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 Grimm's 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, Iron John, (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 traditional 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 opposing 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 acknowledgment 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 ape-like 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.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wasteland_(mythology)
    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 creation 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 Grimm's 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 non-sexual, 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 Sįva  (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 Grimm's 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 Grimm's 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 Grimm 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.

A woman may hope to save a man from the destructive effects of his personal and family history, certain that she will be able to bring out the potential that he himself is apparently unable to activate.  This, of course, neatly dovetails with the desire of many a man for a mother-lover to perform the impossible task of making him into "a real man," while simultaneously fulfilling his every need.  But no man bound to a maternal figure, whether his actual mother or her stand-in, will ever sense himself to be entirely a man, no more than the unfortunate woman to whom he is attached will feel capable of being her own woman.

Almost all relationships involve some degree of co-dependency with one partner's problematic behavior finding support in that of the other.  If a couple is willing and able to wrestle with this difficult dynamic, it has the potential for transforming them both.  The gardener's boy can reclaim his disavowed specialness while assuming responsibility for his own life.  The princess learns about the value of ordinary things like  wildflowers, and gardener's boys who may never be princes in anyone's eyes but hers.

The princess was perhaps foolish in the risk she took in bringing the gardener's boy up to her room.  Beyond the fact of his enchanting golden hair, she knew nothing about him or what he might do.  Still, she remained firmly in charge of the situation, making him come up to her rather than going down to him.  Assertive women may sometimes frighten men, but a man relatively secure in his masculinity will find a woman's clear expression of power that is legitimately hers attractive.

The surprised boy, possibly unaware of the princess’ existence until the moment of her command to him, quickly covered up his head and gathered some wildflowers.  But on the way up to the princess’ room, he met the gardener who was appalled to find the boy taking up a bunch of ordinary wildflowers such as any peasant might have picked from the roadside.  The youth's insistence that the princess preferred such flowers probably only added to the gardener's suspicion that his young assistant was affected by something much more serious than mere simple mindedness.

But the boy knew the value of wild things.  The gardener had probably never met a wild man, let alone served an apprenticeship, however brief, to one.  The gardener's time was spent nurturing carefully cultivated, intentionally planted things.  In his estimation wildflowers were weeds to be eliminated when they sprang up in his garden, and of no interest whatsoever in their natural habitat.

Perhaps it was the gardener, not the boy, who was the fool.  At any rate, the youth took his wildflowers on up to the princess.  But once he was in her room, it quickly became apparent that she was interested in something other than flowers, whether cultivated or wild.

As her father had done, she ordered the boy to take off his hat in her royal presence.  And, as he had done with the king, the boy refused to bare his head.  But she had seen what her father had not, and knew that the boy's head was far from being the disgusting sight that he claimed it was.  Before he knew what was happening,  she grabbed his hat and uncovered his golden hair.  He fled, but not before she forced some golden coins into his hand.  Caring "nothing for gold, "the youth gave the coins to the gardener as playthings for his children, no doubt furnishing further proof of his craziness in the gardener's perception.

"Iron Hans"  being a folk tale and thus bound to the rule of threefold repetition, the drama between the princess and the gardener's boy was acted out two more times.  But the boy, apparently now a faster learner than he had been at the golden spring, managed to dodge the princess’ second and third attempts to expose him.  He was determined to keep the golden mark of his failure hidden; she was almost as determined to see it.  She lured him up to her room in an attempt to uncover his secret, and then seemingly tried to bribe him.  He refused to show her what she wanted to see, and found no value in her gold.  But still he took flowers up at her bidding.

If the genders were reversed, with a prince luring a servant girl up to his room to expose her in some way after which he pressed money on her, the obvious interpretation would be that this was an attempted seduction or even rape.  The prince would be condemned for taking advantage of a poor girl whose resistance would be admired.  But what are we to make of a princess who tries to seduce a gardener's boy or, perhaps even more puzzling, his refusal of her?  No doubt there were many young men in the kingdom who would have willingly paid almost any price to gain access to the princess.  Yet here was a young man, poverty stricken with no apparent hopes for improving his lowly position, who not only rebuffed the princess but had no use for her money.

Clear and direct communication about sexual attraction and desire is exceedingly rare.  Sometimes it seems as if the object of courtship is not so much to love as to defeat the other.  Adding to the confusion attendant on most affairs of the heart (affairs that also involve other, even more problematic aspects of the human anatomy) is the degree to which we become unconscious, losing sight of our own best interests and intentions, when struck by the arrows of Eros.  Many a man, and woman, has known at first hand the truth of Shakespeare's line:  "Man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviors to love."²

Inexperience in romance combined with sexual frustration can hold a man back from availing himself of the usual ritualized subterfuges of seduction.  Acting on mistaken assumptions, he may ignorantly rush in without regard for either the situation or the wishes of his intended lover.  The man who rides roughshod over a woman's feelings may be in fact more naive than ill intended.

Having just left his mother, hoping to find the Court of Arthur and become a knight, Parzival or "Simplicity's Child," as Wolfram titles him, came upon a half nude woman asleep in a tent.  Knowing nothing of male-female relations beyond his mother's advice of "whenever you can win a good woman's ring and greeting, take them. . . . You must haste to kiss her and clasp her tight in your embrace," Parzival tried to do just that with "this marvel of uttermost desire." After clumsily embracing and kissing her, he took a ring from the terrified woman.  Then he went on his way, cheerfully ignorant of having done any wrong or of the difficult situation in which he had left the woman with her jealous husband.³

Naiveté can also hold a man back where his advance would be welcomed.  Sometime after his encounter with the woman in the tent, having managed in the meanwhile to become a knight, Parzival came upon the castle of a most sad maiden queen.  Having been "cured of his simplicity" by his knightly mentor who had "counseled him against questions," Parzival "sat there with that noble queen without opening his mouth to speak a word," much to the queen's discomfort and confusion.

