Summary of Iron John by Robert Bly

Takeaway

• The development from boyhood to manhood used to be achieved through rituals across many old cultures and civilizations.
• Those rituals had, at their core, the same pattern.
• The story of Iron John tells the development of such a pattern.
• Among the most important steps are getting in touch with the inner Wild Man, breaking the bonds with the mother, severing ties with the parents, being taught by the Wild Man, descending into poverty and hard work, emerging and cultivating skills and personality, unlocking the warrior to go to battle, getting rid of shame, and, at the right moment, uniting with the feminine through marriage.

Table of Contents

What Iron John Talks About

Iron John was written by the poet Robert Bly. It is a mytho-psychological exploration of myths and tales aimed at accompanying the development of the male psyche.

While nature takes into her hands the transformation of girls into women through bodily changes, it does not do so with men. For dozens of thousands of years, cultures across the world had come up with initiation rites to help boys become men.

The fact that they have completely disappeared is one of the reasons for the current malaise of the modern man. Iron John seeks to rebuild the map of this transformation.

9/10. While the book is a fairly good one, the author, at times, moves too far from his original mission and gets lost in non-mandatory mythological details.

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Short Summary of Iron John Written by Robert Bly

This summary doesn’t summarize the book as much as it summarizes the journey from boyhood to manhood, which is, in the end, the most important aspect of the book.

1. Get in touch with the Wild Man (empty the pond with buckets)

• Get in touch with the Wild Man in your psyche by paying attention to wild impulses and desires.

2. Steal the key under the mother’s pillow (break the link with the mother)

• Break the bond with your mother by stealing the key to Iron John’s cage, located under her pillow. (Aure’s Notes: I did this when I pierced my ears, which I knew she would highly disapprove of).

3. Open the cage and free Iron John (accept the initial wound)

• Free the Wild Man from his cage with the key. This necessarily means accepting the wound that will result from it. This may mean taking a job that you want to do but that your parents disapprove of, moving abroad for a year, etc.

4. Follow Iron John to the forest (enter the male initiation space)

• Follow the Wild Man’s intuition and let it transform you. This may necessitate a mentor.

5. Guard the spring and watch your hair turn into gold (embrace inner transformation)

• Obey the Wild Man and accept his challenges. You will most likely fail, but will nonetheless gain something in exchange (the golden hair).

6. Descend into the ashes (experience katabasis and grief)

• You will know a challenging period that will compel you to grieve your personal wounds, get rid of naivete, passivity, and numbness, and let go of the idea that you are a special little child.

7. Learn to shudder (acknowledge human frailty)

• Accept the limitations and the negative side of life and of yourself.

8. Move from the mother’s world to the father’s world (reclaim the father)

• Reclaim personal grief and investigate the wound, often inherited from the father, to forge a connection with his soul and masculine energy.

9. Cultivate the garden (nurture the soul)

• Create your own garden and work in it to grow stability and boundaries, learn love and yearning, and get rid of the shame.

10. Awaken the inner warriors (move from copper to iron)

• Connect to your inner warrior and establish boundaries to protect your psyche. Choose what to defend and fight for, which means giving up on certain things.

11. Ride the red, white, and black horses (integrate stages of development)

• Cultivate different aspects of the masculine to win over the Queen (aggression, purity, maturity). Learn to shamelessly display yourself.

12. Receive the wound by the king’s men (embrace vulnerability)

• Accept the second wound, a symbol of shadow integration which enables to move beyond perfectionism.

13. Reveal the golden hair and claim identity (assert authentic self)

• Own, then reveal yourself.

14. Marry the princess (unite with the feminine)

15. Reunite with parents and Iron John as king (reconcile and inherit)

• Reconnect with the parents at the wedding and receive the gifts from Iron John.

Summary of Iron John Written by Robert Bly

Introduction

The image of man given by popular culture has worn out. One could say it’s even become negative. Men grieve, and this grief has only increased since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.

Chapter 1: The Pillow and the Key

The male from the 50s knew what a man and his responsibilities were, but the one-sidedness of his vision was dangerous. The 60s led to another type of man asking if he knew what a man was due to the waste and violence of the Vietnam War. If being a man was the Vietnam War, they wondered if they even wanted to be one.

Meanwhile, the feminist movement led men to consider women in a different manner, leading many to consider their own feminine side.

This process has continued to this day.

While wonderful as it made men more gentle, it did not make them freer. Men have become nice boys whose task is to please the women (mums, colleagues, etc) in their lives.

This has led to the development of soft males, who, while with good intentions, are profoundly unhappy. Lacking energy, they are life-preserving, not life-giving.

Here we have a finely tuned young man, ecologically superior to his father, sympathetic to the whole harmony of the universe, yet he himself has little vitality to offer.

The strong or life-giving women who graduated from the sixties, so to speak, or who have inherited an older spirit, played an important part in producing this life-preserving, but not life-giving, man.

Part of the grief that these men carry was due to the absence of fathers, which impacted their marriages and relationships. The fierceness they needed at the time to pursue them wasn’t coming. They lacked life in them.

The “soft” male was able to say, “I can feel your pain, and I consider your life as important as mine, and I will take care of you and comfort you.” But he could not say what he wanted, and stick by it. Resolve of that kind was a different matter.

The development of the soft side in men has been interesting, but it should not be the end of the journey.

Finding Iron John

Iron John is a tale narrated by the Brothers Grimm. It tells the story of a kingdom. One day, a series of hunters disappear in the forest nearby, and none can be found. Frightened, the king forbids anyone to go into the forest. One day, a huntsman stops by the castle and asks if he can help. He’s told about the forest, and decides to visit it with his dog.

As he approaches a pond, a hand grabs the dog and takes it to the bottom of it. So the man goes back to the castle and comes back to the pond with three men and a bucket. They empty the pond and discover at the bottom of it, a man covered with hair: a Wild Man. They take him back to the castle and imprison him, calling him Iron John.

In every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

Approaching this archetype is scary, and it should be. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what’s dark down there, including the nourishing dark.

