An archetypal story I am moved by that features a male protagonist, though the archetype is in no way masculine- is the story of Chiron, who is often referred to as a depiction of the Healer archetype. In my own life , this is one of the archetypes I resonate with as I am on this path too. This is a mythic story, not a fairytale/folktale, so doesn't really fit with a discussion of male archetypes in the European folktales canon. But its a wonderful story of a male who is gentle and kind and makes a heroic self sacrifice.
Chiron is born as a centaur, and unwanted/abandoned by his birth parents. In Greek mythology, centaurs in general are violent bullies , rowdy, drunken, with no moral compass. Chiron was fathered by the god Cronus and a sea nymph named Philyra, and was very different from the other centaurs- not possessing these traits. After being abandoned by his parents he was raised by Apollo and taught the healing arts, philosophy, wisdom. He became a great healer and trained many other healers. Accidentally pierced by a poisoned arrow shot by Heracles, he renounced his immortality in favor of Prometheus and was placed among the stars as the constellation Centaurus. Because he was the son of a god he was immortal and did not die, and suffered excruciating pain from the wound. He sacrificed his own immortality to heal another who had been wounded - Prometheus, who brought humans fire.
So as a male, 75 year old and going fast, I thought to respond with some of my experience since the paywall is down. Being raised in the Southwest US, patriarchy was the end all, be all, of learning to be masculine. We were encouraged to practice superficial respect, always emphasizing this was because females were "the weaker sex' and needed our protection. At the same time we were encouraged to see our roles in society as the more necessary and prominent with women's roles still confined within the house. Of course, this was in the society encircling us and not the values and practice of North American Indian communities which, by and large, still had and have, a matriarchal tradition. So we were understandably confused. When we reached puberty, we were taught that males should seek out and take advantage of any female we could while at the same time looking down on them for not resisting, or even accepting our advances. Unfortunately that was during a time period of 60's free-love, so sex was plentiful and relationships
short and uncommitted. That didn't help later on when we established families and had children. My ideas of being masculine were severely skewed and I am ashamed to say I was abusive , disrespectful and uncompromising in every way. My wife and I just reached our 49th anniversary and I would need to apologize every minute of the rest of my life for how I treated her. I always taught my daughters just the way I should have- teaching them independence, confidence, not letting males or their ideas affect how they thought and acted and they have all turned out to be strong, powerful, mind-of-their-own women. But my wife and son bore the physical and mental brunt of all my misguided ideas on how wives and sons should be treated. Boys are victims too! I won't list the ways I was a monster...but I was. I realize that this affected my view of LGBTQ people, politics, work--every value that has importance. Matriarchy is the cornerstone of civil community. Patriarchy is the enemy of humankind. I carry my guilt and shame like concrete on my back. Hopefully my time is short and it won't be long. Today is my son's birthday. He would have been 48 but OD'd in 2015. Too bad he didn't have a different Dad-- he might have lived.
This is really interesting, thank you! I had never considered shapeshifter as archetype but you are right that there are so many one should. In my own research on Roman mythology Vertumnus is an important one but he can become man and woman, solider or the girl of elegy at any point. The fluidity of shapeshifters often makes their gender unstable and would perpaps fit with the notion of the Jungian anima, I don't know.
Another archetype that occurs to me is the companion. In many myths, the main hero or protagonist has his companion, Achilles and Patroclus, Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Pirithous, David and Jonathan and they offer not just assistance but crucial help. In some cases the bonds go beyond friendship and into homoeroticism but that is a long story.
