#11 | The Origins of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement - Michael Meade (Mosaic Voices)
“The soul, like a river never simply stays its course, no matter who sets the course.”
My guest today is the venerable Michael Meade, author, mythologist, and storyteller, who was a prominent figure in the first wave of the mythopoetic men’s movement of the 80’s and 90’s. Michael was right in the center of it – sitting alongside legends such as Robert Bly and James Hillman.
By the mid 90’s Michael moved away from the men’s movement, and founded the Mosaic Multicultural foundation, a non-profit dedicated to education and cultural healing, working with at-risk youth, returning veterans, prisoners, and youth involved in gang life.
Over the last few years, I’d met Michael at a few public gatherings, and have long desired to sit down with him to understand what happened back then, and what the current mythopoetic wave can learn from his perspective.
Just a note: This episode was recorded in late January, at Michael’s studio on Vashon near Seattle. This was before the coronavirus lockdown, and therefore of course, we don’t speak to this topic. At the same time, in our conversation we cover many other rich areas, including those early days of the mythopoetic men’s movement, the problem with codifying archetypes like king, warrior, magician, and lover – and the heart of men’s work, which for Michael, has always been about journey of the soul.
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LINKS
SHOW NOTES
Early days of the mythopoetic movement
Sharing between cultural traditions
Authenticity and leadership
Maps of masculinity, king warrior magician lover, are they still valuable?
The soul defies codification
What is gender
Being a man is becoming your authentic self, not a prescribed role
The youth are not young right now, a condition of self
Elder is not a person it’s a condition
Elders needing to stand up and say this is wrong, offer up sacrifice
Question in the end, did you become yourself?
FULL TRANSCRIPT
IM: Michael Meade.
Michael Meade: Hi.
IM: Thanks for being on the show.
Michael Meade: Sure. Happy to be talking with you.
IM: Could we begin just by hearing a bit of where we are in this moment?
Michael Meade: We're in the studio on my property next to my house that used to be a writing studio, and it's been repurposed as an audio studio. So we record our Living Myth podcast here and have little meetings here and stuff like that.
IM: And the island we’re on…
Michael Meade: That we’re on the east side of Vashon Island, which is approximately the same size and shape as Manhattan Island. And I happened to have moved from Manhattan Island on the East Coast with about 10 million people and a few thousand trees to Vashon Island and the Northwest with about 10,000 people and a few million trees.
IM: You've been here for quite a number of years.
Michael Meade: I’ve been here for like 40 years.
IM: Wow. And what is it about this place in particular that called you?
Michael Meade: I don't know. It was…I've never had the experience before or since. I came out here to visit someone. I come from New York, Manhattan, from urban streets and I was driving down this road to find these people, and halfway down the road, I just had this sense I have to live here. And within two months I moved here.
And so then this property…I raised my children here. And so after the children all left and went into the world on their own, and I guess the marriage left and went wherever marriages go, I found myself sitting in the house, looking out the window, and right behind where you're sitting and outside the window where I write in the morning is a tree with seven trunks rising from the same root. A big apple tree, like a 90-year-old apple tree that has seven trunks coming out of it. And I realized over time, I look at that tree every morning before I start writing and I realized I have this essential relationship with that tree. And so, it's almost for that reason that I'm here.
IM: Wow. This conversation to me was really exciting because for the last five years or so, I feel I've really been exploring men's work from a variety of perspectives after coming through another project where I spent a lot of years exploring the feminine in my filmmaking career. And it was through that journey that I realized how little I knew about the masculine. That journey really launched me into exploring a lot of both this cultural moment as well as the historical precedent that we're in.
And I feel we're in a kind of unique cultural moment where it feels like the spiral of the mythopoetic masculinity, let's say, has come around again, and at least that's how it seemed to me when I started doing the research and I started looking into Bly and Hillman and yourself, and so I just feel it's so important just to be able to go back actually, and hear from what was it like then? Was it even understood to be the mythopoetic movement at the time? Was it even a movement? All of these questions, I would love to hear from you, who was felt like you were right there, whether or not you chose to be in the epicentre.
Michael Meade: Yeah. Well, I chose to be in the epicentre. I just maybe was seeing it differently than others. And so it actually started with Robert Bly very clearly. I had met him and we had been doing events based around bardic imagination because he was a great poet and he was a really knowledgeable person about poetry and the bardic tradition, which I had been studying from a mythic/story point of view.
And so we started working on that kind of thing together. And then he had the idea of why don’t we do an event with just men, which really was caused by his sons growing up and raising issues that he wasn't ready for. I had three sons also. I have a daughter too, but I had three sons that were presenting issues that I found, hmm…I had difficulty measuring up to.
And so when he said, let's try it, I said, alright. So it was launched from that kind of personal sense of what are we passing on? What are we representing? And how do we deal with these intense feelings and conflicts that can come up between fathers and sons? And then between those sons and culture and so on.
That's as much of a plan as we had, is let's see about that. And so all of the early events were really wild and reckless, and there was no form whatsoever. And so that was interesting, just to start to figure out that.
And then I had been working for years studying ritual. Because of my interest in myth, and ritual and myth kind of go hand in hand in some ways. And so I had been looking for an opportunity to work with ritual, and so it became that for me.
And then, and at first it would just be these odd collections of 70 or 80 men in the woods for a week. Basically stories, poems, and music. And it was really fantastic. And for me, I was using images like the Fianna in Ireland where they would…or the Maasai, they would spend months of each year in the wilderness or in the forest, or doing whatever they were doing. And I was trying to reimagine all that.