Back to the story. One day, the king’s son was playing with his golden ball when it ended up in the cage of Iron John. The golden ball symbolizes youth’s innocence, usually lost around the age of eight.

In the second part of the 20th century, men were advised to find the golden ball in their feminine side, but it’s likelier to be in Iron John, or even, lost forever.

The Wild Man is not opposed to civilization; but he’s not completely contained by it either.

The first step to finding Iron John, hence is to empty the pond with the bucket. The second step is to approach him.

Back to the story, Iron John offers to give the ball back to the child if he opens the cage. Scared, he runs away. The child comes back to him a second time. Iron John gives him the same deal, and he also runs off. The third time, he tells Iron John that even if he wanted to free him, he doesn’t know where the key is.

Iron John answers that the key is under his mom’s pillow, entrusted to her by the king.

She won’t give up the key, and one cannot ask for it. The key needs to be taken. Who cannot steal it doesn’t deserve it. The pillow symbolizes intimacy, but also dreams and aspirations that a mother can have for her son.

One day, the boy steals the key, opens the cage, and in doing so, pinches his finger. He frees Iron John, who gets out of the cage and hurries to the forest. The boy calls him: “Wait! If my parents see you’re gone, they will beat me”.

“You better come with me then”, answered Iron John. You’ll never see your mother and father again. But I have treasures, more than you’ll ever need.” The boy gets on Iron John’s shoulders and leaves with him to the forest.

That moment in the story is the equivalent of the ancient male rites’ initiation. In some tribes, the older men take the boys away, and they don’t see their mothers for up to a year and a half. Such practices no longer exist, and older men no longer teach or spend time with the younger boys.

It’s becoming clear to us that manhood doesn’t happen by itself; it doesn’t happen just because we eat Wheaties. The active intervention of the older men means that older men welcome the younger man into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world.

The boy leaves for the first time because he needs to break the bond with his mother.

Today, this can be realized through a holiday with the father exclusively, for example, but it must be done. Some mothers spontaneously and intuitively break the bond, but many would rather not. This may explain why teenagers are so difficult with their mothers – they’re trying to make themselves unattractive to her in order to become adults themselves.

The traditional way of raising sons, which lasted for thousands and thousands of years, amounted to fathers and sons living in murderously close-proximity, while the father taught the son a trade: perhaps farming or carpentry or blacksmithing or tailoring. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father-son bond. When the office work and the “information revolution” begin to dominate, the father-son bond disintegrates.

When older men don’t do their jobs of breaking the bond with their mothers, the younger men become suspicious of them and see them as the embodiment of evil.

When the demons are so suspicious, how can the son later make any good connection with adult male energy, especially the energy of an adult man in a position of authority or leadership? As a musician he will smash handcrafted guitars made by old men, or as a teacher suspicious of older writers he will “deconstruct” them. As a citizen he will take part in therapy rather than politics. He will feel purer when not in authority. He will go to northern California and raise marijuana, or ride three-wheelers in Maine.

There’s a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive.

The Iron John male energy has been slowly destroyed in the West since the beginning of the 1920s, when cartoons portrayed male characters as weak and foolish.

Many young Hollywood writers, rather than confront their fathers in Kansas, take revenge on the remote father by making all adult men look like fools.

When men act on the fear of the demonic father, he becomes flat, stale, isolated, and dry.

When men are taught how to feel by their mothers, they take a female view of masculinity and of their own fathers, seeing him through their mothers’ eyes.

At some point, usually around 35, men want to discover and understand their fathers as they really are. To do so, they must get rid of all preconceived ideas about masculinity and discover what it is on their own.

Chapter 2: When One Hair Turns Gold

Mircea Eliade explains that the initiation of boys begins with two events:

1. A clean break with the parents.
2. A wound that the older men give to the boy.

Adolescence is a time of risk and risk-taking for boys, and many usually endure a high number of injuries in an attempt to “let the wild man out”. If the injury isn’t inflicted by the older men, it will be self-inflicted by the boy.

In the story, the boy goes to the forest with the Wild Man who tells him that if he obeys his orders, everything will go well.

The boy’s first task is watching over a spring and ensuring that nothing falls into it. But the finger he pinched when he opened the cage hurt him so much that he ends up dipping it into the water. He takes it off right away, but ithas already turned into gold. The Wild Man learns about it and tells him not to make the same mistake again.

The wounded finger is a symbol of psychological wounds. Robert Moore said, “If you’re a young man and you’re not being admired by an older man, you’re being hurt.”

In an African tale, a boy goes to hunt with his father. He kills a small rat and asks the son to keep it. Not thinking much of it, the son throws it in the bush. At night, the father asks for the small rat to cook and eat. As the boy reveals what he’s done, he takes his axe and knocks the boy unconscious.

Fathers hit their sons; but mothers shame them. Sometimes, the shame produces such a long-lasting wound that it doesn’t heal. For example, the Greeks abandoned Philoctetes because his wound smelled too bad. They only picked him up when they were told they needed him to win the Trojan War.

When kids get abused, they either become grandiose or depressed.

When people identify themselves with their wounded child, or remain children, the whole culture goes to pieces.

The absence of stories and initiation rites in the contemporary world leads many adults to remain children.

Note that the purpose is not to identify with the Wild Man either. We should be in touch with him, but not become him.

When the boy steals the key, opens the cage, and leaves for the forest with the Wild Man, three things happen:

1. The wound will appear as a gift.
2. The secret spring will appear.
3. The energy of the sun will somehow be carried into the man’s body.

The spring, in the story, is the water of soul life, the water that purifies the body of the enchanted child, who became enchanted due to the evil his parents let be done to him.

When the boy dips his finger in the water, it turns into gold, a symbol of radiant energy, royal power, and sun glory.

This is a promise that the water can help the boy rediscover the gold that was always there. This should be what functioning therapy should be like.

On the second day, the boy dropped a hair in the spring. It directly turned into gold. Upon coming back, Iron John tells him that he would have to leave if something fell into the spring a third time.

Some people make no distinction between the instinct for fierceness and the instinct for aggression. In recent decades, the separatist wing of the feminist movement, in a justified fear of brutality, has labored to breed fierceness out of men.

