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Ghost Dancing in the Gray Nineties by G. Richard Bozarth
[This is an abridged version of the original manuscript. Comments in brackets show where large amounts of text were deleted.] Iron John: A Book About Men by Robert Bly [A] (See Bibliography at end) had mind-blowing commercial success before I ever heard about it. It's hard to remain ignorant about anything that commercially successful in the United States. It seemed as if every day my attention was caught by pro comments here or con comments there. The ones expressing astonishment about the book's commercial success finally caused me to check out its standing on the bestseller lists. Then I was astonished. It had been holding the number one spot for over forty weeks at that time! Man, that impressed me. It stayed there week after week until I finally decided I had to find out what this book was about. And I did. It is about religionistic nonsense. It is a book about men the way Chariots of the Gods? [B] is about archaeology. Any kind of movement trying to put this book's ideas into practice is just wallowing in a mire. The salvation Bly is offering is nothing more than a Ghost Dance for the Gray Nineties. The book is Bly's sociological, anthropological, and psychological analysis of an ancient fairy tale about a young prince who gets separated from his family, is sheltered for awhile by a supernatural entity in the woods (Iron John, who happens to be a king turned into the Wild Man of the Woods by enchantment), joins the servant staff in the palace of another king as a commoner, falls in love with the princess, saves the kingdom in war, reveals himself to be a real prince, marries the princess, reunites with his family, breaks the enchantment binding Iron John because of his success, and, naturally, he and every other person in the tale lives happily ever after. The stages of this fairy tale are supposed to represent the evolution all men would take from boy to mature man if modern civilization had not disrupted the ancient pagan customs and rituals that once enabled this evolution to take place. Centering this book about an ancient fairy tale involving Iron John is no accident. Bly's proposed salvation for men involves learning how to think mythologically again by a conversion to neopagan religionism. The blessings that will come from this include solutions to just about every ethical problem in the U.S.-from sexism to incest to destructive corporate behavior. How original, a religion offering itself as a panacea! Robert Bly considers Iron John to be "the god of depth, wounds, and sacrifice" and points out that industrialized Western culture has "tried to live without honoring him and his depth, his woundedness, and his knowledge of appropriate sacrifice. As a result, our sacrifices have become unconscious, regressive, pointless, indiscriminate, self-destructive, and massive" [A/238- 240]. I couldn't help wondering if resurrecting the religionism of the pagans would also involve resurrecting an enthusiasm for human sacrifice. I have read a bit about pagan cultures and almost all of them practiced some form of human sacrifice with varying degrees of frequency. Bly, though, does not bother to discuss the less lovely aspects of that old time paganism. Bly's interest in promoting neopagan religionism influenced the style of his presentation. His technique is to clearly depict a real problem almost all men experience (for example, establishing a happy relationship with a woman), then to discuss it in a nebulous, mystical blather that seems to have the single purpose of mentioning the names of as many pagan supernatural entities as possible. This is supposed to create the illusion that the pagans had the answer to the problem and we modern men could rediscover the answer if we only convert to the neopagan religionism Bly advocates. The primary problem this book analyzes concerns masculinity, with femininity getting an honorable mention every now and then. Masculinity is a learned behavior (so is femininity). [The author cites many examples to show that masculinity is social and cultural, not biological. Bly only partly recognizes this, and fails to define the term. Instead he opts for a kind of Masculine Mystique which he claims is objective.] The important thing to keep in mind about Iron John is that the book is not really about men. It is about establishing the necessity for neopagan religionism. The real problem of masculinity has no place here. The problem this book wants to solve is how to persuade men that neopagan religionism offers salvation for them in the form of possessing certainty about their masculinity. How does he do this? Examining his analyses of initiation and fatherhood will suffice for an answer. Both permit a full exposure of the unique "genius" that produced one of the most commercially successful books of this century. InitiationOne problem today in Western culture is the transition from childhood to adulthood. The real cause of the problem is adolescence. [Our complex society and economy have created a gap, now over a decade long, between physical maturity and cultural maturity, defined as being a legal adult and able to make a decent living.] Bly's analysis of and solution to this problem has nothing to do with the conflict caused by this gap. The nature of the problem, according to him, is the loss of initiation rites, which