archetype.guide
archetype.guide

Authored taxonomy · an archetype

Ares (Bolen)

The body answers first; the reasons turn up afterwards.

Jean Shinoda Bolen’s Ares, one of the eight god patterns of Gods in Everyman (1989) and the first of her two rejected sons: the pattern of physical intensity, immediate emotion and aggression in a man’s psychology, which she sought to rehabilitate as warrior, dancer and lover.

Bolen’s Ares is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of war. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the first of two rejected sons, with Hephaestus, and her chapter title gives it three roles: warrior, dancer and lover. The man in whom Ares predominates, as she describes him, lives in his body and reacts at once: assertive, physical and passionate, quick to anger and quick to warmth, more at home in action than in words. Bolen insists that this is not only a matter of fighting. The same immediacy, in her account, makes the dancer and the ardent lover, and an Ares man who becomes a family man can be the involved, physically present father his children feel safe with, a passage Shepherd Bliss quoted in his 1989 review. The difficulties she attaches are those of reacting without reflection: the brawl that follows provocation, and impulsiveness.

Go deeper

At the threshold

O For a Muse of Fire, that would ascendThe brightest Heauen of Inuention:A Kingdome for a Stage, Princes to Act,And Monarchs to behold the swelling Scene.Then should the Warlike Harry, like himselfe,Assume the Port of Mars, and at his heeles(Leasht in, like Hounds) should Famine, Sword, and FireCrouch for employment. But pardon, Gentles all:

Public domain · Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue (1623)

The Prologue wishes for a king who could assume the port of Mars with famine, sword and fire crouching at his heels, war as the swagger of a man who has become it.

Constellation

The figures who carry it

Hover a star. Jung’s own examples are marked; the rest are readings applied later, and the entry below says by whom.

All 4 figures as a list
  1. Jung’s example

    Ares wounded

    Homer, Iliad V, -750

    Diomedes wounds the war god, who flees to Olympus and is met by Zeus’s fury at his love of discord.

  2. Jung’s example

    Ares and Aphrodite

    Homer, Odyssey VIII, -700

    The bard’s song of Hephaestus’s net, which catches the war god in the arms of the goddess of love.

  3. Jung’s example

    Hymn to Ares

    Homeric Hymn 8 (Evelyn-White, 1914), late antique (see note)

    A prayer that praises the god of strength and asks him to restrain the fury of the singer’s own heart; it is late and unlike the rest of the collection (Evelyn-White calls it Orphic in character; West, CQ 1970, argues it is by Proclus).

  4. a later reading

    Mars in the Prologue

    Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue, 1623

    A late reading: the king who would assume the port of Mars with famine, sword and fire at his heels.

The wider sky

Where the Ares (Bolen) has been seen

20 exemplars across 9 fields, from myth to this year. Each is marked as Jung’s own example, a scholar’s reading, a widely published reading, or ours.

Hover a field in the sky, or choose one above, to read its exemplars.

Interlude

Of all the gods who tread the spangled skies,Thou most unjust, most odious in our eyes!Inhuman discord is thy dire delight,The waste of slaughter, and the rage of fight.No bounds, no law, thy fiery temper quells,And all thy mother in thy soul rebels.In vain our threats, in vain our power we use;She gives the example, and her son pursues.Yet long the inflicted pangs thou shall not mourn,Sprung since thou art from Jove, and heavenly-born.Else, singed with lightning, hadst thou hence been thrown,Where chain’d on burning rocks the Titans groan.”

Public domain · Homer, Iliad, Book V (Zeus to wounded Ares), trans. Alexander Pope (1716)

Zeus turns on his wounded son as the most hated of the gods, the father’s rejection of the one who delights in discord.

He feels it in the hands before he knows its name.

Loyal to the pack, fierce on its behalf, lost in its peace.

The one they needed on the field and would not seat at dinner.

