Jim Moyers, MA, MFT

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INTRODUCTION

Simplistic though some of its views may have been, the men's movement arose in response to a genuine need.  Many contemporary men feel lost and confused, unsure of who they are and where they belong in a society that has little use for traditional male roles.  While it may be true that economic and political power are still primarily controlled by men, men who experience themselves as personally powerful are few and far between.  In contrast to the progress women have made in moving beyond traditional gender limitations, men continue to be burdened by unspoken but persistent demands that they prove themselves "real men."

The mythopoetic men's movement is not entirely mistaken in looking to past traditions for clues about what we may be in the present.  Individual and collective assumptions about who we are in relation to the world about us are the result of a long process of cultural evolution.  While they may not always fit very well into contemporary life, the ancient ways continue to live on in the deepest parts of the modern psyche.  Dreams, rituals, and traditional practices can produce, in sometimes even the most jaded modern consciousness, an undeniably powerful emotional experience.  Ancient myths, stories, ritual, and traditional practices represent a rich collective wisdom, accumulated through countless ages of human evolution, which, approached symbolically rather than literally, can help us better understand human experience.

There are many myths about what it takes to make a man.  Most suggest that it is a difficult process, with few clearly marked guidelines.  One example of this archetypal theme is the story of "Iron Hans (or John)" from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's famous collection of German folk tales.  Like many others, I first encountered this story in a 1982 interview of Robert Bly by Keith Thompson.³  Bly focused on the wild man element of the story, pointing to it as something that modern "soft" males, uninitiated into the traditions of manhood, have lost. Most of the Grimms' story was left out in Bly's account.

But the wild man episode of the tale only sets the stage for the lengthy (by Grimms’ standards) plot development that follows.  By the end of the story the wild man is restored to his true nature as a great king, a transformation that parallels the gaining of manhood by the young prince protagonist.  After reading the complete tale, I began to wonder whether the men who, following the lead of what became known as "the Bly article," were so eagerly seeking the wild man were not missing something in the rest of the tale.

Eventually Iron John, Bly's commentary on the complete tale, appeared to quickly, and most unexpectedly, become a best seller.  But Bly's book seemed to me to be reactionary, simplistic, and even somewhat naive, especially in his understanding (or lack thereof) of the historic and sociological factors that shape our conceptions of masculinity.  Most of all it did not move me as had the original Thompson-Bly discussion and the Grimms' tale.

What follows is in no way meant as a definitive statement on either the Grimms' tale or male psychology.   My interpretation is simply one perspective on the state of the male psyche at this particular point in human social evolution.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
¹Robert Bly, IronJohn, (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1990).
²Robert Bly, "Men's Initiation Rites," Utne Reader, April/May 1986, pp. 42-49.
³Keith Thompson & Robert Bly, "What Men Really Want," New Age, May 1982, pp. 30-37, 50-51.

I: DON'T GO INTO THE FOREST

Although first recorded by the Grimm brothers in the nineteenth century, "Iron Hans" is medieval in its imagery.¹  In medieval imagination, the forest was a dark, mysterious, and foreboding region.  Lying outside the boundaries of lawful human order, untouched by the redeeming sacraments of the church, the wilderness was a hellish realm populated by outlaws, the insane, fantastic animals, and demons.²  While this perspective reflects the dualistic view held by the medieval church, contrast and conflict between wilderness and civilization is as old as human culture.

One of the earliest extant myths tells the story of Gilgamesh, the depressed, tyrannical king of the ancient Sumerian city of Uruk.  In response to the prayers of Gilgamesh's oppressed subjects, the mother goddess created a hairy man beast, Enkidu, as the king's wild counterpart.  Enkidu spent his early life living with wild animals.  Then a temple prostitute seduced and tamed him.  No longer at home in nature, Enkidu entered Uruk to confront Gilgamesh.  Perfectly matched in strength, the two men fought to a draw and, as often happens between rivals who prove themselves in a struggle with one another, became fast friends.  Gilgamesh and Enkidu then joined forces to destroy the monster that guarded the rich cedar forest of the ancient Mideast, preventing the people of Uruk from using it.³

While ancient and medieval people generally feared the forest's wildness, they were also dependent upon it as a source of food, fuel, and raw materials .   Like the people of Uruk who were unable to enter the forest because of the danger lurking there, the king of the Grimms tale and his people fearfully huddled inside the palace could not avail themselves of the natural bounty  surrounding them.

Another mythic kingdom deprived of its connection to fertility and life is the Wasteland of medieval Grail lore.   According to some versions of the story, the appointed guardian of the mysterious Grail, neglecting his sacred duty, set out in pursuit of adventure.  Alone in the forest, a most dangerous position in medieval tales, the errant Grail King encountered and challenged a heathen knight, a sort of wild man from beyond the bounds of Christendom.  The heathen was killed in the joust, but not before he inflicted a most grievous wound to the king's testicles.  Unable to either recover from his injury or die, the Grail King lived on in impotent agony.  Following the ancient equation of ruler and land, his domain became an infertile wasteland.  King and kingdom alike suffered in impotence, awaiting the promised coming of the perfect knight who would heal them both.⁴

The greater a society's technological sophistication, the less its connection to the natural order.  Men are traditionally associated with the technological innovations that separate the human realm from that of nature.   Women, in their biologically based traditonal role of giving birth and nourishing children, are more often identified with nature.  Woman's domain has traditionally been the home, with men expected to "make a living" by going out into the world in some manner.   With both home and nature considered feminine realms, men have directed much of their energy towards the creation of an artificial political and technological sphere that, until recently, has been exclusively theirs.

Through technology we make our lives more comfortable by distancing ourselves from the effects of nature.  But, as the tale of "Iron Hans"  suggests, something of basic importance to men, some essential masculine quality, has been left out in the woods.  In traditional male roles of hunter and warrior, men came into intimate contact with nature while also oppossing it.  Until recent times, it was not difficult to find places where such roles were appropriate.  But modern society has little need for hunters and warriors.

The old ways of being male have apparently disappeared, leaving modern man to find a place for himself as best he can.  Many have discovered that it is not enough to simply denounce the old ways and cultivate the opposite qualities.  Denying the existence of an aggressive, potentially violent component within the male psyche is no more enlightened than the opposite course of equating manhood with aggression.   A man unable to recognize and come to terms, on a level much more personal and direct than a "politically correct," guilty acknowledgement of collective male misdeeds, with his own aggressive and destructive impulses, with his capacity for wildness, will be unable to access and use his deepest, most instinctual masculinity for fear it will get out of control.  Beset by guilt, fear, and shame, he dares not venture out into the world or down into the dark wilderness of his own soul, but shuts himself up, safely impotent and lifeless, within the walls he erects around himself.

So, fearful of what might be found there, the king and his people went no more into the forest.  Then one day a huntsman turned up, much like the mysterious stranger who appears in western movies whenever there is some trouble that the local people cannot resolve.  True to type, the hunter declared himself fearless, and set out to take care of whatever terrible thing lurked in the forest.  Unlike the king's ill-fated men, the stranger did not fall victim to the danger beyond the palace walls.  Perhaps, in part, this was because he let himself be led by his dog, an apt symbol for the kind of instinctual guide, a mediator between humanity and nature, one needs when journeying into the uncharted wilderness of the psyche.  Following its natural inclination to track an interesting scent, something that the hunter could not himself have done, the dog went directly to a deep, dark forest pool wherein lay the solution to the mystery.  As the hunter watched, a hairy arm came out of the water and pulled the dog down into the depths.

We moderns have for the most part forgotten about the pool out in the forest with its mysteries.  But every so often our usual absorption in the daily routine is disrupted by a strange and compelling dream, an unexplained event in waking life, or a vague but persistent sense that something is very wrong.  Following an irresistibly mysterious urge, we find ourselves in unfamiliar territory beside a deep, dark pool, peering down into waters that are as ancient as the world itself and every bit as contemporary as this morning's headlines.

While the huntsman was fearless, he was also aware of his limits.  Instead of putting on a show of male bravado (could this have been the fatal mistake of the hunters who never returned?) by single- handedly taking on the thing that had snatched away his dog, he returned to the palace for help.  With three men to help him, he went back to the forest to empty out the pool one bucketful at a time.

Getting down to the bottom of things, recovering what has been long lost, requires hard work, and very often the aid of others.  Having been led to believe that "real men" handle things by themselves, are always capable and competent, and never say, "I don’t know," men tend to feel ashamed when they need help.  In Wolfram von Eschenbach's masterful medieval Grail romance, Parzival, the young man after whom the story is titled was told by his initiator into knighthood that a knight should never ask too many questions.  Following what he thought was proper knightly behavior, disregarding his natural wonderment, Parzival made no inquiry into the mysterious things he saw at a castle in which he chanced to stay one night.  Only later did he learn that he had been in the Castle of the Grail.  Had he been able to admit to his need for help in understanding what he was seeing, if, as Wolfram put it, "(he) had only moved his jaws and asked his host the question," Parzival would have relieved the agony of the Wounded Fisher King, whose invited guest he had unwittedly been, and won the Grail for himself.  His adherence to what he took to be the way of true knighthood led to failure in the greatest knightly task of all.⁵

In bailing out the pool, the huntsman had three helpers.  Three is a number that often occurs in fairy tales, usually in a series of events or persons, the third and last of which solves a problem or completes an action.  In numerology, three resolves the conflict between the opposites represented by two, joining them together to form a third entity that transcends both.  But three is not as well balanced as four.  Four marks the end of a process that begins with division of one into two.  The two are again united in the third, and made complete by the fourth.⁶

At the beginning of "Iron Hans," the kingdom was divided in two, with the dangerous forest split off from the safety of the palace.  Then the huntsman, a third element from beyond the limits of the divided kingdom, crossed the boundary between palace and forest.  Four men, the hunter and his three helpers, emptied the pool.  It was also the fourth and final encounter of a hunter or group of hunters with the mystery of the forest.  This time the mystery was solved with the discovery of a wild man, with rusty brown, animal-like hair hiding his human features, at the bottom of the pool.

