Masculinity and the Polycrisis

Figure 1. Heracles and the Lernaean Hydra¹

In the Greek myth of Heracles (Roman: Hercules), the strong hero must atone for his violent past by completing a series of labors. His second labor is to slay the Lernaean Hydra. This beast has eight mortal heads and its ninth head is immortal. When Heracles engages in battle with the beast, it grasps him in its coils. For every head he cuts off, two more heads grow in its place. The mythic motif of the hydra represents the entanglement of crises in multiple systems, which is coming to be known as the polycrisis; and the heroic figure of Heracles is one of our most potent myths for masculinity in Western culture. My admittedly ambitious goal in this article is to link the emerging discourse on the polycrisis with the topic of masculinity. My hope is that by examining masculinity, we can better understand the drivers of the polycrisis, and open new possibilities for a future where life and humans flourish.

Crisis

Let’s begin with some definitions. Before we can understand a polycrisis, we must first define a crisis. A crisis is a sudden event or series of events that causes transformational change in an entity. Sixty six million years ago, an asteroid the size of a city struck the earth, causing the extinction of most dinosaurs. This was a sudden event. It caused transformational change: a change which was unidirectional, meaning it could not be undone. The global biosphere (as an entity) transitioned from the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic Era to the mammal-dominated Cenozoic Era. Importantly, a crisis is an actual event that causes an actual transformation. Therefore the Cuban Missile Crisis was not a crisis under this definition. Rather, it represented the threat of the crisis of nuclear war.

We often think of a crisis as something that causes harm or death. In the definition I am offering (which you are free to disagree with), it is not harm but transformational change which is fundamental to a crisis. A crisis can, and often does, lead to outcomes of greater wholeness and developmental complexity. Hannah Montana underwent an identity crisis to step into the spotlight as Miley Cyrus. The old identity had to die to make space for the new identity, but in the career of this pop icon the crisis was a positive and necessary transition.

Now that we have the concept of a crisis, let’s add a few more definitions. The step from considering an individual crisis to a polycrisis is usually triggered by two important cognitive advancements: relativity and systems thinking.

Relativity

In physics, relativity is the recognition that there are no universally objective phenomena. Every event, every time-stamp, and every position is dependent upon the observer. This advancement in our conceptual framework for reality (ie, our worldview) only came online in the past hundred years or so through the combined efforts of Einstein and Heisenberg. Prior to that, thanks to Newton and Descartes, we imagined that the universe was a giant mechanical clock of discrete particles that could be mapped on one giant grid, governed by a handful of universal, discernable laws. This is known as the scientific material worldview and it is still held by a large portion of humans and institutions today. In contrast, relativity recognizes the entanglement (ie: inseparability) of the observer and the observed. All phenomena are relative to the observer. Different frames of reference will perceive different phenomena and every frame is equally valid. Relativity applies to physics and the hard sciences, but it also applies to the soft sciences and the arts. Cultural truths arise within cultural frames of reference.

Here’s why relativity is relevant: how I understand a given crisis depends upon my frame of reference. So, for example, there is not one “environmental crisis.” If you ask people within different frames what the environmental crisis is, you will receive a very diverse range of answers that include: a crisis where humans run out of the resources that nature provides, a crisis where nature is victimized through the loss of species and biodiversity, or a crisis where interlocking human and natural systems become self-terminating. In their book, Integral Ecology, Esbjorn-Hargens and Zimmerman offer an excellent treatment of the relative construction of the environmental crisis:

An ecological crisis is too complex for any single individual to comprehend, so people select the information to include in their construction of that crisis. The construction of a crisis enables a society (or a group of individuals) to cope with the uncertainty that the crisis represents…Multiple constructions occur because there are multiple ways to observe the environmental crisis.

