The Old King stands as one of the most richly freighted figures in the depth-psychological corpus, operating simultaneously as a mythological datum, an alchemical symbol, a fairy-tale structural motif, and a diagnosis of collective psychic life. Across the major voices of the tradition — Jung, von Franz, Neumann, Edinger, Hillman, and Bly — the Old King encodes the inevitable destiny of any dominant principle of consciousness: to consolidate, to ossify, and ultimately to require supersession. For Jung, working through alchemical hermeneutics in Mysterium Coniunctionis, the king is synonymous with Sol, with consciousness itself, and his senile debility signals the exhaustion of a ruling psychic attitude whose renewal demands mortificatio and dissolution. Von Franz extends this into fairy-tale phenomenology, demonstrating how the aging, sick, or impotent king represents a collective dominant that has lost living contact with the unconscious — the wine gone out of the bottle. Neumann anchors the theme in Egyptian ritual, where royal rejuvenation through the Heb-Sed festival prefigures modern individuation. Edinger reads the king-as-old-man as the ruling ego-principle that must be sacrificed for a new center to emerge. Bly transposes the figure into a contemporary mythopoeic register. The central tension throughout is generative: the Old King does not simply decline — he legitimates, through the very severity of his tasks and his resistance, the new king who must supplant him.