Iron John (Robert Bly)

One of the fairy tales that speak of a third possibility for men, a third mode, is a story called “Iron John” or “Iron Hans.” Though it was first set down by the Grimm brothers around 1820, this story could be ten or twenty thousand years old.

As the story starts, we find out that something strange has been happening in a remote area of the forest near the king’s castle.

When hunters go into this area, they disappear and never come back.

Twenty others go after the first group and do not come back. Intime, people begin to get the feeling that there’s something weird in that part of the forest, and they “don’t go there anymore.”

One day an unknown hunter shows up at the castle and says, “What can I do? Anything dangerous to do around here?” The King says: “Well, I could mention the forest, but there’s a problem. The people who go there don’t come back. The return rate is not good. “That’s just the sort of thing I like,” the young man says. So he goes into the forest and,interestingly, he goes there alone, taking only his dog. The young man and his dog wander about in the forest and they go past a pond. Suddenly a hand reaches up from the water, grabs the dog, and pulls it down.

The young man doesn’t respond by becoming hysterical. He merely says, “This must be the place.”

Fond as he is of his dog and reluctant as he is to abandon him, the hunter goes back to the castle, rounds up three more men with buckets, and then comes back to the pond to bucket out the water. Anyone who’s ever tried it will quickly note that such bucketing is very slow work.

In time, what they find, lying on the bottom of the pond, is a large man covered with hair from head to foot. The hair is reddish – it looks a little like rusty iron. They take the man back to the castle, and imprison him. The King puts him in an iron cage in the courtyard, calls him “Iron John,” and gives the key into the keeping of the Queen.

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Let’s stop the story here for a second.

When a contemporary man looks down into his psyche, he may, if conditions are right, find under the water of his soul, lying in an area no one has visited for a long time, an ancient hairy man. The mythological systems associate hair with the instinctive and the sexual and the primitive. What I’m suggesting, then, is that every modern male has, lying at the bottom of his psyche, a large, primitive being covered with hair down to his feet. Making contact with this Wild Man is the step the Eighties male or the Nineties male has yet to take. That bucketing-out process has yet to begin in our

contemporary culture. As the story suggests very delicately, there’s more than a little fear around this hairy man, asthere is around all change. When a man begins to develop the receptive side of himself and gets over his initial skittishness, he usually finds the experience to be wonderful.