Robert Bly and Marion Woodman undertook a national tour in November to talk about their new book The Maiden King: Reunion of Masculine and Feminine. Men’s Voices publisher Bert H. Hoff and his wife Bernetta had the pleasure of talking to them about the themes in the book before they began this tour. Robert’s prior books include The Sibling Society, and Marion’s include Addiction to Perfection. They talk bout both of these books in the interview.

In the interview Robert and Marion refer to themes and images in the Russian fairy tale “The Maiden Tsar,” the central story in The Maiden King. Those of you who saw the Applewood videotape series On Men and Women will remember that Ivan is out fishing with his tutor when the Divine princess sails up, and tells him she’s loved him all her life. Ivan’s step-mother tells the tutor to put a pin in his tunic to put him asleep when they sail out to meet her. On his quest to re-find her, he encounters three Baba Yaga, who long to gnaw the bones of young Russian lads. W hen he arrives at the house of the Wise Old Woman, she tells him, “She doesn’t love you anymore.” The love is hidden in an egg in a duck in a hare in a coffer in an old oak tree. He carries the egg home, where the Wise Woman serves it to the Maiden Tsar and she remembers her love for him. I’ve left many rich details out of this summary of the story, but mentioned the ones that Robert and Marion allude to in this interview. There’s a lot of richness in The Maiden King that they didn’t have the time to get into here.

Bert: I noticed that in the pre-publication publicity for The Maiden King the subtitle was given as The Triumph of the Feminine. When it came out, the subtitle had been changed to Reunion of Masculine and Feminine. What’s the story behind that?

Marion: Yes, it started out with that subtitle, but as we worked with it and went deeper into it, we realized that that wasn’t the message we wanted to convey. “Triumph” has such a connotation! But that wasn’t where the story was taking us.

Bert: We have so much resistance to the “inner work,” and we seem to relish conflict so much. I remember when Robert was going to give a talk with Deborah Tannen, the New York Times ballyhooed it as “the battle between the sexes.”

Robert: But it wasn’t, of course. When it was men and women talking, they didn’t want to report on that. Deborah is coming out with a new book The Argument Culture. We hear stories about it, but she will be bringing together facts and data about it.

Marion: I think that in our culture we are deathly afraid of intimacy and we engage in conflict to avoid it.

But that’s not what we do in our relationships. There, we do the deeper work, and work on creating and keeping intimacy. Or else we don’t grow.

Bert: I wonder if we don’t have a higher expectation of relationships than we did before. In 1900 people just worried about surviving, getting by and raising our kids.

Marion: And in 1900 there was more acceptance for finding intimacy outside the relationship. That was certainly true in Europe. Now we expect all of our intimacy needs to be met in the relationship.

Robert: So he’s trying to project all of the Divine Feminine onto her in the relationship. But no human can hold all that.

Marion: I think that with the loss of interest in religion, we try to put these Divine characteristics onto ourselves and each other.

Robert: I joke that that’s less true for Catholics than for Protestants. We saw that when Ruth and I were in Spain last week. We went to go see a church with a statute of the Virgin. We took the bus and we went out quite a ways. When we got to the church the people said, “She’s not here right now. She’s over at another church for a few weeks.” We went there, and there were bouquets of flowers next to Her. They treated her as if she were a person.

Marion: And when we do that, we don’t need to project the Divine onto each other.

Bert: I wonder of part of our thirst for conflict might be that our lives are so safe, so ordinary now. We don’t risk death, fighting off wild animals. We don’t struggle with starvation and illness like we used to. So we try to fill this need with risk-taking, body piercings, going in for “extreme” sports and things like that.

Marion: But that’s not the same thing, of course. These things don’t connect us with spirit, or with the mystery of life.

Robert: I remember hearing about a young girl who cut her arm. “When I saw the blood running down my arm,” she said, “I knew I was real.”

I think that what we need to feel real is to feel connected. We all hunger for that connectedness.

Bert: You mean connected with people, and animals, and with the universe?

Robert: Especially, connection with other people. We don’t feel a real connectedness, so we seek it out by creating conflict. It’s another way of connecting with other people, but it isn’t a very good one.

