Iron John: A Book about Men

This is a great book about modern society and men. Even through it was written nearly 20 years ago, it is still completely applicable, if not more so. Written in a textual analysis of an ancient story, the author weaves current observations about our society into a discussion of how human societies evolved over thousands of years. This is a great book if you have a young boy, or work with a Boy Scout Troop or school.

Great book for anyone looking to find out what makes a man. For the past 30 years mens roles have been downplayed and muddled. This book gives insight as to what manhood truly means. It is a bit of a slow read and its the type of read that allows you to skip around a bit without getting lost of "ruining" the story. I would recommend this for any middle aged man that is feeling "lost" or unsure of what the male relationship should or should not be in our society.

This amazing book is a rare find. It transforms your life and mind while reading it.

The themes, discussions and wisdom gained makes this one of the best books I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

This book helps you through many questions that come up on our thirties. Helps us understand the initiation process which many of Us don't have when we need it, and to understand why a single/divorced/widowed mother will never be a "Father-mother".

Excellent reading for men or women, about men! Some songs Jack Johnson put on his To The Sea CD, came to him after reading this book. Very interesting.Iron John: A Book About Men

This is the most outstanding book ever written about the road that must be taken for a young man to achieve maturity and take his place among the established leaders in male society. Through the mechanism of an ancient folk tale, Robert Bly reveals the path toward correct behavior, aided by a wise and demanding mentor, testing himself with difficult tasks, overcoming failures, persisting in sincere effort, and seeking wisdom. It is about the difficult road of taking responsibility for ones own actions---about paying the price without regard for cost, when he knows it is the right thing to do. The Greeks knew this road when they engraved two phrases on the temple at Delphi: Know Thyself, and Nothing Too Much. All Men should be required to read this book, and it wouldn't hurt for women to read it too----especially if they really want to understand what a real man must do to gain respect and dependability among his peers.

Great way of explaining our current condition and simultaneously correlating to a wonderful old story. I found Mr Bly's description of men in current society to be a fitting description of me in many instances. Great book.

I bought this book when the original release was made nearly 20 years ago it seems. Kindle was just waiting for the right moment, and I got it at midnight on release day. It's about living. It's about the transition from childhood to teenhood to adulthood. It explains the rituals of the past, and relates them to the present. Many things are missing in todays youth ... but with the help of reading this book and passing it forward, perhaps that will change the future of our society.

This book is great. If you are already familiar with the 4 archtypes, psychoanalytics, or just simply trapped/stuck in life and wanting answers, this book will definitely address all aspects and help you self reflect or assess.

Years after it was written and popular, this book helps me in my therapeutic work with men. I am a licensed professional counselor and a board-certified dance therapist. The Iron John journey is a felt sense and hearing the story, a piece at a time, has helped many of the men (and women) I work with grow into healthier and more whole people.
-author of Naked Online: A DoZen Ways to Grow from Internet Dating

Having obtained two humanities degrees; one professional doctorate; and receiving multiple recommendations for this book, I really expected to enjoy it. Unfortunately, I kept getting VERY bored/distracted. I stopped reading after one-third the way through. Mr. Bly makes sweeping connections between Iron John and various notions of manhood that very well may be merely his understanding...of another culture's understanding...of manhood. To put it another way: while Bly refers to a culture and its understanding of manhood for a given interpretation of a section within Iron John, what he bases his understanding of that culture's understanding upon is a mystery nearly every time he discusses a new cultural artifact. While I think the subject-matter is very important, especially for current society, the style of writing turns off the more critical thinking reader. To reiterate: Mr. Bly makes reference to his "sources" and relates Iron John to how different cultures interpret(ed) manhood. The problem: he does not discuss his sources in any concrete way before barrelling straight into his explanation of how that culture would interpret the given section of Iron John. It was hard for me to pinpoint which was more frustrating, his unauthoritative discussion of his "authority" or the conclusions he derived therefrom. Sorry, Mr. Bly, but I could not continue reading and screamed in my head, a few times, "WHERE IS HE GETTING THIS BULLS$#!?"