enable children to become adults in a way that makes their adult status clear to them and inculcates the maturity essential to functioning properly as adults. Establishing a neopagan rite of initiation is one of the most important solutions Bly is offering men. Two things, Bly reveals, are necessary to become mature. One is for the person to overcome the wounds of childhood in a way that ensures they do not linger in the mind and cripple the person. The other is preparation for adulthood as a man. According to Bly, both of these can be accomplished by resurrecting the ancient initiation rites of the pagans. "The recovery of some form of initiation is essential to the culture" [A/35]. Bly notes: "To judge by men's lives in New Guinea, Kenya, North Africa, the pygmy territories, Zulu lands, and in the Arab and Persian culture flavored by Sufi communities, men have lived together in heart unions and soul connections for hundreds of thousands of years" [A/32]. Unfortunately, he asserts this without actually offering any evidence for it. Any person who keeps up on current events knows that there is not a lot of happily-ever-after stuff going on in any of those nations, and that the common men are enthusiastically participating in the horror shows that have been going on for years. He also neglects to offer any evidence supporting his surprising estimate of the age of these cultures. Another thing Bly neglects to mention is that most ancient pagan initiation practices involved physical damage to the boys (and sometimes girls) that would violate the decadent laws of our declining culture. For instance, some Melanesian pagans had an initiation rite that included "a progressive series of nose bleedings caused by slivers of bamboo which are covered with salt and then twirled in the nostrils. The tongue is also cut and the penis rubbed with rough, abrasive leaves. By the time he is 18 or 20 years old the young man is introduced to penis bleeding caused by progressively larger objects pushed into the urethra and twirled" [C/1440]. The prince in the fairy tale Bly is analyzing in this book does get wounded as part of his initiation: he pinches his finger when he lets Iron John out of the cage in which the prince's father had imprisoned him. Perhaps Bly does not want to turn off any man by describing what real ritual initiation wounding was like among the ancient pagans. He misleadingly describes it as "minor." FatherhoodFatherhood in terms of parenting is another big problem in Western culture today that is supposed to be solved by Bly's neopagan religionism. This is the problem as he sees it: When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, and not his teaching. If the father is working for a corporation, what is there to teach? He is reluctant to tell his son what is really going on. The fragmentation of decision-making in corporate life, the massive effort that produces the corporate willingness to destroy the environment for the sake of profit, the prudence, even cowardice, that one learns in bureaucracy-who wants to teach that? . . . What the father brings home today is usually a touchy mood, springing from powerlessness and despair mingled with long- standing shame and the numbness peculiar to those who hate their jobs [A/96-97]. I am sure that there are men who feel like that. However, I work for a corporation and know a few fathers there. Despair and shame do not seem to be what bothers them most about the challenge of fatherhood. They want time to spend with their families. Bly, committing his usual failure, does not suggest what the father could teach. [In a primitive society, fathers teach their way of making a living; in a complex society like ours, with much division of labor, it doesn't work that way.] Perhaps the father's teaching is to be the kind of wisdom that will enable his sons to live their lifespans with dignity, integrity, and happiness. If so, Bly does not reveal the tenets of this wisdom or inform the reader how his neopagan religionism will give to fathers today this wisdom to pass on to their sons. Bly says that because humans in Western culture "lost their ability to think mythologically around the year 1000," they "gradually stopped feeding the abundant gods and goddesses with their imaginative energy." We Westerners thus lost their valuable services to us. One pattern that does not develop without faith in pagan supernatural entities is the father-pattern, which is the source of the magnificence mythological thought gives to fathers. In the days of mythological thinking, when there were gods under the ground, beneath the sea, and zooming through the air, "the father picked radiance from above; and the son tried to emulate the father, to become as bright as he is, to reach his height." The loss of mythological magnificence has forced fathers to do the work of fatherhood as mere human beings. Sons deprived of mythological thinking cannot overcome having a lousy father and end up full of psychoquirks that prevent maturity. The result is today's Western culture, which is full of "father-hungry sons" who are made dysfunctional adults by rage or despair or numbness or naive idealism or combinations of the four [A/99-108]. According to Bly, [even having gods] is not enough if fathers are going to be able to succeed at fatherhood. The pagan supernatural entities are essentially spiritual kings (not a new idea for any reader who has studied