Male Initiation and the Mother in Greek Myth

Male Initiation and the Mother in Greek Myth

A man needs a little madness, or else he never dares cut the rope and be free!

– Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek

Part One

The problems of our modern condition seem overwhelming: meaningless work; broken communities; environmental degradation; rampant consumerism; religious literalism; gratuitous cruelty; the collapse of democracy and constant warfare. Despite being overloaded by media images and distractions, we have a diminished imagination of the possible, because we live in what Joseph Campbell called a “demythologized world.” The myths and rituals that once held us together have long faded away or proven insufficient, and new ones have not yet been born. It is a deeply paradoxical situation. While the old stories no longer connect soul, community and cosmos, they still have profound influence on us; we embody and enact them without being aware of them.

Social critics have offered many reasons for our alienation. But from the perspective of indigenous people, whose myths and rituals still provide them with meaning, we simply don’t know who we are. It follows that we are ruled by men who don’t know who they are. This is the essence of patriarchy: not the rule of men, but the rule of deeply wounded, narcissistic, uninitiated men. I suggest that most of our modern problems stem from this fact.

Uninitiated men start wars and send uninitiated boys to kill each other – and women and children. Ninety percent of the victims of modern war are women and children. How odd that we accept these conditions as natural. In 1982, environmentalist Paul Shepard, in Nature and Madness, soberly assessed our condition:

We may now be the possessors of the world’s flimsiest identity structure…where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men…to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity.

Another way to consider this situation is in mythological terms: we are still ruled by the father-gods of the sky, the models for men who abandon their sons and provide no opportunity for real initiation. In the Greek tradition Ouranos pushed his children back into Mother Earth and left them without a father. His son Kronos – Father Time – ate his own children. His son Zeus deposed him and produced many children but was uninvolved with most of them.

The Hebrew Jehovah demanded that Abraham prove his loyalty by sacrificing his own son.

Later, this god sacrificed his only son Jesus, who asked from the cross why his father was forsaking him. Indeed, Jesus was quoting from Psalm 22, which at the time was already a thousand years old.

All four father-gods condemned their children to conformism, competition, meaningless sacrifice and alienation from their own bodies. Three thousand years later, spirit dominates matter, men subjugate women and culture exploits nature. I go into this theme in much greater detail in The Family Curse.

The father-gods rule the temples, the courts, the offices and the war-chambers and are unconcerned with domestic issues. The men of 5th-century B.C.E. Athens, absent from the household like Ouranos, enforced a deeply misogynistic social system that produced deprived and embittered mothers. But such women ruled the home, and their resentment often produced narcissistic sons who grew up to be misogynists. Greek poets created stories of the “bad mother” – malevolent, persecuting figures whose ambivalent love cast spells over the lives of their sons.

The archetypal bad mother was Hera, whose hostility toward her patriarch husband Zeus was displaced onto the many heroes he sired with other goddesses and mortal women. The name of the hero Heracles translates as “The Glory of Hera.” Philip Slater used the phrase for the title of his 1968 study of Greek myth and the family because it captured “the bitter irony of the (ancient) Greek mother-son relationship, inasmuch as Hera was also the hero’s chief prosecutor.”

Slater pointed out similarities to patterns in the American family. But unlike the Greeks, American children of the 1960s were growing up in the suburbs, in nuclear families, disconnected from extended kinship or community – like no previous generation. “Probably at no time in history,” he wrote, “have children been so exclusively dependent upon their parents (as opposed to other adults) for the satisfaction of emotional needs.” Such overcharged households produced boys who were “highly oedipal…oriented toward an unobtainable goal…trapped in fantasy, alienated from experience… competitive, dissatisfied, grandiose.”

This was bad enough; but the situation deteriorated further. American fathers were abandoning a generation of sons either to the fires of Vietnam, or – like the Greeks – to households run by women, leaving them without adequate masculine role modeling. Soon, and through no fault of their own, millions of American mothers found themselves in the unnatural position of attempting to guide boys into adulthood practically by themselves. Psychologist James Hillman wrote:

…the culture is secular and the ordinary mortal must carry archetypal loads without help from the gods. The mothers must support our survival without support themselves, having to become like Goddesses, everything too much, and they sacrifice us to their frustration as we in turn, becoming mothers and fathers, sacrifice our children to the same civilization.

