Westcountry School of Myth and Story

WOOD SISTERS WINTER STORYTELLING FESTIVAL

2012-01-24T14:52:00.000-08:00

2012-01-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

WOOD SISTERS
Winter Storytelling festival on Friday 3rd and Saturday 4th February 2012 at The South Devon Steiner School.

Hey, something great is coming up. A winter storytelling festival, partially a benefit for the WOOD SISTERS - feisty souled storytelling women from down here in the Westcountry. And what a line up: possibly England's most happening poet Alice Oswald, storytelling laureate Katrice Horsley, Chris Salisbury, Tarte Noir, Rebecca Smart, Sarah Hurley, Clive Fairweather, and many other wonderful storytelling, dancing, meditating wonders to be discovered. I am lucky enough to know many of the storytellers on the fliers list (get to see these woman asap) and i say huzzah and right on to the sisters in their enormous effort to construct a red tent for all kinds of spiritual and earthy concerns that i can only guess at. So, a perfect reviver in this dog end of winter. The School of Myth will take a night out from our 'Tasting the Milk of Eagles' weekend to come down on the saturday night where i will be telling the story that helped inspire their good works.

So, in honour and praise of the sisters, some new writing on the sometimes sticky business of the feminine in story - and how far one goes in taking on old ideas of what those phrases masculine and feminine are really about. This is just a tiny segment and so leaves most of that question untouched - it really is just a taster.

The story begins with a king to the east sending a courtier to a women in the west to request a possible marriage....

THE APPLE HEAVY WEST

In many myths there is a woman far to the west, or a woman that lives at the very edge of the world. She is beyond the set up of the sovereigns kingdom, she is an untamed, ecstatic being, but also has a Queenly bearing – her standing outside of the normal boundaries make her appear wild, but her relationship to the mysteries ensures that her crown also carries moon silver and goldenish licks from the Sun Dragon. She is a match. Just the knowledge that a woman like that exists will send the normally staid king utterly crazy with longing.

So the King sends the courtier west. The sovereign within us sets the intention and we, with all our frailties, follow the impulse. The woman is not always about a physical, earthy relationship – much of the emergent 12th century beliefs of courtly love were that they actually needed to stay at a slight distance – it was distance, not erotic fulfilment – that transfigured the attraction up into delirious states of heavenly spirituality. The woman at the edge of the world, what they called ‘the far distant lady’, was a portal to elevated consciousness. A honing of eros into amor.

Equality did not come into it. The woman had to be of a superior rank to the adorer, and so a husband could not cut it. As it was, the marriage already represented an economic and pragmatic situation as so was hardly the ideal setting for the highly charged, adulterous spiritual reckoning that was the longed for pleasure. Certainly in rural France there was still occasional accounts of worship of forest goddesses, and their images lived on in the oral line of storytelling. These ‘far distant ladies’ were not as sexless as the image of Mary, but none the less, served a tricky negotiation between spiritual figure and flesh and blood woman. For many courtly liasons this remained a tense game of poetics and manners, whilst others of course took it a little further, with discreet meetings in hay barns and loving abandon under the willow tree.

A problem for many of us in the notion of ‘the far distant lady’ is passivity; does she sit immobile, valued only for external beauty, whilst all the real adventure is had by the men beating a track to their door? There is a kind of dishing out of roles and expectations that no longer feel appropriate to either women or men. And beauty as the sole source of power? That is a swift route to misery for any women, and just what most main stream media bleats daily. At the same time, is not Elfida’s very receptivity and stillness a vastly needed energy in the world now?

There were of course the Trobaritz, female troubadours scattered over the south. Although there were only a few of them, their poems are earthy, gossipy, imaginative and defiant. Seeing the School of Love through their words paints a rather more dynamic, less celestial scene. Recall Garsenda De Forcalquier;

You’re so well-suited as a lover,
I wish you wouldn’t be so hesitant;
But I’m glad my love makes you the penitent,
Otherwise I’d be the one to suffer.

They seem to watching their backs rather well, and are not the mummified archetypes of male fantasy, but real women enjoying the intrigues and intensities of the role. But still, the role seems confined to those of a youthful and pretty visage.