The wild man was a ubiquitous figure in medieval folklore, literature, and art.  A hairy, animalistic savage, he was often said to have been a man who through some terrible misfortune had lost his human nature. His ambiguous character, made up of animal, human, and supernatural elements, inspired reactions ranging from terror through mockery to curiosity and admiration.   Not limited to medieval times, myths of wild men appear throughout history from Gilgamesh's Enkidu to modern tabloid accounts of Big Foot and Yeti, huge apelike creatures said to still exist somewhere in the wildness.⁷

The wild man is the shadow, the feared and despised opposite of civilized man.  He is not easy to have around - his "bestial self-fulfillment directed by instinct rather than volition and devoid of all those acquired tastes and patterns of behavior which are part of our adjustment to civilization,"⁸ threaten the very foundations of orderly society.  When he enters the kingdom, all is thrown into chaos.

 While the wild man is often presented as a dangerous figure, wild man lore also suggests that he holds something of immense value.  Through his contact with inhuman realms, he has access to supernatural knowledge and wealth that he will gratefully share with anyone able to restore him to his original human state.  But, as is true of any encounter with the raw forces of nature, one must be careful in dealing with the wild man.   To naively go out into the forest in expectation of a friendly chat is to invite disaster.  On the other hand, as Jung reminds us, "contact with wild nature, whether it be man, animal, jungle or swollen river, requires tact, foresight, and politeness.  Rhinoceroses and buffaloes do not like being surprised."⁹   Developing a working relationship with the wild man which can bring his energy to constructively bear on the problems of a life bounded by social constraints, is a long, difficult process.  For most of us it is the work of a lifetime.

The huntsman was familiar with the ways of the wild and well prepared when he met the wild man.  But the huntsman's acquaintance with the wild would likely have rendered him suspect in medieval eyes.  At home in wild, infernal regions where good Christians dared not go, he was  contaminated by the inherent evil of the wilderness.¹⁰

After his capture of the wild man,  "Iron Hans" makes no more mention of the huntsman.  It may be that the hunter, having played his part, was simply dropped from the storyline.  Perhaps the king did reward him with a position in the royal court.  But the disappearance of the hunter fits a motif that repeatedly occurs in action movies, the modern equivalent of ancient hero myths.  After the mysterious stranger, resourceful lawman, famous gunfighter, etc. has done the heroic deed that brings an end to some terrible outlaw's (i. e. wild man's) reign of terror, he finds that the now peaceful community has no place for him.  He is himself too much like the wild elements he has subdued for civilized society, with its suspicion of wildness, to understand or trust him.  He in turn seems unable to comprehend the ways of society.  John Ford's 1962 film, "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," starring Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne, is a classic example of this theme.  The rough, socially awkward rancher played by Wayne kills the outlaw and saves the town.  But it is Stewart's cultured lawyer who gets the credit, the girl, and the place of honor.  Wild men, of any degree, are not long welcome in civilized society.

Regardless of his captor's fate, the wild man was securely locked up in an iron cage.  A royal decree forbade his release and the queen herself was given charge of the key to the cage.  Once more, all was well in both forest and palace.  Or so it seemed.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
    ¹Joseph Campbell, "Folkloristic Commentary,"in The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (New York:  Pantheon,   1972).
    ²Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 52-59.
    ³John Gardner & John Maier (eds.) Gilgamesh (New York: Knopf, 1984), pp. 67-147.
    ⁴Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV:  Creative Mythology  (New York:  Penguin, 1976), pp. 391-393. Emma Jung & Marie-Louise von Franz, The Grail Legend (Boston:  Sigo, 1986 [1960]), pp. 187-212.
    ⁵Parzival, sections 171, 224-256.  An excellent English translation of Parzival translated by Helen M. Mustard   & Charles E. Passage is published by Vintage Books (New York, 1961).   In The Masks of God, Vol. IV:                  Creative Mythology, pp. 433-570, Joseph Campbell retells the story of Parzival with an extensive commentary.
    ⁶J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd ed.(New York:  Philosophical Library, 1971), pp. 232-233.  J. C.       Cooper An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols(London:  Thames & Hudson, 1978), pp. 114-116.
    ⁷Richard Bernheimer, Wild Men in the Middle Ages  (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 1952).
   ⁸ibid. p. 4.
   ⁹C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Collected Works Vol. 14 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,              1970/1955), paragraph 405 note 162.
   ¹⁰Le Goff, p. 178.

II: BARGAINING WITH THE DEVIL

But the proper order of things is determined by those who rule, and the temptation to further one's own power is often impossible to resist.  As human beings are not archetypes, no real person can possess the superhuman strength and wisdom expected of the ideal king.  But a man intent on playing king can easily use his authority to put down all challenges to the illusion of his archetypal identity.  The ideal order is turned upside down with the kingdom made to serve the king instead of king serving the kingdom.

Like an absolute monarchy in which no challenge to the ruler's authority is tolerated, some families have room for only one "real man."  To survive, a boy may find that he has hold himself back for fear of retaliation should he surpass his father.   Unconscious apprehensions about a father's negative reaction to a son's success often continue to be very much alive, undermining  a man's every attempt to realize his potential, long past the time when his father ceased to be an actual threat.

Not every son backs down in the face of paternal tyranny.  Like the Greek god Zeus, who overthrew his oppressive father, Cronus, some young men claim their manhood in an angry, even violent confrontation with the man who stands in their way.  But, as the Greek tragic hero Oedipus found, the defeat of one's father is a heavy burden to bear.  Patricide and incest, literal or symbolic, are equally forbidden expressions of the darkest side of human nature.  A victorious son may seek to evade his guilt, as well as a similar fate, by unconsciously identifying with the oppressor he overthrew.  The rule of Zeus was little more enlightened than that of Cronus, and Cronus himself had begun his reign by castrating his own oppressive father.  So tyrant follows tyrant through one generation after another.

In addition to tyrants, myth and history are also full of ineffectual rulers unable or unwilling to meet the challenge of maintaining their kingdoms.  The king in "Iron Hans"  appears to have been of this type.  Rather than attempting to solve the mystery of his huntsmen's disappearance in the forest, he simply constricted his domain to exclude the area of danger.  Even after the wild man was captured and caged, the king apparently had no direct dealings with him.  Acting from the safety of his royal position, he issued a decree forbidding the wild man's release and made the queen responsible for the key to the cage (more on this peculiar arrangement later).

The king described the forest that had swallowed up his hunters as "haunted." A man who has difficulty establishing or maintaining his place in the world may well be haunted by a persistently negative image of manhood.  If his idea of adult manhood is based upon an abusive or inept, dysfunctional father, he may well be reluctant to take on the role himself.

Having a dysfunctional father, or for many men essentially no father at all, further complicates the general societal confusion as to just what constitutes a "real man."  Male behavior is generally  sorted into the simplistic categories of "macho" or "wimp."  A man trying to avoid being the kind of sexist, oppressive tyrant so many women (and men) complain about runs the risk of being labeled, in Bly's term, a "soft male" (i. e. wimp).  We lack a masculine middle ground.  If we are to create a viable modern model of manhood, we must find a way whereby strength and gentleness, courage and realistic recognition of the limits of masculine power can come together in acknowledgment of the richly complex and contradictory mixture that is manhood.

We must also recognize that each man is an individual, made up for better or worse, of a unique blend of the many varied traits that make us human.  There is no "right" way to be a human being.  Neither is there any single model for manhood, no master plan fitting each and every male, no initiatory process that, correctly done, magically transforms boys into men.  Only as adult men honor the multitude of ways in which they are men will they be able to assist boys in finding and following their own unique paths towards manhood.  Nowhere is this more important than in the relationship of father and son, the place where a boy encounters his first and, throughout his lifetime, most influential example of what it is to be male.

The father who would be a guide to his sons must be willing to face his own inner wilderness.  A man who refuses to recognize the existence of the many strange creatures that live out beyond the bounds of common sense and safety, who ignores the dark and frightening things lurking in the depths of his soul, is no more help to the next generation than is the aggressive tyrant who acts out the wildness he so desperately seeks to control.  The sons of both will be left to deal with the wild man as best they can.

And every man's son will eventually, consciously or unconsciously, come upon the wild man, the dark, unknown side of the masculine that his father, and his father's father, refused to acknowledge.  No matter how firmly entrenched the tyrant's rule, no matter how tightly constricted, well protected, seemingly safe and secure the kingdom, the other, the rejected, despised, and ignored will always somehow find its way in.

In the Grimms story, the king's son was eight years old when his golden ball fell into the captive's cage and brought him face to face with the wild man.  In almost all cultures, children of the little prince's age are taught the fundamental skills needed to become productive members of society.   Teachers, parents, and other children all demand that the child master new tasks and situations.   The child's experience in responding to these challenges is a key factor in establishing a lifelong sense of his  social competence and ability to make a useful contribution to the world.¹

At home with his parents providing a protective environment, a child can freely imagine the realm beyond his front door and his place there to be anything he chooses.  But when the time comes for him to actually venture out, he often finds that life is quite different from what he expected.  For a small child, the world can be a very large and unfriendly place in which he is very small indeed.

Coexistent with the urge to discover and master the unknown is a desire for return to the comfort of the familiar.  For a child unready to meet demands for independent action, these conflicting tendencies can result in an apparent developmental standstill or even regression.  Since masculine worth is customarily evaluated in terms of mastery and independence, the boy who has difficulty leaving home learns early in life to regard himself as "less than a man."

Conflict between independence and dependence is not limited to early childhood.  Times of uncertainty and change often bring nostalgia for some far away, dimly remembered paradise in a time when struggle and anxiety were as yet unknown.  At the core of this archetypal yearning is perhaps a dim, preconscious memory of very early childhood and the womb, a time when all needs were automatically met by a nurturing environment so well attuned to one as to seem part of oneself.²

Birth, physical separation from the perfect environment of the womb, begins a lifelong process of coming to terms with the distinction between oneself and others.  Every phase of life, from the infant's first tentative recognition of the world about it through old age and dissolution of self in death, involves an archetypally based tension between desire for merger with an all sustaining other and the drive to be an individual, whole and complete in oneself.  These seemingly mutually exclusive needs are actually two poles between which the process of individuation, the unfolding of the unique potential inherent in each of us, occurs.  In a dynamic, ever changing lifelong process, each individual works out a unique compromise between these seemingly opposing forces.  When independence and dependence are perceived to be complements rather than opposites, energy that would otherwise be bound up in endless conflict is released to become the driving force of a well-lived life.  Rather than a struggle, life turns into a dance, moving now towards dependence, now towards independence, fixated on neither.

