Iron John by Robert Bly explores masculinity through the lens of mythology and psychology. Using the Grimm Brothers’ tale, Bly examines male initiation, emotional depth, and modern struggles. Advocates for reconnecting with archetypal wisdom, embracing vulnerability, and fostering mature masculinity. The book offers insights into personal growth, relationships, and self-discovery.
Stealing the key from under the mothers’ pillow, picking up a golden feather fallen from
the burning breast of the Firebird, finding the Wild Man under the lake water, following
the tracks of a god — these are meant to be taken slowly into the body. They continue to
unfold, once taken in.
Something strange has been happening in a remote area of the forest near the kings’ 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. In time, 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 out there don’t come back. “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 come back to the pond to bucket out the water. (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.
Some men have already done this work, and the Hairy Man has been brought up from the pond in their psyches, and lives in the courtyard. “In the courtyard” suggest that he individual or the culture has brought him into a sunlit place where all can see him. That is itself some advance over keeping the Hairy Man in a cellar, where many elements in every culture want him to be. But, of course, in either place, he’s still in a cage.
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 associates 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.
” Contact with Iron John requires a willingness to descend into the male psyche and accept what’s dark down there, including the nourishing dark. “
One day the King’s eight years old son is playing in the courtyard with the golden ball he loves, and it rolls into the Wild Man’s cage. If the young boy wants the ball back, he’s going to have to approach the Hairy Man and ask him for it. But this is going to be a problem.
The golden ball reminds us of that unity of personality we had as children — a kind of radiance, or wholeness, before we split into male and female, rich and poor, bad and good. The ball is golden, as the sun is, and round. Like the sun, it gives off a radiant energy from the inside.
All of us, whether boys or girls, lose something around the age of eight. If we still have the golden ball in kindergarten, we lose it in grade school. Whether we are male or female, once the golden ball is gone, we spend the rest of our lives trying to get it back.
The first stage in retrieving the ball, I think, is to accept — firmly, definitely— that the ball has been lost.
So where is the golden ball?
Speaking metaphorically, we could say that the sixties culture told men they would find their golden ball in sensitivity, receptive, cooperation, and non-aggressiveness. But many men give up all aggressiveness and still did not find the golden ball.
The Iron John story says that a man can’t expect to find the golden ball in the feminine realm, because that’s not where the ball is. A bridegroom secretly asks his wife to give him back the golden ball. I think she’d give it to him if she could, because most women in my experience do not try to block men’s growth. But she can’t give it to him, because she doesn’t have it. What’s more, she’d lost her own golden ball and can’t fin that either.
Oversimplifying, we could say that the Fifties male always wants a woman to return his golden ball. The Sixties and Seventies man, with equal lack of success, asks his interior feminine to return it.
The Iron John story proposes that the golden ball lies within the magnetic field of the Wild Man. It is protected by the instinctive one who’s underwater and who has been there we don’t know how long.
7 years — The boy is so scary to approach the Wild Man and runs off. He doesn’t even answer.
18 years pass now.
25 years — On “the second day” the man goes back to the Wild Man and says, “Could I have my ball back?” The Wild Man says, “Yes, if you let me out of the cage.” The man walks away the second time also without saying a word.
Actually, just return to the Wild Man a second time is a marvelous thing; some men never come back at all. The twenty five years old man hears the sentence all right, but by now he has two Toyotas and a mortgage, a wife and a child. How can he let the Wild Man out of the cage? He can’t.
Jung remarked all successful requests to the psyche involve deals. The psyche likes to make deals. If part of you, for example, is immensely lazy and doesn’t want to do any work, a flat-out New Year’s resolution won’t do any good. The whole thing will go better if you say to the lazy part: “You let me work for an hour, then I’ll let you be a slob for an hour — deal?” So in Iron John, a deal is made: the Wild Man agrees to give the golden ball back if the boy opens the cage.