Bernetta: I’ve been thinking about Addiction to Perfection. The idea that struck me was there are lots of forms of addictions, from addiction to alcohol to addiction to exercise. I know I want to have a perfect, healthy body. But at heart, aren’t all of these addictions a form of addiction to perfection? That we can’t accept ourselves the way we are, and life the way it is?

Robert: I’ve just got to say that I admire that title, Addiction to Perfection.

Marion: I think you’re right, Bernetta. That’s the pin that the tutor puts into Ivan’s neck in the story, that puts him asleep when the Divine Feminine comes to him. It’s what makes us unconscious.

Robert: And we expect the world to be perfect. I remember a delightful story about the Sufi Abu Said, who lived about the 13th century. Women prepared their food in braziers. Abu was talking through a street on the village when a woman on a second floor threw the ashes from her brazier out the window and they landed on him. The disciples wanted to storm the house, break down the door, rush upstairs and take the woman to task for defiling the Master that way. Abu said, “I search for fire, and I get ashes ...” and 5 disciples went into ecstasy.

We’re missing that ecstasy in our lives now. We hunger for it, and try to fill it with material things.

Let me get to the central part of the story in The Maiden King. The surprising and astounding thing to me was when Ivan is told that the Divine Feminine doesn’t love her any more. What does that mean, when we say that the Divine Feminine doesn’t love you any more? What did that bring up for you, Bert and Bernetta?

Bert: I’ve had misgivings about some of the New Age stuff, the smiley faces and saying the right affirmations. I could relate to what you were saying about talking only about the good side of the Goddess, and not recognizing the Devouring Mother.

Bernetta: It’s like what we were talking about earlier, about addition to perfection, and not accepting life as it is. Not accepting sickness and death.

Marion: But that’s part of the birth-death cycle. Something has to die, to make room for what is being reborn. We’re at that time of the year right now. Winter is coming on, and things are dying.

Robert: But that doesn’t affect us now. We live in houses, and don’t have to put up with winter.

Bert: It’s like what I was talking about earlier, about risk-taking and being alive. Our life is so safe now, we don’t face dying. Malidoma Somé and James Hillman have talked about this. Malidoma tells of trying to explain the concept of insurance to his Dagara village elders. Now, if your house burns down, you don’t ask what it means or why this happened now, you just figure out how to file an insurance claim and maybe even make a little extra money off of it.

Robert: But what if it was the flames of the Destructive Feminine that burned it down?

Marion: But those are two different worlds. One is in the realm of the soul.

Bert: And we get so caught up in the physical, because we don’t want to deal with matters of the soul. But in so many respects our connection with the physical isn’t real. I think about how we handle death. Death really isn’t in our lives. The family doesn’t lay out the body in the home any more. We send it off to a funeral home, where it’s prettified and wrapped up in cellophane. When we think of scattering the ashes, we think of someone in a white robe daintily picking up a bit of ash and scattering it. It’s not like that. I remember taking my Dad’s ashes up to the mountains to scatter them to the four winds. It wasn’t a dainty little handful. There was a big plastic container of ashes, and you had to reach in with both hands to take double-handfuls, with bone chunks and all.

Bernetta: That’s not the half of it! The wind was blowing. We did it at sunrise, and had our breakfast out. The ashes blew all over our tents, our sleeping bags, and the food we were going to eat. So in a sense we ate pieces of Hank for breakfast. Field mice were running around, and getting into our food. They ate some of him, too.

Later, Bert and his friend climbed up a mountain peak. I was slower, behind them. The biggest herd of elk I’ve ever seen came by, within a foot of me. It’s like they were saying “good-bye” to Hank.

Marion: Yes! Yes! That’s that cycle of death giving birth to life!

Bernetta: Accepting life the way it is is difficult. I have a friend who is dying of cancer, and may not last the week. I was talking to her a while back, and she said, “Remember, I will always be a part of you.” She said it’s hard to leave her children. Luckily, they’re pretty much grown now. She said, “I have to remember, I will always be there. I will always be a part of them.” I love that taking it in.

Marion: Yes! Yes!

