So what about the men?

A conversation about archetypes of the mature masculine

I’d planned, for this weekend, another post about the psychology and mythology of midlife, but something happened which hijacked my thought patterns. Just over a week ago I appeared at the Oxford Literary Festival; I gave a talk about Hagitude. Just one man sat, attentive, on the edge of the sea of women. After forty-five minutes during which I wove together a series of stories populated by the funny, feisty older women in European myth and folklore who I love so much, he asked a question: ‘What about the men?’

It's a very good question indeed, but I’ve never really believed that it’s mine to answer. In my nonfiction I’ve always been scrupulous about writing within the realms of my own lived experience as a woman, and I hate it more than I can say when I read books or listen to talks and performances by men who tell and ‘interpret’ women’s stories, and who are kind enough then to suggest to us ways in which our lives as women might be improved. I’ve never wanted to do the same to them. But this Oxford session wasn’t the first in which I’d been asked such a question, and by the time I’d driven north for four and a half hours along endless, soulless motorways to reach home the next day, I was beginning to wonder whether it might finally be time to make a stab at expressing a more thoughtful – and less evasive – response to it. It’s easy to say, Well, if the men want their stories, let them go and find them – but the knowledge of psychology, myth and folklore that I’ve acquired over the past several decades isn’t restricted to women, and it seems a pity to hold back information and ideas that might be useful.

In offering the thoughts that follow, though, I’d like to stress that I’m writing this to encourage conversation and ideas around this subject, not to attempt to interpret men’s stories for them. Nor is what follows in any way definitive. I’ve spent a full five years researching the stories of older women in European myth and folklore which appeared in Hagitude and will appear in Wise Women in October, poring through vast numbers of old volumes and internet archives. I clearly haven’t done the same for stories about older men and nor do I intend to; the focus of my work will always be women’s stories. So again: this is just an opening.

I do have some male readers, so I’d be eternally grateful if you felt it possible to respond to this article with your own thoughts and ideas. To encourage as many men as possible to contribute, I’ve left the paywall off this one.

For my women readers, who are in the majority: most of us have men we’re close to – fathers, husbands, sons, male partners or friends, work colleagues – so hopefully this will be interesting to you too. The stories men tell themselves about who they are have always impacted women, and always will. Given the ways in which we have been damaged by the old stories, we have some part to play, I think, in the ways they might be transformed.

Edited to make this point, which kept coming up in the comments. When we talk about masculine and feminine archetypes there is no exclusivity. Jung, for example, firmly believed that we all have an inner feminine and an inner masculine; stories and archetypes have medicine for whoever might need it. But some stories and archetypes particularly highlight women’s lived experience, and some stories and archetypes particularly highlight men’s lived experience. And there is no problem at all, and no exclusivity, in recognising that and working with it. I’ve written before in my books that stories aren’t in the business of excluding. In the end, though, all stories and archetypes shed a light on what it is to be human, in all our many searchings and complexities.

Image by Alan Lee

Why aren’t there more studies of the masculine in fairy tales?

It’s well known among fairy-tale scholars that there are hardly any studies of the masculine, or of male archetypes, in fairy tales. This is in good part because feminist fairy-tale studies (quite a significant field) developed in opposition to the belief (back in the day) that masculine experience was the norm, or was the only experience that was important. You know: the Hero’s Journey and all that blah. Well, it turned out that women wanted to find themselves in fairy tales, and they wanted to find themselves, themselves. It’s also the case that men seem not to be quite as addicted to fairy tales as women are – or at least, if they are, they don’t admit it because fairy tales sound sissy. I’m not entirely sure what the truth of it is.

Robert Bly’s Iron John, which came out in 1990, around the same time that Women Who Run with the Wolves was published, was the first major book-length study of the masculine in fairy tales – or rather, one fairy tale, from the Brothers Grimm. Bly’s book inspired the ‘mythopoetic men’s movement’ and was loved by many men, but it’s worth pointing out that he’s been criticised by folklorists for greatly distorting the story in order to make his points (does that matter? I have mixed feelings) and also for a complete lack of acknowledgement of or consideration for the ills that men can cause if they’re not properly, as he suggests, initiated. (Or even, actually, if they are.) It focuses on just one archetype: the Wild Man.

