Iron John the Baptist
Not too many days ago I watched part of a religious TV
show about Saint Joseph, a.k.a. Joseph of Nazareth, the father,
step-father, or foster-father of Jesus depending on your theological
orientation. The participants were engaging in a veritable orgy
of obsequious doting on Saint Joseph, required to do so by his
position on the official calendar of saints. In such cases, where
religious duty, defined by dogma, compels one to wax eloquent
on a subject about which there is nothing to say, it is always
remark able what people will wind up saying.
One panelist cooed on about how in our society, with its
decay of family patterns, it is especially important to hold up
Saint Joseph as a role model for fathers. Utter nonsense! If
there was ever an "absentee father," it was the good
saint. When Jesus returns to Nazareth in Mark chapter 6, the locals do a
quick nose count of his relatives, listing his mother, four
brothers, and an unspecified numbers of sisters. But no Joe. Was he dead
by this time?
In fact we know nothing at all about Joseph of Nazareth.
If we look to extra-canonical legends about Joseph, the
situation is even worse: in the various Infancy Gospels of the second
and third centuries, Jesus is pictured as a kind of
miracle-working Dennis the Menace, Joseph as a bumbling buffoon much
resembling the dad character on the typical network sitcom. For
example, Joseph is unable to figure out how to get all the legs of
a chair to come out the same length, but Jesus strolls into the
carpenter shop and miraculously lengthens them. That's m'boy!
If any New Testament character qualifies as the
father-figure for Jesus, it is surely John the Baptist. Evidence from
John's gospel implies that Jesus for a time considered himself a
disciple of the Baptist before he broke away to form his own
movement. And according to the other gospels Jesus never had aught but
the highest praise for John, even calling him the greatest
man in history (Matthew 11:11)!
Admittedly we know scarcely more about John the Baptist
than about Saint Joseph, but the significance of John as a
father-figure is not limited to the historical question. Its
real significance emerges in the dimension of myth and archetype.
And here I must invoke the recent book, now
much read, Iron
John by poet Robert Bly. Bly expounds an ancient legend found
in Grimm's Fairy Tales, but probably far more ancient. It
treats of the need, deep-seated in the male
psyche, for male initiation before one can enter upon true manhood. The work of
anthropologists and comparative mythology scholars like Victor
Turner, Arnold van Gennep, Joseph Campbell, and Mircea Eliade
would rein force Bly's claim that from the beginning boys did not
success fully navigate the passage into mature manhood without
being initiated by older men into ritual and vocational
competence. Having a first, biological father wasn't enough; a lad needed a
second father, a mentor, to initiate him. This mentor (or as Bly
also calls him, a "male mother") might be an uncle,
a tribal elder, or the village shaman (healer, priest, seer, mediator,
"medicine man," "witch doctor").
In the legend of Iron John, the initiator is the title
character, and he is a striking mythical type: the Wild Man or Green
Man familiar from rural English folklore but as old as Enkidu
in the pre-biblical Gilgamesh Epic.
In the story a wandering adventurer penetrates a
mysterious quarter of the forest from which no one has returned alive.
The king has often sent armed parties to explore the region, but
none is heard from again. But the adventurer discovers that Iron
John, a titan of a man covered head to foot with rust-colored
fur, lives beneath the surface of a lake from which he emerges to
snag the unwary. The king's men proceed to drain the lake and
capture Iron John. He is caged and put on show in the courtyard. There
the king's son sees him.
One day the boy's golden ball chances to roll into the
cage. Iron John offers to return it if only the young prince will
free him. But to do this the prince must needs steal the key from
where it reposes beneath the pillow of his mother the queen. At
length he does and accompanies Iron John into the forest. His giant
companion turns out to be quite civil, as well as a powerful
benefactor who comes to his aid at crucial points throughout the
prince's subsequent life.
After passing through many adventures in the course of
which he proves his own manhood, the prince beholds Iron John
again, only this time the wild man's hirsute covering is gone, and
Iron John is revealed as a great golden king radiant with sun-like
splendor. He had been the victim of a magical curse which
doomed him to a bestial existence until he should aid a young prince
to fulfill his own destiny.
Bly interprets the story pretty much a la Jung. The Wild
Man is the primordial maleness which must find expression in all
men, without which they will be but gray, faceless puppets of
society, mere echoes of the authentic existence they are born for.
This maleness is neither chauvinism nor machismo, but rather
strength, fairness, rejoicing in duty,
decisiveness and courage.
(Incidentally, Bly admits that there are equally
important female mysteries with requisite rites to enter into them, but as
a male he does not presume to expound them. He leaves that to
women. So do I.)
