SOPHIE STRAND: I know you as podcaster, as documentarian, as philosopher, as facilitator, as narratologist, as Ian MacKenzie, and also as the brains behind The School of Mythopoetics. So I think I will begin there and let you flesh out that description.
IAN MACKENZIE: Okay, nice to be here, Sophie. Nice to be on this side of the conversational equation, hosted by you. And in this container. I had never heard the word narratologist. I like that.
SOPHIE STRAND: The study of the shapes of stories.
IAN MACKENZIE: Beautiful. I would say—also, welcome to everyone here, who’s tuning in with us live—that my work is concerned mostly with finding these threads of the emergent culture, no matter where they are, from years at Burning Man to Occupy Wall Street. And at one point, I was inspired to try to illuminate this, I call it this mimetic rise of the feminine. And, I didn’t understand what that meant, really, at the time. Ultimately, it was shaped through collaborations with my co-director, Nicole Sorochan, and many others, a project that examined the feminine through the lives of female DJs and producers mostly, and used a mythic lens.
And so it was natural, through that process, that I was drawn to then look at masculinity through the same lens, because I’d realised, largely too, because of the way that I’d grown up in the absence of a lot of this mythological context, that I was drawn to that, and I discovered the whole mythopoetic men’s movement, and beyond, and started The Mythic Masculine. So there’s all these threads that have just called to me and ultimately, I guess, I see myself as an amplifier of the cultural shifts that I wish to see, generatively contributing to this time, and the mediums can change—whether it’s film, writing, podcasting, things like that. But ultimately, I feel like that’s my mission.
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah, I see you as embodying a very kind of mycelial sensibility, of course, not thinking of fungi as a monolith. But thinking very specifically about mycorrhizal fungi. And how they create ecosystems that connect disparate nodes of a forest together, and how you’ve been really expert at connecting me with people who I would have never expected to collaborate with, and creating a landscape of conversation rather than a monomyth. So, I see you as as really acting like a mycorrhizal fungi in the work that you do, whatever medium you take as your direction.
I do have a question, which is, because the topic of this conversation is conceivably about masculinity. And I wanted to ask, when you were growing up, what was your experience of the masculine narratives offered to you? Which ones appealed to you? Which ones felt constructing? How did you navigate that narrative ecosystem?
IAN MACKENZIE: Yeah, thanks for this. As I reflect, it really becomes more clear to me that the absence of any mythological context was offered, it was more the inverse; picked up through osmosis, through pop culture, through models of masculinity that were around—my father, other older men… it was never presented as a cultural framework, [like,] here’s when you enter the initiation context from childhood to adult and like, here’s the myths that are given to me at this time, for example, I understand, more intact cultures do have these kinds of frameworks; there’s a guiding context that’s more apparent than essentially picking up in its absence.
So certainly, I grew up, 80s, late 80s, early teens and then into the 90s, and some of the tropes were certainly there. Often the strong, dominant man, action hero, elements there, the stoic masculine, doesn’t feel much but gets things done. These kinds of things were apparent, but also blending with a softer masculinity. A more gentle, a more pleasing masculinity that, certainly I think are still in a lot of tension today, but I would say I didn’t have a real clear sense, of what does it mean? I had to discover it, personally, like I think so many other men do.
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah. And so you mentioned discovering the mythopoetic men’s movement. I’m wondering what intersection you see between mythmaking and then self-identification and gender, and how that has fruited in your own life, in your own self-identification?
IAN MACKENZIE: Well, it was 2015, when I came across the book, Iron John, [for] those folks that [haven’t] heard of this, it’s sort of the mythopoetic foundational text for, at least the Robert Bly inspired wave of the mythopoetic men’s movement. Certainly his teachers influenced him. Essentially, the use of story, in this case, a myth of Iron John, Iron Hans, in the initial German or Bavarian place-based understanding… He used that myth to illuminate the experience of men at the time, largely, through the late 80s, again, into the early 90s.
And reading that myth, there’s something that many men I think, experience, and I did too… [which] was—[and] certainly it was also through his commentary that was able to make these kinds of connections—so deeply illuminating to my own experience, as a man in this culture. It was a profound sense of being seen, which had never really happened. I had never really had that experience before. And so on the one hand, it was a feeling of being seen and being recognised for having a certain kind of experience and challenges in growing up with masculinity.
