Insight Editions · No. 210
A Book About Men
Robert Bly
Using the Grimm tale of Iron John, Robert Bly presents male initiation through mythic images, psychological development, mentors, grief, and changing forms of masculine identity.
A study guide to Iron John by Robert Bly. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
Figure. Eight initiatory stages feed the dual ascent/descent; Wild Man distinction and historical telescope frame the whole.
| Ch | Title | Tale stage | Gist |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pref | To the Original Edition | Frame | Male initiation only; Wild ≠ savage; eight stages as walking path |
| 1 | The Pillow and the Key | Pond / cage / key | Hard vs soft male; golden ball; steal key; leave on shoulders |
| 2 | When One Hair Turns Gold | Spring trials | Wound-gold; genius; exile with call-gift |
| 3 | Road of Ashes, Descent, Grief | Kitchen | Ashes work; salted grief; descent before garden |
| 4 | Hunger for the King | Mentors / father | No-father time; sacred King vs empty power |
| 5 | Meeting with the God-Woman | Garden / flowers | Wild over cultivated; God-Woman; coin refusal |
| 6 | Interior Warriors | War band | Revive warriors without State slaughter |
| 7 | Red, White, Black Horses | Festival | Three colors; refuse premature name |
| 8 | Wound by the King’s Men | Leg wound / wedding | Grounding wound; unenchantment; seven beings |
| Epi | Wild Man in religion & folk | History | Animals → Shiva/Dionysus/Cernunnos → Enkidu → pageant |
| Story | The Story of Iron John | Full arc | Bly translation spine |
| After | 25th Anniversary | Temper | Cage, pillow, multi-season; greed vs wisdom |
For Noah, Micah, and Sam.
Worn-out cultural images of the right man, the tough man, the true man fail adult life. Fairy and hearth stories have passed through generations of men and women “as water through fifty feet of soil.” Their images (stealing the key from under the mother’s pillow, the golden feather from the Firebird, the Wild Man under the lake, following wound-tracks that resemble a god’s) are meant to be taken slowly into the body, where they keep unfolding.
From old myths he names what popular culture denies: Zeus energy as positive leadership; King Arthur for the male mentor; Iron John for moving from mother’s world to father’s; initiation stories for leaving parental expectations and finding a second father or second King.
There is male initiation, female initiation, and human initiation. This book addresses male initiation only. Bly states he does not seek to turn men against women or restore the domineering mode that repressed women and their values. The men’s and women’s movements are related but run on separate timetables.
The dark side of men is named without softening: mad exploitation of earth resources, devaluation and humiliation of women, obsession with tribal warfare. Genetics, culture, and environment all contribute.
Most language here speaks to heterosexual men but does not exclude homosexual men. The term homosexual is eighteenth-century; before that, Bly says, gay men were simply part of the large community of men. In his reading the mythology does not make a big distinction between homosexual and heterosexual men.
Birds store nest-building, migration, and mating dance in instinct. Humans, needing flexibility, stored such knowledge outside instinct: in stories. Fairy stories, legends, myths, and hearth stories are a reservoir of responses when conventional ways wear out. Students of that reservoir Bly names: George Groddeck, Gurdjieff, Carl Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, Georges Dumézil. First teacher in unfolding fairy story: Marie-Louise von Franz. He aims to be as true to masculine stories as she has been to the feminine.
Community of men behind the book: Alexander Mitscherlich (German analyst, died 1981); teaching companions Michael Meade, James Hillman, Terry Dobson, Robert Moore, John Stokes; Keith Thompson (first chapter rewrites his interview); editor William Patrick. Grateful to men who listened, told stories, sang, danced, or wept.
Even though the book lays out an initiatory path in eight stages, other men may see a different order or entirely different stages. “We make the path by walking.” Antonio Machado: You walker, there are no roads, only wind trails on the sea.
Eight stages structure the book’s initiatory path, yet Bly warns that other men may see a different order or entirely different stages. “We make the path by walking.” The Machado line closes the preface as method: no roads, only wind trails on the sea. Teachers named for fairy-story unfolding begin with Marie-Louise von Franz; he aims to be as true to masculine stories as she has been to the feminine. Reservoir students he lists: George Groddeck, Gurdjieff, Jung, Heinrich Zimmer, Joseph Campbell, Georges Dumézil. Community of men behind the pages: Mitscherlich (d. 1981); teaching companions Michael Meade, James Hillman, Terry Dobson, Robert Moore, John Stokes; Keith Thompson’s interview behind Chapter One; editor William Patrick.
There is no stable “American man” across decades. Bly sketches successive types: Saturnian New England farmer (1630); Southern motherbound cavalier; greedy Northeast railroad entrepreneur; reckless Western settler. Within living memory the agreed model still shifts.
The Fifties male: early to work, responsible, provider, admirer of discipline. Reagan as mummified version. Appreciated women’s bodies more than souls; boyish optimism about America’s cultural role. Strengths present; underneath, isolation, deprivation, passivity. Without an enemy he is unsure he is alive. Football, aggression, never cry, always provide: receptive and intimate space missing. Lack of “flow” and compassion, Bly argues, fed Vietnam and later callousness toward the powerless.
The sixties male: Vietnam waste made manhood itself questionable; feminism forced men to see women’s history and sensibility and to notice a “feminine side.” Thoughtful and gentle, yet not freer: a nice boy who pleases mother and partner. Bly calls the later type the soft male: lovely, not interested in harming earth or starting wars, life-preserving but not life-giving, often beside strong women who radiate energy. Bumper sticker he recalls: “WOMEN SAY YES TO MEN WHO SAY NO.” Receptive maleness was rewarded; nonreceptive equated with violence. Soft men in early men’s gatherings (Lama Community, New Mexico, 1980, about forty men) wept within minutes: remoteness from fathers, trouble in relationships. They could say “I feel your pain” but could not say what they wanted and stick by it. Fierce resolve was missing on both sides when needed.
In The Odyssey, Hermes tells Odysseus to show his sword before Circe (matriarchal energy). Many soft men could not distinguish showing the sword from hurting someone. One man who had lived in a tree for a year could not extend an arm holding a sword. Showing a sword can mean joyful decisiveness, not only fighting.
Something strange in a remote forest: hunters vanish. An unknown hunter arrives, takes only his dog, finds a pond. A hand pulls the dog under. He does not become hysterical: “This must be the place.” He returns with men and buckets and empties the pond slowly. At the bottom: a large man covered with reddish hair like rusty iron. They cage him in the courtyard; the King names him Iron John and gives the key to the Queen.
Fear detail matters. Welcoming responsiveness (what Bly sometimes calls the internal woman) often feels warmer and more companionable: poetry, ocean, less need to dominate in sex, empathy. Approaching what he calls the deep male feels like risk. Contact with Iron John needs willingness to accept nourishing dark, not only frightening dark. Sanitized corporate manhood and thin religious niceness both starve that contact. Industrial community warns young businessmen away; Christian church is not too fond either. Contemporary men’s job is to follow Freud, Jung, and Reich down. Some have brought Hairy Man into courtyard awareness: sunlit, visible, better than the cellar. Courtyard or cellar, he may still be caged.
The King’s eight-year-old son plays with a golden ball that rolls into the cage. The ball images childhood unity and radiance before splits (male/female, rich/poor, bad/good): sunlike, radiant from inside. Around age eight (or later in school) the ball is lost; the rest of life is retrieval. Freud: distressing contrast between the child’s radiant intelligence and the average adult’s feeble mentality.
Sixties culture told men they would find the ball in sensitivity, receptivity, cooperation, and nonaggressiveness. Many gave up all aggressiveness and still did not find it. A bridegroom secretly asks his wife to return it; she would if she could; she does not have it, and she has lost her own. Most women in Bly’s experience do not try to block men’s growth. Oversimple map: Fifties male asks a woman; sixties-seventies man asks the interior feminine; both fail. True radiant energy in the male, Bly argues, waits in the magnetic field of the deep masculine, protected by the underwater instinctive one. John Wayne macho field also empty of the true ball. Pre-Christian by a thousand years, the story is not anti-Christian; retrieval still clashes with certain conventional tameness. Popular Christian ethical shell does not support Wild Man; hint that Christ did: a hairy John baptized him at the start of ministry. Talk with Wild Man is not talk with minister, rabbi, or guru about bliss and higher consciousness. Wet, dark, low: Hillman’s soul.
Bucket work: no giant sucks the pond; Esalen weekend, acid, cocaine will not empty it. Rembrandt, Picasso, Yeats, Rilke, Bach: that pace. Keith Thompson: Wild Man will not simply hand the ball over. Lazy part ignores New Year’s resolutions; bargain hour-for-hour. Cage-open ↔ ball-return is the bargain.
Jung: successful requests to the psyche involve deals. Wild Man: ball back if the boy opens the cage. Boy runs off without answering (parental and institutional warnings). Second visit (perhaps age twenty-five): same deal; Toyotas and mortgage block him. Third visit (thirty-five): dismayed, he continues the conversation: even if he wanted to, he does not know where the key is.
Deal visits at the cage: first ask, boy runs (parental and institutional warnings). Second visit around twenty-five: same deal; Toyotas and mortgage intervene. Third around thirty-five: he continues the conversation even while dismayed; even if he wanted to open the cage, he does not know where the key is. That ignorance sets up the pillow teaching. Practical thefts Bly lists are not burglary manuals; they are psyche moves: six-hour vigorous dance, wholehearted conscious Trickster, refusing to carry the whole family’s shame. Opening the lock pinches a finger: the wound Chapter Two investigates.
Iron John: “The key is under your mother’s pillow.” Freud territory. Mother’s job is to civilize; King gives key into Queen’s keeping.
Audience wrong guesses Bly records: around the boy’s neck; hidden in the cage; inside the golden ball; treasure-room hook; tower wall. All no. Pillow also lies in the parental bed. Michael Meade: pillow stores expectations (“My son the doctor,” “My son the Jungian analyst,” “My son the Wall Street genius”); almost never “My son the Wild Man.” Transferring the key from mother’s pillow to a guru’s pillow does not help. Forgetting she holds it is a mistake. Attacking and shouting (Oedipus with Jocasta, Hamlet) do little; she may smile with elbow on the pillow. Steal when “father and mother are away”: head free of parental inhibitions. Gioia Timpanelli: Hermes theft. New Age consensus ask (“Mom, could I have the key?”) earns, in Bly’s telling, the silent fury of every woman in the room; such men dangerous to women and men. “Come over and give Mommy a kiss” answers “I want to let the Wild Man out!” Practical thefts: six-hour vigorous dance; wholehearted conscious Trickster; refusing to carry whole-family shame. Story: one day he stole it, opened the lock, pinched a finger.
Opening the lock pinches a finger (wound for Chapter Two). Wild Man returns to his forest.
If Wild Man leaves and boy stays, the civilized/primitive split reasserts. Replacing the key and lying produces the respectable life that “has never seen the Wild Man.” Tea-garden conversations in the courtyard are too close to mother’s pillow and father’s rules. The boy’s marvelous move: “If my parents find you gone, they will beat me.” Wild Man: come with me. Up on the shoulders into the woods. Alice Miller (For Your Own Good): nineteenth-century German warnings against children’s exuberance; Puritan restlessness punished. Iron John: you will never see mother and father again; I have treasures more than you need.
Going off on the Wild Man’s shoulders is the moment Bly maps to the Dionysus priest accepting a student, or the shaman taking a boy into the bush. In U.S. culture there is no such moment. Boys keep needing initiation into male spirit, and the nuclear family, for all its strengths, cannot supply the clean break that old initiators staged outside the house. Fear of wildness, irrationality, death, and “insanity” (in the bourgeois sense) has to be overcome at least for that leaving. The boy’s line about being beaten if parents find the cage empty is not cowardice; it is clear thinking that forces the next move: leave with the mentor-force.
Covert mother-son bonds can persist even when a father lives in the house. Bly’s case stories: sons traveling to a convention with the father, then a kitchen shove that says the body already knows the break; a hulking son’s explosion that sends the mother to the wall and is followed by a turn back toward the father. Prefer ritual. Without it, kitchen ugliness is a clumsy attempt to become unattractive enough to force separation. He assigns fault more to older men who abandoned the initiator role than to mothers’ malice. Single mothers in Evanston named the bind clearly: the son needs a hardness she cannot give without losing what she experiences as her femininity; “send him to his father at twelve” met the reply that men are not nurturing. Bly’s answer: nurturing can appear when it is called for.
Analogues: Dionysus priest accepting a student; Eskimo shaman taking a boy; Hopi and Southwest: boys at twelve into male kiva for six weeks, no mother for a year and a half. Nuclear family’s fault here is not only craziness but that old men outside the family no longer offer a clean break. Manhood needs active intervention of older men, welcoming into mythologized male world. Kikuyu ritual: boy fasts three days; older men open veins into a shared bowl; boy drinks. Lessons: nourishment from men as well as mother; knife for more than wounding; welcome among males; then myths and songs beyond competitive values.
Without that labor: nineteenth-century mingling (grandfathers, hunting, farm work) faded; men’s clubs disappeared; peers alone know nothing from the initiators’ view. Sixties men sometimes took initiation from women; Bly’s hard line: only men can initiate men, as only women can initiate women; men change boy to man after women change embryo to boy.
Without old men’s conscious labor, Western initiation limped on after Greek schools were destroyed. Nineteenth century still mixed generations: hunting parties, shared farm and cottage work, local sports, grandfathers and uncles in the house. Wordsworth’s old man under the tree in “The Excursion” singled out the grave-looking boy as chosen comrade for woodland holidays. That chance mingling ended. Clubs faded. Grandfathers live in Phoenix or the home. Peers alone, from the initiators’ view, know nothing.
Sixties path: strength borrowed from women who had strength from the women’s movement. Tried initiation from women. Bly’s hard claim remains: second birth must come from men. Thompson’s she-wolf dream (no face in the river) is offered as image of missing male face, not as proof against all single-mother households. Evanston mothers named the bind: son needs hardness she cannot give without losing her femininity; “send to father at twelve” met “men aren’t nurturing.” Bly answers that nurturing can appear when called. Covert mother-son conspiracy to evict father is another pattern; the San Francisco convention trips and the kitchen-body explosions are his case stories for body knowing the break before mind does. Prefer ritual. Without it, kitchen ugliness is clumsy self-uglifying. Fault assigned more to absent older men than to mothers’ malice.
Traditional trade proximity (farm, carpentry, forge, tailor) was murderously close and formative. Industrial and information work: father cannot show the day; loses the son five minutes after birth. Lawrence’s arc (teachers’ contempt for physical labor → mother’s ascensionism → late Italian longing for father’s vitality) is Bly’s parable for a whole generation’s split. Poem “Finding the Father” ends the section: lonely father behind the door, waiting, having seen the child only once.
If the Wild Man leaves and the boy stays, the civilized/primitive split hardens again. Replacing the key and lying produces the respectable life that “has never seen the Wild Man.” Tea-garden conversations in the courtyard stay too close to mother’s pillow and father’s rules. The decisive move is the boy’s: confess the beating risk, accept the shoulders, enter the woods. Fear of wildness and of looking “insane” to the castle must be faced for that hour.
Older initiators conveyed assurance that is invisible and nonverbal: you have a male face; you belong among men; the knife is for more than wounding. Without them, peers invent courage without meaning. Men’s clubs faded; grandfathers live in Phoenix or the nursing home; Wordsworth’s woodland old man from “The Excursion” no longer singles out the grave-looking boy. Industrial remoteness then fills Mitscherlich’s hole. The chapter’s practical demand is not nostalgia for farm forges; it is restoring older men who can welcome, wound meaningfully, and mythologize the male world again.
The love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution, Bly says, is the father-son bond. Traditional trades kept father and son in murderously close proximity; industrial and information work hide the father’s day. Schools with mostly women teachers taught contempt for physical labor (Lawrence’s arc). Father “loses his son five minutes after birth.” Poem “Finding the Father”: lonely father behind the door, waiting.
Mitscherlich’s hole fills with demons of paternal evil when the father’s day is invisible. Columbia CIA-letter hunts enact the incongruity: upright exterior, demonic suspicion, driven by remoteness more than proven wickedness. Body’s deeper need (closer to father’s body) is not satisfied by finding a letter. Marathon Man restages the suspicion of older men after a destroyed leftist father. Downstream styles: smash old luthiers’ guitars; deconstruct older writers; prefer therapy to politics; purity outside authority; marijuana farms and three-wheelers.
Zeus energy (intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership) is authority for the community’s sake. Seneca chiefs chosen by women, owning almost nothing, are Bly’s Native American check on domination. Popular culture’s long campaign (Maggie and Jiggs, Blondie and Dagwood, cold-medicine dads, sitcom fools) trains contempt. Hostile-takeover twenty-seven-year-olds dismantle thirty-year houses. Bly confesses his own literary arrow-fire at older men; later rethinks his father as deprived, not only depriving. Jung’s warning: feeling learned from mother → masculinity seen through mother’s competitive eyes; wounded father-image can last into the forties until a natural turn toward the father. Seattle door line: “I don’t accept my mother’s view of you any longer.” Father: “Now I can die.”
Fathers wait. What else can they do? Bly’s poem energy returns here: the father behind the door has often seen the child only once. The son’s work, when the forties turn arrives, is to throw off inherited maternal indoctrination and discover the father for himself: deprived as well as depriving, lonely as well as remote. Popular culture’s long campaign against male authority (Maggie and Jiggs, Blondie and Dagwood, cold-medicine ads, sitcom fools) makes that discovery harder. Hostile-takeover culture at twenty-seven dismantles houses built over thirty years. Bly confesses his own literary arrow-fire at older men before rethinking the pattern.
Double energy is the visual curriculum he wants restored: Apollo’s gold standing on Dionysian dark; Bhutanese bird-dog masks; flower-club temple guardians; Shiva’s Bhairava face; Christ’s whip in the temple; Cuchulain’s smoking heat. Wild Man holds both strands. Keep him distinct from the savage who prefers not to examine his wound. Women needed Kali; men need a parallel harshness Bly names Kala. First step remains pond-bottom contact, sometimes reached only through accumulated grief.
Ancient images of double male energy: Apollo on Dionysus; Bhutanese bird-headed dog-toothed masks; temple guardians with flower clubs; Shiva/Bhairava; Christ’s temple whip; Cuchulain’s heat. Wild Man includes Apollo and Dionysus strands. Keep Wild Man ≠ savage (macho domination, cold war holding, objectifying). Women needed Kali energy; men need parallel harsh Dionysus / Kala. First step remains: find Wild Man at pond bottom, sometimes through accumulated grief. Hopeful close: grief and longing for father and mentor make men readier for Wild Man and initiation again.
When a man contacts the Wild Man, Bly claims, true strength may be added: he can shout and say what he wants; he can protect earth and children; he can refuse the sitcom-fool script. Softness is not discarded; resolve joins it. The energies lie in ponds no one has walked past. Approaching them frightens men and women who spent decades trying to be only nice or only efficient. The chapter’s hopeful close is cultural: grief for the remote father and hunger for mentors may be preparing a generation to accept initiation again, rather than only therapy or only takeover.
Not every father is good. Bly does not deny abusive fathers; he insists remoteness alone is enough to fill Mitscherlich’s hole with demons. The corrective is not pretending every CEO is Zeus. It is recovering images of male authority that serve the community (Seneca chiefs chosen by women and owning almost nothing; Zeus energy as intelligence plus generous leadership) so that young men have somewhere to aim besides contempt or imitation of corruption.
Chapter One path: worn male images → pond work → key theft → leave with mentor-force; Zeus and remote-father material explain why the break is scarce.
| Figure / image | Role in Ch. 1 |
|---|---|
| Iron John / Hairy Man | Deep masculine under pond; rusty iron hair; caged then freed |
| Golden ball | Childhood radiance/unity; lost ~8; not held by woman or soft self |
| Key under pillow | Mother’s keeping + expectations; must be stolen (Hermes) |
| Dog | Companion that “goes down”; cost of first approach |
| Buckets | Slow psychic discipline vs magical shortcuts |
| Zeus energy | Positive male authority for community (Greek) |
| Mitscherlich’s hole | Unseen father’s day → demons of paternal evil |
| Kikuyu bowl / Hopi kiva | Embodied welcome by older men |
Leaving with the Wild Man is Huck Finn on the raft with a companion from another world. When exile comes, the call-name remains: shout at the forest edge and power answers. That retained link is what confirmation and driver’s license do not give. The golden head is not a crown; it is a problem that opens the road of ashes. If the story is initiation, a wound must follow. Mircea Eliade across cultures: boys’ initiation begins with (1) clean break from parents into wilderness, (2) a wound from older men (scar, cut, nettles, tooth). Not mere sadism: injuries meant to reverberate from a rich center of meaning. Australian example: Darwalla story; tooth knocked out while boys look for Adam-in-the-tree; tongue forever links broken tooth to living connection with the first man.
Adolescence: risk, edge, even edge of death, as yearning for initiation. San Francisco exercise (Doug van Koss): hundreds of men, thousands of red cloth strips on every bodily wound; room became a sea of red. In this story old men do not give the wound; the boy pinches himself opening the cage. The scar stands for a wound already there.
In this story old men do not cut the boy; he pinches himself opening the cage. The scar stands for a wound already received while trying to free brilliance and spontaneity (the Wild Man). Adolescence courts danger and the edge of death as a yearning for initiation when culture offers none. Eliade’s grammar still holds: break, then meaningful wound. Without a rich center of meaning, scars stay only medical or only grievance.
Infantile Grandiosity (child as God, womb kingship) differs from True Grandiosity. Axe and shame collide with the prince fantasy. Alice Miller’s fork after abuse: grandiose road (climb above the wound, good grades, cheerful doctor of others’ suffering, not very human) or depressed road (live inside shame as crowned victim). Third road: paralysis, robot numbness, hollow center. Addiction deepens the slave path; Philippe Ariès on childhood clothes: identifying only with the wounded child fragments culture after the invention of special childhood. U.S. decline since 1950 framed as stuck between junk-bond grandeur and depressed underclass roads. Hillman: early ecstasy without discipline as another way the Great Mother keeps the key. Sue the Wild Man for a rusty lock; stay victim; never take a mentor. Wild Man is not merely “inside”: a mentor-being who thrives outside whether he takes us or not. Steal the key and climb: three changes follow: wound investigated becomes gift; sacred water appears; sun-energy enters the body.
Wild Man sets boy down in dark forest: never see parents again; stay with me; obey and all will go well; gold and treasure beyond anyone else’s. Bed of moss. Morning: golden spring, clear as crystal, full of light. Guard it; nothing must fall in; wrong the spring. Evening check.
Boy sees golden fish and gold snake; is careful. Wounded finger hurts so much he dips it involuntarily; finger turns gold and will not wash off. He hides it; lies “nothing.” Iron John knows: dipped; pass this once.
Living inside the story means asking: what wound hurts so much we must dip it in water? Initiation helps young men remember soul wounds. Outward scars can remind of inward ones.
Wounds arrive whether parents are honored or not. Many are wounds to grandiosity. Infantile Grandiosity (child as God, womb kingship) differs from True Grandiosity. Axe and shame collide with prince fantasy. Solutions: inflate further (ascension); or take Alice Miller’s fork after abuse: grandiose road (climb above wound, good grades, cheerful doctor of others’ suffering) or depressed road (live inside shame as crowned victim). Third road: paralysis, robot numbness, hollow center. Each person uses more than one.
Without story we cannot take hold of the wound: we climb too high or become only the wound. The injured finger stands for childhood wounds incurred when trying to free our own brilliance and spontaneity (Wild Man). Addiction as deepening the slave path; Philippe Ariès on childhood clothes: identifying only with wounded child fragments culture. U.S. decline since 1950 framed as stuck between junk-bond grandeur and depressed underclass roads. Early ecstasy without discipline: Hillman; another way the Great Mother keeps the key. Sue the Wild Man for a rusty lock; stay victim; never take a mentor. Wild Man is not merely “inside”: mentor-being who thrives outside whether he takes us or not.