Whilst a celebration of an aspect of the feminine is be praised over a blanket repression, the feeling none the less remains that maybe that very image itself is inauthentic to a woman’s wider personality. Luckily myth is poly rather than mono, and the search is on for a wider remit of image. It could be dangerous to regard the feminine as ‘other’, just another trick by beardy saboteurs to ostracise and exoticise the experience of being a woman. A woman would have to feel deep into her own nature to get a sense of the truth in that. I know women that seem exhausted, utterly closed to the natural world, rage filled, finger wagging, statistic obsessed - what is the archetype for their disposition? Or the many men in a very similar position, weighed down with a kind of Hercules complex. Of course, both indicate a falling away from psychic health, a disconnect from the renewal that myth and wilderness can offer.

Of course, the language of the sensitive male ‘discovering his feminine side’, is everywhere, and a prime technique for attempting to convincing a woman that you are worthy candidate for sex. Many men are now wonderfully adept at expressing emotion entirely from what they envisage is the ‘feminine side’. This is sometimes a combination of seduction technique and a stunted repression around male emotion that we are all familiar with. If you haven’t witnessed it (mature male feeling), then how do you model it? I recall leading a workshop in Ithaca, New York, with the poet Jay Leeming, as a man claimed that his testicles were really little ‘wombs’. The women present were appalled at this handing over his last remaining shred of maleness, and my own response is not appropriate for the confines of this book.

Who say’s what is an ‘inner-feminine or masculine?’ Is there even a particle of energy left in such a phrase? Why is a man drawing on the feminine if he want to sit quietly in a forest? As a writer you are always looking for where energy crests in language and where it dips, but there appears to be a simple flatline around this. I will occasionally use something approaching that thinking, but I would hope it comes from a sense of life experience not linguistic redundancy.

Rigid clinging to beliefs about men and women’s nature is dangerous, even from the guru Jung himself – a genius with some weak spots in this area. The whole area is far more mutable than it appeared fifty years ago. That said, as a lover of the old stories I suggest that they know things that we do not. They were not all devised in the nineteenth century as devices to imprison and control. Some images, especially troubling ones, are there to convey in image things we may rather not want to look at. To much reliance on myth criticism pushes us to far into analysis and history rather than the lively wisdom’s of the story itself. That we try and constantly interpret the story from the human politics of the history it first arrived in rather than witnessing its changing evolution. So we tread carefully, don’t make too many assumptions but enjoying entertaining possibilities.

To psychologise an experience is to potentially un-lock or see through it, to reduce its hysteria and to give it clarity. To mythologise it is to suggest radiant, un-human energies stand behind that experience as well. The Fates loiter nearby, not just the absent father and difficult childhood. Both are useful at different times. Mythology would suggest that there are certain biological, ontological and supernatural factors within what we call masculine and feminine, as well as possible social instruction, terror of otherness, just plain old patriarchy?

Two thoughts arise at this point:

1. That the call to a deeper life that this woman embodies is becoming a rarer and rarer phenomenon. That many do not travel west, or to the edge of the world, or inwards under a summering oak to mingle with the sensual life she awakens. Sensual does not have to mean sexual. In a world of increased brutality, overwork and ever present distractions, we can be made to believe that the only place for sensuality is in the bedroom. Porn wrecks the emotional infrastructure that is sensitised to an electrical storm, or the flank of a horse, or the pert mounds of an Irish hillside. It wrecks the poet.

So these troubadour links to the sufferings of longing having a religious sensibility tied up with the body of a woman, are a very subtle frequency for most of us these days. So much of the psyche is in exile that we lack the heightened inner-vocabulary to make the journey west.

2. That the image of the woman herself could feel one dimensional, contrived. Where are the hoofed, foul breathed, bad tempered, bloodied thigh dimensions of this character? We know that we don’t have to go far within mythology to meet the terrifying characters of Kali and Yaga, who have no wan young men with lutes serenading them at dusk, rather a bone-pile of clumsy humans surrounding them in steamy piles. The phrase ‘juicy’ that is often used for characters like these is very naïve. Loaded, potent, vast, terrible, maybe better.

The woman at the edge of the world is not really about a human women, and that very lack of roundedness is what makes this a myth, not a novel. Roundedness is what they call ‘characterisation’. It’s what makes certain folks relatable. The myth teller has to walk a line between sensing who within a story holds that roundedness, and who is almost elemental in nature. Elfrida is a radiance, a woman of flowers, some say the soul itself. It would be a good discipline for both men and women reading mythology to not try and cram every scene and character into the human experience. It is a way in – as this book illustrates – but contains many shaded areas that are really for the inhabiting of the invisible world. The stories are not just for us.

