Iron John

August 21, 2024

Table of Contents

The Pillow and the Key

In The Odyssey, Hermes instructs Odysseus when he approaches Circe, who stands for certain kind of matriarchal energy, he is to lift or show his sword. Showing a sword doesn’t necessarily mean fighting. It can also suggest a joyful decisiveness.

Finding Iron John

“What can I do? Anything dangerous to do around here?”
When he approaches what I’ll call the “deep male”, he feels risk.

The Loss of the Golden Ball

King’s eight year old son’s golden ball rolls into Wild Man’s cage. If he wants the ball back, he’s going to have to ask him for it.
Freud: “What a distressing contrast there is between the radiant intelligence of the child and the feeble mentality of the average adult.”
The Iron John story says that a man can’t expect to find the golden ball in the feminine realm, because that’s not where the ball is. The story proposes it lies within the magnetic field of the Wild Man.
Wild Man energy, by contrast, leads to forceful action undertaken, not with cruelty, but with resolve.
[Bucket work implies] much more discipline that most men realize.
The key is under your mother’s pillow. Michael Maede: the pillow is also the place where the mother stores all her expectations for you.
The king gives the key into the keeping of the Queen. A mother’s job is, after all, to civilize the boy.
The key has to be stolen.

What Does the Boy Do?

Exuberance in a child is bad, and at the first sign of it, parents should be severe. Exuberance implies that the wild boy or girl is no longer locked up.

Going Off on the Wild Man’s Shoulders

The fault of the nuclear family today isn’t so much that it’s crazy and full of double binds, it is that old men outside the nuclear family no longer offer an effective way for the son to break his link with his parents without doing harm to himself.
Women can change the embryo to a boy, but only men can change the boy to a man. Initiators say that boys need a second birth, this time a birth from men.
Classical solution in many traditional cultures, which send the boy to his father when he is twelve.
When office work and the “information revolution” begin to dominate, the father-son bond disintegrates. One could say that the father now loses his son five minutes after birth.

The Remote Father

Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of community.
The father in contemporary TV ads never knows what cold medicine to take.
revenge on remote father.
Jung: when the son is introduced primarily by the mother to feeling, he will learn the female attitude towards masculinity and take a female view of his own father and his own masculinity. Since the father and the mother are in competition for the affection of the son, you’re not going to get a straight picture of your father out of your mother.
Somewhere around forty, forty-five a movement toward the father takes place naturally.
In the Greek myths, Apollo is visualized as a golden man standing on an enormous accumulation of the dark, alert, dangerous energy called Dionysus. The Wild Man in our story includes some of both kinds of energy.

When One Hair Turns Gold

Initiation experience begins with two events. 1. clean break with the parents after which the novice goes to the forest, desert, or wilderness. 2. wound that the older men give the boy, which could be scarring of the skin, a cut with a knife, a brushing with nettles, a tooth knocked out.
Something in the adolescent male wants risk, courts danger, goes out to the edge - even to the edge of death.

The Story: The First Day at the Pond

Initiation, then, for young men amounts to helping them remember the wound, and by that we mean the soul wounds, or the injuries to the emotional body.
Robert Moore: If you’re a young man and you’re not being admired by an older man, you’re being hurt."
Having a critical, judgemental father amounts to being one of Cronos’ sons, whom Cronos ate.
Father gives a blow, and the son gets it. And it’s a wound the boy remembers for years.
Mother makes sure the son receives a baptism of shame.
Gang members try desperately to learn courage, family loyalty, and discipline from each other.
Having no soul union with other men can be the most damaging would of all.
All wounds threaten our princehood.
The initiation tells the young man what to do with wounds, the new (by men) and the old.
When people identify themselves with their wounded child, or remain children, the whole culture goes to pieces.
Ecstasy too early - or generalized excitement - may be, as James Hillman has remarked, just another way the Great Mother has of keeping the man from developing any discipline.
Wild man is not “inside” of us.
the water of soul life
willingness to be a fish in the holy water, to be fished for by Dionysus or one of the other fishermen. Being a fish is to be active, not with cars or footballs, but with soul.
Denial mean we live for years in trance.
Being brought by the water by a mentor means the end of enchantment. The Wild Man’s water does not itself heal the wound that led to the escape or ascension, but it gives strength to the part of us that wants to continue the effort to gain courage and be human.
The Wild Man here amounts to an invisible presence … The physicist working with his mentor at Princeton suddenly writes an equation on the board with his golden chalk.
therapy, when it good - waiting by the pond.
Where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.
Water in symbolic systems does not stand for spiritual or metaphysical impulses (which are better suggested by air or fire), but by earthly and natural life.

The Story: The Second Day

we know from shaman stories that their wounds were impersonal. Wounds need to be expanded into air and lifted on the ideas our ancestors new, so that the wound ascents through the roof of our parent’s house and we suddenly know how our wound (seemingly so private) fits into a greater and impersonal story.
Without the weight given by a wound consciously realized, the man will lead a provisional life.
hair represents sexual energy, animal life, passionate flaring nature peculiar to mammals and excess.
the amount of hair suggest how far the instincts are curtailed and the spontaneity curbed.
hair suggest thoughts. Even when the conscious system is shut down at night, thoughts keep coming out: some of them are called dreams.
hair stands for intuitions that appear out of nowhere
If a human being takes an action, the soul takes an action.
the generous response made by the sacred pond spring depends on a serious decisive effort made by a man or woman.

The Story: The Third Day

https://allpoetry.com/I-Am-Not-I
Narcissus has already become separated from his male hunting companions as the story opens. It turns out that Hera is also angry at him, and has sent a nymph called Echo who repeats each of his words as soon as he speaks them. Narcissus is bottled up inside his own circuits.

Going Out into the World

Accepting an initiatory task is more important than succeeding or failing at it.
The Wild Man’s job is to teach the young man how abundant, various and many-sided his manhood is.
A man or a woman is not a machine only for protecting, hunting, and reproduction, but each carries desires far beyond what is needed for physical survival.
A young man is asked to descend into his own wounds, to climb up into the ream of “the twin”, and to expand sideways into the consciousness that is in tress, water, animals and “the ten thousand things”. Upon achieving these three realizations, the hair turns gold. This doesn’t solve all his problems, but brings new ones. The golden head is going to be a problem.

The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief

He learned that the whole world is on fire. “Everything is intelligent!” All of his hair turns gold.
A bit of gold can send us into high altitudes, from which we don’t want to descend.