I imagine that one of the things females could hold onto in the past were fairytales or stories with a fairytale nature. I personally haven't gotten into them that much but I DO know and most females know that men have pretty much ruled over us in the past. My intent is not to be rude, but asking what about men seems rather ridiculous to me. One only has to look at history to answer that question. In history women had no rights because the men ruled over us. We had little to nothing that was our own, what we did have came from our imaginations. That is something no man could touch, and can't touch today. Men are paid more even today because that is man's doing. That needs to change and until it does we deserve something to hold onto. I think it's beautiful and wonderful to stand up in any way for womens rights because we certainly deserve them! I believe that the men of the past not giving women the freedom that they have today may be the reason for some fairytales based on women. I may be wrong there as that is NOT something I am an expert at by any means. Females in the past probably needed stories in order to survive though. Times were EXTREMELY HARD for them. I actually never took the time to think of the fact that male fairytales are often based on a man who has been cursed by a female. That was interesting to read. That fact alone was probably a way of saying to society that females are cursed already. If you look at the history in Salem, and really all over the world with female hangings, etc. it's pretty obvious that way of thinking sadly was not just in fairytales. Today we know that being female does not mean you're cursed or more open to being evil but long ago they hardly understood that. Personally, if some asked, what about the men, the answer from someone like me would have been what about the women? I would question if they knew that much about history and if they know that they are paid more than females today. Personally, I think fairytales, etc. should be more about men when they all choose to pay us equally, etc. That is just me though and just a thought... Either way, great writing..
I welcome any well told stories, by anyone, because I need to understand myself better. I guess it wouldn’t occur to me to be offended, possibly because I do not feel any ownership over my gender.
Christianity has been alluded to by some of the other commenters here. I have been watching with interest the public conversions of certain previously Pagan-affiliated men including Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth. This makes me uneasy for reasons I find hard to articulate- it's something to do with my feeling that Christianity is an ideological retreat from the feminist implications of older ways of thinking, back into a more safely patriarchal lineage of thought. But maybe- more charitably- it has something to do with Jesus as an archetypal figure? The Man of Peace, one might say. I have noticed, for instance, that Shaw frames his conversion as being directly about 'the Wild Jesus', who he calls Yeshua.
I found this most interesting.So much is written of female archetypes in psychology and fairytales, I see less written about male archetypes. Thank you.
I think the interesting question is about boundaries and where and how come we set them.
It seems very possible to miss contextual information if telling or analysing stories that seem to be speaking to a specific gender or from a different place.
We are very sensitive to colonial history and it’s impact on the psyche, rightly so.
On the other hand because we are never a perfect whole, who and what’s different will always fascinate and continue to speak to us.
I think we will always need cross gendered and same gendered mentors and so to speak to either is a fair challenge.
I think it’s the tone more than anything, and the danger with speaking about archetypes to me always seems that they allow people to speak with more authority about large generalities than is possible or warranted.
I like your collection of male characters because they seem a lot more rooted in a world than an abstract king lover magician warrior totality.
Because the psyche can identify at depth with almost anything it meets but also get it wrong it seems important to learn and analyse the stories that speak to something peculiar about one’s own situation.
John Rowan wrote a good book called healing the male psyche.
Robert Bly was a great speaker and he brought a spark of mischief and joy into men’s lives you can hear in the recordings between him Hillman and Meade how much fun they are generating and space opening up .
I suppose for Jung it’s a process of dis identification, so identifying where you are identified allows that to be dropped and gender has such a strong call on that .
Wonderful, detailed and nuanced work on your part Sharon. Personally, I've never had any real interest at all in the above mythical types, including as a child. Maybe that's a failing in my imagination. My ideal figures almost always came from the real world (or at least they seemed real-like, believable as physical men) and I suspect that's because they had faults and messed up as I did. The sorcerers and warriors and the like lived well outside my experience, fiction or not. The wild man was too macho and competent with fiddly stuff like fires and natures intricacies. I had sportmen yes, but where were the writers, painters and thinkers in the myths of my generation?
I wrote an article in response to Dr Blackie's request for some masculine perspectives on fairy tales and how we as men, assimilate them. It was a bit long for posting here so I have shared it from my Google drive space, here is the link:
Since I wrote it, I realized I left out the most important thought on the subject: HOPE.
That is because all the action in the stories we read and our responses to them are a way of building hope. And this is likely true for all people, not just men. Whether it be the mystical, the wizards action, the smithy's creation, or Adam Smith's "the invisible hand of God" (from Wealth of Nations) or what I call "the thumb print of God on our lives"; each functional story, fair tale or what ever that that raises our hopes or empowers us to move forward, raises our hopes.