Also around that time, Jungian analysts Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette wrote a book called King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the mature masculine. I’ve read it, and found myself underwhelmed. They focus on the four masculine archetypes which they believe to be fundamental to the male psyche: the King (just and creative ordering), the Warrior (aggressive but nonviolent action), the Magician (initiation and transformation) and the Lover (the energy that connects men to others and the wider world).

There really isn’t much else. In 1993, psychotherapist Allan Chinen wrote a book called Beyond the Hero, which was a collection of fairy tales from around the world that he believed offered more compelling models of manhood. It has a few interesting insights but most of his stories are non-European, and it always makes me a bit uncomfortable to work with stories that aren’t part of my own native culture, because I do not know their connotations and so fear misusing them. Which would be disrespectful both to the stories and to the cultures they came from. Also, he doesn’t analyse the stories in an archetypal fashion, which I feel helps to organise them and make them more useful.

If any of you know any other good book-length studies, please do share in the comments.

There are, similarly and probably for the reasons already discussed, few fairy-tale retellings by men. (I don’t mean works of fantasy, sort-of-fairy-tale fiction, just retellings and reimaginings of traditional fairy tales.) But I do heartily recommend a beautiful collection by the brilliant American novelist Michael Cunningham: A Wild Swan, and other tales. Here’s a paragraph from his reimagining of ‘The Wild Swans’, which we worked with in this month’s Fairy Tale Salon (for paid subscribers); the ‘twelfth brother’ here is, of course, the brother whose nettle shirt was missing an arm, and so when he was transformed back into his human shape, he was left with just one human arm and one swan wing:

‘The twelfth brother can be found, most nights, in one of the bars on the city’s outer edges, the ones that cater to people who were only partly cured of their curses, or not cured at all. There’s the three-hundred-year-old woman who wasn’t specific enough when she spoke to the magic fish, and found herself crying, “No, wait, I meant alive and young forever,” into a suddenly empty sea. There’s the crownletted frog who can’t seem to truly love any of the women willing to kiss him, and break the spell. There’s the prince who’s spent years trying to determine the location of the comatose princess he’s meant to revive with a kiss, and has lately been less devoted to searching mountain and glen, more prone to bar-crawling, given to long stories about the girl who got away. In such bars, a man with a single swan wing is considered lucky.’

There’s a brilliant story from the perspective of Rumpelstiltskin and there are even a few women: a fascinating reimagining of the perspective of the ‘Hansel and Gretel’ witch, for example. Much recommended for all.

A random selection of archetypal older men

As Jungians would have it, men might well need, as part of their development, to connect with their inner feminine (the anima), but that’ll be no use at all if it’s not grounded in a healthy version of their inner masculine. So here are just a few characters and archetypes who seem to me to have something to offer in that respect. When you’re thinking about them, remember that all archetypes have a shadow energy, and so don’t conflate the positive and the negative sides of the archetype. There’s a shadow King who’s a tyrant, a shadow Warrior who’s a bully and rapist. That doesn’t mean the archetype itself is a bad one: it just means that you have to be very careful how you embody it.

I’m working here specifically with archetypes of the mature masculine, just as in Hagitude I was concerned with the mature feminine and the second half of women’s lives. Again, this isn’t remotely a definitive list – it’s really just a set of very early notes based on ideas I already have – but I do hope it’s the beginning of a conversation, and maybe the beginning of a bigger project. Who knows. Again, if you can think of relevant other archetypes (with specific myths or fairy tales attached to them) please share in the comments.