If these conditions prevailed in the sixties, then how much truer they are now, after two further generations of absent fathers. Let’s look more closely at the historical context.

Fathers – as Greek myth shows us – have been abandoning their children for millennia. But the economic and technological changes connected with the rise of capitalism greatly accelerated both the rate of separation and the human tragedies that resulted. The seeds of such changes fell first on America’s fertile ground, with its legacy of radical individualism. Robert Bly’s classic Iron John argued that the Civil War generation was the first to experience major separation between fathers and sons, when men left the farms to work in factories and later in offices.

Long before women revolted in the 1970s, American men had been escaping from the constrictions and confinements of the nuclear family and its traditional roles, first by economic necessity and then by choice. In the 1950s a new magazine attained spectacular success with a very revealing name – Playboy – and it opened the floodgates of post-war male entitlement. Suddenly, it seemed, thousands of men, then hundreds of thousands, for the first time in history, no longer felt bound by unwavering moral law to adequately support women and their children.

Soon women also initiated significant changes in marital patterns, doubling the divorce rate between 1965 and 1975. Men, however, continued to earn appropriate incomes, while millions of women and children were cast into poverty. In 1978, sociologists began to speak about the “feminization of poverty.” By 1981, only 25% of those American women who had been awarded child support by the courts received anything from the fathers of their children.

Part Two

Every increase in knowledge is an increase in sorrow. – Traditional

Barbara Ehrenreich argued in 1983 that the “breadwinner ethic” was collapsing. Men who avoided marriage were “deviant” in the fifties; now they were considered quite normal. She quoted a researcher: “When men relinquish ties to their children during childhood, they rarely resume them later in life.” By 1990 one third of American children lived apart from their fathers, and 50% of children of divorced families saw them rarely or never. Now, half of all American children spend part of their childhood with one parent.

Even if the father is physically present, he is usually an Ouranos than a Kronos type: emotionally detached, overworked, hiding behind the newspaper, responding to the son’s curiosity with, “Ask your mother.” In 1996, after fifteen years of men’s conferences, Bly argued that Oedipus is now irrelevant. How can a boy desire to kill his father if he has never met him? “Father-longing is beginning to replace father-anger.”

A numbing of the pain – but also of creativity – takes over. Psychologist Samuel Osherson saw a “wounded father” in such men: “When a man says he can’t love his children because he wasn’t loved well enough, it is the wounded father he is struggling with.” The son will either idealize or degrade the unknown father and all he stands for. If he feels betrayed, he interprets the absence as his own fault. He may determine to be everything the father was not, or form alliances with mother and siblings to deceive the father. He carries the knowledge that the family is not a safe place to be emotionally vulnerable into adulthood.

When woman, the primary victims of patriarchy, are forced to teach boys how to be men, they learn to mistrust the masculine. Reacting against a suffocating or emotionally needy mother, the son learns to mistrust the feminine. He is compelled to act out the old patriarchal curses in yet another generation: innocent violence and violence against the innocent. Often, he will attempt to prove his masculinity by getting a girl pregnant at too young an age and refusing to support her.

By contrast, writes Mayan shaman Martin Prechtel, “Only an initiated man could marry a woman and not be miserable and disappointed.” Indigenous wisdom is clear: uninitiated men are dangerous to women. Untransformed male energy cannot approach actual women without resulting in abuse. But it does not approach from a position of strength. When a man decides that the only way he can get what he wants from a woman is to rape her, writes Camille Paglia, “…he is confessing to a weakness that is all encompassing. She is abused, but he is utterly tragic and pathetic.”

He may act out his rage within his new family, like Kronos, or turn that rage against himself in the failed attempts at self-initiation that become suicidal “accidents.” More likely, he will model himself after Ouranos and devalue all commitment. Resisting pressure to grow up, he encounters marketing strategies that model narcissistic obsession with his appearance and consumer gadgets. By 2000, long before AI, popular culture had replaced the benevolent family man and the stoic warrior-hero ideal with the unattached adult teenager whose childlike fantasy included all the perks of adulthood and none of its responsibilities.

This vicious spiral of mistrust makes men secondary victims of patriarchy. When boys cannot find meaningful images or stories that reflect the abundance of their polytheistic souls, they become compliant consumers instead of knowing themselves. They identify with corporate logos instead of a heritage of compassionate masculine elders. They belittle the fathers they long to be seen by. Having less relation to ancestry than any generation in history, they unconsciously search for a connection with father, clan or sacred king in all the wrong places.