I have met many women recently who have simply given up on second hand Jungian archetypes, or inherited notions from books about who or what defines these impulses that move through them. They have chosen a more experiential route. The labour of a craft, relationship to wilderness, handling a business, raising red faced and troubled kids, attention to dreams, delight in making clothes, unconventional lovers, bizarre and un-harmonious opinions, suddenly leaving the idyllic country for a big city.

In other words, they don’t rely on the passivity of received opinion but let the energies that want to speak in their lives arise and be witnessed. The longing for the symbolic world, to reach out towards the curling wave and the lovers call in the nightingale’s song is not a patriarchal trap: it is a call to being a full human being. The key is to find the true resonance of this symbolic world, not just vague platitudes. A life without it can be opening a door to dis-connection, cynicism, even despair.

The emergence of a healthier, more visible, femininity is, unfortunately, a very recent event. I would imagine several decades of feeling our way into an embodied rather than an entirely conceptual sense of feminine and masculine is the right order of things. I know many younger women who are going deeper into their own mysteries, and men also. But their eyes are open: they are neither swallowing wholesale mainstream or cultish dictates about what defines them. They, like the characters in these stories, are on a journey, and will pick up the signs and boons as they go. They may well settle deep into the part of themselves that is indeed in love with distance, ecstasies, the moon – that is indeed a cosmos, indeed connected to the Woman at the Edge of The World, but the thread they hold comes belly deep, from the knowing that comes with the journey.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2012

THE COMMONS OF THE IMAGINATION

2012-01-19T12:35:00.000-08:00

2012-01-19T12:32:00.000-08:00

something fresh out of the pot this week - from a new book i'm working on - some chunks of story related themes that may prove interesting. Great time in London at Tongue Fu last week, so packed i had to go up three flights of stairs just to get a chair from which to tell my story from (needed seat for frame drum). A great bunch, and a lovely time in the east end - i'll drop some lines about it here soon - it sneaked into this new book.

What is Mythtelling?
I use the word mythtelling rather than storytelling sometimes to indicate that these stories (in book) are more than just folklore – more than the intelligence of the village figuring their place out in the world. Mythtelling has a wider context, that the stories may come from a ridge of mountain, cloud or deity. It’s not meant as a form of pretension, but to highlight this less anthropocentric emphasis.

The first road maps of the British isles used to include detailed sketches and information about forests, lakes, rivers and mountains. They were not just negligible blurs between service stations. I would hope that mythtelling restates that attention within story. That we are not just caught up in the twin-lane highway drama of the human characters, but keep an eye for the lucid twinkles of ravens eye, or the bright sap on the crust of a rowan trees bark. To mention it constantly would make it self-conscious, but it will come up occasionally as a gentle re-orientation.

I have had a long standing involvement with wilderness rites-of-passage work. It involves a protracted fast in a wilderness area with an ear to the visionary – a very old practice on Dartmoor and all over the world. It means my relationship with myth is very specific, rather narrow some could call it. It’s a sympathy with what I call prophetic stories rather than pastoral. Stories that seem to have wet black roots, rather than squeezed entirely into a human anecdote. There are many different definitions of myth - quite opposed to mine, and can be sought out easily.

The Protean Era
With the revival of the storytelling tradition, and a simultaneous focus on the bio-regional, it seems appropriate to recognise that local folklore can be just as nourishing as a plate of fresh vegetables from the garden or a haunch of venison from a nearby forest. It is a form of soul food. This book is about that very thing. Just as the farmers market is growing happily against the onslaught of the supermarket, and allotments have waiting lists for the first time in a generation, I am suggesting that the vitality of localised myth can be just as crucial to the health of our own inner-ecosystem. In this next section I will move between both the gains involved in this immediate knowledge, and acknowledging the wider pantheon of story that is now readily available. It may be a frustration that I will not promote one entirely over the other, but I hope as we go my thoughts will become clear.

Story orientates: and not just to the immediate, geographical landscape but to wider, eternal concerns: concerns of the soul. It’s for this reason we sense the resonance of a Russian epic right down in the gut, we laugh out loud at the bawdy intelligence of a wolverine tale from Labrador, despite having been raised in an different time and space. I would call that nomadic recognition – past the cultural flavours and directly to the energy that lives behind it. It’s the power of truly vital image; we are shot clean of everyday reference and abide in its almost electrical refreshment, that, for a moment, hangs above specific fields of cultural association. However, for most there has not always been such a wide field of reference. Many human groups throughout history, have, for the most part, enjoyed a geographically specific relationship to the stories they tell. Of course a certain amount of cultural diffusion can be present, but is often waywardly pulled into the local over time. This generation spanning, steady telling I would call slow ground. It’s a localised cosmos that roots you steady in it. It confirms you, your thinking, your rituals and your tribe, establishes place, and reveals with a slow drip drip drip, the mythic energies you stand upon.