religionism). A father needs to connect to a spiritual king in order to develop his inner king, which will enable him to be perceived as a king by his sons. A man's inner king cannot connect to the spiritual king without the medium of a political king. "Wiping out kings severely damages the mythological imagination . . . When the political kings lose respect, cannot do their work, lose their connection to the Sacred King, become dilettantes or gods, are killed, vanish from our sight, then things change. The imagination has more to do. It doesn't do it. Our fathers then become lessened in our eyes" [A/109-110]. If the salvation of Western culture depends on a return to being ruled by a divine-right king, Bly could have done a lot towards persuading We the People by providing evidence that such a government might be reasonably moral. I have read some history and I cannot think of one single king who was not the ["blood brother", as it were] of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Idi Amin. I tell you this: we need civil liberties much more than we need mythologically magnificent fathers! [Bly is quite certain that mothers can't substitute for fathers in raising their children, despite their own kind of mythological magnificence.] Here is why: When a father and son do spend long hours together, which some fathers and sons still do, we could say that a substance almost like food passes from the older body to the younger. The contemporary mind might want to describe the exchange between father and son as a likening of attitude, a miming, but I think a physical exchange takes place, as if some substance was passing directly to the cells. The son's body-not his mind -receives and the father gives this food at a level far below consciousness. The son does not receive a hands-on healing, but a body-on healing. His cells receive some knowledge of what an adult masculine body is. The young body learns at what frequency the masculine body vibrates. It begins to grasp the song that adult male cells sing, and how the charming, elegant, lonely, courageous, half-shamed male molecules dance [A/93]. Bly should have immediately provided evidence for the existence of this father-food. For instance, what is its chemical structure? What is the average quantity of it a father produces in an hour or a day? Does he produce it continuously as he does sperm, sweat, and saliva? Or does the presence of the son stimulate production? Do all men produce father-food, or is the production unique to fatherhood in a way similar to milk production being usually unique to motherhood? [The author here asks many more such questions and does a lot of speculating, all logically derived from Bly's hypothesis of father-food.] Or perhaps what should be said is simply this: Bly's father-food is pseudoscience every bit as silly as Creationism's flood geology or Daniken's extraterrestrial visitors! ConclusionIron John is one strange book and an even stranger cultural phenomenon. To use the adjective "intellectual" for any of the thinking that produced this book would be an insult to intellectuals all over the world. It is nothing but a theological mire very poorly disguised as an analysis of men in Western culture today based on work done by sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. When a theologian tries to use science to verify the conclusions he has reached by an act of irrational faith, he always ends up distorting it into pseudoscience, because no science supports the existence of anything that can be described as supernatural. Bly's completely absurd assertions about human biology are excellent examples of this, as are the abuses Bly makes of anthropology and sociology. His analyses are consistently poorly thought out and leave more questions unanswered than answered. That also is typical of theologians, who prefer leaving as much unwritten as possible to provide deniability in case some person pursues their ideas to their logical conclusions. This book is dishonest in every way all theological books are dishonest. How did this book become such an amazing bestseller? That so many men have read this book and taken it seriously says something about men in the U.S. today that I find nauseating. Yes, I know that Daniken's equally ridiculous book was also a bestseller, and that just about anything can be commercially successful in a country with well over two hundred million citizens. That, though, does not explain the intellectual respect with which this book has been treated by those who are usually recognized as intellectuals (or does it?). Of course, I can only refer to the discussions about this book I have read. Even a grumpy feminist, who resented the idea that men have any kind of claim to being gender victims, discussed this book as though it was worthy of intellectual respect despite her disagreement with many of its ideas. Here We the People are on the threshold of the 21st century and we heap commercial success and intellectual honors on Iron John! It is truly the Gray Nineties when so many of us are eager to do this Ghost Dance. BIBLIOGRAPHYThe numbers by the letter-identifiers in the text are page numbers. A: Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1990. B: Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1969. C: Initiation, Man, Myth & Magic, Vol. 11, Marshall Cavendish Corporation, 1970.
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