Never being welcomed into the male world by older men is, for Bly, a wound in the chest. The Detroit police chief’s observation that many arrestees had never met a responsible older man becomes evidence that peer gangs teach courage without elders. Michael Meade’s point: peers can teach risk; they cannot teach the meaning that turns a scar into a living link with the first man (Darwalla tooth).
Soul union among men is the wound Bly suspects is most damaging in industrial cultures. In New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, pygmy territories, Zulu lands, and Arab cultures he cites men still gathering for stories, music, and noncompetitive presence. American business, by contrast, allows mostly competitive anxiety. Bar talk often dissolves when a woman enters; the men have no practiced male soul-space that can survive her arrival. Without that space, the boy who stole the key still has nowhere to take the gold that appears at his injury.
The Wild Man’s water does not instantly heal. It ends enchantment: the Grimm Raven girl, the Six Swans brothers, the trance after family shame that alcoholic-family workers call denial. Poem “Fifty Males Sitting Together”: the son turns away, loses courage, feeds with wild things, grows long wings, enters the spiral, ascends away from the drunk-father kitchen. Mentor water strengthens the part that wants courage and humanity; the wound remains until it is worked as gift.
Sacred spring: Celtic pollution fear (everything on earth dies); Merlin brooding in Vita Merlini; Logres well; Connla’s Well and hazelnut salmon. Psychologically: soul water for those ready. Eliade: puberty initiation is revelation of the sacred; before it boys do not fully share human condition because they lack access to religious life. Bly’s “religion” here: willingness to be fish in holy water, fished by Dionysus, take dream hints, eat grief, be both fisherman and fish; active with soul, not cars and footballs.
Denial (alcoholic-family work): amnesia after shame; trance for years. Grimm enchantments: Raven girl; Six Swans boys. Poem “Fifty Males Sitting Together”: son ascends into spiral away from drunk-father kitchen. Mentor water ends enchantment; does not itself heal but strengthens the part that wants courage and humanity.
Gold: sun-glory, royal power, radiance, freedom from decay, immortality, spiritual luminosity. Rediscovery of womb gold (Wordsworth’s clouds of glory; Kabir’s radiance in the womb). Egyptian mummification gold on fingernails: “gold which belongs to Horus… makes you immortal.” Roman genius (man) / juno (woman): daimon seed of good fortune; Jacobsen’s “white shadow.” Gold appears on the finger that opened the cage: fate bound to use of the key.
Ordinary gold moments: love affair with Wild Man/Woman in the room; artist’s pond in the studio; runner’s toes with coach present; physicist’s chalk with mentor; gardener’s golden thumb; therapist and student slipping into soul water. Good therapy = waiting by the pond; dipping the wound for nourishment. Initiation: neither ascending above nor remaining numb inside, but knowing when, with mentor, to dip.
Culture teaches boys that a stopping wound is girlish; the story teaches the opposite. Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be. The community gift comes from the precise injury: alcoholic father, shaming parent, isolation, disability. Those with no wounds would be unluckiest; Bly says none have been found.
Gift-givers he names as working from injury: Edvard Munch (disabling anxiety), Kafka, Dickens, Dickinson, Akhmatova, Vallejo. Ordinary gold is smaller and local: lovers with Wild Man and Wild Woman both in the room; painter’s pond in the studio; runner’s toes gold at the finish under a coach’s eye; physicist’s chalk under a mentor; gardener’s golden thumb; therapist’s tongue when student and teacher slip into soul water. Good therapy equals waiting by the pond and dipping the wound for nourishment, not ascending above it or remaining numb inside it.
Gold as symbol: sun-glory, royal power, self-generating radiance, freedom from decay, immortality, spiritual luminosity. Rediscovery of womb gold (Wordsworth’s clouds of glory; Kabir’s radiance already in the womb). Egyptian mummification gold on the nails: gold that belongs to Horus makes you immortal. Roman genius (man) and juno (woman) as daimon seed of good fortune; Rolf Jacobsen’s “white shadow.” Gold appears on the finger that opened the cage: fate bound to use of the key. Sun-energy, somehow, enters the body when Iron John brings the boy to the water.
Soul-union wound, Bly presses hardest: New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, pygmy territories, Zulu lands, Arab cultures still show men gathering for stories, music, and noncompetitive presence. American business allows mostly competitive anxiety; bar talk often dies when a woman enters. Without male soul company, the chest wound of never being welcomed never closes.
Grandiosity caricatures Bly names: Wall Street man and New Age harp player both devoted to infantile grandiosity; each imagines himself already Wild Man or already healed victim, so mentor adoption is impossible. Few American men in recent decades, he says, get past the detail of the key.
Mitscherlich dream Bly treats as omen: a boy with no hands at a goldfish fountain; fish takes a hand; skull-headed old man shoots. Image of “handless boys” in gangs: hunger for initiation without elders who can bind wound to meaning.
Sacred spring lineages Bly stacks: Celtic fear that polluted wells kill everything on earth; Merlin brooding mad in Vita Merlini; the Logres well; Connla’s Well and the hazelnut salmon of wisdom. Psychologically the spring is soul water for those ready. Eliade: puberty initiation reveals the sacred; before it boys do not fully share the human condition because they lack access to religious life. Bly’s “religion” here is willingness to be fish in holy water, fished by Dionysus, take dream hints, eat grief, be both fisherman and fish; active with soul, not only with cars and footballs.
On gender of the water he refuses the quick equation water = feminine. The West kept sky-father / earth-mother and forgot sky-mother and earth-father. Egypt kept Ra and Isis plus Nut (sky-mother on coffin lids) and Geb (earth-father, phallus toward the stars). Libby and Arthur Coleman’s The Father reproduces Geb imagery. Fragmentary Greek inheritance polarizes the sexes and harms both: “the earth is female” can make a man feel he has lost the right to breathe; “God is male” can make women feel they have no right to pray. Iron John is pre-Greek in spirit: Wild Man lives in and under water and on earth; neither element exclusively gendered. Water here means earthy natural life, not air/fire metaphysics. Reopening mythology to women in sky and men in earth-water would, Bly hopes, shrink gender distance and make earth-protection feel natural to white men as to Native American men.
Finger still hurts; hand through hair; one hair falls in; pulls out gold. Iron John: allowed this time; third time dishonors the spring and ends the stay.
When one hair falls in and turns gold, Bly reads four linked meanings before intuition:
Hair also means thoughts and processes that continue when ego sleeps: hormonal and digestive work; Kekulé’s benzene snakes; artists’ unplanned images; Yeats’s crane that may take a trout if it does not seem to care; Marion Woodman’s client dream of a path already cut on the far mountain. Soul reciprocity: take an action, the soul takes an action; hair enters water, soul adds gold. Rilke: eyes already touch the sunny hill; we are grasped by what we cannot grasp. Ritual space returns a gift to the prepared entrant; secular space does not. Day two elevates the private wound into mythological space (Fisher King, shaman); without conscious wound-weight, life stays provisional.
Determined not to dip; gazes at reflection; leans to look into own eyes; all hair falls in and turns gold, shining like the sun. Kerchief cover fails. Iron John: kerchief off. Silence.
Day three: hands stay back; eyes lean in; the whole head of hair falls and shines like the sun. Kerchief fails; Iron John says take it off. Silence.
Looking into one’s own eyes yields the impression someone looks back. Shame often blocks the meeting. Rilke’s 1906 self-portrait (tr. Bly): the face has never gathered itself in grief or ecstasy for any permanent task, yet someone there seems to be planning a serious labor. Machado: look for your other half who walks always next to you and tends to be who you aren’t. Jiménez: “I am not I… the one who will remain standing when I die.” Gnostic twin separated at birth; Jacobsen’s white shadow; dream of an unknown person rearranging the apartment. Friend at thirty-eight: nine-foot man of light with a spear: “If you don’t make something of your life, I will take it from you.”
Eyes in the water also as nature’s ordered intelligence, not exactly “consciousness.” Blake: how do you know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed by your senses five? Personality in nature: Native American buffalo chief; Dordogne makers; Great Mother held in women’s palms at birth. Contrast Narcissus: cut from hunting companions, Echo-trapped, falls in love with his face. Iron John’s boy, under Wild Man protection, looks through the eyes to intelligence in nature and breaks the self-circuit.
Three realizations for a golden head: descend into wounds; climb to the twin; expand sideways into oaks, glaciers, animals, the ten thousand things. Three ritual days may be fifteen years. Task failed three times; gift each time. Accepting the initiatory task matters more than succeeding. Iron John sends him out: learn poverty; no evil in your heart; when in trouble shout “Iron John, Iron John!” at the forest edge. Wild Man here behaves less like savage than meditation instructor, Kabala teacher, mystery holder, hunting god. Real initiation is not confirmation, Bar Mitzvah, or driver’s license alone. Whatever shuts you from waterfall and tiger kills. Initiator’s job (man or woman): prove the youth is more than a flesh-and-blood survival machine. Golden head solves nothing neatly; it brings new problems. Next stage: ashes, descent, and grief.
Three days at the spring: psychological dip, mythic elevation, twin/nature gaze; third way between grandiose, depressed, and numb roads.
| Day | What falls in | Gold meaning | Psychological move |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wounded finger | Genius / daimon spark at injury | Dip wound in soul water; stop pure denial |
| 2 | One hair | Instinct and intuition blessed | Lift private wound into ancestral story |
| 3 | Whole head of hair | Golden head; twin + nature eyes | Look back into self/nature; then leave mentor nest |
Denial after shame can last years as trance. The mentor’s job is not instant cure but the end of enchantment and the start of dipping. Therapy, when good, is pond-waiting: each dip nourishes; the involuntary dip of the hurting finger is already a gift signal. Wall Street and New Age harp-player caricatures refuse the mentor because each already believes he is Wild Man or already believes he is only victim. Few men, Bly says, get past the detail of the key.
Day-two fierceness claim needs the A CLOSER LOOK held close: distinguishing fierceness from aggression is useful; blaming “separatist feminism” for breeding fierceness out of men is a 1990 men’s-movement polemic, not a history of feminism. Use the tetrad (sex, hunt, mammal heat, excess) as image-work; do not treat the feminism sentence as social science.
When the golden head arrives, exile follows. Learn poverty; keep a clean heart; retain the forest call-name. Metaphors in the tale refer to all human life but are tuned to men’s psyches; Bly states that tuning without claiming women have no parallel springs. The next road is ashes, descent, and grief: golden head does not crown a king yet.
Iron John’s promise after the shoulders: treasures more than the boy will ever need. The treasures are not only coins; they are soul water, gold at the wound, twin in the mirror, and a call-name that still works after exile. Stage one frees the cage; stage two turns injury into vocation signal.
The boy has not gone into delinquency or self-shaming. He has been lifted toward what is great in him: trust in instinctual “hair,” eyes looking back from water and woods, the sense that everything is intelligent, a head of gold. Similar teachings arrive for many in fragments: woods that feel alive in early childhood; sexual love that feels very good at twelve or fourteen; sudden mental or physical powers in the teens. Most people already guess they are sons or daughters of kings and queens misplaced in a prosaic family. Grandeur feels good; we want it always.
A little genius feeling can send a person into high altitudes from which he does not want to descend. Robinson Jeffers on scientific grandiosity: a pebble from the shingle, a drop from the oceans; who would have dreamed this infinitely little too much? To keep grandeur, a child may refuse ugly facts: abuse, abandonment, parental addiction, indifference. Animals, Bly says, worry less about inflation; humans do not.
Young men lifted high may become white swans, grandiose ascenders, flying boys; young women similarly lifted may become flying girls. Jungian language: puer aeternus and puella aeterna. Marie-Louise von Franz’s Puer Aeternus is the classic; The Little Prince is her generic story (Saint-Exupéry the pilot-hero longing for other planets; the prince dies by snake bite on this one). Peter Pan, ashram habitués of “higher consciousness,” platonic lovers and some Don Juans hunting the missing pearl: all flyers. They inhabit bodies poorly, fear abandonment and limitation, hate the boring texture of human life. Elevator dreams: rising on the outside of a building, no entrance at the top. The puer may shrink a woman into a bottle in his pocket. Ascenders are not simply negative: they carry spiritual energy; without them American culture would thicken into concrete. Bly names himself as a lasting example: at twelve already ascending; at twenty-eight still longing to be above it all.
Von Franz: ascent as revolt against maternal earthiness and female conservatism; magnets in the ground (marriage, job, commitment) feared. Bly softens the charge into timing: spiritual work is not wrong, but when it happens matters. Baal Shem Tov would not let young men read certain spiritual texts until thirty-five. First-half-of-life task: bond to matter, learn a craft, befriend wood, earth, wind, fire. Jung’s Zurich training: already a success in another career; a way of saying thirty-five or older.
Not all young men ascend. Some are earthbound early: responsibility, soles of shoes on the ground, no right to look at sunlight. Fairy tales call them shoemakers against higher-hearted tailors. Medieval scarcity limited ascension; modern entitlement barely knows the goddess of necessity. The boy in the tale is at the moment of ascension, like millions in American culture. Bly proposes three diagnostic words for the flyer: passivity, naïveté, and numbness. He confines the section to men’s ascensionism and leaves women’s to women to describe with more accuracy.
For ages men were admired for activity: pierce dangerous places, carry courage to waterfalls, dust wild-boar tails; shamans wrestling spirits; initiative on oceans and rocky farms. Young Vikings walked the oar-ends while others rowed. Women, Bly says, were long forced into passivity by monks, doctors, philosophers, moralists, theologians, judges. Now women move into activity as many men pass them going the other way. Soft-male passivity (Chapter One) often surprises women.
Thirty years of cultural ask: go with the flow, follow rather than lead, live nonhierarchically, be vulnerable, adopt consensus. Some women want a passive man if they want a man; church wants tamed priests; university wants tenure-track domestication; corporation wants team-workers. Blake’s charter’d streets: marks of weakness, marks of woe. Passivity rises as schools turn out “products.” By eighteen the average American child has seen four thousand hours of commercials; few televisions smashed, few debates interrupted, few military budgets stopped by mass protest.
Blake’s infant: struggling in father’s hands, striving against swaddling bands; bound and weary, sulk upon mother’s breast. Fail to get free of narcissistic binding from either parent, and sulk becomes habit. Adult men, baffled by a partner’s interpretation of their behavior, go into sulks for a week: no screaming, no kvetching; passive to their own hurts. Without old men to break the hold, passivity spreads.
Forms Bly lists:
The naïve man feels pride in being attacked. Called chauvinist or sexist, he opens his shirt for the lances; friends carry him to the hospital. Attention from a mysterious superior woman seems wonderful; wounds may pay for chauvinism and keep him special. He picks up women’s pain early (kitchen-table confidences at five) and later specializes in carrying it, often more in touch with her pain than his own. Bly’s rule of thumb: each gender drops its own pain when it tries to carry the other gender’s; hearing is not carrying. Women tried for centuries to carry men’s pain; it has not worked well.
Special relationships get a cloying goodwill that never examines the dark side of son, daughter, wife, friend. Mutual non-investigation of darkness. A secret special bond with an interior wounded little boy: no challenge, no listening, the boy runs the life. Sincerity as city wall: Rousseau/Whitman nobility; betrayal confessed as if confession canceled consequences. Self-isolation play in four acts when a woman is angry: “You’re right” → “I’ve always been this way” → implicate the father → “All men are shits.” Now isolated from her and from men.
Boundary failure: New Age man tells white-light experiences and last night’s dream to strangers; thieves walk through the house; he tells the giant all his plans; improvises without form; suspicious of containers. Inappropriate relation to ecstasy: wants it through the feminine/Great Mother/goddess even when that ungrounds him; uses ecstasy to flee discipline. Mood as mountain: cannot walk around a low mood the way some women detach a party mood; everyone descends into his hole. Specializes in not telling when assigned a task, then wonders why others carry the anger. Unaware of the sick being inside who wants to remain sick. Lacks Hillman’s natural brutality: hawk and fox drive young out; the ascender waits until a major wounding happens later. Timing off: after a blow he skips anger and goes straight to empathy; misuses turning the other cheek. Final claim: something in naïveté demands betrayal; the universe crystallizes deceit when naïveté saturates a bond.
Bly’s personal fable: at two or three he asked his father for protection; being with the intense father felt more dangerous than the street. He asked his mother; the instant she said yes, he went numb from neck to lower belly. Alternative readings he allows: genetic expectation of father-protection shocked into numbness; or a decision that accepting mother’s protection meant learning to feel as a woman feels, so feel nothing. The fable’s moral for him: a mother’s protection, however well meant, does not substitute for a father’s. Through high school head and genitals were fiery; he chest was blank. Asked “Do you love me?” he could not answer; a girl could name a spectrum (respect, admire, fond, interested, not love). Men who “won’t express feelings” often get no answer from the chest at all; withholding is not always a strategy. Age, and protection from age-mates, feisty women, and determined younger men, thawed some of it.
Iron John, in essence: you know gold, not poverty; going up, not going down. Spoken form: go into the world and learn what poverty is; no evil in your heart; when in trouble shout “Iron John, Iron John!” at the forest edge; power greater than you believe; gold and silver in abundance. The boy wanders beaten and unbeaten paths to a great city; no craft; palace kitchen takes him: carry wood and water, rake the cinders. Fall from king’s son to cook’s helper is the demanded step. Basement kitchen = Drop Through the Floor, Descent, humiliation, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. For privileged graduates and entitlement culture, soul life often begins in that basement.
Katabasis (Greek): the way down. Mark of Descent: newly arrived lowliness, water and soul (water prefers low places), especially for the initially high and lucky. Separates the young man from companion flyers; reveals a depression that may have lived unnoticed for years. Mean life of ordinariness, heaviness, silences, soberness. Next initiation step: find the rat’s hole, the dark way Williams or Haverford did not prepare, the trip the upwardly mobile imagines only lower-class men take.
When katabasis hits, specialness ends. One day fed and housed on someone else’s money behind brick walls; next day looking for a meal and a bed. Doormen turn; waiters sneer. Inner masculine shifts: shiny prince replaced by helpless, brittle, isolated derelict. Oedipus: arrogant king to blind man led by others. Modern routes: addiction (alcohol, cocaine, crack) stripping health, family, job, “every mark of former art and life”; or the Tahoe-weekend success who finds himself on the lawn with a loaded shotgun and loses every shred without addiction. Joseph: gravel pit / dry well → slave traders → Egypt → dungeon. Life “discharges” him: accident, job loss, broken friendship, divorce, breakdown, illness. Jung’s reported reverse congratulations: promotion → “I’m very sorry”; fired → open a bottle, wonderful news.
“The Devil’s Sooty Brother”: discharged soldier boils pots underground (kitchen + Descent united). Being “discharged” is, for Bly, a good and holy state that prepares Descent; Iron John discharges the boy after the three spring days. Nineteenth-century men characteristically failed to notice female suffering (The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar); this century, Bly adds, men characteristically fail to notice their own.
The finger-wound from Chapter Two intensifies. Dip it in therapeutic or ritual water to feel injustice, enormity, harm to spontaneity and joy, link to open or covert rage; kitchen work means intensification and exit through the wound as door. If father abandoned him, he becomes truly abandoned: no house, mother, or woman. If shame wounded him (sexual abuse, beating, shame-filled parent), he lives shaming out among the chronically shamed, fifty times a day. If mother wounded through possessiveness (inadequate, too small), he becomes really helpless: no status, no contacts, smallness confirmed. If culture stuck him as observer, head split from body, katabasis makes him truly stuck: César Vallejo’s huge colorless bleeding spider, head one side and abdomen the other, many feet stretching, cannot solve it; invisible eyes as death-bringing pilots. Vallejo’s mode: heroic exit through the wound, not through heroism (hero) or invincibility (warrior). “Well, on the day I was born, God was sick.” The way down does not require poverty, homelessness, or dishwasher work necessarily; it requires a fall from status in consciousness: human being to spider, middle-class person to derelict.
Divorce as discharge from wedding-day task: can walk backward through the door watching funny movies, or face the dark and use collapse as invitation into the wound. The breakup may revive the childhood wound that shaped the marriage or its failure; agony of separation from a substitute mother figure, money demands, cold new rooms, community withdrawal, self-doubt: a new loneliness usable as door if the man refuses cheap cheer.
Dark humor of forced katabasis: a spiritual teacher at a fork (motel liquor and women vs the ascetic center he administers) cannot choose; the car goes straight into a yellow brick wall painted THE JOKE SHOP; partial paralysis for life. Another flyer, quick to help community, runs to a ditch grass fire and is pinned by a car flying through the air; ribs and pelvis broken. Energies that ask for katabasis have immense power. Christ’s line as mood: you shall not get out until you have paid the last penny. Tomas Tranströmer image Bly invokes: most of us transfer weights pocket to pocket to keep the boat balanced; suddenly the boat turns over; Titanic water and ice mountain. Antonio Machado: mankind owns four things no good at sea: rudder, anchor, oars, and the fear of going down. Minnesota Lutheran minister who could balance jealous congregational waters uses firmness on a sixteen-year-old son still demanding the car; son steals it; father calls police; chase; son kills state patrolmen with a .22: boat down for both.
Depression as small unwilling katabasis (a hand pulls you down because you refuse to go); grief as chosen descent. With initiators gone, little instruction on going down alone; U.S. culture often allows male grief only at funerals. Soul itself asks descent. D. H. Lawrence: not a mechanism; ill from wounds to the soul and deep emotional self; long difficult repentance; realization of life’s mistake; freeing from endless repetition of the mistake mankind has sanctified. Drinking as a door when “I can handle it” dies; AA’s Twelve Steps take him down. Vallejo again on the way: they know he chews food, not why harsh winds whistle in his poems; on the day he was born, God was sick, gravely. On the way down, a little instruction about the dark side of God.
At every naïveté, a corresponding katabasis. Descender’s disciplines: see dark sides (“I trust him for the most part”); partial self-trust; in marriage hold each other’s nethermost beast on a leash. Flyer toward the sun cannot see his shadow; in katabasis it catches up. Instruction also about the dark side of God and of the Great Mother: Kali’s flowers to skulls; Baba Yaga’s boar energy; Grendel’s pool; the Giantess’s sack. Only Shiva-form Wild Man stands up to Kali: hint why Wild Man guides the boy. Pwyll (Mabinogion): not king until a year exchanged with the Underworld king, night beside the Black Darling. Descent complete when childlike eros at the breast/milk/first girlfriend is, for a time, replaced by boar-tusked Baba Yaga energy. Young men fantasize killing her; stories say only matching her intensity, wildness, shrewdness, and truth-hunger works; then sometimes: “Okay, what do you want to know?”
Four faces of descent after the golden head; depression vs chosen grief; Saturn as mythic container toward the Garden.
Kitchen work branches into three further forms: Taking the Road of Ashes, Learning to Shudder, Moving from the Mother’s World to the Father’s World.
Rake the cinders: Askaladden (Ash-Boy) in Norwegian tales; Cinderella across countries. Ashes are not sunlit crown or strong roots; ash is death of the trunk. Code for ashy, sooty, depressed, “out of it” time. In fairy stories the lucky third child tends the hearth; modern ears hear only punishment. Fingerprints in ash powder: whorls clearer. Ashes life differs from explosive katabasis: less status-fall required; steadier, even lethargic.
Viking long houses (R. Keyser): pavement fire down the center; ash heaps between fire and beds; young men sometimes lay there two or three years, crouching, rolling in ashes, eating ashes, chewing cinders: Cinder-Biters. Ritual hibernation the elders allowed. Starkad (eleventh century): years in ashes, then foster father invites an expedition; he stands, shaves, dresses, becomes distinguished warrior and saga poet. Without ritual, today’s dropout may meet only shame or prison. Ash Wednesday forehead mark. Mircea Eliade: initiators in Australia, Africa, Near East, South America, Pacific cover boys with ash (color of the dead) so some infantile ego-bound boy can die; dark hours with ancestor spirits; crawl through brush tunnel; new name at the far end; mothers sometimes pretend not to recognize them and joyfully relearn who they are.