On the third day, the boy becomes fascinated by his reflection in the water, which he approaches slowly. As he does so, his hair falls into it and becomes gold-plated too.

Hair is associated with sexual energy, hunting, fierceness and passion, and excess and spontaneity. When the hair falls into the well, the boy learns that all of those things are good.

In real life, when a man realizes his capabilities and understands the intelligence in nature, then his hair turns gold.

In the story, three days have passed during which the initiator gave a task to the boy that he failed three times; yet he got a reward each time. Accepting the task was probably more important than succeeding at it.

In any way, the Wild Man tells the boy that since he failed, he must go into the world, “learn what poverty is”, but whenever he is in trouble, he can come to the forest and summon Iron John for help, and he will help him.

Chapter 3: The Road of Ashes, Descent, and Grief

What happens to the boy, the contact with his own intuition and the realization of the intelligence of the world, is something that happens to some boys around 13-14 years old.

Young men when lifted up may become white swans, grandiose ascenders, “flying boys,” just as young women similarly lifted up may become flying girls (…) In any case these flying people, giddily spiritual, do not inhabit their own bodies well, and are open to terrible shocks of abandonment; they are unable to accept limitations, and are averse to a certain boring quality native to human life.

Marie-Louise von Franz said that “flying boys” choose ascent as a revolt against maternal earthiness and female conservatism. They fly upward out of fear of the women’s demands for marriage, jobs, responsibilities, and commitment.

We must highlight, though, that not all men are flyers. Some are earthbound and begin carrying responsibilities early on.

Their family tradition is that the son’s grandiosity is to be wiped out early; sometimes in those families the women are the inflated ones, and the men are not; men take the depressed road.

For thousands of years, men’s activity was to create a safe place for women and children. This activity is no longer required. Since the end of WWII, particularly, men have been asked to follow instead of leading, to live in a nonhierarchical way, to be vulnerable, to adopt consensus decision-making.

The church wants a tamed man, the university wants a domesticated man, the corporation wants a team-worker, and so on.

The modern man can be looked at through three words: passivity, naivete, and numbness.

Passivity

The average American child by age eighteen has seen four thousand hours of commercials. Blake thought that passivity was learned in childhood.

The infant boy struggles against the father’s hands, fighting the narcissistic father’s desire to bind or murder him; and he struggles against swaddling bands, fighting the narcissistic mother’s desire to change him to what she wants. When the boy fails to get free, then, Blake says he learns to sulk.

Many adult men, when baffled by the behavior of a woman, go into a sulk.

When a man sulks, he becomes passive to his own hurts.

Studies showed that in three marriages out of four, women want more intimacy from their partners, who seek to escape it.

The passive man may not say what he wants, and the girlfriend or wife has to guess it. As a compensation for passivity at home, he may go into robot production at work, but that isn’t really what he wants either.

Naivete

Another aspect of the modern man is his naiveté. The naive man finds pride in his girlfriend being furious at him. He receives her attacks in his chest, proudly suffering from them. His friends are usually tasked with getting him back on his feet.

He feels, as he absorbs attacks, that he is doing the brave and advanced thing; he will surely be able to recover somewhere in isolation. A woman, so mysterious and superior, has given him some attention. To be attacked by someone you love-what could be more wonderful? Perhaps the wounds may pay for some chauvinistic act, and so allow him to remain special still longer.

The naive man also finds price in being on the other and of women sharing their pain. His mum may have shared with him a lot of pain that she had in her marriage, which subsequently defined his role later with other women.

His specialness makes him, in his own eyes, something of a doctor. He is often more in touch with women’s pain than with his own, and he will offer to carry a woman’s pain before he checks with his own heart to see if this labor is proper in the situation.

Sincerity is a big thing with him. He assumes that the person, stranger, or lover he talks with is straightforward, goodwilled, and speaking from the heart. He agrees with Rousseau and Whitman that each person is basically noble by nature, and only twisted a little by institutions. He puts a lot of stock in his own sincerity. He believes in it, as if it were a horse or a city wall. He assumes that it will, and should, protect him from consequences that fall to less open people.

The naive man has no boundaries. He doesn’t fight for what is his, but gives it away.

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 ecstasy through the feminine, through the Great Mother, through the goddess, even though what may be grounding for the woman ungrounds him. He uses ecstasy to be separated from grounding or discipline.

The naive man cannot detach himself from his mood and feelings. He’ll just sink into it. The naive man does not tell what he fails to do or what he wants to do, believing that tricking people is the safer bet.

The naive man often doesn’t know that there is a being in him that wants to remain sick.

He lacks what James Hillman has called “natural brutality.”

The naive man will betray, persuaded that his motives are always good. But he will also be betrayed.

Numbness

A spiritual man may love light, and yet be entirely numb in the chest area.

The origin of the numbness is unclear; however, the author shares this story.

When I was two or three years old, I went to my father and asked him for protection. But he was an intense man, and being with him felt more dangerous than being out on the street. I then went to my mother, and asked her for protection. At the instant she said yes, I went numb from my neck down to my lower belly.

Coming back to our story, what Iron John meant when he told the boy that he knew a great deal about gold but not about poverty was that he knew about ascending, but not falling down.

So the boy leaves the forest and reaches a city. Unable to find work, he ends up working in the kitchen of the king’s castle, taking care of the wood to heat up the stove and emptying the ashes. Hence, the falls.

The low places are associated with water and spirit.

The way down and out usually separates the young man from his companion flyers and from their support, and it makes him aware of a depression that may have been living unnoticed in him for years. A mean life of ordinariness, heaviness, silences, cracks in the road, weightiness, and soberness begins.

The Greeks called this descent katabasis, which is the step when the man realizes that he is, in fact, not special. The young, grandiose, and naive man is replaced by an old man.

Many men get into their katabasis without realizing it because they may be doing well financially. They’re living, but they’re not alive.

Jung used to be attristed when his friends came with good news like “I have been promoted” and happy when they came with bad news like “I just go fired”. In the latter case, he’d say, “Let’s celebrate, as something good will happen now”.