In addition, they note that we as individuals are prone to project our internal psychological crisis onto the natural world. Byron Katie, a self-inquiry teacher, has a hilarious video where she facilitates a woman who is fixated on the plight of the polar bears. Through the facilitation, the woman comes to recognize that it is not the polar bears who are struggling for survival and need her care, but that she herself is the one struggling for survival who could use some support. We unconsciously find the external crisis to match our unmet internal needs.

Relativity introduces the hall of mirrors complexity to the crisis. The challenge is not only the crisis itself, but also the multiple social representations that individuals and groups will use to define the crisis–each of which is potentially equally valid. When the crisis defies simple definition, it will therefore defy simple solutions and add complexity to communication and coordination around the response. The crisis becomes slippery, fuzzy, and multiple – oh dear.

Systems Thinking

As I already noted, the scientific materialist worldview sees a reality composed of objectively definable particles. These particles interact to produce the phenomena we observe today. Within this paradigm, in order to understand a whole entity, we must break it down into its constituent parts. This is known as analysis and it focuses on material.

In contrast, a systems view recognizes that while each whole entity is composed of component parts, there are aspects of the whole that cannot be explained by the interactions of the parts. When the entity incorporates an organizing pattern, then the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and this is what we mean by a system (or an organized complex).

Systems thinking means a shift of perception from material objects and structures to the nonmaterial processes and patterns of organization that represent the very essence of life.

–Capra and Luisi, The Systems View of Life

The cognitive shift to systems thinking is big for a few reasons. First, patterns are invisible and become revealed through interpretation. It’s easy to see the material stuff, but in order to see a system, one must discern the pattern. Second, systems have emergent properties–also called complexity–where the state of the system cannot be traced to any individual part. The system must be understood at the level of the system. A cat walking across the room to its food bowl is understandable at the level of the cat as an entity: the cat is hungry. It is not understandable at the level of the interactions of the molecules that comprise the cat.

Systems thinking includes concepts like feedback mechanisms (and recursion), self-organization, self-regulation (homeostasis), complexity, chaos, and importantly: nonlinear dynamics. Linear dynamics can be solved analytically, like the formulas we learned to manipulate in high school math courses. Nonlinear dynamics must be solved numerically through trial and error, often by computers, and their answers are patterns (i.e., attractors). The patterns of systems are statistical, fuzzy, and emergent. In order to understand weather in the atmosphere, we need to use a systems approach. What we get is a statistical forecast rather than a discrete solution.

As an example, let’s take a systems view of atmospheric warming. The combustion of hydrocarbons increases the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (and a handful of other gasses). These emissions change the amount of energy the atmosphere retains in the form of heat. That heat increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold, which itself is a greenhouse gas and therefore holds more heat, but which also creates clouds which reflect more sunlight. Each new phenomena (like more clouds) feeds back into the system as a whole in complicated (ie nonlinear) ways. In order to understand atmospheric warming, we must use systems-level thinking.

A system will often find a stable equilibrium. This is illustrated in figure 2, below. The blue ball represents the state of the system. It is resting in a basin, or local minimum, on the line that maps out the possible system states. The higher the ball is, the more volatile the system, and the lower on the graph, the more stable.

Figure 2. Stability landscape for a system.

The definition of a crisis I provided above is for an individual entity. In the context of a system, we can add more nuance to a crisis. When a system moves out of its equilibrium state, it enters a crisis (Figure 3). This happens through the accumulation of stress over time, plus a discrete trigger like the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. Stressors are slow-moving accumulations that make the basin of the attractor shallower. Examples of stressors include atmospheric warming, economic inequality, and resource scarcity. These slowly push the system toward greater volatility. Triggers are unpredictable fast-moving events including the loss of a keystone species in an ecosystem, a major bankruptcy, and a political regime change. The stressors and the trigger work together to carry the system out of the basin of its attractor. The system then moves into disequilibrium. From there, it may settle back into its prior attractor, it may move to a new attractor, or it may remain in a state of chaotic disequilibrium. A crisis in a system means the pattern becomes disrupted, and the crisis ends when the system returns to some type of equilibrium.