But then also a sense of, oh, wow, so many other men are experiencing this. Then there is something that is actually transpersonal. Like, if so many men growing up in a certain context can recognise or find value in a myth, then there’s something beyond just preference. And so whether that is just the fact that we share a certain experience growing up presenting masculine in the culture, or that there is some kind of relationship to biology or, I’m thinking of another guest who I had on that spoke to masculinity as a theatrical spirit. Like that there is something recognisable, that is beyond simply individual preference. At least, that was mirrored back to me, when I had that experience with the book.
Just having an overt relationship to a myth, and to my story, again, was a profound sense of possibility for me, and again, for other men that ultimately, that wave crested, and now it’s in a renaissance. And of course, the work you do, as well, is I think, again, a conscious application of myth. Haven’t read the book yet, but I’m very much looking forward to it, by the way, Sophie, and what I’ve tried to do in the masculine podcast as well, right, is again, illuminate, I think you’ve used the word polyphony of narratives of the past, to bridge the ecosystem of more ways of experiencing and exploring, in this case, masculinity.
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah, I think because masculinity has been so conflated with patriarchy, and because patriarchy has infiltrated, on the wave of colonialism, so many different corners of the earth, it’s very easy to think that it’s always been here.
But I, as I was doing this work into looking back into the deep time history of the masculine, we’re actually embraced, I think, on either side by alternatives. Just as recent as five thousand years ago, we have—it’s not that we even have a healthier mode of the masculine, it’s that we have a biodiversity, a polyphony, as you recall: which is many different songs, some discordant, some harmonic, all composing a complex musical ecosystem.
And I also think that in the future, we’re moving towards that kind of coppice, when you think of a tree that you cut back and then it pollards out into like six different stems.
I think we’re diverging right now into many different options, a biodiversity of expressions, so that we can begin to think of patriarchy not as being this monolithic obstruction that’s always been here, but as being a blip…
That we can look backwards and see the rhizomatic diffusion of many different possibilities and then look to the future and see our hyphae branching out, as we see this little thing behind us, this little hyphae, into many different possibilities. So I’ve been trying to think of time as being an embrace for the masculine, and the present moment as being not the only state you’ve ever been in.
IAN MACKENZIE: Well, I recall, just to speak to a more personal story, recently, as well, I attended a gathering a few weeks ago, this was on an island, close by to me.
It was put on by a friend, who brought in some trainers, facilitators from I believe, Oregon, essentially they create mentorship training, in this case for men to train in how to mentor younger men. So the frame of that was actually called the inner mentor training, because they presented this sense that before one is able to authentically be in a mentorship role with youngers, in this case, younger men, that there needs to be work done, of course, to reconnect to enough of yourself, that you don’t project stuff on that younger person, or try to get needs met, that you didn’t get when you were a teen, that are showing up.
And it’s funny how much actually shows up, in recognising those intergenerational touchpoints. One of the things that came up for me, when they presented the material, was they spoke a lot about what not to do, scenarios around, in this case, mentoring young men, and it probably works in mentoring any young folk, but this idea of trying to fix them, arguing, telling them you’re wrong, judgement, coercion—all of these ways which [can show up in] parenting. And then in the alternatives, what was presented was, presence, curiosity, being with, all of these things that create the kind of contact, the kind of relationship, and where mentoring can happen authentically.
It’s not something that’s like being done. It’s actually just presence and curiosity, often are these gateways, and true contact can occur. And, this language wasn’t used in the materials that was presented, but I couldn’t help but [see] the lens presented by Riane Eisler, of course, in her book The Chalice and the Blade, [where she] talked about Dominator culture versus Partnership culture. And it was so clear to me, when I was looking at these materials, like, oh yeah, this is a paradigm of domination, i.e., we use interchangeably, often now, with patriarchy, and this is a paradigm of partnership—of real contact, of actually being curious.
And, we could also throw in, modern industrial civilisation, and the insane pace of efficiency or more, which is such the enemy of all of the qualities that actually provide the space for true connection, true feeling. One of the things that it spoke to was this [question] of essentially spanking, does spanking work, in terms of creating behavioural shifts. And the comment that was made was, well, it does “work”, in heavy quotations, it works, but does it work that well, like, does somebody, who’s basically afraid of being dominated, does that actually engender the behavioural authenticity, of wanting to be a good person or do the right thing, whatever it is.