If it weren't for Iron John being a cohesive theme, it reads like a stream of consciousness from someone very well educated in literature/philosophy/anthropology that enjoys talking just to hear herself talk.

I purchased this book, as a single mother, to help me raise my two young boys. It was good and insightful, but very bias and single minded. It is an over analysis of a children's book called Iron John.

The content of the book is good when Bly actually focuses on men. Not only right off the bat did he virtue signal and give your standard leftist harangue about men being evil and exploitative - though in a more mild and concealed manner - but when discussing anything about initiation or the concept of the "Wild Man" or any example really, in almost every instance he goes out of his way to be gender inclusive and talk about the women's side too.

I didn't buy your book to read about women Robert. I wanted to read exclusively through a masculine lens. This book reads more like a general story analysis more than anything, intended not for men but for everyone. He's always sure to be politically correct and reiterate that men being soft and "feminine" today is just dandy but then tries to explain their depression through analysis of the symbolism in a story. Pure intellectual masturbation.

What if it is just something as simple as low testosterone, engineered by the elite to keep us docile? Doesn't even entertain the thought. Culture is a part of it for sure, but biological imbalances are the most powerful factors in this phenomenon.

And then you have your standard jab at conservatism and Christianity wherever he can make it seem somewhat relevant, can't say I'm surprised really. Just another politically correct "poet" who wrote some overinflated drivel that got praised by the mainstream media for obvious reasons.

After having just finished Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man: One Woman's Year Disguised as a Man, I had to revise my review of "Iron John." Vincent quotes from "Iron John," and the selections she made were spot-on. It's too bad, though, that Bly's entire book couldn't have been as clear and straightforward as these few paragraphs.

My favorite phrase in describing the major flaws in "Iron John" is "breathtaking non-sequiturs." Bly writes some things, then comes to conclusions seemingly out of left field. More than once he writes, "We all know that...", making me cry aloud, "No, I don't know that!" If he'd "shown his work" a little more clearly, and not just done the figuring in his head, his assertions might have been more convincing (and not so frustrating).

I agree with Bly's premise that modern men tend to founder because we have no ritualistic rites of passage into manhood, but he gets way too New Agey for my taste. I don't doubt that this is an "important" work in the men's movement (indeed, it started the movement), but as hard as it was to finish without throwing it away disgustedly on more than one occasion, it's hard to fathom HOW. Nevertheless, it remains the place to start.

The unavoidable guilty feeling society places on men who simply want to be men.
Some of us could do with a reminder of what men used to be like. Current trends in society have deprived men of the role models they need to grow into respectable men and flourish. Men need role models to fill the shoes of gentlemen and be worthy of our finest predecessors. Undeniably, neither sex can say they’ve been saints and for men, we sometimes have women to remind us of that constantly, but why do we focus on the bad and forget the good things we’ve done for each other?

Something that might have been considered a mere pleonasm only 60 years ago has become endemic in the modern world where men are no longer masculine and society frowns upon those who are. Men are now taught that masculinity is a very bad thing.

Most men are no longer masculine.

It is a disempowering truth for men because most of us suffer from the constraints to express our masculinity without judging eyes—a powerful statement that I shall open with in this review of one of my favourite books, Iron John. Iron John was written by Robert Bly, an imminent figure of the male movement that began in the U.S. sometime in the late ‘80s.

While it’s considered a highly influential book for men, it spent 62 weeks on the New York Times ‘Best Sellers’ list. I marvelled at the unexpected and unpredictable mix of poetry, anthropology, mythology, sociology and psychology references Bly uses to demonstrate his messages. When he’s not observing male rituals from tribes in New Guinea, he’s busy transporting the reader to the symbolic world of myths, infusing the wisdom of Jung or inserting abstract words of poems. He makes an occasional use of inklings to suggest some of his thoughts and, by doing so, I suspect he deliberately provides his reader with the freedom to build their own understanding.

