Iron John: A Book About Men

by Robert Bly

The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored.

The dark side of men is clear. Their mad exploitation of earth resources, devaluation and humiliation of women, and obsession with tribal warfare are undeniable. Genetic inheritance contributes to their obsessions, but also culture and environment. We have defective mythologies that ignore masculine depth of feeling, assign men a place in the sky instead of earth, teach obedience to the wrong powers, work to keep men boys, and entangle both men and women in systems of industrial domination that exclude both matriarchy and patriarchy.

The Wild Man, who has examined his wound, resembles a Zen priest, a shaman, or a woodsman more than a savage.

Antonio Machado said: You walker, there are no roads, only wind trails on the sea. Robert Bly

A new journey begins...

The male in the past twenty years has become more thoughtful, more gentle. But by this process he has not become more free. He’s a nice boy who pleases not only his Mother but also the young woman he is living with.

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

Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our contemporary culture.

When a man begins to develop the receptive side of himself and gets over his initial skittishness, he usually finds the experience to be wonderful.

corporations do so much work to produce the sanitized, hairless, shallow man.

When a man welcomes his responsiveness, or what we sometimes call his internal woman, he often feels warmer, more companionable, more alive. But when he approaches what I’ll call the “deep male,” he feels risk. Welcoming the Hairy Man is scary and risky, and it requires a different sort of courage. Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what’s dark down there, including the nourishing dark.

The first stage in retrieving the ball, I think, is to accept – firmly, definitely – that the ball has been lost.

The Iron John story proposes that the golden ball lies within the magnetic field of the Wild Man,

We have to accept the possibility that the true radiant energy in the male does not hide in, reside in, or wait for us in the feminine realm, nor in the macho/John Wayne realm, but in the magnetic field of the deep masculine.

getting the golden ball back is incompatible with certain kinds of conventional tameness and niceness.

The kind of wildness, or un-niceness, implied by the Wild Man image is not the same as macho energy, which men already know enough about. Wild Man energy, by contrast, leads to forceful action undertaken, not with cruelty, but with resolve.

The Wild Man is not opposed to civilization; but he’s not completely c...

Conversing with the Wild Man is not talking about bliss or mind or spirit or “higher consciousness,” but about something wet, dark, and low – what James Hillman would call “

Bucket work implies much more discipline than most men realize.

Actually, just returning to the Wild Man a second time is a marvelous thing; some men never come back at all.

“The key is under your mother’s pillow.

man should not skip over the mutual attraction between himself and his mother if he wants a long life.

The mother’s pillow, after all, lies in the bed near where she makes love to your father.

pillow is also the place where the mother stores all her expectations for you.

it’s wise to steal the key some day when your mother and father are gone.

a day when the head is free of parental inhibitions.

No mother worth her salt would give the key anyway. If a son can’t steal it, he doesn’t deserve it.

The possessiveness that mothers typically exercise on sons – not to mention the possessiveness that fathers typically exercise on daughters – can never be underestimated.

Some men never address a sentence to the Wild Man.

The Wild Man says, in effect, “That’s good thinking. You’d better come with me.” So the Wild Man lifts the boy up on his shoulders and together they go off into the woods. That’s decisive. We should all be so lucky.

The fault is that the old men outside the nuclear family no longer offer an effective way for the son to break his link with his parents without doing harm to himself.

The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort – only through the “active intervention of the older men.

The active intervention of the older men means that older men welcome the younger man into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world.

But only men can initiate men, as only women can initiate women. Women can change the embryo to a boy, but only men can change the boy to a man. Initiators say that boys need a second birth, this time a birth from men.

When women, even women with the best intentions, bring up a boy alone, he may in some way have no male face, or he may have no face at all. The old men initiators, by contrast, conveyed to boys some assurance that is invisible and nonverbal: it helped the boys to see their genuine face or being.

Many men, however – and I am one of them – have found inside an ability to nurture that didn’t appear until it was called for.

Even when a father is living in the house there still may be a strong covert bond between mother and son to evict the father, which amounts to a conspiracy, and conspiracies are difficult to break.

older men are not really doing their job.

the love unit most damaged by the Industrial Revolution has been the father-son bond.

The Industrial Revolution, in its need for office and factory workers, pulled fathers away from their sons and, moreover, placed the sons in compulsory schools where the teachers are mostly women.

and the new attitude centred on one idea: that physical labour is bad.

A single clear idea, well fed, moves like a contagious disease:

When the office work and the “information revolution” begin to dominate, the father-son bond disintegrates.

if the son does not actually see what his father does during the day and through all the seasons of the year, a hole will appear in the son’s psyche and the hole will fill with demons who tell him that his father’s work is evil and that the father is evil.

“Where is my father … why doesn’t he love me? What is going on?

man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive. Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. They called it Zeus energy, which encompasses intelligence, robust health, compassionate decisiveness, good will, generous leadership. Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community.

I found myself missing contact with men – or should I say my father?

I began to think of him not as someone who had deprived me of love or attention or companionship, but as someone who himself had been deprived, by his father and his mother and by the culture.

Jung said something disturbing about this complication. He said that when the son is introduced primarily by the mother to feeling, he will learn the female attitude towards masculinity and take a female review of his own father and of his own masculinity.

So the son often grows up with a wounded image of his father – not brought about necessarily by the father’s actions, or words, but based on the mother’s observation of these words or actions.

Somewhere around forty or forty-five a movement towards the father takes place naturally – a desire to see him more clearly and to draw closer to him. This happens unexplainably, almost as if on a biological timetable.