That night, wearing what Wolfram delightfully describes as "raiment of combat" - a sheer nightgown - the queen came to kneel weeping at Parzival's bedside.  As his mother had taught him that it was proper to kneel only to God, Parzival, apparently still somewhat simple, told the sobbing woman to arise and join him in bed.  With Parzival carefully lying on the other side of the bed, the queen requested his help in averting a grave threat to her and her kingdom.  Being a good knight, Parzival the next day met and vanquished her enemy.  The couple spent another night together, and again Parzival "left the queen a maiden."  Not until the third night did he recall his mentor's description of man and wife as one, as well as his mother's admonition (which had caused so much trouble before) to embrace women.  "And so they entwined arms and legs . . . . and he found the closeness sweet ."⁴

Perhaps the most basic of the many standards by which men judge the masculinity of other men is that of sexual potency.  The proclivity of males to boast about their conquests is notorious.  This is particularly true in adolescence when a boy's masculine identity, especially when challenged by his equally uncertain peers, is still very tenuous.  A young man who does not brag at least a little about his sexual exploits is apt to be poorly regarded by his fellows; a youth who fails to even attempt a conquest when he has the chance is likely to be considered a fool or worse by his more aggressive peers.  In their world, no healthy and sane male ever passes up the opportunity to "get some."

For the women who find him attractive, the unresponsive man, like Parzival with the maiden queen and the gardener's boy with the princess, presents a puzzle, and perhaps a challenge.  He may himself only feel tremendously frustrated by his apparent inability to act on opportunities that he allows himself to recognize as such only in retrospect.  While some will see in him, like the Bible's Joseph spurning Potiphar's wife,⁵ a model of proper behavior, his restraint may well be due to something other than adherence to a strict moral code.

Human behavior springs more from archetypal predisposition than moral ideals.  Intimate relationship requires the exposure of one's most private self, and yet we have an inherent reluctance to expose ourselves, as is literally expressed in the near universal association of nakedness and shame.   Even more potentially shameful than physical nakedness is the psychological nudity without which there can be no real intimacy.  No matter how well we hide those parts of ourselves that we want no one to see, being truly intimate means that sooner or later we will be revealed as who we really are.

We both long for and fear such an exposure.  We so much want to be accepted for who we are, and fear that we will be found shamefully unworthy of acceptance.  We desire to be known, and are afraid of what might become known.  Our fear is not so much of the other as it is of what the other might see in us.  As with any potentially transformative experience, intimate relationship "is not comfortable and harmonious; rather it is a place of individuation where a person rubs up against himself and against his partner, bumps up against her in love and in rejection, and in this fashion learns to know himself, the world, good and evil, the heights and the depths."⁶  Resistance to intimacy is in its essence resistance to the potential pain of such an encounter.

While both sexes resist intimacy, they tend to do it in different ways.  Cultural conditioning makes it relatively easy for a woman to assume the role of nurturer.  At first glance, nurturing might appear to be anything but an avoidance of intimacy.  But a woman continually focused on her partner's needs is not likely to have her own exposed.

Men are generally well trained from an early age in the techniques of concealing their real selves behind a facade of rationality and emotional distance.  The mysterious stranger, as a romanticized ideal, appears in countless myths, novels (including romance novels whose female authors and readers do their part in maintaining male stereotypes), and films.  Many men try to live up to this expectation by being mysteries even to themselves.  The man who responds to the stereotypical psychotherapeutic inquiry of "What are you feeling?" with "I don’t know" or "I think . . . ." may truly be unaware of his feelings or lack the vocabulary to describe them.  If he believes, as do most men on an unconscious level, that being masculine means being always in control, emotional detachment will seem almost as essential an aspect of his manhood as his genitals.  Asking such a man to freely express his emotions may well be experienced as the symbolic equivalent of a request that he castrate himself.

In the early stages of therapy the therapist may have to acknowledge a man's emotional life for him.  In intimate relationship this part is usually played by a partner who, on a mostly  unconscious level, bears the burden of his emotions along with her own.   But fewer women these days are willing to serve as emotional nursemaids to men seeking to evade responsibility for their own inner lives.  A woman's steadfast refusal to nurture without being herself nurtured in turn can mark the beginning of a painful, but ultimately rewarding change for her mate as well as herself.

The initial relationship, like many beginning relationships, of the princess and the gardener's boy was an ambiguous one.  Perhaps the gardener's boy was foolish in not valuing the princess and her gold.  Then again, maybe he was wise.  The story leaves us to draw our own conclusions.  In any case, he continued to be an intriguing mystery to her and, while the story says nothing about it, we may well imagine that he found himself from time to time thinking of her and her room.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
   ¹Freidrick Heer, The Medieval World (New York:  Penguin, 1962), pp. 32-55, 157-196.
    ²Much Ado About Nothing, II, iii, 8-9.
   ³Wolfram Von Eschenbach, Parzival (trans., Helen M. Mustard & Charles E. Passage) (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), pp. 73-77.
   ⁴ibid. pp. 103-111.
   ⁵Genesis 39.
   ⁶Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig,  Marriage Dead Or Alive (Dallas:  Spring Publications, 1977), p. 61.

VII: WAR!

Men and war are not easily separated.  Men seem to have an innate propensity for organizing themselves along military lines to "attack" problems, even when a warlike approach may well be counterproductive.  Men who hardly know one end of a rifle from another use the language of war to describe the relatively peaceful tasks of their everyday lives.  The professional sports which obsess so many men are a very thinly disguised form of ritual warfare.  While men often exhibit the best traits of warriors, they also have a distressing tendency to emulate the worst behaviors of off-duty soldiers.

The archetypal power that drives men to war has very little to do with the rational explanations we invent for it and has, thus far in human history, successfully eluded all attempts to banish it.  There is an undeniably strong spiritual quality to war.  Throughout history, in culture after culture, blood sacrifice and religious experience have been tied together.  In war the linkage is explicit and literal.  Every war is, in a sense, a holy war made so by the actions of men sacrificing themselves as well as their enemies to a cause transcending life itself.  Standing face-to-face with death, the warrior passes beyond, if only for a moment, the bounds of his own mortality.  Even in death, through his sacrifice the fallen warrior is joined to something greater than his mortal self.

Despite its horrors, no matter what its cost in wasted lives, wealth, and energy, there is something fascinatingly  compelling about war and the men who wage it.   Many of the greatest stories of all time, masterpieces that have captured the very essence of human experience, are set in and about the battlefield.   From ancient tales to the latest blockbuster movie, the resolute man of action who resolves problems by skillfully dispatching the people who cause them is a universally admired figure.  Judging by the number of titles containing the word "warrior" to be found in New Age and self-help sections of bookstores, even proponents of peace and harmony find the archetypal appeal of the man of war hard to resist.