This slow ground is becoming rapidly fragmented in what many call a Protean age. Proteus is a shape-shifting god of the sea – mutable, able to swiftly change position. With the ludicrously intense barrage of information that we daily face, a kind of mimic of the nomadic leap becomes far more common parley than this slow ground. We multi-task to the last, digesting intestinal-wrecking amounts of stress in the bargain. The TV show, jerkily cutting from camera to camera, illustrates this malaise in a way we all understand. It seems to be revealing some great restlessness of spirit, way down inside.

The Commons of the Imagination
A major factor of nomadic recognition within storytelling – this experience of possibly unknown but somehow emotionally recognised image - is then the move back to slow ground to root it in the discipline of crafting and telling the story. The performative. It re-finds its ground by the labour of telling – it grows roots. It cannot entirely replace the origination point of the story, but stories are living beings, origination points are a birthing but not an ending of it. Slowly the story becomes settled visually in the inner-landscape of the teller and the listeners. That inner-landscape will not be the same for everyone. Although the experience can be very deep, we are seeing different locations, geographies, visual triggers. The image-net is wider. James Hillman talks about “the return to Greece” not as a physical journey to the Mediterranean but as a revival of pantheistic consciousness. That is the trade for learning of these stories. They enter a cross-culture commons of the imagination. They abide not in a particular gully or narrow mountain range (except for a very few listeners) but have ended up in the wide, rainbow’ed vista of collective information. From this commons many apprentice storytellers wander excitedly through, gathering a bulb of Hungarian folklore here, a herb or two from Tibet over there.

Of course, this all seems like a snapshot of so much that is wrong with modern life. That the specific and vital becomes the generic and jumbled. As Tom Waits say’s “ a song needs an address”. We en-soul something by naming it, a detail anchors it in more than a floating intelligence. By taking the original localised references out of the story have we somehow robbed it of its soul? Yes and no - I cannot go along with that entirely. I would suggest that what is needed within this collective information is a greater connection to one’s own roots. I would do away with the rainbowed, new age picture of everything as one, and more the image of a sea port, or desert meeting place, or crossroads inn, where cultures and travellers swap stories, recipe’s, opinions, songs - and all leave deepened by the exchange but also confirmed in their own ground.

My concern within myth is that the collective commons is overwhelming the local – we end up with storyteller’s floating several feet above their own ground, constantly enthralled with the exotic, wider picture.

Of course, some stories travel but also have a specificity that locks it into a particular location. In 1284, a man with a brightly coloured coat arrived at the edge of the town of Hamelin. He had an unusual ability; he claimed his pipe could lure all the rats and mice out of the area. For a sum of coin. They agreed and the ‘Brightman’ started to play. From every guttering, shed, woodstore, house and privy came the rats. When all were gathered he turned and walked towards the Weser river, still playing. He then took of his clothes and entered the water. The rats, still entranced, followed him and drowned. Despite the clear success of his venture, the locals reneged on the deal and would not pay. On the 26th June he returned, this time dressed as a hunter with a strange red hat, and started to play again. This time it was not rats but children that followed him, even the mayors daughter. As a flock he led them to a nearby mountain where he and the children were never seen again. Maybe it was the early hour – 7am – but none but a nanny saw them leave, and she alerted the wider community. Despite desperate searching none could be found. A boy that has run back to his gather his jacket was able to lead the adults to a hole in the side of the hill and claimed they had gone inside. The event was documented in town records, and inscribed on the town hall these words:

In the year 1284 A.D.
130 children born in Hamelin
were led out of our town
by a piper and lost in the mountain

Although speculation persists that they were taken for a children’s crusade, or a better economic life somewhere else, or that it is a cover up for a plague that took their lives, all we know is that it was an event that was noted in the records of the day as an actual event, in a specific place. The street the children took to leave the town is still called the Street of Silence, and no music is allowed to be played there. What is fascinating is that the detail of rats do not get mentioned until 1556 by the theologian Jobus Fincelius – rat catchers being very much a character of the era, and possibly a storyteller’s addition. What we can say is that something deeply traumatic happened to the people of Hamelin around the year 1284.