Because the path from boyhood to manhood, the topic Iron John focuses on, is by no means something you can simplify or vulgarise, Bly uses all of the subtleness of the English language’s artistic beauty to deliver an ingenious message that men, not as a whole, but in all their diversity, can understand.

The red line of the story revolves around a tale of the Grimm’s brothers from 1816 that tells the tale of how a young prince frees a wild man from the kingdom’s prison and flees with him into the forest where their paths separate.

The boy then finds a job in the kitchen and after failing to impress the king, is sent to work in the garden where he encounters a girl with the golden hair. With the help of the wild man, the prince defeats the kingdom’s enemies by riding successfully with the red, the white and the black horses—in metaphorical words: the coloured horses are respectively chaotic passion, righteousness and wisdom.

The book can be divided in several parts, all noted with symbolism, Bly unravels with the help of his references: digging out the wild man from the pond, the loss of the golden ball, the key hidden under the mother’s pillow, working in the kitchen, the failed meeting with the king, the time in the garden and riding the red, white and black horses to defeat the kingdom’s enemies.

Bly’s book, at times, felt confusing because of the relevant quantity of subjects he tries to assimilate although. Although, as I read more, I was able to match up his messages and grasped more. Granted there are things I won’t be able to relate to until later in my life, the process from boyhood to manhood is a lifelong one.

The prince’s first challenge comes from the wild man who’s locked into the cell of the King’s castle. If the boy wants his golden ball back, he’s going to have to free the wild man by stealing a key from underneath his precious mother’s pillow. As Bly puts it: “the golden ball reminds us of that unity of personality we had as children”; “all of us lose something around the age of eight”; “once the golden ball is gone, we spend the rest of our lives trying to get it back”. While most men are misled into thinking women possess the golden ball, the story suggests it’s in the realm of the wild man.

Bly could almost publish a separate pamphlet on the key’s location under the mother’s pillow with all its Freudian implications that I won’t dwell on…

What the prince decides to do with the key, however, is decisive. If the prince overcomes his fear of the wild man, he can’t ask his mother for the key because he simply won’t get it. As Bly says: “mothers are intuitively aware of what would happen if he got the key: they would lose their boys. The possessiveness that mothers typically exercise on sons can never be underestimated.” The boy has to steal the key and break some sort of consensus with his mother. Of course, metaphorically speaking, the boy is a man in between his late 20s and his mid-30s.

Later in the story, Bly defines the road of ashes and descent where the prince, after fleeing his kingdom sitting on top of the wild man’s shoulders, has to take the undesirable task of kitchen work. A knife through the ego of a prince who was brought up to think he was special and beyond the menial jobs of peasants.

The prince has learnt to ‘go up’ and he now has to learn to ‘go down’. I relish this part of Iron John as Bly describes how men are passive as a result of learning to sulk instead of learning to assert— they are naïve and numb before they ‘go down’.

In my own personal work, I interviewed a businessman who told me he couldn’t make any business endeavour successful before quitting his job and jumping in with both feet. Being unemployed for some time constitutes for this very drop.

George Orwell resigned from his comfortable military career in Burma and spent two years living as a homeless person in Paris and London before he could write anything worthy of reading. Bly uses similar examples to illustrate that “it’s as if life itself discharges him (the boy)” and, as he emphasises, “there are many ways to be discharged: a serious accident, the loss of a job, the breaking of a long standing friendship, a divorce, a “break-down”, an illness.”

One day, a man wakes up at 35 and realises his dreams have turned to ashes.

When the boy embraces the time he spends in the garden, he works on the little things in life behind high walls. The garden is a place to find shelter, to work on introversion, to grow the soul as opposed to favouring hedonist short-term rewards. The garden is a time to learn to know oneself better.

