The ancient societies believed that a boy becomes a man only through ritual and effort—only through the “active intervention of the older men.”
The traditional initiation break clearly is preferable, and sidesteps the violence.
...A single clear idea, well fed, moves like a contagious disease...
The unconscious intuitions come in, not because the father is wicked, but because the father is remote.
He will go to northern California and raise marijuana, or ride three-wheelers in Maine.
There’s a general assumption now that every man in a position of power is or will soon be corrupt and oppressive.
Yet the Greeks understood and praised a positive male energy that has accepted authority. They called it Zeus energy...
Zeus energy is male authority accepted for the sake of the community.
Many young Hollywood writers, rather than confront their fathers in Kansas, take revenge on the remote father by making all adult men look like fools.
...decides one is the Wild Man (the grandiose path) -or- if one agrees, one is the victimized helpless child (the depressed path).
The people who are wholeheartedly devoted to infantile grandiosity—the Wall Street man, the New Age harp player...
If the young man steals the key and climbs on the shoulders of the Wild Man, finally, the energy of the sun will somehow be carried into the man’s body...
Those with no wounds are the unluckiest of all.
Our story gives a teaching diametrically opposite. It says that where a man’s wound is, that is where his genius will be.
Wherever the wound appears in our psyches, whether from alcoholic father, shaming mother, shaming father, abusing mother, whether it stems from isolation, disability, or disease, that is precisely the place for which we will give our major gift to the community
New Age parents usually want the boy to bypass hunting and go directly to ethics.
The trouble with such a bypass is that the boy is mythologically living through the past history of man, which includes century after century of joyful hunting
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