Michael Meade first came to my notice as a sidekick of Robert Bly and James Hillman, on a tape made by the three of them which I heard last year. Michael Meade told dramatic stories and legends, accompanied by a drum, which were then analysed by the three of them. In this book Michael Meade carries this idea through very thoroughly and well, taking stories from many cultures in many parts of the world, and relating them to the needs of men. It is a sort of Women Who Run With the Wolves for men, and I liked it a lot.
Meade's basic case is that in today's world, men have no initiation ceremonies. Such ceremonies were fine in traditional societies, where they took the young man from one fixed role into another fixed role. But today all the roles are fluid and flexible, and no single ceremony would do. But somehow we have to find a way. And Michael Meade is very clear that initiation is always a matter of death and rebirth. Moving from one stage to another requires a brush with death, he says, a sense that one stage dies and the next one grows out of it.
In our culture what corresponds to this? Meade suggests that it is the natural crises we all come across:
'All severe separations in life evoke the sense of initiation in the psyche and open a person to psychological and mythical territories of unusual depth. Initiation is the psyche's response to mystery, great difficulties, and opportunities to change. The ground of the psyche shifts and breaks and opens... Once the opening has occurred, the psyche is animated with the expectation that this beginning will be carried through to a new organisation of inner and outer life.' (p.11).
What often happens then is that the person gets into therapy. And in our day, in my view, therapy is the way of initiation. It is only therapy which can stay close enough to the man over a long enough period to do the necessary work. In therapy a man can open up to his own inner life and question all his assumptions about what is normal. Like initiation, therapy involves healing.
But healing from what? Meade is not altogether clear about this, but my own view is that it is healing from the injuries of a patriarchal society, which reduces or tries to reduce men to a masculine role which is much too narrow and limiting, and indeed lethal.
'If a man does not know he is wounded, he can deny the facts forever. One fact about a man who does not know he is wounded is that he cannot see that others are wounded. More than that, he will put his wound into others because of his vague sense that there is a wound somewhere. He will only see it when he puts it into someone else and will feel strangely better when he sees it there. Then he will lose touch with it and have to stick it on someone again.' (p.50).
There are some deep insights in this book, insights which we need if we are to make sense of the world in which we live. And Michael Meade is clear that we need to go back into our own childhoods if we are to pick up the clues that we need in order to go on in a different way. He says that initiation in the modern world often begins with a return rather than forging ahead.
And if we can do it properly, entering into the process in a wholehearted way, rather than haltingly and with too many reservations, we discover important things about our inner world.
'During initiation someone or something other than our usual "self" takes charge. The "ego", the usual ruler of the person, must submit to some other force or authority and let things go. All of the awareness and attention a person has will be needed to endure the ordeals. So, there is a loosening of personal identity that allows hidden, undeveloped, even denied aspects of the self to appear.' (p164).
This is the process which therapy can contain. It can help us to take down the shutters from the experiences we had shut off and disowned. It can enable us to meet and deal with the parts of ourselves we had pushed away and warded off.
In doing so, it can help us deal with our own heterosexism - the assumption that only heterosexuality is normal and natural - an assumption which virtually makes heterosexuality compulsory.
'The catchall word for the fears among men is homophobia: fear or dread of what is similar or the same as I am. Since American culture has a dread-love relationship to sex, homophobia usually means fear of love with those of the same gender. But it has many other phobias inherent in it. There are fears of being physically harmed or dominated by another man; fears of being intellectually dominated and spiritually damaged or misled. There are fears of the bodies of other men, fears of the spirits of other men, and fears of the souls of other men.' (p167).
It is good to hear someone like this speaking out against prejudice and yet recognising what hard work it is, dealing with such deeply engrained attitudes.
Finally Meade tells us that we cannot do this work at a conference, in an evening meeting, even in a weekend workshop. Initiation is not like that in our day, in our culture.
'There is no single initiation that occurs once and gives us status for the rest of life. Initiation consists of the willingness to set out, to begin, to step into something with no certain outcome.' (p 192).
Many men, of course, avoid therapy like the plague. After cultivating their egos for so many years, the ego has come to believe that only it is capable of keeping chaos at bay and making a way through life. The ego feels humiliated when it is not in charge and crazy when it is disoriented. For most men, it is more embarrassing to ask for help as it causes a humiliating feeling of powerlessness. Yet this is what is needed. This is the way forward in today's world.
This book is written in a very exciting and unusual way, first telling a story, then telling of experiences in how this story has been heard and reacted to by men in large workshops, then giving some ideas of his own. The stories are gathered from many cultures : "The Hunter and His Son" and "The Boy and the Half-Giantess" from the Hausa culture in Africa; "The Sweetness of Life" from the Ronga, also in Africa; "Conn-Eda" from Ireland; "The Firebird" from Russia; "The Lizard in the Fire" from the Lope in Africa; "The Water of Life" from Germany; and "The Companions" which he says is universal.
I have to confess that Michael Meade does not mention the word therapy even once, but his ideas fit so well with what James Hillman has said about therapy in his previous books that I have taken the liberty of linking the two.
John Rowan
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