017: Sight of the Father
"This is my father or, maybe,
It is as he was,
A likeness, one of the race of fathers: earth
And sea and air."
-Wallace Stevens
The Great, archetypal Mother can be incredibly inviting. She draws us in, comforts us, nurtures us; when we are with her, we are relieved and embraced, even held within her as we once were before birth. Mother Earth provides; we lay in her grass, pick her fruit from her trees, admire the beauty of her flowers and her animals, and swim in her seas. The Great Mother receives us exactly as we are, with life generating abundance and makes us feel whole. We can go to the Great Mother anytime we’d like because we know not only where she is, but who she is and what awaits us there.
But what images can be conjured of the father?
We have Father time, Father sky, the Sun to our maternal Moon. These are things we experience but cannot touch. It seems the offerings of the Great Father can be difficult to understand because we can not live with them in the same tactile way as with the Great Mother. The sky is an intangible noun; it is the view of space from below, yet it conjures up powerful mysteries in our hearts and souls. With time we can do no better as it cannot be held or visited, at least, not in this dimension, yet we are preoccupied with age, with the past and the future. We have asked questions since the beginning, “where are the ones who came before us?” The Sun is a special case we will touch upon later.
As Michael Meade once wrote, “walking into the house of fathers means beginning in questions and entering into mysteries.” Take even the God of Christianity, “The Father” who is elsewhere, inciting our greatest ambition to find him through good works and acts of faith. In general, the West seems to have long been missing the Father, though much work is being done to rectify this. Robert Bly points to the industrial revolution as the cause of our missing Fathers. Before industrialization, children grew up as apprentices to their fathers and/or other men in their community. They worked in close quarters and learned more than just how to cobble a shoe or blow glass. They also learned to mirror the masculine expressions of their teacher or parent, which in turn bloomed the masculine energy within the child. But when men were brought off their farms and out of their smitheries and made to work in factories and warehouses in the cities, children were cleaved from the world of their fathers, and the quiet way of a Father’s teaching was silenced.
If we are to accept Bly’s hypothesis, then we can quite easily follow the winding path of history and find ourselves in a present where we generally lack the virtuousness of the archetypal Father. This isn’t to say that the past was filled with noble men who raised children perfectly, but that virtues of the mature masculine male have faded as if a dead language only remembered and spoken by few. And the pidgin we’ve cobbled together from the fragments of stories, myths and legends of the Father has left would-be fathers with a certain grandiose expectation of self without any of the tools or training to reach that potential.
Meade went on to write that, “the father inevitably brings distance to the child’s world. [...] He is somewhere beyond the falling, reaching, calling of the child. And later, whether the father moves closer through the efforts of love or disappears in some struggle, he will always be present in the distance between one thing and another.”
It seems we are meant to find the Great Father out in the world. It’s as if he won’t be coming to us, but rather, waiting somewhere, behind a great door, lit dimly by candles, until we find our way to him and ask to be let in. This can and often is mirrored in the everyday. Robert Bly used to say that “a father waits,” meaning that children, being traditionally born into the world of the feminine, through their deep connection to the mother, leave the father waiting until the time comes to depart their veritable Eden naturally, before they can truly commune with him.
In that sense the Father represents a sort of horizon, catching the eye of his children, drawing them out further and further into the world where they can come into their own. The father, when fully embodied in his masculine energy, invites the innate curiosity of the young one out to explore. It is the desire of the baby bird to leap from its nest, the desire of the young child to climb higher; to run when it can barely walk. Our Fathers offer an early introduction to the foreign notion of independence, which starts our journey toward individuation. This happens whether the father is himself independent, individuated or not. His innate apart-ness from the bond of Mother and Child, splits the hermetic worldview of the child open. After months of being physically, psychically and spiritually linked to our Mothers, suddenly there is this other who comes and goes, supplying no immediate sustenance–who is that?
Returning for a moment to the Sun, we have yet another example of how we can relate to the father. However, despite our being unable to stare directly at our star for too long without feeling its wrath, there is a way we can feel the warmth on our skin. This warmth resembles the “sight of the father”, the penetrative gaze that truly sees us, that witnesses who we are. The light of the Great Father comforts us. We need only look to the child desperately pleading for her father to “look at me, dad” while she goes down the slide. Even though there is distance, the vision of the father can cross the gap, and often, this can be enough. Such is the enigma of the divine masculine.
When we think of the traits that the archetypal Father embodies, what comes to mind? Images of containment and protected spaces? Measured calm, patience and stoicism? What about the sense of being held in the mature energy of a wise one who finds strength in self-acceptance and security? It can almost appear monolithic, can’t it? No wonder many men have become closed off and isolated in their emotions. This is perhaps why men congregate together, like a stand of silent oaks who are united beneath the surface by some mycelial intelligence. There is a certain quietude to the Father; he teaches through action and cannot explain as well as he can demonstrate. This distance can feel cold and isolating for a child. But when the sun returns, and the sight of the father is upon us, suddenly, we are made less alone. We are blessed.
This isn’t an invitation for fathers to be more distant. Anything but, as we have historically had this angle covered. Just as we all have our archetypal feminine and masculine parts, a father can access his mothering qualities. Bly called this phenomenon, “the Male Mother”, who is able to hold his child, stroke their hair, hug and kiss, show affection, grace and deep physical care. But each of us also has the ability to father within us, regardless of our having children or not. One can father a movement, an idea, a community, institution, or even oneself. The traits of fatherhood are earned through personal maturity and therefore not relegated to those of a specific biological sex.
Far more rigid than the flowing Mother, the Father brings discipline and structure to the world and the archetype demands commitment to a certain level of devotion to the very act of living. His is the energy of doing rather than being. He requires action; to reach out for what he is offering you. The Great Father is magnetic in that sense. We are mystified by his endless sky, filled with curiosities we absolutely must come to know; just as we have painted his Sun in caves since the beginning of time, built great structures of stone to map out the passing days, telling stories about the old ones and sharing hopes for the new.
But as we wrote last month, on the subject of the archetypal Mother, we know that there is another side of the Father, one related to the Titans of old; to Ouranos, the Father of fathers, the sky god of ancient Greece; to Saturn who would devour his own children whole, so afraid of them was he. This is the darker side of the archetype; Zeus crippling his son forever for having the audacity to side with his mother, Hera; the Father in his underworld who rejects his responsibilities and turns his sight elsewhere.
And yet still, we seek his sight, though we may hate him for his abuses. How old is the story of the man seeking his father’s approval? In its latest iteration it’s Logan Roy trying to destroy his own children in Succession. What incredible feats have been accomplished to draw pride out of the old man? This is the power of the external world, where affirmations and comforts are hunted for, rather than gathered.
Saturn asks us to be the father of our own life and accept the responsibility for ourselves, pushing us away, as another means of drawing us out from the shade of our comforts and into the light of the world. He challenges us to be seen by ourselves. Think of your “Saturn Return”, the sudden upheaval that compels us to change our lives in significant ways because we have reached the limit of our circumstance. What arrives is the initiatory rite of the Great Father, Saturn, who asks us to witness our lives, hold ourselves accountable, no matter our discomfort, and come into a new way of being.
Our Fathers are an early source of external validation, beckoning us out into the world while inviting us to become who we are as we interact with it. A father’s role, however, is not just to be the carrot on the stick, but to provide this validation as a means of showing us where it lives within ourselves, and to help us generate it internally. This is not to suggest that the role of the father is to train you to become a rugged individual who has no need for the sight of others, but rather an individual with a strong sense of self who remains interdependent with their community.
See yourselves well,
Inner Vision