Without any hope we are a sad lot of creation.
This is why Christianity took off, despite the persecution, like a wild fire between 33AD and 312AD; It offered through Jesus teaching, the hope of redemption. We are not just what we were yesterday, we can rise to a new day and be a new person. Pick ourselves up, dust-off and start afresh. The book of John quotes Jesus using the term "born again" to describe this hope. I use this term in a universal way as being able to start fresh without any conditions as hopefully we have learned better from yesterday.
There was a song not long ago that I think says it better than I can.
"This curse I get
From my father's kin
They fought the beast
I feel within
We don't talk about it
And we don't call it's name
We just carry on
Hoping it'll change
Though we know it'll never change"
This is Mama Werewolf by Brandi Carlile, but I think it speaks to the archetype you were talking about.
I think shape-shifting for men tends to be a stand in for generational trauma or predispositions for things like substance abuse or mental health problems.
I feel there may be more than one comment needed here, and I’m working this out as I’m thinking and writing. The first is about the ‘Well, if the men want their stories, let them go and find them’ response referenced in Sharon’s initial post. I’ve heard variations of that reply from ‘Wise Women’ leaders of women’s groups when being asked by men when they will run groups for men. My view has tended to be, that whilst women are fighting off the patriarchal conditioning and controls of the male dominated dominant culture, then they’ve got enough on their hands without responding to the young boy wanting rescuing. But, after consideration; in this field, women do tend to have a head start from the development of feminist thought and writing. ‘Masculinist’ thought, as a concept, has to overcome the dominant chauvinistic and toxic blinkers of traditional masculinity.
There is also the ‘Masculinist’ view as antifeminism, an argument gaining ground in some areas that men have been disempowered by feminism. I’m not going into that particular mechanism of divide and conquer here.
As men we don’t yet have the male teachers / leaders to help even recognise, let alone take off those blinkers. Over the years of my own journey I’ve read male and female writers; all too often I’ve found that male writers, even when seeking to offer a male perspective analogous to a feminist perspective, come back to traditional masculine interpretations of male archetypes, even when suggesting they’ve challenged those interpretations. I also find that many writers tend towards a need to justify their views, providing either intellectual argument or ‘channelled’ as evidence to support them.
My own views have been more influenced by the work and writing of people such as: Clarissa Pinkola Estés; Angela Carter; Carolyn Hillyer; Caitlin Matthews; and, of course, Sharon Blackie. There is a resource out there for men, if willing to ‘quest’, to find. Yes it comes more from women than men, but, in my view, it is my responsibility, as a man, to ask the question, then seek for guidance towards answering my question.
There are SO MANY stories told about masculinity in Myth. For starters all men must read well the works of Robert Bly, Martin Prechtel, Martin Shaw and Stephen Jenkenson. As for a good tale to start steeping in? Parzival. I look deeply regularity into myth as it pertains to men on my Substack as well, all are welcome to tag along. All blessings https://open.substack.com/pub/gregorypettys/p/he-is-risen?r=f1gey&utm_medium=ios
Contrary to some modern scholarship, masculinity is not instrinsically a performative exercise of received social constructs, though it might be that for some individuals. Rather, it is what you observe when men live out their embodied potential. Masculine and and feminine narratives differ because the embodied potentials of men and women are different.
Stories of masculinity should therefore be a fairly free riff on the different ways that men live their lives. They show a difference and a sameness that tells us something about the nature of living life as a man.
But it is always worth reminding ourselves that all of us are the current iteration of a line of ancestors that have reproduced ourselves
for hundreds of millions of years, and that over the broad sweep of time, men and women have done this together. Billions of other living entities have fallen away, but we are here. That is the most amazing fact of our lives. The contemporary narrative is of separation and disengagement. But if men and women have a future, it is together.
An archetypal story I am moved by that features a male protagonist, though the archetype is in no way masculine- is the story of Chiron, who is often referred to as a depiction of the Healer archetype. In my own life , this is one of the archetypes I resonate with as I am on this path too. This is a mythic story, not a fairytale/folktale, so doesn't really fit with a discussion of male archetypes in the European folktales canon. But its a wonderful story of a male who is gentle and kind and makes a heroic self sacrifice.