The katabasis can be understood as being discharged from life, and it happens through breaking up, losing a job, having an accident, etc. Iron John discharges the boy after three days at the spring.

The next is to find the way down and out.

The way out is about getting into the wound (the boy’s pinch when he opens the cage) that was inflicted by our parents or the people close when growing up. The wound becomes a door through which one should get out. If the wound is shame, the way out is to be shamed 50 times a day.

What the way down requires is only a loss of status, even though it can come as more dramatic than that.

In divorce, when a man’s emotional safety may disintegrate, he can either walk backward through the door while looking at funny movies, or he can try to take in the true darkness of the door as he faces it.

19th-century men didn’t notice women’s suffering. The modern man doesn’t notice his own suffering either.

With the initiators gone in modernity, we don’t receive instructions on how to “go down”. A good analogy would be the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous). The first step at AA begins with the acceptance that one is an alcoholic: it takes them down.

Seeing the dark side of a person close to us is a discipline the descender accepts.

The descent is meeting up with the dark side of God. It can also take three other forms:

1. Taking the Road of Ashes
2. Learning to Shudder
3. Moving from the Mother’s World to the Father’s World

The road of ashes refers to the Norwegian Cinder Boys, young men who were allowed to lie on ashes and do nothing for up to three years. The idea is that before a boy can become a man, some infantile being in him must die.

Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy.

The gold-obsessed man, whether a New Age man or a Dow Jones man, can be said to be the man who hasn’t yet handled ashes.

It is the equivalent of men early on dropping out of school. While such behavior should be tolerated, it is often shamed nowadays.

But, for us, how can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determined to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, poverty, lethargy, or misery?

Despite that, some men around 35 or 40 will experience the ashes by realizing that so many of their dreams are now dead.

In Greek mythology, Zeus fought the Titans and buried them under the earth. When they ate Dyonisus, he burned them to ashes, from which humans came. Dyonisos was remade from his heart, the only part that the Titans had not gotten.

Humans, hence, came from the Titans-who-ate-Dionysus’ ashes.

Gaining the ability to shudder means feeling how frail human beings are, and how awful it is to be a Titan.

Let’s talk about Moving from the Mother’s World to the Father’s World. When a boy begins initiation, he moves from the mother’s world to the father’s world, a ritual initiated by the older men.

A boy cannot change into a man without the active intervention of the older men. A girl changes into a woman on her own, with the bodily developments marking the change; old women tell her stories and chants, and do celebrations. But with the boys, no old men, no change.

In the story, the boy moves away from the mother when the Wild Man takes him to the forest, but it’s just a break, and doesn’t inherently change anything inside the boy.

He cannot move on to the father’s world without taking care of the Trickster.

Upon learning that his companions are carrying a letter asking the king to kill him, Hamlet replaced the letter with another one asking the king to kill them.

Upon joining the father’s world, the boy’s naivete dies.

A man’s effort to move to the father’s house takes a long time; it’s difficult, and each man has to do it tor himself. For Hamlet it meant giving up the immortality or the safe life promised to the faithful mother’s son, and accepting the risk of death always imminent in the father’s realm.

Among a man’s jobs is to reclaim his own grief. When a man has reclaimed his grief and investigated his wound, he may find that they resemble the grief and the wound his father had, and the reclaiming puts him in touch with his father’s soul.

Chapter 4: The Hunger For the King in a Time with No Father

Fathers have become an object of ridicule.

Taking the metaphor of the well, the “father-water” has lowered.

In traditional cultures, fathers and sons live together and the sons have older men from whom they can learn life (uncles, grandfathers, etc).

While men know how the bodies of women work for having spent 9 months inside one, they don’t know how the male body works. This explains why it’s important for them to spend time with their fathers, so that the knowledge and feelings of the adult male body can be passed on to the son.

The sons who haven’t received this will long for a father for their entire lives. These men hang around older men for this reason.

The son later may try to get it from a woman his own age, but that doesn’t work either.

Only one hundred and forty years have passed since factory work began in earnest in the West, and we see in each generation poorer bonding between father and son, with catastrophic results. By the middle of the twentieth century in Europe and North America a massive change had taken place: the father was working, but the son could not see him working.

Alexander Mitscherlich developed the metaphor of the hole appearing in the sons’ psyche when they could no longer see their fathers working, replacing the image of the father with the image of demons, leading to suspicions for older men.

Such suspicion effects a breaking of the community of old and young men. One could feel this distrust deepen in the sixties: “Never trust anyone over thirty.”

The son, 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.” Many marriages are lost that way.

What the father brings home today is usually a touchy mood,
springing from powerlessness and despair mingled with longstanding shame and the numbness peculiar to those who hate their jobs.

Fathers used to be able to bond by teaching fishing, animal care, or anything else. This is no longer happening, which hurts both men and women.

A father’s remoteness may severely damage the daughter’s ability to participate good-heartedly in later relationships with men. Much of the rage that some women direct to the patriarchy stems from a vast disappointment over this lack of teaching from their own fathers.

The patriarchy is complicated. It is matriarchal on the inside and patriarchal on the outside. The Industrialization killed the Sacred King and the Sacred Queen.

When a father now sits down at the table, he seems weak and insignificant, and we all sense that fathers no longer fill as large a space in the room as nineteenth-century fathers did.

As the father seems more and more enfeebled, dejected, paltry, he also appears to be the tool of dark forces.

As political and mythological kings die, the father loses the radiance he once absorbed from the sun, or from the hierarchy ofsolar beings; he strikes society as being endarkened.

As long as the political kings remained strong, the father picked up radiance from above; and the son tried to emulate the father, to become as bright as he is, to reach to his height. The son perceives the father as bright.

When we portray fathers as ridiculous beings, the son struggles to develop his own identity as a man.

Some sons fall into a secret despair. They have probably adopted, by the time they are six, their mother’s view of their father, and by twenty will have adopted society’s critical view of fathers, which amounts to a dismissal.

Some father-hungry sons embody a secret despair they do not even mention to women.

They believe they will be as diminished as their fathers and give up, feel numb, and believe they must be as dark as their own fathers are.

Other sons feel the need to “fly up in the air”, compensating in light for their fathers’ darkness.