Girls who lose fathers through divorce are far more likely to be sexually abused and to become pregnant as teens than girls from intact, two-parent families. I am not minimizing their plight. They may be narcissistic, needy or depressed. They may fill the lack of meaning in their lives with eating disorders, rituals of consumption, scarification or early pregnancy. But compared to uninitiated males, they are unlikely to seek their souls by abandoning their children or going to war.

Nor am I implying that the mere presence of a father in the household creates well-adjusted youths. Some boys do fine without fathers, except for a predictable drop in their socio-economic status. But statistics only hint at the long and gradual decline of male initiation and paternal involvement. American men have abandoned their sons to the streets, the prisons their mothers.

American boys come of age without knowing who they are, but desperate to extricate themselves from this maternal matrix and find their way to a sense of masculine identity. They want to kill some outdated boy within so that their real selves can emerge and their real lives can begin. But without true elders, not to mention concerned fathers, our demythologized culture provides only the “toxic mimics” of real initiation: violent sports, substance abuse, gang affiliation and the military. For role models boys see only athletes, narcissistic entertainers, comically dishonest politicians or local gangsters.

Part Three – Oedipus

Every act of creation is first an act of destruction. – Pablo Picasso

With little or no masculine energy in the household, the unfulfilled feminine fills the vacuum. Carl Jung wrote that the negative side of the mother archetype is “terrifying and inescapable like fate.” For men it becomes mixed with projections of the anima, and statements of men about the mother “are always emotionally prejudiced…showing ‘animosity.’” He wrote in 20^th century gendered but still relevant language:

...the mother is an archetypal experience; she is experienced by the more or less unconscious child not as a definite, individual feminine personality but as...an archetype charged with an immensity of possible meanings. As life proceeds the primordial image fades and is replaced by a conscious, relatively individual image...But in the unconscious the mother always remains a powerful primordial image, coloring and even determining throughout life our relations to woman, to society, to the world of feeling and fact, yet in so subtle a way that, as a rule, there is no conscious perception of the process. We think all this is only a metaphor. But it becomes a very concrete fact when a man marries a wife only because in some way she resembles his mother, or else because she very definitely does not. Mother Germania is for the Germans, like 𝘭𝘢 𝘥𝘰𝘶𝘤𝘦 𝘍𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦 for the French, a figure of the utmost importance behind the political scene...The all-embracing womb of Mother Church is anything but a metaphor, and the same is true of Mother Earth, Mother Nature, and “matter” in general.

We need to look backwards toward old forms and old stories to re-imagine approaches to this dilemma. Greek myth is a tangled amalgam of stories, some of which date from the pre-patriarchal eras when the genders may have lived in harmony. Over time, newer myths that justified the rule of men replaced most of the older narratives. But we can still find the archetypal theme of initiation in many of them, because all stable societies have had to address the need to make boys into men. The most fundamental transition (besides birth and death) is the separation from his mother that boys must undergo. Greek stories rarely deal directly with this theme, but the images lie just below the surface.

The task of many a heroic figure is to cut the psychic chords to the mother, and in Greek myth, she is usually the bad mother. Slater saw many of these male images as examples of unconscious strategies to deal with the narcissistic mother. This may be a psychologically accurate statement, but it reduces myth to psychology. Jung, by contrast, wrote, “…instead of deriving these figures from our psychic conditions, (we) must derive our psychic conditions from these figures.” I prefer to see them as the indigenous imagination’s creative efforts to find initiatory routes to the world of the fathers.

At the social level the bad mother represents misogynistic condemnation of the needy or vindictive female. But psychologically, she is a man’s mother complex projected onto women: that flawed inner relationship with the feminine part of his own soul. And it determines how men see women, nature, family and the whole world of relationship. A man projects that relationship outwards in moodiness, or in wildly idealized visions of actual women, who, he feels, can either save or destroy him. “We look for the wonderful woman to be our salvation,” wrote Hillman. But this longing for the unattainable “…constellates the other side: betrayal and destruction.”