Like sex, war takes place in a primal realm where only the most basic instincts matter, and a man's prowess is simply and directly tried.  Sometimes we confuse sex with war, mistaking a sexual partner for an enemy whose conquest must be achieved at any cost.  Archetypally sex and death, being mysterious biological processes representing respectively the beginning and end of the life cycle, are closely linked.  Men at war are especially apt to mix up the business of creating life with that of taking it, for the same energy that drives battlefield exploits also fuels sexual aggression.  The increased sexual activity so often noted during wartime makes biological sense as an evolutionary adaptation to an increased death rate.  The soldier who impregnates a woman before marching off to his possible death ensures that something of himself will continue to live on, even if he himself does not.

The defense of women and children against an enemy who would rape and kill them is an often heard rationale for war.  Yet the same men who willingly sacrifice themselves in defense of their loved ones all too often have no hesitation about raping the enemy's women.  Rape has probably been an integral part of warfare for as long as there has been war.  In Homer's Iliad, the wise old warrior, Nestor, rouses the discouraged Greeks with a reminder that the women of Troy will be theirs once the Trojan men have been disposed of.  Sexual aggression as an element of war is not just something that happened in long ago times.  As recently as the Serbian-Bosnian civil war and the terrible conflicts that have repeatedly convulsed Africa, rape has been intentionally used as a weapon.¹

Throughout most of recorded history, women have been regarded as the property of the men for whom they produce children.  In "plunder, rape, and pillage," the traditional behavior of victorious armies, winners reap their rewards in the form of the loser's property.  In forcing the enemy's women to submit to him sexually and perhaps bear his children, the victor both adds to his possessions at the expense of his enemy and furnishes irrefutable proof of his masculine superiority.

Primal masculinity in its best and worst aspects is manifest in war.  By killing the enemy the warrior proves himself master of the most primordial of male challenges.  He willingly sacrifices himself in defense of others.  He knows at first hand the fierce freedom and horror of going beyond social constraints.  He is rewarded for actions that would be condemned if done anywhere except on the battlefield.

To kill and risk being killed so that others may live is the ultimate expression of male power and sacrifice in service of community.  This is especially true within the intimate community of the squadron, the basic unit of every army.  In the shared ordeals of training and the battlefield, the men of a squadron prove their worth as men to one another.  The manhood of anyone outside the group, not having been proven in company with them, is open to question.  First and foremost, a soldier's loyalty is to the small group of men with whom he shares the rigors of basic training, the tedium of camp life, the horror and glory of battle.  He fights to protect his buddies, and in turn depends on them to stand by him.²

War has deep psychological and biological roots.  The greater the difference, real or imagined, between ourselves and others, the easier it is to justify their destruction.  We tend to fear and distrust those who are not as we are, forming groups, organizations, and neighborhoods to include people like ourselves and exclude those who are not.  At times we are so ill at ease with otherness as to be unable to rest until those who differ from us have been exterminated.

Closely related to fear of the other is the biological drive to perpetuate one's own kind.  In evolutionary competition, the winning male is the one who impregnates the most females and best ensures the survival of the resultant offspring.  While attempts to reduce complex behaviors to "nothing but" biological drives are always simplistic, war in its essence is about surviving at the expense of the other.

The warrior is based upon an archetypal, hence natural, potential of the human psyche.  But the warrior himself, the soldier who fights as he is ordered, is an artificial development, an exaggeration of that potential.  Even more than the general run of men, soldiers are made and not born.  The would-be warrior must learn to quell his reverence for life along with his fear of death.  From ancient Sparta to contemporary boot camp, military training is designed to suppress a young man's softer, feeling side while exalting his capacity for phallic aggression.³

Parallel with archetypal fear of the other is the desire to join with other individuals like oneself.  The most obvious group to which we all belong is the human race.  But we rarely regard others as our equals on the simple basis of shared biology.  Normal narcissism leads us to value people who are like ourselves more than those who are not.  Our group, being defined by qualities that we value, naturally seems superior to groups lacking those qualities.  Since social rules and ethical standards apply more within the group than without, aggressive energies that threaten group stability are directed out of the group.  While killing a member of one's own group is regarded as murder, the killing of an outsider may be sanctioned as a necessary and even heroic deed.

Perhaps in some long ago Golden Age there were wars, like that depicted by Homer, in which enemies both respected and slaughtered one another.  But more often the enemy is despised.  Not only is he (as the representative of a debased masculinity in contrast with the idealized manhood of our side the enemy is always "he") a consummate threat to all that we hold dear, he is not even fully human.  Since the moral obligations that govern our relations with the rest of humanity do not apply to him, we are free to kill him with a clear conscience.  In fact, his destruction is absolutely necessary if civilization as we know it is to continue and any means, no matter how terrible, towards that end are justified.

As self-proclaimed civilized people, we take pride in going to war only when we can justify it as a necessary evil in defense of the good.  Still, our ideals repeatedly lead us into wars in which we repeatedly betray them.  Labored theological and political reasonings to the contrary, the existence of the truly just war is doubtful.  As the distinguished historian of war, John Keegan, puts it:

"Most wars are begun for reasons which have little to do with justice, have results quite different from those proclaimed as their objects, if indeed they have any clearcut results at all, and visit during their course a great deal of casual suffering on the innocent."⁴

It is tempting to renounce war and all that pertains to it as an evil that should not be, and leave it at that.  But the problem of war is not so easily resolved.  The potential for aggressive evil, if not its realization, seems to be inherent in human nature.  Some human actions are truly demonic, and must be actively resisted if we are to have any hope at all for social safety and stability. Dismantling weapons and disbanding armies is, in itself, no more likely to eliminate war than dismissal of the police force would end crime.  While we often see an enemy where there is none and the possibility of war clearly increases in proportion to the preparations made for it, history is littered with the ruins of peoples and nations who were unprepared when more aggressive people arrived at their door.  Had there been no warriors willing to kill other young men in the name of freedom in World War II, fascism may well have swept over the globe like a bloody tide to become the dominant ideology of our world.

Sometimes it seems that the terrible choice of "kill or be killed" cannot be avoided.  Nowhere on earth is there a secure refuge from the darker side of human nature.  So it happened that the country in which the once prince of the Grimm's tale had found work as a gardener's helper was invaded by an enemy.  As the king feared, the battle did not go well.  Many of his soldiers had fallen, and those remaining were on the verge of a rout, when an unknown knight arrived with a whole company of iron armored troops.  The fresh troops fell  upon the enemy, slaughtering them as they turned and ran in panic.  Having utterly destroyed the invaders, the mysterious knight and his army disappeared as quickly as they had come.  The king was left bewildered, but grateful.