Chiron is born as a centaur, and unwanted/abandoned by his birth parents. In Greek mythology, centaurs in general are violent bullies , rowdy, drunken, with no moral compass. Chiron was fathered by the god Cronus and a sea nymph named Philyra, and was very different from the other centaurs- not possessing these traits. After being abandoned by his parents he was raised by Apollo and taught the healing arts, philosophy, wisdom. He became a great healer and trained many other healers. Accidentally pierced by a poisoned arrow shot by Heracles, he renounced his immortality in favor of Prometheus and was placed among the stars as the constellation Centaurus. Because he was the son of a god he was immortal and did not die, and suffered excruciating pain from the wound. He sacrificed his own immortality to heal another who had been wounded - Prometheus, who brought humans fire.
So as a male, 75 year old and going fast, I thought to respond with some of my experience since the paywall is down. Being raised in the Southwest US, patriarchy was the end all, be all, of learning to be masculine. We were encouraged to practice superficial respect, always emphasizing this was because females were "the weaker sex' and needed our protection. At the same time we were encouraged to see our roles in society as the more necessary and prominent with women's roles still confined within the house. Of course, this was in the society encircling us and not the values and practice of North American Indian communities which, by and large, still had and have, a matriarchal tradition. So we were understandably confused. When we reached puberty, we were taught that males should seek out and take advantage of any female we could while at the same time looking down on them for not resisting, or even accepting our advances. Unfortunately that was during a time period of 60's free-love, so sex was plentiful and relationships
short and uncommitted. That didn't help later on when we established families and had children. My ideas of being masculine were severely skewed and I am ashamed to say I was abusive , disrespectful and uncompromising in every way. My wife and I just reached our 49th anniversary and I would need to apologize every minute of the rest of my life for how I treated her. I always taught my daughters just the way I should have- teaching them independence, confidence, not letting males or their ideas affect how they thought and acted and they have all turned out to be strong, powerful, mind-of-their-own women. But my wife and son bore the physical and mental brunt of all my misguided ideas on how wives and sons should be treated. Boys are victims too! I won't list the ways I was a monster...but I was. I realize that this affected my view of LGBTQ people, politics, work--every value that has importance. Matriarchy is the cornerstone of civil community. Patriarchy is the enemy of humankind. I carry my guilt and shame like concrete on my back. Hopefully my time is short and it won't be long. Today is my son's birthday. He would have been 48 but OD'd in 2015. Too bad he didn't have a different Dad-- he might have lived.
This is really interesting, thank you! I had never considered shapeshifter as archetype but you are right that there are so many one should. In my own research on Roman mythology Vertumnus is an important one but he can become man and woman, solider or the girl of elegy at any point. The fluidity of shapeshifters often makes their gender unstable and would perpaps fit with the notion of the Jungian anima, I don't know.
Another archetype that occurs to me is the companion. In many myths, the main hero or protagonist has his companion, Achilles and Patroclus, Heracles and Iolaus, Theseus and Pirithous, David and Jonathan and they offer not just assistance but crucial help. In some cases the bonds go beyond friendship and into homoeroticism but that is a long story.
Do archetypes only represent what is, or can they also include what isn't? How about an archetype of "absent father"?
