Last week on the podcast I released more audio versions of poetry from my book . This article will form the episode coming out later today.
Recent articles in the press have so misunderstood Robert Bly's analysis of ‘Iron John’ - often seen as the founding text of the modern men’s movement - that I feel it's worth getting back to basics. Iron John as we have it (faery tale gathered by the Grimms) is surely deep myth; quite literally, as this rust-coloured hairy man is bucketed out of a lake, where many men have disappeared. And such myth is not supposed to be taken on a superficial level: after all, in Arthurian legend it's a lady who emerges mysteriously from under a lake and offers a young man a sword to find his purpose in the world. These natural lakes and those who rise from them are deeper aspects of nature and spirit, beyond time, deeper forms of consciousness that call for a poetic invocation, not a trashy call for stereotypical he-men. Most pop psychologists will tell you that water represents the subconscious, the truths beneath the surface. Let's take a little dive.
‘Iron John’ - what the story’s first king calls the wild man he’s captured - takes the young prince in the story on a journey towards maturity, in a series of motifs that echo the story of the Buddha. Emerging as an innocent from the palace into the challenges, unfairness and busyness of the world, Siddhartha too sought out the wisdom of the trees to find revelation and enlightenment. And it's there that the true, inner riches are to be found: "I have gold and treasure in abundance," says Iron John. "Call on me". In a place where he has nothing that the materialistic world would recognize as anything of the sort. I've felt it though, and if you've stepped into the woods you probably have too. That aliveness, bubbling up, free, abundant, naked. A place where yogis might more easily feel the oneness, even if it’s possible in a CBD studio.
So spending time with the Wild Man is a lesson in context, from which we modern men are usually so disconnected. Iron John is able to recognize the value, the abundance, in the simplicity of "nature", of which he's part. That modern divorce of Man from nature, which mainstream Christianity emphasized (that is, particularly the version of Christianity the destructive later Romans were into, and passed on to medieval kingdoms), and a millennium later mainstream science sent into overdrive, peels us away from other visions of divinity, even from within the Judaeo-Christian context. St John the Baptist, whose festival today (as I write) lays the annual foundation for Christ's six months later: the long-haired priest-king from the wilderness, surviving on the bounties of nature. Shiva, the shaman-God, embodying the leopard and the spirit of the mountain and dancing in fire for everything to turn. Neither of these characters, like Iron John, are creatures of comfort. They urge us to see our connections in the wild: to be brave enough to reach out to the Mother; through a medium we male-bodied ones have to accept: through Father Nature, if you like. Whose existence in our imagery is, perhaps, intended to make sure men can't palm off the idea of protecting and being part of nature to womenfolk. (Bear with me if you find this suspect - I’m rather keen poetically on the idea that ideas themselves have ideas, independent of human thought - of course they do, if it’s a conscious universe!)
There's no getting away from the fact that women's bodies, as a design concept of the divine, are inherently much more obviously connected to nature's cycles, in its fecundity and its challenges: in the experience of monthly menses, in the intense (possibly fatal) act of giving birth, in the act of breastfeeding. Traditional sweat lodges were designed for men, as a way of pushing males too into remaining connected to the cycles, the bounty, the challenge of going within, the facts of death and rebirth. Many cultures have recognized this need for men to tap into the 'wild' consciously. When I stand barefoot on the earth and hug a tree I'm tuning into things science might finally be waking up to as a way to supercharge our energy: for the simple reason that we don't have to provide it all ourselves, and we get it, in our minds and our hearts and our bodies (through all our senses). I certainly have: rarely have I felt so alive as when clambering through wild places.
Of course modern industrial society has lost sight of this. An outward, busy, imbalanced Yang version of the world, dominated by men lording it over nature, has in fact been eating nature up like a caterpillar, even as it promotes that Alpha male 'goodness'. And in doing so it's cut men off from the land (quite literally, with the aid of Legal Title and maps that redrew landowners' boundaries, starting in Europe as aristocrats "Enclosed" territory, and then spreading this idea to everywhere these capitalists went. Along the way throwing men, women and children off the land, into factories and sweatshop wages, or labouring in the fields of the rich). And reducing adult life expectancy from the traditional peasants' three score and ten, to around half of that for those thrown off their land back during that wonderful Industrial Revolution.