Long after everyone else had returned from the battlefield to celebrate the victory, the gardener's boy came in on his limping horse.  He made a strange remark about having saved the day, but as usual no one took him seriously.  The youth let the matter drop, and once again his real identity remained a secret.  This time, though, it was concealed more by the assumptions of others than by his reluctance to reveal himself.

The gardener's boy was an outsider.  While the people at the palace thought kindly of him and wished him no harm, they could not help but notice that he seemed more than a little odd, the sort of person who never quite fits in.  Even while he was still at his father's palace, the tale gives no indication that the prince had any playmates.  Given his royal status, it may have been difficult for the little boy to find any peers.  In his father's kingdom, his special position set him apart.  As a gardener's boy, he was isolated by his lowly station and peculiar behavior.  Like many a lonely individual, he probably felt at one and the same time inferior and superior to the people around him.  Awareness of his unusual and inconsistent nature only added to his reluctance to reveal himself.  Part prince, part common laborer, yet really neither, he was a person who seemed to belong nowhere.

Social standing and social conformity go hand-in-hand.  Peer relationships are an important and often overlooked factor in the development of a sense of self.  Rejection by other children can be devastating.  Elementary school boys tend to organize themselves into competitive groups, miniature warrior bands dominated by the most aggressive boys.  Boys both within and outside the group are judged by conformity to group norms.  Members of other groups are looked down upon, and bullied when the opportunity presents itself.  A boy who belongs to no group at all is likely to be abused by everyone.  While the importance of peer groups waxes and wanes during the course of a man's life, the dynamics of playground, sports field, barracks, shop, and boardroom groups are strikingly similar.

Outsiders often find solace in dreams of revenge against those who have excluded them.  Sometime such fantasies explode into violent realities when a quiet loner suddenly begins mowing down people at random.  Suicidal fantasies often revolve around the bitter belief of an ostracized individual that a dramatic death will bring recognition denied in life.  Fortunately most violent fantasies are never acted out, and most imaginings of social revenge take a more benign form.  Dreams of what might be can sustain purpose and direction in times when there is otherwise little support for who one is.  Sometimes dreams even come true when hidden potential meets with activating circumstance.

The gardener's boy, left behind with his useless horse, knew where to find the assistance he needed to realize his heroic potential.  He had not yet availed himself of Iron Hans' promised aid.  Maybe the boy knew that he had to first complete his assigned task of learning "what it is to be poor" before he could go to the wild man for help.  Perhaps a certain degree of maturity is required to be worthy of the gifts of a wild man.  Or it may have been that Iron Hans, who was after all less than civilized, would have been of little use to the boy in peaceful society.

In war, civilized behavior gives way to wildness.  Inside the noblest warrior, no matter how well disciplined, lurks a wild man.  The immature warrior, unable to control it as a means towards a constructive, socially sanctioned end, is overwhelmed and himself used by the wildness.  In battle or not, he carries it with him as a threat to social order.  The mature warrior draws upon the same energy to do his terrible deeds, but knows that he is not the wild man.  When the battle is done, like Odysseus restrained by Athena after he had slain the suitors he found pestering his wife Penelope's when he finally arrived home, he leaves the wildness behind.

The youth was ready for the wild man's gifts.  Riding the lame horse out to the edge of the forest, the boundary where the civilized and the wild came together, he called for Iron Hans.  True to his word, the wild man responded and all went well for everyone but the enemy.

The youth become a man might have returned to the palace with his magnificent charger and army to justly be acclaimed as the hero of the day.  But instead, he rode back to the forest to return the horse, armor, and army to Iron Hans.  And so the identity of the hero was still a mystery when the gardener's boy came in on his crippled mount.  His claim that things would have gone badly without him was taken as further evidence of the general belief that he was a fool.  But the king's daughter, knowing that there was more to the gardener's boy than met the eye, had her suspicions.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
   ¹Paul Lewis, "Rape Was Weapon of Serbs, UN Says," New York Times, Oct. 19, 1993, pp. A1, A4.  César Chelala, "Rape As a Weapon of War:  It Persists in Africa," San Francisco Chronicle,  June 25, 2005, p. F-3.
   ²John Keegan, The Face of Battle (New York:  Viking, 1983), p. 53.
   ³David D. Gilmore,  Manhood in the Making (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 188-191.
   ⁴Keegan, p. 60.
   ⁵ibib, pp. 73-74.

VIII: THE HERO FOUND

The contest, as a means for obtaining otherwise inaccessible knowledge, was a form of divination.  Whether involving a test of skill, as in our tale, or elaborate consultation of oracles, divination is based upon the belief that there is no such thing as chance.  Behind every event, great or small, it is assumed that there is some hidden directive process at work.  The goal of traditional divination is not so much to gain control over such transpersonal forces as to come into alignment with them.  Life generally goes well when attuned to the powers that govern its fate, and poorly when they are ignored.

Whatever their actual ability to control the patterns, chaotic or otherwise, that mark their lives, most men have an ingrained belief that they should be "captains of their fate," heroically following a well charted course through the sea of life no matter what storms they may encounter.  The man who wanders off course, or worse fails to set and follow any course at all, is condemned as lacking the most essential qualities of manhood.

But life is not a journey from one given point to another.  It more resembles a voyage of discovery with the exact route and destination unknown.  Anyone who ventures into unexplored territory, which of course every life is, must be ready to alter his plans in response to what he encounters there.  A life rigidly governed by preset plans is no more likely to succeed than is the life driven entirely by chance.

Paradoxically, a man's belief that he can and should direct every aspect of his life may keep him from finding any direction at all.  Overwhelmed by the sheer impossibility of achieving the perfect control he believes he must, a man governed by such a belief will tend to feel inadequate to every task that comes his way.  Unconsciously convinced that any assumption of responsibility is doomed to end in failure, he becomes quite proficient in avoiding the burdens of life.  At the same time he feels hopelessly weighted down by his existence in a world that seems to have no place or use for him.