So the grief of the event, and its anchoring within time and space, grounds it still in a particular location. This event in particular alerts us to perennial fears of the brooding wilderness that lurks beyond the ploughed field, and also of ‘Brightmen’ who carry the medicine of animals and music, who abide the other side of the village gates. But many other stories travel and gradually lose the specifics, the place names – or a nimble teller will just swiftly change them to something more local.

Anthropologist’s correctly point out that we miss much local nuance in this wider embracing. How do we grasp the role of the duck in a Seneca love story? Or approach any real knowledge of ritual colours in a Dagara folk tale? Only through a possibly dry academic approach can we get near an appraisal. Well true enough, on one level. If the story is entirely conceptually bound to that tribe or place. But what if it also has a travelling spirit? A sprit that is bound up in the telling of the story, there in the room, more than being entirely anchored in a historical context. That it is a kind of animal.

There is damage in all of this it’s clear. It’s a complex situation, but I believe caution is needed when myth is described as only rooted in history, culture and geography. Myth on a deep level really isn’t all about history, rather a truly animistic present. But we also may relate to a sense of numbness when presented with yet another anthropological marvel of folk tales from some far off place. The sheer velocity of availability dulls the mind. Sometimes, as the poet Olav Hauge reminds us, we just need a sip of water, not the whole ocean.

In all of this scope - of firebird feathers, and Tuvan blades, of African genies and the hooves of Mongolian steeds riding briskly through a star-lit desert - it can be easy to get a little dismissive of the local. Surely nothing of note happened right here? And sometimes that can seem to be the case. We look around at inner-cites, or remote stretches of Lincolnshire fields and think the old stories, if there ever where any, have long fled. But nowhere is bereft of story, if we have some patience and an enquiring spirit. This book is about finding some slow ground for those nomadic leaps to land upon.

I sometimes think of the old East Anglian tale of “The Peddler of Swaffham”: a story of a man’s long journey across half the country because of a dream of fortune, only to find that that the very dream-gold is buried in his back yard. Journeys are good, voyages better, but I write this in the hope we do not neglect the gold that is in on our very doorstep.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2012

He came to make your brain melt.

2012-01-11T14:20:00.000-08:00

2012-01-11T14:15:00.000-08:00

Something i am sure i posted some time back this week, but a little refresher can be useful. It's from Lightning Tree and looks at some of Jaques Derrida's ideas and how they relate to modern day storytelling and actually the notion of initiation itself. I value the ideas and how it rubs up against the near impossibility of claiming a purely oral tradition in the west when our speech is now already so influenced by writing - and how that rub is actually very creative, very interesting.

I'm in London tomorrow night - at TONGUE FU, at rich mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green rd, 7.30 to 11pm. Telling a big story, Come down and find out what it is! Alongside some the wonderful Malika Booker and Tim Claire. These are high end evenings in terms of quality performers, so do keep checking out their events. Ok, better start packing. Johnny Bloor turns up at first light for the long drive - a day in Foyles bookshop on the Charing Cross road sipping frappabrandychino's in the esoteric section i think, then onto the misty east end. Hope to see you there!

Trickster Language
I want to deepen this idea of a crossroads, by how it relates both to initiatory practice and the relationship between speech and literature. It would be useful to get a sense of where the ideas in this book place themselves, situated both in oral myth-telling and the page. The philosopher Jaques Derrida maintained that for over 3,000 years of Western philosophy, philosophers have claimed logocentrism–that the voice is the center, from Plato to Aristotle, to Rosseau, Hegel and Husseri. So languages are made to be spoken. Writing serves only as a support to speech. This idea would regard speech as exterior to thought, and writing as exterior to speech. There is a clear and distinct sense of hierarchy—a regression from mind to voice to letter.

From the perspective of logocentrism, presence is implicit in the communication of speech, but for writing, absence is the defining characteristic. So with speech, the listener and speaker are both present in time, and present to the succession of words from the mouth. The image of letters on a page, wrapped in an envelope, and sent to a distant figure, illustrates the concept of absence.

So writing becomes marginalized, quite opposed to Derrida’s notion that the development of modern language actually derives from an interplay of speech and writing, therefore one cannot claim primacy over the other.