Figure 3. Stressor, trigger, and systemic crisis

The Great Depression in the early twentieth century illustrates the model. Increasing unemployment, overproduction, and poor monetary policies acted as stressors on the global financial market. The Black Tuesday stock market crash and ensuing liquidity crunch was the trigger. The global financial system then entered a crisis period where businesses went bankrupt, GDP fell, and unemployment skyrocketed. The crisis ended with the onset of WWII and the government spending projects that reduced unemployment and re-ignited industry.

If you’ve been following me so far, then we have a shared understanding of a crisis, relativity, and systems. Now we’re ready to discuss a polycrisis.

Polycrisis

In today’s world, an incredible number of human systems and natural systems are simultaneously operating: ecosystems, economic systems, food systems, political systems, etc. These systems are entangled with each other, meaning: none of them operate in isolation. The functioning of each system is interconnected with the processes of multiple other systems. With the term globalization, we recognize that we exist in a complex system of systems.

A common sociological tool to assess the human institutions of a society follows the PESTLE acronym. Institutions are categorized as political, economic, social, technological, legal, and environmental. Each of these institutions contains multiple systems, each category is interdependent with each other category, and all of these human institutions interact with natural systems.

Figure 4. Interconnected social institutions

When one of these systems enters a crisis, that in turn, will influence the states of other systems. A polycrisis is not simply multiple simultaneous crises. A polycrisis denotes the inter-systemic impacts of multiple entangled systems, some of which are in crisis. Here is an important point: the complex destabilization from multiple systems in crisis is different from, and more severe than, each destabilized system in isolation. And in fact, the idea of distinct crises must be transcended in a polycrisis situation: the polycrisis must be understood as a new whole (which we technically refer to as the metacrisis.) The behavior and evolution of a polycrisis is emergent and complex.

Here is a very simplified list of ways that multiple systems in crisis may interact. The stressors of one system may also be the stressors of another system. The triggers for one system may also be the triggers for another system. The stressors or triggers for one system may influence the stressors or triggers in another system. The crisis of one system may be either a stressor or trigger for another system. The crisis of one system may causally affect the crisis of another system. A domino effect may arise – meaning a one-way series of causality may ensue. These interactions may also enter feedback loops, in which the interactive effects become recursive or enter run-away cycles.

Just as every crisis has multiple social constructions, the polycrises–even more so–will have multiple interpretations and meanings, each of which may be equally valid. It is at this point that the myth of the nine-headed hydra becomes an apt symbol for the polycrisis.

Integral Theory

We have already made a distinction between individual objects like an atom or an ant, and systems like an economy or an ecosystem. Both of these categories of things exist in the objective, scientifically measurable, physical world. They are ontological and material. Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory expands this framework by proposing that every entity has four categories of being-in-the-world: the individual interior, the individual exterior, the collective interior, and the collective exterior. So far, we have been examining individual exteriors, i.e., objects, and collective exteriors, i.e., systems.

In addition, the theory posits that every entity has an interior awareness. For you and me, that is our self-reflexive consciousness which includes our identities, psychology, and states of consciousness.

The fourth category is termed the collective interior, which refers to the we-space or hermeneutic circle of association that forms within a group. The collective interior holds the shared identities, values, beliefs, and meanings of a group of people. Another name of the collective interior of humans is culture. We, as individuals, are members of multiple collective interiors: our family, a friend group, our nationality, people who speak our language, and so on. We hold this membership by acquaintance and association. When you are inside a group of friends, you know it first hand. When you are outside a group of friends, you know it by the feeling of not-belonging. Even though membership is intangible in the scientific materialist sense, integral theory posits that group membership is a real, actual fact of the kosmos.

The interior culture is composed of the communications, values, and belongingness of the group. The exterior system is constituted by the material exchanges of a group. These two functions may be related, but are phenomenologically distinct. Let’s imagine I have a neighbor who only speaks German and I only speak English. We are not in the same we-space because we can’t understand each other. However, because we both use the public utilities, transact in the local economy, and participate in the local institutions, we are in the same system of society. The collective interior is inter-subjective while the collective exterior is inter-objective.