What Happens

When I was twenty-eight I still had the longing for purity, “to be above it all,” not to be involved.
When Jung established a training center in Zurich, he would not accept a person who was not already a success in some other career. It was a way of saying thirty-five or older.
Ascenders … passivity, naivete, and numbness.
For hundreds of thousands of years men have admired each other, and been admired by women, in particular for their activity.
During last thirty (sixty ATM) years men have been asked to learn how to go with the flow, follow rather than lead, live in a non hierarchical way, how to be vulnerable, how to adopt to consensus decision-making.
Passivity increases exponentially as the education system turns out “products”.
When a man sulks, he becomes passive to his own hurts. When no old men appear to break the hold of the sulking infant, the habit of passivity spreads to other parts of his life.
The passive man may not say what he wants, and the wife has to guess it.
The passive man may ask his wife to do the loving for him; his children to do his loving for him.
A woman does not want a man to tell her what to do, but other forces may have turned her away from a fruitful action or act. If her husband sees this happening, he should tell her about it. A man hopes a woman will tell him as well, if she sees him accepting the direction of invisible forces.
adolescent “in trouble” who is “acting out” may in fact be transferring some of the anxiety between mother and father to himself, and in that sense carrying it. Children are active in loving to the point of sacrificing themselves

Naivete

the naive man feels pride in being attacked.
The naive will be also proud that he can pick up the pain of others, particularly women’s pain.
Sincerity is a big thing with him.
The naive man will lose what is most precious to him because of a lack of boundaries. Unaware of boundaries, he does not develop a good container for his soul, nor a good container for two people. There is a leak in it somewhere.
The naive man tends to have an inappropriate relation to ecstasy. He longs for ecstasy at the wrong time or in the wrong place, and ignores all masculine sources of it. He wants it through the feminine, through Great Mother, through the goddess, even though what may be grounding for the woman ungrounds him.
The man without limitations may also specialize in not telling.
He doesn’t know that there is a being in him that wants to remain sick.
His timing is off.
There is something in naivete that demands betrayal. The naive man will have curious link to betrayal, deceit and lies. Not only he will betray others easily, but when a woman lives with a truly naive man for a while, she feels impersonally impelled to betray him. When there is too much naivete around, the universe has no choice but to crystallize out some betrayal.

Numbness

A spiritual man may love light, and yet be entirely numb in the chest area.
A mother’s protection, no matter how well intentioned, will not do as a substitute for the father’s protection.

The Story: Taking Kitchen Work

Go out into the world now and there you’ll learn what poverty is.

Katabasis

lowliness, associated with water and soul, as height is associated with spirit.
Drop - ancient Greek called katabasis. Our ego doesn’t want to do it and even if we drop, the ego doesn’t want to see it.
When “katabasis” happens, a man no longer feels like a special person.
These days katabasis comes through addiction - alcohol, cocaine, crack.
Life somewhoe “discharges” him. There are many ways: a serious accident, the loss of a job, the breaking of a long-standing friendship, a divorce, or a “break-down”, an illness.
“I’ve just been promoted” Jung would say: “I’m very sorry to hear that; but if we all stick together, I think we will get through it.”
Kitchen work means intensification of the dipping (into the wound). This is the time to live it out.
He does not exist, as the hero does, through his heroism, nor through his invincibility, as the warrior does, but he exists through his would.
The way down and out doesn’t require poverty, homelessness, physical deprivation, dishwasher work, necessarily, but it does seem to require a fall from status, from a human being to a spider, from a middle-class person to a derelict. The emphasis is on the consciousness of the fall.
In a divorce, man’s emotional safety may disintegrate.
Marriage’s breakup or breakdown revives the wound.
Divorce feels for most men like a discharge, as if one had been fired from a task taken on the day of the wedding.
If the man refuses to be cheered up, and considers all the discomforts to be cunning expression of an isolating would received in early childhood, then the man can use the divorce - like any other serious collapse - as an invitation to go through the door, accept katabasis, immerse himself in the wound, and exit from his old life through it.
Christ: “You shall not get out until have paid the last penny.”
Some power in the psyche arranges a severe katabasis if the man does not know enough to go down on his own.
Some Sufi groups begin their night-work with a repeated word reminding them of the grief of what they have not done the past year.
Seeing the dark side of a person close to us is a discipline the descender accepts.
It is said that in the marriage, the man and women give each other “his or her nethermost beast” to hold. Each holds the leash for the “nethermost beast” of the other.
dark side of Great Mother, one with boar tusks coming from her lips. Angry woman. Compensation for earlier life “above the ground”, being fed with fish and fowl.
When we are betrayed the toothed side of the universe shows its mouth.
Kali. Only Shiva, one of the forms of Wild Man, can stand up to her.
Pwyll, Prince of Dyved, whose story appears in The Mabinogion, does not become king until he has exchanged places for a year with the King of the Underworld.
We reach the bottom when Baba Yaga’s hostile boar energy has completely replaces - for a time - the childlike eros which each of us felt when our mother set a breast to our mouth, or later set a cup of milk down for us at the table, or when our first marvelous girlfriend beckoned us to bed.
The only solution to the power of the witch is for young man to develop energy as great as hers, as harsh, as wild, as shred, as clear in its desire. When a young man arrives at her house, proves himself to be up her level of intensity, purpose, and respect for the truth, she will sometimes say, “Okay, what do you want know?”

Taking the Road of Ashes

Ashes do not belong to the sunlit crown of the tree, nor to its strong roots. Ash is literally the death of the trunk.
life of ashes is very different form dropping into katabasis. It doesn’t require a fall in social status. It is not so explosive; there is something about ashes that is steady, even lethargic.
Young men in Viking times were allowed sometimes two or three years of ashes.
Some kind of hibernation or ritual lethargy
before a boy can become a man, some infantile being in him must die.
The gold-obsessed man, whether New Age man or a Dow Jones, can be said to be the man who hasn’t yet handled ashes.
At thirty-five his inner stove begins to produce ashes as well. It’s time for him to by a small black shovel in the hardware store and get down on his knees.
Some habitual error we keep making in our relationships produces more ash than heat.
Ashes present a great diminishment away from the living tree with its huge crown and abundant shade. Proper experience for men who are over thirty.
A man may keep his job and family and still experience ashes if he knows hat he is doing.
Somewhere in our past life there is a dead body. Could be a career mislaid, relationship gone into the river, or the corpse of ashamed boy.

Learning to Shudder

it is Dionysus, the last of the Greek gods to be developed, who guides that secret process in which the young man or woman learns to shudder.
Cruel titans. The horror at what these can do makes one shudder.
Gaining the ability to shudder means feeling how frail human beings are, and how awful it is to be a Titan.
Just as Hermes helps “through the lines” on the road to retain the corpse, he is helped to shudder by the god Dionysus, the grandson of Titans.

Going from the Mother’s House to the Father’s House

Boys have lived happily since the birth in the mother’s world, and the father’s would naturally seem dangerous, unsteady, and full of unknowns.
Until eight to twelve boys lived exclusively with women.
A young man cannot make the move to the father’s world alone without taking on the dark side of the Trickster. Learn to rob the robbers.
A man’s effort to move to father’s house takes a long time; it’s difficult, and each man has to do it for himself.
Convincing the naive boy or the comfort-loving boy, to die.
The Beneath Father, being a snake, associates with the spinal cord.
when a man accepts the Descent as a way to move to the father’s house, he learns to look at the death side of things, he glaces down to the rat’s hole, and he accepts the snake rather than the bird as his animal.
Initiation asks the son to move his love energy away from the attractive mother to the relatively unattractive serpent father.
he regards Descent as a holy thing, he increases his tolerance for ashes, eats dust as snakes do, increases his stomach for terrifying insights, deepens his ability to digest the evil facts of history, accepts the job of working seven years under the ground, leaves granary at will through the rat’s hole, follows the voice of old mole below the ground.
Apollo was present at the spring, Saturn, natural container of restraint, melancholy, fast systems, disciplined repetition, mentor standards and heavy grieving is concealed in the ashes work.
Saturn, helps men to get heavy with the full weight of their wound, and the full power of their failures. After Saturn introduces a man to Lord of Melancholy, that man begins the black courtship of the soul which eventually leads the man to the Garden.

The Hunger for the King in a Time with No Father

Disturbances in Sonhood

Too Little Father

traditional cultures seem to have plenty of father
In most tribal cultures fathers and son live in an amused tolerance of each other.
Both male and female cells carry marvelous music, but the son needs to resonate to the masculine frequency as well as to the female frequency.
Women cannot replace that particular missing substance.