The garden comes almost naturally after the descent as the young man choses to focus on something dear to him.

Among the other concepts developed by the author, men’s relationships with their fathers or the process of bringing the interior warriors back to life to defend the inner king are the most evocative.

When I read the parts on the remote father and the sufferings of the masculine soul, it triggered a reasoning process that has partly reversed a lifetime of masculine despising caused by society’s brainwashing and acknowledging this has helped me improve the way I see my own father. I can let go of the bitterness of knowing I won’t ever have the similar nurturing relationship with him than I have with my mother. Instead of focusing on our father's personality flaws, we can learn to appreciate their “love of knowledge, love of action and ways to honour the world of things.”

The work in Iron John gathers a deep reasoning coated with a wealth of cultural references and, to some extent, one could dare to wonder whether the Grimm brothers intentionally built such a metaphorical message in their tale; whether, coincidentally, Bly managed to find myths as old as the world and references from our finest and wisest psychologists and poets to support the story of manhood.

Questioning the ulterior motives of a tale for children to illustrate such a complex and challenging process is legitimate. Bly’s genius, however, was to include the Grimm brothers’ tale as the spine of his essay. By doing so, he made his story more fluid and, hence, more enjoyable to read. Bly has composed something quite extraordinary to depict the personal, strenuous, self-sacrificing, but enriching path that every boy should join in their journey to becoming a man.

I can only recommend this read to men lacking the mental support of masculine role models and mentors to embrace their masculine identity and to trigger the process of feeling pride as a man instead of feeling that disempowering shame and guilt that society places on us for no good reason.

I cannot believe this book was suggested to me by the store as being in the same line as Jack Donovan's "The way of men." I stopped reading it about five pages in when the author attempted to assert that men who dodged the US draft in the Vietnam War were courageous and honorable. If your looking for a book about masculine virtue don't waste your time look elsewhere.

I'm a woman and only halfway through reading "Iron John" but wanted to state that this amazing book has also helped me connect the fragmentary dots of my experiences with my father. Bly's style of writing -- a weaving of the Iron John fairytale with self-reflective commentary, scientific data, mystical scoops of "What If?", mythology, symbolism, and enlightening, spot-on poems by widely varying authors --has somehow, suddenly congealed for me into a cohesive picture of how men (in particular) have become lost as their roles in their families, communities, and the world at large have changed for reasons both mundane and profound. I also finally have an "observer's view" of the resulting damage, anger, and emptiness that results from these "unfinished men" trying to make their way in a world without the compass of sage Wild Men directing them to a sense of self-worth and wholeness.

I feel like I've finally found a therapist who "speaks my language" and for the first time, am finding the option of viewing my father with compassion instead of hatred a possibility. I hope Mr. Bly reads this, as I don't think I could offer higher praise for this beautifully complicated book: it has opened a door I was certain I'd nailed shut, and in the process, is incrementally freeing me from a painful history.

I look forward to continuing my journey, in "rising from (my) ashes", and restoring the Sacred King to a place of honor, where I may be able to invite him in from time to time, accepting his darkness as well as his light. For those ready and willing to do the work, this book can be a key to unlocking generational cycles of anger, resentment, and ennui. 5 THOUSAND stars!!!

Robert Bly (born 1926) is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. This 1990 book was on the The New York Times Best Seller list for 62 weeks. He has written many other books such as A Little Book on the Human Shadow,News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness,Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (Pitt Poetry Series), etc.