Many myths and folktales give a hint: before accessing his own masculine nobility – imagined as becoming king or claiming his birthright – a boy must first break that bond and then (eventually) his immature relationship to the feminine. But when the father (or the community of initiatory elders) is absent, as he is in almost every Greek myth, the son is on his own.

Greek myth imagines initiatory separation from the mother in several modes. We begin with our best-known example.

The most famous mother-son story of all, the man who married his mother and killed his father, provided the fundamental image behind Freudian psychology.

Like any profound myth, the tale of Oedipus is full of ambivalence. Did he ensure his demise through his incestuous union? Or did his fatal flaw lead to the terrible insight that propelled his life toward his maturity as an honored sage and elder? Wasn’t the realization of his incest – or his entanglement in his mother’s emotional web – the first step toward self-knowledge? Wasn’t the blindness that he inflicted upon himself an initiation into a deeper “in-sight?” Is it possible that he achieved that insight only after his mother (complex), Queen Jocasta, killed herself?

Part Four – Orestes

Whoever isn’t busy being born is busy dying. – Bob Dylan

With Oedipus as our primary example, consider how Greek myth imagined three other young male heroes and the routes they took to manhood: Orestes, Pentheus and Telemachus. All three boys were the only sons of heroic kings, yet they didn’t know their fathers. Pentheus’ father Echion was absent or dead. Agamemnon, Orestes’s father, was gone ten years at Troy and murdered when he returned. And Odysseus, also gone at Troy, wandered for ten more years before returning. But seen with a mythopoetic eye, each son underwent a more – or less – successful separation from his mother.

Orestes inherited a barbarous family curse of crimes and reprisals. As in many families, we can identify the heritage of the father gods of the sky in this story. Agammenon carried the yoke of both Kronos and Ouranos. To Orestes he was the classic absent father, gone to war and then deceased. But to Orestes’ sister Iphigenia, Agamemnon enacted the family’s child-killing history that extended back two generations.

The legacy of the House of Atreus culminated with an impossible choice: Apollo demanded that Orestes murder his mother Clytemnestra to avenge her own murder of Agamemnon. Clytemnestra was the ultimate bad mother of world literature. While she did love Iphigenia, she disregarded her other children, Orestes and Elektra.

But she was still his mother – she bared her breast to him just as he lifted his sword (a near-universal symbol of the ability to discriminate between truth and illusion) to her. To refuse the terrible task meant incurring Apollo’s hatred and lifelong exile. It meant refusing initiation in a lifetime wasted as a child who would never know himself.

Obeying Apollo, Orestes committed the murder. But the price of obedience was madness: tormented by guilt and the vengeful furies, he went insane. Years of wandering, grief and purification passed before he was healed.

Feminists rightly criticize the best-known version of this story, Aeschylus’ Oresteia, as an allegory of the shift from indigenous goddess-worship to patriarchal religion. But this doesn’t account for the emotional impact of Orestes’ tragic situation. Men – and perhaps mothers – sense that he made the only possible choice. The classicist Robert Fagles argued that Clytemnestra represents the Great Mother as well as the bad mother. When she tells Orestes, “I see murder in your eyes, my child – mother’s murder,” she is stating both “a horrified accusation and a challenge.” Her “death-cry is a birth-cry too, for she brings forth the destiny of her son; she turns his innocence into power.”

He had to accomplish the murder of the bad mother – as mother complex – before knowing his own masculine nobility. Yet only after his years of grief and atonement would Athena and the Athenian elders judge him as sufficiently transformed to be admitted to the community of mature adults, the polis. In one variant of the story, he bit off a finger and sacrificed it to the Furies. Perhaps it symbolized not phallic potency but the brittle masculine armoring that veils the fear of those who haven’t cut the maternal chord.

Orestes survived the symbolic death of his old self. He was willing to experience the descent, and his grief was not merely for himself but for his criminal ancestors. In killing the bad mother, he also killed the family curse. In refusing to pass it on to future generations, he embodied the truth repeatedly sung in the Oresteia: “Sing sorrow, sorrow, but good wins out in the end.”

Does the killing of the mother in myth serve as a model for misogynistic treatment of actual women? For some men, perhaps. But we miss an opportunity when we take mythic images literally. These are symbolic murders that become literalized only when a person – or an entire culture – loses the capacity for metaphorical thinking. Jung wrote, “To the logos, unconsciousness is the primal sin, evil itself. Therefore, its creative act of liberation is matricide.” But there is a price.