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.”

In Egypt, Osiris gets locked up in a coffin by Set and “goes dark”, leading his son, Horus, to fly “beyond the flight of the original god’s soul”, to redeem the father’s name.

The son has seen his father’s shadow, but his remains hidden.

The boy in the story rose when the Wild Man carried him on his shoulder, then went down into the water with his finger, then he rose again when his head turned gold, then fell again when he took care of the ashes.

One day, he is asked to carry the food to the king as nobody else was available. Since he doesn’t want his golden hair to be seen, he keeps his cap on. When the king asks him to take it off, he says he cannot due to his “bruise on the head”. The King then instructs the cook to fire him.

Everyone wants to be with the king; everyone wants to matter to the king. But when we invite ourselves before being invited, or linger for too long, we inevitably fall back into the shadow.

The King is an important character: there are three types of kings.

The Sacred King is in the imaginary world.

From his mythological world he acts as a magnet and rearranges human molecules. He enters the human psyche like a whirlwind, or a tornado, and houses fly up in the air. Whenever the word king or queen is spoken, something in the body trembles a little.

It is thought that Westerners stopped thinking mythologically around the year 1000, and the mythological layer collapsed. We don’t know why.

The second king is the Earthly King, the political king, who goes back as far as 2000 BC. The Sun King and the Moon Queen held society together until the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries in Europe when they were replaced by republics.

When the earthly king disappears, the Sacred king does too.

The third one is the Inner King. The Inner King knows what he wants to do without being influenced by other people’s choices and options. He is often killed at 2 or 3 years old, as not protected. The Inner King orchestrates the child’s mood, but the mood of the parents is often more important, so the child sacrifices his mood (and the king) for them. By 12, he doesn’t know what he wants or feels anymore.

A man whose King is gone doesn’t know if he has the right to decide even how to spend the day.

Leaders, then, need to be strong enough so that the young men can let them carry their inner King for a while, and then to live long enough so that the young men can take it back, still undamaged, and let the King live inside them.

The process of bringing the inner King back to life, when looked at inwardly, begins with attention to tiny desires-catching hints of what one really likes.

There are two kings: the Sacred King, and the Poisoned King, and from them stem the double stream inside the father.

In the African story where the father hits his son with the axe after he gets rid of the rat, the son subsequently wakes up, goes to his home, takes his clothes, and leaves. He arrives in a village and ends up in the hut of the chief, who offers him to be his new son after his was killed in a war under the condition that he keeps it secret.

The son accepts, but later, has his real father come to the village, asking for him back. That chief is a mentor, and at some point, there will be a conflict between the mentor and the father.

Many men know where their father’s ax hit them. It’s important to understand the blow in the context of myth: there are two energies in the father, and the pain that he caused us was not personal.

Because of the tremendous hunger we each feel for the King, the Sacred or Blessing King, we want to start living with him right now. We want to leap over our father and move to his place. But it appears we cannot move there until we have dealt with the ax father.

Children visit the King, but adults build a suitable place so the King can visit them. It’s important to build a realistic image of the father. Those who have known their father only in the good light need to make room for his twisted side, and inverserly. Stories from the friends of the father help to do so.

The father is a king. He should not live in an apartment.

Most of us want the father to be close but also as far away as possible. While mythology is ripe with bad-father examples, there are very rare stories about good fathers. It’s impossible we’ll never be as close to our fathers as we’ll ever wish.

Male symbolizes that which is set apart.
John Layard

The perceived absence ofthe father is actually the absence of the King.

Chapter 5: The Meeting with the God-Woman in the Garden

Back to our story: Rather than firing the boy under the order of the king, the cook decides to exchange him with the gardener. One day in summer, the boy was so warm he took off his hat. The sun shining on his golden hair bounces off his head and animates the king’s daughter’s room. She calls him up to her room, asking for flowers. The boy obliges and picks up wild flowers. Upon asking him to take off his hat, he refuses. The girl gives him money for the flowers, and the boy gives the money to the gardener, not interested in it. This repeats for three days.

The hair finally comes into play. It is something special that is slowly revealed, something that the princess knows about, unlike her father.

The garden is the place where we can rest and find safety, a welcome place after the basement and the ashes. But this also means weather and changing seasons.

In the garden the soul and nature marry. When we love cultivation more than excitement we are ready to start a garden. In the garden we cultivate yearning and longing-those strangely un-American feelings-and notice tiny desires. Paying attention to tiny, hardly noticeable feelings is the garden way. That’s the way lovers behave.

Some men entering the garden begin by getting up at 5A.M. and keeping an hour for themselves each morning before work. A father, in order to do that, may have to resist his own insistence that his life belongs to his work, his children, and his marriage. Making a garden, and living in it, means attention to boundaries, and sometimes we need the boundaries to prevent caretaking from coming in and occupying all our time.

Addiction to perfection, as Marian Woodman reminds us, amounts to having no garden. The anxiety to be perfect withers the vegetation. Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden. Men and women deeply caught in shame will, when they tend their garden, pull out both weeds and flowers because so many of their own feelings seem defective or soiled. What do we love so much that we want to protect it from strangers? That is a good question for garden makers.

In ancient times, back when mythology was an integral component of society, men and women were careful not to see the person they fell in love with, but the archetype behind them. We no longer have this skill, and mix the person with the idea that we have of them.

What does it mean when a man falls in love with a radiant face across the room? It may mean that he has some soul work to do. His soul is the issue. Instead of pursuing the woman and trying to get her alone, away from her husband, he needs to go alone himself, perhaps to a mountain cabin, for three months, write poetry, canoe down a river, and dream. That would save some women a lot of trouble.

Why is a girl a necessary part of the story?

Men go from the world of Law (learning how the world works) to the World of Legends, the adventures. Women embody both of these worlds, the archetype is the Woman Who Sees Both Ways. When a man sees her, he sees both worlds more distinctly.

In the story, the boy does not keep the golden coins for himself, and he does not show his hair of gold either. While in the garden, his job is to learn skills, not produce work.