Bernetta: That’s the thing that helps us get through these things, I think, is that taking it in. Although it isn’t always easy.

Marion: I think that’s an important part of the book. I came to that recognition of that difference between the part of the step-mother and the so-called dark side of the Goddess. The step-mother is life in the service of death, and the Baba Yaga is death in the service of life. The one would kill life…

Robert: Without humor …

Marion: Without humor, and with no purpose except to kill it. She would pass judgment and out of power cut off the life-force. She’d cut it off out of power, because she needed the power because she needed to find her own identity in that control. But for Baba Yaga death happens in order to make new life. That’s a law of life. That’s how I perceive it.

Robert: Well, also Baba Yaga would be connected with something like flamenco dancing, in which you see the woman and the man with a tremendous amount of physical energy. They make gestures toward each other which are both loving and threatening. They’re a little like to cock birds circling each other.

Marion: There’s nothing better than that for sexuality!

Robert: You can just feel that, that it is not just step-mother stuff. It has a great deal of humor, but also animal force.

Marion: A force for life!

Robert: It’s possible for death, too, to come into that environment. You remember that Lorca felt that that would come into gypsy songs sometimes. The word that is used in Spanish is duende. In a particular form of art, whether it’s music or poetry or dancing, it gives you feeling that death is in the room, but you feel more energetic that you’ve ever felt. That’s called duende. It’s a beautiful thing to talk about.

Marion: That’s that mystery that just comes in and opens up everything into a new dimension, even if it is death. It’s that edge, right on that razor’s edge between life and death.

Robert: You also notice that this conflict that takes place between Baba Yaga and the people who come into her domain. She’s always asking difficult questions. I don’t know if you know Walter Ong. He’s down in St. Louis. He must be 85 now. He gave some of the first ideas about the medium is the message. Marshall McLuhan was a student of his. One of his books that isn’t very well known is Fighting for Life. (Ong, Walter J., Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness) It’s a history of human beings fighting verbally. I won’t go into the whole thing, but there are interesting details about the old habit of really powerful verbal sparring between students and between students and teachers. This was a great part of the training in Tibetan monasteries. It began to disappear in the West when the state universities came. It was present in Oxford and Cambridge, and in all the medieval universities.

Marion: Why, Robert?

Robert: Well, one of the things is because they felt that people could get hurt feeling there. The more you went into state universities the more you went into universities for everyone. There as a sense that they should be protected. They should be shielded. If they went to all the trouble to go to the university they shouldn’t be isolated, or left out, or defeated. You know, that’s happening with political correctness now. It’s incredible, because I had never really understood how much positive energy of learning could come out of powerful exchanges with aggression.

Marion: Yes, because otherwise you’re just being told what to think. There’s no room for your own creativity and your own life-spark, to challenge the old order.

Robert: But it’s also true that when the state universities came in was the time when more women were educated. The men wanted to protect the women. They didn’t want the women to be talked to in that way.

Bernetta: That’s fascinating! My ex-husband was a college professor. I noticed that they would weed out the out the professors who were controversial. They would not get tenure. And they were some of the best professors. I would think that that was exactly what the school needed, a person who that was giving a whole different side from what everybody else was, so the students could make up their own minds. They could argue back and forth. I wondered, is this an educational system, or is it an regurgitation system?

Robert: Exactly! This is a way to have small children and try to disguise them as adults. Protect the small children.

Marion: That is right!

Bernetta: It takes away all the energy. Things become sort of sluggish.

Robert: That’s how poetry is reviewed in the United States now. There’s almost no negative review of a book. They feel if you’re going to review it, you should say something positive about of it. Of course, that drives the young poets nuts! They look at a book and they know it’s bad. Then some 50-year-old says, “No, it’s very good.”

Bernetta: That’s so interesting, because we just cut away education, by not having those differences of opinion.

Marion: I think that has something to do with Baba Yaga’s question. “Do you come here of your own free will, or do you come from compulsion?”

Robert: How do you connect it? Tell me.