Alchemist

I wrote in Hagitude about the Alchemist as an example of the Medial Woman archetype* and as the mistress of transformation. There are, of course, alchemists who are men. (They’re better known, but not always as influential.) The best-known image of the alchemist is of an old man with a long white beard, black-robed and presiding over arcane contraptions in a medieval laboratory. The archetype reflects the alchemical process, which is about the transmutation of matter – and of energy. It’s about stripping the material that’s being alchemised back to the bone: back to its essential core. Men too can ask the question I posed in this context in Hagitude: when everything you once thought defined you has been stripped away, what is left? This archetype, then, is about growth, transformation, purification (the latter not, of course, in a religious sense). I don’t have a specific myth or story to offer about an alchemist, so am breaking my own rules of engagement here, but it’s such a well-known archetype and so very relevant to the profound transformations that happen to all of us at midlife that I wanted to be sure to include it.

Shapeshifter

I’ve noted before that whereas shapeshifting in female characters in fairy tales is usually seen as something quite natural to them, a man who shapeshifts is pretty much always doing so as a consequence of a curse: he’ll be the victim of a spell, usually cast by a woman, and it’s usually the fairy tale’s heroine who saves him from it. If they’re not cursed, they’re evil, like werewolves and vampires, and the Scottish each-uisge (water horse)..

There are male shapeshifters in European mythology, too, but they’re not usually especially benign either. The Greek god Proteus was famous for it and gave his name to the adjective protean. Zeus was known to turn into a swan, or a bull, or an eagle, or even a shower of gold in order more easily to rape whichever new woman he had in his sights. Looking to the Norse tradition, Loki takes the form of a mare and she-wolf, and shapeshifting is quite common in sagas such as the Volsunga – but rarely for benign ends.

How can we transform this archetype into something more positive? Because where women shapeshift it’s usually natural, and mostly (though of course not always) benign, whereas the male shapeshifter tends to do it to kill or to have power over someone else. I’m thinking now of a couple of great characters in Irish myth – though they’re not quite shapeshifters, it’s just that they took animal forms in previous incarnations. And so Tuan mac Cairill was a recluse who retained his memories from previous incarnations, going back to before the Great Flood. Through a series of animal transformations (stag, boar and salmon) he survived into Christian times. Fintan ma Bóchra similarly survived the Flood in the form of a salmon; he then turned into an eagle, then a hawk and then back to human form.

Magician

Here, we might think of Merlin (originally Myrddin) in the Arthurian legends and romances.

We might also think of the Magician in the eponymous tarot card. In front of him are various objects which represent the four suits of the tarot: he is clutching a wand and on the table before him is a pentacle, a cup and a sword.  With his right hand he’s pointing to the sky, and with the left, to the earth. Perhaps he’s representing the Hermetic maxim, ‘As above, so below.’ In a sense he’s a lightning rod: the position of his hands and the presence of the wand suggest he is focused on manifesting the spiritual into the physical world. He’s a channel for energy, grounding it. He seems to represent the notion of channelling your will in a specific direction, creating something tangible from an idea.

The Smith

I’ve long been a fan of smith characters in folk and fairy tales. Again, this is a profoundly creative archetype, but the Smith knows how to manage, work with and create from that most dangerous of elements: fire. He creates magical items. He’s also the person the heroine will go to so that he might, for example, make her a pair of magic shoes which will enable her to scale the impenetrable glass mountain. (In ‘The Black Bull of Norroway’, one of my favourite Scottish fairy tales.) It takes a smith to make a myth, to quote a line from a Carolyn Hillyer song, and I’ve always thought that we should spend more time focusing on the Smith.

Warrior

The (seasoned) warrior, in contrast to the Knight who’s off looking for glory and a good fight, is above all protective. His work is defence – of people, of the land. He’s not a destroyer: rather, he protects and shields. He also represents duty, an old-fashioned concept which, back in the day, didn’t mean something you disliked but did anyway because you thought you must: it was a joyous calling which you followed out of love, not hate, and which wasn’t necessarily seen to be a sacrifice. The Warrior of course represents courage – and also discipline.