When we lie or cheat ourselves, as this distraction-focused post-industrial-comfort-oriented-air-conditioned life would have us do, we prevent ourselves from taking the time out, the time to bucket out our lakes and recognize the inner emotions we've been sitting on. This is not some kind of stereotypical macho quest. If the men who told stories experienced watery lakes as the subconscious, maybe it also had something to do with boys frequently being told not to cry and "bottling it up". Bly complained of modern men being unable to really let out those emotions - sadness, but also fear and ultimately joy, so that modern man becomes a stoical, unimaginative grey character in an office suit (Arthur Pewty the accountant, as Monty Python would have him, fifty years ago). Anger, stereotypically, is a more acceptable emotion for men, one the internet and its simplistic influencers obviously love. I'll look more into the true power of anger, but the key for the Wild Man in Bly's analysis is the richness this archetype brings to masculinity: the possibility of being able to access a variety of natural forces, and truly step into them, not in some half-hearted way where the dominant emotion is polite resentment.
The story of Iron John is also a call for time out of time, a time to realize - deeply realize - our divinity, that we are only truly present to when we recognize our interdependence as part of the whole of creation, equal to the forest ants: not the Big Man divinity of Roman Emperors, but one that recognizes the same creative force drives all the movement we can see in the wild, and all the movement we can't see. It takes the young prince work, though, to see this, and it takes him making mistakes, failing in tasks that seem too boring, like giving simple Attention to something as natural as a forest pool, before he learns patience and the value of repetition. Wash On Wash Off. But also, the Wild.
Of course, the organic, wild feminine, the primal Medusa-Kali, the nurturing-destructive wildness that men and their texts have tried for long ages to contain, has her own mighty pedigree. And when Taylor Swift gets her fans to tap into it and angrily/cathartically join in with "Fuck the Patriarchy" some men might get uptight. But the patriarchy is exactly what's got us uptight in the first place, what's created grey modern man, as unable to meaningfully express his emotions as, say, Britain's current prime ministerial hopefuls. It's a product of a few men in ages past in positions of power; colluded with by women upholding its values where they too couldn't see beyond it. As Australian Steve Biddulph said straightforwardly decades ago, patriarchy oppressed women and isolated men, made us mistrust each other deeply. I would suggest the only reason we play this competitive game of hierarchy based on 'power over others' and call it masculinity (such a pale, thin version of the same) is not, actually, some inherently nature-based drive for patriarchal power. Survival of the Fittest is a crass Victorian version of nature that belies the actual cooperation at work, often on a more macro level than separatist, isolating, microscope-driven scientists have realized until recently. Lions are not lording it over their prey: predator and prey are engaged in a natural dance, both knowing the rules of the game and playing it without question. Sure, the competitive juice is important too: Yang is as essential as Yin, but things have got way out of balance. We've taken men's usually superior upper-body strength and assumed it leads to warfare, when most of our paleolithic ancestors engaged in nothing of the kind. In fact, warfare may have emerged because of men needing something as passion-filled and wild, because they'd cut themselves off from the Wild Man. Look at those Victorian Brits again, or the stuffy central Europeans that crashed their way into world wars. The real Wildness might well have something to do with sacrificial violence: but the dance of predator and prey, both playing their part in the system: not the human version of kings just hunting for sport. We see those kind of hunters getting swallowed by the lake in the first scene of the story before the Wild Man was discovered to be the one responsible - or at least we assume that he was, though of course he was part of the lake itself; part of the Great Mystery, like the Arthurian Lady.