Marion: Well, I’m thinking about those students that are silenced, and their compulsion to drive a thing to the edge where they are recognized. At that place, they could be destroyed, because who wants to be bothered with someone’s new ideas, and who are they to defy the authorities? But they take that chance. Some of them take that chance from their free will. Or they are compelled by that life-force within them, even when it’s going to cost them their Ph.D. or first-class marks. They are compelled to stand up for their own truths. And if things go wrong, they have to ask themselves, “Well, did I come here of my own free will, or did I come by compulsion?” I just find that such an important question in my own life now.

Robert: I also recognize that that’s what Freud did, when he brought up these things that no one wanted to talk about. And then Jung did the same thing to Freud. He talked about the things that Freud didn’t want to talk about!

Bernetta: We all have things we don’t want to talk about. There are things we don’t talk about with family or friends because we know they’re not going to like it. It cuts off communication.

Marion: That nakedness, though, is so important to honesty.

Bernetta: Exactly! Because you don’t really get to know someone if you can’t talk to them about things.

Marion: I think that’s essential to relationships, to love somebody enough that you can be honest with them.

Bernetta: It’s the hardest thing. I’ve grappled with that myself, too, to tell the truth. You can tell yourself a million time to do it, but it’s that risk. They might not like hearing the truth.

Marion: You might not like hearing it, either. That’s where I think the crone energy comes in. The old lady. She would tear him to shreds if he talked to her now. But she does make him face the truth.

Robert: You know, I want to come back to the end of the story, and what we were talking about earlier, about addiction to perfection. Toward the end of the story, it turns out that the crone says about the Goddess, “she doesn’t love you anymore.” And then it comes out that the love has not been annihilated. If it was, we would all die. It’s been stored somewhere. Then the interesting thing is, where is it stored. One of us would say, “it’s stored in New Age books,” or “it’s stored in a library somewhere,” or “it’s stored somewhere in Afghanistan, where there are some wonderful old teachers.” But that’s not what the story tells us. The story says that it’s stored inside manner. It’s stored in an egg which is stored in a duck, which is stored in a hare, which is stored in a wooden chest, which is stored in an old oak.

I was thinking about that this morning, not starting with the oak, but with the egg. Then you have something which Marion has often talked about. What does it mean that spirit is inside matter? What does it mean that matter is something that holds all of these things that we want? To me, there are amazing images there. If we want to find this love, we have to go into matter. Going into a computer is not going to do it.

Marion: No, it’s the living matter.

Bernetta: Is it the going into yourself, your own living matter?

Robert: No, I’m not going to accept that, because it sounds like going into your own memories. Maybe you’re not thinking of that. Maybe you’re thinking of going into your own body.

Bert: Kinesthetic body work. Marion won’t do an Intensive, unless there’s a body-worker and a voice-worker there.

Marion: That’s true, Bert. Because we have to deal with the whole person. You have to bring psyche and body together.

Robert: You know, when you talk about going into your own body, sometimes it feels a little elegant, but one of the poems that’s been one of the most important in the 20th century is where Beaudelaire described the maggots inside a dead dog. They made sounds almost like the shiftings of grains. That’s matter!

Bert: That comes back to the addiction to perfection point we were talking about, because of the whole Western split, the Gnostic split, between spirit and matter. Matter is something that is dirty. If I’m perfect, I rise above all that.

Robert: Exactly. What would happen if you went to your therapist and the therapist, instead of saying for you to go home and study your dream, he said, “I want you to go home and find a dead dog with maggots, and watch it for two hours”?

Bernetta: Oh, God!

Robert: Did that get you, Bernetta? (chuckling)

Bernetta: Could you pick something else for me to look at?

Robert: No, it’s got to be a dog, and maggots.

Bert: Well, the Tibetans went for air burial. And part of a young priest’s training was to cut up a body and feed it to the birds.

Bernetta: That’s hard for us to think about, in our culture.

Marion: But, you see, that’s that theme of death’s sacrifice to life. The whole last part of the story is one sacrifice after another. It connects right back to the Tree of Life.

Robert: I think I should bring that dead dog into my section of the book. Don’t you think so, Marion?

Bernetta: All the reviewers would say, “What’s that dead dog doing in the book?”