The Wild Man is there in all men, but it is submerged. We
fear it and leave it buried, for we fear it will run amok like
the unbridled Id. But that only happens when a man receives
no initiation and the inner Wild Man bursts forth untutored.
Urban street gangs are the perfect example here. These young
hellions have no male initiators, but they have plenty of Wild Man
energy. It is a dangerous recipe. By contrast, the neurotic,
introspective anti-hero that so preoccupied the intellectual
imagination in the sixties can be seen as the result of the Wild Man
never having emerged in any form at all.
To claim one's genuine manhood, Bly says, men must steal
away from the apron strings of their queen-mothers and take to
the road with an initiator (figuratively, but perhaps
literally, too, as in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance).
A man must trust himself to a male mentor: a coach, a
dissertation advisor, a job supervisor, or a spiritual director, who
will take him under his wing as an apprentice. And eventually the
Wild Man within, the volatile creative force that contains the
secret gift of the real you, will be seen to bear the image of the
Sun King, a divine ego-ideal of maturity.
In Jungian terms, we might say the Wild Man is the Ego,
while the Sun King is the Self. One must let the Ego emerge,
embarrassing and uncomfortable as it may be, or one will come to
nothing. But one will remain arrogant and immature unless one allows
the Self to emerge, a persona with wider dimensions and broader,
more generous horizons.
Bly says this whole scenario (to which there is much,
much more; read the book) is not particularly Christian, though
neither is it anti-Christian. It is more basic, a deep psychic truth
common to human males as a species.
But I wonder if in fact we do not have a genuine biblical
parallel in the story of Jesus and John the Baptist. Consider
the bearing of the Baptist after all. He appears in the
wilderness, a locust-eater clad in a hair shirt. Fortuitously, he is
even named John! And this hairy wild man is even found in the water!
If Iron John lurked in the lake, John the Baptist wades in
the Jordan.
A king, Herod Antipas, sends troops to apprehend him,
just as a king sent men to capture Iron John. In the Iron John myth
the role of the initiator begins at this point, once the
king's son meets Iron John, whereas in the gospel John's initiator
role precedes the arrest. Jesus is initiated by baptism in the
Jordan while John is still at liberty. But it is only after the
arrest of John that Jesus launches his own movement, carrying on
the work taught him by his mentor John the Baptist. And just
as the prince in the story invokes Iron John's aid from time to
time, so does Jesus frequently cite the example of the Baptist to
authenticate his own actions (Matthew 11:7 ff; 17:9-13; 21:23-27).
Does John the Baptist ever graduate from Wild Man to Sun
King? His pupil Jesus does (see the Transfiguration story and
the Resurrection subsequently, in some versions of which his
countenance shines like the sun). But the Baptist himself did,
too, as his disciples eventually concluded that he, too, had
risen from the dead (Mark 6:14) and was the Light of the World
(Bultmann suggests the Logos hymn of John 1 was borrowed from the
sect of the Baptist and originally referred to John as "the
Light that enlightens every man").
There is another, an older biblical Iron John analogue,
that of the Baptist's prototype the Prophet Elijah. John even
borrows from Elijah the costume of the camel's hair tunic. In the
Hebrew text Elijah is called "a hairy man," and the
great biblical scholar Ignaz Goldziher (Mythology Among the Hebrews)
pointed out that this description often denotes the symbolic identity
of a character as a personification of the sun, the hair
standing for the sun's rays. Long-tressed Samson (whose name is simply
the Hebrew for "sun") is an even clearer case of
this. Elijah finishes out his earthly course, as you know, by ascending
into the heavens aboard a fiery chariot! Now if that isn't a dead
giveaway, I don't know what is! He is the noontide sun.
So Elijah is both hairy Wild Man and glorious Sun King.
He fits other aspects of the Iron John pattern as well. He is
eventually arrested by the troops of the king (2 Kings 1:9-15), and
here the story is even closer to Iron John's, for the first two
parties of troops dispatched do not come back: Elijah roasts them
with the solar fires at his command! And Elijah is an initiator!
Just as the Baptist initiated Jesus who went on to continue and
magnify his mentor's work, so did Elijah initiate Elisha, who
carries on his master's work after Elijah's departure, with a double
share of the latter's miracle-working spirit!
So I think Bly is mistaken: the Iron John archetype is to
be found in the Bible, in both Testaments, and in fact if
there is anything to his analysis of it, then he has provided an
important new hermeneutical key to understanding and applying these
passages. Perhaps the churches ought to think about building
into their Confirmation and adolescent Baptism rites a new
(really very old) dimension of adult initiation. The biblical
resources are there for it. And if we did, we might wind up with a
form of Christianity less immature, less timid, than the one we
now endure.
Robert M. Price