Distrust of Older Men

The so, having used up much of his critical, cynical energy suspecting old men, may compensate by being naive about women - or men - his own age.
A contemporary man often assumes that a woman knows more about a relationship than he does, allows a woman’s moods to run the house, assumes that when she attacks him , she is doing it “for his own good.”

Temperament Without Teaching

in most families today, the sons and daughters receive, when the father returns home at six, only his disposition, or his temperament, which is usually irritable and remote.
father as a living force in the home disappeared when those forces demanding industry sent him on various railroads out of his various villages.

The Darkened Father

as political and mythological kings die, the father loses the radiance he once absorbed from the sun
eternal boy, understands his flight upward as a revolt against the earthly, conservative, possessive, clinging part of the maternal feminine.
many contemporary sons, do not fight the father as in earlier eras, or figure out strategies to defeat him, but instead ascend above him, beyond him, determined to have a higher consciousness than their father. That is not wrong at all, but it is flying.
I count myself among the sons who have endured years of deprivation, disconnection from earth, thin air, the loneliness of the long-distance runner, in order to go high in the air and be seen. Such a son attempts to redeem the “endarkened father” by becoming “enlightened”.
A man may of course pursue spirituality too early in his life. The ascension, then, I add to our list of imbalances brought about by the diminishment and belittlement of the father.
Society without father produces this birdlike men, so intense, so charming, so open to addiction, so sincere…

The Story: Visiting the King

Wild man carried him off his shoulders. Then he went down along with his damaged finger into the water, then rose steeply when his whole head turned gold, then descended again and experienced his Ashes Time in the kitchen.
There are two kings. Father - first king. And a new king. After some time in the kitchen, the cook gives him an order to take the food to the king.
why, in our twenties and thirties, are the visits so short.
we long for that oceanic feeling we felt in the womb, when we were divine and fed by ambrosia. Addiction amounts to an attempt to escape limitations and stay in the King’s room.
Many of us go up the stairs even before he cook asks us to and through alcohol, sex, or cocaine, extend the visit beyond moments allotted for it.
Singles bar -fantastic alchemical ovens where attempts to fuse crude metals go on day after day, night after night - resemble King’s room.
even though we’ve done good ashes work, the soul is still contaminated with infantile angers, unrealistic hopes, and rage at our parents or at ourselves.
Our soul, when it is in the kitchen, resembles some sort of crude or mixed rock. The king, who lives in his room high in the castle among air and sunlight, has arrived at unity; undistorted, unmingled, as compared to the boy of ashes, he looks on matters differently.
The lesser wedding is a union or fusion of substances not yet thoroughly separated or discriminated. It is always followed by a death
Those who ignore “the cook” may become stuck in the kitchen stage for years, identified with the victim child, who knows only ashes.

The King in His Three Realms

The Sacred King

King in the imaginative or invisible world, in the sacred space. From there he acts as a magnet and rearranges human molecules.
The King and the Queen send their energy down. Solar King and Lunar Queen.
Lord of the Four Quarters.
overarching inner heaven.
estimate that people in the West lost their ability to think mythologically around the year 1000. Perhaps because Christianity would not allow any new stories, gods or perhaps because after the Renaissance the pursuit of science absorbed more and more imaginative energy. European men and women gradually stopped feeding the abundant gods and goddesses with their imaginative energy - their heaven collapsed.
Sacred or Solar King is the principle of order and space. When he is present, there is a sacred space free of chaos. He does not create order, simply where he is, there is order.
Sacred King blesses. He encourages creativity as his realm.

The Earthly King

The political king meres heavenly sun power and earthly authority.
Sun King and his Moon queen held societies for about 4000 years together. They began to fail in the 18th and 19th centuries in Europe.
When the political king disappears from the lanes, we find it difficult to “see” or feel the Eternal King.
He derives his energy and authority from his ability to be transparent or receptive to the King above him. Few actual kings are that good, but the three-tiered world depends on his trying.
We need to see the Sacred King not “with but through the eyes”, and to see our radiant inner King uncontaminated by the images of fallen Herods or dead Stalins.

The Inner King

One who knows what we want to do for the rest of our lives, rest of the month, rest of the day.
He can make clear what we want without being contaminated in his choice by the opinions of others around us.
Vigorous when were were one or two years old. For most of was was killed early on. Inner warriors were not strong enough to protect the King.
When my King is weak, I ask my wife or children what is the right thing to do.
If the younger men have no public man to whom they can give their King, how can they develop the King inside?
When the outward flesh-and-blood king falls, his plunge downward entangles the fail Kings in the other two layers.
The inner King, once recovered, required feeding and honoring if he is to remain alive.

The Double Stream Inside the Sacred King

A second, darker side of the king, who will curse young men, discourage creativity, establish - by his presence alone - disorder.
Devil to be the brother of Christ.

The Double Stream Inside the Father

We are now looking at a mentor in this world, or a Scared King in the other world.
father contains both Kings at once.
An apparently weak father can control the entire family from beneath with his silence.
The Destructive Father does not give energy to those in his family but draws it out of them into some black hole he shelter in himself.
Stories of no guidance, no support, no affection, and in their place sarcasm, brutality, coldness.
James Hillman: “If you’re still being hurt by an event that happened to you at twelve, it is the thought that is hurting you now.”
There is no father who will be good all the way, either.
If we insist he was an evil person, who shamed us all the time, we fall into victimhood and there is no longer a place for us in the story.

The Longing to Live with the King

We cannot move to Sacred or Blessing King, until we’ve dealt with the ax-father.
“Children visit the King, but adults make a place where the King can visit them.”
Son’s first job is to redo the room, clean it, widen it, refurnish it, honor the father’s clear and helpful side.
Add a room onto the apartment to house the Destructive King and his relatives.
If you haven’t made two rooms, furnished them we can’t expect our father, living or dead, to move in. Then you can think of inviting a mentor in. He’ll also need two rooms.
Same for king. The King is a “man of the world” and he will never come to live in these cheap one-room apartments we have available.
After the mentor has come, we might think of inviting the King to the refurbished rooms where the mentor has lived.

The Male As a Set-Apart Being

each child begins in the womb as female, and the fetus chosen to be male goes through hundreds of changes before he is born.
a stone, while attached to the mountainside or the bedrock, is female. It becomes a male stone when it is moved away from its quarry place and set up by itself.
There are no good fathers in the major stories of Greek mythology, and very few in the Old Testament.
Whatever the father gives us, it will not be the same of closeness that our mother offered.
In many traditional cultures the men older than the father give and teach nurturing.
Mother -> Earth -> old men.
Father’s birth gift is one thing, and old men’s gift another.
Father contributes to the love of knowledge, love of action, and the ways to honor the world of things. He gave and gives a sheathing, or envelope, or coating around the soul made of intensity, shrewdness, desire to penetrate, liveliness, impulse, daring. His gift cannot be quantified.
The perceived absence of the father is actually the absence of the King. Addiction does not have to do with Colombian drug logs, but with the absence of the King.

The Meeting with the God-Woman in the Garden

The Maternal Feminine and the Private Feminine

The boy, after he left with the Wild Man, has been introduced well to soul.
The boy is about to meet the feminine in a non maternal form, in its powerful, blossoming, savvy, wild, investigating, erotic, playful form.
The Celts do a great deal of work in distinguishing two forms of feminine energy, or “yin”, an earthly form and a starry, moonlike or sunlike form.
The moon is attractive to the sun, and draws light from the sun. So the call her the “Silver Woman” or “The Woman Who Loves Gold” is not contradictory.