35 years — Feeling overworked, alienated, empty, he asks the Wild Man with full heart this time: “Could I have my golden ball back?”
“Yes,” the Wild Man says, “If you let me out of the cage.” Now something marvelous happens in the story. The boy speaks to the Wild Man, and continues the conversation. He says, “Even if I wanted to let you out, I couldn’t, because I don’t know where the key is.”
By the time we are 35 we don’t know where the key is. It isn’t exactly that we have forgotten — we never knew where it was in the first place.
The story says that when the King locked up the Wild Man, “he gave the key into the keeping of the Queen,” but we were only about seven then, and in any case our father never told us what he had done with it. So where is the key?
“It’s around the boys’s neck?”
— No.
“It’s hidden in Iron John’s cage?”
— No.
“It’s inside the golden ball?”
— No.
“It’s inside the castle… on a hook inside the Treasure Room?”
— No.
“It’s in the Tower. It’s a hook high up on the wall?”
— No.
The Wild Man replies, “The key is under your mother’s pillow.”
A mother’s job is, after all, to civilize the boy, and so it is natural for her to keep the key.
Getting the key back from under the mother’s pillow is a troublesome task. Freud, taking advice from a Greek play, says that a man should not skip over the mutual attraction between himself and his mother if he wants a long life. The mother’ pillow, after all, lies in the bed near where she makes love to your father. Moreover, there’s another implication attached to the pillow.
Michael Meade, the myth teller, once remarked to me that the pillow is also the place where the mother stores all her expectations for you. “My son the doctor.” “My son the Jungian analyst.” “My son the Wall Street genius.” But very few mother dreams: “My son the Wild Man.
The boy goes to the mother and say, “Mom, could I have the key back? I want to let the Wild Man out!”
The mother says, “Come over and give Mommy a kiss.”
Mother are intuitively aware of what would happen if he got the key: they would lose their boys. The possessiveness that mothers typically exercise in sons — not to mention the possessiveness that fathers typically exercises on daughters — can never be underestimated.
” No mother worth her salt would give the key anyway. If a son can’t steal it, he doesn’t
deserve it. “
One day, he stole the key, brought up it to the Wild Man’s cage, and opened the lock. As he did so, he pinched one of his fingers. The Wild Man is then free at last, and it’s clear that he will go back to his own forest, far from “the castle.”
Getting the key varies with each man, but it to say democratic or nonlinear approaches will not carry the day. One rather stiff young man danced one night for about six hours, vigorously, and in the morning remarked, “I got some of the key back last night.” Another man regained the key when he acted like a wholehearted Trickster for the first time in his life, remaining fully conscious of the tricksterism. Another man stole the key when he confronted his family and refused to carry any longer the shame for the whole family. We could spend days talking of how to steal the key in a practical way. The story leaves everything open.
“If they come home and find you gone, they will beat me.”
The Wild Man says, in effect, “That’s good thinking. You’d better come with me.”
So the Wild Man lifts the boy up on his shoulders and together they go off into the woods.
he moment the boy leaves with Iron John is the moment in Ancient Greek life when the priest of Dionysus accept a young man as a student.
” Iron John says to the boy, “ You’ll never see your mother and father again. But I have treasures, more than you’ll ever need. “
When the Wild Man had reached the dark forest once more, he took the boy from his shoulders, put him down on the earth, and said, “You will never see your mother and father again, but I will keep you with me, for you have set me free, and I feel compassion for you. If you do everything as I tell you, all will go well. I have much gold and treasure, more than anyone else in the world.”
The Wild Man prepared a bed of moss for the boy to sleep on, and in the morning took him to a spring. “Do you see this golden spring? It is clear as crystal, and full of light. I want you to sit beside it and make sure that nothing falls into it, because if that happens, it will wrong the spring. I’ll return each evening to see if you’ve obey my order.”
