Breaking or domesticating wildness out of horses.

The Iron John story explores the loss of our Wildness and how Wildness is domesticated out of us by the forces of the Establishment, The Status-Quo.

In the Shamanic world the two poles of the Axis-Mundi, ”Above and Below” are naturally separated by the mortal world, our world. Mankind is supposed to stand between these two divine world’s energies, creating the mortal world. In the world we live in we create our experiential world through our belief systems. When the the vertical connection is lost for mankind in the Above direction, it comes crashing down and collapses on the world of Below creating a very thin world between these two divine energies we call our world (the meso-cosm). “Meso” as in mezzanine floor a floor between. Through the loss of the recognition of the Divine our world becomes flat psychologically as laid out in the poem below. 

When Euclid started out to measure Hades 

He found it had neither depth nor height. 

Demons flatter than stingrays 

Swept above the plains of death. 

 

There were only waves, no hills, 

no chasms or valleys. 

Only lines, parallel happenings, angles lying prone. 

Demons shot along like elliptical plates: 

They covered an endless field in Hades as though with moving dragon scales  

Victims of flat evil, 

With no comfort from a high place 

Or support from a low place. 

Burial mounds are flattened by forgetfulness.  By Harry Martinson 

In the grand scheme of things Mankind is not here by coincidence we have an important role to play in creation. Each of us comes to this world with a personal and a collective mission to heal the world and the families we incarnate into. When we do not fulfill that mission the world is poorer for it. On this plane, we create our reality from the beliefs we hold. It is up to us to interrogate those beliefs and to ensure they are life-affirming. We are not here by accident nor by mistake. This is our spiritual reality and our grand opus.

When we look at the world around us we see that the belief that we are here by accident and are inconsequential is rife in the world. Those who stole our birthright do so for their own ends of Ego-driven desires.

As Soul, our Wildness is domesticated out of us by the continuing collapse of the vertical Axis we become literally dispirited. The pressure to conform and to be acceptable domesticates us out of our natural wildness away from Soul to serve the will of the collective, the Establishment, and the Status-quo.

A contrary view is expressed in this poem by David Whyte,

Everything is waiting for you

The Iron John story. The First line.

As the Axis Mundi collapses, when the above and below of the divine energies meet in the middle the energies of mediocracy and the suffocating sameness of domesticating conformity creates the all-encompassing energies of the Status-quo.

This collapse of the Axis Mundi and this reality of the Status quo is the context in which we find ourselves today. This is the only context from which we can interpret the story. So, for us where all we have is the narrative it is incumbent on us to see and qualify what the words imply.

The opening line in our story.

We know these stories carry transcendent signpost for us in our lives, we also know that these stories are written in the same code as dreams and visions. So, to unpack what is meant by the first phrase we need to understand something about Kingship, a place and great forests filled with wild animals.

Narrative: There was once on a time a King who had a great forest near his palace, full of all kinds of wild animals.

We know quite a lot about Kingship in general and this King in particular. https://samsleeman.com/iron-john-chapter-0-kings-and-kingship/

We know this is an image of an older established King. He has after all a Palace already established and I imagine made of stone. Stone is a metaphor in stories for the literal truth. That literal truth we would call the code of the status quo the domesticated reality we live in today. To live in a stone castle or palace is to live in and by the code of literal truth.

In such a castle there is an army of enforcers to see the code of the Status-quo is kept, this is no more apparent than how the police force and armed forces act in our world today. Perusing the ever-narrowing agenda of the status quo, becoming ever more tyrannical and autocratic over time.

The opening line states the truth of the duality of our time. The old King, the Status quo, and the great forest full of wildness. The great forest is a metaphor for the entirety of the human psyche called by some “The Great Self” “the grand opus of life”. It is place where the wildness of nature resides. The undifferentiated unity of nature, Soul, the Feminine, and the direction of below of the axis mundi. It is also the safe place for the lost inner child of the story described as the loss of the Golden Ball. This is the place where the split-off parts of ourselves go for refuge in the process of becoming acceptable in the world of the Status quo. To understand this forest, we also need to understand Soul, it helps to flesh out the metaphor of the “Great forest” to understand something of what is meant by Soul. https://samsleeman.com/towards-an-understanding-of-soul/

Now that we have established the duality that between place the castle /palace and the great forest. We can see only one pole of the axis mundi, the Below direction. What happened to the other two positions? In some way, this is the message of the Parsifal story in the version of the “Fisher King” Much of these ideas are set out in the link below.

https://samsleeman.com/iron-john-parcifal-and-the-star-woman-story-the-axis-mundi/

What happened to the other two directions, the Inner direction of mankind and the above direction of the masculine, father sky, discernment, code, tradition, prayer, meaning and order, differentiated-unity? The best way to understand this is through something that James Hillman wrote. Laid out below.