The Story: Meeting the King’s Daughter

Meeting with the feminine woman after the ashes. Fruitful meeting of that sort can only happen after the man has left the cellar and gone into “the garden”.
The cook took pity on the boy and exchanged him for the gardener boy.
kairos: the right moment for what was lying hidden in one’s fate to be revealed.
sunlight hits the gold hair, bounce of the wall to princess’ chamber, from there into her eyes.
Mercury or Hermes watches over the process of alchemy.

Entering the Garden

European walled garden of the Middle Ages contains fons mercurialis, Mercury’s Well, or the Well of Hermes.
Hermes guides the forming of containers, the establishment of boundaried places.
Entering the garden we escape the rain of blowers offered by “the world” and find a temporary shelter.
“Where springs not fail” is a quality of garden.
The walled garden also is a place to develop introversion.
gr:Pluto = “wealth”
For men an unnamed god of duty holds down the surface of the earth. There a man makes a stand, makes an empire, but sooner or later, if he’s lucky, the time comes to go inward, and to live in “the garden”.
It is in the garden that a man finds the wealth of psyche.
In the walled garden, as in the alchemical vessel, new metals get formed and the old ones melt. The lead of depression melts and becomes grief. The drive for success, an insistent tin, joins with Aphrodite’s copper, and makes bronze, which is good to make both shields and images of the gods.
This new work in the garden means a coming out of basement space into wind and weather.
In the garden we’re still doing work “in the darkness”.
In the garden the soul and nature marry. When we love cultivation more then excitement we are ready to start a garden.
The most important events in the lives of the great lovers take place in the Garden Not Open to Everyone.
The enclosed garden encourages true desire for the infinite more than the greed for objects.
Renaissance accounts: it was not unusual for a young man to take two or three years off, and spend it learning to be a lover. Learn to play a musical instrument, learn poems “by heart”, practice setting them to his own music, and then sing them to introverted women sitting behind iron window bars.
To lovers everything looks better
Lovers are full of praise
Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries.
Addiction to perfection amounts to having no garden. Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden.

The Woman with Golden Hair and Delicious Confusion

they saw the Track of the Moon on the Water and were deliciously confused (teenage boys upon seeing a teenage beauty).
One man about 35 told me: After a few months, everything collapses; she becomes an ordinary woman.
The glory of the Woman with Golden Hair drifts down from its eternal luminous space onto a public figure.
During the 12th and 13th centuries all this was understood.
“Wild flowers would please here more.”
We’re on the way from overly obedient man to wildness.
We move from Saint George toward the dragon.
When a man is ready to make a decisive move towards “The Legends”, a feminine figure whose face “looks both ways” may appear in his dreams. One looks toward the world of rule and laws, the other toward wildness, adult manhood, moistness, desire. She is the Woman with the Golden Hair.
She resembles Shakti, erect, instigating, fiery, outrageous.

Hermes and the God-Woman

Hermes is the god if the interior nervous system. His energy is also called Odin, Mercury.
True learning doesn’t take place unless Hermes is present.
The whole Ph.D. system was created by Germanic Hermes-killers. Hermes is magical, detail-loving, obscene, dancelike, goofy, and not on a career track.
What people call a Freudian slip is really a Hermes precision.
Mercury is the nearest of all planets to the sun, so so he is the sun’s closest relative.
Mercury has the ability to liquefy gold and silver. In the presence of Hermes, a flow between the masculine and feminine in our story has begun to happen.
Hermes and Aphrodite go very well together.
Whatever one receives in the garden is to be given away. And the head covering needs to remain on. In the general the public wants artists to show their gold immediately. Iron John story implies be cautious about showing paintings at the twenties or publishing a book too early.
Once the garden - which may take ten years to develop - has been experienced, then we could say the young man has begun to honor his own soul, has learned to become a lover, and has learned to dance.

To Bring the Interior Warriors Back to Life

warriorhood follows the garden - Celts: “Never give a sword to a man who can’t dance.”

The Warriors Inside

warriors, mythologically, lift their swords to defend the king.
The inner warriors do not cross boundary aggressively
when our parents do not respect our territory at all, their disrespect seems overwhelming proof of our inadequacy.
the child, stiffens with shock, and falls into timeless fossilized confusion of shame.

The Outer, or Disciplined, Warrior

Indo-European civilizations: the King, the Warrior, the Farmer. There are three sorts of ceremonies, three sorts of living life, three world views, three gods and goddesses for each way.
- Romans: Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus
- Greeks: Zeus and Hera, Ares, Dionysus and Ariande
- Northern Europe: Odin, Thor, Frey and Freya
quality of a true warrior is that he is in service to a purpose greater than himself - to a transcendent cause. Mythologically, he’s in service to a True King. If the King he serves is corrupt, or there is no King and all, and he’s serving greed, or power, then he’s no longer a warrior, but a solder.
Japanese story: pond has lost its King; uncertain what to do, the pond’s inhabitants finally elect a heron (who’s in Japan is associated with the warrior) to be King. The heron eats up everyone in the pond.
When the warrior is in service to a True King - to a transcendent cause - he does well and his body becomes a hardworking servant, which he requires to endure cold, heat, pain, wounds, scarring, hunger, lack of sleep, hardship of all kings.
A clawed hand takes the comfort-loving baby away, and an adult warrior inhabits the body.
Strategy as an essential quality of true warrior. Includes cunning, worldliness, intelligence.

The Eternal, or Sacred, Warrior

The physical warrior loves the battlefield. The Holy Warrior loves the field of good and evil. Light vs. Darkness.
A Sacred King and Queen live in the Luminous Realm, but the Holy Warrior also lives there.
The Sacred Warrior has a blessed side and a poisoned side.
When the Holy Warrior falls, he entangles the warriors in the two other places in his fall.
Lover and warrior mingles. Nowadays that mingling is mostly gone. The physical warrior disintegrated into solder when mechanized warfare come on. Ares it not present on the contemporary battlefield.
The disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanizes war, disdained and abandoned by high-tech culture, is fading in American men. The fading of the warrior contributes to the collapse of civilized society. A man who cannot defend his own space cannot defend women and children. The poisoned warriors called drug lords prey primarily for recruits on kingless, warriorless boys.
Our story goes back to a time when the warrior was still honored.

The Story: The Battle Scene

it is our own psyche (Kingdom) that has been invaded.
The invasion is more than a distraction, the story says that the King is losing the battle.
Time for the warrior in us to learn to fight. We notice that in the story the warrior pursues the battle to the end - no halfway measures in mind, no pulling back.
Mithraic cave: “Just as the God kills the bull, I kill my own passions.”
The battle we are discussing happens in a ritual space, and we expect that some sort of wheat, or corn, or honey will come from these “bodies”. Bible: bees make honey inside the dead body of the hostile lion.
Being passive, hiring an expert to fight our enemy, won’t do.
The enemy in our story is never named.

Gaining a Four-legged Horse

“Four” is complete - four-gated city, four directions, for rivers of Paradise, four Seasons, four letters of the Holy Name.
The horse reminds of the animal side of human beings, and of the body. The rider stands for the intelligence or the intellect or mind.
The fourth leg is a shamed leg. The animal has been crippled by shame.
When we were very tiny, our horse had all four legs. By the time the child in our culture is twelve, at least one of the legs will be crippled by shame.
We need an older man, or a mentor, who will provide is with a four-legged horse. We know we have to return it, but just the experience what it is to ride a horse without a crippled legs, even for a few minutes, is worth it all.
Iron John, lending us the horse, does not away with out early shaming; that cannot be done away with. But we can work to prevent further shaming. And we can learn what connection we still have to that earlier, four-legged horse.

