Iron John, by Robert Bly.
Gaining a Four-Legged Horse
A remarkable detail that leaps out of this scene and demands some interpretation is the three-legged horse that the boy finds in the stable. This three-legged horse doesn’t feel like good news when we see it standing there, and it obviously feels worse when one rides it. We might look at what a horse could be in such a story as this, and what the difference might be between three legs and four.
“Four” is complete in that it stands for the four-gated city, the four directions, the four rivers of Paradise, the four seasons, the four letters of the Holy Name, the four horses of the sun carriage, and the four strings of the sistrum. The old rhyme goes:
One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for wedding,
Four for birth.
Three, on the other hand, falls a little short. A three-gated city is not impressive as a four gated city, and a planet with only three directions would seem odd to us. Dawn, noon and sunset add up to three parts of a good day, but night is left out. Fall, winter, and summer would not be acceptable to farmers, for they need spring. So we have to think that something important is gone.
As for the horse, its associations range over heaven and earth. The horse has reminded human beings of ocean waves, of the dead, of thunder, of sexual energy, particularly sexual energy of men, of the Great Mother, for Lady Godiva rode on a horse, of glory and kinship, and of divine energies, such as the four horse of the Apocalypse.
The horse, when contrasted with its rider, reminds men and women of the animal side of human beings, and of the body. The rider stands for the intelligence or intellect or mind, and the horse stands for the animal desires and instincts and energies that have their home there.
I am going to consider the fourth leg as a shamed leg. I assume that the boy’s animal body has been crippled by shame, his hobbledehoy walks so because it has a shamed leg.
We have already spoken of shame and its power. Shame can come in from many sources; from parents who deliberately shame us in order to make us more controllable, from addicted parents who shame us as a side affect of their own addiction, or from peers who shame us to get rid of some of their shame. Asking a parent for a response and not receiving it cause enough for shame; we can ingest a shame-bound parent, and receive shame by inheritance; every invasion, whether sexual abuse or physical abuse, produces in five minutes shame that lasts for thirty years. Simply making up a false personality to please our parents can generate shame for a lifetime. The shaming we receive from irritable school teachers, manic Catholic priests, or our own internalized perfectionist increases the store of shame that gets poured into our hollow leg, and each drop of shame increases our commitment to isolation. We attend secret meetings of apology, submission, resentment, and collaboration.
When we were very tiny, our horse had all four legs, and it joyfully lived in whatever sensualities it could gallop to. By the time a child in our culture is twelve, one of the legs at least will be crippled by shame, whether it lives in a ‘dysfunctional’ household or not.
None of us knows at twelve how to heal our horse of shame. The story suggest that a boy’s horse needs to be brought to an older man or mentor, or, lifting a scene to the imaginative level, it needs to be brought to the Wild Man. We take the nag out of the barn, where “the older boys” have left it for us; we ride to the edge of the forest; and then we ask the Wild Man for a better horse. We know we have to return it, but just to experience what it would be like to ride a horse without a crippled leg even for a few minutes, is worth it all.
Robert Bly
I love how he shows how our damaged psyche is like riding a cripple horse, how shame damages the leg of our body, how we then are crippled.
Imagine the impact we can wield to another human?
The power of words and how we use them, the way shame is for controlling the other.
I know that my words and my tactics as a ‘crippled mother’ myself, crippled my kids.
As I heal my shame-crippled leg, I will no longer damage my children, and hopefully work at healing theirs.
To hear the sound of a healthy horse galloping away as your child leaves home, what a grateful sound.
I M Perfect lady 