Marion: I think we should take that dead dog with us on the road. (chuckling)

As I think about it, I think of the radiance of the cells, cells that are truly divine.

Robert: What are you thinking about, Bert?

Bert: I’m still caught up in that dead dog imagery. We are so totally isolated from life in so many ways. It comes back to what I was saying, that because we don’t have much contact with life we do more risk-taking and body-piercing.

Marion: Which isn’t real risk at all, Bert. It isn’t real.

Robert: Even cutting your arm isn’t a real risk.

Bernetta: The real risk is getting in there and seeing what’s there.

Marion: And the real risk is breaking up all your little boxes, and opening up your eyes to a whole new vision. It seems to me that that’s what Ivan is doing there, at the end of the story. He breaks up the coffin, then the hare, and so on, and each opens up a whole new possibility, until he ends up with a gorgeous egg. Which she eats.

Robert: That’s the most mysterious thing in the book, that the love is contained inside an egg. That’s understood as being contained in matter, and so on. And yet, the only way that she can get back the love she had, that the Divine has for the human being or that the Goddess has for the man, is to eat the egg. There’s something very deep in that.

Marion: And he has to bring it back, Robert.

Robert: That’s an example of the male and the female working together.

Marion: Oh, boy! I’d say so! If you think of her as the Divine, and him as the human here, it’s his human courage that steadfastness. I always imagine him carrying a raw egg back, and how hard that must be. That human frailty gets it back to her. And it’s the old Wise Woman who cooks it, on her birthday.

Robert: Tell me, how do you understand the cooking? How does it strike you in the image part of your being, that she cooks it?

Marion: Cooking has to do with putting fire underneath the egg. In other words, it’s the fire of passion or the fire of emotion. You work with your own living humanity, the pain of it and the joy of it, and all those human emotions that are the fire. The egg has to go through the fire.

Robert: Does that imply that the fire is basically divine? That the coolness in the earth is human, but if it’s not met with divine fire it’s not going to be cooked?

Marion: My answer, of course, would be that human emotion is divine. Those passions that we sometimes associate with darkness are carrying just as much divinity as darkness.

Robert: Let me ask you this. I’ve never asked you this. More and more, I’m getting depressed by the failures of pop-art. In what sense is great art “cooked,” and pop-art is not? Pop-art seems to have a lot of feeling in it.

Marion: I’ll have to think on that one a bit.

Bert: I have an answer to that…

Marion: Bert, what is it?

Bert: It’s sort of like my reaction to the “tone poem” music of the 19th century. Great art expresses something, but it also connects with something. It has a context, a relation to Spirit. It’s not done just so I can do it. It’s not “I’m going to write a book Love Story and use a gimmick for a first line just so I can evoke an emotion in you and show that I can raise an emotion in you.” That doesn’t connect to anything. It doesn’t take you anywhere, once that emotion is raised.

Robert: Well, I don’t know. Remember that night we had, called “We Are the World”? All the pop singers got together. They said that they are connecting to people all over the world.

Bert: There’s something that scares me a whole lot about that. Remember the commercial “I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and live in perfect harmony”? The idea was that people all around the world could find a commonality. But as I thought about it more, I found it really frightening. Let’s wipe out everybody else’s culture, and let’s get everybody around the world to buy an American product, consume American products, and think like Americans.

Marion: It has to do with the transitory. You know, Cokes aren’t actually eternal. Most of the themes in pop-art has to do with transitory images. Great art has to do with eternal imagery.

Robert: Here’s another question, that’s very much related to what Bert said. What is the relationship between global capitalism and pop-art?

Marion: What do you see, Robert?

Robert: I don’t know. I just see them going together. They’re growing bigger, both of them.

Marion: People want the transitory. They want it cheaply, and fast. Let it be destroyed as quickly as it comes in, so we can make way for another fad.

Bernetta: Isn’t that just another way of not facing reality?

Bert: I see another, more immediate connection. Right now, they will spend millions to make a 30-second commercial. They’ll create a whole genre of art, like the Peter Max art of the 60s. It’s then used to sell things. Or the MTV images that come up way too fast, before the brain can absorb them, much less contemplate them. It’s like the corporate culture can take over pop-art to define for us what our standards and views on art are, because these are also the ones that will sell products.