Chapter 6: To Bring the Interior Warriors Back to Life

The warriors inside American men have become weak in recent years, and their weakness contributes to a lack of boundaries, a condition which earlier in this book we spoke of as naivete.

When a boy grows up in a “dysfunctional” family (perhaps there is no other kind offamily), his interior warriors will be killed off early.

When the warriors inside cannot protect our mood from being disintegrated, or defend our body from invasion, the warriors collapse, go into trance, or die.

Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame. The child concludes that ifit has no sovereignty, it must be worthless. Shame is the name we give to the sense that we are unworthy and inadequate as human beings.

The child, so full of expectation of blessing whenever he or she is around an adult, stiffens with shock, and falls into the timeless fossilized confusion of shame.

Georges Dumézil wrote that the Indo-European civilization is composed of three layers:

• The King: Sovereignty, political parenthood, royalty, the sacred, and how to administer it. Jupiter for the Romans, Zeus and Hera for the Greeks, Odin for the Nordics,
• The Warrior: Mars for the Romans, Ares for the Greeks, Thor for the Nordics,
• The Farmer: abundance in men and goods, nourishment, health, peace, sensual gratification. Quirinus for the Romans, Dionysus and Ariadne for the Greeks, Frey and Freya for the Nordics

Robert Moore said that the warrior was inherently a part of men, but the main question came down to knowing whether it was to be conscious or unconscious.

Warriors go to war (physical, psychological, spiritual) on the battlefield. Moore said that true warriors had a transcendent purpose to go to war for – a King. Societies led by Warriors eventually died out.

We can say, then, that knowledge of what warriorhood is, and how to deal with its dark side and how to admire its positive side, has been lost. Simultaneously, the warrior himself, or our image of him, has suffered a collapse in all three worlds.

Battle, when carried by men, used to be joyful. Here’s the French knight Jean de Brueil, in 1465.

Battle is a joyous thing. We love each other so much in battle. If we see that our cause is just and our kinsmen fight boldly, tears come to our eyes. A sweet joy rises in our hearts, in the feeling of our honest loyalty to each other; and seeing our friend so bravely exposing his body to danger in order to fulfill the commandment of our Creator, we resolve to go forward and die or live with him on account of love. This brings such delight that anyone who has not felt it cannot say how wonderful it is. Do you think someone who feels this is afraid of death? Not in the least! He is so strengthened, so delighted, that he does not know where he is. Truly, he fears nothing in the world!

Here we see the lover and the warrior mingling. But that mingling is now mostly gone. The physical warrior disintegrated into the soldier when mechanized warfare came on.

Anything left of the warrior vanished with the mass bombings of Dresden, the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the B-52 bombings of rice fields in Vietnam.

It was a madness associated with the warrior that–during the last war–destroyed the very fabric of culture which it was once the job of the warrior to preserve.

The disciplined warrior, made irrelevant by mechanized war, disdained and abandoned by the 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.

Back to the story after the garden episode, the king prepares to go to war. The boy asks to join but is met with mockery and told that the soldiers will leave a horse for him in the stable once they’re gone if he really wants to join. Indeed, a horse is left, but it’s a three-legged one. The boy rides his horse to the forest and calls Iron John, asking him for a better horse and an army to lead.

Iron John obliges, and the boy joins the king on the battlefield, who is about to lose the war. He pursues the enemy to the last one and brings the king victory, then goes back to the forest and gives Iron John back his army, taking his own horse back, and goes back to the castle, where he is made fun of for his three-legged horse, not revealing who he really was during the battle.

The invasion of the kingdom relates to our psyche being invaded, or, at least, the boy growing conscious of his psyche’s invasion. Change usually does not happen without tragedy. Eg: you start going to meditation practice and get evicted from your place.

During all the time we were busy going to college, or setting up a career, or longing for purity, a mysterious force was invading the Kingdom. How often men and women in their twenties feel suddenly in danger. A secret voice says, “You must make a change now. If you don’t, it will be too late.”

The King is losing the battle because the center of the psyche cannot protect his territory. It’s time for the Warrior to come and fight. And when he does, he pursues the battle to the very end.

The wolf who swallowed the six kids has to be killed; nothing is said about a halfway measure such as therapy for the wolf. All this is inner work with inner wolves but the attitude needs to be decisive. If there is no decisive move, the wolf will simply go on eating your “kids.”

In the story, the boy doesn’t ask Iron John to fight for him. He does the fighting directly.

The three-legged horse is important as it insinuates a lack of capacity. Four is a complete number: three falls short. The fourth leg is probably absent, because shamed.

When we were very tiny, our horse had all four legs, and it joyfully lived in whatever sensualities it could gallop to. By the time a child in our culture is twelve, one of the legs at least will be crippled by shame.

The horse needs to be brought to a Wild Man to be fixed.

The collapse of the warrior means that the sword is thrown away. I have met many good men since who say that if someone gave them a sword, they would break it or stick it into the earth and walk away.

Australians’ aboriginals used a symbolic sword to break the bonds of men and their mothers.

The sword has the edge that cuts clinging away from love, cuts boyish bravado away from manly firmness, and cuts passive-aggression away from fierceness.

Without it, there cannot be an adult life.

We also may need a sword to cut us apart from our own self pity.

The Greeks said that there was once an egg floating on the ocean, and that a sword slid in half. Eros was inside the egg. Without breaking the egg, there can not be Eros. The power of the sword was to split to bring some distinctiveness.

It is desirable, then, for men and women to aim for distinction consciously. It is dangerous if they do not do so.

Men no longer fight well in their relationships because they spend their time fighting in the office. They don’t know how to fight well with their women, resultantly.

A good fight gets things clear, and I think women long to fight and 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.

If men and women have only soldiers or shamed children inside, they will have to settle for damaging battles constantly.

When the sword has done its work and the Logos-Knife has cut well, we will find ourselves less needy and more ready to enter the pairs of opposites.

Children in dysfunctional families feel tension between, say, the furious mother and the weakling father, or the furious father and the addicted mother. In that, the child becomes a bridge between them.

The boy who becomes a conductor values himself for the complicated current that runs through his body, for his ability to conduct wrath to the ground by a quiet reply, for the self-sacrificing stretching out of his arms to touch each pole.