Like keen-eye Trickster, Derrida also disrupts this old oppositional thinking by locating what he calls “undecidables.” Specifically concepts or words that cannot be brought into a binary logic. They unsettle. A phrase like Pharmakon, which means both poison and remedy. An “undecidable” within the context of a wilderness rite- of-passage would be contact with a spirit—rarely conforming to a hegemonic form—something neither male or female, a disruption to normality. Indeterminacy–it indicates no precision, clarity, or easy definition. Initiatory process indicates that it is only in the surrender to this difficult awareness that any real vision can ultimately arise (hence the severing from certainty that takes place). Initiation places you in the slippery crucible of paradox. With time this evolves, and insights emerge, but not without the profound drop into this contrary Underworld. You are neither Village or Forest, but some other, subtle thing. The world turned upside down. It’s a hard thing to talk about.

This book’s position is one of intense interplay, a shuttling between. Speech is occurring within the writing and writing is
occurring within the speech. Many insights have come from telling a story orally, which is in turn influenced by years at the desk. What arrives seems to have a liminal touch, a betwixt and between. For the book to work within what Derrida—and Heidegger before him—refers to as “the metaphysics of presence” (the old position), the crossroads motif cannot exist, no matter how nebulous. Inter- estingly, the logocentric is a position many oral storytellers would support, being central to their craft. I disagree. Where I do speak up is in the call for the spontaneous within an oral telling, the wild Intelligence that arrives in the moment—but that does not belittle writing or its influence, just a script used inappropriately.

Like Trickster, Derrida is not interested in eradicating what came before, but in helping to engender some new constellation. He also draws from the past—writing about literary texts— while using such a contrary linguistic style it appears that the sentences are breaking down and reconfiguring in front of your eyes.

By working with host texts, Derrida actually requires the oppositions of past literature to find the instabilities that open the ground of uncertainty. Think again of Trickster: “The god of the roads (trickster) needs the more settled territories before his traveling means very much. If everyone travels, the result is not the apotheosis of trickster but another form of his demise,” explains Lewis Hyde.19 This is an ancient ritual arrangement, the trammelling of boundaries to ensure that vitality tickles the status quo and life continues to grow. Trickster is nothing without something to rub up against.

As Derrida shakes the foundations of both structuralism and phenomenology, there is a loyalty to some wild spirit of
investigation that is both troubling and refreshing. As an old oak collapses, at the same moment a green shoot leaps from the earth. Speech and writing always hold the energies of history, influence, and repetition among them. Derrida is in the business of hints and diffusion, traditional attributes of the Underworld journey, rather than brightly lit sound bites. Still, when the young initiates are led from the village, they are blindfolded, spun round, turned up side down–they are now in submission to a fiercer dynamic. This is all in the nature of rupture. Derrida is being true to his work.

Copyright White Cloud Press 2011

2012-01-05T02:30:00.000-08:00

TASTING THE MILK OF EAGLES: A New Weekend at the School of Myth

2012-01-05T02:27:00.000-08:00

Just posting this - new ideas, new stories, new challenges for 2012. Please 'share' and spread the word, that would be much appreciated. I am very much looking forward to this! Cheers, Martin.

Friday, February 3, 2012 at 8:00pm until Sunday, February 5, 2012 at 4:00pm
Where: Blytheswood Hostel, Steps Bridge, Dunsford, Exeter, Devon EX6 7EQ

A WEEKEND GATHERING SPECIFICALLY CONCERNING MYTH AND INITIATION with storyteller and mythologist Dr. Martin Shaw. This weekend (the 3rd in the ongoing year programme, but all are welcome), features initiation stories from the tribal edge: the Nart Sagas of the Caucacus mountains, the Seneca Indians of the forests of the east coast of America and an ancient Polish fairy tale. Much of the material and ideas explored are brand new to the School of Myth programme.

All of the stories are to do with the edges, scuffs and challenges that we face as we grow older. How do we indeed 'taste the milk of eagles', rather than move into the disappointment and numbness we see in society at large? In a time of rioting in the capital and chronic dis-connect could there be information for us in the old tales? The content of these stories are both very sophisticated and deeply moving. They have implications we are only just beginning to explore in the west.

Throughout the weekend we will delve very deep into the stories relevance to our own lives, learn more about the motivation behind the ancient initiation practices found around the world and learn a variety of powerful exercises to help forge a relationship to the living world. Shaw will also be using the weekend specifically to layout what he calls 'foundational stones to mythtelling' - unmissable for any apprentice storytellers.

On the Saturday night an unexpected treat: we will be visiting the Wood Sisters Winter Storytelling festival in nearby Dartington where Martin will perform 'The Handless Maiden', and we will also witness the new storytelling Laureate of Great Britain, Katrice Horsley. Do not miss this juiciest of weekends - fellowship, laughter, stories shared, great food and wild possibility!

