We live in a time when people are generally uncomfortable with the Warrior form of masculine energy – and for some good reasons. Women especially are uncomfortable with it, because they have often been the most direct victims of it in its shadow form. Around the planet, warfare in our century has reached such monstrous and pervasive proportions that aggressive energy itself is looked upon with deep suspicion and fear. This is the age in the West of the ‘soft masculine’, and it is a time in which radical feminists raise loud and hostile voices against the Warrior energy. In the liberal churches, committees are removing such ‘warlike’ hymns as ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ from the hymnals.

What is interesting to notice, however, is that those who would cut off the masculine aggressiveness at its root, in their zeal, themselves fall under the power of this archetype. We can’t just take a vote and vote the Warrior out. Like all archetypes, it lives on in spite of our conscious attitudes toward it. And like all repressed archetypes, it goes underground, eventually to resurface in the form of emotional and physical violence, like a volcano that has lain dormant for centuries with the pressure gradually building up in the magma chamber. If the Warrior is an instinctual energy form, then it is here to stay. And it pays to face it.

—Robert Moore, Douglas Gillette