Here is the real tragedy: the man who cannot “kill” his mother complex may turn his depression or his rage onto real women and perpetuate the conditions of patriarchy. He must, as Rilke says, change your life. Rumi says, If you don’t become a rebirth, you won’t understand what real life is. Men who cannot experience initiatory transformation can’t realize their purpose, and they can’t love a real woman. And both nature and women take the blame.

Part Five – Pentheus

…nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent – Yeats

Oedipus’ mother killed herself and Orestes killed his mother. But Pentheus’ mother killed him. As I write in Chapter Five of my book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, Dionysus drove the women of Thebes mad because they hadn’t respected him. His cousin, the adolescent King Pentheus, tried to imprison him and defeat the mad women, who were led by Pentheus’ mother Agave and his two aunts. This king was blind to the fact that a god (or, if you prefer, an unacknowledged part of himself) stood before him. Eventually Dionysus drove him mad as well; and the crazed women, thinking he was an animal, killed him. The Bacchae by Euripides is the most troubling of all tragic plays, because it involves the horrifying imagery of a mother tearing her son’s body apart, at the instigation of a god.

A powerful man who remains a boy emotionally endangers everyone. He lacks the wisdom that comes from having suffered into experience. Pentheus is already king when the play opens, yet he is inflexible and authoritarian. He epitomizes puritanical sublimation of Eros to the goals of the state. And he is young. The absence of his father indicates an interruption in the transmission of authentic masculine values. His youth symbolizes the uninitiated masculine psyche at any chronological age.

“Adolescence” is related to “nourish.” Something already present in a youth needs to be identified, cultivated and educated (“to lead out”), rather than instructed (“to pile on”). Without being seen and encouraged by one’s elders, however, purpose rarely emerges in a socially positive manner. It festers and turns sour. Instead, initiation would pull someone deeper into life than he would normally choose to go, or in Jung’s words, away from “neurotic suffering” toward “authentic suffering.”

Things begin to fall apart as soon as Pentheus confronts Dionysus. He is almost literally begging for trouble – or initiation – from this god of madness. Dionysus offers him opportunities to realize his errors, but Pentheus pursues his dangerous course until he reaches the point of no return. Eventually, after the gruesome murder, Agave returns to Thebes with Pentheus’ severed head, realizes her error and collapses into grief. The House of Thebes has fallen.

Many commentators on The Bacchae fail to notice a subtle distinction. The God of wine can bring either joy or destruction, depending on how he is received. The band of women who have accepted him and follow him everywhere – the Bacchants – are mad with religious ecstasy.

But the other women in this story are the Maenads. They include Agave and her sisters, and they have succumbed to the madness caused by their refusal to accept Dionysus.

The play evokes the archetypal necessity of initiation in the image of the dismembered Pentheus. The Bacchae is about neither punishment of evil nor redemption of a soul. It is concerned with the consequences of willful innocence. Dionysus isn’t good or moral, and Pentheus isn’t evil. He is, however, profoundly ignorant of his own motivations. As an ephebe – a boy on the cusp of manhood – thrust into the role of king, he has not experienced the mixed curse and blessing of having suffered into wisdom. In the final scenes, his grandfather Cadmus addresses the corpse as “boy” or “child” several times. The boy had to die symbolically. Only then could Pentheus embody his mature form (Pentheus means “man of sorrow”).

We may interpret the story as either a successful or as a failed initiation, depending on which version we read. Ironically, the original text of The Bacchae that ancient librarians copied was incomplete. A small but critical section – about fifty lines during which Agave and her father Cadmus reassemble Pentheus’ body – is lost. Scholars have “re-membered” it from fragments and later material. About half of the many translations include these words of Agave:

Come, Father. We must restore his head to this unhappy boy. As best we can, we shall make him whole again.

Are they making him “whole again” to bury him properly, or has Pentheus returned from his psychological dismemberment – the experience universally described by shamans – as a whole person? Most scholars believe the scene expresses the tragedy of the boy-king who is literally destroyed by the god. But after the family reassembles the body parts, the chorus sings of the “famous prize of grief…fold your child in your arms, streaming with his blood!”

It is horrifying yet absolutely appropriate imagery. Perhaps the scene was intended to induce in its audience an experience of symbolic death, so that they might avoid a more literal one. At the very least, it warned that such a shift was necessary for both individual men – and for imperial Athens.

