time to clear up this mess, particularly as my mother and father devoutly adhered to the biblical verses which state, ‘train up a child in the way he should go and when he is old he will not depart from it’. So as fate would have it at 18 years old I found myself in a church once more praying a prayer of repentance for being born a sinner and asking Jesus to become my lord and saviour.
It took a lot of living and a Spiritual Awakening to enable me to come to the realisation that to apologise for existing was to give up my Sovereignty. That to surrender to an external entity albeit, an entity which for all intents and purposes could be described as an egregore ‘a thought form’, would enable this thought form to be enveigled initially by my mother and father in childhood, and later by the church in adulthood. Therefore, after years of wasting time, energy and money seeking to please the lord and be a good christian boy. The Divine eventually had mercy on me and enabled me to realise that in order to please Them the only imperative was to know and embrace my truth.
As James Hollis Ph.D. says in Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, ‘What constitutes “personal authority”? (ie. Sovereignty)* Stated most simply it means, to find what is true for oneself and to live it in the world. If it is not lived, it is not yet real for us, and we abide in what Sartre called “bad faith,” the theologian calls “sin,” the therapist calls “neurosis,” and the existential philosopher calls “inauthentic being.”
So like we said, it is not simply understanding sovereignty as an intellectual idea, but, ‘living it in the world’. Now, I disavowed my religious affiliation with christianity many years before I actually came to an understanding of my Sovereignty. And this wound from childhood remained unresolved. James Hollis would describe an unresolved wound as, ‘memories unmade bed’ or an ‘expensive ghost’. Indeed, haunted by this wound beneath my consciousness I was not yet prepared to operate as a Sovereign Man. As a result my Sovereignty was abdicated. Many men with unresolved wounds in the area of their Sovereignty react in the opposite direction, they seek to over compensate for the Sovereignty they do not feel and as a result rather than abdicate, they dictate. So the poles of the shadow King archetype swing between abdicated King or dictatorial King. The man who knows he is Sovereign, who knows internally that he has a right to exist without apology or justification transcends the ‘either’, ‘or’ of these poles and simply operates from the secure place of knowing himself to have Sovereign leadership over his own life. As a result he is able to live intentionally and with purpose.
To give you a visual from pop culture, this is reflected beautifully in the characters of Argon in The Lord of the Rings who is a reflection of a King secure in his Sovereignty, by contrast to Denethor the Steward of Gondor who is overcompensating due to his lack of security in his role and the King of Rohan who has abdicated his role and allowed his magician Gríma Wormtongue henchman of Saruman to turn him into a husk of the Sovereign he is until a mightier Magician in the form of Gandalf releases him from Gríma’s clutches.
The Magician as we’ll discover when we explore the Magician archetype is essentially ‘Our Mind’ and as a Sovereign we’ll have to learn to ‘use our mind’ and interrupt the survival patterns installed in childhood to help us survive – parents, teachers, bullies and bastards so that we can have our internal Magician instal programs into our minds that will enable us to thrive as opposed to just survive and restore balance and harmony into the kingdom of our lives in contrast to the dysfunctional traps we fall into in response to life’s many unresolved traumas.
Sovereignty has dimensions. And learning to stand as a Sovereign man on the earth is important from multiple perspectives. But until we address what is happening for us psychologically and understand the pathway to healing the childhood wounds which hamper our capacity to emotionally operate from the energy of Sovereignty, the unresolved wounds will keep us functioning within the realm of abdication or dictation. So this page is a resource to bring understanding regarding what spiritually and practically seeks to undermine our Sovereignty in our Kingdoms and in society to prevent us from realising our Idea of a Man™ by influencing us to buy into others projection of their Ideas of a Man™ as it suits their intents and purposes and keeps us dependent on external energy sources to sure up our identity, thus ensuring that we are unable to fulfill our true potential and purpose.
*words in brackets () added myself
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