July 2007
Thursday
12 - Tuesday 17
July
2007
The Masculine Sequence
Robert Bly writes:
"If the Great Mother sequence lays out the feminine mysteries of life and death, and the alchemists' sequence lays out a neutral sequence, true for both men and women, then we could say that Iron John's sequence lays out the masculine mysteries of wounding and growth. This road begins with red and ends with black."
A great Russian fairy story called "Prince Ivan and the Firebird" provides a vivid scene for the start of the red. A young warrior rides along and suddenly sees on the forest floor a feather "that has fallen from the burning breasts of the great Firebird." metaphorically, it is a red feather.
His horse advises him not to pick it up, for if he does, it will bring trouble. The young man picks it up anyway. Since the feather has fallen from the breast of the Firebird, we know it is connected to the heart - it is burning, fiery. It calls to the man as a vocation or as initiation calls. The Middle Ages paid a lot of attention to Iron John's sequence, and we can see this movement from the Red Night, to the White Night to the Black Knight clearly in the adventures of Parsifal.
According to Bly, we "try these days to move young men by compulsory education directly from childhood into the White Night." The danger of this is that the man has not lived "in the red." He often sets up a false war with some concretized dragon, such as poverty or drugs.
If we take nothing else away from the Iron John story, we could usefully take this idea that the young male moves from red intensity to white engagement to black humanity. Each man is given three horses that we ride at various times of our lives; we fall off and get back on. We should not consider one horse better than the other; all we could say is that none should be skipped. Church ministers often find themselves forcibly confined to white because they skipped red, and their congregations won't let them go back to it. Then they cannot go forward into black.
When a person moves into the black, that process amounts to bringing all the shadow material, which has been for years projected out there on the faces of bad men and women, communists, witches, and tyrants, back inside. That process could be called retrieving and eating the shadow. It takes a long time to move into the black. How many years pass before a man finds the dark parts of himself that he threw away? When he does find those parts, and retrieves them, other people will begin to trust him.
- Robert Bly
Personal notes:
For many years I have personally motivated young students to find and embrace their shadow self, but now, after much research and this journey as Indigo Boy, I realise that they are way too young around the age of twenty-one, to really access and embrace their shadows, or their dark sides.
Indigo Boy, 12 - 17 July, Cape Town
www.chrisdiedericks.co.za/indigoboy/
copyright
2006/7
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