The mythopoetic movement was created by a group largely consisting of psychologists, poets, musicians, storytellers and writers from the early 1980s. It was inspired by the work of activist and poet Robert Bly, among others such as James Hillman, Michael Meade, Marion Woodman and Clarissa Pinkola Estés. They were influenced by the likes of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Robert A. Johnson and Marie Louise von Franz, using myth, storytelling and poetry as a way to interpret the personal and collective challenges confronted by modern society.

The work for Bly began after studying the feminine aspect of the psyche. Much of his 1973 book of poems, ‘Sleepers Joining Hands’, is concerned with the goddess. In the context of the Vietnam War, he saw a focus on the divine feminine as urgent and necessary. In 1975, he founded ‘The Great Mother Conference’, however, in the early 1980s it was renamed ‘The Great Mother and New Father Conference’ to reflect the changes contemporary men were facing. In 1984, Bly also founded the ‘Minnesota Men’s Conference’. Both continue to this day.

Bly suggested that in order to get in touch with their feelings — and the mature masculine — men needed to understand that it is not about ‘up and out’ spiritual ascension, but ‘inward and down’ to the depths of their soul, where they can learn to express their grief, which he often saw as the gateway to emotional intimacy for men.

Through a mythopoetic lens, the desire for spirit sits equally with the honouring of our primal, instinctive animal nature. Emphasised is the importance of embracing ancestors to learn from true elders, not simply ‘olders’ passing on their prejudices.

The most well-known mythopoetic text is Bly’s ‘Iron John: A Book About Men’ which was published in 1990. Bly suggests that masculine energy has been diluted through modern social institutions and industrialisation, resulting in a separation of fathers from family life. He introduced the idea of the ‘wild man’ and urged men to recover a pre-industrial concept of masculinity through brotherhood with other men. The purpose was to foster a greater understanding of the forces influencing the roles of men in modern society and how these changes affect behaviour, self-awareness and identity.

Bly found that when he told this Grimm Brothers tale, originally Iron Hans, it resonated with men. In these early seminars, he also asked men to re-enact a scene from The Odyssey, in which Odysseus simply lifts his sword as he approaches the symbol of matriarchal energy, Circe. These were men who had come of age during the Vietnam war, and he found many were unable to carry this out.

Bly recognised that these same men were also distinguished by their unhappiness, which he asserted was caused by this passivity. He aimed to teach these men that learning to flash the sword was by no means an act of aggression, but showed what he called ‘a joyful decisiveness’, and a sense of vivid, loving, aliveness.

It is also important to note the publishing in the same year of Clarissa Pinkola Estés’ mythopoetic classic, ‘Women that Run with the Wolves’, in which she speaks of the ‘wild woman’, the wise and ageless presence in the feminine psyche that gives women their creativity, energy and power.

‘Iron John’ spent 62 weeks on The New York Times Best Seller list and is still in the top 25 at Amazon under Gender Studies. Meanwhile, ‘Women Who Run with the Wolves’ spent 145 weeks on The New York Times Bestseller list, a record at the time. Estés won a Las Primeras Award from the Mexican American Women’s Foundation for being the First Latina to make the list.

In the years following Iron John, Bly ran a series of workshops and seminars including ‘Men and Women’ with Marion Woodman, which centred on a book they co-authored in 1999 called ‘The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine’.

Academic work has also arisen from the mythopoetic movement, as well as creative communities such as The Fifth Direction.

The Fifth Direction acknowledges our lineage by way of a recognised affiliation with the Minnesota Men’s Conference.