A man's difficulties in assuming responsibility for himself can often be linked to an absent, whether physically or emotionally, father.  Children idealize parents, endowing them with godlike power and goodness, even when realities are very different.  Without a real and involved parent with whom to compare and contrast the idealized parental image, abandoned children often feel, on some mysterious but very real level, that they are to blame for a parent's absence.  If they had been better sons, perhaps their fathers would have stayed around.  As adults, they continue to condemn themselves the same reasons that they imagine their fathers rejected them.   Mistakenly assuming responsibility that was never rightfully theirs in the first place, they come to believe that they are inherently inadequate to the responsibilities that do belong to them.

Once allowed to emerge, the rage and grief of a man abandoned by his father can be immense.  Expressing anger towards the father who went away, mourning a loss that went so long unrecognized can be a wonderfully liberating step towards leaving the past behind.  But, as with any developmental stage, one can get stuck in it.  Some abandoned sons never move beyond identification of themselves as victims of their absent fathers and, by extension, an uncaring patriarchal society.  Caught up in a past that can never be undone, they overlook the things that need their attention in the here and now.

But the man who is truly fortunate in his ability to see things as they are moves through and beyond his pain to ask what happened to the father who should have been there and was not.  In the course of searching for the facts of his father's life, he often discovers his own identity in the life that he, and no one else, must live. The wounded son becomes a man, and the man becomes a hero.

Luke Skywalker, a sort of naive country boy at the beginning of the original Star Wars trilogy, could have refused to follow the adventure that "just happened" to come his way.  He might have excused himself on the grounds that he had no father to initiate him, and hence no way of knowing how to be the kind of man able to rescue a princess and save the galaxy.  Parzival too might have remained in the forest with his mother, resenting the lack of anyone to give him a ride to Arthur's Court.  But instead, both boys set off for the unknown, following their fated course to the discovery and redemption of their true selves.  In the process they also found, and in some ways redeemed, their missing fathers.

It takes a good deal of faith, and perhaps even a bit of naiveté and foolishness, to follow after opportunity when it comes along.  A man may have nothing beyond his own wavering intuition to guide him as he heads off into the unknown, taking a leap of faith that, for all he knows, could be a plunge to disaster.  Parzival had no inkling of what lay beyond the paradise in which his mother sought to keep him.  Luke Skywalker had no assurance that any good would come from answering the princess’ mysterious distress call.

The gardener's boy had only the untried word of Iron Hans to support him in his declared intention of going to war.  Probably there would have been no objection made had he remained in the garden, quietly daydreaming about heroic deeds while everyone else went out to the battle.  He might have done the same during the festival, safeguarding his fantasies by remaining hidden, and no one would have been the wiser.  But instead, he took his chances and went out to the forest's edge to once again put Iron Hans, as well as himself, to the test.

The boy seemed intent on remaining unnoticed and unknown.  After his rout of the enemy,  he probably would have been given anything he asked for had he only made his identity known.  But, except for dropping of a few hints on apparently deaf ears, he kept his heroic deed a carefully guarded secret.  During the festival, he three times caught the golden apple and two, almost three, times escaped discovery.

There is always some degree of mystery about the hero.  The actual men behind hero tales tend to disappear into the legends that grow up around them.   Since the role is archetypal, heroes are of necessity larger than life.  So long as the hero's real identity and personality remain unknown, he seems to embody the idealized image projected onto him.  No one looks upon him as just another man.

The superheroes of comic book fame are super by virtue of their hidden identity.   Lois Lane's feelings about Superman would likely be quite different if she knew of his secret link to Clark Kent. While Superman is every woman's dream, the inept Clark is more an object of good natured pity.  Superman can do almost anything.  Anything that is except have a personal relationship.  No woman, not even Lois, ever gets close enough to see the man behind the hero.  Desired by every woman, accessible to none, his is a most comfortable position for a man who is uneasy with intimacy.  It is also a very lonely one.

In the comic book saga, the link between Superman and Clark Kent is rarely suspected.  Likewise, almost no one associated the lowly gardener's boy on the three-legged horse with the mysterious knight who arrived just in time to save the kingdom.  Only the princess, who alone knew what the boy had hidden under his hat, suspected the truth.  But while the disguised prince seemed intent on keeping his identity hidden, he also repeatedly risked exposure.

Like the gardener's boy waiting for someone to see through his disguise, we both long for and fear being known, not for what we appear to be, but for who we really are.  Yet many people, women as well as men, fear intimacy even more than they do loneliness.  The very possibility of love is a challenge to their habitually constricted sense of self.  Pushing away the very thing they most desire and need, they dismiss love as an illusion capable of bringing nothing but pain.  They are not entirely wrong in their perception, for love, like anything worthwhile, always brings with it the painful possibility of its loss.

In catching the princess' golden apples while continuing to frustrate the king's attempts to discover his identity, the youth seemingly sought to have his cake and eat it too .  The golden apple is an ambiguous symbol.  Since the Latin word for apple also means "evil," Christian tradition assumed that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil bore apples.  As the forbidden fruit, apples came to symbolize sin.  But in the hand of Christ or the Virgin, an apple also represents the plan of salvation that the fact of sin - "the happy fault" as it has been theologically termed - made both necessary and possible.   Like the ball that fell into the wild man's cage, apples are spherical and thus symbolic of wholeness.  Apples are associated with sin, desire and death, as well as love, fertility, and joyfulness.  Offering an apple is traditionally regarded as a declaration of love.¹  It can also bring strife, as did the golden apple that indirectly led to the Trojan War.

According to Greek mythology, the goddess Strife was not invited to an Olympian wedding.  Angered by the slight, she threw a golden apple into the midst of the wedding party.  Finding that the apple was inscribed, "For the Fairest," Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite disrupted the celebration with an argument over which of them it was meant for.  Intervening in the dispute, Zeus sent the goddesses to Paris of Troy, the most handsome of mortal men, for his judgment as to their relative beauty.  Aphrodite won Paris' favor by bribing him with the promise of the most beautiful woman in the world.  As Aphrodite triumphantly carried off the golden apple proclaiming her supreme beauty, Paris, cursed by the losing goddesses, set out to lure Helen away from her Greek husband, and unwittingly start the war in which Paris and his fellow Trojans would perish.

The princess' golden apples were in appearance much like the golden ball that the boy lost and then regained in his bargain with the wild man.  The story says nothing about the ball after it was returned to the boy.  Perhaps he took it with him as he journeyed from palace to forest and then out into the wide world, the palace kitchen and garden.  Or maybe the golden sphere was lost somewhere along the way only to reappear, as is often the case in myth and dreams, multiplied threefold in the golden apples.