EMAIL tina. schoolofmyth@yahoo.com TODAY for place.
01364 653723 for more details
170 pounds (50 pounds non-refundable deposit), fully residential. More details on contact with Tina Birchill.
www.schoolofmyth.com

Walking North Tawton

2011-12-31T03:38:00.000-08:00

2011-12-31T02:57:00.000-08:00

Morning all. New Year's Eve.

Well, i did cook that goose, but have to admit i think i did a better job on the leg of lamb - goose requires a kind of artistry i may not possess yet - although its fat helped make the best roast potatoes i have ever eaten. Got a veritable treasure chest of esoteric and off the grid books for christmas who's titles and quick reviews i will try and lay out on the blog in the next few weeks. Also gifted a Donegal tweed, one bottle of Balvenie, one brown leather briefcase, one oiled wooden cigar box for my study desk (one heavy duty cigar per draft of a book - not a big smoker) and various other lovely gifts. Never made it to see the play Jerusalem with Mark Rylance in London's west end (regret that but prohibitive prices), but did stand on the south bank of the scat-dark Thames drinking mulled cider with my loved ones, and that softened the blow somewhat. Sad to report that Harris tweeds have gone up madly in price in charity shops, and oddly touched to note a Mod revival on the streets of the capital. Not a big one, but there they are, shuffling about.

Early 2012 offers more work on my new book which i hope will reach a strong draft stage by about April/May. My Parzival manuscript feels cooked (separate book) and i look forward to a five day telling of that genius epic at the Great Mother Conference in Maine, U.S.A. first week of June 2012. I will announce the full line up as soon as i have it.

Been an interesting year - Lot's of travel and teaching in America, completed PhD and got book out, enjoyed teaching alongside Robin Williamson, Gioia Timpanelli, Tony Hoagland, Caroline Casey and Alistair McIntosh, wandered Norway with Coleman Barks, got drunk with Robert Bly and collectively fell into a Minnesotan snowdrift, a weeks collaboration on fairy tales with John Densmore from the Doors, and sharing a stage at the Eden Project in Cornwall with the mighty Martin Carthy. So, whoopsy do. But it was also a hard time - my father's been ill and the school has experienced the same recession squeeze that everyone else is. So behind the scenes it certainly had its tough times. Also reflecting on the passing of James Hillman, Jackie Leven and my beautiful grandmother Christine Gibson, bless her wooly haired, bright eyed Crone-ness.

HUGHES AND BOOKS THAT CHOOSE THEIR OWNERS

One rainy later summers day i drove up to North Tawton and wandered Ted Hughes's old haunts. The local pub still smelt of cigarette smoke which was wonderful, the moors felt oppressive and brutal up there in a way the south moor doesn't (north and south moor - i live on south). I sat in the church of his funeral and heard in my mind the reading Seamus Heaney gave. I saw his house in the distance and drove through the drizzle up towards the purple scarred tors that he loved so much. A strange village it was.

To go back in time a little - It’s late summer at the Westcountry Storytelling Festival 2010, up at Embercombe, outside Exeter. I’m in deep discussion with Hugh Lupton, a mesmeric British storyteller about Hughes and his work. He mentions a couple of books I know of but have not got round to. Four months on it’s Christmas Eve in Norfolk, two hundred and forty miles from our discussion. Remembering our chat, when in a old book shop I come across a copy of Hughes’s Moortown, I am delighted, and make a mental note to contact Hugh if I enjoy it. By now it’s starting to snow, so I tuck the book under my coat and head out into the frosty darkness.

Later, at Cara’s parents cottage I settle down by the fire with a pint and the book. I read by lamplight and enjoy greatly what I am reading. After about half and hour, something makes me glance at the inside sleeve of the book, I like to see the scrawl of old owners, and yes, there’s something there. Emblazoned on the page is the old owners name. Hugh Lupton.

Anyway, i digress. So, big, big blessings on all of us in this next passing of the Ravens wing. May your glass be full, belly replete and bed warm.

Here's something from Lightning Tree - some of which i've posted before, but what the hell. New Years resolutions and something on myth tellers and relationship to the land.

