Men and Myth

The mythopoeic men's movement was created when Robert Bly discovered that telling fairy stories to men could help them to consider the issues of their lives on a deeper level than was otherwise possible. A mythic vocabulary is more easily learned than a technical one, but there are other benefits to this approach as well. The story of Iron John was the first story Bly used, and became the center of his bestselling book of the same title.

I am quite thankful for how I was introduced to this story. A week before this happened, an older friend of mine had been reading the book Iron John and either read or recounted the story from chapter one to Dr. Rod Rosenbladt. I went to Coco's with Dr. Rosenbladt and he recounted the story and offered some personal commentary. Well, I was hooked. To have my spiritual father and mentor tell this story to me at a critical time gave it a resonance that I'm sure went beyond what a typical reader would have found. And I think a typical reader would have found much to resonate with.

As time has gone on since then, I have seen two things happen. One was that Bly's men's movement got eclipsed for a while in the media by the Christian Men's movement. I had no interest in the latter. I was involved in Christians United for Reformation (CURE), a group of men who were involved together in Theology. I didn't need to add what appeared to be a bunch of pseudoevents from Promise Keeper's into my life. Don't get me wrong. I think male connection is such a powerful thing that many may have benefitted greatly from their activities. But I think the space they created for that mattered much more than the content. My life had a lot of space already for the kinds of connetions they fostered. In addition to being eclispsed in the media by the Christian men's movement, Bly's movement was also put under scrutiny for being either a reaction to the Woman's Movement, which it was not, or for being just a bunch of guys running through the woods beating drums. Well, the latter sounds like it couldn't be a bad idea. But from what I saw of the gatherings in the Bill Moyers special, the use of myth was a deeper part of what was done. And it is the mythic that I think needs greater attention. This was not just a bunch of overcivilized men going tribal, as feminists feared.

The mythic is a funny dimension of human culture to try to characterize. In the past, it was a much greater part of culture. In our own time, it would be easy to say that it had fallen on hard times. Except that it is much more widely recognized now than, say, fifty years ago. Great mythographers have exposed generations to the lost power of myth. There was James Frazer in the nineteenth century, W.B. Yeats in the early twentieth, J.R.R. Tolkien at mid century, and Joseph Campbell a little later. My own generation grew up in the shadow of Narnia, Middle Earth, and Luke Skywalker. This was a far cry from the mundane concerns of generations before us.

The mythic has greater popular exposure. But what do we do with it? We enjoy the myths as stories to be sure. Perhaps we see that they tell us about our lives to a degree. Sam and Frodo fight evil as we fight it. Their journey is much like ours. Their journey tells us what we can expect, even in cubicleland. But the description, even where it is true, is a different kind of description from that of Dilbert or Office Space. Comic treatments such as those are meant to deflate the importance of the bosses. Mythic treatments magnify the stakes. We know this much.

But the mythic has another kind of hold on consciousness. Mythic time is not like ordinary time. We feel like we're entering another realm when we go into it. Bly knows this. He makes use of sacred space and sacred time. He doesn't think that these dimensions are the sole property of religion. And current religious practice suggests this is abandoned property even if it belonged to religion. And when we enter this realm, we find that we are broader beings than we imagined.

One writer who gets this is G.K. Chesterton. His piece "Christmas and the Aesthetes" is must reading. (And it's a good time of year to do so.) It can be found in his book Heretics, which is not so much about formal heresies, as much as modern people whose ideas fall short of Christianity. Unlike an ancient apologist, Chesterton tells you all the places that these writers get things right, and expresses gratitude for that fact. (Generally, each heretic is a sage.) Chesterton explains that "A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive." And I think that mythic work will take us to where we feel more of a need to be what we are.

Mythic work invovles rituals that give us a sense of what we are on a gut level. Bly once described one where the men were buried in the ground with only their heads sticking out. It gave them a certain sense of the earth.

I am drawn to this kind of thing. When I became Lutheran I found that having the Lord's Supper at the center of the service changed how I perceived all kinds of things. It was a reality whose centrality I had missed growing up. No amount of teaching from the pulpit could ever have registered on the same level as what happened when I would go forward with the congregation to receive grace.

But I think there are secular uses of this as well. In fact, I think we could speak of the mythic nature of much of modern life. The "myth" of schooling for one. John Taylor Gatto tells us of the "hidden curriculum" of compulsory schooling. The kinds of things students unwittingly learn as they go to school day-after-day, year-after-year, no matter what this or that teacher might teach under this or that stated curriculum. (For instance, that nothing is ever worth spending more than an hour on.) We need to be aware of these things.