Both sexes, of course, face the challenge of finding a viable balance between independence and dependence.  Women in our society are generally expected to be every bit as independent as men.  However, traditionally a much greater degree of independence has been demanded of men. In the often hostile environment in which our race evolved, man as heroic protector, ready and willing to stand alone and, if need be, sacrifice himself in defense of women and children, was of vital importance to the survival of humanity. The ability to act independently, fearlessly, and aggressively while repressing feelings was of necessity a basic requirement for our distant male ancestors.

But modern urban life has few of the dangers that were immediate, everyday facts for our forefathers.  Few contemporary men ever face anything more dangerous than a rush hour freeway commute, a setting in which traditional male traits such as aggression and fearlessness are dangerously maladaptive.  Yet the old ways and expectations, as always,  live on, shaping what we feel we should be and what we are.  What boy or man has not at some time imagined himself as a hero fearlessly holding back the forces of evil as he sets right all that is wrong?

However, there are limits to heroism and a point beyond which the heroic attitude is self defeating.  After the wild man's capture, the hunter was apparently not much help in furthering relations with the captive.   In the modern world, the heroic technological conquest of the environment, while making our lives comfortable to a degree unimaginable only a few generations past, has ironically created an evil apparently greater than that which it banished.  While the heroic attitude may well have made possible the survival of our species in times past, it is now represents the single greatest threat to the future of both ourselves and our planet.

Creation, the shaping and rearranging of primal material into something new, is the prototypical heroic deed.  In mythic accounts, the state before creation is a unified, yet chaotic mass of infinite possibility.  Chaos takes on definite form as the process of creation proceeds, and possibilities become limited by emergent form.  Chaos, however, continues to exist with a hidden life of its own separate from the created realm. At any time chaos may reemerge to reduce form to original formlessness.  The hero's task is to prevent such a catastrophe or, failing that, lessen its impact.  But since creaton has its source in chaos, some sort of ongoing contact with the unformed regions of infinite potential is a vital necessity for the continued well being of creation.  If there is no channel open to the flow of creative energy from the other side, the ordered realm becomes lifeless and brittle, easily swept away when chaotic forces unexpectedly arrive on the scene.³

Like the king who thought that he had the wild man safely locked away, we like to think that we can control any threat to our orderly existence.  We do our best to ignore the many indications that it might be otherwise, that there are some things that do not conform to our desire for a predictable, reasonable universe.  But denial never renders a thing nonexistent.  The non-rational and chaotic, the messy bits of life that refuse to fit neatly into the formulas by which we try to define what is real, turn up regularly in the unbelievable but real horrors we hear about in the news and, more mundanely, in the countless little horrors we daily perpetrate against ourselves as well as others.

Sometimes it takes a crisis, a breakdown in the usual way of being, to bring about recognition of the other side of things.  New life and meaning rarely occur without dissolution of the old. Such an experience, full of chaos and confusion, is dangerous in its threat to the established order, but is also rich with possibility.   Often the most difficult and chaotic times prove, in retrospect, to have been the most important.

In the Grimms' tale, the crisis began when the little prince's golden ball strayed into the wild man's cage.  Seeking to regain his treasured ball, the boy entered forbidden, dangerous, and unknown territory.  The wild man in his cage only seemed to have been brought under the king's control.  While confinement may have constricted his domain, it had not curtailed his power.  The wild man, not the king, ruled the space within the cage and everything that came into it.  The boy's ball, following whatever natural laws governed its movements, left the realm of the king for that of the wild man, and its owner soon followed.

With the loss of his golden ball, the young prince also lost his golden boyhood.  His privileged status as a royal child passing his days in carefree play about his father's palace was gone forever.  In his encounter with the forbidden, devil like creature in the cage, the boy discovered another, much darker side of life.  A frightening, fascinating darkness led him deep into the unknown.

Almost all cultures have a tradition of some sort of fall or decline from an original state of innocence, perfection, and wholeness.  According to Judeo-Christian myth, the first humans lost their original innocence and perfection as a result of their disobedience to divine command.  Gnostic Christians, declared heretics by the early Catholic Church, pondered the Genesis story and came down on the serpent's side.  According to Gnostic theology, the creator, far from being the good, just, and all powerful being he claimed to be, was an ignorant and evil fallen minor deity.  Inverting the traditional interpretation, the Gnostics claimed that the serpent was actually a savior sent to bring knowledge of the real nature of the world and its maker.⁴

In both orthodox and heretical accounts, the prefall state was one of ignorance as well as innocence.  Consciousness, the awareness of who and where one is, rests upon the ability to make distinctions, to be aware of the passage of time and the changes that it brings.  In the eternity of Eden before the fall, none of this was apparent, for nothing changed.  Only after eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil did Adam and Eve become aware of the constantly changing interplay of opposing, yet complementary forces - good and evil, light and dark, female and male, self and other - that, inextricably intertwined one with another, make up the human condition.

As in the Genesis account, the gaining of new knowledge, the opening to new ways of being, often follows a violation of established boundaries.  Like the serpent lurking in the garden, a tempter of some sort, through a combination of seduction, guile, threats, and promises, urges the forbidden.  He may be a trickster, like Coyote, Raven, or Rabbit in Native American stories, who never follows the rules.  His utter disregard for the accepted principles of proper behavior often results in disaster.  Yet he is also a savior who brings new life, healing, and knowledge.⁵

Yielding to temptation, breaking through the rigidity of established norms, can be an important and liberating step on the way to finding one's own identity and way of life.  It can also be confusing, frightening, and disillusioning.  There is, of course, often genuine danger in attempting the forbidden which, after all, has likely been placed off limits for good reasons.  For all the Grimms’ little prince knew, the wild man might have eaten him for lunch.  Beyond physical dangers, there may be even more serious psychological risks.  A boy lacking a relatively secure, stable sense of self, and some awareness of the difference between constructive and destructive risk taking, can easily become addicted to the thrill of rule breaking for its own sake.  Defying convention in the company of other young rebels, he establishes a pseudo-identity based primarily on what he is not, avoiding the more difficult question of his real identity.

The transformative power of an encounter with the shadow comes not through blindly following it to act out the forbidden, but from consciously engaging the challenge it presents to everyday morality.  As anyone who has paid attention to his dreams knows, the unconscious is not governed by the considerations that govern actions in the outer world.  The wild man, coming as he does from the same regions as dreams, likewise has little regard for the rules of daily life.  If we are to have any hope of acquiring the treasure that he holds for us, we will have to find some way to bridge the gulf between his world and ours.  This, of course, is much easier said than done.  When we sit down to bargain with the wild man, we come face-to-face with all the terrible ambiguities and moral dilemmas of the no man's land between the prescribed and the forbidden, the known and the unknown.  It is here that the real struggle, the real work that leads to transformation, occurs.

Only after three long days of deliberation, bargaining, and, one imagines, deep inner turmoil, did the boy get the key from under his mother's pillow and open the cage door, receiving his golden ball in return. Even then the boy did not just stand by while the wild man made his escape.  Following after him, the boy insisted that the wild man take some responsibility for the uncertain situation their bargain had left him in.

One could say, as those who insist on following "common sense" and doing "the right thing" often do, that the boy should have known better than to get into such a situation in the first place.  If he had only stayed away from the wild man's cage, which he must have known was dangerous, his ball would not have come into the wild man's possession.  Even when it did, the boy might have sought his parents' help.  Then again, maybe he remembered the king's helplessness before the terror out in the forest, and knew that his father's authority had little weight in the regions into which his ball had strayed.

Whatever the reason, the boy dealt with the problem of his lost ball alone and, in so doing, discovered something that seemed to have eluded his elders.  In his childish naiveté, not knowing that wild men are supposed to lack all human qualities, including understanding and speech, the prince asked the wild man for his ball.  For the first time in the story, the wild man was spoken to and, in response, he for the first time spoke.  For three days the boy and the wild man bargained.  Then on the third day (for three is always a charm), the prince gave in, and boy and man were set free.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
  ¹Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd. ed. (New York:  W. W. Norton, 1963), pp. 258-260.
   ²Mario Jacoby, Longing For Paradise (Boston:  Sigo, 1985).
   ³Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History (New York:  Harper & Row, 1959 [1954]).  David Maclagan, Creation Myths (New York:  Thames & Hudson, 1977).
   ⁴Kurt Rudolph, Gnosis (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1987), pp. 94-102.
   ⁵Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art  (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1998).

III: FATHER AND SON

Besides psychological and sociological factors, there may be a biological basis for the frequently tenuous relationship of men to family life.  The connection between a child and the man who fathers it is far from clear.  Some tribal cultures came into the twentieth century unaware of any connection between sexual intercourse and pregnancy.   The Trobriand Islanders, studied by the pioneering cultural anthropologist, Bronislav Malinowski, firmly believed that women produced children all by themselves.¹  If the facts of sexual reproduction are a relatively recent discovery in the history of human evolution, it may be that we have not yet completely sorted out the implications of male involvement in bringing children into the world.

Even after a child is born, the mother's role is better defined than that of the father.  A special bond exists between a mother and the child who was for nine months a part of her body.  She is biologically equipped to feed the infant, which initially seems to need little else.  With no clear, naturally defined part to play in relation to the little stranger who has entered his home, a new father may see no reason why he should not resume life as it was .  Leaving mother and child at home, he returns to his hunting in the forest, saddles his charger to ride off to some adventure, or goes back to his desk at a company that may provide maternal but not paternal leave.

There are, of course, many fathers who are deeply involved with their children.  Many cultures expect fathers to play an active part in child care.  Despite their ignorance of the male role in conception, the Trobriand Islanders believed that every child should have an involved man in its life.²  In the Trobriand "savages," as he unfortunately labeled them, Malinowski found a culture that regarded the sexes as more or less equal.  Men and women spent a good deal of their time together, with no initiatory rites to radically separate young men from women.  Trobriand culture fits a widespread pattern in which equality of the sexes, absence of elaborate initiatory practices, lack of a warrior tradition, and male involvement in child raising are associated.³  In the cultures from which the men's movement of the 1990's derived many of its rituals for "making men,"adult men, strongly identified with the role of warrior, spend little time with women and children. In some such cultures, boys have almost no contact with their fathers until they are forcibly taken away from their mothers to be initiated into the mysteries of manhood.⁴

If, as is often claimed, boys must be made into men through some imposed process, we should carefully examine just what it is that we are making.  Why is the end product of traditional male initiation so often a man who views women and children as alien, inferior beings?   Can we really afford to continue turning out such men?  Perhaps, rather than trying to revive male initiatory tradition, we should be striving to eliminate its remaining traces from our culture!  The challenging phrase, "be a man," implies that manhood is a state radically distinct from that of women.  Too often boys are conditioned to believe that, apart from brief encounters in the course of sexual conquest, "real men" avoid everything associated with the feminine, being particularly careful not to take on the domestic roles traditionally assigned to women.

