The Magical Child archetype

Deep dive on the archetype of the magical child for The Book of Love

Hello hello,

The intro’s have happened and I’m excited to begin sharing the cards with you as well as their meanings. I’ll be sharing them one at a time and letting you know my thoughts behind the energy, archetype and symbolism in the artwork too. I am creating this deck as a resource for emotional healing, you can read more about this project in previous posts.

This deck is largely expanding upon inner child work, which is a therapeutic practice of connecting to younger parts of self in order to meet needs which weren’t met in the moment. When we experienced unmet needs as a child, it’s as if that young aspect of self becomes vibrationally frozen in our cellular memory and psyches. Because of the high level of need here( I don’t necessarily mean capital T trauma, instead I mean whatever triggered an intolerable or confusing and therefore unresolved concern) these inner child aspects often end up reaching forward into our adult lives, still attempting to rectify themselves but often repeating the original pattern through a younger and fearful logic.

When we bring these aspects into awareness, we not only become able to spot reactive patterns coming from our young selves, we also have the ability to meet the unmet needs rather than outsourcing them to a version of an original caregiver archetype (parent, carer, god, universe, collective ) .

An example of this is : Amy experiences abandonment from a primary caregiver as a child which generates a need to be loved and a tension around being loveable, this develops into a pattern in which Amy unconsciously manages situations to try and stay ‘loveable’, leading to a lack of agency and authenticity. The child Amy is at the wheel of these experiences, not just in the original wounding but also showing up later in similar dynamics through adulthood. When Amy becomes aware of the needs and beliefs of the younger self she can begin to meet those needs from her adult self as well as grieve for the feelings of this little one. When she can meet her own need to be loved she doesn’t need to betray her adult needs in order to appear ‘loveable’ and not be abandoned.

This is a super simple example, and lacks nuance - it’s very difficult to adequately honour the experience of the inner child and the subsequent healing in words - your own process will feel extremely sacred, in whatever way that appears to you.

Compassion is at the core of this practice, we are well versed in critiquing ourselves for being silly, too sensitive, too much or in many ways too innocent. This in itself if often a marker of a wounded inner child aspect. In the example Amy is not weak or wrong for what’s playing out. For the child self her survival is tied up in being loved and taken care of, so the level of urgency in rectifying this is at an emergent level in the body. This emergency signal and subsequent script and patterning can be triggered by a range of happenings ‘big’ or ‘small’ logical or seemingly illogical. The measure I go by is - if I something is kicking for space, give it space to see what it transforms into. If you find yourself connecting to an aspect in these descriptions which trigger annoyance whether it’s in the light OR the shadow side of these child archetypes, I invite you to return to a compassionate view as a practice. Noting how easy or difficult this is for you, and whether this mirrors the level of tolerance you have for your own inner child. Equally, just exploring these topics can be a lot, remember to breath and again - try to be super kind to whatever arises.

So, this deck has a suit of inner child archetypes to help you connect to what your inner child ( and there can be multiple) might be feeling or experiencing just out of the view of awarness. As with a tarot deck we each hold capacity to experience every archetype in the pack, though some will be more familiar both at certain times when a specific healing arc is at play and overall as common threads in our lives.

Today we are looking at The Magical inner child archetype :