Puer Aeternus Tenebrarum

The Dark Side of Peter Pan

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

For an account that hides itself safely behind a nom-de-plume, I often lack a filter when it comes to self-disclosure on many levels. So here’s another piece of personal information for you: I was born deaf. Aside from my dad’s insistence on the television being the “devil’s box” and removing it sometime around my Kindergarten year of school, I spent the majority of my childhood reading out of need and necessity (and desire) rather than out of a lack of better options. It’s not like I was watching a lot of television anyway.

I read many of the original stories that most of my peers saw at the theater. I read the novelizations of Star Wars before I saw it (with sound). I’d read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings a couple of times by the age of six. So it was with the classics as well: Shelley’s Frankenstein, Stoker’s Dracula, Poe’s entire repertoire, almost everything published at the time by Bradbury and Asimov, and a whole slew of smaller authors (early Harry Harrison was a favorite: The Stainless Steel Rat, anyone?). Alongside books like A Thousand Nights and One Night, the Arthurian literary cycles, A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh, and other children’s tales, was also J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.

When I finally saw (and heard) the Disney version of Peter Pan, I never understood why they made Pan so soft and angelic, even if they left him a bit mischievous. But I knew Pan. I remembered what he was like in the book. I remembered what kind of a puckish creature he was.

Let me offer you a quote from the original Peter Pan—and then we’ll jump right into the topic:

The boys on the island vary, of course, in numbers, according as they get killed and so on; and when they seem to be growing up, which is against the rules, Peter thins them out; but at this time there were six of them, counting the twins as two.”¹

He thins them out. He culls the herd.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure,”² Peter says later in the story.

Puts a lot into perspective, doesn’t it?

Peter Pan, in the original story, was a psychopathic murderer of youth-into-adulthood. Peter Pan Syndrome is not the “inability to grow up,” but rather the pathological need to destroy anything that it meets that does not remain within an infantile personal worldview.

Sound familiar?

We look around at the manosphere and see the hooks of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Carl Benjamin, Charlie Kirk, and Milo Yiannopoulos tugging at the frustrations of a demographic (specifically, men) that feels pushed aside. I don’t think it is a coincidence that the mainstreaming of this ideology in the late 2000s to early 2010s coincides with the rise of toxic online influencers and personalities within Thelema (specifically on our American side)—nearly all of them men as well.

But the Peter Pan Syndrome isn’t about men staying immature and irresponsible; rather, the idea of “never growing up” creates caustic and sinister complexes that hinder the development of maturity. What begins as a refusal to engage reality soon festers into a kind of spiritual rot masked by charm, cloaked in creative spectacle, and defended by perpetual irony. And nowhere is this more visibly destructive than in the lives of men today.

A Crisis of Men

Peter Pan Syndrome is not as some light refusal of masculinity or adulthood, but something far more insidious. It is a toxic-masculinity‑inflected pathology rooted in violent denial of others’ maturation. In Barrie’s original, Peter’s act of “thinning out” any Lost Boy who begins to ‘grow up’ is less whimsical than psychotic: he kills them off to preserve his eternal boyhood. His declaration, “To die will be an awfully big adventure,” later in the story, doesn’t mourn death. It exalts death as dominance over growth and change.

This isn’t just a psychological hiccup or generational quirk. It’s a full-blown cultural crisis—one in which manhood itself is increasingly uninitiated, undefined, and untethered from any coherent mythos of development. Without clear rites of passage and meaningful models of transformation, boys are not simply delayed in their transition to maturity. They are being abandoned to a maze of self-reinvention, alienation, and identity confusion. The result is a masculinity that either calcifies into brittle dominance or dissolves into performative, disembodied confusion.

Psychologically reframed, this syndrome isn’t about crusading for endless adolescence. It’s about the pathological maintenance of an infantile worldview through repression, sabotage, and control. Peter Pan Syndrome is an authoritarian infantilism. Rather than simply avoiding adulthood, the embodiment of Peter Pan actively suppresses anyone showing signs of mature development. Underneath lies a fragile, narcissistic core: emotional paralysis, avoidance of responsibility beyond his self-centered desires, hypersensitivity to criticism—all weaponized to contain others within an immature orbit.

This isn’t merely childish immaturity, but rather a failure to evolve—it is aggressive stasis. Toxic masculinity equips Peter Pan with tools: emotional repression presented as strength, fragility masquerading as invulnerability. Failure to conform—or worse, to surpass his limited emotional range—must be punished. He rejects vulnerability, dominates relationships, and sabotages growth in partners, friends, or colleagues who threaten to leave his childish domain.

Here is where toxic masculinity and fragile masculinity intersect: a man terrified of being seen as weak reacts to maturity in others by sabotaging those in close proximity or “thinning” his social circle of anyone who does not adhere to the code of perpetual adolescence disguised as masculinity.

