
Iron John

A girl changes into a woman on her own, with the bodily developments marking the change; old women tell her stories and chants, and do celebrations.
Robert Bly • Iron John
“Men have been depressed now for many years in their male and resplendent selves, depressed into dejection and almost abjection.
Robert Bly • Iron John
When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, and not his teaching.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Shame keeps us from cultivating a garden.
Robert Bly • Iron John
Each child lives deep inside his or her own psychic house, or soul castle, and the child deserves the right of sovereignty inside that house. Whenever a parent ignores the child’s sovereignty, and invades, the child feels not only anger, but shame.
Robert Bly • Iron John
only men can initiate men, as only women can initiate women. Women can change the embryo to a boy, but only men can change the boy to a man. Initiators say that boys need a second birth, this time a birth from men.
Robert Bly • Iron John
child will not become an adult until it breaks the addiction to harmony, chooses the one precious thing, and enters into a joyful participation in the tensions of the world.
Robert Bly • Iron John
We must repeat that it isn’t the personal mother who imprisons the son—she wants him to be free. It is the possessive or primitive side of the Great Mother that keeps him locked up.
Robert Bly • Iron John
“Why are there more and more naïve men in the world?” Whether the fathers are actually darker than they were in the past, they are perceived so, and a son assigns himself the task of redeeming the dark father.