Gold-obsessed New Age man and Dow Jones man: both have not handled ashes. Job covered himself with ashes: living Job mourning dead comfortable Job. Disneyland = “no ashes”: malls and entertainment complexes denying death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, poverty, lethargy, misery.
Around thirty-five or forty, private ashes arrive anyway without ritual or old men. High-school dreams (race driver, mountain climber, Miss America, millionaire by thirty, Nobel by thirty-five, tallest building, Paris, fabulous friends) burn down. The inner stove that once took whole nights until dawn (drink, sex, enthusiasm, madness) no longer accepts such chunks; ashes fall on the floor; buy a small black shovel at the hardware store; kneel; see bootsole prints in ash. Robert Frost’s oven bird frames the question in all but words: what to make of a diminished thing. New diets, pop singers, authors: ashes by thirty-five.
Bly’s “Snowbanks North of the House” (~age thirty-eight): snow sweeps stop suddenly six feet from the house; thoughts that go so far; boy leaves high school and reads no more; son stops calling home; mother puts down the rolling pin; wife at a party loves the husband no more; energy leaves the wine; minister falls leaving the church; father grieves in the room with the coffin; man in the black coat turns and goes back down the hill; no one knows why he came or why he turned away. Habitual relational error producing more ash than heat; men afraid to enter a new relationship because the last ten or twelve ended in ashes. Young men, Bly says, cannot get enough ashes; enlightenment addicts think they want ecstasy from the guru and may really want soot; having no kitchen fire, they smear soot and hope mother will not recognize them. Neruda (“Brussels,” tr.
Ashes as diminishment from living tree with huge crown: proper recognition for men over thirty. Miss it, and inflation stays: identify with all that can fly (sexual drive, mind, refusal to commit, addiction, transcendence, coolness). Coolness in some American men means ashes skipped. Roosevelt found ashes in polio; Sadat in prison; Solzhenitsyn in the Gulag; Depression poverty for Steinbeck, Faulkner, Thomas McGrath, Tillie Olson, David Ignatow, Kenneth Rexroth.
Katabasis vs ashes: first needs drop, poverty, class break (prison can hold both); ashes can arrive with job and family intact if consciousness is present. Murray Stein (In Midlife): Ashes Time as search for the corpse (mislaid career, drowned relationship, shamed boy). Priam retrieving Hector’s body with Hermes of the Invisible Cap: slip at night through the lines; cunning, stealth, a god’s help.
| Mode | Social status | Tempo | Core task | Mythic helpers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Katabasis | Often crashes | Abrupt drop | Exit through wound as door; lose specialness | Joseph’s pit; Oedipus blinded; AA steps |
| Ashes | May keep job/family | Slow, sooty, lethargic | Let ego-boy die; handle diminished dreams | Cinder-Biters; Eliade ash-cover; Job |
| Shudder | Any | Shock that teaches feeling | Feel frailty; refuse Titan cruelty | Dionysus; Casualties of War fifth man |
| Father’s house | Identity shift | Long, repeated | Leave comfort-son; join Beneath Father | Hamlet’s ghost; serpent seals; Wild Man |
Early Grimm: young man normal except he could not shudder; ghosts, hanged men, demon cats, coffins: nothing worked. Children shudder easily at wounded animals; domination culture later turns some boys into insect-and-animal torturers to perfume their insignificance. Titans before the gods: Cronos castrates Uranus, eats his children (Zeus excepted); Zeus defeats Titans, buries them; they later “accidentally” eat Dionysus the shudderer; Zeus burns Titans to ashes; humans made from those ashes (cruelty and coldness explained); Dionysus reconstituted from the heart the Titans missed. After adolescence, learn what Titans never learned: legitimate aim of initiation. Dionysus guides the secret process of learning to shudder.
Casualties of War: four of five in a Vietnam platoon capture, rape, kill a Vietnamese woman; from initiator’s view they are brutal unfinished boys stuck before ashes. Michael J. Fox as the fifth: refuses, tries to save her, reports at risk of his life; shudder is his most adult aspect. Non-shudderers hate shudderers; the four threaten isolation and rape. Shuddering feels how frail humans are and how awful it is to be a Titan; it thaws numbness. Empathy here is not only “feminine feeling”; it develops part of the masculine emotional body. Hermes helps through the lines to the corpse; Dionysus helps the shudder.
When initiation is in place, old men help boys move from mother’s world to father’s. First stage across cultures: sharp clean break; spears into women’s compounds, boys eight to twelve taken; New Guinea example: mothers put up fierce resistance then later ask each other if they looked fierce enough; coffee and debrief. Sentence Bly cites as accepted across some eighty New Guinea tribes: A boy cannot change into a man without the active intervention of the older men. Girls, in his contrast, change with bodily development plus old women’s stories; boys need men. Wild Man’s shoulders = that break in this tale; break is not yet internal movement.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet as long comic-tragic record of how hard the move is. Ghost’s clear order: shudder over my death, look at the ashes of my kingship, give up studious life. Hamlet has not taken kitchen work; he knows his genius but is stuck; perhaps he carefully put the key back under his mother’s pillow. He struggles the whole play to leave her realm; makes too much of her sexual life; does not regard her as an “other” with awe proper to a grown person. Father must return from the grave again and again to keep movement from collapsing into the old stuck place.
If no old man or competent initiator is present (Polonius is not such a man), all moves slowly. Lesson Bly draws: a young man cannot make the move to the father’s world alone without taking on the Trickster and especially the Dark Trickster; the good side will not do it. Grimm “The Raven”: the mother’s boy must learn to rob the robbers or never finish the story. Hamlet’s Trickster rewrites lines in the little play and stages it; kills Polonius after the overheard talk; on ship, finding Rosencrantz and Guildenstern carry Claudius’s letter asking England to kill him, forges a letter that dooms them instead of merely being firm; returns to Denmark with pirates. He tries and tries; the move seems too drastic. Meanwhile Ophelia dies: the young feminine suffers when the man cannot reach the father’s world; also a sentimental girl inside Hamlet goes mad at the clumsy move and will “die.” Parsifal, another man without older mentor, lived with his mother through childhood and youth; saw knights, took them for angels, left; mother died on the spot. Some deaths stand for the naïveté that dies when the son accepts the father’s world.
Final scene: intricate double and triple trickery; in the duel Hamlet arrives at last at the father’s house; his own mother dies; he kills his father’s murderer; almost immediately he dies himself (“nothing is perfect”). Shakespeare lets Fortinbras occupy the stage at the end: men who do not know how to shudder. Unsentimental close. Cost of the move: give up immortality or safe life promised to the faithful mother’s son; accept death-risk always imminent in the father’s realm. Each man does it for himself; it takes a long time.
Reclaiming grief and investigating the wound may show they resemble the father’s; reclaiming puts the son in touch with the father’s soul. Senses sharpen until he smells the father’s wound “as one smells a serpent, who sheds skins and lives.” The move does not require rejecting or shouting at the mother (Hamlet is off there); it requires convincing the naïve comfort-loving interior boy to die. Other interior boys remain; this one dies. Fish and turtles leave the mother on day one; for developing men, independence from the womb-world goes in agonizingly slow motion. One wants to run; legs will not move; wake exhausted.
Joseph Campbell (Occidental Mythology): a scene repeated on numerous Babylonian seals: standing male figure; nearby seated female (goddess or priestess); third figure a large snake. Possible meditation object for men raised in culture strengthened, ruled, or moistened by the Great Mother. Personal mother in such a culture would be strong too; to live, the young man detaches from both mothers or never escapes the Great Mother’s field. Campbell’s speculation: the standing male is the body received from the mother in the womb. Hate her, conquer her, destroy her: fantasies are off. Instead, meditating, attach in imagination to the serpent father. Ancient world did not call the serpent evil; holy animal under roots of the World Tree, also in branches. Hamlet calls the ghost’s voice a mole because it moves under the ground, now here, now there. Identification with serpent father may have been characteristic male meditation of the second and third millennia B.C.
Contrast Jesuit late-seventeenth-century meditations: disidentify from matter-loving Great Mother and all paganism (keep some identification with the Virgin); disidentify from the body by name-calling, sleeplessness, fasts, occasional whipping; identify with a heavenly, bodiless, celestial, golden, eternal spirit above it all; serpent force unmentioned. Great change from the earlier meditation. Older pattern, still practiced in essence in India, Africa, New Guinea, aboriginal Australia: join the Beneath Father, who retains shape through many changes as snakes do; associates with the spinal cord; a powerful snake said to live at the bottom of the cord, at the survival house.
Today’s man embarking toward the father’s house sits between these mythologies. Ascender flees earth, water, dust, and flesh, and effectively asks women to take care of the earth. Old men in traditional initiation lead the young man to the Beneath Father near where ancestors live and snakes are; that voyage does not exile him from heaven (snakes in the crown of the tree too; snake as Lord of the Waters). Mythologically the snake resembles the Wild Man, the King, and other beings in water at the bottom of the psyche. Accepting Descent as way to the father’s house: look at the death side; glance down the rat’s hole, also the snake’s hole; accept snake rather than bird as animal. Middle-class father may own car and credit cards, but mother lives longer and returns from the cemetery after he is buried; son feels pull to her sturdiness and, beyond, to vibrant Great Mother energy. Initiation asks that love energy move from the attractive mother to the relatively unattractive serpent father.
During each Iron John stage a masculine god has taken part. Apollo at the spring; concealed in ashes work, Mediterranean Saturn: restraint, melancholy, vast systems, disciplined repetition, mentor standards, heavy grieving. When Saturn is present, failure sits solidly and is not explained away. Saturn introduces the Lord of Melancholy; the man begins the black courtship of the soul that eventually leads to the Garden.
At men’s gatherings since the early 1980s, Bly hears one sentence in a hundred phrasings: “There is not enough father.” Father is spoken as a substance like salt once scarce, or groundwater that has simply disappeared.
Geoffrey Gorer (The American People): for a boy to become a man in the United States around 1940, only one thing was required: reject his father; American fathers expect rejection. European sons traditionally imagine wrestling a demonic father (Kafka’s “The Judgment”: the son wrestles and loses). Many U.S. sons visualize father as an object of ridicule: comic strips, commercials, “a person who rustles newspapers in the living room.” Father water in the home has sunk below the reach of most wells.
When the father-table drops, sons face a new problem: drill for new father water, ration it, hoard it, distill mother water into father water. Traditional cultures still seem to have plenty. Substitute fathers work the young man: uncles loosen him or talk about women; grandfathers give stories; warrior types teach weaponry and discipline; old men teach ritual and soul. All honorary fathers.
Bruno Bettelheim judged Freud’s father-son hatred (wordless Viennese sexual jealousy assumed universal) as mostly true of late-nineteenth-century Vienna, not tribal life. In most tribal cultures fathers and sons live in amused tolerance: hours trying and failing together at arrowheads, spears, tracking. When they spend long hours together, Bly says a substance almost like food passes from older body to younger: not miming alone, but body-on healing. The son’s cells learn what an adult masculine body is, at what frequency it vibrates, how “charming, elegant, lonely, courageous, half-shamed male molecules dance.”
Months in the mother’s body tuned the son to female frequencies; he either tunes or dies. Beside the father repairing tools, washing pistons, caring for birthing animals, body-strings retune to a harsh, demanding, humorous, irreverent, impatient, opinionated, forward-driving, silence-loving older masculine body. Both musics are marvelous; the son needs both frequencies. Sons who miss the retuning carry father-hunger all their lives: salt, water, protein missing; the stomach eventually eats the muscles. Hungry sons hang around older men like the homeless around a soup kitchen, with nameless bitter shame. Women cannot replace that substance; neither can a woman the son’s own age.
Only about 140 years have passed since factory work began in earnest in the West; each generation shows poorer father-son bonding. Bly reads the English Enclosure process as ending free pasture and common land partly to force the landless father toward the factory; he links South African policy of his day forcing black fathers similarly. By mid-twentieth century in Europe and North America: the father worked, but the son could not see him working.
Hunter, hunter-gatherer, agricultural, and craft societies kept fathers and sons working and living together. As late as 1900 in the United States, about ninety percent of fathers were in agriculture; sons saw fathers at all hours and seasons. When that sight ends, Alexander Mitscherlich (after thirty years with young German men as fatherless as American industrial sons) names a hole in the son’s psyche. The son does not fill it with hero, saint, or white knight. Demons of suspicion move in. They break the community of old and young men. Sixties slogan: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”
Older men in the American military and government, Bly argues, betrayed younger men in Vietnam: lied about the war, stayed safe, asked young men to be warriors and sent them out as ordinary murderers. Demons then praise films (Lawrence of Arabia, Dead Poets Society) that show how corrupt men in authority are. Mentorship becomes hard to sustain; initiation is rejected. Anthropologists under those demons cast all elder ritual as sadism. A young architect rejoices when a Louis Sullivan building falls; rock music carries malice toward the grandfather’s ear.
Suspicion concentrated only on older men destabilizes the son elsewhere. He may be naïve about women his own age, assume she knows more about relationship, let her moods run the house, take attack as “for his own good.” Many marriages are lost that way. In business he may let a peer steal everything or accept humiliation under friendship’s cover. Bly forecasts more damage to men’s vision of the masculine; between twenty and thirty percent of American boys then lived in houses with no father present. He wonders whether daughters of mothers working out of the house, unable to show what they produce, may develop parallel suspicion of grown women; that, he says, remains to be seen.
When a father absent by day returns at six, children receive his temperament, not his teaching. Corporate work leaves little to teach: fragmentation of decision, willingness to destroy environment for profit, bureaucratic prudence and cowardice. Rare fathers who take children into factory, chambers, lot, or office reclaim some craft-culture reward. Most bring home touchy mood from powerlessness, despair, longstanding shame, and job-numbness. Earlier fathers could break through inadequate temperament by teaching rope-making, fishing, posthole digging, grain cutting, drumming, harness, animal care, singing, storytelling. Teaching sweetened temperament.
Longing for the father’s blessing through teaching remains, fossilized. What arrives instead is Blake’s Nobodaddy: “No One’s Father,” the male principle in the Kingdom of Jealousy. A father’s remoteness may damage a daughter’s later good-hearted participation with men; much rage some women direct at “the patriarchy,” Bly says, stems from disappointment over missing father teaching. Industry sent the father out of the village; no historical model prepares the contemporary son’s psyche. New furniture, new demons, new flights. Next: disappearance of positive kings.
Patriarchy and matriarchy are complicated: each, mythologically, holds the other inside. A genuine patriarchy brings down the sun through the Sacred King into every man and woman; a genuine matriarchy brings down the moon through the Sacred Queen. Death of Sacred King and Queen leaves industrial domination, which Bly insists is not patriarchy: it honors neither male nor female mode of feeling. No king, no queen; the system decides resources, values, which animals live, how children are treated.
Death of Sacred King and Group King sharpens father shortage. The father at the table seems weak and small beside nineteenth-century fathers. Some welcome the shrink without reading all implications. D. H. Lawrence: men depressed for years in their male and resplendent selves, into dejection and almost abjection: “Is that not evil?” As father grows enfeebled he also looks like a tool of dark forces. Star Wars gives Darth Vader, pun on dark father, wholeheartedly on the dark side. As political and mythological kings die, the father loses solar radiance and strikes society as endarkened.
Mother cannot redeem him and usually does not want to. The son is left with the job. While political kings stayed strong, sons tried to emulate bright fathers; literature into the eighteenth century is full of that deference. Now father as sitcom ridicule, Star Wars suspicion, bad-tempered office fool, or weak puddle of indecision leaves the son unsure how to imagine a man’s life.
Some sons fall into secret despair by age six (mother’s view of father) and by twenty (society’s dismissal). They ask women for help; even the best-intentioned cannot give what is needed. Without investigating the personal father, they accept a generic diminished idea: “I am the son of defective male material.” They go numb, quit political participation characteristic of nineteenth-century U.S. men, become underground people, sometimes drown in alcohol in a burrow.
Other sons leap and fly. The deeper the father sinks, the longer the flights. News of abuse, rigidity, workaholism, alcoholism, wife-beating, abandonment intensifies the brightness some sons compel themselves to achieve. That helps answer why naïve men seem to multiply: whether fathers are actually darker, they are perceived so, and the son assigns himself the task of redeeming the dark father.
Recall the ascending son, eternal boy, moth mad for light, puer. Marie-Louise von Franz (Puer Aeternus) reads flight as revolt against earthly, conservative, clinging maternal feminine. James Hillman (“The Great Mother, Her Son, Her Hero, and the Puer”) relates the flight to the father. Contemporary psychology, Bly notes, related everything to the mother; Freud and Jung were mothers’ men. Many sons today do not fight the father; they ascend above him. Transcendental psychology, Thoreau’s higher consciousness than the father: not wrong, but flying. Bly counts himself among deprivation flyers who endured thin air to be seen high, attempting to redeem the endarkened father by becoming enlightened.
Model: Egyptian Horus, hawk and falcon son of Osiris. Set tricks Osiris into a nailed coffin on the Nile; later a second darkness inside a tree trunk at Byblos. Horus’s soaring answers the father’s imprisonment: he flies farther than other gods, beyond Set’s bounds, unique in flight. The sun-flying son does not see his own shadow (it falls behind); he has seen the father’s. Ascension flies away from the father, not toward him; it may redeem the name while failing to rescue the man. Society without the father produces birdlike men: intense, charming, open to addiction, sincere, like Homer’s cranes flying in millions toward the sun.
Sacred King radiates two streams into earthly fathers and into the recovering inner King; both rooms must be furnished.
The boy rose on Wild Man’s shoulders, went down with damaged finger into water, rose when the head turned gold, descended into kitchen ashes. That breathing looks right; every man who took the way down and out is a descended man (Joseph to Egypt, Job’s fall, Huck on the river). The story is not ready to end. Nothing has been said yet about the second King.
Great fairy-story theme: two Kings. Trouble with one’s own father (first King); leave the first castle; after suffering and isolation a second King appears (often while hunting), adopts the hero or heroine, sets a task. A complicated dance begins toward fruitful connection with the new King.
The boy, lacking craft (a father-teaching deficit), takes kitchen work in a castle that is not his father’s. Soot and ashes, golden hair retained. When no one else is at hand, the cook orders him to carry food to the royal table. He keeps his tarboosh on so the gold will not show. The King: hats off at the royal table. Boy: “I have a sore place on my head.” The King scolds the cook and has the boy fired and removed.
Gold hair helps adolescence survive; it is also intrusion. “I have a sore on my head” is accurate: a taste of heaven one does not know how to wear before the King, whether to brag or hide. Everyone wants the King’s presence: Elvis, Prince, Letterman’s house-breaker, Prince Charles napkins, Jackson camps, White House invitations, Dalai Lama replacing the pope for some. Father-hunger transmutes into King-hunger. Golden hair does not give leave to remain.
Kitchen job, ashes, even katabasis do not guarantee a long stay. Guards let you in and escort you out. Adolescence remembers crush-teachers, brief celebrity visits, embarrassing advice-seeking. Acceptance may open an apprenticeship one lacks discipline to keep. A woman entering a guru’s chambers may find he wants sex. Genuine concern meets the wrong word blurted from hunger for praise. The King or Queen may not be physical: twelve-year-olds’ unnamed light, fourteen-year-olds’ flash of all mathematics or Indian saints’ meaning, Seventh Heaven then abrupt fall.
Romantics long for oceanic womb feeling. Addiction tries to escape limits and stay in the King’s room: alcohol, sex, cocaine extend the visit. Bly says the entire culture obsesses this one Iron John scene: visiting the King. Visit before called, or stay too long, and fall back into ashes. Singles’ bars resemble the King’s room: extravagant promises, spirit losses. Shakespeare’s sonnet on lust (“All this world well knows, yet none knows well / To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell”) closes the alchemical oven image. Alchemists: even after good ashes work the soul still carries infantile angers, unrealistic hopes, parental rage. Kitchen knows wood, fire, ashes. Soul there is crude mixed rock; clarified Spirit cannot imprint clearly yet. The King high among air and sunlight suggests solar power and holy intellect: unity against the sooty boy or girl. Short visit should not surprise.
Edward Edinger summarizing alchemists: the lesser wedding fuses substances not yet thoroughly separated; it is always followed by a death. A longer “great wedding” comes later, at the story’s end. Iron John is a dance in which the young man gradually, with hesitations, comes closer to the second King. The story can also end in the kitchen: “There’s no one up there,” “Let him get his own soup,” or level-confusion (“I never serve anyone else, certainly not a King”). Ignore the cook and stay stuck as victim child in ashes; Burroughs and Hawkes, in Bly’s charge, speak from stuck places insisting ashes are all there is.
“King” and “Queen” have history in invisible myth (not implying gendered persons alone) and in visible monarchy. Bly distinguishes three:
A King in imaginative or invisible world: magnet rearranging human molecules, whirlwind that lifts houses. Word king or queen makes the body tremble a little. King and Queen send energy down like sun and moon through cloud. John Weir Perry calls the Sacred King Lord of the Four Quarters; he sits with Queen of the Four Quarters; neither undermines the other. Mythological layer as inner heaven: Dionysus, Freya, Odin, Thor, Virgin Mary, Kali, Buddha, Zeus, Allah, Athena, Artemis, Sophia still alive there. Mythological thinking imagines what they do while keeping human and god layers distinct.
Bly estimates the West lost mythological thinking around the year 1000; the layer collapsed. Christianity’s freeze on new stories and gods, or Renaissance science absorbing imaginative energy: Europeans stopped feeding abundant gods with imagination. Broken glass underfoot. Perry: Sacred or Solar King is principle of order and space; where he is, there is order (he does not “create” it). He blesses. Robert Moore: he encourages creativity in his realm. Queen’s power is equal in force; lead alternates. Right space together: fig trees blossom, ditches run milk and honey (Celtic openings describe Heaven, not earth). The story’s King high in chamber represents this Eternal King; he lacks a Queen here (loss or meaning through absence); he has a daughter who will become Queen later. His presence marks the Iron John field as cosmos, not chaos.
Broad-power city and empire kings appear in the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamian city-states; China’s Sun King relation is uncertain in sequence. Political king merges heavenly sun power and earthly authority. Chinese double kingship remains a model of mythological imagination. Sun King and Moon Queen held societies about four thousand years; as order principles they began failing in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. Kaiser, Tsar, Emperor, Maharajah, Sultan, Bey: kings fell across Europe and colonies.
Medieval kings touring realms: villagers waiting felt blessing from the Sacred King as the physical one passed. When the political king disappears from the lanes (even for good reason), feeling the eternal King grows harder. Bly does not call king-killing error or demand restoration; he notes visual imagination confuses when the physical king vanishes. Wiping out kings damages mythological imagination; each person must repair it alone.
U.S. rejection of flesh-and-blood King George (1776) preceded Louis XVI’s beheading; Fourth of July fireworks repeat the rejection with less joy as ascending victory and descending failure cast shadow on fathers. Surviving flesh-and-blood kings live in the National Enquirer with Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Prince. Popular confusion: readers take fairy-story King for political king and sneer. The political king is middle tier of a three-tiered world; he derives authority from transparency to the King above. Few actual kings manage it; the structure depends on the try. When political kings lose respect, connection, and sight, fathers lessen in the mind’s eye. If Sacred King is broken glass, father is a broken cup. Same logic for Queen, Sophia, Kali, and women’s standing. Women’s work: lift Sophia and Kali. Men’s work: lift Dionysus, Hermes, Zeus energy. See the Sacred King “not with but through the eyes” (Blake); see radiant inner King uncontaminated by Herods and Stalins. Feet stumble each morning over bits of Sun King on the sidewalk.
Inside: a third King one can honor or not. He knows what one wants for the rest of life, month, or day, clear of others’ opinions. Connected with fire of purpose and passion. At one or two he was often alive and vigorous. Some families do not care what children want. For most, the King was killed early. No King dies for good; he falls. When inner warriors are too weak to protect him (at two or three, who could expect otherwise?), he dies.