This corresponds closely to concepts like hypermasculinity, which valorizes aggression, emotional suppression, dominance, and often misogynistic attitudes, as well as toxic masculinity, defined by destructive dominance, emotional repression, and devaluation of those who don’t conform to narrow gender norms. In psychological literature, fragile masculinity captures the anxiety of not measuring up—and the resulting aggression or control when threatened.

The classic Peter Pan Syndrome—a loosely defined set of traits like emotional paralysis, reluctance to accept responsibilities, difficulty with relationships, narcissistic disconnection—overlaps significantly with narcissistic personality tendencies. In this Dark-Pan reading, those traits become tools: emotional numbness to avoid attachment, relational sabotage to preserve control, and weaponized incompetence to keep others (especially women) either caretaking or infantilized.

What emerges is a toxic, coercive dynamic. Such men don’t simply avoid change—they see change in others as existential threats. So they erase it. This is not childish folly. It is psychological violence born of fear.

In relationships, such individuals mirror the “man-child” pattern extensively described by clinicians: unreliable, financially irresponsible, hypersensitive, shunning milestone commitment, using weaponized incompetence to avoid emotional labor. But in the Pan frame, these behaviors aren’t simply incompetence or entitlement—they are sabotage aimed at preserving an immature monopoly over emotional terrain.

Viewed clinically, understanding this approach requires integrating pop-psych concepts like Peter Pan Syndrome with gender studies theories—hegemonic masculinity, toxic and fragile masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity demands dominance and emotional stoicism; toxic masculinity weaponizes those norms to suppress vulnerability; fragile masculinity exposes the fear of failing those norms. Together, they present a picture of someone who must feign a sense of wisdom and experience while continuing to annihilate maturation around them to maintain control.

So rather than thinking of Peter Pan Syndrome as benign immaturity, consider it as pathological policing of growth, cloaked under infantile authority. This is infantilism fused with aggression. It’s not only that Peter Pans don’t grow: it’s that they won’t allow anyone else to grow either.

“To die will be an awfully big adventure”

Now that’s the real pivot, isn’t it?

Because if we’re being honest—and we should be—this Peter Pan archetype stands uncomfortably close to something that is, at least outwardly, celebrated in Thelemic symbolism: the Crowned and Conquering Child. Both figures radiate youth, both subvert conventional maturity, both refuse the ossification of adulthood, both embrace death as part of life. But while one appears to bask in sunlight and sovereign freedom, the other slinks in shadows, stunting and silencing anything that attempts to grow beyond its outwardly imposed form.

So how do we reconcile the two? Or more sharply: can we?

The first distinction lies in directionality. The Crowned and Conquering Child is becoming—ever new, ever bursting forward in its explosive and irrepressible growth. It represents the unfolding of Will, the shattering of forms not to regress, but to evolve. It is youth not as stasis, but as force. Peter Pan, on the other hand, is static—forever youthful, childish in nature, yes, but at the cost of everyone else’s evolution. He isn’t youth in motion; he is youth as barricade. Not eternal return, but eternal entrapment. He undermines the very idea of growing up (maturity), not because it’s false, but because it threatens his sense of security.

Thelema’s sacred Child, at its most lucid, isn’t childish. It is childlike in that it is wild, unconditioned, luminous—but not unformed. There is deep responsibility in the image of the Crowned Child. It is crowned, after all. This is not a tantrum-throwing toddler-king; this is the Solar Self that has claimed its place not through refusal, but through personal conquest, through ordeal, through self-knowledge.

Peter Pan, at least in his darker register, has no ordeal. He has no depth. He conquers nothing—not even himself. He simply evades. He is a tyrant of stasis. And that is his great transgression. Not that he remains young, but that he denies others the dignity of becoming.

There’s also a question of volition. Thelema is rooted in Will. Not want, not whim, not indulgence. Will. Thelema’s Child embodies a matured Will breaking forth into joy—not a brittle ego clinging to its illusions. Peter’s “thinning out” of those who grow up is not an act of Will, but of fear.

A Crowned and Conquering Child knows when to die and be reborn. Peter Pan only knows how to kill what reminds him he should have.

So yes, the iconographies brush up against each other, and yes, it’s tempting to confuse the two. But where one blazes forward in solar luminosity, the other hides in lunar shadow. One is Becoming; the other is denial of Becoming. One is mythic sovereignty; the other is pathological regression.

We ought to be careful, then, when we invoke the language of youth in spiritual development—not to slip into sentimentality or unexamined archetypes. Not every child is divine. Some refuse the throne not because they reject kingship, but because they would rather nothing rule but their fear.

Love is the law, love under will.

1. Barrie, J M. 2011. The Annotated Peter Pan: The Centennial Edition. National Geographic Books, 64-65 (emphasis mine).

2. Barrie, The Annotated Peter Pan, 108.