King

In old Irish traditions, the King was associated not only with the land, but with society. During the reign of a king favoured by Sovereignty, the goddess of the land, the land would be fertile and prosperous and the tribe would be victorious in war. But if the king didn’t match up to the goddess’ expectations, he didn’t last long. And what she expected more than anything was that the king – and through his example, the people – would cherish the land. So it was that the ancient rites of kingship in Ireland included a ceremonial marriage, the banais ríghi, between the king and the land, and those rites lasted into the sixteenth century. In this sacred marriage, the king swore to uphold the land and his people and to be true to both; in return Sovereignty granted him the gifts which would help him to keep his oath.

There is also a concept known as Ḟír Flathemon (the Prince's Truth), which declared that a king who is not just and true would cause the collapse of society. In this context, in some Arthurian romances we find the character of the Fisher King, whose physical wounding might cause the land to become a Wasteland: the body of the King is associated with the body of the land.

Wild Man

I wrote about the Wild Man in European myth and legend in this article so will just briefly describe this archetype as a kind of counter to an excess of civilisation.

Trickster

As I wrote in Hagitude, female tricksters are, more often than not, truthtellers; this is how they disrupt (and remember that disruption – by whatever means – is at the heart of the Trickster archetype). Male tricksters usually disrupt in other ways – through malicious pranks and other forms of classic trickery, for example – and are more likely to be malign (such as Loki in Norse myth, who caused the end of the world). Hermes is often considered to be a Trickster: he’s the inventor of lying and the patron of thieves. In Irish folklore the leprechaun was a Trickster, and several characters in English folklore, such as Robin Goodfellow.

Grandfather

Like the Grandmother, the archetypal Grandfather is a mentor and teacher to the young, and also their protector.

Wise old man

This is an important archetype in Jungian psychology, in which tradition it is called the Senex: an ancient Roman title which was awarded to elderly men with families who had good standing in their village. We might also call this archetype the Sage. In Jung’s individuation process, the archetype of the Wise Old Man emerged late in life; it was thought of as reflecting the Self. It has some commonality with the Magician and we might also think of Merlin in this category; it also might take in the Hermit.

Other random thoughts

My knowledge of European fairy tales – but remember I haven’t done a full analysis – suggests that there are possibly even fewer positive older men characters than there are positive older women. But there are older men in Greek myth: Geras, for example, the Greek god of old age, who gave the field of gerontology its name. Uranus, the father of the Titans and his son Kronos, sometimes called ‘Father Time’ (his Roman equivalent was Saturn). The Old Man of the Sea is a character who shows up in The Odyssey and other tales.

In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we have Abraham, Moses, Solomon, Methuselah, Simeon, Joseph and many others who are considered to be wise old men.

As I indicated, this has just been a very brief selection from characters that I’m already familiar with. Who else do you know and what inspirational stories can you share?

For the men who I very much hope will be reading this: I’m also curious to know how you feel about women messing with your stories. Does it irritate you, or do you welcome it?

Sharon

* In 1956, Zürich-based analyst Toni Wolff, lover and colleague of Carl Jung, described what she believed to be four key female archetypes: the Mother, the Hetaira, the Amazon and the Medial Woman.  Wolff argued that although every woman has the potential to embody all of these four archetypes at various stages of her life, one or more of them tends to be of primary importance to each of us. The woman who is most identified with the Mother, for example, finds her primary identity and fulfilment in nourishing life – usually, but not necessarily, in bearing and raising children. The word hetaira refers to a class of highly educated women in ancient Greece who were trained not only to provide sexual services to men, but also to provide them with long-term companionship. And so the Hetaira woman, according to Wolff, finds her primary identity and fulfilment in relationships; in some senses, she might be thought of as a muse. The Amazon is a capable, resourceful woman who finds her primary identity and fulfilment in the outer world; she excels in work and skills that are usually perceived to be the domain of men. The Medial Woman, unlike the other three archetypes, doesn’t define herself in relation to others. Instead, she finds her primary identity and fulfilment in cultivating relationship with Jung’s ‘collective unconscious’ – which is similar in many ways to the place that in many older European traditions might be called the Otherworld – and acting as a bridge between it and the human community. Medial Women are visionaries, psychics, healers and poets. In some cultures, they might be priestesses or prophetesses, shamans or oracles.