He wrote in the Preface of this 1990 book, "We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life. Such a man is open to new visions of what a man is or could be... In this book I am talking about male initiation... this book does not seek to turn men against women, nor to return men to the domineering mode that has led to repression of women and their values for centuries. The thought in this book does not represent a challenge to the women's movement. The two movements are related to each other, but each moves on a separate timetable. 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." (Pg. ix-x)

He states, "The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort---only through the 'active intervention of the older men.' It's becoming clear to us that manhood doesn't happen by itself; it doesn't happen just because we eat Wheaties. The active intervention of the older men means that older men welcome the younger man into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world." (Pg. 15) He observes, "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 how many of their dreams have turned to ashes. A young man in high school dreams that he will become a race driver, a mountain climber, he will marry Miss America, he will be a millionaire by thirty, he will get a Nobel Prize in physics by thirty-five, he will be an architect and build the tallest building ever. He will get out of his hick town and live in Paris. He will have fabulous friends... and by thirty-five, all these dreams are ashes." (Pg. 81)

He notes, "When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his termperament, 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?" (Pg. 96-97) He argues, "We can say that for each of us this father question has to be dealt with. Sooner or later, we have to deal again with that side of the father who hit us with an ax." (Pg. 114-115) He adds, "Mythology helps us to see the dark side of our own fathers vividly, unforgettably. Understanding that we and our father exist in some great story lifts us out of our private trance, and lets us feel that the suffering is not personal to us." (Pg. 117)

He suggests, "I believe that a woman sometimes finds herself channeling the rage of dozens of dead women who could not speak their rage while alive. Conducting that rage is dangerous." (Pg. 171) He also states, "We could say that New Age people in general are addicted to harmony. The alchemical woodcut says that a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world." (Pg. 177)

This path-breaking book is more than twenty years past its "heyday"; yet the issues it speaks of (e.g., male dreams turning to ashes; lack of "initiation"; poor relationships with our fathers, etc.) are still very pertinent to the modern male. (This book is also helpful for females looking to understand the male psyche better.)

Robert Bly (born 1926) is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the mythopoetic men's movement. This 1990 book was on the The New York Times Best Seller list for 62 weeks. He has written many other books such as A Little Book on the Human Shadow,News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness,Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (Pitt Poetry Series), etc.

He wrote in the Preface of this 1990 book, "We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life. Such a man is open to new visions of what a man is or could be... In this book I am talking about male initiation... this book does not seek to turn men against women, nor to return men to the domineering mode that has led to repression of women and their values for centuries. The thought in this book does not represent a challenge to the women's movement. The two movements are related to each other, but each moves on a separate timetable. 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." (Pg. ix-x)

He states, "The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort---only through the 'active intervention of the older men.' It's becoming clear to us that manhood doesn't happen by itself; it doesn't happen just because we eat Wheaties. The active intervention of the older men means that older men welcome the younger man into the ancient, mythologized, instinctive male world." (Pg. 15) He observes, "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 how many of their dreams have turned to ashes. A young man in high school dreams that he will become a race driver, a mountain climber, he will marry Miss America, he will be a millionaire by thirty, he will get a Nobel Prize in physics by thirty-five, he will be an architect and build the tallest building ever. He will get out of his hick town and live in Paris. He will have fabulous friends... and by thirty-five, all these dreams are ashes." (Pg. 81)

He notes, "When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his termperament, 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?" (Pg. 96-97) He argues, "We can say that for each of us this father question has to be dealt with. Sooner or later, we have to deal again with that side of the father who hit us with an ax." (Pg. 114-115) He adds, "Mythology helps us to see the dark side of our own fathers vividly, unforgettably. Understanding that we and our father exist in some great story lifts us out of our private trance, and lets us feel that the suffering is not personal to us." (Pg. 117)

He suggests, "I believe that a woman sometimes finds herself channeling the rage of dozens of dead women who could not speak their rage while alive. Conducting that rage is dangerous." (Pg. 171) He also states, "We could say that New Age people in general are addicted to harmony. The alchemical woodcut says that a child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world." (Pg. 177)

This path-breaking book is more than twenty years past its "heyday"; yet the issues it speaks of (e.g., male dreams turning to ashes; lack of "initiation"; poor relationships with our fathers, etc.) are still very pertinent to the modern male. (This book is also helpful for females looking to understand the male psyche better.)