Robert: Marion, it’s interesting that you bring in spirit here, because this process in the story of going back from the egg to the duck to the hair to the coffir is very slow. Isn’t that right?

Marion: Very slow.

Robert: And people hate psychoanalysis now, because it’s too long, 20 years.

Marion: You see, it’s all the quick fix, the fad. You will get this today, and get something else tomorrow. That is not what this story is about. This story is about a very slow, gentle, deep and fierce process. It’s a soul process.

Bernetta: He takes a long to time to get to the end ... well, you’re never ended with our journey.

Marion: And you’ve got to be willing to work very hard.

Robert: It took us about seven years to do this story. (All chuckle.)

Marion: And it’s a very extroverted culture now. Pop-art is very extroverted, as contrasted to the introversion of this story, or great art.

Bert: The story is very vague about time. You don’t know if it’s one year or twenty years between the first Baba Yaga and the second Baba Yaga.

Marion: There’s no way of knowing that, Bert. It’s a timeless, spaceless world.

Bert: I’m coming back to Robert’s imagery about the egg that holds the love being matter. But it’s not just matter. It’s not a turnip or a stone. It has a spirit potential, it holds the potential for new life.

Marion: That’s the whole point. It carries life within it. It has the possibility of everything new.

Bert: Depending on how it’s prepared. How did he know to bake it, rather than boil it, fry it or scramble it?

Marion: The Old Woman prepared it in the story. He brings it home and gives it to her to cook.

Robert: When I was doing that, Marion, I got almost into a love affair with eggs. I said that this is unbelievable, the egg is connected with all of the past of the human race. I tried to put it into terms of their being some kind of a genetic connection between chickens and people. But also I noticed that my favorite thing is to boil it for four minutes, take the top off, and then eat it with a little spoon. I find myself admiring the sculptured interior of that egg.

Marion: I know. I have a completely different feeling about eggs, too, I must say. I really do see and experience eggs in a totally new way, with immense respect!

Bert: I didn’t want to let you two go without asking about the Clinton matter, since it’s on everybody’s minds. I saw both the Addiction to Perfection and The Sibling Society in the public reactions. I don’t want to admit I have an addiction to perfection, so I will project it out to our leaders, and expect them to be perfect. And when a child reaches adolescence, he’s hard on his parents when he discovers that they aren’t perfect. Isn’t the public’s reaction to Clinton just evidence that we’re a sibling society, as well as being addicted to perfection?

Robert: Oh, I think so.

Marion: I would agree with that, Bert.

Robert: Marion, that means that both you and I are prophets! (chuckling.)

We want our prophet pin pretty soon.

I think you’re right. I think American culture is the most childish culture in the world. We’re the ones that do these things.

Marion: And this yearning for perfection is totally immature. It can only create a black, filthy shadow side. Everything that is not perfect has to be destroyed.

Robert: You know, Kenneth Starr’s name has the word “star” in it. He’s been addiction to “star-perfection” since he was very small.

Bert: Isn’t it ourselves that were destroying?

Marion: That’s what I feel, Bert. So long as we’re putting that projection on another person, we are putting it on ourselves. As within, so without. Somewhere within us there is someone putting those ferocious judgments on ourselves. e can’t deal with it, so we project it out. But, ultimately, we go down under our own judgment.

Robert: That’s scary, Marion. I hate that.

Marion: That’s scary stuff! That’s what causes compulsive behavior. We end up being a compulsive, addictive society.

Bert: As a sort of wrap-up question, I’ll just throw out a general question about where this work going, what do we need to be doing or not doing?

Robert: That’s not a question, it’s like an egg dropped on the floor! (Chuckles) Give us another one.

Marion: Oh, Robert, you do say it well!

Robert: I suppose you’re talking about what kind of fight are we in. We have a fight against people who don’t want mythological information of any kid. Ted Hughes fought that fight, too.

Marion: But I thank that there are very many people who do respect mythology and do care about the spirit and the soul. Those people are interested in this kind of work.