The deep layer · what was written

Ares (Bolen): the entry

Definition

Bolen’s Ares is a pattern in men’s psychology that Jean Shinoda Bolen named after the Greek god of war. In Gods in Everyman (1989) it is the first of two rejected sons, with Hephaestus, and her chapter title gives it three roles: warrior, dancer and lover. The man in whom Ares predominates, as she describes him, lives in his body and reacts at once: assertive, physical and passionate, quick to anger and quick to warmth, more at home in action than in words. Bolen insists that this is not only a matter of fighting. The same immediacy, in her account, makes the dancer and the ardent lover, and an Ares man who becomes a family man can be the involved, physically present father his children feel safe with, a passage Shepherd Bliss quoted in his 1989 review. The difficulties she attaches are those of reacting without reflection: the brawl that follows provocation, and impulsiveness.

Her central claim is about value. The Greeks, she notes, respected Ares least of the Olympians for his irrationality and battle frenzy, and Zeus himself rejected him; a patriarchal culture that prizes mind and will, she argues, devalues the emotional body in the same way, so that the pattern needs cultivating and freeing rather than suppressing. Two exclusions apply. This is not Ares the god of Greek religion, whose myths enter only as Bolen’s material. And it is not one of the classical figures of Jung’s psychology. Bolen calls her gods archetypes; what she describes is a type of man, recorded here as hers: one of eight god patterns for men (1989), companions to the seven goddesses of Goddesses in Everywoman (1984), among them Hera, his mother, and Aphrodite, his lover.

History

The pattern first appears in chapter 8 of Gods in Everyman (Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1989; paperback 1990), in part III, “The Generation of the Sons”. Bolen groups Ares with Hephaestus as the sons Zeus rejected, who, unlike the favoured Apollo and Hermes, do not live by mind or words but express themselves through physical action. The chapter follows the book’s standing order, the god, the archetype, the man, his difficulties and ways to grow. A twenty-fifth-anniversary edition (2014) changed the book’s subtitle; the figure has not been renamed.

The myths are public domain, and most of them are unkind. In the Iliad Diomedes wounds Ares, who flees to Olympus to complain, and Zeus answers him:

I hate you worst of all the gods in Olympus, for you are ever fighting and making mischief. — Homer, Iliad (c. 750 BCE), 5.889–891, trans. S. Butler (1898)

Quotation · not covered by the CC BY licence

Bolen reads that reply as the archetypal rejecting father, unsympathetic when the son is hurt. The Odyssey has the bard’s song of Ares caught with Aphrodite in Hephaestus’s net (8.266–366), and Hesiod names their children, Panic and Fear, and Harmonia (Theogony 933–937). Against this record Bolen sets the Homeric hymn to Ares, whose praise of the god as father of victory and helper of justice she quotes in Charles Boer’s translation. The hymn is an unusual witness. H. G. Evelyn-White, whose 1914 translation is the public-domain text, called it “Orphic in character” and the one item in the collection that might be devotional; M. L. West (1970) argued that it was written by the Neoplatonist Proclus in the fifth century CE, and it ends with a prayer to be kept from strife. Bolen’s rehabilitation of Ares therefore rests on the least typical of her sources.

The debate

The roster places Bolen’s Ares nearest the hero, and the fit is loose. Jung’s hero is a personification of psychic energy and of the ego’s struggle to win consciousness from the unconscious; its battle is with the mother and the dragon, not with an enemy army, and it describes a process in everyone. Bolen’s Ares is a temperament that some men have. The closer comparison is Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette’s Warrior, one of the four foundations of their King, Warrior, Magician, Lover (1990), developed in The Warrior Within (1992). Their Warrior is aggression channelled by discipline into world-making ends (p. 83), and its failures are the Sadist and the Masochist; Bolen’s Ares is closer to what they would count as raw, uninitiated energy, valued for its immediacy. The same book contains their criticism of her method: she tends to identify gods with personality types, whereas “no human being is an archetype, and neither is any God or Goddess” (notes to chapter 2, n. 17).

Robert Bly (1990) shared Bolen’s sense of loss but placed it in history rather than in men’s temperaments: mechanised war, he wrote, has left the battlefield godless, and “Ares is not present on the contemporary battlefield” (p. 156). James Hillman’s A Terrible Love of War (2004) took the opposite view of the god himself, reading Ares through his Homeric epithets, man-slaying, destroying, murderous, as the inhuman force that war reveals (chapter 2, p. 82), which is far from Bolen’s dancer and family man. Publishers Weekly (1989) singled out her instant reading of Robert Kennedy as having “an Ares streak” as an example of the book’s method. William G. Doty (1993), more sympathetic, recommended chapter 8 for drawing contemporary parallels with the classical material, even while objecting elsewhere that Bolen fits myth too freely onto modern types.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested Bolen’s Ares as a psychological construct, and no instrument based on her eight gods has published psychometrics. The large research literatures on aggression, impulsivity and paternal involvement make no use of the figure.

