Playlists, Practice, and Poems for Magician, Warrior, King, Lover

Nov 16, 2025

I made a recent post about training games you can play to develop your inner magician, warrior, king, and lover.

I kept thinking about this topic and wanted to make some notes that may contextualize the games. I have also added some songs to get into the mood of each, as well as combinations of each of two of them.

What’s useful about this framework?

I haven’t read the original book, but have heard some things about it and started having my own thoughts. It was originally used for masculine archetypes, and I am a woman, so I’m probably doing something a bit different with them from the original authors.

I have a suspicion that like in resource pipelines, the archetypes “flow” into each other. A dejected lover can mean a weak king, a weak magician can mean a king without imagination that cannot operate, a confused king can mean an awol warrior. I have not seen this being written about—perhaps it is somewhere, but I am making this up as I go along.

Where I see this as useful is even marginal gains in one domain can be very helpful. For example, powering up your king to the max is cool and all but if your magician is very weak that king won’t get activated very much because there won’t be a lot of imagination powering the will to action. This would be like putting a ton of stats in Dark Souls into strength, but because you didn’t put anything in Dexterity you can’t move the heavy sword you can now hold very *fast,* that that becomes a blocker to better fighting.

Below, I wanted to write down words that came up for me, as I thought about the archetypes. These were meant to be a bit abstract and not written in a narrative structure.

magician + warrior - art around your walls, photography that is deeply meaningful, poetry - engrain the cerebral into the mind. what you love put onto the page onto the paper, onto the walls. engrave them into your mind.

why it’s hard to learn poetry, what is hard about memorizing poetry emblazing, engraving, the magic into your brain, making it physical making the neurons remember, have it, even when there is not something there
you dont have to conjure it, it’s just there, it’s just there in the neurons

what’s hard about it? you’re only engraving the 10 commandments onto stone, only arranging rocks such that the light can hit them and you can tell time. only examining how the moon affects the tides only spinning wool into a sweater to embrace yourself in the cold, feeling the fibers that you have spun. only learning how to distill some chemcial from a plant, to take it, and feel how it affects your body, and you can’t see it, but you have to notice it
it’s only just all that. only just all that is so hard

the magician - there are many “kinds” of magic. it can be small and pointy, or pretty big actually. cerebral

creation, imagination, can be self-deception, or deception, can be revealing, truth creating, truth seeking. cerebral modality. moon, jupiter, cold

hazards are self deception, living too much in your head, recursion in a bad way onto itself, unraveling, unspooling reality

warrior -
has channeled rage, physicality, loyalty, commitment, saving people, healthcare, saving lives, getting in motion, getting in between things with the body to create outcomes

large wells, canyons, the great big canyon, the grand canyon, hot and dangerous

you sound so sleepy, now take this, now leave me. please slow me down if i’m going fast. you’re in a strange part of our town!
yeah, the night’s not over you’re not trying hard enough
our lives are changing lanes you ran me off the road
you’re no logner laughing i’m not drowning fast enough

-the strokes - reptilia

self as in relationship to the physicality

yourself in motion, yourself as physicality, your consciousness and your body are one
a change in the body is a change in the consciousness

volcano - warrior

warrior-magician - like a cold blue volcano

hybrids - pink floyd - the magician and the warrior

textured velvety physical dreams - dreams turned in to physical colored clouds, physical smoke

Magician

Warrior