The son loses his distinctiveness as a man by learning to be a conductor; the daughter who accepts this task becomes, similarly, a bridge, not a woman.

The more the man agrees to be copper, the more he becomes neither alive nor dead, but a third thing, an amorphous, demasculinized, half-alive psychic conductor.

In Greek mythology, Paris is asked to choose the goddess he likes the most.

“I want it all.” “Go for it” is the current cliche expressing some horrible greediness, naivete, and love of the unlimited. Some naive men and women do not want to choose, but want events to choose.

A man chooses his life’s desire, and the warrior in him agrees to the unpleasant labors that will follow.

If we choose “the one precious thing”-the object of our desire-then, according to the alchemists, the inner King in us that has been asleep for so many years wakes up.

As long as nothing is clear, as long as we have not chosen whether to be conductor or human, the King-and the Queen-sleeps on. Paris’ choice marks out one goddess, or life-road, from another. There is something fierce in it.

The alchemical woodcut says that a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world.

Each time we use the warrior well, we are not so much fighting battles as awakening the King.

Moving from Copper to Iron

This process of reviving the inner warriors goes on for years, and it is associated with the change from copper to iron. Each of us needs to imagine how to bring the interior warriors back to life, and it is not physical work so much as imaginative work. The Fianna loved Ireland, and were willing to defend her borders. What do we love well enough to want it defended?

This doesn’t happen automatically with old age. It must be an actual process. Metaphorically, this means moving the doorknob of the door to your interior, on the inside, so you get to control the door, and not on the outside, where anyone can close and open. The more honor and room we give to the warriors, the likelier they will watch over the door.

Each time we ask our warriors’ intuition to smell out shamers, we gain shrewdness. We may lose some “boyish naivete” of course, some “optimism about human nature,” but we are no longer a wounded six-year-old. The wounded child may still need to be nurtured and defended, but the child no longer possesses us.

A practical way of preventing oneself from being a copper bridge is to become conscious of conduction the moment it is happening. Conduction is unconscious, and naming it helps move it to communication. “I don’t think I’ll be a conductor for you any longer.”

Riding to the forest, to exchange the three-legged horse against a fiery normal horse, is wearing the Warrior to go to battle.

When the battle is over, the Warrior, too, must cede control. Which is why the boy gives it back before going back to the castle after the battle.

Chapter 7: Riding the Red, the White, and the Black Horses

We know that our society produces a plentiful supply of boys, but seems to produce fewer and fewer men.

Michael Ventura wrote that tribal people got their teenagers into rituals, quite strong in fact, to turn the boys into men. The contemporary Western culture fears it and gets away with it, turning the other way, hoping for something better when it ends.

He also noticed that everything in the culture was created to aim at a prolonging of teenagehood and delay adulthood.

Initiation is linear and split into five stages.

1. Bonding with, then separation from the mother.
2. Bonding with, then separation from the father.
3. Arrival of the male mother, or the mentor, who helps a man rebuild the bridge to his own greatness or essence.
4. Apprenticeship to a hurricane energy, such as the Wild Man, or the Warrior.
5. Marriage with the Holy Woman (Queen).

The Twisted side of the Great Mother doesn’t want the boy to grow up because if he does he will pass out of her realm. She doesn’t curse him as the Twisted side of the Sacred King does, but she holds him.

Increasingly, mothers rely on their sons for emotional satisfaction, which is some sort of psychic incest.

It’s not uncommon for grown men to turn to young women for sexual companionship; a grown woman may turn to her eight-year-old son for soul companionship.

Hundreds of times one man or another has said to me that now, at forty or forty-five, he realizes that his task throughout his life has been to be a substitute husband, lover, and soul companion for his mother. He envisions himself as a white knight for womankind. If I ask such a man, “How do you feel about men?” he is likely to say, “I have never been able to trust them.”

The boy who is called on by his mother too early feels helpless when he realizes that he is too small to do what is asked of him. His emotional energy is too fragmented to support his mother’s needs, and his male confidence is far too unsteady for him to replace his father.

It isn’t unusual for such a boy to feel himself a failure in relation to his father, with whom he has virtually no relationship. Then, when he doesn’t save his mother, he feels a failure in relation to her as well. He begins life with a double failure.

Out ofshame over his inadequacy, and in some fear of being pulled over onto the mother’s side before he has stabilized himself as a man, the boy finds in himself an inexplicable anger, a rage that prevents the mother’s dream of a delicate man from becoming real.

The men who were called on too early and didn’t manage to save their mothers might feel guilt and shame.

They punish themselves by going into jobs they hate or marrying the wrong woman. The horse in the story might have bitten off one of his legs out of shame.

Let’s go back to the story. Why didn’t it end after the battle? Because it’s not good to remain stuck in warrior mode – it is, in itself, poisonous.

We know that we can’t end the story here because the release from aggression or the passage through has not yet appeared.

The king organizes a festival for knights to catch a golden apple thrown by his daughter, hoping that the mysterious knight who saved the battle would appear. The boy goes to Iron John, who gives him a red armor and a horse. He catches the golden apple, then gallops away.

On the second day, Iron John gives him a white armor and a white horse. The boy catches the apple and gallops away, angering the king, who still doesn’t know who he is. The third day, Iron John gives him a black armor and horse, and he again catches the apple and escapes. But the king’s men go after him, and one wounds his leg. The boy loses his helmet, and his assailants see that he has golden hair.

The apple is the symbol of the earth, of the Woman Who Loves Gold.

Change or transformation can happen only when a man or woman is in ritual space. Entering, one first needs to step over a threshold, by some sort of ceremony; and second, the space itself needs to be “heated.” A man or woman remains inside this heated space (as in Sufi ritual dance) for a relatively brief time, and then returns to ordinary consciousness, to one’s own sloppiness or dullness.

The festival is a ritual place.

Each person’s interior emptiness, one could say, has its own shape. In ordinary life, we try to satisfy our longings, and fill the emptiness, but in ritual space, both men and women learn to experience the emptiness or the longing and not to fill it.