The book deals with the primary thing that drives men -- testosterone. First, a disclaimer. I read an earlier edition of this book about 20 years ago.

Testosterone and the aggression it fuels drives much of how men interact with people and the world around them. Bly uses a somewhat repetitive and expanding mythological story to build a picture for the reader of how testosterone affects men.

As a man, you have three choices. You can allow testosterone to control you. Men that do that tend to be brutal and uncaring. Alternately, you can try to deny testosterone's impact. These men tend to be subservient and never achieve their potential or real satisfaction with life. Lastly, you can embrace testosterone's impact and use it to achieve the best parts of being a mature man. Here, you remain in control, while living on the edge. This is where true satisfaction for a man exists. Taking some risks, striving to accomplish, moving forward.

Yes, the stories in the book seemed somewhat repetitive. But, I think Bly did this to better illuminate the complex, amorphous concept of what being a real man is. By approaching this concept in slightly different ways, he builds more of a three dimensional image of the concept for the reader.

Lastly, Bly laments the loss of a rite of passage for young men in our society. This rite helps young men to learn to deal with their testosterone. You only have to look at the high crime rates for young men from fatherless families to see the importance of something like this in society. Big Brother programs, Police Athletic Leagues (not to mention the Boy Scouts), etc. try to deal with this, but it needs to be more broadly inculcated into our society.

Robert Bly is a modern day Carl Sandberg. Iron John was on the Top 10 Best sellers list. This is one of my favorite books and I highly recommend it for young boys, men, and women with children that have no father at home! In todays society dysfunctional families are at an all time high and "Iron John" can furnish helpful and insightful information. I really enjoyed the metaphors and mythology; "The lad leaned over and looked into the smooth and reflective pond water and didn't see his own reflection but that of three female wolves looking over his shoulder." The lad lived at home with no father or brothers but with his mother and two sisters and had no identify of his own.

Highly recommend anything on or about Robert E. Howard (1906-1936)The Best of the Best writer/poet ever. Must Reads = Blood & Thunder, The Life & Art of REH by Mark Finn, The Last of the Trunk by Paul Herman of REH Foundation and Selected Letters of REH by Rob Roehm of REH Foundation, One Who Walked Alone by Novalyne Price, The Dark Barbarian & The Barbaric Triumph by Don Herron, Solomon Kane, Kull, Conan, Bran Mak Morn, The Last of the Frontier, Lord Samarcand, and anything of Weird Works and Weird Tales by Greenberg, Life After Life by Dr. Raymond Moody, The Star Rover by Jack London, and my favorite The Beast from the Abyss about cats, I Am A Barbarian by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and The Best of H.P. Lovecraft.

Looking through the lens of myth, poet Robert Bly concludes that the Industrial Revolution pulled families apart. He blames absent fathers who failed to initiate boys into adulthood for many of today's cultural woes, including passivity among men, unhappy marriages and the prevalence of gangs. Bly cites stories from the ancient Greeks through the Brothers Grimm to show that young men's struggle to achieve mature adulthood has remained constant throughout history. The myth of Iron John follows the development of a young prince from his early ties to his mother, to his maturation and entry into the world of his father. Mothers, says Bly, must relinquish their babies to enable their sons to grow up. Bly uses his ramble through literature to explore deep issues that play out in men's personal and work lives. His metaphoric, poetic language may be off-putting to concrete thinkers, but getAbstract recommends Bly's classic to men and women who are looking for insight into modern men's psychic drives and struggles.