Sure, it works based on fear, maybe, and the consequence, in a way, but other ways work better, actually, time in, curiosity, getting to the root of certain behaviours. But this goes back to this word time—it takes way more time actually, to do these things, it takes way more presence, way more effort. And those things are completely opposite to a lot of the momentum of the dominant culture. And so, I’ll just say one last thing about what I see in this arc of shifting from a culture of domination and efficiency and go, is this call for presence, receptivity, deep feeling…
This is one of the key mantras, for men, doing “men’s work”, is really developing the capacity to feel deeply again. And of course, then it butts into all of the qualities of typical masculinity, of strength, of competition, all these things that can’t be lost along the way either because then you lose these other values or powers, of masculinity, that also are really important to a culture. I just see all of these things are jostling for some kind of new universalism. I mean, hopefully not. But some kind of dynamic palette, perhaps, that can be at the ready, as we navigate this moment.
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah, toolbox. It’s so interesting, I sense a larger theme coming up in what you’re talking about with things I’m massaging in my work about trauma and illness as someone who has an incurable genetic illness and has PTSD. And I think that we’re in such a solutionist culture and solutions are always… we always want to grab the easiest, fastest one. Efficiency is always prized, be it, men’s work, be it, healing, and we lose a lot. And we actually, we end up doing more damage ultimately. Like you spank the child, and maybe they listen to you that day, but then they act out later in life, we do something upstream, and it affects a whole flow.
A friend of mine who’s also participating in this course, Jessica Dore, was talking about the difference between trying to fix someone, and then giving them presence and accompaniment, and I heard that in what you were talking about with mentorship, which is, it’s not about trying to change someone, it’s about walking alongside them. And we know from, a lot of actual science, that when we’re walking alongside someone, we begin to mirror neuron with them, we begin to actually come into regulation, and we start to walk with each other.
And each person brings the other person into a more balanced state. I was thinking about how that’s a kind of partnership model rather than a dominator model, where you’re trying to force someone to come into your precise physical experience. Rather, you’re meeting in some kind of collaborative homeostasis.
IAN MACKENZIE: Yeah. I mean, that’s beautiful.
I think that that is both the practice, I feel, and also demonstrating models of masculinity that have that range. And, I never saw, when I was younger, a group of men, authentically relating to each other. I never saw that, which is, again, bizarre to me now, [with] the amount of spaces that are existent now, hopefully my son sees, maybe doesn’t understand—I have a son who’s about four now—but the way he sees… He just picks up on things, to say like, oh, wow, that’s also in the range of how adults are or how men can be together.
I just think that that has an effect, beyond a later stage imposition, that has to happen over time, to really take root, I think, in a way of being, that I’m banking on, I suppose, for my son, certainly.
SOPHIE STRAND: I also have a question which is, so, you did this incredible project called The Mythic Masculine. If people watching haven’t listened to it, it was a series of interviews, you did with people from many, many different backgrounds and gender expressions, about what masculinity means. I was a guest, but I also listened to pretty much every episode and found it to be one of the only examples of a masculine interrogation that didn’t try and settle on one answer, that lived to the question, that it mulched the ground, rather than sterilising it and creating a monocrop. I guess my question is, what were you surprised by at the end of that experience? What expectations did you go in with? And what surprised you most about the inquiry? What did you learn? What did you change your mind about?
IAN MACKENZIE: I’ll just add a little thing to that. It’s not fully composted yet, in terms of completion, it’s been quiet for a while, which is, I think, a natural way of… the ebb, of realising, oh, I arrived somewhere, within that experience, or within that inquiry, and then I thought, okay, now’s the time to just let it rest for a bit. And I’m grateful to say, actually, that there’s a couple of really amazing episodes coming out.
But I can say that going in, the intention was one, like you said, to lean into that question, but from a mythopoetic lens. I was wanting to bridge the generations of the previous mythopoetic wave, people like Michael Meade, other folks that were really at the epicentre, and then speak to now, this current moment, because it did feel like it was coming through a resurgence. But also, again, to bring in lots of voices that weren’t included in that inquiry in the past, or in that gathering in the past.