Another view: King stands for mood. Child’s mood (play, stay, be loony) meets grownups’ bigger moods. Abusive, depressed, alcoholic, workaholic, or crazy parent’s mood is the only one that counts; others adapt and sacrifice. King is sacrificed. By twelve the child may not know his own mood. A man whose King is gone cannot decide how to spend the day; weak King asks wife or children what is right. Bly’s sweater story: wife praises purple; green fades and becomes ugly in his eyes. Some have strong King before an audience, moderate King in a small group, weak King one-to-one.
Men around forty-five projected undeveloped inner King on Jack Kennedy (Camelot), Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy. Their murders mid-career were catastrophe for that generation; some men never got back on track. Leaders need strength to carry young men’s King for a while, and longevity so the young can take it back undamaged. Reagan/Bush-era young men, in Bly’s 1990 frame, struggled to find carriers: Meese, Poindexter, Contra lies, savings-and-loan betrayal by both parties. Bly’s generation gave King to Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Bradley, Fulbright, and others who carried order and even blessing without being literal kings.
When the flesh-and-blood king falls, his plunge entangles frail Kings in the other two layers by sympathetic magic. How revive the inner King with mythology gone and no political carriers? Inwardly: attention to tiny desires, catching hints of what one really likes. William Stafford: take in the fingers the end of the golden thread. Notice turns of thought or language that please; remember at forty or fifty what sort of partner one really likes; recover childhood delights before a life of pleasing others. Mythologically: pick up a single feather from the burning breast of the Firebird. After tiny desires: long grieving over the dead inner King surrounded by dead warriors. Once recovered, the King needs feeding and honoring; each person figures that out. Women too have a King as well as a Queen (difference deferred). Yeats: twenty minutes in touch with the Sacred King worth all prior labor (“That I was blessed, and could bless”).
Robert Moore: the King who blesses, encourages creativity, and orders by presence has a darker twin who curses young men, discourages creativity, and establishes disorder by presence alone. Day with night; healing and poisonous plants. Sacred King and Poisoned King both send radiance down: Arthur and Herod in the political world. If Herod sees a bit of male creativity, he moves to kill the young men. Twisted King and Whole King coexist as some traditions hold Devil brother to Christ. Deduce: every man meets Destructive Brutal Warrior and Constructive Warrior, Dark Trickster and Playful Trickster; Snow White girls meet Poisoning and Nourishing Queen; Greek myth holds Petrifying and Enlivening Athena. Two streams: Blessing King into Churchill, Twisted King into Stalin.
Michael Meade’s African story (partly told earlier): father and son hunt; father catches a rat; son throws the “rat” (occupation) away; father axes him; son wakes, takes clothes at night, leaves. After a long walk in the dark he finds a village asleep except the chief in a brightly lit central hut. Chief: “Can you keep a secret? I had a son killed in battle; I want you to be my son.” Mentor in this world, or Sacred King in the other. The boy agrees, passes tests, sits in the royal hut. One day the first father appears: “I want my son back.” The father problem is not settled. Sooner or later each person must deal again with the axe side.
Kafka, Metamorphosis: son wakes as shelled bug; crawls under bed; father returns unexpectedly and throws an apple that dents the shell and damages the soft interior. Garden-of-Eden apple moves the scene from psychology into mythology: malignant Jehovah-scale shaming. In “The Judgment,” the aged father changes size: baby playing with the watch chain while carried; then leaps and touches the ceiling; claims the son’s best friend; condemns the son to death by drowning; authority so great the son obeys at once, saying as he slips over the bridge, “Dear parents, I loved you all the same.”
Each father inherits thousands of years of cunning fatherhood. Apparently weak fathers control by silence. Alcoholism can be Napoleonic rule by economical means. The Destructive Father does not give energy; he draws it into a black hole, as tyrants draw from citizens. Grimm “The Six Swans”: father, lost and cowardly, agrees to marry the witch’s daughter to get out; he let evil into the house. One’s own father, through cowardice or fear, may have arranged disasters before birth.
Men’s gatherings: rage at the axe-father lasting twenty minutes; men locate the blow (left head, between shoulders, down through the crown, groin). Stories of sarcasm, brutality, coldness, “You’ll never be half the man I am,” abandonment with a hint of murder. Ability to see the axe side is admirable; getting caught there is the risk. Hillman: if an event from age twelve still hurts, it is the thought that is hurting you now.
Other men feel strong blood tie, treat discipline as minor, tell of generous supporting fathers who praised and protected and initiated as best they could without old initiators. The first group hears whitewash; it may not be. Psychological thinking toward the father can bring forgiveness, humor, symbolic subtlety, compassion: see how little love he got, take childhood traumas into account. It rarely enlarges him; it shows what he could not help but do, leaves him same size or smaller, more acceptable and less original. There is no right single move; no father good all the way. Two streams flow into physical kings and into fathers.
Diminish the father to sitcom absurdity and there is no place for him in the story. Insist he was only evil shamer and fall into victimhood with no place for yourself. Mythology lets one see the dark side vividly and lifts private trance into a great story so suffering is not only personal. Virgin Mary’s radiance shows purity and sweetness in a woman; Baba Yaga, Kali, Durga show violence, strength, openness to death. Sacred King / Arthur radiance shows bravery and generosity in one’s father; Poisoned Fathers (Herod, Cronos, Stalin, Thornbush Cock Giant) show devouring hunger, fear of death, insistence that everyone live in disorder.
Hunger for the Blessing King makes people want to leap over the father and live with the King now. It appears one cannot move there until the axe-father is dealt with. Children visit the King; adults make a place where the King can visit them.
Inquire what rooms exist in the head for one’s own father. Grudging sitcom respect yields a rundown apartment: sagging door, plastic curtains, rotten food, demons of suspicion, paintings of Pinochet and Jesse Helms, black dogs on the radiator. First job in a country like the U.S.: redo, clean, widen, refurnish, honor the father’s clear helpful side. Men who simply love their fathers find this easy (Washington on the wall).
Men who know only the positive side need a whole room for the twisted, secretive, destructive, vulgar, shadowy side, even if he was a hero to others. Alaska conference: young man about twenty-five whose policeman father was killed on duty; mother pedestalized him; years later old policeman friends told stories of cheating at cards, drinking, women: gift through stories that made the father human.
Sons who always knew the cruel side furnish the dark room easily: Kafka’s Letter to My Father bound in leather, poison darts, Jim Beam wallpaper, Cronos headboard. Widening that room means increasing capacity for horror, life-hatred, tyranny, jealousy, murderousness, as Blake did with Urizen (curses, tombstone tablets, hands writing thou-shalt-nots): an extra room on the father’s apartment. That same son must build a second room for the generous blessed side. Father’s friends help when humor and generosity were hidden from wife and children: great dancer in youth; saved a man from prison silently; “your father was the only one who read books during the Depression.” Build against selective memory and a culture that wants unfairness to the father’s masculine side, self-serving readings of generosity, monster assumptions. For some: find the grave and lie on it howling a long time.
Without both rooms furnished, living or dead father cannot move in. Men who have both rooms can think of inviting a mentor (who also needs two rooms). The King is a man of the world; he will not live in cheap one-room apartments. After the mentor, invite the King into refurbished mentor rooms. God, male or female, is said to have two sides and will not live with a person who has not made space for King, mentor, and father’s blessed and poisoned sides.
| Room work | Who needs it most | Furnishings Bly names | Risk if skipped |
|---|---|---|---|
| Blessing / clear side | Sons who know only cruelty or sitcom ridicule | Helpful deeds, friends’ stories, Washington, books in the Depression | No place for father; King will not visit |
| Poisoned / axe side | Sons with pedestal or only-light fathers | Kafka letter, Cronos, Urizen, Jim Beam, card-cheat stories | Idealization; shadow returns as suspicion of all older men |
| Mentor suite | Those who finished both father rooms | Two rooms again for the mentor’s streams | Premature King-hunger; short kitchen visits only |
| King visit | Adults who made space | Place where King visits them (not child’s leap) | Addiction as fake long stay; ashes relapse |
Each child begins in the womb as female; the fetus chosen to be male goes through hundreds of changes before birth. John Layard: old tradition holds a stone female while attached to mountainside or bedrock; male when moved and set up alone. Easter Island and Stonehenge stones as male. Every father is set apart: from wife and from children. Bly’s Aran Island lines to his father: farther out than granite cliffs, wanted even farther, “at the edge of all human feeling.” Most want the father close and also already at that edge.
Mythology is full of bad fathers: son-swallower, remote adventurer, possessive jealous giant. Good fathering of the wanted kind is rare in fairy tale and myth. No good fathers in major Greek mythology; very few in the Hebrew Bible. Uranus, Cronos, Zeus: three styles of horrendous fatherhood. Abraham willing to sacrifice Isaac; Jacob good to Joseph, not clearly to the other eleven, and did not protect Joseph from brothers. Few close chummy father-son bonds in mythological literature. Arthur radiates generosity as uncle, initiator, guide of young men, not as father. Possibly sons never get the closeness they want from fathers. Layard: male symbolizes that which is set apart.
Bly speaks to young men who want from the father a repetition of mother’s affection or missing female nurturing. Whatever the father gives will not be the same closeness. Some men must accept a non-close father relationship. In many traditional cultures men older than the father teach nurturing. Old men’s nurturing builds on mother’s warmth and singing, then earth as teacher (hunt, cold, wind), then male nurturing and vision. Women experience set-apartness too when developing a masculine side as adults.
Father’s birth gift: a black overcoat around the soul, sheathing of intensity, shrewdness, desire to penetrate, liveliness, impulse, daring; contributes to love of knowledge, action, and honoring the world of things. Old men’s gift is another thing. Naming father’s gifts matters in a belittling time.
Sons and daughters in the United States still feel “too little father,” and that is probably not going to get better. Fathers themselves have not changed so much; they seem smaller because we do not see behind or through them the Blessed or Destructive King. Opaque fathers; Sacred King farther away; eyesight poor.
When the mythological layer collapses and political kings fall, patriarchy as a positive force is over. Sun and moon energies can no longer get down to earth. Ancient Celtic image for the end of patriarchy: eagles on top branches of the sacred tree, dead animals under claws; rotting flesh falls through branches; swine eat below. We are the swine. When all meat from above is rotten, neither sons nor daughters receive the true meat. Women’s complaints about earthly food are right; men are not well fed either. Dissatisfaction is structural starvation. That does not imply rebuilding patriarchy; it implies understanding that we are starving. The harder the King visit, the hungrier everyone is. Perceived absence of the father is actually absence of the King. Addiction, Bly closes, does not have to do with Colombian drug lords, but with the absence of the King. Men and women have been separated from the King many times before. The story’s next move waits in Chapter Five.
The boy has already given hair to the soul, made a road toward it, dropped into ashes, and briefly visited the King’s chambers. Stopping here would leave the feminine out of the initiation. The maternal form he has known since before birth; what remains is the feminine in its powerful, blossoming, savvy, wild, instigating, erotic, playful form. On the earth plane she is the savvy woman. On the mythological plane fairy stories name her the Woman Who Loves Gold or the Woman with Golden Hair; Russians call her the Female Tsar; Celts sometimes call her the Track of the Moon on the Water.
Celtic thought distinguishes two yin forms: earthly and starry/moonlike/sunlike. The old Mabinogion tale Culhwch and Olwen preserves the split. Culhwch’s mother goes mad in pregnancy, then in terror of pigs gives birth among the sow pens: one yin form is the sow-mother (Demeter also linked to pigs). The second form, more erotic and spiritual, Celts associate with water and moon. Olwen means Path the Moon Takes on the Water: standing on shore looking at that shifting road, one cannot tell water from moon. The image catches the elusive, reflective, private, shape-changing, buoyant, silvery mood of the savvy feminine. Moon draws light from sun, so Silver Woman and Woman Who Loves Gold are not contradictory.
In ordinary life a man meets the maternal feminine at birth (before birth, in fact); bonding quality depends on the mother. Many later meetings with the feminine arrive in school years. The story ignores those early meetings. Often both leave with less consciousness than before. Bly points to John Cheever’s “The Chaste Clarissa.”
The King scolds the cook for taking such a boy into service and orders him fired. The cook has pity and exchanges him for the gardener’s boy. Now the work is plants, watering, hoe and spade, wind and weather. One summer day, alone and hot, he pulls off the head covering. Sun touches the golden hair; beams blaze into the bedroom of the King’s daughter. She leaps up, spies him, calls: “Boy, bring me a batch of flowers!”
He replaces the tarboosh, picks wild flowers, ties a bunch. The gardener meets him on the stairs and scolds: ordinary flowers for the King’s daughter? Pick the best and most beautiful. The boy refuses: wild flowers have stronger fragrance and will please her more. In her room she orders the headthing off; he claims mange and will not dare. She grabs and yanks; golden hair tumbles magnificent around his shoulders. He runs; she holds his arm and gives a handful of gold coins. He puts no stock in them and gives them to the gardener for the children to play with. Second day: more wild flowers; she reaches for the hat; he holds with both hands; coins again; he refuses and gives them away. Third day: same pattern; she cannot get the hat off; he will not accept the coins.
One August-ish day he reveals the gold head to the sky only for a moment. The Princess does not see the head itself. In a detail Bly praises as Shakespeare-worthy, sunlight bounces off the gold, then up to the wall of the second-floor chamber. Swedes call such spots of light moving on a wall a sun-cat. The sun takes part in her first glimpse; the Princess meets the man with gold hair, and the gold head also meets the sun. Hair kept hidden until now does something. He senses being seen and replaces the cap, but too late. This is the Greek kairos: exactly the right moment for what lay hidden in fate to be revealed.
The geometrical path (sun → hair → wall → her eyes) is magnificent indirection involving solar light: sacred intellect again, this time associated with woman. Lorca: “Woman who can kill two roosters in one second, / Woman who isn’t afraid of light…” Mood is playfulness of light. If alchemical themes appeared when the boy carried crude metals upstairs for the “brief wedding,” alchemical wittiness continues here. Mercury/Hermes watches alchemy; this garden scene, light shooting about like a ball of mercury one tries in vain to grasp, is mercurial: witty, astonishing, playful, serious, delighting in leaps.
Many men remember a fateful meeting that arrived by coincidence: telephone number falling from a wallet, wrong restaurant, stumble over the curb together, same book at the library checkout, dogs’ leashes entangled, fight over who should do a shared task. Coincidence, simultaneity, serendipity, synchronicity, light: something belonging to the “other world.” This “woman” has some connection with that world.
Indirection of light opens the meeting; wild flowers, retained covering, and refused coins set the garden’s ethics.
Assignment to garden work opens the mythological walled garden: a place marked out, separated from farmyard, grain field, forest, or desert, so human beings can cultivate precious plants. Inside the walls, rare roses, unusual grains, Persian pear shoots, new apple varieties, climbing vines develop by intent.
European medieval walled gardens drew traits from Persia, Arabia, and the Near East: geometrical beds, curiously shaped central fountains, strange association with alchemy. Alchemical texts show a stone fountain three or four feet high over a well, sills carrying water to the four directions: the fons mercurialis, Mercury’s Well or Well of Hermes. Greek Hermes has ancient connection with walled gardens and all that is enclosed by intent. A can of peaches is still “hermetically sealed.” Hermes guides containers and boundaried places set aside for inward work: nun’s cloister, meditation room, deep well, niche for a god, relationship meant to cultivate a holy tree, closed tomb, lover’s room, philosopher’s study, alchemist’s vessel.
Universities were once walled gardens; people of fifty still leave business and enroll in medieval studies, sometimes moving into college rooms. Throughout Latin and later Italian, French, and Spanish literature, the hortus conclusus set poems; a good poem itself is private, enigmatic, mysterious. Twentieth-century critics call Montale, Mallarmé, and Celan hermetic. Hopkins’s “Heaven-Haven” (subtitle: “A Nun Takes the Veil”) makes poem-sounds into a walled garden: springs that do not fail, no sharp hail, a few lilies, out of the swing of the sea. Entering the garden escapes the world’s rain of blows and finds temporary shelter. Renaissance northern gardens kept the mood of the ordered courtyard of the classical Roman house.
If sexually abused in childhood, or raised in any “dysfunctional family,” a person sooner or later needs a heaven-haven; the story says each of us needs it. The walled garden shelters recovery from broken trust. In Grimm Allerleirauh (Rough Animal Skins), the garden takes the form of a hollow tree where the heroine, coated in rough furs, lives for a time. The garden also develops introversion. Rilke (Bly’s translation): too alone and not alone enough to make every moment holy; wanting one’s own will toward action, and in silent times when something is coming near, wanting to be with those who know secret things or else alone.
In the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new metals form as old ones melt. Lead of depression melts into grief. Drive for success (insistent tin) joins Aphrodite’s copper and makes bronze, good for both shields and images of the gods. Enclosed garden suggests cultivation against rawness, boundaries against unbounded sociability, soul concerns against outer obsessions, passion against raw sexuality, growth of soul desire against generalized greed. Lorca’s rose was not searching for sunrise, darkness, science, or even the rose: motionless in the sky, searching for something else.
Garden work means coming out of basement space into wind and weather: seeds, seasons, falling leaves, bulbs. Roethke’s leaf-life study (beetles, newts, lice, bacterial creepers cleaning wounds) belongs here. Manure alters into leaves, roses, apples; disasters need not all be blamed as one’s own fault. Work continues “in the darkness,” but darkness now resembles black earth.
In the garden, soul and nature marry. When cultivation is loved more than excitement, one is ready to start. Yearning and longing (strangely un-American feelings) and tiny desires are the garden way: how lovers behave. Trysting lovers in medieval literature (Tristram and Isolde) meet there; one might meet a young girl, a wise old man, or the King walking “in the cool of the day.” Arab love poetry is thick with gardens. Al-Muntafil’s mole on Ahmad’s cheek as rose-garden whose gardener is an Abyssinian calls up the dark man who belongs in the garden. Most significant soul events take place in the Garden Not Open to Everyone. Enclosed garden encourages true desire for the infinite more than greed for objects; all true desire is dangerous. Ibn Hazm: secret meeting reaches intensity open meeting cannot; delight mixed with danger, like walking on shifting sand-hills. Contained love can turn solids to liquids and liquids to air; heat of Eros is delight mixed with danger.
Initiation asks every young man at a certain point to become a lover: develop the lover from seed to flower. Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and other Renaissance accounts show young men taking two or three years to learn lover’s craft (musical instrument for heart resonance, poems by heart, setting them to music, singing to introverted women behind iron bars). Garden work with longing in it. Modern graduate school absorbs those years instead.
Robert Moore’s phrase appreciative consciousness names the lover’s nature: harmonies of strings, sunlight on a leaf, grace of wind, folds of a curtain open the garden of love at unexpected moments. After falling in love, leaf, phrase, shoulder look better; even abandoned small-town main streets become lovable. Praise belongs to lovers. When a man falls in love with a woman or a man, he is in the garden. Rumi: Come to the Garden in spring… If you do not come, these do not matter. If you do come, these do not matter.
Garden work may begin by accident: illness confining someone to a room for weeks; an accident. Thoreau chose cabin and Walden Pond and said he had fallen in love with a shrub oak. Some men begin by rising at 5 A.M. and keeping an hour before work, resisting the insistence that life belongs only to job, children, and marriage. Making a garden means attention to boundaries that keep caretaking from occupying all time. Marian Woodman: addiction to perfection amounts to having no garden; anxiety to be perfect withers vegetation. Shame keeps people from cultivating; the deeply shamed pull out weeds and flowers alike because so many feelings seem defective. Good question for garden makers: what do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers? Rilke again: no matter how deeply I go down into myself, my God is dark, like a webbing of a hundred roots that drink in silence.
What is it like for an ordinary boy to meet the Woman Who Loves Gold? Bly recalls a man who, at fifteen, worked as a Catskills busboy. A tall, blond, beautiful, self-contained, high-cheekboned sixteen-year-old walked into the dining room; it was over in a moment. He and equally moved friends never talked to her. After work they discussed who spoke to her, what she wore at breakfast, who sat at her table. Her inaccessible beauty made them feel like hicks, inarticulate clods, matter-ridden louts; she was above matter. Three weeks of morning fever; summer ended; she left. Only one event in the summer.
She was not the Woman with Golden Hair, but the boys did not know that. They saw the Track of the Moon on the Water and were deliciously confused. On her side she may lack self-esteem, be insecure, shamed, even victimized, yet the radiance on her face reads as queenly, self-possessed, golden, invulnerable. The Gold Woman in the other world sends radiance down; her beauty hooks otherworldly longing and may fit some template in genetic memory. One look and summer is complete.
If the boys had been eighteen, one might have spoken, courted, even made love, and realized she wasn’t “she.” Disappointment: “How could I have been so wrong?” He may tell her. Here Bly locates much male desperation and much female suffering. A man may repeat courting and collapse. One man about thirty-five said layer-confusion ruined his life: sees a woman across the room, knows immediately it is “She,” drops his current relationship, pursues with wild excitement; after a few months she becomes ordinary; then another radiant face; the whisper seems to say, “All who love the Woman with Golden Hair come to me.” She may not know she sends it. The whisper gives great power (men rearrange lives) that is not real power; when men leave, she feels insignificant, abandoned, powerless. A generation earlier, millions of American men gave that longing to Marilyn Monroe; she offered to take it and died from it.
Glory of the Sacred King drifts down to public leader and to a father who can receive it. Glory of the Woman with Golden Hair drifts from eternal luminous space onto Marilyn Monroe or Meryl Streep, then onto a sixteen-year-old in a Catskills resort. Under the invulnerable face is an ordinary human girl, highly vulnerable, pulled by impersonal ruthless forces.
Twelfth- and thirteenth-century troubadours, instructed by Muslim religious intelligence, wrote to the Golden Woman and kept planes clear by describing her as “the wife of the Lord of the Castle”: secrecy and containment built in. Lords’ wives were savvy and knew soul desire was being served; some women (Countess of Dia) became troubadour poets and looked through a man to a luminous figure behind him, as men poets did with women. An ancient Greek seeing Zeus energy would never say “That man is Zeus”; mythology distinguished layers. Now that mythology has collapsed, contemporary men again and again confuse a living woman with the Woman Who Has Golden Hair. A living woman with stomach, small intestine, and a disturbed childhood is not the woman of light. A person who discreetly farts in an elevator is not a divine being, and a man needs to know this.
Falling in love with a radiant face across the room may mean soul work is due. Instead of pursuing her alone away from her husband, go alone yourself: mountain cabin for three months, write poetry, canoe, dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble. Bly is not saying romantic love is always illusion to be discounted. The matter is delicate. Robert Johnson, often accurate, may suspect romantic love too much. Another Jungian mistake: adopting the “hideous word” anima and treating every good-looking woman as one’s anima. When a man says “You are my anima,” she should scream and run. The word has neither the greatness of the Woman with Golden Hair nor the greatness of an ordinary woman who wants to be loved as a woman.
A woman never met who appears in dream may mean the Woman with Golden Hair is approaching (Bly’s poem “A Dream of an Afternoon with a Woman I Did Not Know”). John Fowles said The French Lieutenant’s Woman sprang from ten seconds of dream: woman, face partly scarfed, at the end of a dock in a storm; Streep enacted it; later scenes show the Mysterious Hidden Woman loving privacy, overhanging trees, long skirts, shadowy places under bridges, low light. One intense sexual storm in a hay barn means more to her than three years of tepid lovemaking; she wants passion and purpose, carrying desire between erotic feeling and religious intensity.
Dante, who knew Provençal troubadours to his toes, wrote of a woman conscious of what she carried: savvy, not naïve. Bly’s version of the sonnet: ecstatic love in her eyes; whatever she looks at grows less worldly; men turn and tremble; self-absorption leaves ahead of her; praise to the first who glimpsed her; her smile brings a presence he cannot speak of or keep in remembrance.
Maud Gonne visited the Yeats house when W. B. Yeats was eighteen. That was it. Poems, public speaking for her, love and proposals for thirty years until he decided to marry an ordinary woman; even then she stayed in his head. “Memory”: charm and face in vain because mountain grass keeps the form where the mountain hare has lain. Wild mountain hares; connection to wildness. The boy in Iron John: wild flowers would please her more.