Norah Vincent tried life as a man and it sent her towards a psychological breakdown, as she catalogued in "Self Made Man" nearly twenty years ago. The breakdown came from realizing the straightjacket social ideas of modern masculinity and manhood placed upon men, though also from her own level of deception once she attended an 'Iron John retreat' and found men vulnerably opening up to her impostor "male" self. The Wild Man subtly encourages men to break away and take risks, for sure. But not at the expense of community. In the end the young prince needs to trust his inner gold, through working with others, and then he becomes worthy of the feminine. And that inner gold is much more than some kind of ability to hunt willy nilly: it's an engagement with the wild places, a new kind of seeing gained there. The inner gold arises in context again, flowers as part of the sheer power and passion of nature that is both Shiva and Shakti, both St John and Mary Magdalene, Gaia and God. The princess loves him in the end because she prefers wildflowers to ones cultivated in the field. Cowslips and disas as the ultimate inspiration for manhood, anyone? (I guess our cricketers have it right for once by being known as Proteas).
Bly delves, of course, into other archetypes that might inspire modern men to be more than grey ciphers slavishly following Big Men: in particular four archetypes that are familiar to anyone putting in a cursory study of Jung: the Magician, the Warrior, the Lover and the King. They're not the only archetypes that might inspire (other writers have explored, for example, the presence of the Trickster, the Cook, the Fool, the Grieving Man as valuable places for men to explore in our psyches). Yet the key thing is that the Wild Man's passion is able to access all of them. These four also, of course, are able to be placed in the four directions, easily grasped in an enquiry into the psyche, easily recognized as aspects we may have failed to call on enough as we get stuck in the overused ruts of agreed manhood, structured in a heady relationship with the world. Ruts which, frankly, haven't changed that much in the last decades since Bly wrote, though there's definitely conversations and embodied explorations going on, in circles of men and beyond. Because society still ignores the Wild Man, the beautiful "irrational" soul, for which read "intuitive". And ignores the living, divine world. Thirty years ago I cycled daily past the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary, a Very Rational place, where animism was defined as "belief" in spirit inhabiting "inanimate objects". Like rivers and rocks, presumably. Living, conscious parts of Mother Gaia, as the Wild Man knows.
Many would indeed claim that the real wildness is Kali/Gaia etc, and thus wonder about the need for a male version like Iron John, but this is heavily missing the point. I even think Iron John can speak to women too, and their Inner Man (Rudolf Steiner, Advaita Tantra writers and Taoists alike speak of the value of connecting with this aspect of self - an imagined version of the opposite sex within us that we can call on in our energy field, in our quest for inner wholeness). But it definitely helps for those of us in men's bodies to access archetypes that reflect those bodies; otherwise we're left feeling pretty superfluous to the world, just the spider waiting to have his head bitten off. Of course the reverse is very much true (so many well-known male characters in history and fiction! And so much need to find more female ones!) As a primary school teacher I did my best to balance the rich, ancient stories of male protagonists out with female ones I'd discovered or devised. But the character of Iron John has a particular nobility that I feel boys and men need to know about (not necessarily through this particular story, though I've seen it serve its purpose, when heard by boys and men with all kinds of cultural backgrounds and personality traits). More than the rescuer woodchopper or the villain wolf, more than prince charming, Iron John is a faery figure men need to recall somehow, if we are to rescue and revise "masculinity" into something everyone (particularly those in male bodies) can be inspired by, and collectively we can thereby be helped in stepping beyond the polarising stereotypes that are crippling modern men.
That Green Man in the medieval churches of Europe (and the odd English pub name) has something in common with that male nature god Pan, but arose from the creative collective consciousness in later times. He's an integrated piece we need if we're going to stop stripping nature of Her gifts. And sure, I used a feminine pronoun there because it's so obvious. As Rilke said, "the deepest experience of the creator is feminine". The Wild Man, though, lives confidently and gratefully in Her home. The womb that is the world, of which he's part. To access him, we need challenges, rites of passage, access to drums and dance and unkempt forces that both modern religion and science have been scared of. If not, he's a force in the lake that will burst through anyway, unmanaged, uncontrollable, unrecognized. Until men rip rainforests apart, unable to see that the true wildness is not the destructive bomb-dropper. That's just an aberration who hasn't felt the soil speak to him through his feet. Hasn't recognized the gold and abundance all around him. Every day.