I imagine that one of the things females could hold onto in the past were fairytales or stories with a fairytale nature. I personally haven't gotten into them that much but I DO know and most females know that men have pretty much ruled over us in the past. My intent is not to be rude, but asking what about men seems rather ridiculous to me. One only has to look at history to answer that question. In history women had no rights because the men ruled over us. We had little to nothing that was our own, what we did have came from our imaginations. That is something no man could touch, and can't touch today. Men are paid more even today because that is man's doing. That needs to change and until it does we deserve something to hold onto. I think it's beautiful and wonderful to stand up in any way for womens rights because we certainly deserve them! I believe that the men of the past not giving women the freedom that they have today may be the reason for some fairytales based on women. I may be wrong there as that is NOT something I am an expert at by any means. Females in the past probably needed stories in order to survive though. Times were EXTREMELY HARD for them. I actually never took the time to think of the fact that male fairytales are often based on a man who has been cursed by a female. That was interesting to read. That fact alone was probably a way of saying to society that females are cursed already. If you look at the history in Salem, and really all over the world with female hangings, etc. it's pretty obvious that way of thinking sadly was not just in fairytales. Today we know that being female does not mean you're cursed or more open to being evil but long ago they hardly understood that. Personally, if some asked, what about the men, the answer from someone like me would have been what about the women? I would question if they knew that much about history and if they know that they are paid more than females today. Personally, I think fairytales, etc. should be more about men when they all choose to pay us equally, etc. That is just me though and just a thought... Either way, great writing..
I welcome any well told stories, by anyone, because I need to understand myself better. I guess it wouldn’t occur to me to be offended, possibly because I do not feel any ownership over my gender.
Christianity has been alluded to by some of the other commenters here. I have been watching with interest the public conversions of certain previously Pagan-affiliated men including Martin Shaw and Paul Kingsnorth. This makes me uneasy for reasons I find hard to articulate- it's something to do with my feeling that Christianity is an ideological retreat from the feminist implications of older ways of thinking, back into a more safely patriarchal lineage of thought. But maybe- more charitably- it has something to do with Jesus as an archetypal figure? The Man of Peace, one might say. I have noticed, for instance, that Shaw frames his conversion as being directly about 'the Wild Jesus', who he calls Yeshua.
I found this most interesting.So much is written of female archetypes in psychology and fairytales, I see less written about male archetypes. Thank you.
Thanks Sharon,
I think the interesting question is about boundaries and where and how come we set them.
It seems very possible to miss contextual information if telling or analysing stories that seem to be speaking to a specific gender or from a different place.
We are very sensitive to colonial history and it’s impact on the psyche, rightly so.
On the other hand because we are never a perfect whole, who and what’s different will always fascinate and continue to speak to us.
I think we will always need cross gendered and same gendered mentors and so to speak to either is a fair challenge.
I think it’s the tone more than anything, and the danger with speaking about archetypes to me always seems that they allow people to speak with more authority about large generalities than is possible or warranted.
I like your collection of male characters because they seem a lot more rooted in a world than an abstract king lover magician warrior totality.
Because the psyche can identify at depth with almost anything it meets but also get it wrong it seems important to learn and analyse the stories that speak to something peculiar about one’s own situation.
John Rowan wrote a good book called healing the male psyche.
Robert Bly was a great speaker and he brought a spark of mischief and joy into men’s lives you can hear in the recordings between him Hillman and Meade how much fun they are generating and space opening up .
I suppose for Jung it’s a process of dis identification, so identifying where you are identified allows that to be dropped and gender has such a strong call on that .
Thanks for a thought provoking read
Wonderful, detailed and nuanced work on your part Sharon. Personally, I've never had any real interest at all in the above mythical types, including as a child. Maybe that's a failing in my imagination. My ideal figures almost always came from the real world (or at least they seemed real-like, believable as physical men) and I suspect that's because they had faults and messed up as I did. The sorcerers and warriors and the like lived well outside my experience, fiction or not. The wild man was too macho and competent with fiddly stuff like fires and natures intricacies. I had sportmen yes, but where were the writers, painters and thinkers in the myths of my generation?
Someone else might have recommended it already, but check out Sophie Strand's The Flowering Wand: Rewildling the Sacred Masculine
I wrote an article in response to Dr Blackie's request for some masculine perspectives on fairy tales and how we as men, assimilate them. It was a bit long for posting here so I have shared it from my Google drive space, here is the link:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EQw8qiHTh50fknKQp9zgUkfbuEVvwIgf/view?usp=sharing
Since I wrote it, I realized I left out the most important thought on the subject: HOPE.