I would say one of the most significant touchpoints or maps of the terrain that came forth, of the tapestry, just how dangerous—[maybe] dangerous [is] not quite the right word but…
How seductive it is, to try to supplant a universal with another universal.
And by that even universal could be everybody decides what they are. Like, that’s ultimately the best outcome. And, without a faithful willingness to not just toss everything out, I think sometimes you can head that way. You can just say, that’s all there is. It’s just personal preference. And it’s like, whoa, wait a second, there are, what I’ve discerned, at least from many guests, these patterns, or [whatever] you want to call them, emerging from the collective unconscious or wherever, that do have sway into how they organise human experience in human societies. So there’s something in that.
I guess what I’m saying is, the calls for a universalist response, at least my recollection, never came from those rooted in their own cultures. It never came from the Indigenous folks saying, yeah, just toss it all out. That would never seem to happen. They would just say, well, this is what we do. So it’s like, okay, there’s a real humility there, of, well, this is how it works for us, or how it has worked—not that it stayed the same either, but there was a sense of, well, this is what we do. So basically, there didn’t seem to be a strong impulse to try to universalise the way that they were doing things. Now, that’s really important, again, I think to highlight, because, to a universalist, irradiated mind, a universal response seems like the antidote, but not understanding it to be universalist. So that has been a major inquiry. You want to speak to that?
SOPHIE STRAND: No, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about a lot—which is, I was reading an incredible essay from a book that I really recommend, called Death by Landscape, by Elvia Wilk, about universalism, and how universalism is always a fiction, it’s always going to be a violence to something else…
This is my expansion of that, but it’s always a colonial enterprise. It’s always taking one type of wisdom and then trying to disseminate it to many different ecosystems and cultures and pretending like it could possibly thrive. So I’ve just been really thinking about how to problematise this movement towards universalism that we’re seeing, in the realm of animism, and the psychedelic renaissance, and all ecological realms that are, I think, have good intentions, but can actually re-articulate the various systems they’re trying to oppose.
IAN MACKENZIE: The way I see it is that universalism is a monotheism. It’s like the Russian doll—you pick it up, and you’re like, oh, there it is. The way I understand it is, and this is drawing from my time with one of my main teachers, Stephen Jenkinson, who has this phrasing, which always gets me, but it’s first-generation trauma, second-generation God. And there’s a detonation, there, if you really can hold that. But this sense that the first generation experiences the trauma, but because it’s so traumatic and can’t be lived, it ends up often in the next generation, being deified.
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah. This is totally holds up in all of my research. I read a lot about second temple period Palestine and the movement from pantheism to monotheism, and you see the dislocation of people from their ecosystems, you see mass climatological pressures, volcanic eruptions during the end of the Bronze Age, and trauma, that was not sacred to people, that was absolutely meaning-extinguishing, probably. And then, of course, a couple generations down the line, you get this mass cultural somatic response, which is the disassociation of mind and matter. You get Platonism, which then, of course, gets re-articulated by Christian theology. And then by Cartesian Dualism.
It’s interesting to see that it gets accepted as rationalism, as intellect, but it began as trauma.
IAN MACKENZIE: Beautiful. I love [those] threads, I can just visualise the waves of each generation. It’s like [makes wave sound] takes on a different form, but it’s the same ripple, coming out from the epicentre.
SOPHIE STRAND: I also think what it does is it gives us empathy. We can be empathic with ourselves about survival mechanisms, and cultures need survival mechanisms, to just survive being exiled, being genocidally oppressed, experiencing incredible volcanic eruptions… they need ways to make meaning, so we can be empathic about that, just as personally, when we’ve experienced violence, we need to find ways to [unknown word], but we can also understand that it’s not sustainable. It’s not always healthy.
And I do think, people have experienced a lot of violence and it’s very easy to point the finger at men—that was me for a long time. I hid in the divine feminine. But then I realised that all my favourite people are men.
I wasn’t going to change the story, I wasn’t going to create more interesting conversations if I didn’t involve men in them, and start to look at those myths, and have empathy.
So I’m wondering what role empathy plays, be it between human beings and also between beings, humans and more-than-humans, in your work, in your thinking?