Bly is sly. He talks about men without isolating women, without excluding the Divine Feminine from the male experience.
In a day and age where the alpha male has been replaced by the only rational option, the beta male, Bly offers a third way, the nurturing Father.
I really like the way Bly brings in fairy tale, mysticism, some gnosticism, and paganism, and um, even mythicism and also um the kitchen sink to describe the male ego in all of it's complexity.
The most telling, for me, is the chapter on the lost King, concerning modern men's relationships to their workaholic distant Fathers, and embracing of their Mothers. The mothers encouraged men to eschew manual labor (vulgar!) for more 'spiritual' work involving intellectualism. And obviously, with the Enlightenment and the dispatch of Kings, the male ego has no really earthly Father to gaze upon as a Spiritual Guide.
Bly rightly points out that in aboriginal tribes such as Indian and Australian, male initiation still takes place for boys where today in postmodern Western society, the lack of men intervening in boys' lives makes the process much more drawn out, much more protracted and even postponed. What happens in some aboriginal boys' lives at age thirteen only happens to young 'men' aged forty in Western society.
Initiation, for me personally, occurred anonymously and in my late thirties, and lasted much too long. I only now am just coming to grips with the fact it happened and the resultant implications.
It is uncanny the path and waypoints the initiation takes as described in Bly's book and how it was meted out in my own experience, pointing to what must be a universal phenomenon that encompasses many cultures.
I recommend this book for any man who has ever failed miserably at being a 'man'.
The rest already have this stuff down pat, I'm sure.

This book performs the very valuable function of providing a critique on the obstacles posed to men's development by our modern society, which Bly feels has gradually become closed towards mythical consciousness since 1000 AD. Actually, similar problems exist for women in our lives and development, when society fails to provide us the myths and stories, and the wise women to guide us, and Jungian authors such as Clarissa Pinkola Estes and Marion WOodman have addressed women's issues this way. Robert Bly is doing the same for men, and I love his book. I consider it a travesty of narrowness that any feminists would oppose the wholeness of men and attack Bly or Iron John because Bly calls for men to integrate their dark, hairy side. Women also need to integrate our dark side! Our social rejection of these shadow qualities is forcing them underground where they will inevitably explode out. We must all, men and women both, resist those powers in the world which would deny us our own soul and our own wholeness. Mythology greatly assists in this task.
One of the most important critiques Bly makes is that modern men are growing up without adequate fathering and particularly without any adequate form of initiation into manhood, and that this problem has gotten worse since the Industrial Revolution when fathers stopped working in the fields and in trades, and went away to work in factories, where their sons couldn't see them work and didn't know or sometimes believe that their fathers contributed anything valuable to the world. Thus Industrial & Technological society placed a rift between fathers and sons. It is likewise true, as the whole realm of ecopsychology also suppports, that not just men but women too suffer from the separation from earth and work with the hands.
The point Bly makes about young men not being provided proper initiation into manhood is EXTREMELY important, and it's just this issue which we see at work in the phenomenon of urban gangs, where young men are basically trying to intitiate each other into manhood, only in a terribly immature and meaningless "Lord of the Flies" way, e.g such as by implying that if you commit such and such a crime, you're a man. Public schools in my view fail young men because they are archetypally more mothering than fathering, and without adequate fathering, young men act out, and no suprise, violence in our schools is a huge problem that's only increasing. Bly says that 20 to 30 percent of young men are growing up in homes without fathers. That's devastating for their development, and also for the rest of us, since young men without direction tend to be much more outwardly destructive than young women (young women, as many women, tend more often to turn their destructive tendencies inward, against themselves)
To appreciate this book it will be necessary that the reader appreciates mythology and our psyche's need for it. Not all will take this perspective or even understand this view. In this area, reading a book about the importance of mythology, such as Campbell's The Power of Myth or Rollo May's The Cry for Myth, or Larsen's The Mythic Imagination, will help provide an orientation to the basic perspectives of Iron John and Jungian-Archetypal psychology.

Robert Bly explores the wild man, the king of the animals, the hairy man, in this expanded exploration of the Grimm's fairy tale of Iron John. Bly makes careful and thoughtful connections between the hairy underwater Iron John and the images of John the Baptist, the wild hairy man of Christiantiy.