Integral theory organizes these categories of being-in-the-world into four quadrants (Figure 5), which can also be designated by the personal pronouns an entity in that quadrant would carry: I for individual interior, it for individual exterior, we for collective interior, and its for collective exterior. (Check out my Friendly Primer on Integral Theory for more info.)

Figure 5. The four quadrants of Integral Theory.

I am offering this framework in the context of the polycrisis because it illustrates the limits to defining the polycrisis on purely systemic terms as we’ve done thus far. Applied solely to the world’s ecosystems and social institutions, the polycrisis remains a one-quadrant affair. The four-quadrant approach posits that all quadrants mutually co-enact and therefore no realm of beingness is primary or more fundamental than the rest. This tool gives us the framework to understand every phenomena and entity holistically through the lenses of individual, collective, interior, and exterior. When systems theorists discuss the polycrisis solely in terms of the interactions of systems (exactly as I presented it above), we are succumbing to quadrant hegemony, to use the parlance of integral theory. “The system alone is real and all other knowledge domains and experiential realms are functions of the system.” This is the gap in our thinking that the four quadrant model brilliantly exposes.

An integral approach to the polycrisis, therefore, will examine the causal entanglement of multiple systems in crisis (ITS), together with the behavior and ontological aspects of individuals who both contribute and are shaped by the polycrisis (IT), together with the psychological and epistimological aspects of individuals, again: who both contribute to and are shaped by the polycrisis (I), together with the cultural values, identities, and beliefs that form in complex causal entanglement with the polycrisis (WE)…In short: a four-quadrant examination of the polycrisis. Just as a crisis for an individual body is different from a crisis for a system, it’s also true that a crisis for an individual psyche is distinct, as well as a crisis for a culture. Each of these types of crises can and do interact with each other.

I’ll just note here that this is only the beginning of a proper integral treatment of the polycrisis–a full exploration of which would fill a hefty book. For our purposes in this article, my current point is that the vast majority of discourse on the polycrisis focuses primarily or solely on the systemic aspects and tends to ignore the cultural and psychological interior aspects altogether. Each successively more holistic perspective we are able to take on this issue reveals both greater framing and more comprehensive responses. We have now moved from a crisis, to a system of crises, to a four-dimensional holistic crisis model.

My second motive for locating the polycrisis within the four-quadrant model is that it opens the door to discuss the interplay of masculinity with the polycrisis, which, finally, is what this article really wants to be about. Masculinity occupies the interior realm of meaning and identity on the left hemisphere of the chart, and it has profound implications for the exterior realms of behavior and society on the right hemisphere. Now that we have a sense for the hydra, let’s turn our attention to Heracles.

Masculinity

In my book, The Organic Masculine, I go into detail answering the question, “What is masculinity anyway?” (which I’ve now shared as an article). This question matters because what we decide to do with masculinity depends upon how we understand it.

Here’s an illustration. Masculinity can be understood as a social representation. More accurately: there are many culturally constructed masculinities including cowboys, surfer bros, and metrosexuals. Each distinct version of masculinity is held in the cultural we-space of a group. Each masculinity is culturally constructed, which means it can also be deconstructed. If I were to hold the view that masculinity is solely a social construct, and then if I were to look around the world at all the harm and suffering that masculinity is causing, I might conclude that the appropriate solution would be to get rid of masculinity altogether. Let’s just deconstruct the whole gender. Personally, I haven’t come to this conclusion because I hold a wider definition for masculinity, but I know people who have landed here and I recognize that this perspective is valid within the worldview.

Okay so, this begs the question: what is masculinity and why shouldn’t we just deconstruct it?