The boy sat down at the spring’s edge. Occasionally he glimpsed a golden fish or a golden snake, and he took care to let nothing fall in. But as he sat there, his wounded finger was so painful that, without intending to, he dipped it into the water. He pulled it out instantly, but he saw that the finger had turned to gold, and no matter how much he washed it, the washing did no good.
Iron John came back that evening and said, “Anything happen with the spring today?”
The boy held his finger behind his back to keep Iron John from seeing it, and said, “No, nothing at all.” “Ah, you’ve dipped your finger in the spring!”, said the Wild Man. “We can let it pass this once, but don’t let that happen again.”
Early the next morning, the boy sat again at the spring watching over it. His finger still hurt and after a while, he ran his hand up through his hair. One hair, alas, came loose from his head and fell into the spring. He immediately reached down and pulled it out, but the hair had already turned to gold.
The moment Iron John returned, he knew what had happened. “You’ve let a hair fall into the spring. I’ll allow it this time, but if it happens a third time it will dishonor the spring, and you will not be able to stay with me any longer.”
The third day, as the boy sat by the spring, he was determined, no matter how much his finger hurt him, not to let it move. Time passed slowly, and he began gazing at the reflection of his face in the water. He got the desire to look straight into his own eyes, and in doing this, he leaned over farther and farther. All at once his long hair fell down over his forehead and into the water. He threw his head back but now all his hair, every bit, had turned gold, and it shone as if it were the sun itself. Now the boy was frightened!
He took out a kerchief and covered his head so that the Wild Man wouldn’t know what had happened. But when Iron John arrived home, he knew immediately. “Take that kerchief off your head,” he said. The golden hair then came tumbling down over the boy’s shoulder, and the boy had to be silent.
“You can’t stay here any longer because you didn’t make it through the trial. Go out into the world now and there you will learn what poverty is. I see no evil in your heart, however, and I wish you well, so I’ll give you this gift: whenever you are in trouble, come to the edge of the forest and shout, ‘Iron John, Iron John!’ I’ll come to the edge of the forest and help you. My power is great, greater than you believe, and I have gold and silver in abundance.
Then the King’s son left the forest, and walked by beaten and unbeaten paths ever onwards until at length he reached a great city. There he looked for work, but could find none, and he had learnt nothing by which he could help himself. At length, he went to the palace, and asked if they would take him in. The people about court did not at all know what use they could make of him, but they liked him, and told him to stay. At length the cook took him into his service, and said he might carry wood and water, and rake the cinders together.
Once when it happened that no one else was at hand, the cook ordered the boy to carry the food to the royal table, but because the boy did not want his golden hair to be seen, he kept his tarboosh on. Such a thing as that had never happened in the King’s presence, and he said, “When you come to the royal table you must take your cap off.” The boy answered: “Ah, Lord, I cannot; I have a sore place on my head.” The King called the cook up, scolded him, and demanded how he could have taken such a boy as that into his service; and told him to fire the boy and get him out of the castle.
The golden hair helps us to survive in adolescence, but it is more an instrusion than a help, and the boy says it quite accurately: “I have a sore on my head.” Such hair is a taste of heaven, but we don’t know what to do with it when we meet the King — whether to let it show and brag about it, or hide it and be devious.
Everyone wants to be with “the King.” We know how intensely young girls wanted to be in the presence of Elvis, the King, or more recently to be near “Prince”, or are willing to do anything to be invited to a White House party. Everyone wants to be in the presence of “the King.” The Dalai Lama acts out “the King” for many people now, for some replacing even the pope.
The hunger for the father transmutes into the hunger for the King.
But the story says that having golden hair doesn’t give leave to remain in his chambers.
Perhaps each of us has taken some sort of kitchen job, got acquainted with ashes, even endured a katabasis, but that doesn’t mean we can have a long stay with the King. The guards let us in and escort us out again. That is what the story says.
Why do we have so much hunger for “the King?” And why, in our twenties and thirties, are the visits so short?