Warriorhood in Teaching, in Literature and in Science

disappearance of fierce debates is a loss. When the playful verbal combats disappears, then warriorhood becomes reduced to wrestling, football, the martial warfare, blood-and-guts movies.
Science adopted generational struggle during the Renaissance as a means of progress, and still uses it. Blake fought a mental fight against Newton.
The collapse of the warrior means that the sword is thrown away.

The Pelasgian Creation Myth

more than one American man today needs a sword to cut his adult soul away from his mother-bound soul.
sharp interior sword. Tibetans refer to it as “the Vajra sword”.
We may need a sword to cut us apart from our own self-pity.
Pelasgian creation myth: Once upon a time there was an egg floating on the ocean. Then a sword cut the egg in two. It turned out that Eros was inside the egg.
No sword, no Eros in the World.
Such a history of creation is history of discriminations. Great Cutter arrived and divided matter into heavy and light. Then he appeared once more and divided the light stuff that became Fire and Air. Then he divided the heavy matter into Earth and Water.
The Divine Cutter - Logos - kept dividing.
These cuttings resulted in the finely articulated, singing, beautifully detailed, shining world of minute particulars that the landscape painters love.
The Cutter leaves behind its tracks as pair of opposites that exist everywhere.
Jung: Animals always remain what they are. But human beings are suggestible and can lose distinction. When they merge into “the masses”, they fall into indistinctiveness.
Gnostics: Pleroma - place of enormous abundance, but also enormous indistinction.
“prodigious complexity” we all love depends both in nature and in culture on a love of distinctiveness.

Warriorhood in Marriage and Relationship

conscious fighting is great help in relationships between men and women.
Jung: “American marriages are the saddest in the whole world, because the man does all his fighting at the office.”
When shouts of rage come out of the man, it means his warriors have not been able to protect his chest; the lances have already entered, and it is too late.
Begin identifying the weapons that have come down through their family lines. Short dagger used unexpectedly, spiked mace which swings down onto the soldier’s head, broad indiscriminate sword, doorway lance…
A good fight gets things clear, and I think women long to fight and to be with men who know how to fight well.
When both use their weapons unconsciously or without naming them, both man and woman stumble into the battle, and when it is over the two interior children can be badly wounded.
The adult warrior inside both men and women, when trained, can receive a blow without sulking or collapsing, knows how to fight for limited goals, keeps the rules of combat in mind, and is able to keep the fighting clean and to establish limits.
If a woman has a fair argument, it is not right for the man to leave; he should stay and fight.
Anger comes from personal level, rage from an archetypal core. It comes out of centuries of abuse. If taken into relationships, it destroys.
The interior warrior in both men and women can help them to fight on the human plane.
If men and woman have only soldiers or shamed children inside, they will have to settle for damaging battles constantly.

Iron vs. Copper

Iron belongs to Mars and Ares. Iron relates to blood because of the red hiding in it.
Two kinds of iron: magnetic associated with sky-gods, that has “fallen from heavens” and ordinary, with earthly dark gods, such as Set, who pursues and kills the solar god, Osiris.
Iron often considered lucky - horseshoes.
Iron associated with intellect and spiritual warfare.
The Vajra sword should cut apart what has been inappropriately joined.
What if we feel to young to inhabit the dangerous space between male and female? A child can easily become a professional bridge. Conducting metal - copper.
Mother and father talk through the child.
Copper is such a good conductor, that the boy doesn’t heat up.
Intense isolation of the father. Intensity of female suffering.
The child loses his distinctiveness by learning to be a conductor.
The more the man agrees to be copper, the more he becomes neither alive nor dead, but an amorphous, demasculinized, half-alive psychic conductor.
Conducting large amounts of charm and niceness is also dangerous.
Ingesting excessive amounts of copper is an occupational hazard for therapists, priests, ministers, resembling the hazards of ingesting the lead that some factory workers endure.
Men and women, often become conductors not from bravery or openness to change, but from a longing for comfort, for peace in the house, for padded swords, for protective coloration, a longing to be the quail hiding in fall reeds.
Becoming a conductor is not achieving andrygony. Hermaphrodite is an image from alchemy and becomes possible on an inner plane after years of distinctiveness, years of cutting, opposites and discrimination. A false androgyny is achieved early through conduction, but usually neither Hermes nor Aphrodite are present.

Sustaining the Tension Between Opposites

We lose our childhood and a lot of playfulness by becoming copper wires.
We become suspicious of all forms of merging. It is right to examine all mergings: merging of molester and victim, of tyrant and citizen, of company and employee, of group mind and personal mind, of husband and wife.
Men and women, must learn, when faced with excessive merging, to say as the little boy did: “Get away! Shut up!”. Some merging is right, some is not. Our intuition will tell us when the merging is appropriate; then it is the warrior inside who can teach us how to hold boundaries.
able to sustain the tension between opposites, with neither attitude understood as wrong, but different.
Choice: bridging opposites with Aphrodite’s metal, copper, or living in the opposites, while not coming down hard on either side.

Living in the Opposites

live between opposites, not only recognising that they exist, but rejoicing that they exist.
does not mean identifying with one side and then belittling the other, regarding it as enemy.
Rejoicing in the opposites means pushing the opposites apart with our imaginations as to create space and then enjoying the fantastic music coming from each side.
Catholic church, obsessed with the opposites of pagan and Christian attitude, identified with one side during the Inquisition and the result was disastrous. In any religion it is tempting for ascetic men to identify with the male pole. Then, disguised as spiritual warriors they are angry at women all through life.

Admiring Paris’ Choice

Ares’ sister was Eris (Discord), she was the one who caused trouble for Paris lending him a golden apple.
Paris saw Hera and her Rooted Earth Energy, Aphrodite and her Erotic Joy, and Athena and her Estatic Spiritual Knowledge.
Choosing a goddess is very different from identifying with one side of pair opposites. The question here is what you really love. Eris says choose what you want and then pay for it.
“the one precious thing”
At the instant Paris indicates his choice with his wand, the king wakes up.
New Age people are in general addicted to harmony. Child does not become adult until it breaks addiction to harmony, chooses one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world.
The battle happens over and over. Each time we use the warrior well, we’re awakening the King.

Moving from Copper to Iron

The process of reviving inner warriors goes on for years. Imaginative, not so much physical work.
The warrior’s task is to warn us when the person talking to us intends to pass on some of his or her shame. (sa:han)
- “I don’t think I’ll be shamed by you, if that’s all right with you”
Accepting thorns as well as the rose, living in scarcity, doing the unpleasant, avoid talk of how things might be better.
Conducting is unconscious and naming it helps move it to communication. “I don’t think I’ll be a conductor for you any longer”
The Odyssey says there are suitors inside who want to marry the soul. These toothy suitors have plans for you life. If a person never lifts the sword, he might get high marks for gentleness, but he may end up as a slave to the suitors or target of an arranged wedding.
Now that the images of eternal warrior and outward warrior no longer provide the model, one major task of contemporary men is to reimagine the value of the warrior in relationships, in literary studies, in thought, in emotion.
the energy that loves to fight need to learn to play all over again.

Riding the Red, the White, and the Black Horses

our society produces a plentiful supply of boys but seems to produce fewer and fewer men. We have no idea how to produce men.
Michael Ventura: “The Age of Endarkenment”.
For about forty years, the young in our culture have generated forms - music, fashions, behaviours - that prolong the initiatory moment … as though hoping to be something initiated by chance somewhere along the way.
The prolongation of the initiatory moment has everything to do with the massive drug market in the US.