In my view, masculinity is a pattern of influence, also known as a morphic field, which traverses through the layers of reality. In the physical layer (ie, the gross realm), this morphic field manifests as the features of maleness: chromosomes, hormones, genitals, and physiology. There is not one clear demarcation of maleness, simply a pattern of influence. In the emotional and cognitive layer (ie, the subtle realm), masculinity includes gender identity (who I think I am) and gender expression (its relational context within my culture). Each culture holds one or more social representations for “maleness” and for “masculinity”. Together, we hold an agreement on what these terms mean. Interestingly, how we define maleness doesn’t change the fact of physiology, it only determines how we interpret those features. So the features of a person’s sex exist in the gross realm, but the meaning of a person’s sex is held in the subtle realm.

Where it gets really interesting is the symbolic layer of reality (ie, the causal realm). This is where the archetypes live. Let’s consider what an archetype is. For starters, there are two categories: the causal archetypes and the evolutionary archetypes.

The causal archetypes are the design principles that were required for the universe to come into form through the Big Bang. These include the dimensionality of space-time, geometric and mathematical principles, the Logos (the creative function of the kosmos), Eros (the drive for parts to develop into wholes), Agape (the drive for wholes to embrace and integrate parts), colors, qualities, forms, and so on. These archetypes exist prior to our everyday world in the gross and subtle realms.

The evolutionary archetypes are the patterns of influence that have been developing along with the kosmos. So, for example, the Benevolent Father archetype was laid down as a groove in consciousness as soon as mammals began to breed into family systems that included care. Prior to that, we have no reason to think the benevolent father would have existed as an archetype. Since then, countless generations of mammals and humans have been adding layer upon layer of meaning to this symbol as we’ve evolved.

This leads to an important point about archetypes: they are universal. Carl Jung noticed that the same symbols and images would arise again and again in dreams for different clients, even across different cultures. These symbols correlated with the myths and religious icons found universally throughout human civilizations and history. This led Jung to posit the existence of a universal repository for these symbols that we each have access to: the collective unconscious. If you haven’t studied archetypes before, let this sink in for a moment: there is a collection of symbols that influences every human across culture and history. These symbols color our dreams, our religions, our mythologies, our language, and our identities. (Check out a Tour of the Psyche for a deeper dive on this material.)

I call masculinity a high-archetype because of its primariness and the fact that it includes many other archetypes within it: the boy, the man, the father, the prince, the king, the wild man, the tyrant, the hero, and so on. The archetype of masculinity is a universal feature of the kosmos, deeply embedded into the fabric of our collective consciousness.

Putting all these layers together, we have a morphic field for masculinity which is a primal pattern of influence in the kosmos. It is singular, yet infinitely varied and it is continually evolving together with us. The masculine morphic field pervades our biology, our emotional and cognitive states, and our universal symbols.

Retuning to the question I posed about whether we wouldn’t be better off just deconstructing masculinity and transcending gender altogether: the social representations our culture carries for masculinity can and should be deconstructed, but masculinity itself is a core feature of the kosmos. We cannot deconstruct the morphic field of masculinity and transcend it any more than we can deconstruct gravity. Therefore, we would be more productive working with masculinity than fighting against it.

Archetypes are not inherently good or bad, but they are vastly powerful. They are unbounded sources of energy and meaning. They deeply influence the unfolding of life. If you hold that we live in a sacred kosmos or that all of life is sacred, then by extension, masculinity must also be sacred. I use the word sacred to mean precious. So even though we see masculinity causing an incredible amount of harm in the world (and we’ll delve into this shortly), my perspective on masculinity implies that there is a sacred, life-affirming core of masculinity. My term for this is the organic masculine.

Understanding masculinity as a morphic field opens new possibilities to engage with it. Archetypes mature through the process of initiation. The boy becomes the adolescent hero, who becomes the adult man, who becomes the elder. Each transition requires a rite of passage.

Figure 6. The masculine life-cycle with archetypal roles and initiations

In the wheel above, I outline the archetypal progression of the masculine life-cycle. Each transition point is shepherded by an initiation in which the old identity dies and a new identity is born. The prior role disengages from the sovereign center of the self and the new, more mature role assumes authority. Each passage brings greater empowerment and responsibility.