Until recently child developmental literature tended to regard fathers, if they were considered at all, as maternal substitutes with little or no contribution of their own to make.  Not until the mid-1970's, as gender roles became less rigidly defined, did developmental theorists begin to look beyond traditional assumptions to discover, as the Trobriand Islanders might have told them, that fathers do have a unique and essential role.⁵  This is especially true when the child is male.

Developmental theorists generally agree that the achievement of a secure sense of gender identity is more difficult for males than it is for females.  Initially both sexes establish a primary identity and bond with their mother as the person who is most often present in their experience of the world.  A girl can easily continue to imagine herself as "like mommy" with little challenge from either the environment or her growing sense of self.  But, as his awareness of self and others grows, a boy cannot avoid the fact that he is fundamentally different from his mother.  With a loving mature man available to him, most boys naturally progress from the stage of "like mommy" through discovery of "not like mommy" to eventual identification with his father (or a father substitute).   Sharing in his father's sense of self, a boy gradually makes his father's maleness his own.

The sense of who and what one is develops through relationships with other people.  The founder of self psychology, Heinz Kohut, described three types of relationship needs as vital to developing and maintaining a stable sense of self.  We need the experience of being recognized, affirmed, and appreciated by others for simply being who we are.  We also need a stable, powerful, and admired other person or persons able and willing to support us in our endeavors.  Finally, we need to know that our experience of the world and ourselves is like that of others.⁶  Direct experience of an admired man who lovingly affirms a shared maleness is vital to a boy's developing sense of what it means to be male.

Every boy child comes into the world with an as-yet unlimited masculine potential, a protean archetypal template containing an infinite number of possibilities for experiencing the world through a male body.  In a complex interaction of biological predisposition and experience, some aspects of the masculine archetype are shaped into a conscious image of what it is to be a man.  But, since every archetype is by definition a whole, containing all the possible manifestations of a particular theme, other aspects of the masculine remain undeveloped and therefore unconscious, indicating their existence indirectly through dreams, fantasies, and problem behaviors.

A boy without a consistent, admired man to emulate may have difficulty in appropriately moving beyond early identification with his mother.  This is not to say that a boy without a father, or with a father unable to adequately respond to him, has no hope of establishing a stable male identity. There will probably be other men around whom he can emulate.  Many single mothers very effectively recognize and affirm their sons’ developing masculinity.  Sometimes, however, a mother may be so wounded by her bitter experience with men that she is able to convey only a negative or even blank image of the father.  She may, in fact, want her boy to grow up to be anything but a man.

Such was the case in the medieval Grail legend with Parzival and his mother .  Not long after Parzival's father had more or less deserted his mother to go to war in a far off land, he was killed in battle.  Soon after, Parzival was born.  In sorrow and anger, the widowed mother took her child away from the kingdom where she had ruled in happier days.  Determined that he would know nothing of his father or knighthood, she told Parzival nothing about his tragic and royal family history.  So he came to manhood totally ignorant of his connection to anyone but his mother.

As with any wound to the psyche, the absence of a father has the potential for being a tragic loss from which one never recovers or the basis for transformation that otherwise would not have occurred.  The deeds of many mythological heroes are a direct function of their fatherless states.  Had Parzival's early life been different, had he known his father, he likely would not have set off on the haphazard quest that led him to the Grail.  If the king in "Iron Hans"  had not been out hunting while his son bargained with the wild man, the boy might not have released the wild man to begin the process that eventually transformed them both.

A father's absence may be more psychological than physical.  It is relatively easy for a man to withdraw from the domestic scene.  Work or other outside interests and responsibilities pull him away.   If he is physically present at home but emotionally unavailable, his abandonment may not be readily apparent.  The age old pattern is repeated as a man turns away from family life, leaving his mate to deal with domestic responsibilities as best she can.

Rites of passage, in Arnold van Genep's classic formulation,⁷ consist of three phases:  separation from life as previously known, movement into and through a transformative experience of some sort, and incorporation of the transformative experience into everyday life.  In traditional culture, the initiate returns to the community from which the the early stages of initiation separated him to share the results of his transformative experience.

Many, but not all men make it through the first two stages.  Most manage to leave home and their infantile identity with mother.  Some, however,  get stuck just beyond the front door.  Constantly vacillating between comforts of the familiar and the excitement of the unknown, they go nowhere.  Others find their way to some sense of what it is to be a man in the world.  But many fail to complete the cycle.  They, in effect, never return home to incorporate their experience as men into an equal and fertile connection with the feminine.

Behind the resistance of men to domestic life lies a powerful fear of the feminine.  Deep within the psyche of even the most enlightened man lurks a primitive (i. e. strong, unconscious, and not susceptible to logic) sense that masculine identity is so tenuous as to be in continual danger of disintegration, especially when brought into contact with its apparent opposite.  Male fear of women is similar to the civilized man's fear of his wild counterpart, except that women can represent an even greater threat.  A man defeated by another man, no matter who the victor might be, has at least proven himself not a coward.   But the man defeated by a woman is likely to be an object of shameful derision in the eyes of his fellows as well as within himself.

Creativity and new life come through the union of opposites.  A masculinity cut off from its opposite and complement becomes rigid, power bound, and brittle, with no means for sustaining itself other that of oppressing others.  Anything that does not fit into its limited schemas must be made to fit or be destroyed.  Women must be dominated, kept in their place, for fear that they will overpower, and in effect, castrate men.  If he cannot control the women in his life (which no man can really do), the best way to escape this reminder of the limits of male power is for a man to distance himself from women and all that pertains to them.  In refusing to acknowledge and come to terms with his self-constricted identity, he misses the opportunity to grow beyond it.  And once again, his son is left to deal as best he can with what his father refused to face.

The king in "Iron Hans" gave his queen responsibility for safeguarding the key to the wild man's cage.  While he turned his attention elsewhere, undoubtedly to matters that he thought more important, his wife was supposed to make sure that no one let the captive out.  Like the queen, mothers (and the maternal substitutes men find in other women) are often assigned responsibility for keeping the dark, instinctual masculine shut away where it will not contaminate their "nice boys."  Finding that some things valued by male peers are condemned by his mother, a boy learns to hide parts of his self from her.  As an adult  he continues to habitually conceal certain aspects of who he is from women, even though they may share none of his mother's judgments.

The sense that there are separate and distinct rules of behavior for males and females is reinforced as a boy grows older.  He learns to be sexually aggressive, measuring his masculinity by the quantity and quality (for some girls are "easier"than others) of his conquests.   He is led to believe that girls, not boys, hold primary responsibility for setting limits on how far sexual experimentation will go.  Despite a multitude of changes in sexual attitudes and behaviors, the double standard remains very much in effect.  In the twisted logic that traditionally governs relations between the sexes, women are alternately depicted as angelic sexless beings or demonic temptresses seething with carnal passions that they use to enslave men, who apparently lose all capacity for rational choice when under a woman's influence.  When wildness breaks out in a man's life, the finger of blame is likely be pointed at some woman.  Maybe she led him on, was too provocative, was not supportive enough, or just happened to be in the vicinity at the time.   The underlying assumption seems to be that men are inherently incapable of controlling their instinctual drives.

If a man is to truly be a man, he must accept full responsibility for who he is and what he does.  He must defy the old, outmoded rules and customs that say someone else is ultimately answerable for his behavior.  He must go where he is not supposed to, recover the key his forefathers gave away, and take his chances in opening the forbidden door.

The key has been put where "good boys" do not go.  As his last defense against the wild man's temptation, the boy said that he did not have the key to unlock the cage.  But the wild man knew what the prince's innocence kept from him:  the key was under the queen's pillow.  Caught up in his desire for the golden ball, the boy "threw caution to the winds."  Going to his mother's bed, the secret place of his own origin, he found the key where the wild man said it would be.  In daring to enter that forbidden region, the prince lost another bit of his childish innocence.  Like all children who catch a glimpse of the mysteries of their parents’ bed, the prince now knew that his mother was no virgin, his father was not a god, and he himself was not some divine child magically come down from on high.  Like every other flesh and blood being, he had come to be through a very physical, instinctual act.  From one perspective this is sublime; from another it is appalling.

In the young prince's defiance of his father's decree and violation of his mother's bed it is not difficult to see the classic oedipal situation.  But while the potential for oedipal conflict is present in every father-mother-child triangle, it only becomes a manifest problem when there is some serious disturbance in the family.  A father who reacts to his son as if to a deadly rival or a mother who sees in her son a substitute for an inadequate or missing mate are not normal, healthy parents!  As Kohut⁸ put it, "Healthy man experiences, and with the deepest joy, the next generation as an extension of himself.  It is the primacy of support for the succeeding generations which is normal and human, not intergenerational strife."

Freud's gloomy formulation, based on the murderous fight at the crossroads between Oedipus and the father who  rejected him from before his birth, has little room for love between father and son.  Kohut, in his reformulation of psychoanalytic theory, looked to another ancient myth for a healthier model of the father-son relationship.  Although bound by treaty to join the Greek expedition against Troy, Odysseus wanted to stay home with his wife and newborn son.  When a delegation came to remind him of his obligation to go to war, Odysseus tried to convince them that he was insane and thus unfit for military duty.  Wearing the headgear of a madman, hitching a mismatched team of an ox and an ass to his plow, and throwing salt into the furrows as he went along, he began to plow up his land in a completely crazy manner.  Knowing his reputation for craftiness, his visitors suspected Odysseus of trickery.  Seizing his son, Telemachus, they threw the baby in front of his father's plow.  Instantly Odysseus turned aside to plow a protective semicircle around his son.

Found out, Odysseus was forced to sail away with the Greek fleet to Troy.  But he had furnished double proof of his paternal love.  Unlike Laius, haunted by the fear that Oedipus would displace him, Odysseus was fully aware of the value of his son's life in relation to his own.  He was willing to sacrifice his reputation as a brave and brilliant man if he could thereby remain at home with his family.  Ironically, his attempted self sacrifice was defeated by the very love that prompted it.  Apparently there was no shame in either his feigning madness or being found out.  He had given ample demonstration of where his highest values lay, and was respected for having done so.  The triumphant reunion of Odysseus with his son, wife, and father which closes The Odyssey further confirms the primacy of love in the healthy family.