That is because all the action in the stories we read and our responses to them are a way of building hope. And this is likely true for all people, not just men. Whether it be the mystical, the wizards action, the smithy's creation, or Adam Smith's "the invisible hand of God" (from Wealth of Nations) or what I call "the thumb print of God on our lives"; each functional story, fair tale or what ever that that raises our hopes or empowers us to move forward, raises our hopes.
Without any hope we are a sad lot of creation.
This is why Christianity took off, despite the persecution, like a wild fire between 33AD and 312AD; It offered through Jesus teaching, the hope of redemption. We are not just what we were yesterday, we can rise to a new day and be a new person. Pick ourselves up, dust-off and start afresh. The book of John quotes Jesus using the term "born again" to describe this hope. I use this term in a universal way as being able to start fresh without any conditions as hopefully we have learned better from yesterday.
William Main
Re; shapeshifters.
There was a song not long ago that I think says it better than I can.
"This curse I get
From my father's kin
They fought the beast
I feel within
We don't talk about it
And we don't call it's name
We just carry on
Hoping it'll change
Though we know it'll never change"
This is Mama Werewolf by Brandi Carlile, but I think it speaks to the archetype you were talking about.
I think shape-shifting for men tends to be a stand in for generational trauma or predispositions for things like substance abuse or mental health problems.
Anyhow, good post.
I feel there may be more than one comment needed here, and I’m working this out as I’m thinking and writing. The first is about the ‘Well, if the men want their stories, let them go and find them’ response referenced in Sharon’s initial post. I’ve heard variations of that reply from ‘Wise Women’ leaders of women’s groups when being asked by men when they will run groups for men. My view has tended to be, that whilst women are fighting off the patriarchal conditioning and controls of the male dominated dominant culture, then they’ve got enough on their hands without responding to the young boy wanting rescuing. But, after consideration; in this field, women do tend to have a head start from the development of feminist thought and writing. ‘Masculinist’ thought, as a concept, has to overcome the dominant chauvinistic and toxic blinkers of traditional masculinity.
There is also the ‘Masculinist’ view as antifeminism, an argument gaining ground in some areas that men have been disempowered by feminism. I’m not going into that particular mechanism of divide and conquer here.
As men we don’t yet have the male teachers / leaders to help even recognise, let alone take off those blinkers. Over the years of my own journey I’ve read male and female writers; all too often I’ve found that male writers, even when seeking to offer a male perspective analogous to a feminist perspective, come back to traditional masculine interpretations of male archetypes, even when suggesting they’ve challenged those interpretations. I also find that many writers tend towards a need to justify their views, providing either intellectual argument or ‘channelled’ as evidence to support them.
My own views have been more influenced by the work and writing of people such as: Clarissa Pinkola Estés; Angela Carter; Carolyn Hillyer; Caitlin Matthews; and, of course, Sharon Blackie. There is a resource out there for men, if willing to ‘quest’, to find. Yes it comes more from women than men, but, in my view, it is my responsibility, as a man, to ask the question, then seek for guidance towards answering my question.
That’s my starter for ten.
There are SO MANY stories told about masculinity in Myth. For starters all men must read well the works of Robert Bly, Martin Prechtel, Martin Shaw and Stephen Jenkenson. As for a good tale to start steeping in? Parzival. I look deeply regularity into myth as it pertains to men on my Substack as well, all are welcome to tag along. All blessings https://open.substack.com/pub/gregorypettys/p/he-is-risen?r=f1gey&utm_medium=ios
Contrary to some modern scholarship, masculinity is not instrinsically a performative exercise of received social constructs, though it might be that for some individuals. Rather, it is what you observe when men live out their embodied potential. Masculine and and feminine narratives differ because the embodied potentials of men and women are different.
Stories of masculinity should therefore be a fairly free riff on the different ways that men live their lives. They show a difference and a sameness that tells us something about the nature of living life as a man.
But it is always worth reminding ourselves that all of us are the current iteration of a line of ancestors that have reproduced ourselves
for hundreds of millions of years, and that over the broad sweep of time, men and women have done this together. Billions of other living entities have fallen away, but we are here. That is the most amazing fact of our lives. The contemporary narrative is of separation and disengagement. But if men and women have a future, it is together.