An Overview of Classic Initiation

Five stages:
1. bonding with mother and separation from mother.
2. bonding with father and separation from the father
3. arrival of mentor, who helps to man to rebuild the bridge to his own greatness/essence and to his “Gold Head.”
4. apprentice to a hurricane energy such as the Wild Man, or the Warrior, or Dionysus, or Apollo. When he has done well, the young man receives a drink from the waters of the god (Such a drink is one thing the adolescents are asking for).
5. marriage with the Holy Women or the Queen.
The personal father draws down both the orderly and twisted/poisoned side of the Sacred King.
From Great Mother also her accepting, nourishing, praising positive side flows down to the son. But she’s got also a Twisted, possessive side, for she too is an immense hurricane energy that puts her clawed hand through the wall. “It is necessary to steal the key from under mother’s pillow.”
conscious mother, aware of the power she is exercising over the child, and unconscious mother, who keeps running Great Mother programs in her grain over and over, hardly distinguishing between partnership and domination.
The Twisted side of Great Mother doesn’t want the boy to pass out of her realm. She does not curse him as the Twisted side of the Sacred King, but she holds him.
It isn’t the personal mother who imprisons the son - she wants him to be free. It is the possessive or primitive side of the Great Mother.
“Stepmother” is a code word in fairy tales for Poisoned Side of the Great Mother.
Collectivized education puts whole nations to sleep.
Sometimes the intellectual ideas the mother brings to the son late at night are a blessing, sometimes not - the boy could end up years later isolated in a high mental tower. If the union takes place on a feeling level, he could end up imprisoned under the water.
Sioux were more aware of the possibilities of psychic incest between mother and son.
Frank disclosure is often better than silence, but it becomes harmful if the son feels he has to do something about it.
In American culture two trends come together, emphasis on adult man’s inadequacy and woman’s increased awareness of her own interior emotional richness. Hope for change and fulfillment falls on young sons.
at forty or forty-five, he realizes that his task throughout his life has been to be substitute husband, lover, and soul companion for his mother.
the boy finds in himself an inexplicable anger, a rage, that prevents the mother’s dream of delicate man from becoming real.
how difficult it is to become a conscious father and a conscious mother.
son didn’t save his mother. He failed to replace his father and so father is in shame, but the son is in guilt.
a traditional strategy, when one feels too much guilt, is to bite off one part of your body, and throw it behind you. A man in guilt man decide to fail during the first half of his life.
Some men who fail to rescue their mothers become therapist, and some attempt to rescue a woman over and over. They bite off the finger of their emotions, and listen to other people’s emotions the rest of their lives.
His masculine beauty does not come out, and the rigid boundaries, the angry boy inside, the dead King, the robotlike interior soldiers, throw his family and his wife into despair. His mother did not protect him from his father, as he sees it, and his father did not protect him from his mother. In that state, the two hemispheres of his brain do not commune well with each other. He does not know what his feelings are, they do not come up into words.
such a man needs a male mother, in this world or the eternal world, to whom he can bring his three-legged horse and from whom he can receive a horse with all four legs

The Story: Festival of Golden Apples

Living in the marvelous opposites of the midbrain, its dreamlike furies, its secret defenses of passion, its heightened adrenaline-inspired bloow flow, a man can give spirit to the world, protect the community, and be in passion himself.
The ability to fight well, as well to dance - wholehearted intent to be in the world, is not savory when the man can imagine another person only as enemy.
gave him a leg wound with the end of his sword.
Men invigorated by warrior energy need the ability to modulate out of the warrior mode.

The Golden Apples

the apple associates with immortality.
Celts imagined paradise to be an apple orchard in the West where death is.
Ritual banquets used to begin with the egg of the east and apple of the west.
Apple is the earth and pentangle (apple sliced transversly) is its secret configuration and sign for Holy Women or Sophia - the soul of the earth.

Threshold Space

Protestantism has spread its ignorance of ritual space everywhere in the world.
Dionysian initiation work took place in exquisitely maintained ritual space. Greek tragic theater amounts to a transfer of this elaborate ritual space to a public event.
In ritual space our desire energy does not rush forward towards its climax, whether that be orgasm or battle, but delight replaces fury, and a turn of phrase or a turn of symbol replaces the turn of the sword.
Culture beings very likely with baskets made of reeds that are “soft” and hold emptiness.
In ritual space we learn to experience emptiness or the longing and not to fill it. Such a man can be in the presence of innocence without moving to have sexual intercourse with it, enjoy his fierceness without acting it out physically, know his mother’s neediness without moving to satisfy it. A warrior can enjoy the beauty of his sacred warriorhood without engaging in battle.
is there to be seen, to display.
Blake called the highest stage of consciousness “constant creativity” or “The Shining City of Art”. The golden apple lets one into the paradise of form.
The heron or the peacock and the deer express in their vivid outrageous display what the absence of shame is like. Blake: “The pride of the peacock is the glory of God”.
To be without a supportive father is for a man an alternative phrase for “to be in shame.”
Only when a man’s interior warrior are strong enough can he go into the joy of display and enter the delight of form.
Shapeless clothing, verse that is sloppy, chaotic furnishings: all are linked in secret ways to shame. The universe is not ashamed, and it delights in form.
The delight in form, then, moves one away from old duality of hero and enemy, right and wrong.
When a man or woman enters ritual space, each takes actions meant to be seen, and the joy of display helps pull energy away that would otherwise be invested in conflict.
The knights who parade before the King’s stands, patiently waiting to receive a “golden apple”, are lovely emblems of the new stage in which the infinitive to win fades and is replaces be the infinitive “to be seen”.
Ritual space, headed by the Holy Feminine and the King, becomes hot enough to allow change.

Riding the Red, the White, and the Back Horses

hero or heroine who chances to see a drop of red blood fall from a black raven into a white snow, sinks immediately into a yogic trance.
Red: “blood-red thread of life”, anger, menstrual blood, blood of birth, blood shed by weapon, red earth, war, witchcraft and sacrifice of men and beast.
white: semen, saliva, water, milk, lakes, rivers, sea, priesthood. web of connection that ideally ought to include the living and the dead. blessing, good fellowship, strength, purity, persons with high moral purposes.
black: charcoal, river mud, badness, evil, blackened corpse, suffering, disease, lack of purity, night, darkness. death, mourning, depression, left-hand path, crude matter, “prima materia”, lead, Osiris’ body when in the underworld.
for the Ndembu, ’to die’ often means to reach the end of a particular stage of development ’through death to maturity.'

The Great Mother Sequence

white, red, black
White of the virgin as the New Moon. Innocence
Red of Motherhood as Full Moon. Love and battle
black of the Crone as Old Moon. Death, destruction and knowledge
We all travel this road and it is a broad one.
Feminine mysteries of life and death.

The Alchemists’ Sequence

black - prima materia, lead, matter utterly untouched by spirit or consciousness.
“Beauty and the (black) Beast”
white: purification, imagination, spirit and humor
red: rising sun. sulfur appears, flaring up, passion
lead-gold path of men and women who ant increased personality, more spirit, occult knowledge, who want spiritual lead to turn into spiritual gold. It begins maybe at 45, not at birth.