Appearances

Bolen’s mythic instances are the wounded god rebuked by Zeus, the lover of Aphrodite, and Ares as a father who protected and avenged his children in myth; Doty (1993) quotes her saying that the Ares archetype, like the god, is present in passionate, intense reactions, and draws on her chapter in his own, “Ares the Aggressive Militarist”. Her contemporary instance, as reported by Publishers Weekly, was Robert Kennedy. Popular discussion of her types has named biblical warrior-kings and fictional soldiers as Ares men, as in a 2018 episode of the Personality Hacker podcast on the rejected sons. Apart from Bolen’s own instances, these are readings, and the guide’s own exemplars are marked as such.

Sources

  • Bolen, J. S. (1989). Gods in Everyman: A New Psychology of Men’s Lives and Loves. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250098-4. Chapters 2 and 8; part, chapter and section titles checked by full-text search of the Internet Archive scan, https://archive.org/details/godsineverymanne0000bole
  • Bolen, J. S. (2014). Gods in Everyman: Archetypes That Shape Men’s Lives (twenty-fifth-anniversary ed.). Harper Paperbacks. ISBN 978-0-06-232994-3.
  • Bolen, J. S. (1984). Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women. Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-06-250082-3.
  • Homer, Iliad 5.855–898 (S. Butler, Trans., 1898). Project Gutenberg #2199.
  • Homer, Odyssey 8.266–366 (S. Butler, Trans., 1900). Project Gutenberg #1727.
  • Homeric Hymn 8, to Ares, and the translator’s introduction; Hesiod, Theogony 933–937. In Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and Homerica (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
  • West, M. L. (1970). The eighth Homeric hymn and Proclus. The Classical Quarterly, 20(2), 300–304. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800036260
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1990). King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine. HarperSanFrancisco. ISBN 978-0-06-250606-1.
  • Moore, R., & Gillette, D. (1992). The Warrior Within: Accessing the Knight in the Male Psyche. William Morrow. ISBN 978-0-688-09592-5. P. 83; chapters 7–8; notes to chapter 2, n. 17 (pp. 245–246 by the index).
  • Bly, R. (1990). Iron John: A Book About Men. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-201-51720-0. P. 156.
  • Hillman, J. (2004). A Terrible Love of War. Penguin Press. ISBN 978-1-59420-011-3. Chapter 2, “War is inhuman”, p. 82.
  • Doty, W. G. (1993). Myths of Masculinity. Crossroad. ISBN 978-0-8245-1233-0. Chapter “Ares the Aggressive Militarist” and its bibliography.
  • [Unsigned review of Gods in Everyman]. (1989, 27 February). Publishers Weekly. https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780062500984
  • Bliss, S. (1989). [Review of Gods in Everyman]. Yoga Journal, May/June 1989, pp. 72–76. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_vOsDAAAAMBAJ
  • Personality Hacker (2018). Podcast episode 0238, “Gods in Everyman: The Rejected Son God Archetypes”. https://personalityhacker.com/podcast-episode-0238-gods-in-everyman-the-rejected-son-god-archetypes/

Leaving

If in some smothering dreams, you too could paceBehind the wagon that we flung him in,And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin,If you could hear, at every jolt, the bloodCome gargling from the froth-corrupted lungsBitter as the cudOf vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--My friend, you would not tell with such high zestTo children ardent for some desperate glory,The old Lie: Dulce et decorum estPro patria mori.

Public domain · Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est (1920)

Owen’s last stanza answers the glory of dying for one’s country with the sight of a gassed man, the cost of the god’s ecstasy seen from the ground.

The colour drains

Back into the dark, and on.

Next in the journey⚔ HeroConsciousness, fighting its way out of the dark.Return to the void