Love is the cement that binds healthy relationships, within families or without, sexual or nonsexual, holding them together through the vicissitudes of life.  Archetypally, sexual union is symbolic of all relationships in which distinctly separate beings come together to form a whole greater than the sum of its parts.  The merging of two bodies into one creates an image of mystery and wholeness, a source of wonder and awe approaching the outermost reaches of human understanding.

As in the fateful encounter with the serpent (another image to which we respond with an uneasy mixture of disgust, fascination, and awe) at the forbidden tree, the discovery of sex brings a loss of innocence.  Learning the facts of sex, looking at what one is not supposed to see, requires a certain amount of daring, perhaps even grandiosity, in defiance of taboo.  Kohut coined the wonderfully descriptive term, grandiose exhibitionary self, for that aspect of the psyche which has no inhibitions, recognizes no boundaries, and wants its exploits to be seen and admired by all the world as it "blissfully experiences itself as the omnipotent center of all existence."⁹

A child's natural expression of grandiosity calls for recognition, tolerance, and appropriate channeling.  The self-assertion of a child in daring to go where it is not supposed to go, looking at what it is not supposed to see, and asking what it is not supposed to ask, deserves a response from parents who are neither threatened nor seduced by such behavior.

Competition for the mother, the driving force behind oedipal strife according to Freudian theory, is not the only source of father-son friction.  Conflict can arise around a father's attempts to shape his son into a worthy heir, a crown prince who will faithfully continue the family lineage by upholding his father's ideals and values, and perhaps achieving what his father failed to.  A father may find it difficult to understand a son whose character, interests, and talents differ greatly from his, or perhaps even more difficult, a son whose limitations too closely reflect his own.

Sons disappoint fathers and fathers disappoint sons.   The ideal father, able to meet without fail all the archetypal expectations of the role, would perfectly embody king, warrior, wild man, wizard, and every other image of the masculine that his children might imagine.  But no actual man can hope to adequately play all those roles.  Some aspects of the Great Father will fit him better than others; some will not fit at all.  No matter how much a boy may idealize his father, no matter how good a father a man might be, there inevitably comes a time when he fails his son.

The realization that an idealized figure is not what he seemed can seriously disrupt one's sense of reality, and one's sense of self.  A man who had great difficulty in finding his place in the world, recalled how he, as a small boy witnessing the breakup of his parents’ marriage, watched his father collapse into a helpless, hysterical, and suicidal heap.  In that moment, the image of the strong, capable, even heroic man he had believed his father to be, along with his developing sense of his own ability to be such a man, was shattered almost beyond hope of repair.

Yet parental failure to meet a child's expectations, when not so drastic as to be traumatic, can actually help a child build a realistic sense of human limits.  No one, including one's parents and oneself, is perfect; everyone, to some extent, falls short of the ideal.  As the illusion of parental perfection fades, the child learns to depend on himself.  The image of the idealized parent, no longer projected onto an actual parent, is internalized as an inner source of comfort and strength.

Such a shift from outer to inner is best facilitated by a parent who can willingly acknowledge his or her imperfection.  A father intent on presenting a flawless image of his masculinity will resent his son's expectations, knowing on some level that he cannot fulfill them.  He will be further disturbed by his son's efforts to prove himself a man by pointing out paternal failings.  A father's denial of imperfection may only increase his son's angry demands that he acknowledge them.  In defense of his threatened status as dominant male, the father lashes out by belittling the boy's far from secure young masculinity.  And once again Laius and Oedipus, tragically and ignorantly, battle to the death at the crossroads.

But when a son forgives his father, and a father his son, each recognizing the failure of both himself and the other to be as they might have been, healing can begin.  Villorio de Sica's classic neorealist film, "The Bicycle Thief," tells the story of a father's failure and his son's forgiveness.  The film is set in Italy just after World War II.  Betrayed by Mussolini and the political manifestation of the Terrible Father represented in his fascist regime, postwar Italy seemed to be a nation where men were no longer men.  Lucky if they could find work of any kind, the men who survived the war found it nearly impossible to support their families.

The film follows a few days in the life of a family consisting of a young couple, an early elementary school age boy, and an infant.  As the film opens, the father has finally found a job.  But his bicycle, which he needs for the new job, has been pawned.  His wife, apparently more adequate to the situation than her husband, solves the problem by pawning the family's bed linens in exchange for the bicycle.  Full of hope, watched by his proud son, the man rides off to work.  But then disaster strikes as the bicycle is stolen.  Devastated, ashamed of his helpless impotence in the face of his family's need, the father comes home on foot.

The next day father and son set out to track down the stolen bicycle.  After a long series of frustrating experiences in which the boy is exposed to a side of both life and his father that he has never before seen, the thief is finally found.  But the father cannot prove his accusation.  He is ridiculed by the thief, the thief's family, and the whole neighborhood.  In silence, but with a face far more expressive than words, the boy witnesses his father's humiliation.

As they return home on foot, the father notices an unattended bicycle.  Not wanting his son to know what he is about to do, he tells the boy to go on without him.  Puzzled but obedient, the boy goes to catch a streetcar.  But it is overcrowded and he cannot get on.  As he anxiously awaits the next car, his father comes around the corner riding the bicycle that was leaning up against the wall.  Behind him is an angry crowd shouting, "Stop thief!"

No more accomplished at stealing bicycles than he was in recovering them, the father is quickly caught by the crowd.  A policeman arrives to arrest him.  Unnoticed, the boy has made his way through the crowd.  Sobbing, he stands beside his now also weeping father.  Seeing the child, the bicycle's owner softens.  He tells the policeman that he will not press charges, and the father is released.  Without speaking, father and son walk away.  As the film ends, the boy reaches up to take his father's hand.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
   ¹Bronislav Malinowski, The Sexual Life of Savages (New York:  Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1929), pp. 179-195.
   ²ibid. p. 195.
   ³David Gilmore, Manhood In the Making (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 201-219.
   ⁴J. S. La Fontaine, Initiation (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England:  Penguin, 1985), pp. 115-140.
   ⁵Michael Lamb, "Fathers:  Forgotten Contributors to Child Development,"Human Development, 18 (1975), pp. 245-266).  John Munder Ross, "Fathering:  A Review of Some Psychological Contributions on Paternity,"International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 60(1979), pp. 317-327.
   ⁶Heinz Kohut, How Does Analysis Cure? (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 194.  Ernest S. Wolf, Treating the Self (New York:  Guilford Press, 1988), p. 55.
   ⁷Arnold van Genep, The Rites of Passage Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1960 [1908]).
   ⁸Heinz Kohut, "Introspection, Empathy, and the Semi-Circle of Mental Health," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 63,(1982), p. 404.
   ⁹Ernest Wolf, Treating the Self, p. 183.

IV: THE TEST

Once out of the cage, the wild man kept his half of the bargain and returned the boy's ball.  For a moment it seemed as if the problems of both wild man and boy had been resolved.  But then the boy realized that there would be serious consequences when the king came home to find the empty cage.  Rather than risk his parents’ anger, the boy decided to take his chances with the strange man from the woods.  From the perspective of the king and the queen, the wild man was a most dangerous creature.  But the prince, in his childish innocence, was not bound by his parents’ preconceptions.  Approaching the wild man as a fellow human rather than the monster the king and queen believed him to be, appealing to his kindness, the boy found in him a mentor and an ally.

The wild man had no evil intentions.  He was not even interested in turning the prince into a fellow wild man.  Once in the forest, the boy was not made to beat a drum, perform an ecstatic dance, or do any of the other "wild" things some men seem to think are essential to male initiation.  Far from encouraging a display of wildness, the wild man demanded a demonstration of the boy's ability to be still, to control the naturally restless energy of youth.  The boy was led to a spring where life giving waters, "bright and clear as crystal," welled up from somewhere deep within the earth.  Traditionally, springs are magical places where anything at all can and does happen. Visions of strange and wonderful things regularly appear in their waters.   But underground streams, even when pure as gold, are never completely isolated from the world above.  If not carefully protected, the water of life can turn into a deadly poison.

The boy's assigned duty was to sit quietly by the spring, watching to make sure it remained uncontaminated.  For a while, all went well as he let nothing fall into the water.  From time to time he caught a glimpse of the golden creatures to which the water gave life.  But then one of those things that in retrospect should never have occurred happened.

In opening the wild man's cage, the boy had pinched his finger.  In the excitement of the moment, the injury was probably overlooked.  Besides, everyone knows that "real men"never let anyone, including themselves, know about their pain.  But a day later the finger, likely by then swollen and throbbing, was very painful.  Instinctively the boy plunged it into the spring's cold water.  Quickly realizing what he had done, he jerked the finger out.  But it was too late.  The spring was contaminated, and his injured finger had become golden.

Plunging a swollen member into pure waters in hope of finding relief has unmistakable sexual connotations.   The association of penis and finger requires no great imaginative leap - boys sometimes delight in shocking others by waving a finger through their open fly.  The possession of fingers and a penis is, from boyhood on, a continual source of wonderment, pleasure, and pain.

The most basic and direct sense of self is physical.  We are first and foremost flesh and blood beings bounded by an exquisitely sensitive surface of skin.   A man's most direct experience of himself as male is a bodily based sense of his ability to stand tall, take the initiative, and push on through.  Being as it is "not very nice,"this phallic self is for the most part relegated to the unconscious, and hence often a source of trouble.  Purely phallic masculinity is grandiose and narcissistic. Focused solely on itself, driven by an urgent need to quickly reach its goal regardless of cost, it relates to people and the environment only as they serve to further its own ends.   If not constrained, raw phallic masculinity would, as it often has, plunge society into chaos.   But in initiatory experience it is tempered and shaped so as to constructively serve, rather than destroy society.

The central ordeal of many initiatory rituals is circumcision.  Deliberate wounding of the most obvious indicator of the initiate's masculinity marks his movement from boy to man.  The altered penis becomes an outward mark of a necessary inner wounding of youthful phallic grandiosity, a lifelong proof and reminder of the expectation that he be willing to sacrifice his needs to those of the community.