And what are these “prizes” – humility and grief? For young men, humility – reconnection with the ground of being – is an essential component of initiation. The ground: humus, the earth, mother in the deepest sense. For older, uninitiated men the primary experience is indeed grief. The longer the period of adolescent grandiosity, the deeper the grief when it is finally punctured. Men intuitively understand this equation, and they desperately fear the moment when the shift can no longer be avoided. Some find solace in poetry, such as these lines from Vachel Lindsay:

Men thank God for tears,

Alone with the memory of their dead.

Alone with lost years.

But once Dionysus – known as “the Loosener” – has broken down the walls of the heroic ego, new voices may speak: I know who I am – or I am not who I thought I was – I am we, or even, as spoken by some Mayan Indian tribes: In lak’ ech, Hala ken – “I am another you, as you are another me”.

Part Six – Telemachus and Heracles

He acts as if he has no relatives. – Navajo insult

The story of Telemachus occurs within the broader context of the Odyssey, in which Odysseus experiences a series of initiations (all of them by female figures) and evolves from a one-dimensional hero into a mature, archetypal king. The gods made repeated comparisons between Telemachus and his cousin Orestes, neither of whom had seen his father since infancy. Telemachus’ lack of fathering was evident in his inability to confront the suitors who were eating up his possessions and threatening his inheritance. He was an ephebe with no elders – most had never returned from Troy – to oversee his initiation. His mother Penelope, for all her love, couldn’t provide it. Without it he would certainly die.

Disguised as Mentor, Athena advised Telemachus to undergo a dangerous night-sea journey to Sparta, where he met Helen and Menelaos, who had returned from Troy. The texts of both the Iliad and the Odyssey repeatedly connect Helen with Aphrodite, and Menelaos with Ares. The two immortals’ child was Herminone. Helen and Menelaos, whose child was also named Hermione, represent the two divinities; their marriage of passive beauty with aggressive action produced harmony. Because of their hieros gamos (sacred marriage), they could bless Telemachus during this liminal voyage. He returned to Ithaca a man, “strong with magic,” according to Homer, finally ready to meet his father, defeat the suitors, and claim his inheritance. Their meeting is stunning in its emotional impact:

Salt tears rose from the well of longing in both men,

and cries burst forth from both as keen and fluttering

as those of the great taloned hawk,

whose nestlings farmers take before they fly.

So helplessly they cried, pouring out tears,

And might have gone on weeping so till sundown…

Fate favored the House of Ithaca. Telemachus’ initiation, overseen by a female deity, was relatively painless, partially because he had a loving mother. His first bold act was to leave without asking her permission to find his father. We may consider Penelope as an aspect of Athena, who suggested that he go, just as Helen is an aspect of Aphrodite. He defended the good mother. He died as boy into man without having to symbolically kill her, and his transformation paralleled that of his father.

Heracles

Authentic masculinity serves the feminine. Heracles is an extremely complicated figure, appearing in more stories than any other mortal. Born of Zeus (who remained absent) and a human mother (Alcmene), along with a twin (Iphicles), his name meant “Glory of Hera.” Yet Hera had been tricked into suckling him, and their relationship was ambivalent. She sent snakes to kill him in the cradle, persecuted him continually and drove him mad enough to kill his own children. As penance, he was forced to labor for twelve years. One of those labors was to travel (like Odysseus and Dionysus) to the underworld.

This macho culture hero destroyed monsters and obtained the inexhaustible horn of plenty, the cornucopia; yet he usually needed Athena’s help and even briefly became a transvestite. But the consistent theme in these tales is his suffering; and his labors – and glory – were for Hera.

Heracles died a terrible death, but afterwards he split in two, as he had at birth. His shade went to the underworld, while his immortal spirit ascended to Olympus. He was the only hero to become a god, and when he did, he finally reconciled with Hera, who gave him her daughter Hebe for his wife. Hebe was Hera herself in her younger, sweeter form. Hillman writes:

We are so used to assuming that the son of the great mother appears as a beautiful ineffectual who has laid his testicles on her alter and nourishes her with his blood, and we are so used to believing that the hero pattern leads away from her, that we have lost sight of the role of the Great Goddess in what is closest to us: our ego-formation.