The Masculine Sequence

Iron John’s sequence - masculine mysteries of wounding and growth. Red, white, black.
red: mars.
Gisu and Masai: Initiators encourage boys go express pride, get into trouble, be arrogant, antisocial etc. the young may stay in the red stage for ten or fifteen years. Girls make love to them but never marry them - they are unfinished. People do not trust them.
We try these days to move young men by compulsory education directly from childhood into the White Knight.
Saint George was riding a white horse. Man can have relationship to the dragon - doesn’t imply killing him - distorted version of original myth. In some old versions the dragon transforms into a woman, or gives treasure. The dragon is not evil, he’s dark water-energy.
Celtic hero gets into relationship with dragon by throwing loaves of bread into his mouth - he has to throw accurately, so we can say precision and skills enters white.
If a man hasn’t lived through the red stage, he is a stuck white knight who will setup a false war with some concretized dragon.
Black horse - decisive descent into woundedness, and is often wounded “by the King’s men”.
People who are in black usually give up blame.
young male moves from red intensity to white engagement to black humanity. Each man is given three horses that we ride at various times of our lives; we fall off and get back on.
Teacher and parents tell us to skip the red horse. Such a man then will have to go back to red later, learn to flare up, and be obnoxious when he is forty.
Black - bringing all of the shadow material, which has been for years projected out there. Retrieving and eating the shadow.
A man who goes into the black has to “walk the rest of the way”. It takes a long time to move into the black. When the man finds the dark parts of him he threw away, and retrieves them, other people will begin to trust him.
When he’s able to ride the black horse, it will carry him to the place where King’s men wound him. At that moment golden hair falls down over his shoulders…

The Wound by the King’s Men

leg wound

A Wound to the Genitals

possible that leg is a euphemism for genitals
piece of iron lodged in the testicles.
In fairy tales iron relates to imprisonment for men, glass for women.

A Wound That Lames

The young man has become more and more in touch with underworld treasures -its ashes, its armed men, its horses - and now the young man is sent to the lower half of his body.
Boy’s first would, to his finger, sped him up. Wounded leg slows him down.
Old tradition says that Jesus walked with a limp.
Get “grounded”.
No man is adult until he has become opened to the soul and spirit world.
People too healthy, too determined to jog, too muscular, may use their health to prevent soul from entering. They leave no door. Through the perfection of victory they achieve health, but the soul enters through the hole of defeat.
Lame goat by Rumi

The Boar Wound That Kills Adonis

In old Mediterranean and Mesopotamian cultures, vegetation was assumed to be male. The earth lives forever; the “vegetable world” dies.
The boar, with his curved moon-tusk, have Adonis a wound in the genital area, and that wound was fatal.
Tusk has a beautiful curve, like a breaking wave, or the new moon, or the harvester’s scythe.
Pig was the earliest domesticated animal, and was succeeded by a layer of sheep and for some cattle culture.
Margaret Walker in Encyclopedia of Women’s Myths and Secrets: Adonis: Greek version of Semitic Adonai, “The Lord,” a castrated and sacrificed savior-god whose love-death united him with Aphrodite, or Asherah, or Mari. In Jerusalem, his name was Tammuz… Another form of the same god as Anchises, castrated: “gored in the groin” by Aphrodite’s boar-masked priest. His severed phallus became his “son,” the ithyphallic god Priapus, identified with Eros in Greece … Castrating the god was linked to reaping the grain, which Adonis personified.
Abraham stopped the sacrifice of Isaac, which was going on for centuries presumably. At that time Palestine was in sheep culture, so a ram was substitute instead.

The Boar Wound That No Longer Kills

There are men who do not survive an encounter with the negative side of the Great Mother, and there are men who do.
When the fight takes place under the care of old men - the grandfathers - the boar attack only leaves s scar. The man himself remains alive, and, when old, is cunning like Odysseus and full of knowledge.
Mythologically, Odysseus unites in himself the adventuresome young man, the “puer” and the steady old man, the “senex.”
Ulysses’ name, becomes literally “thight wound”. He receives wound and lives.
When Odysseus returns secretly to Ithaca, he stays in swine herder’s hut (pigs again).
Distinction between the boar wound that takes the boy to paradise and the boar wound that leaves him with a scar on his thigh. If we have that scar, our “old nurse” can recognize us. Our own eyesight apparently is also clearer.
We know Odysseus was the initiated man - he is “the thirtheenth” in his band when they visit Circe.
If one has no scars, one becomes blind in the next world, but perhaps the man without scars is also blind in the imaginative world.
Odysseus gives evidence that the scar helps him see and escape all the dangers (e.g. Circe turning his man into pigs - again).

The Wound As Male Womb

Dionysus was born from Zeus’ tight. Because Dionysus’ destiny was to be “A Man with Two Mothers”
Siberian shaman needs be a wounded man. Spear gave Christ a wound before his death
Spear when drawn is also phallus, wound a vulva.
It is as if the boar is to the young man as a man is to woman. The boar opens a sexual passage; he crates sheath; the young man receives female opening.

The Wound As a Man’s Commitment to the God of Grief

The Titans gave Dionysus a minor wound when he was an infant, and then while he was distracted tore him apart and ate him. He was reconstituted from the heart, which the Titans overlooked. Dionysus stands for the ecstasy that can come from tearing and being torn. The ecstatic wine comes only if the cluster of grapes is torn apart, trampled, enclosed.
Ethical philosophy wants Apollo, morality, and perfection. The pagans want tearing and ecstasy.
Some young men in the past, presumably those guided by the old men, became more and more like evergreens and less like spring flowers.
No one gets to adulthood without a wound that goes to the core.
women have two hears: one heart in their chest and another heart in their womb.
The old initiators make the young man, through the ritual space, double-hearted. Now the man has a physical heart he has always had, but also a compassionate heart.

The Story: Asking for the Bride

The man in earth time would be about fifty years old now, or older. Some flower has finally unfolded and blossomed; the golden salmon have laid their eggs; the young man has received through his descent a grounding that allows him to reconnect with some creativity that would have frightened him when he was younger.
Life in a family takes that assurance (of glory) out of one fast; and each of us goes through a shaming time or deprivation time.
Eventually at fifty, or fifty-five, we feel a golden ring on the finger again.

The Wild Man and His Qualities

Rudeness and sarcasm may be savage, but the unexpected is not savage.
The wild man represents the positive side of male sexuality. He’s not been clean shaven out of shame and his instincts have not been suppressed as to produce the rage that humiliates women.
Wild Man’s sexuality does not feed on the feminine or pictures of the feminine, it resonates also to hills, clouds, and ocean.
Apollo, Hermes, the Virgin may be above nature, but the Wild Man is nature.
The Wild Man encourages and amounts to a trust in what is below. “Water prefers low places”
Desires for the infinite, for the Woman at the Edge of the Word, for the Firebird, for the treasure at the bottom of the sea, desires entirely superfluous.
We need to build a body, but not on parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires.
The Wild Man can come only to full life inside the man when he has gone through serious disciplines suggested by taking first wound, doing the kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, white and black horses. Learning to create art and receiving a second heart.
He doesn’t come to full live being “natural”, going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing and generally being groovy.
Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.
The Wild man prepares matter, emotional body, so he can receive grief, ecstasy, spirit.
Rumi: “everyone who is calm and sensible is insane”
Wild Man’s energy is that energy which is conscious of a wound. His face and body contains grief, knows grief, shares grief with nature.
The hard survivor in us survived to adulthood. Wild Man leads the return to the place of childhood abuse and abandonment.
The Wild Man is better guide to that pain as our inner child, because he’s not a child. He knows stories and can lead us into personal suffering and through it.
Wild Man’s qualities, among them love of spontaneity, association wild wilderness, honoring grief, respect for riskiness, frightens many people. Some men, as soon they receive first impulses to riskiness and recognize its link to the Wild Man, become frightened, stop all wildness and recommend collective behaviour and timidity to others. Some of these men become high school principals, some sociologists, some businessmen, Protestant ministers, bureaucrats, therapist; some become poets and artists.
If a man doesn’t descend to the kitchen, he won’t know ashes.
Do not want ordinary life; they prefer possibility of intensity, even though it entails risk of failure or insanity, preferring it to the “even-tempered life promised to the good servant.”
Aim is not to be the Wild Man, but to be in touch with him.