As political king and personal fathers receive radiance from the Sacred King, so Maud Gonne and every living woman receive radiance from the Holy Feminine or Gold Woman. “The feminine” is not interchangeable with “a woman.” Women participate in the feminine as water in a jar participates in light passing through it. Kabir: jar of water set down on water has water inside and outside. Femaleness is abundant as ocean or sunlight, endless, beyond jars, yet caught here and there: sometimes in women’s bodies, sometimes in men’s. Each body holds only a taste. Blake: the naked woman’s body is a portion of eternity too great for the eye of man. In the story the jar appears as the King’s daughter.
Why is initiation incomplete without her? Bly’s offer: every person is on the road from the Law to the Legends. Legends stand for the moist, swampish, wild, untamed: watery beside the dryness of Law. Twenty years to understand the Laws; a whole lifetime to get from there to the Legends. Law: commandments that keep us alive, which side of the road, gravity, not breathing water, not murdering over a slight, canon against self-slaughter, prudence and politeness, control of madness. Some stay with the rules. Yeats on scholars: shuffle, cough in ink, wear the carpet, think what others think; what would they think if their Catullus walked that way?
The boy walks toward Legends: golden ball talk with the Wild Man, departure with him. Celtic tales: bird with human head telling of a shaggy horse that carries a youth to the ocean and down, loaves thrown to dragons at the right moment. Motion from Saint George toward the dragon.
John Layard: when a man is ready for a decisive move toward the Legends, a feminine figure whose face looks both ways may appear in dreams: one face toward rule and laws, one toward dragonish desire, moistness, wildness, adult manhood. Not flesh-and-blood; luminous eternal: the Woman with Golden Hair. Bly guesses something similar for women (male figure looking both ways) and admits he is guessing; women know more. Russians call her the Tsar Who Is Also a Woman; Woman Attracted by Gold; or any name you invent. If she could be named once for all, as the Tao Te Ching says, she would not be the real luminous being.
After the Woman Who Sees Both Ways appears, the man can see Law-world and Legends-world with more precision because she can see them. Plot moves faster. In getting life’s plot moving she resembles Hindu Shakti more than the Western feminine imagined as receptive and passive. Shakti in Indian paintings: erect, instigating, up-leaping, fiery, outrageous; Shiva nearby on the ground or under her feet, apparently asleep: receptive, cool, laid back, deep inside himself. Relation to Mary Magdalene deserves study: impulse to cause trouble, throw spark into dry wood, pull energy from stagnant psyche, stir the sea with a single hair. Machado, from Arab and Persian culture: sooner or later the preoccupied man sits by the road; whole life becomes time and attitudes of despair while waiting; but She will not fail to arrive.
| Figure / name | Plane | Function in Ch. 5 |
|---|---|---|
| Sow-mother / Demeter | Earthly yin | Maternal, pig-linked fertility; Culhwch’s birth pens |
| Olwen / Moon-track | Starry / watery yin | Private, reflective, shape-changing savvy feminine |
| Woman Who Loves Gold | Mythic / eternal | Instigates; related to Sacred King; likes gold; knows |
| King’s daughter | Tale / earth | Jar that holds a taste of ocean; sun-cat meeting |
| Shakti | Hindu parallel | Erect, fiery plot-mover; not passive Western “feminine” |
| Anima (Jungian) | Clinic jargon Bly rejects | Neither Gold Woman nor ordinary woman; scream and run |
| Hermes / Mercury | Alchemical / wit | Kairos, wild flowers, coin-giving; softens stuck gender |
Saturn is god of ashes: lethargic, depressed, cinder-biting, right to worship when ashes are the season. Dense, condensed, heavy, driven; discipline in lucky men, sour bitterness in unlucky; god of correct failure.
Hermes is god of the interior nervous system: heavenly wit. In his field, messages pass with fantastic speed between brain and fingertips, heart and tear ducts, genitals and eyes, suffering and laughter. Mercury cannot be held: rolls, separates into tiny drops, joins again, falls, rolls under the table, amazing quickness: quicksilver. Northern Europe: Odin; Italy: Mercury; Greece: Hermes. Day: Wednesday / mercredi.
When friends talk in a closed room and heat rises (witty things, contributions from all sides, imaginative leaps, genuinely spiritual an instant after genuinely obscene), Hermes has arrived. At a beautiful moment silence falls that feels mysterious; until the fifteenth century Spain called it Hermes’ silence (López-Pedraza). Old tradition: true learning does not take place unless Hermes is present. Depressing news for university English, sociology, and religion departments that get rid of Hermes teachers first. The whole Ph.D. system, Bly charges, was created by Germanic Hermes-killers. Hermes is magical, detail-loving, obscene, dancelike, goofy, not on a career track.
Hermes slips true information in the split second between starting a word and finishing it. Plan “This is my mother,” say “This is my wife” (Bly did; mother looked pleased). Plan “farther,” get “father.” What people call a Freudian slip is Hermes precision. He punctures pomposity, piety, sureness, self-satisfaction.
Hermes has been active in the garden: choosing the instant for the headcloth to come off, sending the ray into the Princess’s room at the right second, choosing wild flowers over tame, giving away the gold coins. All this sun work is his. Planet Mercury is nearest the sun: closest relative. Alchemists knew mercury liquefies gold and silver. Masculine and feminine can both become stuck and stiff; Mercury softens so each can flow. In Hermes’ presence, flow between masculine and feminine in the story begins.
The young man, Iron John’s student, receives a multiple blessing: from Aphrodite (another name for the Woman Who Loves Gold) and from Hermes. They get along; surviving Greek sculptures show Aphrodite running fingers through Hermes’ hair. Not every god-goddess pair works (Hera and Zeus). Hermes and Aphrodite together modeled the hermaphrodite: a soul union of Hermes in a man with Aphrodite in a woman, or the other way around.
She pulls off the tarboosh knowing what the King did not. She gives gold coins for wild flowers; each time he says he will give them to the gardener’s children to play with. Implication: whatever one receives in the garden is to be given away. The head covering needs to remain on. A woman may be too eager for a young man to show his gold. In general the public wants artists to show gold immediately. Iron John implies caution: do not show paintings through the twenties, or publish a book too early. If, like Keats, you will die at twenty-five, timing differs. For those who have agreed to live longer: put the head covering on; say of the coins, give them to the gardener’s children.
Hermes with wells and walls arranges the garden (Hopkins again: where no storms come, green swell in havens dumb, out of the swing of the sea). Iron John wants the young man to experience the garden. Once the garden, which may take ten years to develop, has been experienced, the young man has begun to honor his own soul, learned to become a lover, and learned to dance.
Celtic motto Michael Meade recalls: “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.” Outer warrior training (Marines) skips that provision. This chapter begins with the inner warrior: boundary defense, not invasion.
Interior warriors in American men have grown weak; weakness shows as naïveté and missing boundaries. A six-foot grown man lets another cross his psychic house, verbally abuse him, carry treasures out, slam the door; he stands with an ingratiating, confused smile.
In a “dysfunctional” family (Bly doubts there is any other kind), interior warriors die early. Mythologically warriors lift swords to defend the King; in a child the King stands for and stands up for the child’s mood. Parental mood overruns the child’s; when warriors cannot protect mood or body, they collapse, go into trance, or die.
Inner warriors do not cross boundaries aggressively; they defend them. Model: Ireland’s Fianna, out all spring and summer watching borders, in for winter. A typical child has no such protection: slap, force-fed food, shouted-through auditory boundaries, territory invaded whenever a parent wishes. The crying child is carried away, mood included.
Each child lives in a psychic house or soul castle and deserves sovereignty inside it. Ignoring that sovereignty produces anger and shame: the sense of being unworthy and inadequate. Bly cites Gershen Kauffman (Shame) and Merle Fossum and Marilyn Mason (Facing Shame) on family shame systems. A slap across the face pierces deeply: the face is the soul’s boundary. Sexual boundary crossing kills warriors; one invasion or beating usually leads to another; revived warriors die again.
Alcoholic family: warriors swept downriver; unprotected child shares more with snow geese than people. Bly’s poem: geese on Dakotah snows; drunken father pulls the boy inside; boy breaks free, spends the night eating with geese among broken stalks. Teenager later seeks single rooms, maternal women, gurus, systems, withdrawals, “nonattachment”; at thirty or thirty-five still unprotected, unable to defend against others enraged at their own unprotection.
Every adult or older sibling who wants entry gets it: doorknob on the outside. Improper maternal intimacies, paternal belittling, sexual fondling, incest (physical or psychic). Early death of warriors may keep the boy from growing up and may stunt the female in the boy: Dickens’s horrendous childhood, Bly suggests, shows in sentimental girlish female characters as projections of an unprotected interior man.
Identification with victimhood keeps the soul house open for more invasions. Most American men, Bly claims, lack enough living warriors to defend soul houses; most people of either sex do not know what genuine outward or inward warriors look or feel like.
Georges Dumézil: Indo-European civilization rests on three soil layers: King, Warrior, Farmer. Three ceremonies, three ways of life, three sets of gods.
| Culture | King / Queen | Warrior | Farmer / fertility |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rome | Jupiter | Mars | Quirinus |
| Greece | Zeus and Hera | Ares | Dionysus and Ariadne |
| Northern Europe | Odin | Thor | Frey and Freya |
Agricultural vision: fecundity, abundance, nourishment, health, peace, sensual gratification (nineteenth-century fertility obsession with gods). Royal vision: sovereignty, political parenthood, the sacred and how to administer it (Chapter Four). Warrior vision (middle layer): combat and force in combat. If Dumézil is right, roughly one-third of Indo-European vision, brain, DNA instinct, and thought is warrior thought. Sobering, Bly says.
Robert Moore: for men the warrior is hardwired, not software. Plenty of warrior already; question is honor it consciously or unconsciously. Old warrior-mode philosophers imagine opposites (straight/crooked, long/short). Extroverted warrior men (Patton): steel on steel, holiness of battlefield as black-seeded field is holy to the farmer, adrenaline, noble death.
Quality of true warrior: service to a purpose greater than himself, mythologically a True King. Corrupt King (Ollie North’s case in Bly’s frame) or no King (service to greed or power) → not warrior but soldier.
Aztecs (~A.D. 1200) lifted warrior caste above kingly caste among Toltec inheritance: organizational novelty that, Bly says, doomed Aztec culture. Japanese pond story: inhabitants elect a heron (warrior-associated) as King after losing theirs; heron eats everyone in the pond.
In service to a True King, body becomes hardworking servant: cold, heat, pain, wounds, hunger, sleeplessness. Examples: finish the Ph.D. and footnotes; endure obnoxious chairs; live sparsely like Ralph Nader; write under one dangling bulb like T. S. Eliot; clean endlessly like Saint Francis or Mother Teresa; endure exile like Sakharov. Clawed hand takes the comfort-loving baby; adult warrior inhabits the body.
How can complicated culture live without strong warrior energy? Outward warriors inside some women are today strong, sometimes stronger than in men: society recently encouraged women as warriors while discouraging warriorhood in boys and men.
Meade: strategy is essential (cunning, worldliness, intelligence). Soldier impulse: attack giant or witch head-on. Warrior devises strategy: boy enters giant’s forest beating a small drum, claims to lead ten thousand small men with tiny hammers who will knock out the giant’s brains in sleep; giants love sleep and fear small things; deal follows. Witty strategy is warrior vision.
Neil Forsythe, The Old Enemy: Satan and the Combat Myth: physical warrior (Roland, Joan of Arc, Patton) loves the battlefield; Holy Warrior loves the field of good and evil. Ancient literature (Ramayana) describes invisible battles more than human battlefields.
Marduk epic: enemy Tiamat = chaotic sea forces (female-toned chaos); Humbaba = male-toned chaos. Christian texts call chaotic forces Satan (male tone): holy battle as two brothers, Christ and Satan. Milton (outward-warrior qualities; lost eyesight in verbal battle after Charles I’s execution) imagined eternal warriorhood in Paradise Lost; loved good/evil battlefield as Patton loved North Africa tanks.
Persians: Ahura Mazda (Warrior of Light) vs Ahriman (Destructive Spirit). Judaism: Yahweh as Warrior of Light, Satan as Darkness. Author of Job: dark side inside Yahweh; Job glimpses “monstrous and fearful side of God” (Forsythe). Eternal Battle: God vs Enemy, or war between halves of God; humans feel these wars inside.
Machado (Bly trans.): every man fights two battles: with god in dreams, with the sea when awake.
Sacred King and Queen live in the Luminous Realm near Dionysus and Jesus; Holy Warrior also lives there, hardwired into the universe. Battle against chaos, sea, greedy giants, Great Mother, Great Titan Father, dwarfs, devils: never ends. Judaism adopted Jehovah Warrior God rather than King God; Judeo-Christian inheritance: tightened muscles, armor-covered chests of the Warrior Who Fights Forever.
Sacred Warrior has blessed and poisoned sides; earthly warriors mirror that: self-sacrificing fighter for a cause beyond self vs madman soldier, rape, pillage, napalm over villages. Holy Warrior invades as hurricane energy; moves behind flesh, alters moods, makes body do what the power wants.
Each whirlwind force (Wild Man, Warrior, King) imagined as a large claw taking the human baby through the wall into the other world. Viking berserk (bear-shirted): journey and return; folklore: warrior sleeps at home while a huge bear fights on the battlefield; wound on bear’s right paw → wound on sleeper’s right hand. Celtic and Viking literature: warriors who went “too far”; community cooled them and reintroduced them carefully. Modern practice: let warriors go berserk, then discharge them into the streets.
Knowledge of warriorhood’s dark and positive sides has been lost; warrior image collapsed in all three worlds. Blake on Milton: really wanted Satan to win; for old mythologists, massive betrayal. Industrial people romanticize chaos, perhaps wanting it to loosen rigid lives. India still exults in Krishna’s victories; Bali temples act Ramayana daily; West prefers Woody Allen, humor, fines for noncompliance. Iran’s recent history: humorless fundamentalism will not replace missing imagination. Muslim holy warriorhood reduced to Iran-Iraq war; Arthurian imaginative wars concretized into “Cold War.”
When Holy Warrior falls, he entangles the other two warrior layers. Chivalry (eleventh and twelfth centuries, Arabic and Persian sources) tried to sustain warrior ideal toward elegance, compassion, sacrifice, partnership. As late as eighteenth-century Italy, warrior language included lover images.
Terry Dobson (aikido) found Jean de Brueil (1465): battle as joyous; love in battle; tears; sweet joy of loyalty; delight so strong one fears nothing. Lover and warrior mingling: mostly gone. Physical warrior disintegrated into soldier under mechanized warfare.
Some date conscious warrior’s end to late Civil War slaughter (Grant stayed drunk). Ypres 1915: one hundred thousand young men dead in one day without seeing the machine gunners. Remainder vanished with Dresden, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, B-52 rice-field bombings in Vietnam. Contemporary war made aggression’s heat seem disgraceful; Ares absent. Vietnam veterans: entered serving a warrior god, returned godless. Old saw “Women hate war but love the warrior” no longer holds in the West: warrior, soldier, murderer often undistinguished. A Russian woman from Kiev to Bly: men of her generation who left for Moscow’s defense never came back; U.S. women’s anger at male aggression looks different if you have been invaded.
Result: disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanized war and abandoned by high-tech culture, fading in American men; fading contributes to collapse of civilized society. Man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children. Poisoned warriors (drug lords) recruit among kingless, warriorless boys. Ypres finishes outward warrior (1915); within about thirty years, interior warriors weaken: outer and inner worlds connected; history is serious.
Kingdom swept by war. King gathers forces, unsure against a powerful enemy. Gardener’s boy: grown now, will go to war if given a horse. Men laugh: look in the stable after we leave; we’ll leave a horse. He finds a lame three-legged horse, rides hippity-hop to the dark forest, calls Iron John three times.
Wild Man: what do you want? Strong war-horse for war. “You will receive that, and more than you have asked for.” Stableboy leads a snorting war-horse; large band of warriors entirely clothed in iron, swords shining. Boy turns over the nag, mounts, rides at their head. Near battlefield: King’s men nearly defeated. Boy and iron band gallop like a hurricane, strike all who oppose, pursue to the last man. Then, instead of returning to the King, roundabout back to the forest; returns horse and men; rides hoppity-hop home.
King returns; daughter congratulates. King: not me, a strange knight and band. Who? Unknown; last seen pursuing. Daughter asks gardener about his boy; gardener laughs: just home on three-legged nag; farm help mock “Moopygoop,” ask if he was under a lilac bush; boy claims he fought well, if he hadn’t been there who knows; they fall over laughing.
If fairy-story characters make one psyche, our psyche has been invaded. Battle appears not because invasion happened yesterday, but because the gardener’s boy realizes invasion and intensification. When change heats the psyche, heat attracts demons, sleeping complexes, bitter enemies. Meditation groups: two or three good weeks, then landlady kicks out, filling falls, laundry lost, car broken into: renewed invasion.
Who invades? During college, career, longing for purity, a mysterious force was invading. Twenties danger-voice: change now or too late. Bly at about thirty described invader as python: ape in bamboo smells python; grave moves from ambush through leaf tunnels; shining thing inside shakes bars; may be gone before we wake. Invaded country and invader; spiritually hopeful and dangerously hostile; dove-part and toothed-part of soul (Vallejo: what if after so many wings the stopped bird doesn’t survive).
King is losing; center cannot protect territory; soul no longer partnered or in harmonium (Wallace Stevens). Enemy may feel like chaos or part of own soul: “The lion and the honeycomb”; bees make honey in the hostile lion’s dead body. Time for the warrior to learn to fight: pursue to the end, no halfway measures. Wolf who swallowed the six kids must be killed; nothing about therapy for the wolf. Inner work, decisive attitude; else wolf keeps eating “kids.”
Religious ritual space: what is “killed” transforms. Mithraic initiation: priest stabs bull; novice says, as the God kills the bull, I kill my own passions. Cave painting of bull execution rotates to reverse: wine (blood transformed) and wheat from the dead bull. Egypt: wheat sprouts from earth on Osiris’s dead body. Expect wheat, corn, or honey from these “bodies.” First: boy’s initiation into warrior intensities; right to be in contact with the enemy; passivity or hiring an expert won’t do. Enemy in the story is never named.
Figure. Tale path: shame-nag → Wild Man → iron horse and band → total pursuit → gifts returned; public remains “Moopygoop.”
Three-legged horse demands interpretation. Four: complete: four-gated city, four directions, four rivers of Paradise, four seasons, four letters of the Holy Name, four horses of the sun carriage, four strings of the sistrum. Rhyme: one sorrow, two mirth, three wedding, four birth. Three falls short: three-gated city weaker; dawn/noon/sunset without night; fall/winter/summer without spring farmers need.
Horse associations: ocean waves, the dead, thunder, male sexual energy, Great Mother (Lady Godiva), glory and kingship, Apocalypse horses. Horse vs rider: animal side, body, instincts; rider = intelligence, intellect, mind.
Bly reads the fourth leg as a shamed leg: animal body crippled by shame; hobbledehoy walks because of it. Shame sources: parents shaming for control; addicted parents’ side effect; peers dumping shame; unanswered request to a parent; ingesting a shame-bound parent; sexual or physical invasion (five minutes → thirty years); false personality to please parents; irritable teachers, manic priests, internalized perfectionist. Each drop increases commitment to isolation; secret meetings of apology, submission, resentment, collaboration.
Tiny child: four-legged horse in sensual gallop. By twelve in this culture, at least one leg crippled by shame, dysfunctional household or not. At twelve, no one knows how to heal it. Story: bring the horse to an older man, mentor, or imaginatively to the Wild Man. Take the nag the “older boys” left; ride to forest edge; ask for a better horse. Must return it; even a few minutes on an uncrippled horse is worth it. Swedish version: four-legged horse rises from the earth. Here: from forest with fifty or so armed men, spears shining; their iron matters.
Work can prevent further shaming and recover connection to the earlier four-legged horse. “I will give you what you ask, and more.”
Twelfth- and thirteenth-century Tibetan monasteries: novices line a corridor; master walking between shouts (“What was Buddha’s face before he was born?”); high-spirited replies; adrenaline; thought-strings tightened; brain as falcon hunting.
Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy): fate of combative teaching in the West. Medieval angel debates (ridiculed now) were, Henri Corbin shows, battles between Aristotle and Avicenna over soul matters: existence of the imaginal world as third realm between spirit and body (Avicenna yes, Aristotle no). Combative debates survive in some European universities, almost ceased in American ones. Men without family tradition of lively argument feel overwhelmed; some men and women dislike competitive fierceness; pity for the loser dulls combat joy. Loss: when playful verbal combat disappears, warriorhood reduces to wrestling, football, martial arts, guerrilla war, blood-and-guts movies.
Science and literature advance by ritual generational battle: Eliot drives Browning from the poetic-monologue field; New Criticism vs historical criticism; thirties leftist criticism vs New Criticism. Generational warrior impulse propels literature, breaks language bones, keeps flow. Ortega y Gasset: combat among astronomical thinkers from a century before Galileo; Renaissance science adopted generational struggle and still uses it. Blake’s mental fight against Newton: sword will not sleep until Jerusalem is built in England’s green land.
Warrior ideals in business: Japanese study of self-sacrificial warrior duty since shoguns strengthened responsibility toward employees. U.S. nineteenth-century owners so little duty that unions had to protect workers; contemporary executives move lightly company to company, vote bonuses before bankruptcy, sell out retirement funds: not building Jerusalem. Few strong taxpayer swords against those outrages, S&L greed, or campaigners’ refusal to debate.
Earlier: man literally unable to extend arm holding even a wooden sword. Collapse of warrior = sword thrown away. Many good men since: if given a sword, would break it or stick it in earth and walk away.
More than one American man needs a sword to cut adult soul from mother-bound soul. Australian Aboriginal initiators use that sword to cut the psychic umbilical. Edge cuts clinging from love, boyish bravado from manly firmness, passive-aggression from fierceness. Tibetans: Vajra sword; without it, no spiritual life and no adult life.
Also needed to cut self-pity: victimhood inattentively joined in childhood trance by molester, brutal sibling, violent parent; Siamese-twin bond to self-pity, resentment, depression, low self-esteem, passivity, rage.
Greeks admired Pelasgian creation myth, older than Olympian: egg floating on ocean; sword cuts egg in two; Eros was inside. No sword, no Eros: parent’s love for child, man’s for woman, woman’s for man, bee’s for hive, worshipper’s for God: none without the sword.
History of creation as history of discriminations: Divine Cutter / Logos divides matter into heavy and light; light into Fire and Air; heavy into Earth and Water; earth into mainland and island; water into salt and fresh; on into minute particulars landscape painters love. Different feel from “God created Heaven and Earth.” Pythagoras: tracks of the Cutter into the invisible are pairs of opposites everywhere (right/left, straight/crooked, male/female, limited/unlimited, moving/resting).
Jung, “Seven Sermons to the Dead”: hawk remains hawk among owls; humans are suggestible and lose distinction in “the masses” (Fascism). Gnostic Pleroma: enormous abundance and enormous indistinction. Men and women should aim for distinction consciously. Gender-distinctiveness debate: Pelasgian implication is that “prodigious complexity” in nature and culture depends on love of distinctiveness.
Conscious fighting helps men and women. Jung: “American marriages are the saddest in the whole world, because the man does all his fighting at the office.”
Toe-to-toe: man often does not know what he wants; wants conflict to end from fear, inability, disbelief in fighting, never seeing fruitful parental fight, or boundaries so poor every thrust reaches a tender chest. Shouts of rage mean warriors failed to protect the chest; lances already in; too late.
Meade: both partners identify family-line weapons. Woman may inherit short dagger (unexpected) and spiked mace (late swing onto foot soldier’s head). Husband: broad sword swung in fright in large circles (“never,” “always,” “You always talk like your mother”) plus slender witticism spear. Doorway lance: argument over, partner leaving for work, “By the way…” pins them to the doorframe.