Even when unmarked by formal rites of passage, puberty is itself a process of initiation. Physical changes, some for the better, some for the worse, bring a changed perception of oneself.  Sexual maturity creates new possibilities for delight and torment.  For most teenage boys, sex is an almost constant obsession.  Try as he might to banish forbidden fantasies and control his actions, a boy's attention is repeatedly drawn to his all too often swollen member and its insistent demand for relief.  Throughout his life, his penis - erect at inconvenient times, limp and useless when he most needs its power - is a constant reminder that there are some very basic aspects of his being over which he has very little control.

For a shy, repressed boy, inwardly seething with lust that he is not supposed to feel, let along express, the mere existence of his sexual interest is a shameful secret.  Fearing that his fantasies will be exposed for all the world to see, he avoids as best he can all situations that have even a remote possibility of becoming sexual.  Only in compulsive, secret, and shame filled masturbatory fantasy does he find momentary relief.  But almost immediately, relief gives way to the guilt and shame of once again having failed to control his secret urges.  Always he fears discovery and, like the boy at the spring concealing his golden finger, does his best to hide all evidence of his obsession.

While sexuality is an important part of every boy's transition to manhood, it would be a serious mistake to reduce the prince's experience at the spring to "just sex" (as if anything so richly complex as sex could be described as "just"!).  A phallic symbol is much more than a penis; a pool or spring is much more than a symbolic womb or vagina.  In addition to their physical resemblance, a penis and a finger are alike in being instruments of power, penetration, and creation.  The rhythmic rubbing of masturbation resembles the repeated friction that produces fire, the creative act that perhaps first set humanity apart from the rest of the animal kingdom.¹   Creation myths sometimes describe a divine masturbatory act as the beginning of the world.²  While it can be a refuge from the difficulties of real intimate relationships, masturbation is creative in its potential for generating a rich inner world of fantasy.  In fantasy the many possibilities, sexual or otherwise, presented by life can be safely explored.  As one quietly watches, there appear, beneath the surface ripples and reflections, shinning images of what might be, and uneasy questions about what is.  While most fantasies never see the light of day, some eventually emerge to become a vital part of who one is.

The golden creatures and reflections the watching boy saw in the spring resemble the golden dreams of youth.  For a boy discovering his ability to penetrate and engage the world, nothing seems impossible.  Where others have failed, he will succeed.  No doubt there will someday be for him a golden princess, a perfect image of womanhood to match his perfectly realized manhood.

But it is one thing to see possibilities, and another to make them realities.  No matter what one does, no matter how great the degree of one's success, there always seems to be a gap between life as envisioned and life as lived.  While many a young person has been dismayed by the discrepancy between his daydreams and actual life, maturity brings recognition of the fact that success in life does not consist in the realization of every fantasy.  But the road from youthful dreams to mature realities is for most people a long and sometimes painful one.

At the end of the boy's first day at the spring, the Grimms' tale, in an abrupt, seemingly unconscious manner, as if it had somehow been known all along, for the first time uses the wild man's proper name.  Up to that point he is referred to simply as "the wild man," the generic representative of a type.  As "Iron Hans," the wild man becomes a particular individual with a specific name that sets him apart from all other wild men.

The "Iron" of his name most obviously refers to the wild man's rusty brown color.  But, like all symbols, a name can carry a multitude of meanings.  The word, "iron," may refer to the metal itself, its particular properties, or certain objects made from it.  Iron is considered a base metal, but is of great value in the many uses to which it can be put.   Although sometimes representative of evil, iron is also said to guard against it.³

The German name, "Hans," is both the diminutive form of Johannes and a generic term for a man.  Perhaps "Jack," as in the Everyman Jack of English folklore and slang, would be a better translation than Bly's "John." The wild man's name combines the ambiguous nature of iron - at once base and precious, good and evil, capable of furthering either war or peace - with plain everyday Hans.  Iron Hans is Everyman, with all the complex, ambivalent potential for exaltation, degradation, and the ordinary present in each of us, and hence the perfect mentor for the prince.⁴

Following the usual fairy tale rule of three, Iron Hans gave the boy two more opportunities after his initial failure at the spring.  On the second day, all seemed to be going well.  Then the boy, once again without thinking, ran his painful finger through his hair.  A hair dropped into the water and, like his straying finger, became golden.

On the third day, the boy managed to keep his injured, now golden finger under control.  But then, in one of the most beautiful images in the story, he became entranced by his own reflection in the water.  Trying to look into his own eyes, as if to peer into his very soul, the boy bent over closer and closer to the golden image of himself.  Unlike Narcissus in Greek myth who drowned in the reflecting pool, the boy was released from his self absorption.  As he leaned down, his long hair suddenly fell over his shoulders and splashed into the water.  The reflected image broke into ripples, and the spell was broken.  The boy jumped back in alarm, but once more consciousness came too late.  His hair had turned to gold that glittered like the sun itself.  For the third and final time the boy had failed the test.  He tried to cover up the golden mark of his failure, but Iron Hans knew what had happened.

Traditional initiations usually make little or no allowance for individuals who fail the test.  A boy who does not perform as expected (if he in fact survives, for failure sometimes means death) is a humiliating embarrassment to both himself and his family.  But failure is something that everyone, at some time or another, experiences.  Ashamed of his inability to do what was expected of him, a man may turn away, like the boy sent out after his failure by Iron Hans to "learn what it is to be poor," to what seems to be his miserable lot in life.  But in the shame of his failure, perhaps, like the boy's golden hair, in the very marks it leaves upon him, there may be something of immense value, the significance of which will be realized only after he has traveled much farther along the difficult path that lies before him.

While the need to hide a pathologically shamed self can severely impair one's ability to effectively interact with the world, an appropriate sense of shame is vital to social functioning.  To be shameless, without regard for the generally accepted limits of self centered behavior, is rightly considered the worst of social sins.  Without the ability to be shamed, to sense that some things are beyond the parameters of acceptable behavior, it would be impossible for any group of people to live together for very long.

The experience of shame brings loss of ignorance as well as innocence - Adam and Eve knew no shame until they tasted the forbidden fruit.   While pathological shame produces hopelessness, healthy shame can push us on to the realization of our hopes.  As with any increase in knowledge, the realization that one has fallen short of expectations has the potential to  be either disillusioning or enlightening.  Often it is both, although the enlightenment may be a long time in coming.

At the apparent peak of his knightly success, Parzival was honored at a feast given by King Arthur.  But, just as the celebration got under way, it was interrupted by the arrival of a most hideous woman astride a bedraggled mule.  Riding into the midst of Arthur's Court, she bitterly denounced Parzival, revealing to all his failure in not having asked about the suffering of the King at the Grail Castle.

Parzival was devastated.  "What help to him now was his brave heart, his manliness, his true breeding?  Still, another virtue was his, a sense of shame. . . . Shame brings honor as reward and is the crown of the soul.  The sense of shame is a virtue above all others."⁵  Utterly overwhelmed by the shame ironically and wisely described as his only remaining strength, Parzival left the Court of Arthur vowing to "know no joy" until he once again saw the Grail.

Shame is a central male experience.  Manhood, not being a natural state (for "men are made, not born") and lacking in definite criteria, is subject to continual challenge and proof.  When a man fails to meet the challenge, whatever it may be construed to be , when he cannot furnish satisfactory proof of his manliness, he feels the shame of being "less than a man."  Lacking any clear social consensus on just what constitutes manhood, most men, most of the time, have a vague suspicion that they are lacking some essential masculine quality, and that their way of being male may at any moment be exposed as shamefully inadequate.

Impotence, being the inverse of masculine prowess, often seems like the most shameful thing that can happen to a man.  But, as many a man has learned to his regret, indiscriminate display of phallic potency can bring shame equal to or greater than that of the inability, literal or symbolic, to use his phallus.  Exhibitionism and impotence, being two sides of one coin, are always linked.  The exhibitionist's worst fears often come true when the psyche's natural tendency towards balance acts to check his overextended potency.   So it was when the Grail King, with the bold cry of "Amor," rode out in pursuit of knightly conquest only to be castrated.

There are other men who, far from being exhibitionists, seem to be hopelessly stuck in a state of impotence with their only apparent ambition being one of getting through life without being noticed.  But beneath most failures to engage the world lurk secret visions of the superman one might be if only things were a little bit different.  Unconsciously convinced that his masculinity, judged by the impossibly high standards of his heroic fantasies, will be found lacking, such a man avoids as best he can any challenge of it in the real world.

Traditional initiation is a carefully controlled, artificially induced experience of shame.  To  stand exposed before peers and elders, admitting to one's ignorance and need for instruction, to willingly submit to painful and humiliating ordeals at the hands of others, is to face shame and learn from it.  A man constrained by fears that any action on his part will shamefully reveal his less than adequate masculinity is not an initiated man.  So too is the shameless man who recognizes no limits to his grandiose display of potency.  Through initiation one learns, often in the most painful way, to respect shame without being overwhelmed by it.  Shame becomes a guide rather than an enemy.

No matter what process may be revived or invented to guide them, modern initiates will never be finished products, with their manhood and place in society securely established to the degree that we imagine occurs in more traditional cultures.  Initiation into a culture as complex as ours is of necessity an ongoing, lifelong process.  The test at the golden spring was only one of many stages of the initiation that started with the boy's pursuit of his straying ball.  Failure, and the shame which accompanied it, is a vital part of the process

Had the boy succeeded in his task, he presumably would have remained in the forest with Iron Hans.  Perhaps he would have become the permanent guardian of the spring, and spent the rest of his life beside it.  Some boys never leave the spring in the forest.  Well into adulthood and middle age they are still seated at the water's edge, gazing intently into the depths, entranced by the beautiful creatures and golden reflections that appear there.  They dream many wonderful dreams of what might be, but never touch or disturb their golden fantasies.  The water remains pristine, and its gold never becomes theirs.

To realize his potential, the boy had to fail the test. Seemingly no longer a prince, he was sent away, apparently without a friend or possession in the world, to "learn what it is to be poor."  But he took with him Iron Hans’ promise of help should he ever need it and, carefully hidden away under his hat, the golden mark of his redemptive failure at the spring.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
   ¹C G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (in Collected Works Vol. 5),  (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1976 [1911-12/1952]), pars. 180-192, 329-332.
   ²R. T. Rundle Clark, Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt (New York:  Thames & Hudson, 1978), pp. 42.  Stella Kranrisch, The Presence of SÌva  (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 3 ff., 100-101, 370.
   ³J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols  (New York:  Thames & Hudson, 1978), pp. 88, 105.  Maria Leach & Jerome Fried (eds.), Funk and Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend  (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1972 [1949]), p. 528.
   ⁴Harold T. Betteridge (ed.), Cassell's German-English/English-German Dictionary  (New York:  Macmillian, 1978), p. 182.  William Morris (ed.) The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language  (Boston:  Houghton Mifflin, 1980), p. 691.
   ⁵Wolfram von Eschenbach, Parzival, trans: Helen M. Mustard & Charles E. Passage (New York: Vintage Books 1961) p. 172.