WHEN FATHER-ING IS ABSENT, by James Hillman. What happens to the sons? What happens to the world?

The missing father is not your or my personal father.   He is the absent father of our culture, the viable senex who provides not daily bread but spirit through meaning and order.   The missing father is the dead god who offered a focus for spiritual things.   Without this focus, we turn to dreams and oracles, rather than to prayer, code, tradition, and ritual.   When mother replaces father, magic substitutes for logos, and son-priests contaminate the Pure spirit.

Unable to go backward to revive the dead father of tradition, we go downward into the mothers of the collective unconscious, seeking an all-embracing comprehension.   We ask for help in getting through the narrow straits without harm; the son wants invulnerability.   Grant us protection, foreknowledge; cherish us.   Our prayer is to the night for a dream, to a love for understanding, to a little rite or exercise for a moment of wisdom.   Above all we want assurance through a vision beforehand that it will all come out all right.

Without the father we lose also that capacity which the Church recognised as “discrimination of the spirits”:   The ability to know a call when we hear one and to discriminate between the voices …

The mother encourages her son: go ahead, embrace it all.   For her, all equals everything.   The father’s instruction, on the contrary, is: all equals nothing – unless the all be precisely discriminated.

https://samsleeman.com/when-the-father-is-absent/

At the beginning of this passage, I wrote about what I see as the collapse of the axis mundi and the because of that collapse the creation of the status quo’s establishment, or perhaps it’s the other way around. The creation of the status quo causes the axis mundi to collapse. In the shamanic world, we speak of three worlds, above, below and the middle worlds. When these three are in good relation ship mankind stands in the middle realm the direction of within. This offers mankind a specific role to be a transformer for the energies of the two other poles, Transforming these two energies into the material world.

A wild idea you might think. Here is how I came to this idea and what it implies. For Mankind to stand in the middle between these two poles we must have moved some way towards our Kingship. When a king or sovereign sits on a throne and wears the Crown of kingship what does that look like? 

A king sits on a throne with four legs signifying the four directions, The throne itself is a Feminine structure that holds the King body. The King wears a crown with points looking upward. Electric charges always gather at points before discharging or receiving energy. The divine Masculine energy of above pours down and into the Kings body and then outward through the four quarters as signified by the four legs of the throne. The Feminine energy comes up from below and pours out into the four quarters also. In this way the health and creativity of the land and its people are nourished by divine energies.

Obviously not just anybody can sit in that chair without being killed by those divine energies passing through him.

It appears to be all of us Divine mission as humankind to stand between these two great powers and fulfil our destiny to transform these divine energies as best as we can out into the world. That is part of our mission, we may well have other missions layered within that mission.

Bread & Wine Friedrich Holderlin.

Oh Friends we arrived too late. The divine energies are still alive, but isolated above us, in the archetypical world.

They keep on going there, and apparently, don’t bother if humans live or not……..and that is a heavenly mercy.

Sometimes a human’s clay is not strong enough to take the divine  water. Human beings can carry the divine only sometimes.

What is living now? Night dreams of them. But craziness helps, so does sleep. Grief and night toughen us.

Until people capable of sacrifice once more rock in the iron cradle, desire people, like the ancients, strong enough for that water.

In thunderstorms it will arrive. I have the feeling often meanwhile it is better to sleep, since the guest comes so seldom;

we waste our lives waiting, and I haven’t the faintest idea how to act or talk…in the lean years who needs poets??

But poets as you say are like the holy disciple of the wild one. The one who used to stroll over the fields and through the enormous forest through the whole divine night.

 “I think or intuit that there are such things as inverted guardians. The vessel has to be ready and prepared before something can come into the light. Like in Alchemy the vessel has to be strong enough for the Opus otherwise the transformation can not take place.”  

When we deride and criticize each other and find each other worthless because of some narrow belief system imposed on us we sabotage the divine mission we have each come to fulfil.

Sam Sleeman updated 25/3/24