When Iron John gives the boy a new horse and armor, he helps the boy feel what it is like to be without shame. Since he gallops away with the apple each time, he must give Iron John back his horse and armor every time. He feels three times what it’s like to be without shame.

In the story, Iron John is a substitute father to the boy.

To be without a supportive father is for a man an alternative phrase for “to be in shame.” Only when a man’s interior warriors are strong enough can he go into the joy of display.

Regarding the colors, they symbolize the development of man. Red is the color of fierce aggression, fight, and lack of restraint. White is the color of purity and engagement. Black is the color of maturity and humanity.

Each man is given three horses that we ride at various times of our lives; we fall offand get back on.

When a person moves into the black, that process amounts to bringing all ofthe shadow material, which has been for years projected out there on the faces of bad men and women, communists, witches, and tyrants, back inside. That process could be called retrieving and eating the shadow.

Chapter 8: The Wound by the King’s Men

As the boy is wounded by the king’s men, his helmet falls off and his golden hair is revealed.

The wound is a sign of growth, an opening through which the soul can enter.

People too healthy, too determined to jog, too muscular, may use their health to prevent the soul from entering. They leave no door. Through the perfection of victory they achieve health, but the soul enters through the hole of defeat.

In Greek mythology, Zeus provides his thigh to Dyonysos, who shouldn’t be born yet: some accounts even say that he cuts his thigh himself. In the pre-historic caves of the Dordognes, the wound is caused by a spear, but the spear can also be interpreted as being a penis. Hence, the wound is a female opening.

In the story, the king’s daughter asks the gardener about the boy. The gardener says that the boy was at the festival and even showed his kids the three golden apples. The king calls the boy and asks him if he is the secret knight. The boy reveals everything, and the king asks him what he wants in exchange for his help. The boy says he wants to marry his daughter.

So, who is Iron John?

Western man’s connection with the Wild Man has been disturbed or interrupted for centuries now, and a lot of fear has built up.

The Wild Man is the door to the wildness in nature, but we could also say the Wild Man is nature itself. The Wild Man encourages and amounts to a trust in what is below. The Wild Man encourages a trust ofthe lower halfofour body, our genitals, our legs and ankles, our inadequacies, the “soles” ofour feet, the animal ancestors, the earth itself, the treasures in the earth, the dead long buried there, the stubborn richness to which we descend.

We need to build a body, not on the parallel bars, but an activated, emotional body strong enough to contain our own superfluous desires. The Wild Man can only come to full life inside when the man has gone through the serious disciplines suggested by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, the white, and the black horses, learning to create art, and receiving the second heart.

The Wild Man’s qualities, among them love of spontaneity, association with wilderness, honoring of grief, and respect for riskiness, frightens many people. Some men, as soon as they receive the first impulses to riskiness and recognize its link with what we’ve called the Wild Man, become frightened, stop all wildness, and recommend timidity and collective behavior to others. Some of these men become high school principals, some sociologists, some businessmen, Protestant ministers, bureaucrats, therapists; some become poets and artists.

The purpose is not to be the Wild Man, but to be in touch with him.

There are other archetypes than the Wild Man, like the Trickster, the Magician, etc. So many of these have disappeared today because men are no longer allowed to do things like pirating or hunting.

The Industrial Revolution has separated man from nature and from his family. The only jobs he can get are liable to harm the earth and the atmosphere; in general he doesn’t know whether to be ashamed ofbeing a man or not.

Back to the story, the boy’s father and mother eventually reunite with their child at his wedding. As they were feasting, someone, a baronial King, suddenly entered the room and walked towards the boy. He said: “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.”

The end.

As we see, the Wild Man improves as the boy goes through his obstacles. We might even wonder if the story wasn’t more about the Wild Man than the boy.

Our work then as men and women is not only to free ourselves from family cages and collective mind sets, but to release transcendent beings from imprisonment and trance. That’s what the story says in the end.

We know that many contemporary men have become ashamed oftheir three percent. Some feel shame over the historical past, over oppressive patriarchies, insane wars, rigidities long imposed. Other men who have seen their fathers fail to be true to the masculine and its values don’t want to be men. But they are.

The young man in our story descended from courtyard to ashes, from ashes to earth, then to horses under the earth, and so on. The Wild Man passes him on the way up, having ascended from under the water to the courtyard, then to his own sacred spring, then to the Master of Horses, and finally to the state of kingship. The Wild Man part ofeach man that was once in touch with wilderness and wild animals has sunk down below the water of the mind, out ofsight, below human memory. Covered with hair now, it looks as ifit were an animal itself. The Wild Man in our wedding scene says in effect: “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.”

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

Stories like Iron John’s exist in many different cultures, and it’s likely that Iron John was originally an animal – the Lord of Animals. This god transformed as societies moved from hunting to agriculture.

The immense philosophical and religious movement around the Lord ofthe Animals and the Lady enters classic Indian culture as Shivaism, which merged with the earlier animism, and from whose source many later religions flow.

Powerful sociological and religious forces have acted in the West to favor the trimmed, the sleek, the cerebral, the noninstinctive, and the bald.

Women’s sexuality has suffered tremendously and still suffers from this tyranny of the bald, ascetic, and cerebral. The goddess Aphrodite, alive inside the female body, is insulted day after day. The same forces have doomed male sexuality to the banal and the profane and the hideously practical. By contrast the Wild Man’s elaboration through Indian imagination into Shiva honors sexual energy.

Christianity, such as Islam and Judaism, fears the energy of the Wild Man, particularly the one that pertains to sex.

With thinkers ofAugustine’s quality on our side, it’s amazing that men can make love at all. Young men in contemporary culture conclude quickly that their sexual instinct is troublesome, intrusive, weird, and hostile to spirit.

When the Church and the culture as a whole dropped the gods who spoke for the divine element in male sexual energyPan, Dionysus, Hermes, the Wild Man-into oblivion, we as men lost a great deal. The medieval Western imagination did not carry the Lord ofAnimals or the Wild Man on into a well-developed Shiva or Dionysus, and the erotic energy ofmen lost its ability to move, as they say in music, to the next octave.

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