V: TO GO OUT INTO THE WORLD

Movement from the familiar into the unknown activates a dynamic, archetypally based constellation of opposites.  On one side is the desire for a familiar, secure place where one unquestionably belongs, the rules are known, and basic needs are always provided for.  On the other side is the drive towards self-sufficient independence.  Many men find coming to terms with these seeming mutually exclusive needs difficult, especially when confronted with the fact of their dependence.  Having been told countless times that "real men always stand tall on their own two feet," proud in their ability to go it alone, boys and men come to believe that radical independence is an indispensable quality of manhood, and judge anything less in themselves as failure.

At the seemingly opposite end of the spectrum from the man who fiercely resists all attempts to limit his freedom, yet so closely linked as to often be manifest in the same man, is the man who is apparently incapable of doing anything on his own.  Seemingly lacking a life force of his own, his very existence seems to depend on his ability to link to some external source of vitality.  While the connection can be to anything or anyone, more often than not the object of his dependence will be some representative of the all nurturing, all engulfing Great Mother, a figure both longed for and bitterly hated, often at one and the same time.

In actuality, the man who habitually denies the fact of his dependency has no more escaped from the clutches of the Great Mother than has the man who repeatedly flees from the threat of independence back into her arms.  The aggressive misogynist fears that, if he relaxes his guard, he will be swallowed up by her.  For the passively dependent man, the realm of the Father seems to threaten destruction should he venture out of the Mother's protective, suffocating embrace.  Neither man knows the wholeness of the embrace in which both parents, and their domains, join to become one.

The Great Mother is, in developmental terms, the omnipotent caregiver of early childhood upon whom the helpless infant is utterly dependent.  She devotes herself totally to the child who as yet lacks the ability to either care for himself or effectively resist her.  In turn, his attention centers on her as his literal source of life.  In a healthy maternal-child pair, the relationship of helpless child and all powerful mother is gradually modified as the child becomes more able to care for himself.

Every child, as it grows, both rebels against maternal dependency and longs to return to the time when mother could magically make everything right.  While both sexes experience this conflict as a generalized ambivalence towards women, the traditional and all too insistent definition of men as beings radically distinct from the feminine virtually guarantees that there will be some degree of confusion, some mixture of longing and fear, love and hate, in a man's every encounter with women.  The man who avoids women due to the mysterious and terrible anxiety he experiences in their presence, the man who dares not openly oppose his mother or wife, and the man who violently dominates women to prove himself a man, all alike make the mistake of confusing flesh and blood women with the archetypal Great Mother.

Schizophrenia, a serious mental disorder characterized by dissolution of ego, the sense of a personal self, in the sea of the unconscious, often offers direct glimpses into the archetypal patterns underlying human behavior.  I have known a number of schizophrenic adult men whose symbiotic relationship with their mothers strikingly resembled that of the Great Mother and her son-lover.  Every step, no matter how minor, taken by the son away from the chronically dependent state to which his mental illness had seemingly sentenced him was met by a countermove in the mother-son relationship.  Usually the net result was a worsening of the son's condition with his dependent status becoming all the more firmly fixed.

As a sort of living death, schizophrenia often produces a permanent disintegration of the self, precluding the possibility of an independent life.  In effect and timing, if not cause, schizophrenia can be viewed as a catastrophic derailment of the process of leaving home.  Typically it first becomes apparent during late adolescence or early adulthood, a time when most people in our culture establish a life apart from that of their family of origin.

While the development of schizophrenia involves a biological predisposition, individuals lacking such an inherent proclivity sometimes experience a similar disintegration of self when subjected to severe stress.  Almost everyone has at some time felt a sudden sense of vulnerability, intense anxiety, distorted sensory perceptions, or disorientation in response to some unexpected event or stress.  Most people quickly regain their equilibrium as the crisis passes.  But persistent and severe trauma, as experienced by abused children or in battlefield and disaster conditions, can result in long lasting, gross distortions of reality.  Extreme gaps between experience and expectations, such as are sometimes encountered in moving suddenly from a sheltered environment out into the world, can seriously disrupt one's ability to function.

The psyche is basically conservative - rather than changing beliefs it prefers to bend perceptions to fit preconceptions.  The resulting distortions range from the relatively minor to full-blown psychosis.  The potential for recovery from psychic disintegration of any degree and, beyond mere recovery, integration of the experience into an expanded awareness is directly related to one's willingness to challenge the psyche's conservative bent.  Acknowledging how little we actually know makes space for those parts of reality that, for better or worse, do not neatly fit our preconceived notions.  Only as we are willing to examine and, if need be, change our beliefs do we learn from our failures to be as expected, the disasters that defeat our every effort to avoid them, and the successes that often come when least expected.  And when we open to the possibility, we find that there is somewhere deep within ourselves, in the midst of all the confusion, vaguely distant, yet near and familiar, a powerful resource ready and able to help if we will only let it.

As he left the forest for parts unknown, the boy in the Grimms’ tale seemed to be utterly alone, with no means whatsoever for directing his course in the world.  But somewhere, hidden and perhaps even forgotten for the time being, he took with him the promise of Iron Hans’ help should he ever need it.  At the tale's end, everything that belonged to Iron Hans, all of his immense strength, wealth, and wisdom, would be the boy's.  But that was too far distant to be visible when the boy was sent out on his own into the world.  The process of internalization,  the work of taking in and making our own what we value in others, is a lengthy one.  The boy had a long, very hard road to follow before he could be a worthy heir to his mentor.

So far the boy's adventures had brought him nothing but trouble.  In only a few days, the royal child had been reduced to a homeless wanderer.  He managed to lose even the perhaps dubious privilege of living in the forest with the wild man.  Totally alone in a world about which he knew nothing, the boy's future seemed anything but promising.

There are times in life when it is hard to avoid the belief that we have been condemned by some terrible fate to helplessly stumble along from one disaster to another.  Lost and alone, there seems to be no way out of our hopeless situation and no one to whom we can turn for help.  St. John of the Cross, a sixteenth century Spanish mystic whose own life had more than its share of darkness, coined the term, "dark night of the soul,"to describe this sort of experience.¹

While the dark night of the soul experience can certainly be described as depression, it is not "just depression."  At least it is not the sort of depression that readily yields to treatment based on the idea that such dark feelings are the result of cognitive errors that can be remedied through behavior modification techniques. Detailed objective examination, as is done in cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy, of habitual thought patterns and behaviors as reinforcers of depression can, in fact, be quite useful.  But difficult existential questions that are encountered in the dark depths of depression demand and deserve recognition in their own right.

At first glance depression might seem to be more of a problem for women than men, with the reported incidence of major depression for women about twice that of men.  But social expectations and stereotypes make it more difficult for men to admit to being depressed.  Men are supposed to be in control rather than be controlled.  A man lost in a dark mood he can neither understand nor change, unable to take charge of himself much less anyone or anything else, is apt to be regarded by both himself and others as a poor excuse for a man. Male depression often remains hidden with even the affected man unaware of his condition.

A major characteristic of depression is an overwhelming sense of utter helplessness.  From the perspective of a seriously depressed individual, there may seem to be absolutely no way to make things better.  John of the Cross recognized this in his description of the dark night in which the soul is "purged from all help, consolation, and natural apprehension with respect to all things."²  As in the spiritual dark night, there may be little a depressed individual can do beyond acknowledging the fact of the terrible mood that seems to have swallowed him or her up.

Recognizing that one is in the grip of a mood greater than one's willful self creates the possibility for establishing a relationship with it, of following it down into the darkness to find out where it comes from and where it might lead.  In such surrender there is more than an element of faith that something greater than one's personal self is in charge of the process, directing it towards an eventual emergence of meaning from what seems to be utterly meaninglessness.

Surrender as a positive act is a difficult concept to grasp in our culture, especially for a man.  After all, how many mythic heroes are so honored because they surrendered?  To give up, to acknowledge  a power greater than himself supposedly diminishes a man.  But, at least in the realm of psychology, recognition of one's limits is often the first step towards regaining control.

When things are not going well, the psyche naturally tends to withdraw from the world.  The low energy and subdued mood associated with depression force a time out from normal activities.  Socially, we recognize this in allowing a period of mourning, during which one is not expected to be as usual, to those who have experienced the death of a loved one.   And at the core of depression, whether recognized or not, there is very often a loss of some kind.

Sometimes the loss and its connection to the depression is clear.  However, things that cannot be seen or touched, but are nonetheless very real, can also be lost.  When the loss is of something intangible, recognition of the fact of the loss, not to mention its resolution, is much more difficult.  This is especially true when the loss involves an aspect of one's self, something that, even in the best of circumstances, is usually more than a little vague.

Despite his almost total ignorance of his origins or identity, Parzival before his exposure as a failure gave little thought to who he was.  As do many men, he apparently assumed that he was more or less what he did.  But then he was denounced as a knightly fraud.  Suddenly everything that he had done, all that he had thought himself to be, became empty and meaningless.  Prior to his encounter with the wild man, the boy in our story was a royal child whose every wish was undoubtedly a command for a multitude of people whose duty it was to serve him.  But away from his father's palace, alone in a world which had no regard for him, he was a total nobody.

Depression that follows the collapse of core beliefs about oneself and the world can be a long time in healing.  After his disgraceful exist from the Court of Arthur, Parzival spent five years aimlessly wandering through "the Waste Land of his own disoriented life ,"³ letting his horse, a representative of the instinctual life force that carries us onward even when we have no idea of which way to turn and no will to continue, take him wherever it wanted.  Traveling at random "over paths beaten and unbeaten," the exiled hero of the Grimms’ story learned well "what it is to be poor" in spirits as well as material goods.  At last he came to a city where he hoped to find some means for changing his so far dismal luck.