If the “King” accepts us we may find ourselves in an apprenticeship that we don’t have the discipline to maintain. Sometimes the concern of the “King” is genuine, and we say the wrong thing… we want praise and validation so badly that when we get confused the wrong thing pops out — and we retreat, hopelessly embarrassed.
The cook, however, had pity on the youngster and exchanged him for the gardener’s boy.
Now the boy had to set out plants in the garden, and water them, chop with hoe and spade, and let wind and bad weather do what they wished.
Once in summer, when he was working in the garden by himself, it got so hot that he pulled his head covering off, so that the breeze would cool his head. When the sun touched his head, his hair glowed and blazed out so brightly that beams of sunlight went all the way into the bedroom of the King’s daughter, and she leapt up to see what that could be. She spied the boy outside, and called to him, “Boy, bring me a batch of flowers!” He quickly put his tarboosh back on, picked some wild flowers for her, and tied them in a bunch.
As he started up the stairs with them, the gardener met him, and said, “What are you doing bringing the King’s daughter such ordinary flowers? Get moving and pick another bouquet, the best we have and the most beautiful.” “No, no,” the boy answered, “the wild flowers have stronger fragrance and they will please her more.”
When the boy walked into her room, the King’s daughter said, “Take your head thing off; it isn’t proper for you to wear it in my presence.” He replied, “I don’t dare do that. I have the mange, you know.” She however grabbed the tarboosh and yanked it off, his golden hair tumbled down around his shoulders, and it was magnificent to look at. He started out the door at a run, but she held him by the arm and gave him a handful of gold coins. He took them and left, but put o stock in them; in fact he brought the coins to the gardener and said, “I’m giving these to your children — they can use them to play with.”
The next day the King’s daughter again called the boy to her and told him to bring her some more wild flowers. When he walked in with them, she reached for his little hat and would have torn it away, but he held on to it with both hands. Once more she gave him a handful of gold coins, but he refused to keep them and gave them to the gardener as play things for his children.
The third day things went the same way: she couldn’t manage to get his hat off, and he wouldn’t accept the gold coins.
Not long after, the country was swept up in war. The King gathered his forces and was not positive that he could succeed against the enemy, who was powerful and retained a larger army. The gardener’s boy said: “I am quite grown now, and I will go to war, if you’ll just give me a horse. “The other men laughed and declared: “When we’ve gone, you go look in the stable — we’ll certainly
leave a horse behind for you.”
When they had all gone, the boy went into the barn and led a horse out, it was lame in one leg, and walked hippy, happily. He climbed on it and rode to the dark forest.
When he came to its edge, he called three time: “Iron John,” so loud that it echoed through the trees.
In a moment the Wild Man arrived and said, “What is it you want?”
“I want a strong war-horse because I intend to go to the war.”
“You will receive that, and more than you have asked for as well.”
The Wild Man turned then and went back into the woods, and not long afterwards, a stableboy came out of the trees leading a war-horse that blew air through its nostrils and was not easy to hold in. Running along after the horse came a large band of warriors, entirely clothed in iron, with their swords shining in the sun. The boy turned his three-legged nag over to the stableboy, mounted the new horse and rode out at the head of the soldiers. By the time he neared the battlefield, a large part of the King’s men had already been killed, and not much more was needed to bring them to total defeat.
The boy and his iron band rode there at full speed, galloped on the enemy like a hurricane, and struck down every one that opposed them. The enemy turned to flee, but the boy kept after them and pursued them to the last man. Then, however, instead of returning to the King, the boy took his band a roundabout way back to the forest, and called Iron John out.
“What do you want?” The Wild Man asked.
“You can take your horse and your men back, and give me again the three-legged nag.”
So it all happened as he requested, and he rode the happily hop back home.
When the King returned to his castle, his daughter went to him and congratulated him on his victory.
“It wasn’t me,” he said, “who managed that, but a strange knight and his warrior band who arrived to help.”