The Community Inside the Psyche

Wild Man lives in complicated interchanges with other interior beings. A whole community of beings is what is called a grown man.
- King.
- Warrior.
- Lover.
- Wild Man - who energizes this whole story.
- Tricker - does not go with the flow but reverses it.
- Mythologist or Cook - knows how long cooking should go on, and how to move from one stage to another. Also called Magician or Magus. Shaman at the highest level. Deals with energies in the invisible world. When the emotional body is severely crippled in the childhood, the Magician might survive. Pure intellectual energy not as damaged by emotions figures things out and ascends to keep sane. Perhaps Magician’s wise ascension is the way naive man gets born. The Magician is then a great blessing. He moves behind the screen of our story invisibly, sending the young man on to garden, for example, no matter what the King says.
- Grief Man. Special figure in men who leads them down into one of their great strengths - the power to grieve. There is a grief in men that has no cause. Our culture gets very little permission to grieve.
Teachers and therapist often have a strong Cook, Mythologist or Magician inside. But if Wild Man is not developed, he will become an “academic”. If a therapist doesn’t dive down to meet the Wild Man, he will try to heal with words.
The Grief Man without the Wild Man can become lost in the labyrinth of childhood.
When a man inherits great warrior energy but does not incorporate Wild Man, he might sacrifice other but not know whom he is to be sacrificed.
When the Wild Man is not strong part of the Trickster, the Trickster may reverse all flows but have none of his own.
If a Lover lacks the Wild Man, he may not give enough wild flowers.
King without enough Wild Man will be king for human beings, but animals, oceans, trees will have no representation in his Senate.

The Story: The Wedding Feast

the despised and lowly becomes honored, the being that is apparently primitive becomes a king.
Some invisible force that we know nothing about has put the sophisticated energy of this being into a primitive form and shape, as if into a cage.
Such initiation does not take place at any one movement or only once. It happens over and over.
The initiatory road in our story includes eight segments, but another story may offer the same stages in different order, or entirely different stages.
I don’t think there is any one right order of initiation. We go through the round of experiences over and over - at first lightly, then as we get older, more deeply.
A man whose Warrior or Lover has been damaged is already farthest from women. He couldn’t be farther.
“A strong power forced me by enchantment to live under the water until a young man appeared who was ready to undergo the discipline and go through the suffering that you have gone through. Now that you have done that, I can appear as I am - a Lord.”

The Wild Man in Ancient Religion, Literature, and Folk Life

The Hunting Era

Ancient man and women see through a veil to a firm, invisible being on the other side of the screen of nature.
Lord of Animals or the Releaser of Animals, crossed the line from animals’ side of things to the human side.
a compact was made sometime in the past between the human realm and animal realm.
Lord of Animals has been associated with the initiation of young men for at least fourteen thousand years.
In our industrial system we ignore Great Mother and Lord of the Animals. We are some of the first people in history who have tried to live without honoring him and his depth, his woundedness, his knowledge of appropriate sacrifice. As a result, our sacrifices have become unconscious, regressive, pointless, indiscriminate, self-destructive and massive.

The Agricultural Era

In the Indian subcontinent the Lord of Animals transforms in such a way as to become Shiva.
Dravidian culture, that was prior the Hindu culture, gave him the name Pashupati and Parvati to his companion, the Lady of the Mountain. Immense philosophical and religious movement around the Lord of the Animals enters classical Indian literature as Shivaism, which merged with earlier animism.
Dravidian language shares many words with Sumerian, Basque, Georgian languages.
Shiva keeps wild aspect, but has also an ascetic aspect, a husbandly side, and enraged or Bhairava side.
Lord of the Animals in the area around Caucasus, Thessaly, Greece and Crete expands into the god called Zagreus, Zan, Zeus.
Cretans named Lord of Animals Zagreus and the Lady of the Mountain Cybele. The bull, the snake and the phallus speak for Zagreus or Zeus, the tiger and the lion speak for Cybele.
As Cretan culture developed, the birth rituals of baby Zeus on Mount Ida and Mount Dicte began to merge with the rituals around the baby Dionysus (who came directly from the thigh of Zeus).
As mankind moves toward the mystery of plants, the Lord of Animals can change while still keeping his sacrificial essence.
Dionysus is the clump of grapes which when torn apart, trampled, enclosed in the darkness of an ox hide, gives to everyone in the community an ecstasy - a wine. Sufis: “Nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent”.
gr:tragedy = song of the (sacrificed) goat.
Dionysus carries knowledge that comes to the soul when it broods on tearing and being torn.
In Celtic societies of ancient Europe Wild Man appears as Cernunnos, Cornely, or Cornelius, emphasizing stag horns. In some Celtic lands he is known as Herne the Hunter, whose hunting dogs are white with red ears.
Visualization of Cernunnos found in Jutland known as Gundestrup Cauldron from first century BC. Cernunnos is seen sitting in yoga posture, holding a serpent in one hand and the Lady’s neck ring in the other, allowing stag horns and leaves to rise from his head. Al l around him is a company made of dolphin, gazelle, lion and dog. Celtic Arthurian circle keeps memories of him, e.g. in Yvain, where he is named Lord of the Animals and Guardian of the Fountain. Cernunno’s female companion has many names, among them Artio - who root she shares with Arthur - meaning “female bear”.
John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene - carries some of the feeling of light hidden in darkness, which we associate with Sophia.
Sophia and Dionysus contain in their legends the secret of a sun that does not shine from the sun down, but rather a sun deep in earth which shines toward us.
Development of the Forest Lord stops dead around A.D 1100. As Wild Man, he is remembered of course in literature and folk imagination.

The Wild Man in Ancient Literature

When a young king, Gilgamesh, golden, inflated, greedy for pleasure, beings to cause trouble, the elders say the only solution is to bring him in touch with the man called Enkidu.
Enkidu travels to the city, meets Gilgamesh; the two wrestle, Enkidu wins, and the two become inseparable friends. Enkidu appears a s a hairy shadow of the new civilized city king.
The tale of Esau (Bible) implies that at a certain point in Near Eastern history the hairy main was exiled or disenfranchised.

The Wild Main in the European Middle Ages

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_and_Orson
Symbolizing union with a women, the ring tempts the Wild Man into the holy and legal bond of matrimony from which he is barred. The soldier and the emperor, with his sword drawn, stalk the Wild Man, ready to strike him down for his transgression against man’s civilized order.
Burning Wild Man preceded the burning of witches by several centuries, and it proceeded from the same fear and anger.

The Threat of the Wild Man in Europe

Pan, Greek god, whose name means “everything”, suggest nature itself.
Powerful sociological and religious forces have acted in the West to favor the trimmed, the sleek, the cerebral, the noninstinctive, and the bald.
institutionalized drive of Christianity, which is toward the idea that sexuality inhibits spiritual growth.