One especially helpful aspect of Bly's analysis is that it is through a wound that the male is reborn. Connecting this concept to the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus, he indicates that all men carry a wound from their boyhood and it is by the passing through this wound on to the other side that the man is initiated and becomes whole in his own masculinity and adulthood. Men are often wounded by their fathers during childhood and thus have deep buried feelings of not being good enough to meet the father's expectations or memories of acting foolishly in front of the father. Bly would say that the story of Iron John is that men must find the hidden wild man within them that guides them through the wound into adulthood. The wild man, the hairy man, Iron John, thus becomes a second father and initiates the young man into the world of adult masculinity. In Bly's conception, men must move beyond the wounded state and must explore the wound and move beyond it to be able to experience the full power of masculinity and adulthood. We have all known men who are the sons of smart, wealthy, talented men and the very brilliance, success, and abilities of the father wounds the son. The son is wounded because he will never be as honest, or as giving, or as respected, or as accomplished, or as wealthy, or as famous as their father. Being the son of a successful man is in itself a wounding process. However Bly would say that to be a boy or male adolscent is to experience the wound, all men become wounded, and those that move beyond it experience a new renewed masculine power.

Bly would say that in our post-industrial society, men remain wounded into their 40's because there is no initiation that gives them the new wild father and allows them to move beyond the wound. I am not sure I agree with this. In fact, I think that the US military often is the initiator of many young men in our society, that they are attracted to the life of the warrior so that they may heal the wound inside by entering a world of wild warriors, some of whom are senior fighting men who act as the second father.

Through the poetic works of Blake and Yeats, Bly connects the reader to the archetypical wild hairy man that is the internal second father and potential adult power. Bly points out the many connections to the wild man, including Hermes, Ulysses, and others.

Why is Iron John under water? He is underwater as a clear symbol that he exists in the unconscious of the male mind. We must dive to reach him, we must go into the dark nourishing waters below to find this wild and frightening giant with his power that he can bestoy on any man who is wiling to move beyond childhood and adolscent shame and feelings of inadequacy and to move toward power, energy, and action. When man talks with the wild man, it is about power and strength.

In exploring the myth of Iron John, the young man must be able to steal the key to Iron John's cage of underneath his mother's pillow. This task is essential and means that the boy must betray his mother to become a fully powerful masculine man. Like Hermes, the trickster, he must use his wits to steal the key and unlock the cage of Iron John. He must also have the courage to confront face to face the giant hairy powerful inner masculine force of Iron John. In primitive societies the men put on animal skins and kidnap the boys to initiate them. In our society, no such rescuing of young males by older males occurs and so boys become rude and hostile and obnoxious to their mothers in anger that the older male or males have not initiated them into the world of men. Our society has produced remote distant fathers and their sons resent it.

This is a thoughtful book for men, integrating the thoughts of Jung and others, so as to present a picture of the male reclaiming his whole masculine power.

Iron John is about taking men back, through myth and legend, to the source of their masculinity, and finding a middle path between the greater awareness of the "sensitive new age guy" and the power and vitality of the warrior. According to Bly, the wild man has been prepared to examine where it is he hurts; because of this, he is more like a Zen priest or a shaman than a savage. The wild man is masculinity's highest expression, the savage man its lowest. Mythology beckons us to enter fully into life, with all its blood and tears; the way we achieve full realisation of ourselves is to focus on "one precious thing" (an idea, a person, a quest, a question) and the decision to follow it at any cost is the sign of maturity. When we make a clear choice, the king in us awakens and our power are finally released. If used rightly, the wild energy can become a source of delight to everyone in its refinement. How else can we explain the unconscious admiration for a glorious knight or a man in a starch white uniform and medals? This image represents the civilisation of warrior energy. Appreciation of pain and sorrow, Bly says is as vital to a man's potentiality as is having the ability to soar in the air.