The daughter asked who this strange knight was, but the King didn’t know, and added: “He galloped off in pursuit of the enemy, and that’s the last I saw of him.” The girl applied to the gardener and inquired about his boy, but he laughed and said, “He is just now arrived home on his three-legged nag. The farm help made fun of him, shouting: ‘Guess who’s here? Moopygoop.’ Then they said, ‘You’ve been under a lilac bush, eh? How was it?’ He said back to them, ‘I fought very well; if I hadn’t been there, who knows what would have happened?’ They all fell over themselves laughing.”
We know that our society produces a plentiful supply of boys, but seems to produce fewer and fewer men. Our culture have no ideas at all on how to produce men, and we let it all happen unconsciouly while we look away to Wall Street and hope for the best.
First, bonding with the mother and separation from the mother.
We do the first moderately well, and the second not well at all, particularly in the suburbs and the ghetto.
Second, bonding with the father and separation from the father.
We often postpone the father bonding until we are fifty or so, and the separation still has to be done.
Third, the arrival of the male mother, or the mentor, who helps a man rebuild the bridge to his own greatness or essence.
Fourth, apprenticeship to a hurricane energy such as the Wild Man, or the Warrior, or Dionysus, or Apollo. When he has done well, the young man receives a drink from the waters of the god.
Fifth, the marriage with the Holy Woman or the Queen.
Iron John represents the adult mentor who reconnects the boy to his greatness and to his “Gold Head.” Iron John as Wild Man is also himself the divine energy from whose water the boy is allowed to drink.
The King say to his daughter: “I’ll arrange a great festival that will last three days, and you will be the one who throws out the golden apple. Perhaps the mysterious knight will appear.”
After the announcement of the festival had been made, the young man rode to the forest’s edge and called for Iron John.
“What do you need?” He asked.
“I want to catch the golden apple the King’s daughter is goung throw.”
“There’s no problem: you virtually have it in your hands rifht now,” Iron John replied. I’ll provide you more: red armor for the occasion, and a powerful chestnut horse.”
The young man galloped to the field at the proper time, rode in among the other knights, and no one recognized him. The King’s daughter stepped forward, and she threw a golden apple into the groups of men; and he was the man who caught it. However, having caught it, he galloped off and was gone.
When the second day arrived, Iron John had him fitted out with white armor, and provided for him a white horse. This time also the apple fell into his hhands; once more he did not pause for even an instant, but galloped off.
That made the King angry, and the King said, “This behavior is not allowed; he is supposed to ride over to me and report his name.”
‘If he catches the apple the third time, and gallops off again,” he told his men, “chase him. What’s more, if he refuses to return, give him a blow; use your sword.”
For the third day of the festival, Iron John gave the young man black armor and a black horse. That afternoon the young man caught the apple also. But this time, when he rode away with it, the King’s men galloped after him, and no one got close enough to give him a leg wound with the end of his sword. The young man escaped; but his horse made such a powerfull leap to do so that the young man’s helmet fell off, and everyone could see that he had golden hair. The king’s men rode home and told the King everything that had happened.
Three themes or details in this passage seem to demand attetion here: the meaning of the golden apples, the curious nature of this festival, and the sequence of three colors insisted on for the horses.
The golden apple in this story, as in many other stories, hint that the events are happening in some special space or time, that they are connected with ritual.
The apple associates with immortality, and we know that some young men, when about to be sacrificed in the Greek ritual of Adonis, were given a golden apple as a passport to paradise.
We recall that the Queen in “Snow White” was sewing one day near an ebony window frame as the snow fell outside; and when she pricked her finger, three drops of blood fell on the snow. She said, “I want a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as this window frame.” The fairy-tale hero or heroine, whether in Russian, German, or Finnish tales, who chances to see a drop of red blood fall from a black raven into the white snow, sinks immediately into a yogic trance. Thata suggest the vast power red, black, and white have or have had over humam consciouness up through the Middle Ages.