IAN MACKENZIE: The role of empathy? Yeah. There’s a couple of threads there, too. Maybe to finalise the last conversation thread, is that basically what I see is all of the conversations that I was having, were either close to that epicentre, or you might say, the crater of the loss of culture. Or not. So they were basically hovering to various degrees, and able to speak to that black hole, I’ll call it. I wrote a piece a while ago around essentially, so much of what we see as the maladies of the time, and the culture, and the individual personifications of that—depression and all these things, one way to see it is, it’s like light bending around a black hole.
My understanding is that, maybe that’s changed, I don’t know, but that astronomers can’t see black holes. Like, you can’t perceive the black hole directly, but you can see how light is bending around it. And then you can infer: oh, this is where black hole is. And so this is how I now see, so much of the afflictions of the time, or even toxic masculinity, I don’t understand it to be a thing, versus it’s the light bending around the thing that already happened.
SOPHIE STRAND: That’s beautiful. The hyperobject of our extractive, Eurocentric culture, like whatever it is, it’s impossible to locate or see—Timothy Morton comes up with the idea of [the hyperobject]. Climate changes is a hyperobject. These things that we can’t put on a piece of paper and say, that’s its shape. But yeah, I love the idea that all of these things are symptomatic, rather than being the root.
IAN MACKENZIE: Yeah. And that plays into again, the understanding of therefore, “what do we do about it”? Because, if masculinity is practised within an absence of that understanding, or men’s work or trying to approach the problem of toxic masculinity, then it’s like trying to mould individuals within a system that is constantly trying to mould them a different way.
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah. And then you throw them back out into the system that punishes them for the work they’ve done. I think about that also in terms of our healthcare system, which is, you become sick by virtue of these entangled systems of oppression that sediment in your body, you go in, they give you a medicine to make you a better worker, and then you go back out to get sick again. What role is medicine playing? What role is men’s work playing, if it’s only treating the symptoms and then throwing you back out into the dirty sea?
IAN MACKENZIE: Yeah. Well, this also is again, the intersection, I’d say, or the inevitable confrontation, if men’s work is doing its job, it will lead men to confront the systems of oppression, of domination. To me, unless that’s happening, then it’s still just circling around this idea of personal growth, self-achievement, this kind of stuff. So that’s really a litmus test actually, does it point, the men doing the work, towards actually confronting the system?
SOPHIE STRAND: Yeah. It’s interesting, because, I’ve watched as you’ve been very involved with Fairy Creek, and protecting the trees there, would you think that work like that is part of your men’s work, that this kind of environmentalism and men’s work can become interconnected?
IAN MACKENZIE: Yeah. And I’ll say too, that I did a few short films with another organisation called Mamas Movement, to help bring awareness. I visited Fairy Creek as well, I interviewed one of the main activists that was there, named Shambu, and interviewed some of the elders that were there. I tried to bring a bit of my media amplification. And most recently, a few weeks ago, I interviewed Rainbow Eyes, who’s an Indigenous activist that was very involved until basically the courts ordered her not to go back, which is again, it’s just a wild situation.
But I have this image too of like… there’s men’s groups all over the place now, and imagine that there was this deep recognition and a rallying cry for those folks running these groups to say, wait a second, we gotta connect with our wild man, we gotta be high achievers in our life and bring value to our families. Yes, and, there’s a situation here that actually needs us. There’s a situation here, these trees are being cut down, these great mother trees. And that’s actually more important in this moment, to abdicate from your job for a couple of days, or weekend or whatever, and all come there.
And imagine that visual image, I just see, of all these men who come to be in service, real service, not Instagram service, but real service to confront these very systems. That to me would be a real marker of like, wow, they’re actually doing the work, like these groups are oriented to what’s actually needed, instead of orbiting, once again, the self-growth paradigm endlessly.
SOPHIE STRAND: It’s so interesting for me, because I’ve been thinking a lot about conversations about gender and self-identification and how they oftentimes feel like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, as these much bigger, multi-species webs begin to fray. Like, how can we look to healing and self-work as being a rhizome with all these other creatures? Maybe our healing isn’t inside of our body, maybe it’s in healing a forest, healing a place, protecting a field of invasive species. Or, not invasive species, but… Well, you know, I’m pro invasive species, because I think they’re very complicated and interesting. I know, that’s a radical thing to say.
But, I was thinking of the monarchs, there’s been this huge effort just to grow up your lawns, and, try and give them a place to live. That can be a kind of healing for you. Even if you aren’t, “doing self-work”.