Hera had made him suffer; yet it was she who ultimately honored him. Why had she been so hard on him? Perhaps we should ask: would he have achieved so much if she hadn’t persecuted him? Whether in human terms it had been worth it or not, he was finally rewarded for having served the mother of material civilization.

Part Seven – Dionysus and Hephaestus

The true mission of American sports is to prepare young men for war. – Dwight

Eisenhower

Dionysus

Dionysus, like Heracles, was born of Zeus and a mortal woman. Initiation motifs occur throughout his life: in his suffering, his dismemberment by the Titans, his double birth and the wound in Zeus’s thigh from which he was re-born. Like Heracles, he was persecuted and driven mad by Hera. Unlike Heracles, he was protected by nymphs and goddesses who became his surrogate mothers.

His human mother Semele had died and descended to Hades, and Zeus, after birthing him, disappeared as usual. Thus, his many tales of invading foreign lands to prove his divine birth may indicate his search to find his father and be accepted among the gods.

He accomplished the task by descending to Hades and bringing his mother to Olympus. The story of how he did this, however, is typical of neither the gods nor the heroes. Not knowing the path to the underworld, he asked directions of a human, Prosymnos, who first made him promise to submit to intercourse after returning. Prosymnos then guided him to a bottomless pool, the entrance to Hades. There Dionysus bribed Persephone to attain Semele’s freedom. What was the bribe? What did he leave in the underworld? Perhaps it was his old, uninitiated self.

Returning, he brought Semele to Olympus, renamed her Thyone (“ecstatically raging”) and confirmed his own divine status. But having discovered that Prosymnos had died, Dionysus carved a phallus out of wood, sat on it, and completed the agreement in effigy.

In this tale he mediates between the active and the passive, showing that losing one’s identity to something greater can be not only a curse but a blessing. This is what Plato called “poetic madness” – passively accepting the inspiration that precedes active creativity. To do so, writes Hillman, means “allowing the other to enter and occupy your soul, to submit, to be penetrated, but not possessed.” Dionysus learned this from his female teachers. Having lost her in his infancy, he restored the mother – the Great Mother – to her former divine status.

Hephaestus

Dionysus reconciled with Hera by doing her a big favor. He got Hephaestus drunk and released her from the golden chair.

Hephaestus was born in anger. Some say that he had no father at all. Zeus had given birth without a woman to Athena. In response, Hera gave birth without a male to Ares and Hephaestus. But disgusted by this lame, ugly son, she hurled Hephaestus out of Olympus. Others say that Zeus cast him out and caused the crippling wound. In either story, though he was immortal, he was an abused, unloved child. Which wound was deeper – his physical lameness or the rejection of his parents? Or did the former indicate the latter?

He was saved and – like Dionysus – nursed by Thetis and her nymphs and ultimately accepted in Heaven. But Hephaestus was angry at his early abuse. In addition to being the god of the forge and of the creation of beauty – his divine gift to the world – he was also the god (Vulcan in Latin) of the volcano, the essence of suppressed rage. He disguised his feelings by playing the buffoon among the gods. His craftsmanship reflected glory on his mother, who eventually accepted him, but he remained resentful.

Eventually Hephaestus took his vengeance. He constructed a beautiful, golden chair for Hera. But when she sat in it, she couldn’t get up, and he hoisted her up in the air, where she remained captive.

Jungian psychologist Murray Stein interpreted this as an initiation story that is played out literally in many marriages where the husband has withdrawn emotionally from a needy wife. Behind the rejection of the son is the patriarchal rejection of the mother. The result is a cycle of mutual ambivalence and hostility, an impasse between countless husbands and wives that mirrors the relationship of Zeus and Hera.

In Jungian terms, a man’s repressed feminine “marries” his shadow complex of repressed masculinity, giving the feminine an evil tone. Projected onto actual women, this “bad” feminine justifies his vigilant opposition to psychological intimacy – the terrain that women are more comfortable in. This repressed masculinity is the terrain of Dionysus, although such painful human marriages are the opposite of of his own sacred marriage to Ariadne.

