The first book
What is Forging Excalibur about?
Forging Excalibur: Rediscover Your Masculinity is my first book, independently published in 2019. It's about the men I was seeing in my counselling room in Melbourne, caught between what they had been raised to chase and what the chasing was costing them, and it argues that achievement was never the problem: the damage comes when success becomes the driving force of a life. It uses the forging of a sword as its picture of how a boy becomes a man. From 2020 to 2022 it was also a podcast of close to 150 episodes.
I wrote it out of the counselling room, where most of the people I sat with at the time were men. It's where this work first became public, so here is what it was and what it grew into.
The book
The men who came to see me were caught between two pressures. One measured them by what they earned and achieved. The other left them unsure whether being a man was something to be proud of at all. Neither left much room to know who they were underneath the role. The book's position is that there's nothing wrong with money or achievement. It's about how a man can strive for what he wants and stay healthy and whole, and what that changes in his relationships and in how he raises the next generation.
Its central image is the forging of a sword: the heat, the hammering, the cooling and shaping, and finally the knighting. The Excalibur legend runs through it as an allegory for the passage from boy to man. Along the way it covers the conscious and unconscious mind and Jung's shadow and ego, the myth of success, purpose, core values and boundaries, a set of standards for how a man lives, and then relationships, fatherhood, work and taking full responsibility for your own life. It closes with a rite of passage.
The paperback is 243 pages, ISBN 9781097415649. The book's page is at lauriareads.com/forging-excalibur.
The podcast
The Forging Excalibur Podcast followed the book and ran from 2020 to 2022, close to 150 episodes. Early on it was mostly me on my own or talking with a guest. Later it included panel conversations. It's being republished on Spotify as Forging Excalibur (Michael Lauria 2019 - 2022 Archive), with the episodes left as they were.
Where it sits now
Today the original book is reproduced in full as Book One of The Excalibur Trinity, which follows it with two more: Sheathing Excalibur and Transmitting Excalibur. The Trinity describes the three as fire, stillness and the pattern. Forging Excalibur is the fire, the work in its first form.
The dated record of those years, the book, the podcast and the interviews, is kept at forgingexcalibur.com. It's kept as a dated record of the work as it was before it became The Architect.
Where the work went next
It's one line of work under three names: the counselling room from 2006, then Forging Excalibur, and now The Architect. What changed most is the scope. The questions stopped being about men in particular and became about the pattern anyone lives out, the thing you keep doing and can't stop. That's what The Architect Speaks is about, and the thirty-three books that followed.
It's also where the Atlas came from. The Atlas isn't a men's programme or a next stage of Forging Excalibur. It's for anyone, and it does one thing: it names the pattern running your life, in a single sitting. If you're coming to this from the book and wondering where the thread leads, that's where.
Is Forging Excalibur still available?
Yes. The 2019 paperback is still in print (ISBN 9781097415649), and the full text is also Book One of The Excalibur Trinity.
Is Forging Excalibur the same as The Excalibur Trinity?
No. Forging Excalibur is the 2019 book. The Excalibur Trinity contains it in full as Book One, followed by Sheathing Excalibur and Transmitting Excalibur.
Where can I hear the Forging Excalibur podcast?
On Spotify, as Forging Excalibur (Michael Lauria 2019 - 2022 Archive). The archive is still being republished.
Who wrote Forging Excalibur?
Michael Lauria, a qualified therapist, author and philosophical mythologist, in practice since 2006. More about him.
Where this comes from
The book's own page at lauriareads.com, the record at forgingexcalibur.com, and The Excalibur Trinity. If you want to go further into men and the work, read does men's work actually work?
Forging Excalibur: Rediscover Your Masculinity
Michael Lauria's first book, 2019. Independently published in 2019, ISBN 9781097415649. A man can go after achievement and still stay whole. It is where this work first became public.
About the bookThe Atlas names the pattern running your life in a single sitting. It is built from twenty years in the chair and the thirty-three books of Michael Lauria, a qualified therapist, author and philosophical mythologist. It takes about forty-five minutes, costs nothing, and ends in a written Record of that pattern, drawn from your own words. It is not therapy and not for crisis. Begin the Atlas · How the Atlas works
Or begin smaller with the nine-question pattern test, about three minutes, no sign-up.