Name which weapons each plans to use in the coming fight; preliminary talk welcomes both warriors into the house. Good fight clarifies; Bly thinks women long to fight and be with men who fight well. Unconscious unnamed weapons: both stumble; interior children badly wounded.
Trained adult warrior in both sexes: receive blow without sulking or collapsing; fight for limited goals; keep combat rules; keep fighting clean; establish limits.
Marie-Louise von Franz story: friend destroyed marriages with damaging fits; new husband, after honeymoon poison, turns pale, says nothing, packs upstairs. “I know I am supposed to act like a man now and shout and hit you, but I am not that sort of man. I will not allow anyone to talk to me that way, and I am leaving.” She asks him to stay; he stays; marriage continues. Bly: imperfect (fair argument deserves staying to fight); von Franz’s “fit” implies possession past the human line into Kali’s realm; men cross that line too. Inner warrior tells which side of the human line the partner is on.
Marion Woodman, The Ravaged Bridegroom: anger from personal level, rage from archetypal core; rage of both sexes from centuries of abuse; taken into relationships it destroys; attacking in possession is not liberation. Interior warriors help fight on the human plane; only soldiers or shamed children inside → constant damaging battles.
Soldiers beside Iron John’s horse are “clothed in iron.” Iron → Mars/Ares; related to blood (red inside iron). Ancients: magnetic iron (sky-gods, fallen from heavens) vs ordinary iron (earthly dark gods, Set who kills Osiris). Astrology: iron governs Mars. Lucky when found on the road; horseshoes against evil; nails in cradles and childbirth beds; scissors hidden in bed. Blake: iron with intellect and spiritual warfare. Fairy tales: benevolent Father-Spirit as small men in iron. Boy brings to battlefield: horseshoes, magnetic iron, blood, Mars, sky-gods, Father-Spirit, intellectual fight.
Warriorhood so far linked to: self-sacrifice and service to King; intellectual combat; clean marital fighting; Vajra sharpness cutting inappropriate joins. After sword and Logos-Knife: less needy, readier for Pythagorean opposites.
Feeling too young for dangerous space between male and female, or for fierce tension of straight/crooked? Messed-up family child feels ghastly tension (addicted/clean parent; cold angry father / warm mother; or reverse). Easy then to give up iron work for copper work: become professional bridge, conductor of the good conducting metal.
Copper begins early: one hand on father’s wrathful chest, other on earth; or mother’s anguished heart and earth; or adult’s isolated head and earth. Boy values himself for current through the body, quiet reply grounding wrath, arms stretched to each pole. Parents talk through the child: alcoholic father’s shame east, dependent mother’s anxiety west; fury and contempt meet in the chest. Copper conducts with little resistance; boy doesn’t heat up; female suffering flows through with little heat (girls, Bly suspects, heat a little more). Son loses distinctiveness as man; daughter becomes bridge, not woman. Adulthood offers more bridging jobs.
Last forty years: conduction popular; sense of not being shamefully narrow, something for everyone; to keep illusion of limited-and-unlimited, child-and-bridge, flesh-and-copper, ignore odd-hour perceptions.
Grown copper man: hand on furious wife’s crown, other on earth; public apologist conducting centuries of justified female fury through his body. As fathers lose warrior touch, modeling beyond copper bridge vanishes. Gathering refrain: “My father never stood up to my mother, and I’m still angry about that.” Sometimes father needed only to say firmly “Enough!” to verbal abuse. If neither parent limits the other’s rage or “loss of temper,” children become copper wires.
More copper → neither alive nor dead: amorphous, demasculinized, half-alive psychic conductor. Woman sometimes channels rage of dozens of dead women who could not speak; conducting that rage is dangerous. Conducting charm and niceness also dangerous: occupational copper poisoning for ministers, therapists, priests (like lead for factory workers). Ministers channel comfort at expense of risk and solitude; bury longing for harsh zany male companionship; bury a minister made mostly of copper.
Conductors often from longing for comfort, peace in the house, padded swords, protective coloration (quail in fall reeds), not from bravery. Conducting male/female currents ≠ androgyny. Hermaphrodite (alchemy) possible on inner plane after years of distinctiveness, cutting, opposites; false androgyny via early conduction usually has neither Hermes nor Aphrodite present.
Difficult subject. Early feminists demanded men conduct more anger for them; women tired of being copper for men’s domination fantasies; Bly suspects early feminists did not notice how much conduction men were already doing.
Copper-wire childhood costs playfulness. Older: suspicion of all merging. Romantic love merges; examine, do not simply reject. Examine mergings: molester/victim, tyrant/citizen, company/employee, church/worshipper, decade/style, group mind/personal mind, husband/wife.
Chekhov, “The Darling”: woman married to theater producer talks audiences and musical comedy; widowed, marries lumber merchant, talks two-by-fours and oak joists; then veterinary surgeon, hoof-and-mouth and hog cholera; then attached to his small son, unfair principals and playground life. Boy in sleep: “I’ve given it to you! Get away! Shut up!” Parallel story writable for a man adapting feeling-wise to wife after wife. Some merging beautiful; some not. Truth-telling child must learn “Get away! Shut up!” Intuition tells appropriate/inappropriate; warrior teaches boundary-holding. Non-copper mode: boundaries kept, relationship alive. Frost: something doesn’t love a wall; boundary ≠ wall; marriage can hold valid views on each side without merging into one.
Frost “Home Burial”: after they bury their infant son (Robert digs the grave), Elinor hates how he dug and how he speaks; “A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead” / “You can’t because you don’t know how”; gravel leaping in air; “Who is that man?”; “A man must partly give up being a man / With women-folk.” Bly loves Frost for sustaining tension between man and woman with neither attitude simply wrong, but different.
Two possibilities toward opposites: bridge with Aphrodite’s metal (copper), or live in the opposites without coming down hard on one side.
Living between: recognize and rejoice that opposites exist. Pythagoras’s pairs: male/female, light/dark, one/many, odd/even. Stretch arms, push opposites far apart, live in resonating space. Not: man chooses male role and treats female as enemy. Catholic Inquisition: identified with one side of pagan/Christian; disaster. Ascetic men as “spiritual warriors” remain angry at women lifelong. Recent decades: some women identify with female pole, everything bad male, everything good female.
Rejoicing: push apart with imagination, enjoy music from each side (sit between sitar and tabla). Flamenco: defender/attacker, attractor/refuser, woman/man, red/red; separate magnetic charges; nations defending borders; warriors in extravagant fierce eaglelike passion.
Ares’s sister Eris (Discord) lends Paris the golden apple: give to the goddess he likes best. Hera (Rooted Earth Energy), Aphrodite (Erotic Joy), Athena (Ecstatic Spiritual Knowledge). Eris: “Choose!” Most pretend not to hear. Choosing one leaves two angry; serious act; ends well for chooser, not for rejected divinities.
“I want it all” / “Go for it”: greed, naïveté, love of the unlimited; want events to choose. Richard Wilbur on Quixote at a crossing: lest he lose purity of chance, lets the horse choose; head light with pride, horse’s shoes heavy, headed for the barn.
Choosing a goddess ≠ identifying with one pole. Question: what you really love. Eris: choose what you want and pay for it. Life’s desire; warrior agrees to unpleasant labors. Same for a woman. Warrior gives permission to live in suffering. Yeats in old age: all men live in suffering, upper road or low, rower or weaver. Suffering: difficult tasks for desire, and painful awareness of roads not taken.
Passion urges choice of “the one precious thing” and payment through poverty, conflict, deprivation, labor, anger from rejected divinities. Lover loves and names the precious thing; warrior in Rembrandt or Mirabai agrees to endure. Yeshiva student may find sexuality’s goddess attacks; Sakharov chose → Establishment hostility, children’s rejection, exile to Gorky.
Medieval alchemists made much of Paris among the goddesses. Sixteenth-century woodcut (Edward Edinger, Anatomy of the Psyche): near Paris and goddesses, a king lies asleep; at the instant Paris indicates choice with wand, the king wakes. Choose the one precious thing → inner King asleep for years wakes. Conductor years burying iron under copper bridges: King had no choice but sleep. Nothing clear, conductor-or-human unchosen: King and Queen sleep on. Paris’s choice is fierce: marks one life-road from another.
New Age addiction to harmony: alchemical woodcut says the child will not become adult until it breaks harmony addiction, chooses the one precious thing, enters joyful participation in the world’s tensions.
After the tale’s battle: boy naïve in one less way; knows what a sword is. Battle happens over and over: find three-legged horse; ride to forest; ask Wild Man for whole horse; without anger join the world’s tensions. Each good use of warrior: less fighting battles than awakening the King.
Reviving interior warriors takes years; imaginative more than physical. Fianna loved Ireland enough to defend borders: what do we love well enough to want it defended?
Protecting boundaries and King = get doorknob on the inside. Age alone does not do it. Man at thirty-five or forty-five may still trance when a hand fumbles the outside knob. Warrior’s job: break the trance; learn marks of trance and who throws us into it. More honor to inner warriors → more warning when someone rattles the knob.
Ask warriors’ intuition to smell shamers → gain shrewdness; lose some boyish naïveté and optimism about human nature; no longer possessed by wounded six-year-old (who may still need nurture and defense). Example after a talk: “I liked your talk, except for one thing. Would you like to know what it was?” Warrior says no → possible answer: “I don’t think I’ll be shamed by you today, if that’s all right with you.” No stick needed; sometimes speaking the word shame holds the boundary; person looks shocked, denies intention.
Protecting the inner house: replace some copper with iron. Grimm “Maid Maleen”: unprotected Maleen and maidservant advised to eat nettles (iron source): accept thorns with rose, live in scarcity, do the unpleasant, avoid talk of how things might be better. Talking about reality brings iron. Practical anti-bridge move: become conscious of conduction in the moment; naming moves it toward communication. “I don’t think I’ll be a conductor for you any longer.”
Inner warriorship = soul alertness protecting against copper-wire fate, shamers, unconscious swordsmen, hostile people, greedy interior beings. Odyssey: suitors inside want to marry the soul; toothy plans for your life. Refuse to lift a sword → high marks for gentleness, possible slavery to suitors or arranged wedding. Wilbur again: head light with pride, horse headed for the barn. Culture too: if it does not take warrior energy in consciously, discipline and honor it, energy turns up as street gangs, wife beating, drug violence, brutality to children, aimless murder.
Major task of contemporary men: reimagine warrior value in relationships, literary study, thought, emotion, now that eternal and outward warrior images no longer model it. Closing question for what follows warrior intensities: doesn’t energy that loves to fight need to learn to play all over again? How?
Society, Bly says, produces a plentiful supply of boys and fewer and fewer men. New Guinea tribes force boys toward manhood through cunning, heated austerities that may move too fast for a solid man. Industrial culture sits at the opposite pole: no conscious ideas about how to produce men; the process runs unconsciously while attention goes to Wall Street and hope for the best.
Michael Ventura, “The Age of Endarkenment” (Whole Earth Review): adolescent music, fashion, words, and codes announce that the initiatory moment has come; those extravagances request a response. Tribal adults did not flee puberty; they celebrated it with holy terror, secret rituals focusing the tribe’s light and darkness, mystery, questions, and stories. Adults had something to teach: stories, skills, magic, dances, visions, rituals. Without that learning, the tribe could not survive. Tribal culture satisfied craving while supplying need; that meeting is called initiation. Often by age fifteen a tribal youth could take a fully responsible adult place.
For about forty years, Ventura argues, the young have generated forms that prolong the initiatory moment, hoping to be initiated by chance. It does not happen: Mick Jagger ages and adults still offer no response. Prolongation plus adult silence, Ventura says, has everything to do with the massive U.S. drug market. Bly’s provisional answer: know more about initiation; at least think.
Initiation is spherical; any sequence is linear and therefore incomplete. With that warning, Bly lays out five stages:
Iron John fits roughly as adult mentor reconnecting the boy to greatness and the Gold Head, and as Wild Man whose waters the boy may drink. Having abandoned initiation, the culture struggles to lead boys toward manhood. Mythologically the Great Father in primitive form and the Great Mother in primitive form both block the path; ignorance of initiation and dismissal of its value remain the main cause of many boys and few men.
A personal father who draws down the Sacred King’s blessing, orderly, creative side can help a son through stages joyfully. The Twisted or Poisoned King also descends through fathers: Blake’s phrase, he “lays his curse on the fairest joys,” damaging generativity, self-esteem, and sexuality so the son is blocked from the garden. Physical and psychic incest by fathers belong here (Chapter Four).
The Great Mother’s positive side sends acceptance, nourishing, praise, courage. Her Twisted side is also hurricane energy: clawed hand through the wall, sometimes removing the human mother and leaving only the mechanical grandmother-pattern. The story compresses possessiveness into one sentence: steal the key from under the mother’s pillow.
Marian Woodman: distinguish the conscious mother, aware of power over son or daughter, from the unconscious mother, who runs Great Mother programs and barely distinguishes partnership from domination. The Twisted Great Mother does not curse like the Twisted King; she holds. She does not want the boy to grow up and leave her territory.
Celtic “Culhwch and Olwen”: Mabon imprisoned under water; salmon hear him weeping night and day. Culhwch cannot finish tasks until Mabon is rescued, which requires bringing down Eidoel, finding the Great Salmon, and so on. The underwater boy is the young male caught in habitual Great Mother possessiveness. The personal mother does not jail him; she wants him free. The possessive or primitive Great Mother, to whom the personal mother is receptive or transparent, keeps the lock.
Russian “The Maiden Tsar”: merchant’s son Ivan loses his mother young; father remarries. Stepmother is fairy-tale code for the Poisoned Great Mother. Disturbing fact: she has fallen in love with Ivan: Great Mother inappropriately loves the uninitiated boy. Father travels; hired tutor takes Ivan fishing. Golden-haired Maiden-Who-Is-Also-a-Tsar greets him and promises return. Stepmother gets the tutor drunk, learns the plan, gives him a pin for Ivan’s collar. Ships arrive; pin goes in; Ivan sleeps through the meeting that mattered for bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman. Tutor pulls the pin; Ivan wakes unmarked. Growth stops without a scar.
Tutor (nominally male) and stepmother (nominally female) do the bad-news work together. “Tutor” implicates an educational system that puts boys and girls to sleep through graduate school, in collusion with the dark Great Mother. Deconstruction essays, Bly quips, are written by people with pins in their necks. Colleges call themselves Alma Mater; negative matter in materialism puts nations to sleep. Woodman calls the pin a false phallus near the head: intellectual conversations from the rationalist unconscious mother with a teenage son; blessing sometimes, high mental tower years later. Feeling-level union can imprison under water where the salmon hear weeping.
Culture rightly attends to men’s physical incest with daughters and somewhat to father-daughter psychic incest. Rising reports of sons’ sexual abuse by mothers, fathers, uncles, older brothers get some notice; psychic incest between mother and son still gets little seriousness.
Mari Sandoz, These Were the Sioux: after about age seven, a Sioux boy never looked his mother in the eyes. Requests went through a sister; repaired sandals returned by circuitous route. Direct eye contact with “Here is your new T-shirt, all washed” can exchange sexual energy. Precautions look absurd, unheard of, inhuman to industrial ears; Sioux men, once grown, were famous for lack of fear with women, uninhibited tepee talk, ease in sexual conversation with wives. Sioux women, Bly reads, were more aware of mother-son psychic incest possibilities than contemporary culture is.
American mothers sometimes confide adult private-life details to small sons. Frank disclosure can beat silence; it harms when the son feels he must do something. Kitchen vow: “Mama, when I’m grown up, I’m going to have a big house for you, and you’ll never have to work again.” Twenty to thirty percent of boys now live with no adult male present; most speak those words silently or openly. Psychic incest is not confined to single-parent homes.
Two trends converge: culture’s increasing emphasis on the adult man’s inadequacy and absurdity, and women’s increased awareness of interior emotional richness (the European novel teaching reservoirs of impulse no ordinary mortal man can meet). Hope for change and fulfillment falls on young sons. Who could “his woman” be?
Hundreds of men at forty or forty-five have told Bly their lifelong task was substitute husband, lover, and soul companion for the mother: white knight for womankind. Asked how they feel about men: “I have never been able to trust them.” Nowhere near stage-two father bonding; they would never trust the Wild Man enough to go off on his shoulders.
Called on too early, the boy feels helpless: emotional energy too fragmented, male confidence too unsteady to replace the father. He feels failure toward a father he barely knows; when he does not save the mother, failure toward her as well: double failure.
One must say these truths without Freud’s wrong over-blame of the mother. Initiatory tradition (of which Freud knew little) lays primary responsibility on men, especially older men and ritual elders: they are to call the boys away. When they do not, the possessive Great Mother starts imprisonment even when the personal mother does not want negative holding. Mothers often do not see it; boys do.
From shame over inadequacy and fear of being pulled to the mother’s side before male stabilization, inexplicable anger rises and blocks the mother’s dream of a delicate man. Teenage ugly talk in the kitchen is private heavy-metal; later forms include isolation, workaholism, thoughtless Don Juan or James Bond who rip off women sexually and demean or shoot them. High expectations that stop initiation at the earliest stage: “the stepmother falling in love with Ivan.”
Loss of Greek mythology and relegation of fairy tales to children leave mothers shrewd about the Sacred King’s dark side and naïve about the Great Mother’s. Alert women asked for Great Mother adjectives offered nourishing, moist, accepting, earthy, passionate, non-judgmental, gentle, supportive, loving; no one said unconscious. Men need reminders how hard conscious fatherhood is; women how hard conscious motherhood is. Exceptions abound; not every mother asks for rescue.
When the son is called too early, the one thing he did wrong is that he didn’t save his mother. Father may be in shame; son is in guilt (he should have been able). Traditional distinction: shame = sense of being utterly inadequate, probably irreparable; guilt = one wrong act that can be atoned. Some sons feel both.
Orestes, pursued by Furious Invisible Women after killing his mother, bites off a finger and throws it; some black Furies turn white and leave him. Traditional guilt strategy: bite off one body part and throw it behind. A man in guilt may decide to fail the first half of life: punishment for not saving mother. Hate a profession until fifty; marry “the wrong woman”; become impotent; become a compulsive seducer who never meets real needs; become a therapist who rescues women forever, listening to others’ emotions after biting off his own. If the tale’s horse did that, it would bite off one of its own legs.
Unable to get the key from under the mother’s pillow: perhaps loved mother too much or worried too long. Unable to descend into ashes or enter the garden: perhaps loved father too much or worried too long. Not all move as fast as Iron John’s student. Men who love neither parent, or who were severely beaten, abused, or abandoned: suffering deeper than most can imagine. Outcome Bly names: cold-hearted survivalist in the Idaho of the mind with dogs and an AK-47; Pacific-island fighter years after the war; masculine beauty withheld; rigid boundaries, angry boy, dead King, robot soldiers; hemispheres not communing; feelings not rising into words; wife-beating or traffic-light violence in fifteen seconds, deepening despair. Mother did not protect from father; father did not protect from mother. Exit from monotonous aggression (personal and national, after the cold war’s collapse): bring the three-legged horse to a male mother in this world or the eternal world and receive a four-legged horse.
The young man, luckier than most, has passed ashes, garden, and battle. He rode a whole horse from Iron John, returned it, rode the hobbledehoy home to stable-boy jeers, and knows what he accomplished. Why not end? Because warrior ecstasy of service, midbrain furies, and adrenaline blood flow are not enough when the man can only imagine persons or countries as enemies. Men as brilliant as Savonarola, Ignatius of Loyola, Karl Marx, Patton, Nietzsche, and Ibsen have stuck in warrior mode. Warrior’s poisoned side: brutality, pillage, unconditional surrender, mindless killing, wife-beating, rape, betrayal of the King’s human values. Men invigorated by warrior energy need to modulate out. Release from aggression has not yet appeared.
The King’s daughter is curious about the mysterious knight who saved the kingdom and suspects the gardener’s boy. The King arranges a three-day festival; she will throw the golden apple; perhaps the knight will appear.
Three details demand attention: golden apples, the festival’s curious nature, the insisted sequence of three horse colors.
*Three successive days: Iron John outfits the boy in red, then white, then black; only on the black horse does the chase produce the revealing wound.
Golden apples mark special space or time: ritual. Paris’s apple among Hera, Athena, Aphrodite; Greek Adonis-sacrifice youths given a golden apple as passport to paradise. Paradise in ancient Persian: walled space; Celts imagined an apple orchard in the West where death is. Halloween bobbing for apples when the dead return; ritual banquets began with the egg of the East and ended with the apple of the West. Slice an apple transversely: dark pips show the sacred pentangle; secret sign for the Holy Woman or Sophia. Apple = earth; pentangle = secret configuration; Sophia as soul of the earth. Hint: the Woman Who Loves Gold has chosen the boy to be a Sacred King.
Natural that the story pass into ritual space. Knights do not fight here; fighting belonged to the last section. No javelins, pierced armor, intestine wounds, arms off at the shoulder. Change asked in warrior expression: modulate out of aggression through display, form, and ritual. Young men display beauty in procession; “luck” decides who gets the apple.
Victor Turner recovered almost-forgotten ritual space. Humans enter and leave over a ceremonial threshold or limen (liminal space). Preparation of person and place sets it apart; inside, time and space differ from the profane. Transformation happens only in ritual space. Enter over a threshold; the space must be heated. Stay briefly (as in Sufi ritual dance), then return to ordinary dullness or sloppiness.
Catholic Latin mass remembered ritual space; Protestantism, with exceptions, spread ignorance of it worldwide. Two mistakes in a forgetful age: provide no ritual space and remain “cool”; or stay too long. Some fundamentalists insist on forty years inside with no exit and no sloppy humanness. No ritual space → soft clay; too long → cracked pot, overbaked and blackened.
Dionysus founded Greek theater; Dionysian initiation used exquisitely maintained ritual space; Greek tragic theater transfers that space to a public event. In ritual space, desire energy does not rush toward climax (orgasm or battle); delight replaces fury; turn of phrase or symbol replaces turn of the sword. Men and women meet the unknown man or woman inside. Beautiful detail: King and daughter institute the festival because they wanted to know who the mysterious knight was.
Indian and Tibetan lovemaking sometimes stays inside heated ritual space: elaborate ceremony; pair joins sexually without orgasm for two, three, or four hours; man visualizes goddesses in the woman’s eyes, woman visualizes gods in his; they ride instincts as on a horse that holds them in ritual space against a lifetime’s plunge toward goals. Enjoying ritual space is intimate and imaginative: enclosed in a bowl or basket. Morris Berman: museums show hard axes and spears as early culture; culture likely begins with soft reed baskets that hold emptiness. Interior emptiness has its own shape. Ordinary life fills longing; ritual space teaches experiencing emptiness or longing without filling it.
Such a man can be near innocence without moving to intercourse, enjoy fierceness without acting it out, know mother’s neediness without moving to satisfy it, enjoy sacred warrior beauty without battle. In the festival each knight joins a parade with no violence: slows speed, gives grace, bows to King and Queen, pushes no boundaries, offers no hostility, is there to be seen. Graceful display moves the Princess to throw the apple at the right moment.
Biologists once read heron and goose dances as practical fertility/survival. Extensive observation of herons, deer, geese, peacocks: some dances have no particular survival value; they are display, beauty and expressiveness with zany grace. Humans display at the front (face); white-tailed deer display at both ends. Display activates watchers; events are meant to be seen.
Culture allows macho strutting and main-street cruising in pre-warrior or warrior stages; gangs show much of it. Adolescent fire, Bly says, but not festival display. Ritual space carries the young man out of machismo, battle, dominator fantasy. Blake’s highest consciousness: constant creativity, “The Shining City of Art.” Golden apple opens the paradise of form. Knights participate in display as love of form and beauty: closer to art than strutting; led from war toward community.