But this story entertains the possibility of an integrated masculine identity. First the gods asked Ares to force Hephaestus to relent, but he easily repulsed Ares with a blast from his furnace. Then they asked Dionysus to intervene. He calmly got Hephaestus drunk. When he woke from his stupor, Hephaestus saw the beautiful Aphrodite and fell in love. The gods worked out a deal: Hephaestus married Aphrodite – the most connecting of the deities, the very essence of interrelatedness. Hera was released and peace was restored, all because of Dionysus. This healed son of a distant father had led Hephaestus, another wounded son, to a proper relationship with his inner feminine, or anima. Hephaestus and Aphrodite lived happily ever after – or, as Michael Meade would say – at least until their first argument.

Part Eight – Conclusion

A few words on ancient Greek initiation: By the 5th century B.C.E., initiation rites were preserved only partially in the indoctrination ceremonies of large societies that were perpetually at war. In the paranoid police state of Sparta, a minority dominated thousands of serfs. Boys were taken early from their parents and constantly trained for war, not attaining full adult status until age thirty. Around age eighteen, they endured public whipping and were expected to show no signs of pain. The survivors became men capable of both self-sacrifice and extreme cruelty.

Upper-class Athenian youths cut their long hair at puberty and spent much time at gymnastics preparing for military service. Male clans welcomed new members in rituals called apellai, after Apollo, who embodied the kouros, the beautiful adolescent male who was the central image of Greek art. Such men knew who they were, even if they became misogynists.

Male rites followed the universal, three-part pattern. Men took the boys away, subjected them to trials and returned them in public ceremonies. The first stage was the pompé (procession). The agon (ordeal) corresponded to the liminal stage. The main characters in drama, the protagonist and the antagonist, conflicted in an agon of purification. Thus, Tragedy itself reflected initiation patterns. The third stage, or komos, (root of comedy) was the triumphal return.

Some participated in the rites of Dionysus or in Demeter’s Eleusinian mysteries which prepared them for the final transition. They did not fear death, because they had already experienced rebirth. Plato said, “To die is to be initiated.”

Athens and Sparta were large, violent, patriarchal societies that had long forgotten the wisdom to be found in the old myths. We address those stories now because we – in our own large societies led by uninitiated men who would take us all down rather than confront their own childhood traumas – need help anywhere we can find it.

Dionysus getting Hephaestus drunk symbolizes not literal inebriation but initiation into a male world that welcomes the feminine, where the mother complex is no longer a threat. Dionysus, says Stein, is both the “agent and the product of initiation…the integration of feminine spirit into masculine consciousness.” The male ego co-exists with the animating feminine nature it had previously suppressed. This initiation reveals the Other as part of oneself; the unity of the two is greater than the sum of its parts. “Know Thyself” becomes “I am we.” In relaxing his macho armoring, a man may release the mother – and women – from their dual captivities in his kitchen of misogyny and the pedestal of unrealistic idealization.

Not only does he see real women for how they want to be seen, but he also begins a relationship with the divine feminine, as mater, the material world. Meade writes:

In most tribal cultures, nature becomes the body that holds and carries someone who has outgrown his or her mother’s arms, and culture or artful living becomes the next womb... the inner mother moves to the Great Mother in nature and the Mother of Inspiration, who presides over the well of memory and art.

In the Greek imagination, art and culture are symbolized by the nine Muses (related to museum and amuse), and their mother was Mnemosyne, or memory.

So we ask: must the changes necessary for a boy to become a man – or for a nation to drop its myth of innocence – come through the violent initiation symbolized by Pentheus’ dismemberment or through the happy relaxation of Hephaestus?

David Ignatow concludes his poem “Kaddish,” in which he describes his mother’s death, by acknowledging his internal transformation:

Earth is your mother as you were mine, my earth,

my sustenance, my comfort and my strength

and now without you I turn to your mother

and seek from her that I may meet you again

in rock and stone: whisper to the stone,

I love you; whisper to the rock, I found you;

whisper to earth, Mother, I have found my mother

and I am safe and always have been.

Having made some peace with the mother and with his own feminine nature – and not by himself – a young man can begin to search for his father. That father, perhaps, is waiting, like Odysseus in the swineherd’s hut, for that moment.

It is a most profound mystery. With deep respect for those who identify as unconventionally gendered, most men will still see women as other, and perhaps they should. But now we have the possibility of relating to the other from positions of neither fear nor of power. With the revival of true initiation rituals and new generations of men and women who know themselves, we may be able to say, before it is too late, En-Lakesh: You are the other me.