On each of the three days of the festival, the gardener's boy went out to the edge of the forest to be transformed, through Iron Hans' gift of horse and armor, into the mysterious knight.  On the first day his horse and armor were red, on the second white, and on the last day they were black.  Any number of associations can be made to these colors.   One of the most obvious for anyone versed in Jung's writings on the psychological meaning of alchemical symbolism would be the colors of the three stages of alchemy.   But the successive colors of the youth's horses and armor reverse the usual alchemical sequence.²

Each stage of life has its own unique process.  Alchemy, and its psychological counterpart of the inner journey, is generally regarded as representing the process of a mature individual who, already established in the world, discovers a deeper reality.  The process depicted in "Iron Hans", being that of a young man finding his place in the world, is perhaps better understood as a reductive one, moving like a consuming fire through successive stages of red hot, white hot, and finally cold black ash, the kind of experience every young hot bloodied male ego needs to pass through with his youthful grandiosity tempered and reduced to manageable proportions by the fires of reality.

Gold was the object of the alchemist's labors, yet the youth apparently had little use for it.  He gave away the gold coins that the princess had forced upon him when he visited her room.  One might have assumed that he went to catch the golden apples to prove his heroic identity.  After all, disclosure of the mystery knight's identity was the stated objective of the festival.  But the point of the contest was apparently missed by the youth as he showed his prizes to no one except the gardener's children.

The young man's experience with gold had so far not been particularly good.  Attachment to the golden ball led to his exile from home.  From the golden spring, where his finger and hair had turned to gold, he had been further exiled into what appeared to be sure and utter ruin.  Perhaps he had good reason for his disregard of generally accepted values.  As the more perceptive alchemists insisted, alchemical gold is not the ordinary gold treasured by the worldly wise.  Insistent on following his own idiosyncratic process, the youth honored neither the princess’ gold nor her father's authority.  But eventually he had to come to terms with both.

On the third and final day of the festival in "Iron Hans", the outraged king determined to put an end to the mysterious knight's continued defiance of royal authority.  The king's men were ordered to bring back, by force if necessary, the man who caught the golden apple.  The stranger still managed to escape, but not before his leg was wounded and, much to the astonishment of all who saw it, his wonderful golden hair exposed to view.

The wound by which one is known is an element in many stories.  Odysseus, finally arriving home disguised as an old beggar, was recognized by his childhood nurse when she saw a scar, the mark of an adventure early in his life, on his thigh.   The resurrected Jesus proved his identity to the doubtful Thomas by showing him the wounds of his crucifixion.   In an Italian variant of "Iron Hans", the youth was so weakened by his wounds that he was unable to change back back into his gardener's clothes, and thus gave away his secret.³

A man unmarked by life, who has never known the pain of having fallen short of his ideals, is a man who has not been touched by the fires of initiation.  Like the circumcision scar that marks the successful initiate, the wounds that life inflicts on a man remind him of his limits as well as his achievements.  Bly⁴ claims that the wound to the youth's leg is not symbolic of a genital wound.  But he also makes reference to the Grail King's wound, an injury which, in Wolfram's telling of the tale, is explicitly castrating.  In a not uncommon displacement of a disturbing image, other accounts describe the Suffering King as having been pierced through the thighs.  As we have seen, the road to manhood is often a painful one.  That a young man's sense of himself might be wounded in the course of his journey along that road is not surprising.  But, if all goes as it should, the injuries he receives will leave him, while perhaps scarred, not crippled.  So in "Iron Hans," the young knight is marked but not disabled.  If his was a genital wound, perhaps it was circumcision rather than castration.

In initiatory circumcision, the initiate's manhood is wounded by elders who act to check his chaotic and potentially dangerous adolescent masculinity while instructing him in its appropriate use.  So in the Grimms' tale, the youth was wounded and his defiance of the established order brought to a halt by the king's order.  The youth was made to recognize the authority of the king, and was in turn finally recognized for who he was.  With the setting of limits on the youthful grandiosity of the hero, the unruly masculine energy furnished by the wild man was brought into conscious service of the kingdom.

No one gets through life without being wounded to some extent.  Some receive more injuries than others.  Some wounds quickly heal; others, like that of the Grail King, are a lifelong source of torment.  Wounding experiences can bring a more realistic view of the relationship between oneself and the world.  While they may seem devastating from the standpoint of his inflated ego, the hero's wounds open the door to adventure far beyond his wildest dreams.

The boy received his first wound in releasing the wild man from his cage.  That wound led to the shame of his failure at the spring, and his subsequent acquaintance with suffering and poverty.  It also brought the promise of help that he drew upon to save the kingdom.  His heroic exploits in turn led to another wounding, the revelation of his secret, and a royal wedding.  After having repeatedly risked being exposed, he was revealed as who he was, and no one else.  And who he was proved to be something far greater than anyone, including himself, had imagined.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
   ¹J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Symbols, 2nd edition (New York:  Philosophical Library, 1962), p. 14.  J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Traditional Symbols (London:  Thames & Hudson, 1978), p. 14.
   ²C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy (Collected Works Vol. 12), (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1980 [1944]), esp. pars. 1-43.
   ³"The Mangy One" in Italo Calvino (ed.), Italian Folktales (New York:  Pantheon, 1980), pp. 398-403.
   ⁴Robert Bly, Iron John (Reading, MA:  Addison-Wesley, 1990), pp. 207-208.

IX:  UNION & REUNION

The king summoned the gardener's boy to the palace.  As before, the youth came into the royal presence wearing his hat.  But before anyone could object to his lack of respect, the princess uncovered his head.  With his golden hair falling down over his shoulders, it was clear to everyone that he was indeed much more than a mere gardener's assistant.  The youth showed his wound and the golden apples as proof of his heroic identity, further declaring himself to be the son of a mighty king with unlimited riches his for the asking.  The grateful king, his anger at the knight who had repeatedly defied him forgotten, acknowledged his debt to the young man.  No longer shy, the newly revealed prince asked for and was given the princess’ hand in marriage.

The story makes no attempt to explain why the prince kept his identity hidden for so long.  His concealment would seem to have only made things more difficult for him.  The prince himself seems to have temporarily lost sight of who he was.

