From the Art of Manliness:
"The Shadows of the Magician Archetype
The Detached Manipulator
The Magician in his fullness desires to initiate other men into his knowledge, bringing them up from degree to degree so that they can become better and happier men. The Manipulator Shadow poses as the Magician in his fullness–he teases would-be initiates with the prospect of learning his secrets, but he does not give them all his knowledge. He withholds things from them in order to feed both his pride and his pocketbook. Shadow Manipulators charge their seekers a ton of money with the promise that the student can become just like them, but don’t give away the real secrets to doing that, and especially the secret that they often can’t become just like them, because their own success was due to x,y, or z factor that won’t happen to anyone else.
The internet has created an army of Shadow Manipulators. Everywhere you look there are hucksters promising you the secrets to bedding women, losing weight, making money online…if you’ll only buy their $200 eBook.
Shadow manipulators play a prominent role on our cultural stage as well. Wall Street bankers, politicians, ad agencies, and media pundits are all absolute experts in getting a following by sharing some of the story, but not all of it.
Another aspect of the Manipulator is his cynical detachment from other people. I see this Shadow in guys too often. They’re the ones who, when confronted with their inability to commit to anything, be passionate about anything, or enjoy any pleasures in life, will retort with “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Moore summarizes this man’s issues very well:
“This is the man who thinks too much, who stands back from his life and never lives it. He is caught in a web of pros and cons about his decisions and lost in a labyrinth of reflective meanderings from which he cannot extricate himself. He is afraid to live, to ‘leap into battle.’ He can only sit on his rock and think. The years pass. He wonders where the time has gone. And he ends by regretting a life of sterility. He is a voyeur, an armchair adventurer. In the world of academia, he is a hairsplitter. In the fear of making the wrong decision, he makes none. In his fear of living, he also cannot participate in the joy and pleasure that other people experience in their lived lives. If he is withholding from others, and not sharing what he knows, he eventually feels isolated and lonely. To the extent that he has hurt others with his knowledge and technology—in whatever field and in whatever way—by cutting himself off from living relatedness with other human beings, he has cut off his own soul.”
The Innocent One
The Innocent One is the passive pole of the bi-polar shadow. A man possessed by the Innocent One shadow wants all the power, glory, and status that comes with harnessing the Magician archetype in his fullness, but he isn’t willing to put in the work or take on the responsibility that said power, glory, and status requires. They see another man doing something really cool, and decide they want to do it too. These are guys who get super excited about a new hobby, or faith, or career path–their excitement is absolutely coursing through them–but after the easy part has passed (coming up with the name of the band, buying a skateboard, designing the start-up’s logo), they realize how much “dead work” is required to get really good at the cool thing, and they give up. Men haunted by the shadow of the Innocent One want to be millionaires, but aren’t willing to toil and work years to achieve it. They want to play guitar like Django Reinhardt, but they give up guitar lessons after just a few weeks. They want to be spiritual, but without all that prayer, meditation, and scripture study business.
But the Innocent One’s shadow behavior doesn’t stop there. Because a man in touch with the Innocent One can never attain or achieve his goals because of laziness, he doesn’t want others to achieve their goals and ambitions either. He becomes a stumbling block to others simply out of envy. A man possessed by the Innocent One begrudges the success of others and does all that he can to diminish it. Theodore Roosevelt despised this type of man. To him, a man possessed by the Innocent One was “one of those cold and timid souls, who know neither victory nor defeat.”"
This informs several interpretations.
Kresten's commitment to the former is not merely translucent but transparent; he is Saruman Incarnate. Only profound narcissism could have doomed him to this fate, for he certainly had the intellect necessary to identify the trend and to transcend it. He simply lacked the motivation; the Fate of the World, at home and a broad, was not sufficient.
Alanna's attachment to her own intellect was projected upon this Manipulative Animus, so much so that it could only reinforce those attributes that led to her untimely and tragic downfall.
No man would forgive this sort of Black Magik.
Andrew is a little harder to spot, but it does not take long to identify self-entitled, uninvolved histrionic attributes in the live-and-let-live Virgo Male. His development of the Lover archetype was precisely at the root of his spiritual laziness and academic setbacks, as well as the haze of unfeeling cynicism and collegiate dismissiveness that followed it, a pale imitation of his turned-on intellectual curiosity and altruistic fervour. He is the Innocent One in the most nauseating ways.
The first part of the dream recounts the intoxication of infatuation. Having become victorious in Love, the protagonist returns home, only to fall asleep at the wheel. (It does not take a Driving License nor even a thorough knowledge of the dreamer's skills in driving to read the ominous portents herein.)
When he awakes, he finds himself within the house of his lover's father. Callous in his methods, the protagonist enters into debt with the father; this is not unlike an unpaid dowry. Forced to confront the realities of enduring patriarchal tradition, he takes his leave of the establishment, but not before his vehicle of love has been broken down.
A slice of pizza (a piece of the Mandala) indicates that he has however salvaged a slice of his personality from that adventure: the Lover Archetype. I would not be surprised to discover that the pizza slice was shaped to be one quarter of a whole circle.
Valuable as it might be, it is alien to this new environment. Only an entire pizza would be a fit burnt offering.
As Andrew takes his leave of the confines, having discovered his means to be invalid, he finds his own father, without the building. Mitchell is coddling a childhood friend of Andrew, who discovers the fate that will befall him should he fail to attain his new goal: a perversion of masculinity that clings eternally to the Divine Child archetype. The perpetually "innocent" Andrew is doomed to the life of the Eternal Boy.
The following part of the dream revisits the childhood state. What starts in the driver's seat ends in the backseat: a position of dependency. Therein he confronts the Anima as it is transmuted into a vicious and confining, matriarchal force: the Spider Mother, but as an octopus instead of an arachnid. His parents, whose inflated egos obligated a young Freedman to prove himself perpetually, become the chief antagonists, for they oversee this bondage but do nothing to stop it. I can personally attest to this softness in their approach to parenting: severe expectations but abounding forgiveness, praising him as much for his sensitivity as for his success, even when the former acts against the latter, rather than in harmony with it.
Directly out of this overwhelming matriarchy emerged the most depraving patriarchy. Again Andrew found himself in the clutches of a daemon, and again he was within a confined space. This time, the innocent boy was robbed forcibly of his innocence by the entire force of patriarchal tradition, represented by a centipede (effectively: a karmic snake) whose every appendage was a phallus and a fallacy.
It is only in the last of the five acts that Andrew is offered a solution: the cultivation of his spirituality, his Becoming-a-Magician. It is precisely this task that he had, by his own eventual admission, allowed to fall by the wayside upon my last visit with him, when he was at his worst and most self-destructive and emasculated.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
R.G.
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