For as long as there have been stories, the tale has been told of the youth who sets out for some distant place anticipating a better life there.  And almost as often, the story tells of shattered dreams as the young man becomes just one more unknown, lost soul awash in a sea of uncaring strangers.  In such an impersonal, perhaps even hostile world one can easily go astray, losing sight of his ideals and even his identity.  In the biblical story, the Prodigal Son, having wasted all his inheritance, became a keeper of pigs, a most shameful occupation for a Jewish man.  "The Hymn of the Pearl,"  a beautiful Gnostic poem about as old as the parable of the Prodigal Son, tells of a young prince who set out from the house of his parents to seek "The One Pearl."  But, alone in an alien land, he forgot both his mission and his royal origins.   More recently an idealistic young man, penniless in the city where he had expected to find fame and fortune, instead found himself in a seedy section of town working as a doorman for a strip joint.

So the wandering boy in "Iron Hans"  came into town in a most unprincely situation.  As a child in his father's palace, assured of having his every need met, he had no reason for acquiring practical skills.  But alone in a place where he was just another stranger down on his luck, no one wanted to take on such a useless boy as he was.  Finally he made his way to the palace of the king who ruled the city.  Luckily for the boy, he was likable.  As Iron Hans said, there was no wickedness in his heart, and his naiveté helped win over the people he approached at the palace. He was given a menial position in the palace kitchen.  So the prince, once destined to rule a kingdom, became a cook's boy, his real identity lost and hidden from everyone, including apparently even himself.

Many a young man has coasted along under the impression that everything he wants will come to him without the need for effort on his part only to be, much to his surprise, brought face to face with the necessity of making his own way in the world.  He discovers too late that there is a most distressing gap between his expectations and reality, especially in what seems to be the shocking indifference of the world to him and his dreams.

Somewhere along the road to manhood, sometime during the course of his initiation (whatever the form it takes), every boy will be faced with the necessity of compromising his dreams as he finds that neither himself nor the world is quite as expected.  Of the infinite number of possibilities that seem to be just over the horizon in childhood, only a very few become adult realities, and fewer still realize anything like their full potential.  Maturation is in part a process of disillusionment in the discovery of the difference between life as imagined and life as lived.

While dreams often fall victim to the struggle for survival, some individuals settle into a position well below their actual abilities as a way to protect their golden fantasies. Attempted realization of a dream entails the possible loss of both the dream and the potential it holds.  So long as grand plans and dreams remain pristine, uncompromised by concessions to unyielding actualities, they can live on as possibilities which may someday, somehow come true.  But one can cling to hopes of "someday" for a whole lifetime.

Little boys often play at being superheroes, complete with mask and cape concealing their real identity.  Although they might be reluctant to admit to such "childish nonsense," many grown men continue to imagine themselves in such a role.  Like Superman/Clark Kent, a man may split his life into inner and outer, heroic fantasy and mundane reality, with an impenetrable barrier erected between the two parts of himself.  Such a life, split into halves that are carefully kept apart and even secret from each another, is not a life to be envied.  Each half is misunderstood and neither, without the other, can ever be whole.

The man whose specialness, the unique possibilities he has to offer the world by simple virtue of being who he is, is hidden by fears that he cannot live up to his fantasized potential is caught in a double bind.  He is secretly proud of what he might be, but at the same time is ashamed of his impossibly grandiose visions.  He fears exposure while longing for someone who will recognize and activate his hidden potential.  Driven to conceal his true self, his secret hope that someone will someday penetrate his disguise may never be unfulfilled.

The prince-become-a-cook's-boy continued to hide his golden hair, the mark of his shameful failure at the spring, keeping his head covered even when he came into the royal presence.  Given what happened later in the story, had the boy removed his hat as the king demanded, it would have been clear to all that he was no mere servant.  But, like the man who habitually counters every compliment with a recitation of his faults, the boy kept his beautiful hair hidden with the excuse that he suffered from a terrible scalp condition too repulsive to be exposed to view.  His real identity still a secret, the boy was declared by the outraged king to be unfit for royal service.  But people again took pity on him.  Instead of being thrown out of the palace entirely, he was banished to the garden, there to await discovery by someone who would be neither satisfied with his explanation nor put off by his appearance.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
  ¹John of the Cross, Dark Night of the Soul,E. Allison Peers (trans. & ed)  (Garden City, NY:  Image, 1959).
   ²ibid. p. 122.
   ³Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. IV:  Creative Mythology (New York:  Penguin, 1976), p. 460.

VI: OF GOLDEN HAIR, WILDFLOWERS , & FOOLISHNESS

The princess' elevation no doubt served to set her apart from the more mundane world as well as from the boy in the garden.  But, unlike some other fairy tale princesses, she had no need of a rescuing prince.  It was more the other way around, as she ordered the boy up to her room.  Unlike him, she seemed to be quite sure of who she was and what she wanted.

There are, of course, many women who while away their lives dreaming of the prince who will someday come to rescue them from their dreary lives.  There are also more than a few men who long for the day when some princess will look down from her window and extend an invitation to (in the words of Mae West) "come up and see me sometime."

Unlike Rapunzel imprisoned in her remote forest tower or Snow White seemingly dead in her glass coffin in other Grimms' tales, not all princesses separated from the world of ordinary mortals are the victims of some malevolent force.  A shy boy, a prince only in his dreams, may so idealize a girl as to raise her, in his perception, to a position hopelessly beyond his reach.

"To love pure and chaste from afar" was the ideal of the Courtly Love tradition that swept through the royal courts of twelfth century Europe in which the Grail and King Arthur stories were also created.  According to rules devised by the women who ruled the Courts of Love, a knight was to devote himself to a lady, often the wife of his lord, in whose name his exploits would be done.  But the lady, at least in theory, was to remain always above and beyond him. She became in effect a more or less divine being beyond the reach of any merely mortal man.¹

But ideals are often one thing and reality another.  This too is reflected in the old stories.  The downfall of Camelot followed the consummation of the love between Lancelot and Guinevere, the queen of his lord and best friend, Arthur.  In another tale from the Arthurian corpus, the young knight, Tristan, was given the task of conveying Iseult, the intended bride of his lord and uncle, to her wedding.  But during the journey, Tristan and Iseult unwittingly drank a love potion intended for the wedding night.  The resulting forbidden passion, along with the guilty couple's attempts to keep it secret, eventually brought about the ruin of just about everyone involved.

Logic and reason have little to do with romance. In spite of our best intentions to be fully aware of the choices we make, falling in love is not a conscious decision; it is more on the order of something that just happens.  Try as we may to dismiss our infatuations as illusions, they refuse to leave us in peace.   A man may believe that he is well beyond the age when romantic notions could make him behave like a love stricken fourteen year old.  But then he catches a glimpse of the princess in the tower, and is hopelessly lost.

For the man who has serious difficulty separating fantasy and reality, who cannot give up the promise of transformation represented by the object of his fantasies, an unrequited infatuation can become a dangerous obsession.  The woman whom he loves in vain is to him, at one and the same time, an angel with the power to save him if only she would and a demon who mercilessly torments him.  Convinced that life without her is impossible, he may end by destroying her as well as himself.

Throughout the history of human culture, men have approached women with a great deal of ambivalence.  On one hand women are idealized to the point of looking to them in hopes of salvation.  On the other, women and the troublesome desires that arise in their presence often seem to represent a potential source of male damnation.  Male fear of women is much more than a fear of sexuality.  With roots in the male child's need to separate from his mother to prove himself a man, it is above all else a fear of the apparent ability of women to lure men away from their dutiful (and often dubious) allegiance to male values and the male establishment that defines their status as men.

Established standards of male behavior exalt the virtues of sane and sober responsibility.  The ideal man is one who is always in charge of both himself and the situation.  But men often do lose control.  Sometimes they even make fools of themselves.  Since so many of us seem to become fools (or even worse, swine, like Odysseus’ men in their encounter with Circe in the Odyssey) when in the presence of women, who better than women to blame for our follies?   In the classic German film, "The Blue Angel," a staid bourgeois professor is utterly ruined through his infatuation with a cabaret singer who seductively toys with him.   While few end up in as sad a state as the professor, reduced to playing the fool in a cabaret show, almost every man has at one time or another done something foolish in pursuit of sexual or romantic fantasy.

Appearing foolish is the last thing most men would freely choose to do.  But foolishness is not necessarily a bad thing. In many myths the hero starts out as a naive fool who, completely unaware that he is doing anything wrong, innocently violates all the rules of acceptable behavior.  According to some traditions, the Grail could only be found and the Wounded Fisher King healed by a perfectly innocent fool such as Parzival proved to be.  By innocently ignoring the rules, foolishness opens the way for possibilities that adherence to the way things "should be,"and are, precludes.  As a threat to the established order, foolishness is always condemned by the powers that be.

The attempt to conceal one's foolishness can itself prove foolish.  Like the boy who kept his golden hair covered, fearing exposure of his shameful failure at the spring, a man may hide his real self for fear that he will be unmanned by disclosure of some "foolish" weakness.  Maybe the gardener's boy, as he went about his work, sometimes imagined, with a mixture of hope and dread, what might happen should his real identity become known.  But then the king's daughter, through what might seem to be mere coincidence, looked out of her window and saw what no one else had seen.

Overcome by the summer heat and thinking himself safe from observation, the gardener's boy paused to rest and take off his hat for a moment.  The princess, perhaps lying on her bed in a fit of boredom such as princesses are sometimes subject to ("nothing ever happens in this castle!"), suddenly saw a flash of golden light.  Jumping up to find its source, she saw not a lowly gardener's boy but a young man with the most radiantly beautiful golden hair she had ever beheld.  The princess, like the royal personage she was, called out her window to the startled boy, ordering him to bring her some flowers.

Would-be lovers bring flowers to the women whose love they seek - was the princess telling the boy to court her?  Was she so bedazzled by his hair that she failed to notice his dirty, bedraggled clothes or his humble station?  What would her father have said about her inviting a male servant, particularly one he had banned from the royal presence, up to her bedroom?  There may have been more than a little rebellion and the excitement of stepping over a boundary, as well as just plain foolishness, in the princess’ interest in the mysterious boy with the golden hair.

We tend to see in others what we find lacking in ourselves.  Intrigued by a life so different from hers, a princess may fall in love with a gardener's boy, much to the bewilderment of all the princes who have been so eagerly competing for her attention.  Beneath the humble appearance that everyone else takes at face value, she may see (or at least think she sees) a prince in disguise.