In an ancient Gnostic text, "The Hymn of the Pearl," the royal child sent down into Egypt to recover the "One Pearl" fell into "a deep sleep" in which he forgot both his identity and his mission.  Only after being awakened by a message from home did the prince recall "that I was a son of Kings and my free soul longed for its own kind."   Awakened to his task, the boy enchanted the terrible guardian of the pearl by "naming the name of my Father . . . and of my Mother" as proof of his royal identity.  Seizing the pearl, the hero returned to the glory of his parents’ house to resume his princely position.¹

While expressly a poetic vehicle for Gnostic teachings about the process of redemption, "The Hymn of the Pearl," like "Iron Hans", depicts an initiatory journey.  In both stories, the hero leaves the blissful innocence of a privileged childhood to be plunged into a dark existence from which there is seemingly no escape.  But the hero eventually emerges from his experience having gained more than he lost.  In "Iron Hans", the gardener's boy draws upon the wild man's promise to save the kingdom.  Having proven himself worthy, he claims the princess as his due, is reunited with his parents, and becomes the heir of Iron Hans.

There is in the tale an assumption that the youth could not have performed his heroic deeds had he not been a prince to begin with.  At first glance this might seem to be an artifact left over from times before the rise of democratic ideals.  But symbolically, it has a deeper meaning.  A royal figure, traditionally the most exalted member of society, symbolically represents the most complete development of human potential.²  The royalty of the little prince playing about the palace was primarily latent.  But in the course of his trials, failures, and triumphs, possibilities became realities.  His golden hair and golden deeds finally revealed, the heroic youth's newly recognized royal status was actually more earned than given.

The royal wedding, the joining of the complimentary opposites represented by the two royal male and female figures standing at the head of the realm, is an age old symbol of transcendental wholeness.³  The fantasy romance with the golden prince or princess who magically transforms one's life can be a potent force.  But, actual princesses being few and far between, literal pursuit of the royal marriage is a certain recipe for disaster.  But taken symbolically, the quest for the perfect mate becomes, once more, a path for inner healing and wholeness.

More than just an account of male initiation, "Iron Hans"  is also about the process of becoming more fully human.  The ultimate task of the hero is the restoration of humanity's lost potential for wholeness.  Going beyond the boundaries that  stopped those who came before him, the hero reclaims what has been lost, bringing it back to revivify the world.  In a culture ruled by masculine values, the heroic task of necessity involves restoration of the feminine to its rightfully equal place beside the masculine.

Parzival's wandering, confused quest repeatedly brought him into contact with aspects of life and himself totally alien to the manly warrior qualities that had so utterly failed him in his initial encounter with the Grail mysteries.  The curse that tormented king and kingdom was eventually lifted, not through knightly valor, but by Parzival's expression of empathy for the suffering Grail King.  Reconnected to its source of life in the feminine Grail, the Waste Land again became fertile, and Parzival himself became Guardian of the Grail.

At the very end of the Grimms' tale, we learn that Iron Hans was once a great and mighty king.  But then a terrible spell made him a wild man.  The story says nothing about the circumstances of the curse, but other tales hold clues as to what may have happened.

In Grimm's "The Frog Prince," an unfortunate prince becomes a frog through a spell cast by a witch.  The frog reverts to human form when the princess, in a fit of anger at his insistence that he be allowed to share her bed, throws the frog against the wall "with all her might."  In Chretien de Troyes' Grail romance, Yvain, the unfortunate knight for which the tale is titled falls under an evil spell of sorts when his wife angrily, in a manner that might be considered witch-like, rejects him after he has failed to keep his word to her.  After living a long while in the forest as a wild man, Yvain is restored to sanity, human society, and eventually his wife through the kindness of a woman.   Apparently the making and breaking of spells has a lot to do with relations between the sexes.  Perhaps Iron Hans' transformation into a wild man stemmed from some unfortunate encounter with a woman.

A woman once told me that her lovers always seemed to turn her into a witch.  She tended to be attracted to men who apparently assumed that women were primarily responsible for what went on in relationships.  This fit in well with her natural inclination to take charge of things.  But when difficulties arose, she was blamed, even when she was clearly not the source of the problem.  Her lover would accuse her of having, as if by magic, made him feel and do things that were totally alien to him.

While witches are represented as both male and female in folklore all around the world, we usually think of them  as women.  If the fairy tale princess is the perfect picture of young womanhood, the (usually old) witch is womanhood gone wrong.  Much like the wild man in relation to civilized man, the witch is the shadow of civilized woman, the inverse of what is expected of females in a male dominated society.  If women are supposed to be beautiful, devoted, and nurturing helpmates to men, the witch is ugly, malevolent, and beholden to no man.⁴

When women are denied access to political and social power, whatever power they manage to obtain will be condemned as an illegitimate, malevolent threat to the established order. Forbidden even the basic right of self determination, disenfranchised women learn to get what they want by manipulating men.  Men come to fear the "subtle wiles" that women supposedly use to surreptitiously gain the upper hand.  Women become mysterious creatures possessing magical powers inaccessible to men.  Such an image can be exciting - the seductive temptress is more or less a beautiful witch.  It can also be horrifying.  Men fear the apparent ability of the witch to unman them, but fail to realize that the witch herself is a product of that very fear.  If the witch is to release the man, the man must first release the witch.

The medieval tale of "Gawain and the Lady Ragnell"⁵ tells of the breaking of one such spell.   Once, so the story goes, King Arthur encountered a terrible giant.  Helpless before the giant's great strength, Arthur seemed doomed.  The giant, however, offered Arthur the chance to gain his freedom by answering a riddle.  But if he did not give the right answer, the king and his kingdom would be the giant's.  Having little choice, Arthur asked for the riddle.  The giant responded, "What one thing above all else do women desire?"  Arthur went throughout the land, asking every woman he met what she most wanted.  He collected a multitude of responses, but all were different and he feared none would satisfy the giant.

Then Arthur came upon a most hideous woman, a sort of witch, in the forest.  So appalling was her appearance, he nearly fainted away at the sight.  The loathly lady berated him for his disdain, saying that while she might be able to help him in his distress, she would aid no one who was not courteous.  Arthur pulled himself together to tell her his problem.  After making him swear to grant whatever boon she asked of him, the woman gave Arthur the answer to the giant's riddle.  Unlike all the other answers that he had collected, this one rang true.  Arthur met the giant at the appointed time and give him the hideous damsel's answer:  "A woman desires above all else the right to freely exercise her own will."  With a terrible oath, the giant confessed that was indeed the correct response.