Old Celtic warrior (Cuchulain) returning from battle: community ritual; women (mother among them) bare breasts to awaken compassion; men place him, still midbrain-mad, into three tubs of water. First vanishes on contact; second boils away. Vietnam asked men to become soldiers; no compassion ceremonies, no heat acknowledgment, no honoring of requested madness. Veterans would be better, Bly claims, if every small town held a festival where veterans rode by and a young woman threw golden apples: return to domestic life inside ceremonies thousands of years old. Instead: flown to New York and dumped. More Vietnam men have committed suicide since the war than died during it. The black wall in Washington remedies and testifies: army’s lack of imagination; reckless forgetting of warrior-to-nonwarrior change. City adolescents meet battle intensities with jail or averted eyes; nothing received; adolescent suicide rises; soon a black wall for ritual failures with the young.
Between battle and festival the boy again rides the hobbledehoy to the forest (strange barn horses would be noticed). Three-legged horse = body with one shamed leg; he exchanges it three more times for a whole horse and rides to display without shame. Heron, peacock, deer express absence of shame. Blake: “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God.” Contemporary man in Kmart, church basement, or lawyer’s office has no Iron John for a four-legged horse; he must return the borrow, yet the experience teaches what pride is.
Interior warriors, between battle and festival, have grown strong enough that he need not hide in corners and haystacks; he can appear publicly, parade with men, call for the apple. Friend’s story: father fled in shame when the son was five; son carried abandonment shame for years; in his twenties spent ten years in Japan studying martial arts with a strong mentor; only then could return and take rightful family place. Without a supportive father ≈ to be in shame; support from substitute father (martial mentor / Iron John). Only when interior warriors are strong enough comes joy of display and delight of form. Shapeless clothing, sloppy verse, chaotic furnishings link secretly to shame. The universe is not ashamed and delights in form: sun, moon, leaves as displays. Poetry is display: vowel and consonant peacock tail; meter as dance for a being in the other world. Bly’s fragment: “Body, Thomas, the codfish’s psalm. The gaiety / Of form lies in the labor of its playfulness.”
Delight in form moves away from hero/enemy, right/wrong dualities. In ritual space actions are meant to be seen; display pulls energy that would otherwise go to conflict. Infinitive to win fades; infinitive to be seen replaces it. Space heated by Holy Feminine and King becomes hot enough for change. Warriorhood that was neither repressed nor skipped can modulate into beauty, delight, display, and art.
Iron John gives different colored horse, saddle, and armor on three days; information rides in the colors. Snow White’s queen: ebony frame, snow, three drops of blood; child white as snow, red as blood, black as the frame. Hero or heroine who sees red blood from a black raven on white snow sinks into yogic trance: red, black, white held vast power through the Middle Ages.
Victor Turner (Ritual Process, A Forest of Symbols) on Ndembu (Zambia) and related African associations; European parallels via Barbara Walker and others:
| Color | Ndembu / Ashanti (Turner) | European overlays (Bly) |
|---|---|---|
| Red | Birth blood, menstrual blood, weapon blood; Ashanti: red earth, earth cults, war, witchcraft, sacrifice | “Blood-red thread of life” (Walker); anger (“saw red”); bull rages |
| White | Semen, saliva, water, milk, rivers, sea, priesthood; seamless web of living and dead; health, fellowship, “white laughter” | Blessing, milk, good fellowship; children’s and brides’ purity; white knight for Virgin and good |
| Black | Charcoal, river mud, black fruits; badness, corpse, suffering, disease, night; mystical/ritual death; death of passion and hostility; “to die” = end a stage toward maturity | Death, mourning, black mood; left-hand path; alchemy’s prima materia, lead, Osiris in the underworld |
Turner: no fixed correlation of colors to sexes; situational, though white may lean masculine (semen) and red feminine, with reversals (white pullet = life; red cock = death/witchcraft).
Three roads share the colors but not the order:
If the young woman begins in white innocence or confirmation dress, the boy begins in red, color of Mars. Gisu and Masai initiators lead young moran men immediately into red: flare up, fight, see red, get into trouble; express pride, arrogance, antisocial quarrel, friendship with anger. Girls encourage fights; an elder guides so wounds are not fatal. A man may stay red ten or fifteen years. Girls make love with him but will not marry him: unfinished, no respect, “too red.”
Red man: shows anger, shouts, flares like a sulfur match, flushes, fights for what is his, stops passivity, walks on the balls of his feet, red hawk, fierce. No one trusts him very far. Russian “Prince Ivan and the Firebird”: young warrior sees a feather from the burning breast of the Firebird (metaphorically red). Horse advises against picking it up; he picks it up anyway. Feather from the breast: heart-connected, burning; vocation or initiation call. Trouble coming, as the horse knew; already on the way toward black.
Middle Ages tracked Iron John’s sequence in Parsifal: leaves mother’s house (no adult men), clumsy naïve fool; almost immediately kills the Red Knight, takes the armor, becomes the Red Knight. Misunderstandings, rudeness, arrogance, antisocial behavior in Red Armor time. Without the red, no white. Contemporary compulsory education tries to move boys from childhood directly into White Knight. Sometimes a mother wants her son white when he is already red (conversely, midlife man may want his wife white and respectable when she has moved into red).
White: gleaming, shining, easy to mock, also engaged. Fights for the good; no longer randomly antisocial. Ralph Nader as white knight engaging the corporate world. Saint George on white horse in white armor engaging the dragon. Going white: relationship with the dragon, not necessarily killing it. Christian crusaders found the myth in Palestine and distorted it; in some old versions the dragon transforms into a woman or gives treasure. Old dragon: dark water-energy, a little regressed, hunger old and understandable. Celtic hero relates by throwing loaves accurately into the dragon’s mouth: precision and skill enter with white.
Danger: white knight often insufferable because he skipped red. Stuck white knights support cold war and project bad redness onto American Indians, red communists, wild women, or black men. Without lived red, they set up false wars with concretized dragons (Poverty, Drugs). Bush-Dukakis debate: sad debate of two stuck white knights; remarkably boring.
Black (third day): black horse, saddle, bridle, armor. On the black horse he makes the decisive descent into woundedness and is wounded by the King’s men. Rembrandt’s paintings darken at the edges with age; Lincoln’s photographs over his last four years show him go into black. People in black usually give up blame. Story: mother wakes Lincoln at five a.m.; son shipped sleepless to Washington, fell asleep on guard, to be shot at eight. Red Lincoln might shout the guards; white Lincoln might say rules are rules and he feels as bad as she does. Actual Lincoln: “Well, I guess shooting him wouldn’t help him much,” and signs. Humor comes in with black.
Useful takeaway if nothing else travels: young male moves from red intensity to white engagement to black humanity. Three horses ridden at various times; fall off and remount. None better than another; none should be skipped. Each gait differs; each horse shies at different things. Teachers and parents often urge skipping red; men who missed adolescent red must learn to flare and be obnoxious at forty. Ministers forcibly confined to white (skipped red; congregations refuse return) cannot go forward into black. Politicians must look white while being God-knows-what color. Anwar Sadat reached black in prison; more politicians (and poets) probably should do prison time.
Moving into black: bring shadow material projected for years onto bad men and women, communists, witches, tyrants, back inside: retrieving and eating the shadow. Robert Frost ate much shadow; greatness partly there. Marriage poem: couple in a buggy; a man steps from trees and stabs the horse to the heart; “the most unquestioning pair that ever accepted fate”; they assumed he or someone he obeyed wanted them to get down and walk the rest of the way. Black means walking the rest of the way. Long years before a man finds dark parts he threw away; retrieving them, others begin to trust him. Riding the black horse, the horse itself carries him where the King’s men wound him; golden hair falls so everyone knows who he is: next chapter’s wound.
Something is left over from the golden-apple festival: the leg wound. That afternoon the young man catches the apple again; the King’s men gallop after; one gets close enough to wound his leg with a sword tip. He escapes, but the horse’s leap knocks off his helmet, and everyone sees the golden hair. The King’s men ride home and report everything. The weight around that detail, Bly says, is half-remembered.
With Freud near, the first guess is a sexual wound: “leg” as euphemism for genitals. The most famous Arthurian wounded man, the Fisher King, carries some genital maiming. In Chrétien de Troyes, Parsifal’s female cousin explains: the King was wounded “through the two thighs,” cannot move himself, cannot mount a horse, and diverts himself by fishing from a boat; hence Fisher King. Some commentators lodge a piece of iron in the testicles. Fairy-story iron often imprisons men as glass imprisons women; sexuality here is somehow in prison. By the eleventh century, Bly suggests, Rome’s hostility to sexuality may have reached the Celtic countryside: old vulgar sexuality dismissed; the King can no longer “mount a horse.”
Because Iron John is probably pre-Christian by several centuries, Bly doubts that Fisher King anxiety maps cleanly onto this tale. The story does not suggest sexual-function anxiety. He treats the cut as a leg wound more than a “thigh” wound, and looks elsewhere.
A head, shoulder, or chest wound concentrates attention there; this new wound sends attention to the thigh and, with the story’s accumulating underworld treasures (ashes, armed men, horses), to the lower half of the body.
Grimm’s “The Water of Life”: a young man, drawing life-water for a sick father before the clock strikes twelve, passes an iron gate as twelve sounds; the slamming gate takes off a piece of his heel. Another late-story leg wound; it will slow him down. The boy’s first wound (pinched finger) sped him up; this one slows him, way down.
A wound lets spirit or soul enter. James Hillman, on Hans Castorp’s tuberculosis spot in The Magic Mountain: “Through the little hole of his wound, the immense realm of the spirit enters.” People too healthy, too determined to jog, too muscular, may use health to keep the soul out: no door. Through perfection of victory they achieve health; the soul enters through the hole of defeat.
Rumi (Mathnawi III, via Coleman Barks) gathers the teaching in the lame goat: the herd going to water leaves the lame dreamy goat at the rear; worried faces; then laughter on the return, because that goat is now the leader. “There are many different kinds of knowing. The lame goat’s kind is a branch that traces back to the roots of Presence. Learn from the lame goat, and lead the herd Home.”
The wounded leg also opens onto ritual woundings of Adonis and Attis. Sir James Frazer (The Golden Bough, especially Adonis, Attis, Osiris) maps Mediterranean and Mesopotamian cultures of Cybele, Inanna, Venus, and Isis in which the Boy-Who-Would-Be-Wounded is imagined as the Great Mother’s lover and son at once.
Easier to grasp if vegetation (flowers, grass, wheat, grapes, lettuce) was imagined as male. Modern “Earth Mother” talk often assumes vegetation female; for them it was male. Earth lives through the year; leaves fall. Earth lives forever; the vegetable world dies. Great Mother, like earth, continues; green vegetation dies in summer heat and winter cold. Religious establishments arranged boys sacrificed around June 21 and December 21 so human and natural worlds move in harmony: magic boy grows up and is cut down. People grew “Gardens of Adonis”: shallow pots, little soil, short-lived flowers (lettuce, fennel), tended about eight days, then allowed to wither and thrown into the sea with Adonis’s image, often from rooftops. Old tune: “The Gardens of Adonis last but a day.”
Names by region: Adonis, Attis, Hyacinthus, Tammuz. Uninitiated boy; no energy resource comparable to the Great Mother; he dies while she lives. Robert Graves writes much on the ritual; Bly rejects Graves’s occasional tone of a Great Mother priestess conspiracy to humiliate and sacrifice men. Men and women together, in religious longing that “what is below shall be like what is above,” prepared and carried it out. Not, for Bly, a war between men and women.
Forgotten events; historians buoyed by ancient literature make clear the death wound came from a boar. Curved moon-tusk into the genital area; fatal. Very ancient Greece: temple may have arranged a fatal boar hunt. The boar arrives from nature (floods, firefalls, wind-weather); tusk curves like breaking wave, new moon, harvester’s scythe. Tales of young men wounded by boars are thousands of years old, rooted in wild-pig and domesticated-pig layers of European culture (pig earliest domesticated animal; later sheep and cattle layers rewrote myths as the symbolic animal changed).
John Layard among Stone Age Malekula found culture still absorbed in pig and boar: symbolic and religious ideas expressed through swine; transcendence experienced through the boar. In Greece the boar acts as a holy animal.
Ovid (Metamorphoses 10, Rolfe Humphries): Adonis scorns warnings; hounds rouse a wild boar; glancing blow; boar charges; Adonis runs, falls; “the tusk entered / Deep in the groin, and the youth lay there dying / On the yellow sand.” Later Greek times: priestess or priest in boar mask with harvester’s scythe gives ritual wound to belly or genitals; boy bleeds to death. Young man may receive a golden apple before the ritual, admitting him to paradise in the West.
Barbara Walker (Woman’s Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets), whom Bly calls sober and reliable: Adonis as Greek of Semitic Adonai, castrated and sacrificed savior-god whose love-death united him with Aphrodite/Asherah/Mari; in Jerusalem, Tammuz. Anchises “gored in the groin” by Aphrodite’s boar-masked priest; severed phallus becomes Priapus/Eros. Castrating the god likened to reaping the grain Adonis personified. “Abraham” stopping “Isaac” (centuries of prior practice presumed) lands in sheep culture: a ram substituted.
At some culture-dependent time, the boar wound stops being fatal.
Bruno Bettelheim (Symbolic Wounds): aboriginal initiation; aborigines say the Great Mother instituted certain male-initiation rituals; later men took them over. When old men take a ritual over, they hold the basic ceremony but change the mood: if the old form weakened men, the new may strengthen them. Bly imagines Greek old-men initiators altering the boar ritual so sacrifice of young men stops.
The Odyssey announces that time. Odysseus’s boyhood boar hunt “with his grandfather” puts the ritual under old men’s care. Homer (Book 19; Fitzgerald): boar charges; white tusk rips flesh above the knee, misses the bone; Odysseus’s second thrust kills the beast. Two kinds of men by then: those the boar kills, and those the boar only scars. Some do not survive encounter with the negative Great Mother; some do. Under grandfathers’ care, attack leaves a scar; the man lives, and when old is cunning like Odysseus and full of knowledge.
Boar ritual begins as killing an uninitiated boy; changes into a ceremony marking a late, decisive stage of initiated ordeal. Parallel: Osiris, once son of Isis, becomes her “brother” and “husband,” contributing (Bly says) to Egypt’s stability. Odysseus, Hillman notes, is not a one-sided hero who flares and dies as a shallow flower; he honors father and warms son; mythologically he unites puer and senex.
Romans translated Odysseus as Ulixes, which some read as oulas (wound) + ischea (thigh): literally thigh wound. He receives the wound and lives; Romans felt the detail decisive. Later Book 19: Odysseus returns secretly to Ithaca, stays in the swineherd’s hut (pigs again); old nurse washes him, sees the thigh wound, knows who he is. The new sort of man is recognized through the scar on his thigh.
Distinction: boar wound that takes the boy to paradise versus boar wound that leaves a living scar. With that scar, the “old nurse” can recognize us; others see who we are; our own eyesight clears. Iron John’s King’s-men wound likely remembers an initiatory cut given by old men at a late stage. Odysseus bears such a scar and is “the thirteenth” in his band visiting Circe: initiated man.
What is a scar? Native American tradition via Lame Deer: when you die you meet the Old Hag; she eats your scars; if you have no scars she eats your eyeballs, and you are blind in the next world. Fast story; fierce defense of scars’ value. No scars means blind next world, and perhaps blind in the imaginative world now. Odysseus’s companions are crushed, eaten by Cyclops, or turned into pigs by Circe; he sees something they do not and barely lives.
Bly’s conclusion so far: the King’s-men wound is not specifically sexual; it goes farther than simple laming (though it is that too); it hints at a forgotten initiatory ritual.
| Wound type | Agent | Outcome | Function in Bly’s reading |
|---|---|---|---|
| Finger pinch (Ch. 1-2) | Cage / self-opening | Speeds; gold hair begins | First soul injury; reminder scar |
| Fisher King thighs | Battle / iron | Sexual-spiritual prison; fishing diversion | Contrast case; not Iron John’s main sense |
| Fatal boar (Adonis) | Boar / masked priest | Death; Gardens of Adonis | Uninitiated boy as Great Mother’s lover-son |
| Surviving boar (Odysseus) | Boar under grandfathers | Scar above knee; recognition by nurse | Initiated man; puer-senex union |
| King’s men leg cut | Sword tip at festival | Helmet falls; gold hair public | Late initiatory wound; second heart begins |
| Water of Life heel | Slamming iron gate | Slows locomotion | Feeling associated with slowness |
Dionysus was born from Zeus’s thigh. Destined as “A Man with Two Mothers,” Zeus’s thunderbolt ended his stay in Semele’s womb. One story: Hermes saves the unborn boy and sews him into Zeus’s thigh. Another: Zeus himself opens his thigh to provide a womb. Magical thinking, thousands of years old; notice the opening.
André Leroi-Gourhan on Dordogne cave paintings: wounded mammoth, shaman in trance, bird-headed wand amount to a study of “the wound.” Siberian sources: shaman must be a wounded man. A spear gave Christ a wound in the side before death. Leroi-Gourhan: Dordogne visual words are multiple; a drawn spear is also a phallus, so a pictured wound is also a vulva. To receive a spear is to have a vulva, or to receive a womb.
Shakespeare’s first long poem, “Venus and Adonis,” tackles the Mediterranean male-sacrifice story head-on. Venus older and hot-blooded; Adonis young, hot, unpracticed; they make love at her urging; readers who know the myth know the boar is coming. Shakespeare’s turn: the boar somehow turns the thigh into a woman’s thigh. “And nuzzling in his flank, the loving swine / Sheath’d, unaware, the tusk in his soft groin.” As if the boar is to the young man as a man is to a woman; the boar opens a sexual passage, creates a sheath; the young man receives a female opening. The “loving” boar resembles Zeus’s or Hermes’ knife: opens a wound resembling the womb in Zeus’s thigh; Dionysus remains associated with that wound.
Dionysus is the Greek god most connected with wounds and woundedness. Titans give the infant a mirror, tear him apart, eat him; he is reconstituted from the heart they overlooked. Apollo and Zeus stand for wholeness, radiance, sun-like integrity; Dionysus stands for ecstasy from tearing and being torn. Ecstatic wine comes only if the grape cluster is torn, trampled, enclosed. Village men and women tramp grapes singing “O Dionysus, I did not know, I did not know.” When cattle culture arrives, spring bull killed; raw flesh eaten while speaking “Dionysus” over and over. Ethical philosophy wants Apollo, morality, perfection; pagans want tearing and ecstasy.
W. B. Yeats, late, stages Crazy Jane against a Catholic bishop who wants sinlessness:
That is pagan and Dionysian praise of tearing. Conclusion on the leg wound: some young men, guided by old men, became more like evergreens than spring flowers. They did not die when wounded; they took a wound and survived with a scar. The Odyssey, remembering what men and women learned about Great Father and Great Mother across a vast span, announces that this sort of man is in the world.
Moreover, the King’s-men wound creates, in long human fantasy, a womb inside the male body. No one reaches adulthood without a wound to the core; the boy does not become King without it. Old tradition: women have two hearts, one in the chest and one in the womb: double-hearted. Old initiators, through a wound given in ritual space, make the young man double-hearted: physical heart plus compassionate heart. The story will show how.
Figure. Bly’s wound grammar from fatal vegetation-god sacrifice to the compassionate second heart.
Next day the King’s daughter asks the gardener about his boy. Back at work; that strange coot went to the festival and returned last night; he showed the gardener’s children three golden apples. The King calls the young man in; tarboosh back on. The daughter pulls it off; golden hair falls over his shoulders; beauty astonishes everyone.
King: Are you the knight of the different-colored horses who caught the apples each day? “I am,” he says, and hands over the apples. Look also at the wound your men gave me; and I am the knight who helped defeat the enemy. King: feats of that magnitude mean you are no gardener’s boy; who is your father? “My father is a notable King, and I have a great deal of gold, as much as I will ever need.” King acknowledges debt; offers whatever in his power. Young man: “I’d suggest that you give me your daughter as my wife.” She laughs: she likes that he does not beat around the bush; she already knew from the hair he was no gardener’s boy; she kisses him.
Time of golden hair has come. Hair fell when he was wounded; it falls again in the King’s presence. Holy moment: whatever happens in it is right. He had repeatedly re-covered his head: hide your gold when you are young. He gave away gold coins, declined public praise after battle, refused acknowledgment each apple day. Why show hair, apples, and kingdom-saving reward now?
A connection with the feminine is also right. The exclusively masculine path has ended. Iron John, a nature god, guided initiation; his teaching never aimed at masculine separation or separatism. Partnership with the feminine principle deepens from here. In nature yang and yin interweave; nature is inconceivable without mingled receptivity and initiative in snail shells, oak trees, tigers, mountains, bees.
Fairy-tale time runs faster than earth time; the man in earth years would be about fifty or older. Some flower has unfolded; golden salmon have laid eggs; descent has grounded him enough to reconnect with creativity that would have frightened him younger.
Fairy tales: each birth brings golden rings, spindles, glory-memories of a transcendent side. Family life strips that assurance; shaming or deprivation follows. Men and women live depressed, know nothing of golden thoughts, get trampled, parted from esteem. Crown locked in a chest, lost in the cellar, stolen: “We are the hollow men, alas.” If lucky, a bridge rebuilds; design and architect unknown and personal. Eventually, at fifty or fifty-five, a golden ring is felt on the finger again.
Most psychological systems, Bly claims, want no masculine grandeur: all grandeur is inflation; crowns belong in the dust. This story holds a different view. Human self-esteem is delicate, not dismissible as infantile grandiosity. Heinz Kohut’s “mirrored greatness” needs careful honoring: neither inflated nor crushed. Entirely dismissed, a man or woman is crippled and open to invasion by the group mind.
Kabir (Bly’s version): inside this clay jug are canyons and pine mountains and the maker of them; all seven oceans; hundreds of millions of stars. The young man has become friend of the Wild Man, drunk luminous water, kept connection to the King; Warrior offered a cup; Hermes sipped him from time to time. Bridge rebuilding, great-self honoring, thirst-satisfying waters: under Wild Man guidance. Time to ask who the Wild Man is.
Western connection with the Wild Man has been disturbed for centuries; fear has built up. “Every angel is dangerous,” Rilke says: some fear is appropriate; knowing nothing is not. Look for traces inside rather than only outside.
Yeats (“A Dialogue of Self and Soul”): cast out remorse; sweetness flows; laugh and sing; blest by everything. Wild Man prepares an emotional body for grief, ecstasy, and spirit; prepares matter. Sophia descended, caught in matter; findable in bark, stone, feather. Wild Man is Sophia’s friend. Rumi: “Everyone who is calm and sensible is insane.”
Fear of Wild Man qualities (spontaneity, wilderness, grief, riskiness) produces high-school principals, sociologists, businessmen, Protestant ministers, bureaucrats, therapists, even some poets and artists who recommend timidity. Men open to ashes (Bly’s diverse list: Richard Pryor, John Cassavetes, James Baldwin, Reshad Field, C. Everett Koop, Woody Allen, recent Jimmy Carter, Cesar Chavez) advise intensity, wound-awareness, impulse alertness, possibility of a fall. Russians handling ashes of incompetent industry, Gulags, Leninist madness: ideas may come because they handle ashes. United States, Bly says, still refuses ashes of agricultural policy, schools, treatment of blacks, trade deficit, environment, poverty of women and children.
Blake and Yeats as Wild Man path-masters for poetry readers: Blake’s Orc in flames; Yeats’s Cuchulain and the grand women Emer and Crazy Jane. Prefer intensity and risk of failure or insanity to the even-tempered life of the good servant; rather Hell if lively than comfortable Heaven.
Aim: not to be the Wild Man but to be in touch with him. No sane Greek said “I want to be Zeus.” American culture, Kerouac among the intelligent failures, confuses being with being-in-touch. Trying to be the Wild Man ends in early death and confusion for everyone.
The Wild Man is one member of a company. Concentrating on him alone is as foolish as concentrating on the Warrior alone. The story’s man companions feminine energy; the Wild Man interchanges with other interior beings. A whole community is what is called a grown man. Bly names seven beings so far:
Seven beings as crystalline underpinning under soul water. Upper fifty feet of male-soul water: roiled. Roles dissolved (hunting, pirating unwanted); Industrial Revolution separated man from nature and family; available jobs may harm earth; shame about being a man. Yet structure at the bottom, Bly claims, remains as firm as twenty thousand years ago; contemporary men get little help descending to it. One or two beings arrive as gifts; the others must be developed. Women’s soul waters also disturbed; women’s psyche also interweaves beings, some shared with men, some private.
