Iron John: A Book About Men

by Robert Bly

He may also have a secret and special relationship with a wounded little boy inside himself. If so, he won’t challenge the little boy, nor will he point out his self-pity, nor actually listen to the boy either. He will simply let the boy run his life.

The naïve man will lose what is most precious to him because of a lack of boundaries. This is particularly true of the New Age man, or the man seeking “higher consciousness.

We could say that, unaware of boundaries, he does not develop a good container for his soul, nor a good container for two people. There’s a leak in it somewhere. He may break the container himself when he sees an attractive face. As an artist he improvises; as a poet his work lacks metre and shape. Improvisation is not all wrong, but he tends to be proud of his lack of form because he feels suspicious of boundaries. The lack of boundaries will eventually damage him.

The naïve man often lacks what James Hillman has called “natural brutality.

At the start of a relationship, a few harsh words of truth would have been helpful. Instead he waits and waits, and then a major wounding happens farther down the line.

when a woman lives with a truly naïve man for a while, she feels impersonally impelled to betray him.

mother’s protection, no matter how well intentioned, will not do as a substitute for the father’s protection.

“You know a great deal about gold now, but nothing about poverty.

“You know a lot about going up, and nothing about going down.

The lowliness happens particularly to men who are initially high, lucky, elevated.

What I am saying, then, is that the next step in initiation for men is finding the rat’s hole.

It is said that whenever a friend reported enthusiastically, “I have just been promoted!” Jung would say, “I’m very sorry to hear that: but if we all stick together, I think we will get through it.” If a friend arrived depressed and ashamed, saying, “I’ve just been fired,” Jung would say, “Let’s open a bottle of wine; this is wonderful news; something good will happen now.

In this century, men have added another inattention: they characteristically failed to notice their own suffering.

The descender makes an exit – from ordinary and respectable life – through the wound.

“a heroic exit through the wound.” He does not exit, as the hero does, through his heroism, nor through his invincibility, as the warrior does, but he exits through his wound.

or perhaps the marriage may have come about because of that particular wound

as an invitation to go through the door, accept katabasis, immerse himself in the wound, and exit from his old life through it.

Often the moment of katabasis is not without its own dark humour.

Katabasis also carries with it the whole concept of disaster, perhaps bringing it into the man’s life for the first time.

One has the sense that some power in the psyche arranges a severe katabasis if the man does not know enough to go down on his own.

Depression is a small katabasis, and something other than us arranges it. Depression usually surprises us by its arrival and its departure. In depression, we refuse to go down, and so a hand comes up and pulls him down. In grief we choose to go down.

and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help and patience, and a certain difficult repentance long difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

characteristics of the naïve man, among them the agreement not to look at the dark side, the assumption that everyone speaks from the heart, an inappropriate relation to ecstasy, the failure to notice that some part of him wants to remain sick, and so on. My guess is that at every point where we have one of those naïvetés, we will eventually find a katabasis to correspond with it.

in

marriage, the man and woman give each other “his or her nethermost beast” to hold.

The naïve man who flies directly toward the sun will not be able to see his own shadow. It is far behind him. In katabasis, it catches up.

The naïve man may receive a little instruction also about the dark side of the Great Mother. Sooner or later, also, the dark side of the Great Mother crystallizes out of the universe;

she will appear in ordinary life as an enraged woman, a woman astounded by inconsistency or betrayal.

Only Shiva, one of the forms of the Wild Man, can stand up to her,

but descent is complete when both have been replaced by the boar-tusked, hog-bristled, big-mouthed, skull-necklaced, insanely high-spirited energy of Baba Yaga.

When a young man arrives at her house, proves himself to be up to her level of intensity, purpose, and respect for the truth, she will sometimes say, “Okay, what do you want to know?

three other forms.

Taking the Road of Ashes, Learning to Shudder, and Moving from the Mother’s World to the Father’s World.

Askaladden

but in the fairy stories that assignment goes to the lucky third son, who is the magical ashy fool, and to the lucky third daughter, Cinderella, the magical suffering child of the mother.

It’s clear that the young men were going through some kind of hibernation or ritual lethargy, and the older men and women allowed it.

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

The word “ashes” contains in it a dark feeling for death; ashes when put on the face whiten it as death does. Job covered himself with ashes to say that the earlier comfortable Job was dead; and that the living Job mourned the dead Job.

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

Despite our Disneyland culture, some men around thirty-five or forty will begin to experience ashes privately, without ritual, even without old men. They begin to notice...

So we have to slip at night “through the lines” to find the corpse. That is ashes work. It requires cunning and stealth. It requires the help of a god.

Gaining the ability to shudder means feeling how frail human beings are, and how awful it is to be a Titan. When one is shuddering, the shudder helps to take away the numbness we spoke of.

But when he learns to shudder, he is developing a part of the masculine emotional body as well.

“A boy cannot change into a man without the active intervention of the older men.

We learn one valuable thing as we watch: a young man cannot make the move to the father’s world alone without taking on the Trickster and particularly the dark side of the Trickster.

the young feminine suffers when the man cannot get to the father’s world.

Some deaths stand for the naïveté that dies when the son accepts the father’s world.

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

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

Moving to the father’s world