Arthur joyfully returned to the woman to thank her, only to be utterly dismayed by her demand that she be wed to a knight of the Round Table.  Arthur returned to his castle to reluctantly relate his adventure and the loathly lady's request for something that he could not bring himself to ask of any man.  Gawain, however, without hesitation offered himself as husband to the ill-favored dame.

After their wedding banquet, Gawain led his bride to their chamber. With sinking heart, he turned towards her.  To his great astonishment, he saw not the hideous woman, but the most beautiful maiden he had ever beheld.  She explained that an enchantment had caused her to take on the hideous form.  The spell could only be broken if the greatest knight in Britain married her of his own free will, as had happened that day.  But she was not yet entirely free.  She told Gawain that he must decide whether she was to be beautiful by day and ugly by night, or ugly by day and beautiful by night.

Gawain thought for a while before telling his now beloved wife that the choice was hers to make.  Joyfully, the lady told Gawain that the spell was now completely broken.  She would henceforth always be her beautiful self, for he had truly grasped the answer to the riddle.

Some versions of the tale say that Lady Ragnell was the victim of a plot by her evil stepmother and giant stepbrother.  Others assert that the giant was actually Ragnell's brother, who too had been cursed by their terrible stepmother.  The evil stepmother is a variant of the witch, and once again, as with Eve in the Bible and Pandora with her box of ills in Greek mythology, it seems that a woman is responsible for everything that goes wrong.  But reading between the lines, we find another interpretation.

While the complexities of mother-daughter relations are well beyond this discussion, the evil stepmother who persecutes the heroine in many tales is an all too accurate description of the process in which mothers, denied "the right to freely exercise their own wills," collude with patriarchy in keeping their daughters in the place assigned to women.   Women, as well as men, often fear the feminine and try to deny it its rightful place beside the masculine.  Internalized misogyny is a powerful, unrecognized force in the lives of many women.  The ability of a man to lovingly respect a woman for who she is can go a long way towards breaking the spell that has led her to believe that she is an inadequate human being, doomed to a lifetime of victimization simply because she is female.

The war of the sexes is a contest in which there are no winners.  Tales of courtly love and knightly quest remind us that the goal is achieved not through power but by courtesy and respect.  The royal wedding, the joining of the two into a whole much greater than the sum of its parts, occurs only when each partner honors the inherent right of the other to freely choose who she or he will be.  Men and women alike have been too long held spellbound by gender expectations.  As women are freed from traditional roles, the power of the male stereotypes that drive men to destroy themselves and others in futile attempts to prove themselves men is also lessened.

Most obviously, the tale of "Iron Hans" is about the process by which a boy becomes a man.  The story concludes with its hero a married man assuming his place in the world.  But the story  can also be read as an outline of the lifelong process of individuation.   Jung described a progressive encounter with persona (one's adaptation to the social world), shadow (aspects of oneself that are denied in adapting to the world), anima/animus (the inner image of the opposite sex), and self (the totality of the psyche). While this schematic description of psychological growth can, like any other, be twisted into a mechanistic formula, many people have found it a useful map.

In "Iron Hans", the king at the beginning of the tale corresponds to the persona, the social role with which one is identified.  But the king was inadequate to the challenge of the wild man (the shadow), for the shadow requires a response from a deeper level.  The little prince with his golden ball is a beautiful image of the undeveloped, largely unconscious self of early life.  The princess, who perhaps knows more about the boy than he does himself, is of course representative of the anima.  Finally, the royal couple (multiplied threefold by the presence of the prince and princess’ parents) at the wedding feast is an image of the realized self, a concept also represented by the figure of the Mighty King who arrived just as the wedding feast was getting under way to announce himself as Iron Hans.

By becoming the person he was meant to be, in fulfilling his destiny, the prince had unknowingly restored Iron Hans to his real identity, and received Iron Hans’ riches without measure as his reward.  Iron Hans was the prince's second, initiating father who did what his first father could not.  As the restored great king, Iron Hans represents the highest development of the boy's golden potential, a development that could be realized only after the wild man, the shadow of the king, had been duly acknowledged.  In effect, the boy redeemed both his father and the wild man, joining them together in the figure of Iron Hans the Great.  The spell that had hung over the kingdom since the beginning of the story was broken as prince and princess, the two royal families, and Iron Hans joined together in joyful celebration.  So always, redemption of the world proceeds hand-in-hand with redemption of oneself.

References (Use "Back" on browser to return to text)
   ¹In Willis Barnstone (ed.), The Other Bible (New York:  Harper & Row, 1984), pp. 309-313.
   ²J. E. Cirlot, A Dictionary of Traditional Symbols, 2nd edition (New York:  Philosophical Library, 1971), pp. 167-169.  Maria Leach & Jerome Fried (eds.) Funk & Wagnall's Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (San Francisco:  Harper & Row, 1984 [1949]), pp. 578-579.
   ³C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis (Collected Works Vol. 14), (Princeton:  Princeton University Press, 1977 [1955-56]), pars. 349-543.
   ⁴Maria Leach & Jerome Fried (eds.), p. 1179-1180.
   ⁵My retelling of "Gawain and Lady Ragnell," a tale which exists in many versions, is based on Polly Young-Eisendrath's interpretation in Hags and Heroes (Toronto:  Inner City Books, 1984) as well as M. I. Ebbutt's Hero Myths and Legends of the British Race (Boston:  David D. Nickerson & Co., 1910), pp. 266-285.
 

EPILOGUE:  NOT HAPPILY EVER AFTER

Every psychological commentary is, as Jung put it, "a subjective confession."¹  My amplification of "Iron Hans"  in relation to the problems of contemporary manhood is, of course, a product of my own experience and personal process.  Looking back over what I have written, I recall a dream from many years ago that seems to me to reflect both my personal struggle and those of many other men whom I have known:

There is a terrible drought.  To relieve it a glass vial must be filled with water from Niagara Falls and then emptied into a local stream.  A young man is chosen to carry out the task.  But I know that he often blunders, and am afraid that he will fall and break the vial.  I follow him as he obtains the water and pours it into the local stream.  I fear that he has done it wrong, but then a geyser of water erupts in the dry river bed, and a woman opens a sluice gate to let the water flow again.

Reference
   ¹Modern Man In Search of A Soul (New York:  Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1933), p. 118.

Jim Moyers, MA, MFT
2424 Dwight Way #1
Berkeley, CA 94704
(510) 843-2424
Mail To: jimmoyers@mac.com

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