Robert Moore - King, Warrior, Magician, Lover

During Bill Moyerss recent interview with the poet Robert Bly, A Gathering of Men, a young man asked the question, Where are the initiated men of power today? We have written this book in order to answer this question, which is on the minds of both men and women. In the late twentieth century, we face a crisis in masculine identity of vast proportions. Increasingly, observers of the contemporary scenesociologists, anthropologists, and depth psychologistsare discovering the devastating dimensions of this phenomenon, which affects each of us personally as much as it affects our society as a whole. Why is there so much gender confusion today, at least in the United States and Western Europe? It seems increasingly difficult to point to anything like either a masculine or a feminine essence.

We can look at family systems and see the breakdown of the traditional family. More and more families display the sorry fact of the disappearing father, which disappearance, through either emotional or physical abandonment, or both, wreaks psychological devastation on the children of both sexes. The weak or absent father cripples both his daughters and his sons ability to achieve their own gender identity and to relate in an intimate and positive way with members both of their own sex and the opposite sex.

But it is our belief and experience that we cant just point in any simple way to the disintegration of modern family systems, important as this is, to explain the crisis in masculinity. We have to look at two other factors that underlie this very disintegration.

First, we need to take very seriously the disappearance of ritual processes for initiating boys into manhood. In traditional societies there are standard definitions of what makes up what we call Boy psychology and Man psychology. This can be seen clearly in the tribal societies that have come under the careful scrutiny of such noted anthropologists as Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner. There are carefully constructed rituals for helping the boys of the tribe make the transition to manhood. Over the centuries of civilization in the West, almost all these ritual processes have been abandoned or have been diverted into narrower and less energized channelsinto phenomena we can call pseudo-initiations .

We can point to the historical background for the decline of ritual initiation. The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment were strong movements that shared the theme of the discrediting of ritual process. And once ritual as a sacred and transforming process has been discredited, what we are left with is what Victor Turner has called mere ceremonial, which does not have the power necessary to achieve genuine transformation of consciousness. By disconnecting from ritual we have done away with the processes by which both men and women achieved their gender identity in a deep, mature, and life-enhancing way.