As Western Culture became domestic and then became modern, we lost our rites of passage. Even though we may biologically age to adults and elders, without the rite of passage we remain psychologically stuck as children and adolescents. Both individuals and cultures have a natural drive to advance through this life-cycle (and note there is also a feminine life-cycle and an androgyne life-cycle). When an individual or culture needs to mature, but gets stuck and is unable to advance, they will naturally progress toward death in order for the cycle to renew itself.

Archetypally, we live in an adolescent culture populated by immature children and glory-seeking heroes trapped in adult bodies. Achievement is a developmentally-appropriate task for a teenager. At a certain point however, the teen should step aside for the adult to assume sovereignty where the developmentally-appropriate task becomes stewardship. Western culture has gotten stuck in adolescence with the vast majority of our adults along with it. Much of today’s masculinity is a pathological expression of the archetypal hero focused on achievement and esteem. Through this lens, we can understand our masculinity problem in terms of the need to mature and a lack of initiatory rites.

At the symbolic level, by the way, the crisis is a core feature of the archetype of initiation…

Masculinity vs. the Polycrisis

Figure 7. Hercules²

The Lernaean Hydra is a swamp monster with poisonous breath and caustic blood. When one head is cut off, two more grow in its place. One by one, Heracles severs a head and then cauterizes the stump so it cannot re-sprout. He takes the final immortal head, still alive, and pins it under a giant rock. Even though the monster is defeated, it can never truly die. Heracles dips several arrows in the monster’s deadly blood, which he uses in future adventures.

Many years later, the hydra’s poisonous blood from these arrows would kill Heracles. As the story goes, Heracles shot the centaur Nessus with a poisoned arrow in retribution for making advances on his wife, Deianira. As he was dying, Nessus instructed Deianira to give his blood-soaked tunic to Heracles to capture his attention. When she does, the caustic blood boils through Heracles’ flesh and kills him. Like the hydra, Heracles is immortal, so Zeus raises him to Mount Olympus. In the end, the hydra remains trapped under a rock and Heracles resides in heaven. This separation represents the split between our wildness and domestication, between body and mind, between chaos and order, and indeed between the feminine below and the masculine above. Just as surely as Heracles killed the hydra, the hydra killed Heracles. These two symbols have remained warring and unreconciled throughout the entirety of our civilization.

In the myth, the masculine hero fights the chthonic monster and both end up killing each other. While this commentary is by no means new, I find it particularly poignant in the context of the polycrisis.

Let’s make a list of the crises that are common subcomponents in the construction of the polycrisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, global health emergencies, inflation, debt bubbles, supply chain disruptions, population growth, energy demands, material demands, war, and the big wildcard: artificial intelligence. This list could be extended and will necessarily evolve over time, but this gives us a sense. Now take a moment and ask yourself: how are each of these areas is influenced by men and masculinity?… Wow, right?

Men wield the vast majority of power and influence in the world. Men control the world’s resources, own the world’s land, and sit in the world’s top political and corporate offices. The figures on this are pretty stark: as of 2024, 87 percent of world leaders, 90 percent of fortune 500 CEOs, and 87 percent of the world’s billionaires are men. The term for this is hegemonic masculinity. The fact that the humans in power are overwhelmingly men means the masculine identities, values, and beliefs that these people hold are shaping the world. I am going to make a bold claim here: the polycrisis is the external expression of humanity’s pathological masculinity. Any attempt to address the polycrisis that does not consider masculinity is going to be doomed because masculinity is the single most important causal factor in the polycrisis.

Even though class, race, and other socially-constructed identities are also deeply implicated in the culture that is creating the polycrisis, gender is the primary driver and here is why: As I mentioned above, we are stuck in an adolescent culture. We need to mature into archetypal adulthood. The process of initiation for maturation is gendered. The boy becomes the hero, who then becomes the man. You cannot undertake a class or race initiation to become more mature in the human lifecycle. So in addition to the fact that men hold the most power and influence in the world, it is through masculine initiation that their identities, values, and behaviors will transform.