But then it…so you mentioned the movement, and so over time, I still remain identified with the men's movement of the 90s or however people talk about it. But I was saying at the time, this is not a movement in the normal social sense. I would try to get people to think about it by saying, imagine in the 90s saying we don't need a men's movement. We already have the Congress. Because the Congress at that time was almost all men and there were no bras to burn. And the idea of men getting together and moving was scary to a lot of people. And you think of armies and stuff like that, and it's done a lot of damage in history.
And I didn't see it that way. Didn't want to be part of that. To me it was soul work. That's how it started. With the bardic imagination and the poetry and stories of the soul. And the idea was to try to stir and awaken a greater depth in the soul of men, whatever age they might be. And I will say that's the work we did.
But this idea of a social movement kind of caught on. And so some people got really dedicated to that. And eventually it all got a little bit tense and a little bit fractured as well.
IM: [00:10:14] Yeah, I'd love to hear about that as well. Like what was the fracture you feel…maybe first, what was tapped in culture that there was such a response? I'm curious even what was going on at the time historically that suddenly there's 80 men or more willing to do that. I'm curious about that moment and then what was this fracture you say.
Michael Meade: Well, I think Robert in the kind of poetic style of prophecy and imagination had really tapped into this kind of hunger and longing inside men to be connected to something meaningful. And so that part was totally on target, and it was something right below the surface. And he was intrigued with the Wild Man, which really goes back, interestingly enough, to the Green Man in Celtic lands. And so if it's coming back around again, it could come back as the Green Man, which might be a little bit more approachable and understandable for people because the wild got confused.
There's a lot of things that are wild. Poetry to me is a very wild territory and so is nature, but people took the wild to mean permission to act out a bit. And that also scares people and you don't necessarily have to bank everything on that.
But I remember, just in story terms…I tend to think and recall the stories…We were doing all the events in the woodlands, the redwood forest in Mendocino, California, ‘cause it was so beautiful and the trees were ancient and huge and it just really took you out of the modern world. It was so fantastic.
But the idea that men were doing something secret or whatever…it wasn't a secret, but that's what people like to think…caused the media to really want to get into it right away. And so we would do a week in the forest and the media, I mean the main channels, were waiting with cameras when the guys were coming out to ask them what happened and all. And so the first big tension came when people inside the retreat said why don't we let the media come in.
And you know how it is when you say something, half the people like it, half don't. And for me that was really clear. No. No media is coming in. And I just drew a line and said, if media is coming in, I'm going out. Because it's soul work. And because the whole idea was to get men to be more vulnerable and to reveal what that aching pain is in there, what that story, traumatic story that's never been touched is. And that's not for media. That in effect, cannot be, especially at that time.
So that was the first big kind of division, was is this something being offered to the media, as the kind of medium of the culture? Or is this something you keep in your soul because it represents the deeper, more meaningful life and therefore you don't keep it secret, but you hold it in the soul and from there it grows like the roots of a tree.
So I thought that was the first big division and first where it became clear to me I'm not going there.
IM: Yeah. It's so interesting to think about current day with social media and all the rest, and I think we'll circle back around there.
Michael Meade: I think we're using it right now.
IM: Yeah, exactly. I went back and I read one of your old interviews, I think it was Sun magazine, maybe ‘89. And there was a reporter at the time…I think it was called “Wingspan” or something, [the] article…where he said that if the 60s and the 70s or the 70s and 80s was a women's decade, then the 90s will be a men's decade.
And I'm curious as what you think about that in terms of what happened, because for me, as a younger looking back now, and I grew up in…I was born in ‘81 and so I was kind of a teen in the 90s and all this, and none of this was on my radar, growing up in sort of middle-class suburbia.
And now that I've looked back, I see like, whoa! What happened? It really felt like there was this mass surge and then kind of went underground. And I'm curious to hear what happened.
Michael Meade: Well, I never could get what people talking about. Like the women had the 80s and men get the 90s. That's just to me a very reduced idea of anything. Women, men, feminine, masculine. It just seems so reduced to me. I don't know exactly what happened, but if we go from the story I was talking about where we're not allowing the media in, there were a lot of people who came out and sought the media and the next thing people were talking about a men's movement.
And that's really intriguing. So it was on magazine covers and TV shows. Not me. If you look at this stuff, I refused to do it until much later on. And honestly, it was serious for me. I would say, if it's going to be about war and peace, I'll come. If it was going to be about social injustice, racism, that kind of thing, I'll come. If it's about the men's movement, no. I've got other moves to make. And so that was my way of dealing with it.
And if it is coming around [again], I imagine it's completely different in the sense that media has to be a part of it now. There's no…literally we're doing it ourselves. And I think what's different now…I hope it's what’s different…is people could realize that what happens in the souls of men affects both culture and nature and that's the issue at hand still.
And the idea at that time...I remembered being in meetings and stuff where people are saying, we're going to have a national men's day and we're going to have all this national stuff. And I said, no. The women's movement, the civil rights movement were about people being oppressed and people being kept from having the normal rights and shared equalities with other people.
This will look like men who already have power trying to get more. And that is so dangerous compared to the original idea of men getting deeper into the connection with their own souls and where that leads them. I just thought that was something worth arguing about, and for me, eventually worth pulling away from.
IM: Because do you feel like it's sort of spiraled around self, like the personal growth or the kind of obsession with the self, versus having a perspective that is about service to the time, about ecological destruction or civil rights? Do you feel that's what happened with that wave, kind of caused it to spiral within self-empowerment?
Michael Meade: Self-empowerment was closer to it. And by that I mean the sense of self that goes from the chest up and the vulnerable search for healing inside oneself and dealing with deeper trauma goes down. And anybody doing that work would learn the difference really fast.
And I had an interest early on in bringing young guys into it. I had grown up [in] kind of a rough neighbourhood in New York, being in a gang, stuff like that. I know what happens to young people when they get exposed to rough situations and how easy it is to get into violence and all that kind of stuff.
I also wanted it to be multicultural. And so I would say things like, I don't think you can call it men's work if it's all white men. You call it white men's work. Now that was interesting too because we had a lot of people who would depart. I eventually said, and I wasn't the only one, but I eventually said I won't do an event called a men's event unless there's men of colour present. And that created a lot of trouble. And also at the beginning of Mosaic was trying to bring diversity into soul work.
IM: Why do you think so many men, white men, are attracted to this?
Michael Meade: Well, I mean, it's a great subject. So imagine people having power but not having earned it or learned it. Something in the soul says the thing ain’t right. I didn't do anything. People that have less opportunity than me are doing better things sometimes. And so I think there's a natural disturbance in there.
And the reverberation isn’t consistent all the way through. And so, I don't know, to me, if someone's gonna handle power, they can only handle as much power going/dealing outside and in the world as they have soulful depth inside themselves. And I think if I go back to how those first conversations started at those very initial events, they were really about looking like grown men and not being able to deal with my own feelings, much less the feelings of my children in the household. That's where it started from. And that's a micro version of what happens in the culture.
And right now, I hope everybody's noticing that in America, the person in charge has the most profound case of symptoms of toxic masculinity and narcissism and obsession with power that I've ever seen. And so, in my view, eventually people elect the symptoms so that we could hopefully start working on the cure.
And so, in the 90s, that wasn't understood. I think it should…hopefully it's more clear now.
IM: [00:20:20] I'm struck by this relationship to…early on, and it's still present for some of the movement…borrowing from other cultures, like borrowing from other rituals. And that there's something that has become more a part of the conversation about what's okay to borrow or use within ritual. A lot of men's groups, mythic men’s groups, they'll have…burn the sage and the talking piece and all that kind of stuff. Banging the drum.
And I think there's something too…I was recently at another gathering. I mentioned Sacred Sons, which is an emergent movement. It started by a fellow and two others, who are actually very diverse in their own ancestry.
Michael Meade: Yeah, I’ve met them.
IM: Yeah, of course. And yet it was primarily white in terms of the people that were there. And primarily I'd say within the age range of kind of like late twenties to early forties. And so for me, of course that's challenging ‘cause there's missing-ness there. Yeah. And I wonder how is that related to a kind of cultural homelessness that I think so many on this continent also have, particularly those of white…Myself, I from Ireland and England, my ancestry. But again, I didn't grow up with that where I grew up in Canada. And there's a hunger for something “real.”
So I'm curious again, what have we learned from the past, if anything, about what is the relationship to ritual and culture, in particular with this work.
Michael Meade: It's really tricky and it's become more tricky. So you have, by now, many more examples of blatant cultural appropriation. It was happening back then, but not to the level it's happening now, so it was easier to experiment. But, I don't know how to answer it simply.
I had had experiences in the African American community in America and in African communities in America. It's kind of a long story behind it, but I felt exiled from the white community. I had been in a military prison and had profound traumatic and blessed experiences. And when I come out, I felt I didn't fit into the culture, and in many ways I didn't.
And I found myself much more connected and at ease, in particular in Black culture. and I happened to be interested in African drumming and could kind of drum too. So I could be part of things in that way. And through that I met African people who had come here, actually to offer aspects of their tradition, particularly people from West Africa where giving the tradition is the tradition, which is very different from some other cultures. So they're going to freely offer you almost everything they have out of a generosity and out of an understanding that the souls are connected in depth.
So that's how the drumming got involved in this whole men's thing. And I'm sorry to say I've been given a hard time by a lot of drummers for causing white men to go out and get drums. Anyway, I'm partly joking, but John Densmore from The Doors is a good friend and he always says, I tell people, even though you did that, you're okay. Anyway, it’s cause I got identified with that.
But really the root of that is that drumming is the most basic instrument and the only universal instrument found in all cultures. And of course, it's connected to the heartbeat. And it's also connected to the visceral parts of the body. And so it's one of the quickest ways to get men into their bodies in a more conscious, felt way. And it's also a natural way to get cohesion by basis of rhythm. And it just really works really well. And particularly well with young men who probably from everybody's inherited roots should be near the drum sometimes. And so it really made sense for that to be present.
And then I happen to play drums while telling stories. And so it made sense for me. I forget what we were talking about, but I'm just picturing now all these events that we did. ‘Cause I invited in all kinds of African, Puerto Rican, Cuban drummers that I had gotten to know. And so, perhaps different from some of the men's groups, there was a real practice and a knowledge of and sharing of the knowledge of really powerful drumming, both ritual style drumming…like if you take Cuban drumming. You have those rhythms and the certain ways that they're used at a ritual, and then you just slightly changed them and you have a social mode. And so we would explore those things. And anyway, yeah.
IM: You're right, there is something almost at a fundamental level around this soul embodiment activation, let's say, through the instruments. And we're also in a time where, again, I feel like the edge of a lot of the learning that's going on right now is in a way…especially on this continent, of course, like the legacy of genocide, the legacy of colonization…So there's this almost reckoning I think that's happening around really what is culture and where’s it come from? Right. And I think as…let's say just the men's groups, for example…Is there a way to move towards regenerating culture, but in a way that also perhaps doesn't borrow? How does one even do that?
Michael Meade: Well, in a sense that all meaningful cultural traditions have roots in art, it is all re-inspiring, re-making, borrowing and sharing. All tradition is that. I think if a group having held and shared their own styles and traditional cultural ways say we don't want to share it, then that should be really respected. And there's usually reasons for that. And sometimes it's colonization has happened and people died to preserve it.
Another way in which is completely legitimate is if someone's borrowing someone else's soulful traditions because they need it badly but are not awakening their own soul, then that's that stealing and that's misrepresenting and that's got to stop.
On the other hand, people always shared traditions. So in studying and trying to learn about storytelling…like in North America. Tribes would have their stories. They would think of it as their stories. But then storytellers, certain kinds of storytellers, would go from tribe to tribe and would trade in kind of seed stories in a wider way and because that was needed too. Because otherwise you get ingrained and your losing, just the way seeds fly on the wind from a tree here to another island or something, people understood that it was natural to have the seeds of story and the seeds of imagination moving about. So it's a matter of figuring out where are we?
Thinking about drumming, early on I had a drummer who was an initiate in Cuban cult music. And so I was learning aspects of Cuban cult music, and then I was doing events with women and men, and then people would say, can I play the drums? And also the next thing up was teaching women and men to play variations of this stuff I had learned.
And then someone showed up and said, you can't. Women are not supposed to drum. I said, I don't know who made the rule up, but it seems to me it's up to them. And all of sudden I was in trouble with people interpreting that tradition. And I said, I really think that's not right. I don't. Nothing anybody could show me could.
And then strangely, I found a recording of women playing that rhythm from Cuba. And so then I just realized, no, you have to watch out who it is that's representing the tradition and where they're coming from. Because the songs that were involved and the rhythms were naturally attractive to women as they were to men. You get into cultural traditions and you're going to be into all kinds of collisions and intricate dances.
IM: What do you think could be learned or integrated for men's leaders, those that work with men now, that could be learned from the time that this first wave, let's call it, was active? What do you feel is vital for men's leadership now to really hold or incorporate into this next wave?
Michael Meade: [00:29:35] The first thing for me is the soul. If it isn't soulful, then I would be careful with it. Because that keeps it not just interrelated and more, but it also keeps it grounded and it keeps the sense of a deeper awareness and a vulnerability present.
So if I go back, the first events we did were in that camp in [inaudible]. I still do a retreat every year in that camp. It's over 40 years now. And that's because of that place. I have to go there. Every year I have to go. And it's become very similar in a strange way to what the Fianna in Ireland did and the Maasai in Africa did. You go to these places in nature that kind of host you and you get to learn that and that place learns something about you.
So here we are. For some reason, this crazy experiment catches on and we now have long waiting lists, people trying to get in, and there would even be arguments about that. And I'm trying to find reasons for making shape.
And so anything over a hundred is a challenge to the human psyche. There are studies on sizes of groups and how much violence increases as groups get bigger. So I used to argue for let's keep it a hundred. It’s kind of like a mythical number. It'd be 95, be 108, whatever. So we always thought of it as a hundred and then you have to start somewhere.
And so one thing that we did that happened early and then it became a tradition. Those who are the teachers…we think of it as teachers because we're coming out of that tradition…we used to sit on a bench together. We were always sitting, always exposed day after day after [day]. Anyway, and the idea was if you're going to be representing guidance or teaching, you have to be vulnerable to begin with. If we're going to ask those who are present to be vulnerable, we have to demonstrate that first.
And then Etheridge Knight, [for] people don't know very well, who is a really great African-American poet who came to these events early on, he was the one who validated that, and he said that's the right way to do it. If you expect someone to trust you, you have to show your vulnerability to begin with.
So we began every event with the I call it the so-called faculty being vulnerable. And that, to me, reminded us that we have to be authentic. And it gave, hopefully, gave those present the sense of people who were in minor temporary positions of power coming from the soul and from vulnerable places in the soul and that didn't just create permission. That created a mission that if you are here, you should take the opportunity and bare your soul. Because in the daily world, well, that could be dangerous and you're unlikely to be protected or get the healing that you're looking for.
And so that was the core of what we were doing, it was healing. It was artistic, creative, mythic, poetic work, combined with healing whoever shows up.
IM: Beautiful. What's the link between men and perhaps men's spaces and vulnerability? Why is that possible in that, with that alchemy?
Michael Meade: So we're trying to figure this out. And again, we would have no form, and we're trying to actually organically experience the chaos and the vulnerability. And then recognize things that have immediate validity.
So in Ireland, there was a tradition where young men learned to sing laments, and often the laments were the story inside the song was a woman lamenting. So without having any big discussions on an academic level of the masculine and the feminine, you would have young men singing from the broken-hearted place of a young woman.
And I happen to know that. So then I would say, let's lament. We have to lament. And then that fits in with things you find in other traditions. And so the idea was to get at vulnerability. And since the other part of the energy we were working with was creative poetry and stuff, that also was a vulnerability. So we tried everything we could to get everybody in a vulnerable space.
And then I was interested in radical ritual, ritual where you don't know where it's going and therefore everybody gets transformed. And so, some of the oldest rituals I found were based on the idea that the afflicted person or persons are sacred and they go in the middle of everything. And so I was dying to experiment with having someone cracks open, breaks down. They're the centre of the ritual.
And I was learning how to take the cracking open of the psychic ground as the beginning of a ritual. And what that means, ultimately, is the ritual is not repetitive. You have to make it on the spot. And that felt to me legitimate for those coming from a culture that lost its own rituals. So then I called that working with the rudiments of ritual to meet the legitimacy of the occasion.
And so we were working at radical ritual fairly early on and knew how do you trust that, right? Because ritual can lead to using power easily. And so what we did was make it based on vulnerability, woundedness and healing. At least that's what I thought we were doing…well, we were doing that. And that's another reason why it didn't go out into public very well, cause you're going to lose that part.
That work and considering what was happening to younger men, but also younger women, early on for me led to doing mentoring work, and the same thing I have found in mentoring. The key in mentoring is authenticity. It's not learning a bunch of skills. It's actually showing up in the moment. That's what writing is about. That's what music is about. Mentoring, like in ritual, authenticity is the key. It's the key. The only way to keep everybody straight. It's fine to have a ritual practice or a routine.
I've visited a lot of men's groups. People started forming men’s groups. Great idea. It's like one of the oldest ideas in the world, but it's a great idea. But what are they going to do? And so what I found is a lot of them, after a year or so, were stuck, ‘cause I would hear from them. So then I would go to participate and see what's going on. I would sit down, usually a circle.
I remember one of the first times I went to this group. They were interesting enough guys, but they were stuck. And what happened is you sit down and then they pass the talking stick. And so the first guy takes the stick and [he’s] saying something that sounded very repetitive to me.
So I just said, excuse me, have you told this story a lot before or something? And someone says, you can't talk. You don't have the stick. And I said, well, I don't know. It sounds like he's not talking either. He just has the stick. I want to know, how many times have you heard this from him? And everybody said, Oh my God, we hear it every month! So I said, no, that's not how you do this. I said, so now you're hiding behind a stick. So now we're in a big tension ‘cause that's what they've been doing for over a year.
But it proved my point. I said no. Honesty, authenticity would be to say, man, I respect you. I even like you to some degree, but I don't like you when you tell that story in that pompous way that you keep doing every week. So would you please cut that out and tell me when you're really bleeding from?
That would be a men's group. I would say, well, that'd be a human group. I don't know. But you know what I'm saying? That's the danger. The danger is to create things that initially seem like they're leading to a deeper place, but eventually wind up becoming mechanisms for avoiding the deeper place. And that's always the challenge.
I think it's the challenge in ritual, by the way. It is the [challenge]…if you go back far enough, if you're in a sweat lodge and something's going wrong, the leader's supposed to say, I think we're at odds with the spirit that we're seeking. I mean, that's a legitimate thing. If it isn't authentic…For instance, a sweat lodge, a lot of people are familiar with it. It can either create the heat that causes healing and transformation, and if that doesn't happen, it's baking in the inauthentic.
And so I watched this happen not just in sweat lodges, but in heated rooms and realized that the main job is to be authentic when the situation gets meaningful. And that's true I found in mentoring also.
IM: In the previous interview I mentioned, you had a line about this relationship between wildness or the wild and form. That wild needs form. And I feel like there's a bit of what you're saying here, the sense that when a form becomes too overtly sort of oppressive or just going through the motions, there's no wildness. And I'd love to hear again, this relationship, how this can be utilized in a soulful way.
Michael Meade: [00:40:12] So, early on in those early events, original events, I wanted to try ritual. But I didn't know if I had the permission to do that. I didn't know from where do I draw that permission? And I knew no one present actually typically had any capacity to genuinely open it up. And yet, I was so interested in it and I felt like…and it was natural from storytelling to go to almost ritual.
So I focused particularly on this Australian tribe. They had a ritual that was the annual ritual where eight elders retreated into a particular place ‘cause they're very particular about the dream time and the dream place. And they knew where to go.
And they would…In their tradition, the elders bleed for the tribe. And they would cut themselves, and then they used the blood as a glue to glue onto their bodies all these feathers from birds that they've collected. And so they look like birds sitting in the forests or the underbrush or wherever they are. And it takes eight of them to do the ritual to renew the tribe, which also means renewing the dream and also means renewing nature.
And then culture came in a bigger way, and everybody was leaving and they realized they weren't getting any new elders. And the next year they doubted if they would have eight elders. That means they couldn't do the ritual because the way they understood it, it took eight of them. They realized that the ritual was going to die and, and they didn't know what to do.
They wound up deciding to have it filmed so that it wouldn't die forever. And so you can actually see it or read about it. In the middle of a 10,000 year-…that's what they estimate…10,000-year-old ritual intended to renew the tribe, the dream of life and nature, they stop and whoever's leading the ritual says, are we going the right way?
That was it for me. That explained the whole thing. You can have a 10,000-year-old practice that is beautiful and meaningful. You can have a good intention, but in the middle of it where transformation becomes possible, the responsibility is to say, are we going the right way? From that, I got permission.
And I got this kind of information or knowledge about try: to be authentic, question the process in the midst of the process. And that starts to help with all the appropriation and all too, because when you move a ritual to a different place, that ritual changes and so on. Anyway, that was the most profound thing I've found.
And then that became, to me, the centre of Mosaic, all the events that we wound up doing after that. That's the question in the middle: are we going the right way?
I've sent that in emails to the White House and to the Congress, who I noticed are active again, or only half of them. But anyway, I've sent it saying, Consider this, when you handle all that power. Here's the question: Are you going the right way? Is it producing healing? Cause if it's not, then it's producing division. There’s not any alternatives. Every alternative is temporary.
So to me, men's work is healing work. And I think that's what it was in all the old cultures and why young men were brought into the healing practices. But like native American people will sometimes say, you want to be on the healing road. Or why always men were singing. That's the waking of the soul when it's hard not to feel the sorrow, and then you're doing lament, and now you're in the healing again. And I think it's supposed to be healing. And if it's not, then I know where it's going. It's going after power.
IM: Wow, I really like that articulation, that it is the soul's work of healing versus a political movement that can easily become lost in itself as kind of aggrandizing. The sense of needing to be seen or needing to experience power.
Michael Meade: Yeah. I've been invited to things where it's about men's rights and I said, well, I'm interested in that, but let's start with men's wrongs, and then we might have a better eye for what's right. I mean, men have to watch it, especially in cultures where there's an unconscious kind of a power formation.
IM: The previous wave of the mythopoetic men's movement really seemed to be drawing a lot of both inspiration and orientation from Bly’s Iron John, of course, became a huge hit. And also King, Warrior, Magician, Lover often gets referenced and the archetypes of the king, the lover, the magician, and the warrior.
I wonder, here decades later, do you still think those maps are valuable in this age, or do you have other maps that have come to you around masculinity? Or what stories about masculinity have come to you that may provide a more current and a dynamic response to this moment of what it means to be a man?
Michael Meade: That's an interesting way to frame the question. Sometimes I feel like the last man standing with regard to all that stuff. I mean, Robert Bly’s still alive, but he's not healthy. Robert Moore passed tragically.
I remember again, early on, you can't codify an archetype. That's why I say, if we really want to look at the Wild Man, let's look at the Green Man. The Wild Man represented the wilderness, not just wild men. I mean, men acting wild. That's like a bad TV show. It was like…I don't have it out here, but in the house I have one of these old masks of the Green Man, which represented nature in a kind of a masculine form coming into culture. And the wildness includes that. And that part could be valuable now.
The story of the Wild Man the way Robert Bly told the German fairy tale, it's fascinating. It's fascinating, but it's really, it has mythological twists and turns that people just skip and just try to condense the archetype. And I think that's what happened with King, Warrior, Magician, Lover.
And I'm getting old [inaudible]. I just tend to tell a story. So we had arguments, ‘cause I would say, you can't say this for archetypes. You just can't do that. That's an imposition on the soul, on the psyche, on the imagination, on the wilderness. There is an endless number of archetypes. Now you can take certain ideas out and look at them symbolically and those four are pretty interesting. But so is the wild one being mentioned by the other guy sitting on the other side that won’t allow itself, hopefully, to be categorized or reduced. So I think there's a reduction quality there that I don't like.
And I mean, I told the authors and everybody at the time that too. We would talk about it. The soul produces archetypal energies all the time, is how I understand it. And so those things are helpful. To me, they're like a starter trees when the forest isn't already there. Something like that. I mean, I like some of that, but I don't like the codification and I think that goes along with the muscular framing that then becomes the same old guys marching. Just now, the flags say Warrior, Lover. [That’s] my concern with that.
IM: I love that. This idea that the soul is constantly generating infinite archetypes. And in that sense, it's almost like the soul is a happening that's constantly happening, instead of a kind of, Oh, I need to impose upon it a structure that therefore kind of locks it in a cage.
Michael Meade: Yeah. Because all of those…Okay. So that idea didn't come simply out of nowhere. It came when…it was a derivation of…I forget her name right now. The woman who worked with Jung.
IM: Oh, Marion Woodman?
Michael Meade: No. This is back before that, naming four feminine archetypes. That's where the idea came from. And this was a kind of a matching to that. And so that's an older psychological idea that…Jung liked fours, but it started out there were four feminine ones, and then this..So anyway, interesting, good stuff. And then the soul, like a river, never simply stays its course, no matter who's at the course.
IM: [00:49:58] What do you think is valuable or what have you found then as you work with men, as you say now you still gather, and of course you work with a lot of different folks now, but what do you feel or what has been valuable in terms of looking at the map of the soul, particularly for men or in men’s spaces? What has continued to remain valuable for you in doing this work?
Michael Meade: Hmm. Well, if it's authentic, if it's genuine, and people come together. I'll just say something about the process also. The way those events in Mosaic and events to this day go, there is no plan per se. You get together and try to say, Okay, what do we think…it doesn't mean you don't know stuff. It just means that you don't assume that there is a plan.
And so, imagine Robert Bly, James Hillman, Terry Dobson, all kinds of people I could name. Robert Moore was there at times. And it begins with us saying, What are we doing? What are we going to do? And usually the question would become, What's the story?
And then, that was often my job, is to say, Well, here's the story I'm most interested in. And then everybody, we talk about the story. And then we would use the story as the territory and with the assumption or the experience that you can never get to the bottom of a story. I mean a real story, a genuine story, a mythic story.
And so I guess, in a way, if it goes to the mythic, which means the soulful, spiritual, surprising territory where you don't know what you're going to encounter, and then if the people doing it can have that care enough to challenge each other, then I think things are probably going to be alright and everybody will learn something.
But once it gets codified, there's a tendency for it to become more like fraternity and more like a club. And then here's the rules and here's the talking stick, and I'm usually gone before that gets passed, and I don't mean to put that down, but I do know something about the tradition of that too, and it comes from a much deeper root than just organizing.
IM: Yeah. I love that. You had an expression that you said, if you have the courage, I think the courage to care, to challenge each other as an essential piece, to compassionately challenge as a way almost of protecting the aliveness of the ritual of the gathering.
Michael Meade: Oh, yeah. It's like, I like Carl Jung's idea of friends of the self. Friends of the soul, friends of the self. And that's what that became for me, was in the midst of the heat of what we were doing. Oh no! Are we making really big mistakes? Or why did we do that? All that kind of stuff.
You get so close to someone else and then you realize I loved them, understanding their tendencies and weaknesses, and then you have a responsibility once you love someone to say, I think you're doing what you do when you're insecure. I think I'm seeing it right now. So why don't we just not go down that road unless we have to.
That was the challenge of sitting…we call it the bench, sitting on the bench together…is to be real. And if it's not happening, then it's addressed immediately afterwards. Like, “I don't believe you. You actually putting something forth there and I don't believe it. Maybe fill me in. Maybe I missed something, but I think you just were running something right then and I don't think that's what we need.” [You] do that in academia. Don't have to do it here.
IM: Yeah. Wow. What do you think is the story…and again, all of the caveats around coming up with some kind of universal anything…but what do you think is the story for men in this moment? Post-#MeToo has happened. There's this climate of course of a kind of reckoning about particularly white men. But, for you, what is the mythology of this moment that men can use to craft meaning from, rather than a simple “men are terrible. They gotta pay.” Of course, that's a bad story, I think. But there's something else I feel that's present. And I wonder for you, looking at the cosmology of stories that you've been…what is most sort of meaning-full to you now?
Michael Meade: That's a really good question. I really like how you’re thinking about all this stuff and reflecting on it.
I think the problem with now is that most things are falling apart. I mean, culture is almost collapsing in its institutional forms, which tend to be hollow now and can't respond to everything that's going on in [culture] and nature's kind of unraveling. So we're in a very unusual period. We don't know how long it's going to be, and so people fall back on things like masculine, feminine, men, women.
I mean, it's confusing to me, ‘cause masculine doesn't mean men. How could it? I like ideas like yin and yang, which can go anywhere in any form. But anyway, I understand that, socially, people want to define gender and gender roles, but I really don't think it's going to work out very well going forward here. And I think the kind of breaking open of the arc of gender that you see happening with children, and you see it happening with a lot of young people and more transgender and more variations on gender. I really think that's the soul saying we're going through this period with very few stable things. And so don't bet on stability in gender either.
So having said that, you still have men, and you still have women, and so all the stories that I get interested anymore are about when everything goes wrong, what do you do? How do you act?
Native American stories of healing in the midst of chaos are really rich. The idea of being present when the weaving of the world unravels, and then you look for the thread to meaning that's nearest to you and that thread I wouldn't pre-describe as masculine or feminine. It's just a thread you better grab it and figure out how to work with.
That's really hard when some part of us thinks that we're supposed to be a man or men this way. It's really a hard time for that. I don't know how people are dealing with it. I really liked that you're having that kind of question.
I do have an old idea I like, which comes from Ireland and it's kinda scary. And it kind of says that you're only a man when you're being true to yourself. And so what I think that means philosophically is there is no general man or general men and that you look at someone and say, I think it's a dude or I think it's a male in the species, but the reason I'm thinking about that is I see a genuine person there in that form. It's a really challenging idea. It could be true for women too, that you're only actually a man when you are yourself, if you're a man. It's not helpful for those trying to work out the gender stuff, but it's an old idea.
IM: Yeah. It actually hearkens back to, I think, again, in that interview I read, you'd use this phrase around like the gender domains or something like that, and that there's also an inheritance, like a mythological inheritance that goes with genders. Something that Sharon Blackie in the interview we did, she said something really interesting about trans as well that it doesn't seem to be many myths, preexisting myths around that gender, but that that's not necessarily a problem. That this is the mythological time for those myths to be born and to be maybe uncovered. And so, yeah, I feel like in what you're saying, that it's almost like the drive to find a universal gender expression is itself a kind of a need to land somewhere that feels: we've got it, we arrived. But this is like a liquid time where so much, as you say, is kind of dissolving.
Michael Meade: [00:58:52] Yeah, which is really challenging to people. I mean, ultimately, I think the issue is: Can we become ourselves? And that will be hard to define. It's another thing that's in process. It's always becoming.
And so, I still think it's different if you're working with a group of men than if you’re working with a group of women. There are differences. But I think we're not in that time where…so you have the social realm and the social level where there are norms of gender expectation. And then you have the biological level where there are gender differences. But the closer you get to the soul, and interestingly enough, in many cultures, the closer you come to being an elder…because early on, the fetus is not defined, gender-wise. Actually, it tends to be feminine. And then later in life, the elders are losing some of the more expected gender capacities or appearances.
And so the idea is there is something deeper. And that's helpful if you imagine that we're in a time when the roles cannot be codified or sustained very readily and maybe shouldn't be. Maybe that's what's really going on.
The other thing I would say is, in studying various cultures, there's always the ground betwixt and between the men and the women, which is inhabited by the healers and the seers who are seeing both deeper and beyond what other people are seeing.
And so, another way to understand it might be, is that centre ground where culture is empty in the centre, but when it comes to gender issues, the centre ground where no definition or trans-definition or multiple-definition is occurring, is getting bigger. And that might be filling the middle that's otherwise empty.
And in many cultures, those who are in between or mixed together…whatever you want to call it, the two spirits, the ten spirits, I don't know what you happen to have...they're the healers too. They're the visionaries and the healers, and so it may be that the healing space between genders is actually trying to grow too.
IM: Beautiful. You mentioned elder, and it was the phrase that you used in the past, which was that elder is not a continuous state. That it is an eruptive, imaginal thing. And I wonder if for you to speak to this sense of what does it mean to be an elder now, at this moment, in this state of dissolution, this state where there's perhaps a tyrant king on the throne? What does it mean to be an elder now?
Michael Meade: Well, I want to start with the youth because the youth are not young. In a time like this with the weight coming down, the youth themselves are not young. And so that tells you that youth is not an age. It's a condition of soul. And so then the same was always true of the elder. The joke in some cultures is you go to see the elder, he or she's napping. Or you're in a critical moment and you bring in the elder and you hope they’re not having an elder moment.
People used to joke about it because it's not a person, it's a condition. So that which we would call an elder, in the sense that they would have some wisdom, they would have a sense of guidance, they would have a sense of grounded responsibility, can happen in a young person. So it can't be simply connected to age. That's another thing that has to be loosened up a little bit, and yet we hope that as people grow older, they grow wiser.
What I think about a lot is…and I don't know how to activate this on the scale that it's needed in this culture: we're sitting here in America…the best thing that could happen, in a way, would be that the older people would stand up as elders and say what's going on is wrong. We don't need lawyers to figure it out. We don't need new rules to make it clear. You feed children, you protect anyone who needs protecting, and you seek healing. And when you have excess, you give it to where it could do some good. And nature's calling on everybody. And I think that's the role of the elders, is to say that something has gone so far wrong.
And then when I want to get more direct about it, I say what's happened is we've put negative elders in charge. Because when a person gets old…neutral is a very rare thing in life. It doesn't last long. So a person getting older is either going to get more elder or get more, I guess you could call it the negative elder. They're going to go into self-involvement. They're going to go into aggrandizing and holding on to things, and they're going to get stuck in the past. Whereas the elder in a healthy way would be more considering of the future and what the future's gonna hold for other people like younger people and and more willing to sacrifice.
Sacrifice is a big old idea for the elders. The elders will sacrifice like the Aboriginal ones in Australia I was talking about. The bleeding isn't just a morose thing. It's an indication that they're sacrificing for the tribe. And when they put the feathers on, what they're doing is saying, We're trying to contact the spirit that would be helpful. We're trying to act as the spirit’s generously giving and trying to catch the vision on a meaning for the rest of the tribe.
And so, I'd like to see some sacrifice and vision from elders. I mean it. If I knew how to activate that, and I'm not sure, but I think about it a lot. I write about it. People are supposed to be...I love the native American idea that the elders make decisions based on seven generations down the line. That means you won't be around to see it. It's like you plant a tree now so that it would provide shade and what did they call it? Carbon…
IM: Sequester?
Michael Meade: Carbon sequester. You gotta say new things now. So carbon sequester for the future and you won't be around to see it, but that doesn't mean you don't plant it now and understand something about that planting that that's its own fullness, knowing that you're putting something in the right place and you're contributing to life.
So the elders are supposed to be doing things that are life-enhancing. And as soon as you watch people using power, whether it's power of wealth or power of politics, and then not doing life-enhancing things, something has gone very wrong. Very wrong. And so I think it requires the imagination of youth as well as elders to hopefully find another way to go and begin healing.
IM: I feel we're almost to completion here. I'm really enjoying this. You've said that the only question that may be asked in the end is: Did you become yourself? And I feel it to ask it of you, not at the end and hopefully many more years, and maybe the wondering that, Have you lived in such a way that you really feel you've become yourself?
Michael Meade: Another really good question. So another way to interpret that? The way I get to that idea is either a person is born blank (tabula rasa, blank soul, blank slate) or they are born gifted and aimed. That's the two kinds of stories. And I like the gifted and aimed stories. And all cultures had those stories until modern times. That each person comes in with natural gift to give, and they're aimed at something meaningful.
So then if that's true, then at the end the question is, did you do it? That's how you get to that question. The test at the end is not: Did you follow the rules? Were you nice to people? Do your children forgive you? All that stuff. No, it's did you become yourself?
So that's how that story goes, but there is a psychological level. Which is not so much at the end, you're at the Pearly Gates and God's sitting in judgment or all that kind of stuff. But the deep self is always sitting in judgment. So at any moment, a person could say this could be my last moment. From the point of view of the self, Did I become myself?
And, you know, [exclamation]! I think about that too because the becoming of oneself is an everyday thing. And so how do you keep showing up for what’s in the day that you're entering or what comes along that day? So, I mean, I find that to be a great challenge.
So all I can say is I wound up telling stories, and that's true to myself. That makes sense inside me. I try to learn about healing all the time. I'm not always sure, although strangely enough, I become more sure when trouble is at hand. It's easy to measure. It's easy for me to figure out where I am.
I started this Mosaic group and it's all been based on going after trouble and going to places where the trouble is profound and you cannot deny it. So now you see what you have to offer. You see what your fears are, you see what you know about healing.
And so, I don’t know. I guess it's a matter of what's happening that day, or did we get ourselves into the right trouble? Then I think it's easier to measure, but yeah, it's still an open question.
IM: Michael, thank you so much. Really appreciate your time this afternoon and your beautiful studio.
Michael Meade: Good to be with you and really good questions. Thank you for all the thought and reflection you're putting into the issues. Thanks for that.