Failures of imbalance:
Therapists will have understood Wild healing, Bly jokes, when they insist on doing therapy with a cow in the room.
Last scene: masculine and feminine together; original father and mother present; wedding interrupted by a strange event. Parents invited; great joy; they had given up hope of seeing their son. At the marriage-feast table, music breaks off; great doors swing open; a baronial King enters with many attendants, embraces the groom: “I am Iron John, who through an enchantment became turned into a Wild Man. You have freed me from that enchantment. All the treasure that I own will from now on belong to you.”
Looking back: the Wild Man has been slowly ascending step by step in harmony with the young man’s slow descent.
Swedish variant: initiator is an “ugly animal”; escapes; gives horses; at the wedding crawls under the bride-and-groom table and from there tells the young man what to do; at the right moment the groom touches the animal with a rusty sword; animal becomes a long-missing king. Despised and lowly becomes honored; apparently primitive becomes king. Wet, moist, foresty, ignorant, leafy Wild Man suddenly related to holy intellect and sun radiance: he is a King. Energy hidden by water among reeds becomes luminous power.
Shock of the last scene: whose story was this? Assumed the boy’s; may be the Wild Man’s. Invisible force had caged sophisticated energy in primitive form. Work for men and women: free ourselves from family cages and collective mindsets, and also release transcendent beings from imprisonment and trance. That is what the story says at the end.
Bly dislikes the inflammatory phrase “Wild Man” and fears how-to books (“I ate a bran muffin and I found the Wild Man”). Need delicacy: brush with the wingtip of the mind; do not net, tranquilize with jargon, or take home to a private zoo. Ordinary life: a mentor guides disciplines that build an emotional body capable of more than one ecstasy, not bodybuilding. Initiation is not one moment once. Australian aborigine (paraphrased): forty years of initiatory work with young men, and “I think I’m beginning to get it myself.”
Iron John’s road includes eight segments; other stories reorder or replace stages. No single right order; the round is lived lightly first, then more deeply. A stage imagined as missed may have happened unconsciously; the leg wound that gave the second heart may already have occurred; what is needed is more imagination to grasp how and when.
Male initiation, female initiation, and human initiation: men and women share a complicated initiation into human warmth with no relation to gender; this story does not treat that directly. Some initiations belong in essence to the human, some to the feminine, some to the masculine. Important, Bly insists, to say masculine without imagining a sexist word.
Geneticists, Bly reports, have “recently” found genetic DNA difference between men and women just over three percent: not much, yet present in every cell. Many contemporary men ashamed of their three percent: historical patriarchies, wars, rigidities; or fathers who failed masculine values. Some say be only human and never say masculine or feminine; Bly calls that a claim on moral high ground and asks for gentleness that lets the words be spoken without carpenter-boxes. Many men literally do not know what “man” means or whether they are grown men; when an older man riskily names masculine qualities he sees, a younger man can locate distance and direction. Simply naming “human” attributes does not help that man. Some contemporary female psychologists, he notes, likewise name womanly attributes so a woman can become conscious rather than unconscious. All naming is dangerous (boxes); hope to do better than the past.
Attention to men’s initiation will not, he thinks, drive men and women farther apart. A man whose Warrior or Lover has been crushed (and who remains unaware) is already farthest from women.
Against the split of “sensitive men” who need mythology versus “construction workers” who are “real men” and never think about masculinity: do twenty-six-year-old journalists truly believe blue-collar workers feel no shame about being men, or that their childhood homes were unmessed? Insults to women passing by usually mark double insecurity. Blue-collar workers and woodsmen at Bly’s conferences are as thoughtful as professors, CEOs, therapists. Shame and pride over the three percent belong to all contemporary men.
Obligation for everyone writing about gender: describe masculine so it does not exclude masculine in women, yet hits a resonant string in a man’s heart; describe feminine so it does not exclude feminine in men, yet makes a large string resonate in a woman’s heart. In reality, besides the two states, degrees, intermediate states, unions, combinations, genius exceptions. For now, the story speaks best to men and women who have passed through the grief door into their own childhood; they can use memory-culture stories preserved until writing.
Holy moments: outer and inner worlds cross; vertical and horizontal time intersect. That moment when the King’s men wounded the rider: still on the horse, helmet off, golden hair tumbling; true identity revealable; soon after, true identity of the Wild Man. Rumi (Bly’s version): pay attention to the name the Holy One has for things; we name by number of legs; the Holy One names by what is inside. Moses’s rod: we said “staff,” inside it was “dragonish snake.” No one knows our name until our last breath goes out.
Young man descended: courtyard to ashes to earth to horses under the earth. Wild Man ascending opposite: under water to courtyard to sacred spring to Master of Horses to kingship. They pass each other. The Wild Man part once in touch with wilderness and wild animals has sunk below mind-water, out of sight, below human memory; covered with hair, it looks like an animal.
Figure. As the initiate descends, Iron John rises from pond-beast to Lord; the feast is where the paths cross and the story’s true protagonist may flip.
Ancient men, Bly says, saw through nature’s veil to a firm invisible being: Lord of Animals, part human, part god, part animal. Ancient women, in a parallel event, saw a Birth Mother and Grave Mother: compassionate, nourishing, abundant, ruthless. Both genders see through the screen of aging seals, infants, buds, dry leaves, minnows, whales, girls, crones.
Tales of the Releaser of Animals or Master of the Hunt appear across Mediterranean, African, Siberian, aboriginal, Chinese, North European, and American Indian cultures. Blackfeet starvation story: old man appeals to buffalo; buffalo chief asks a human bride; daughter moves to buffalo camp; dozens of buffalo gallop over a cliff to feed the tribe. Father visits, is found out, trampled; daughter reconstitutes him from a single vertebra. Compact between human and animal realms: obligations and rights both ways. Eaten buffalo gallops up the ravine next year; a human crosses when an animal crosses.
Industrial culture ignores Great Mother and Lord of Animals alike.
Gods transform messily: include one another, trade, unite beyond mythographers. Still, on the Indian subcontinent the Lord of Animals becomes Shiva. Dravidian southern India named him Pashupati (Master of Animals) and his companion Parvati (Lady of the Mountains), traced to Old Bronze Age and Neolithic. That pair enters classic India as Shivaism merged with earlier animism. Dravidian language carries Shivaite energy; Alain Daniélou (Shiva and Dionysus) notes shared words with Sumerian, Basque, Georgian. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s The Dance of Shiva; Gary Snyder: Shiva still the god with the most living worshippers on the planet. Shiva keeps wild aspect (followers naked, hair uncut) plus ascetic, husbandly, and enraged Bhairava sides: Wild Man immensely articulated.
Around Caucasus, Thessaly, Greece, Crete the Lord expands into Zagreus, Zan, Cretan Zeus. Cretan culture: Lord as Zagreus, Lady as Cybele; bull, snake, phallus for him; tiger and lion for her. Birth rituals of baby Zeus on Ida and Dicte merge with baby Dionysus; Dionysus comes from Zeus’s thigh. As farmers and wine-growers, Mediterranean peoples let Dionysus carry Animal Lord energy; Lady becomes Ariadne (“Holy Woman”). Rituals show plant-mystery change while sacrificial essence remains: Dionysus as grape clump torn, trampled, enclosed in ox-hide darkness, giving community ecstasy (wine). Sufis know how subtle that wine can be. Yeats line Bly returns to: “Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent.” Dionysian gifts to the West: Greek tragic theater; tragedy as song of the sacrificed goat; respect for beneath-darkness, sun under the earth, wine ecstasy, silence inside grief-knowing man; knowledge from brooding on tearing and being torn.
Celtic Europe: Cernunnos / Comely / Cornelius (stag-horn root); sometimes Herne the Hunter, white dogs with red ears. Gundestrup Cauldron (first century B.C., Jutland): Cernunnos in yoga posture, serpent in one hand, Lady’s torc in the other, stag horns and leaves from the head, company of dolphin, gazelle, lion, dog. Arthurian cycle (twelfth-thirteenth centuries) remembers him: in Yvain, Lord of the Animals and Guardian of the Fountain. Female companion includes Artio (female bear; root shared with Arthur).
“Wild Man,” first heard as a silly phrase and confused with irresponsible or churlish man, carries enormous historical information. Through that telescope fuzzy images sharpen: John the Baptist (wild man who baptized Christ); Mary Magdalene (light hidden in darkness, kin to Sophia). Sophia and Dionysus share a sun that does not shine down from above but up from deep earth.
Old Stone Age Master → Pashupati, Shiva, Dionysus, Cernunnos: original energy retained and elaborated in vast religious gardens. In the West those gardens end. Development of Forest Lord stops dead around A.D. 1100 (or earlier: Caesar in Gaul, first century B.C.). Lord of Animals does not contribute moistness and energy to later Western religions. As Wild Man he survives in literature and folk imagination.
Figure. Bly’s historical telescope: Paleolithic Animal Lord blossoms into Shiva, Dionysus, Cernunnos; Western religious gardens close around A.D. 1100; the figure persists as Enkidu, Esau, pageant Wild Man, and dream image.
Fully developed epic character first in Gilgamesh (written down around 700 B.C., older material). City-states already in place. Young king Gilgamesh: golden, inflated, greedy for pleasure, causing trouble. Elders’ solution: bring him in touch with Enkidu. Body hairy; locks like a woman’s or grain-goddess hair; knows nothing of settled fields; clothed like a flock deity; eats grass with gazelles; content at the watering hole. Hunter and temple prostitute sent; she discloses nakedness; Enkidu mates six days and seven nights; afterward beasts desert him; body stiffens; he sits at her feet; she names him beautiful “like a very god” and leads him to Uruk. He yearns for a friend, challenges Gilgamesh; they wrestle; Enkidu wins; they become inseparable. Enkidu as hairy shadow of the new civilized city king.
Old Testament: Esau, hairy Semitic legend-man, brings wild goat meat to blind Isaac. Wily farmers replace religious hunters across the Middle East; Jacob, faking animal hair on his hands, wins the blessing that belonged to Esau. Tale implies a Near Eastern historical point when the hairy man was exiled or disenfranchised.
Vivid in medieval fantasy and folk life: yearly pageants in Germany, Austria, Holland, neighbors. Northern European artists loved those scenes. Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted a Flemish pageant moment; anonymous 1566 woodcut survives. Village square: Wild Man enters from forest. Players have dressed a young man in fish-scale costume, vine tendrils in hair and beard, club like Cerne Abbas giant. Three civilized powers meet him: Holy Roman Church / Emperor with globe and cross (“your time is over”); military man with armed crossbow; woman in conical hat resembling a nun, offering a golden ring. Ring as holy sexual-union ring; Timothy Husband (The Wild Man in Medieval Myth and Symbolism, Metropolitan Museum): ring tempts him into matrimony from which he is barred; soldier and emperor stalk him for transgressing civilized order. Wild Man refuses offers and threats; dancing and Mardi Gras begin; he leaves to cheers. Ominous close: a mile out of town, costume put on a straw man thrown into lake or pond: ritual execution. Mythologically explains how Iron John got to the pond bottom; vestige of earlier real execution.
Husband also: manuscript illumination of Alexander separating Wild Man from wild wife, then throwing him in fire; paintings of Wild Man before ecclesiastical judgment. Burning of the Wild Man preceded witch-burning by centuries; same fear and anger.
Other roles: friend of lovers; courtly love incorporates him. Stained glass: Wild Men climbing castle walls, replacing knights “storming the Castle of Love.” Maidens encourage; armor abandoned; wantonness image. German artist Schweiger (~1515): ink drawing of Mary Magdalene as Wild Woman, hair everywhere except nipples, elbows, knees; angels carry her to heaven; affection for the figure. Medieval place is complicated: praised for spontaneity and sexual energy, more often punished, exiled, killed. Admirable that the culture kept him in consciousness. New Orleans Mardi Gras descends from village pageants but has forgotten the personage; Basel Fastnacht still keeps Wild Man masks and mood.
Why so threatened? Wild Man as relative (uncle) of Pan: name means “everything,” suggests nature; hairy goat legs later slandered onto Satan. Ascetic longing to repress libido at pagan era’s end joined Roman fears of Great Mother libertine emphases into an antisexual front. Mount Athos story: old monk’s only English sentence after hours looking at sea: “Women are evil.” Instant of dark medieval culture; little support from ascetic wings of Christianity, Islam, or Sikh for hairy Magdalene or Wild Man.
Powerful forces favor trimmed, sleek, cerebral, noninstinctive, bald. Blake: priests in black gowns binding joys and desires with briars. Women’s sexuality still suffers under tyranny of bald, ascetic, cerebral; Aphrodite inside the female body insulted daily. Same forces doom male sexuality to banal, profane, hideously practical. Indian elaboration into Shiva honors sexual energy (statues beside radiant Parvati). Jesus: no wife or children; Magdalene association does not survive the Gospels intact. Paul (1 Corinthians): “Let those who have wives live as though they had none.” Origen castrates himself; Justin (second century): Christian men plead for surgical removal of testicles; Mount Athos monks accept castration; Gregory of Nyssa: marriage last stage of separation from Paradise, first to leave; Augustine: man ashamed of sexual desire by nature; later calls involuntary erection “movement of disobedience” proving post-Adam corruption. Wild Man would take that as charming spontaneity.
Contrary currents exist (Brotherhood of Love, Cathars, troubadours, Brethren of the Free Spirit / Bosch), but they could not alter institutionalized drive: sexuality inhibits spiritual growth. Reminder, not attack on asceticism’s dignity: complicated feelings when villagers watch Wild Man led to ritual execution. With Augustine-quality thinkers “on our side,” amazing men can make love at all. Young men conclude sexual instinct is troublesome, intrusive, weird, hostile to spirit. Playboy permissiveness misses the battle: assumes male sexuality is secular play for a playboy. When Church and culture dropped gods who spoke for divine male sexual energy (Pan, Dionysus, Hermes, Wild Man), men lost a great deal. Medieval West did not carry Lord of Animals into a well-developed Shiva or Dionysus; erotic energy lost the next musical octave.
Close: Marie-Louise von Franz lecture on a historical Swiss wild man whose forest advice rulers and common people sought. She notices in recent decades’ dreams of men and women a figure spiritual yet covered with hair: a sort of hairy Christ. What the psyche asks for now: a religious figure who is hairy, in touch with God and sexuality, spirit and earth.
A King has an enormous forest of wild animals. Hunter sent for a deer never returns; two more vanish; all huntsmen and dogs vanish. Forest left in stillness; only eagle or hawk overhead. Years later a strange hunter offers to enter. King refuses; hunter insists he pays no attention to fear. Dog scents game, runs three steps to a deep pool; naked arm pulls the dog under. Hunter returns with three men and pails; they bucket out the water. At the bottom: a Wild Man brown as rusty iron, hair from head over face to knees. Bound, led to castle; locked in an iron courtyard cage; opening forbidden on pain of death; key to the Queen. Forest safe again.
King’s eight-year-old son playing; golden ball falls into the cage. “Give me my golden ball.” “Not until you open the door.” Boy refuses (King won’t let him). Second day: same. Third day, King out hunting: “I don’t have the key.” Wild Man: “Key is under your mother’s pillow.” Boy retrieves it, pinches finger opening the hard lock; Wild Man gives the ball and hurries away. Boy panics: “If you go away, they will beat me!” Wild Man lifts him onto his shoulders into the forest. Empty cage; missing key; missing boy; grief on the royal house.
In the dark forest Iron John sets the boy down: never see mother and father again, but compassion for the freer; obey and all will go well; more gold and treasure than anyone. Moss bed; morning at a spring clear as crystal, full of light: guard so nothing falls in; evening check. Day one: wounded finger pain; dips finger; turns gold; cannot wash it off; hides finger; lies; forgiven once. Day two: loose hair falls in; hair turns gold; forgiven once; third time will dishonor the spring and end the stay. Day three: determined; leans to see his eyes in the water; all hair falls in; shines like the sun; covers with kerchief; Iron John knows: kerchief off; silence. Trial failed; go learn poverty; no evil in the heart; gift: in trouble, shout “Iron John, Iron John!” at the forest edge; power greater than believed; gold and silver in abundance.
Boy walks to a great city; no craft; palace takes him in; cook: carry wood and water, rake cinders. Once he must carry food to the royal table; keeps tarboosh on to hide gold hair; King: caps off at table; boy claims sore place; cook scolded, told to fire him. Cook pities; swaps him to gardener’s boy. Plants, waters, hoe and spade, wind and weather. Hot summer day: pulls covering off; sun on gold hair sends beams into the King’s daughter’s bedroom. She demands flowers. He picks wild flowers (stronger fragrance); gardener wants finest cultivated; boy refuses. In her room she yanks the tarboosh; gold hair magnificent; she gives gold coins; he gives them to gardener’s children as playthings. Second day: same flower call; he holds hat with both hands; coins to children again. Third day: same; she cannot get the hat; he will not keep the gold.
War; King unsure against powerful enemy. Gardener’s boy: grown now, wants a horse. Men laugh: take what’s left in the stable. Lame three-legged nag; rides to forest edge; calls three times; Iron John: strong war-horse and more. Stableboy leads snorting war-horse; large band in iron, swords shining. Boy turns nag over, rides at the head. King’s men nearly defeated; iron band strikes like a hurricane; enemy flees; pursuit to the last man. Boy returns band and horse to Iron John; rides hoppity-hop home. King credits a strange knight; daughter asks gardener; help mocks “Moopygoop” under a lilac bush; boy claims he fought well; laughter.
King: three-day festival; daughter throws golden apple; mysterious knight may appear. Day one: Iron John gives red armor, chestnut horse; boy catches apple, gallops off unrecognized. Day two: white armor and horse; catches; rides off. King angry: must report name; if third catch and flight, chase and sword-blow. Day three: black armor and horse; catches; chase; leg wound; horse’s leap knocks helmet off; golden hair seen. Next day gardener: boy back at work; showed children three golden apples. King summons; tarboosh on; daughter pulls it off; beauty astounds. He is the three-color knight and the war helper; apples produced; wound shown; father a notable King; gold enough. Asks for the daughter as wife. She laughs: likes that he does not beat around the bush; knew from the hair he was no gardener’s boy; kisses him. His parents invited; joy after hopelessness. Feast: music breaks; doors open; baronial King embraces groom: “I am Iron John, who through an enchantment became turned into a Wild Man. You have freed me from that enchantment. All the treasure that I own will from now on belong to you.”
Translation note: Robert Bly from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimms Märchen (Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1946). Parts appear in the chapters numbered in parentheses in the book edition.
Rereading after many years: issues still explosive around the golden ball (who gets it back) and the young man’s progress toward the father’s world. If the ball is something ecstatic, everyone loses it. “Can I have my golden ball?” “Yes, if you let me out of the cage.” Part of you may be caged in Long Island or Salt Lake City. Boyhood lesson Bly recalls: older men teach that you must accept some cage. Every father is in one; priest and minister too; “Who isn’t in a cage?” Life of men stops growing shortly after the wild part goes into a cage; those men never reach the spring they were asked to guard.
Finger dipped in the spring turns gold; the entire question of gold in a young man is unmentioned in college, thrown out the car window, ignored in the rush to expensive suburbs. Older men who fail to mention ball or spring are, in Bly’s hard word, murderers of that young man: greedy soul commands a shortcut to adulthood through money, ease, power, advantage; betrayal of the divine boy. Hafez: do not imagine the world will be fair; it is an old hag who has slept with a thousand husbands. Marriage with the hag of the world (or, if that image indicts an old woman unfairly, a stolen girl forced toward a lecherous technocrat) means ending in a cage.
Key under the mother’s pillow: courage to reach under frees holy one, genius, daimon. Mother does not plan to keep the key; it is how the world is. Father must release unsought erotic power over the daughter; mother must release the boy’s eros from her control. Boys shout: please don’t say the key is there. Nine months inside a woman’s body, not a hollow tree: baby and mother secretly feel that is how it ought to be. Few steps into cold world; artificial womb sought in drugs, cookies, alcohol, failure. Risk of the pillow not worth it; willingness to lead a shrunken life rather than take the key. Hand that steals stirs unconscious wrath of the woman who woke years before with a new being for whom she sacrificed time, energy, life force.
Iron John allied with the good father: reaches backward through history after history; “work and soul talk”; male care and soulfulness distinct from the mother’s; often silent, radiating safety. Father and mother can both confirm the world as shining place where generous impulses can be fulfilled.
In twenty-five years: admiration for the Grimm story greater than ever. Men somewhat less driven by “hunger for a King in a time of no father” because they help care for children; young feel closer bond. New level of greed: some willing to destroy civilization and the natural world, leaving children the consequences. As search for Sacred King continues, descent into ashes, love of the God-Woman, and red / white / black stages resonate for both men and women. Book brought gratitude and uproar; reminder how complicated boyhood-to-adulthood passage is. Advanced technologies widespread; wisdom connection weak for the planet’s future. Becoming a man does not happen in one season; like all true teachings, these remain fresh for those who want their deep intelligence.
Robert Bly
Brief acknowledgments for quoted poems and translations used in the book edition (Lawrence, Kabir, Rilke, Transtromer, Vallejo, Neruda, Rumi / Barks, Yeats, Roethke, Wilbur, Jeffers, Fitzgerald’s Odyssey, Machado, James Wright, Frost, Ovid / Humphries, Campbell’s Gilgamesh passage, and Bly’s own earlier books).
Robert Bly (1926-2021): poet, storyteller, translator, lecturer. Poetry awards include the National Book Award. Iron John (1990) was his first full-length prose book; a 25th-anniversary afterword followed. With his wife, Ruth, he lived in Minneapolis.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Wild vs savage | Examined wound vs domination | Men’s-work misreads |
| Hard / soft / third | Provider, receptive, Wild contact | Stuck male types |
| Pond bucketing | Slow emptying of psyche water | Instant-fix culture |
| Pillow key | Steal past parental erotic gravity | Failure to leave home psyche |
| Spring trials | Gold via wound and gaze; three strikes | Genius inflation / hiding |
| Ashes road | Descent and grief before radiance | Premature garden/festival |
| King hunger | Sacred King vs empty father/power | Mentor void |
| God-Woman | Wild feminine divine ≠ mother | Relationship projection |
| Interior warriors | Force for cosmos not only State | Anger / passivity split |
| Red/white/black | Color stages of horse/desire | Festival / ambition timing |
| Wound as womb | Scar that makes second heart | Victory-only culture |
| Seven beings | Community psyche; touch Wild, don’t be him | Personality cult of Wild Man |
| Dual ascent/descent | Boy down, Iron John up; meet at feast | Endings that feel like beginnings |
| Animal Lord line | Hunt → Shiva/Dionysus/Cernunnos → folk | “Wild Man is new” claims |
| Cage teaching | Elders normalize captivity | Suburban shortcut adulthood |
| Person / figure | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Robert Bly | Poet; translator of the tale; sole essay voice |
| Iron John / Wild Man | Pond guardian; initiator; enchanted King |
| Grimm boy / gardener’s boy | Initiate across eight stages |
| Marie-Louise von Franz | Fairy-story teacher; hairy Christ observation |
| Michael Meade / James Hillman / Robert Moore | Teaching companions; warrior/King psychology |
| Zeus / Dionysus / Shiva / Cernunnos | Mythic elaborations of Animal Lord |
| Enkidu / Gilgamesh | Hairy shadow meets city king |
| Esau / Jacob | Hairy hunter disenfranchised by farmer cunning |
| Fisher King / Parsifal | Wound and question lineage |
| God-Woman / Sophia / Ariadne / Parvati | Feminine divine counterparts |
| John the Baptist / Mary Magdalene | Wild / light-in-dark Christian echoes |
| Augustine / Paul / Origen | Antisexual front Bly opposes |
| Hafez | Afterword: world as unfair hag / cage marriage |
Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly, 1990. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions