When initiation is in place, the old men help the boys to move from the mother's world to the father's world. Boys have lived happily since birth in the mother's world, and the father's world naturally seems to them dangerous, unsteady, and full of unknowns. We recall that most cultures describe the first stage of initiation as a sharp and clean break with the mother. Old men simply go into the women's compounds with spears one day when the boys are between eight and twelve and take the boys away. Up to that point, the boys have lived exclusively with the women. In New Guinea, to take one example, the initiated men live together in houses at the edge of the village. Mothers in New Guinea carefully refrain from telling the boys anything about the impending events, retaining the element of surprise. As the men lead them away, the boys may be crying out, "Save me, Momma, save me!" The mother's world looks wonderful all at once. The women put up a resistance, but it does no good. The old men start to take the boys to, say, an island where the initiator's hut has been built. The mothers of the boys being abducted appear on the bridge with spears. "Here I am, Momma! Save me!" the boys say, but the old men drive the mothers back. The mothers go home, have coffee, meet the other women and say things like, "How did I do? Did I look fierce enough?" "You were great."
— Robert Bly
Bly is describing a ritual that looks violent and feels violent — and that is, in a very specific sense, the point. The break has to be sharp enough that the boy cannot slip back through it. What the passage catches, though, is something usually left in shadow: the mothers are performing their resistance. They rehearsed it. "How did I do? Did I look fierce enough?" The mother's grief is real, and simultaneously theatrical — which means the culture understood that the boy needed to experience her as someone he was being taken from, not someone who handed him over. The fiction of her helplessness is load-bearing. It lets the boy believe something worth believing: that she wanted to keep him, and that the world still took him anyway.
What the passage does not sentimentalize is what is actually asked of the boy in that moment. He is calling out for rescue and rescue is not coming — not because the mother does not love him, but because love is not the instrument that serves him here. The movement into the father's world begins not with arrival but with that specific, non-rescuable moment of abandonment. Bly is clear that what modern culture has lost is not the love — that remains, abundantly — but the choreography that made the love useful by interrupting it.
Robert Bly·Iron John: A Book About Men·1990