Not only does masculinity shape the interobjective multisystemic polycrisis, but the polycrisis in equal measure shapes our intersubjective masculinities. Men run the institutions of politics, economics, society, technology, legal systems, and environment. And these PESTLE institutions, in turn, shape men. In the social justice discourse, this coenactment is known as a systemic ideology of oppression. Our dysfunctional human systems are so deeply entangled with pathological masculinities that we might as well consider them as one super-phenomenon.

Returning to our myth, as Heracles engaged with the hydra, “she hung on to him by wrapping herself around one of his feet.”³ These two hostile forces are only apparently separate. Framed within the wholeness of the self (in Jungian terms), or within the entirety of the four-quadrant matrix (in Integral terms), we see this battle as one big clusterfuck.

This leads to the next point: masculinity is in crisis.

Whereas in a system, a crisis means a disruption of the pattern; in a culture, a crisis means the death of an identity. Masculinity is having an identity crisis.

In my work as a therapist, I have come to recognize that psychological parts sometimes need to die. This is a healthy and necessary function of the psyche. It often seems scary because when I am identified with that part, it then seems like I need to die. The wise guidance that I received along the way, which I now offer to my clients is: go right ahead and die, but by no means cause any physical harm to yourself in the process.

In the archetypal process of initiation, we enter sacred space and undergo an increasingly overwhelming ordeal until finally we are stripped of all defenses and identities. Then we enact the initiation by dying: Jonah in the whale, Jesus on the cross, Inanna on the peg, and the dismemberment of Dionysus are just a few examples. On the symbolic plane, every death is followed by a rebirth–this is true for each of the characters I just mentioned.

As I look at the world today, what I see in the collective is masculinity caught in the tyrant’s holdfast, refusing the call to embark upon the journey of initiation. The holdfast is exactly what the words imply: we are holding fast to the world as we know it, refusing to change. We are threatening to destroy our human and natural systems as we resist transformation, thus giving rise to the polycrisis.

But that is not all I see. There are a growing number of individuals and small communities that have undertaken the initiatory journey into true adulthood: into men, women, and gender-magicians. These are the future leaders of humanity, and at a certain point, these soul-walkers will enact a tipping point for the collective. We will overcome the tyrant’s holdfast and enter the process of initiation as a culture. In past paradigm shifts, this had been a very bloody affair. My hope is that the paradigms shift into life-affirming, regenerative culture will be nonviolent, following the precedent set by Mahatma Gandhi.

There is one other important aspect of the archetype of initiation that I want to mention. Not only does the initiate die and then resurrect, but the kosmos does as well. In the moment of rebirth, they enact the eternal return and the kosmos is recreated. Order is restored and natural systems are set back into balance.

In the new myth that I’d like to offer for now times, the myth of the masculine and the polyhydra, the hero and the monster embrace. Each turns toward the other. The meeting brings both horror and ecstasy through the union of opposites (ie, the coniunctio oppositorum). Both entities symbolically die and are then reborn in life-affirming wholeness.

Figure 8. Magician and Dragon⁴

What does this look like in practical terms you may ask? Ah, well, the mystery is part of the magic. But what I can recommend is this: if you have not yet undertaken an initiatory journey into your gender, start here. Going through the process yourself is the single most important contribution you can make to the collective. It will open you to your soul-self and your path of service. From there, life will have no problem putting you to work in exactly the right place.

16-July-25 update: This article is the theme of my interview on the Mythic Masculine podcast with Ian MacKenzie: The Hydra, Hercules, and the Polycrisis. Check it out!

1. Getty Center, CC BY-SA 3.0

2. by John Singer Sargent

3. Pseudo­Apollodorus, Bibliotheca.

4. by Tithi Luadthong