Bly is diagnosing a specific hunger here — the longing for the Sacred King, the nourishing father, the blessing — and it is worth sitting with what that hunger actually is before accepting his resolution. The soul that wants to leap over the axe-father and land immediately in the King's light is running a recognizable logic: if I could reach the luminous thing, the generous thing, I would not have to suffer the damaged one. The leap is the logic. And what Bly offers is not a refutation of the longing but a deferral that doubles as a maturation: the adult does not receive the King's visit by earning it through virtue but by making a place, which is to say by doing something interior that changes the architecture of the psyche.

The formula is elegant enough to be suspicious. "Children visit; adults make a place" hands the reader a usable distinction, almost a program. But notice what it quietly requires: you have to have "dealt with the axe-father," meaning you have to have gone through, not over, the wounding inheritance. The hunger for the King does not disappear in that passage. It becomes capable of hospitality rather than flight — which is a very different thing from satisfaction, and much closer to what depth work actually yields.