Odyssey Into The Feminine And The Civilization of Men.
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A long time ago, I read a book called Iron John by Robert Bly. It is a book about men and masculinity based on a Grimm’s story.
The thesis is that men need to find more of their natural masculinity.
I can get it if he is talking about the first half of life. I would take my lead from Carl Jung on this. According to Jung, there is a difference in the requirements of men in relation to the Feminine between the first and second halves of their lives.
In the first half (in the puberty rites, for example), boys are separated from their mother. They leave their mother’s realm, so to speak, and are initiated by men into the father’s world and their masculine identity. But in the second half, the initiation for men might be more likely through the Feminine, which might even be the way of individuation, as Jung has called it.
Getting back to the story, Iron John lives at the bottom of the pond. After he gets out of the pond, he is put in a cage by the king. A young boy loses his golden ball after it rolls into the cage with hairy Iron John. The only way the boy can get his golden ball back is by freeing him from his cage, and he has to get the key from under his mother’s pillow. It places this story in boyhood for me.
The boy has to get the key from under his mother’s pillow. It places the story somewhere between childhood and manhood. Freud might like this story too because he had a lot to say about boys and their mothers. It can be an Oedipal problem, he said. Modern psychology has reminded us of primary entanglement with the mother. It been built on the mother problem, in a way.
On the Mother complex
Not only in Freud, but in Jung too, we get this idea of the Mother as the first and powerful carrier of the Feminine. She is our first world, said Jung, the first love of our life. The Mother might be the place to start to consider men and the Feminine. She carries the image of the Feminine for us in our childhood.
There can be a kind of conspiracy between the mother and the son to stay in childhood, said Jung. It is hard to know who is more at fault. They might both want the situation of childhood to continue. Put it this way, a Mother complex would be wanting to stay in the lap of the mother for too long. Wanting to stay in the charmed circle of childhood (and maybe, forever).
We love our mothers. Modern psychology reminds us that family and childhood are the province of the mother, and it might not be a good idea to stay in childhood forever. It also reminds that there is also usually a kind of natural psychological separation that takes place (or a natural cutting of the umbilical cord). In an Oedipal situation, that kind of separation might not take place, psychologically speaking.
Robert Bly doesn’t really seem to go for sensitive types whom, these days, we might call New Age boys. They might not have stolen the key from under their mother’s pillow yet. They are nice people. They say all the right things. They have good manners. They are caring, and listen attentively. But they seem a little passive. They might still belong to their mothers.
They might not know how to use a sword, and seem to be lacking in some natural masculinity.
Even very good mothers might not like to give the boy that key, to open the cage door to be a natural man, voluntarily. Because they have raised their boys on mother’s milk and nourished them since they couldn’t do anything for themselves.
Put it this way, your mother might be more likely to say “Could you please comb your hair properly” than throwing you the keys and saying “Could you please just go out the back open the door to release the natural and instinctual man?”
Mothers civilize their boys. They want them to have good manners, to always be polite, and to grow up to be socially adaptable. Maybe one day, when you are over 40, and have learnt how to use your knife and fork, then possibly, you might leave home and become a successful professional (but never forget to always love your mother).
In a story about Aboriginal initiation that I read, once a boy reached a certain age, his mother would stop talking to him. Not only that, all of the women in the tribe stopped talking to him. He was kicked out of the mother’s realm, so to speak, and the women turned away from him.
He had to go and hang out with the men for a while and get initiated into the men’s business where they were initiated into the first stories by older men and into their father’s world.
The mother threw her son the keys to the masculine world and into his masculinity. Modern psychology might point towards the need for a rite of passage like this, intended towards the delicate process of separating from the mother.
It could seem like tough love to some people. The way the boys are pushed out of the mother’s home and realm into men’s business. But there might also be something essential in the structure of these indigenous rites of passage.
“There were intricate rites of passage,” said Jung, “in so-called primitive societies to shift the image of the Feminine from the Mother.” He also said, “Because the mother is the first bearer of the soul image, separation from her is a delicate and important matter of the greatest educational significance.
Accordingly, amongst so-called primitives, we find a large number of rites designed to organize this separation. The mere fact of becoming adult and of outward separation is not enough; impressive initiations into the men’s house and ceremonies of rebirth are still needed in order to make the separation from the mother (and hence from childhood) entirely effective.”
But, there is something else that happens in the second half of life, according to Jung. In the second half of life, the initiation for men might be more likely to come through the Feminine. The Feminine that is not like the Mother. Let’s say, a boy has stolen the key from under his mother’s pillow. He has learnt how to use a sword. He is grounded in some masculine spirit.
But in the second half of his life, there is still the question of the deepening into his psyche or soul. In this half, the initiation is more likely to come through the Feminine. A man has to find the other side of himself. The other side is in the Feminine principle.
He has to find the depth of his soul. And the Feminine can be like an initiator or a guide or a mediatrix for a man into his psyche or soul. Renewal for a man might be through the Feminine.
St George has conquered the dragon, let’s say (and everything devouring or regressive about the Mother). He has become a Hero. But men still need an inner life, a deep-feeling life and some responsiveness towards their own soul.
To take a different kind of hero, Sir Gawain went looking for a cup or a chalice (or a container for his own soul). It is the interiority of the Feminine that a man needs. The imagination and the beauty. We need the chalice as well as the blade.
The sun needs the moon. Eros needs Psyche (and Psyche needs Eros). Jung calls the feminine side the anima. It is the archetype of life, he says. The archetype of relationship. It animates and re-enchants life, and makes the world alive. “A man is asked to love his own soul,” says James Hillman.
The Hero will at some stage have to meet with the Goddess (or the Feminine) in Joseph Campbell’s mythic hero journey. The Masculine can easily become too one-sided, and when that happens, everything starts to dry up or become barren, if not destructive.
There are two figures from myth that are in good relationship with the Feminine, and both of them are non-heroic in some ways (they are not like classical heroes): Dionysus and Odysseus.
The Odyssey might also be a better story for this second part of life, where Odysseus is surrounded by feminine figures that play many roles, as Hillman states: Goddess (Athene), Mistress (Calypso), Devourer (Scylla and Charybdis), Enchantress (Circe), Mother-Daughter (Arete-Nausica), Personal Mother (Anticleia), Rescuer (Ino), Seductress (Sirens), Nurse (Eurykleia), and Wife (Penelope) — the Feminine is there in The Odyssey in all of its many forms.
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Jon Wilson has undertaken change management and management development programs for a number of organisations, including Johnson And Johnson New Leaders (Australia), The Office of Public Sector Management and The Orient Hotel (Thailand). He is the author of Global Scenarios (1998 EPAC) and The Self-Managing Strategy (1999). Jon lives in Fremantle, in Western Australia.
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