See you in 2012!
Mx

POSSIBLE NEW YEAR RESOLUTIONS
Become an apprentice to the way Caravaggio handled color and don’t worry about having an original thought for at least five years. Allow yourself to feel strange and slightly magical. Compose poetry that is irritable and fiery, that runs to hundreds of lines, then learn by heart and recite to nearby jackdaws. Write letters again, and find the oldest mail box you can to post them from. Decide that your hips are an altar to old Romanian Goddesses and take up belly dancing. Give out library cards as birthday presents. Run a three- week course from your porch on the relationship between the Aztec temples and Gypsy gambling games from medieval Wales. Don’t go easy on yourself.

STORYCARRIER
A close relative to the Bard and the Poet is the almost extinct figure of the Seanchai, the wandering Storyteller whose very body is a rattling bag of mystery. This is what you might call a Storycarrier rather than teller. Characters like these have walked between settlements in Ireland and Celtic Britain for thousands of years. In Africa they may be called a Griot, in Guatamala a Great Rememberer. The Seanchai had a mystical dimension, and were even seen to have pulled some of the energy from the Filli (High Bards) of ancient Ireland with them. Conveying specifically stories from oral culture—from the campfire to the farmhouse to the Inn to the Great Hall to the campfire—they could move between huge hero cycles, to geographically specific folk tales, to meandering multi-dimensional personal anecdotes, somehow spinning the whole evening into a shimmering cloud that rained ecstatic intimacy on the listeners.

These individuals could conjure: ancestors would roll up behind every listener and lean in to hear stories of their lives once more, willow trees would move through a hundred feet of wet grass to get to the window, a hole would appear in the mythological world and luminous little beings would pour down through the container of the story and fly out into the room, collecting teardrops. This wasn’t so much a performance as an invocation: a ritualized righting of time from the imagined straight line into the circle where the animals, the old ones, weather patterns, and great sagas could suck strong milk from each others’ breasts, and much healing was done in this world. This was almost always carried on at night, when some wyrd energy steals through the camp, cutting our threads to the mortgaged world.

Some contemporary storytelling can appear to be a kind of ice walking; it becomes a layer through which you peer down and de scribe the lives of images moving cold underneath your feet, but you never jump into the story river itself. Burn the script and get wet. That way the story is always being told for the first time, over and over again.

The joy of an oral culture is the old bones of story reconnecting to the inflamed tissue of spontaneous language. It is a specific kind of animation, an incantational convergence of narrative tracks worn smooth by the ancestors and giddy new vistas of linguistic image that are only glimpsed in that telling in that moment. Myth telling understands that the voice spoken in this attunement reaches to- wards the harsh thinking of the wind moving over a fissured moor, the excitement of the bat as it senses dusk. So does nature think?

As I write earlier in the chapter, I believe we plant our rickety societies on huge dreaming animals. The whole point of something like a Vision Quest was to create an axis of experience that somehow accommodated the thought-ripples of nature.

The patterning of crows over a winter field is an oracular thought of the mud, sky, and bird; the elegant procession of the reindeer across a spring meadow is part of some epic train of imagination that has been running for tens of thousands of years. The swift dive of the killer whale is a new vision from an ancient sea. Thought is not just contained in language, not even for us humans. But it is all story. The animals are myth-tellers in the way that they are. The hundred ways the otter gleefully crosses a stream is the same way the tellers splash their routes through a story: the same destination but differing currents, details, and varying intensities of stroke. These images are more than just metaphors for our own condition but, entered respectfully, offer a glimpse of the great, muscled thoughts of the living world. It is always thinking.

Copyright White Cloud Press 2011

2011-12-19T02:28:00.000-08:00

BARDS, FAKERY AND THE NEED TO GET DREAMT.

2011-12-19T01:48:00.000-08:00

Well, it's proper cold now. The car is at the garage, clothes are getting shoved into suitcases, bottle of Jura lovingly bought for the visiting of old friends - in a few hours la fam Shaw takes to the high road and a migrational route of London, Norfolk and Lincolnshire for Christmas revels, before arriving back in the mother county Devon for New Year's Eve. I have some one off events for Jan/Feb.

LONDON: 12th January.
At Rich Mix, 35-47 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 - i along with other performers will be telling a story whilst accompanied utterly in the moment (i.e. absolutely no rehearsal -that's the point). The event is called Tongue Fu and i'm sure can be googled for opening time and door fee.

TOTNES: 26th January.
Liminal Culture: The Genius of the Margins in Story and Initiation.
How Do we Bring the Jewel Back From The Otherworld?
An evening of stories and ideas from 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree', as part of the Consciousness Cafe series. 7.30 door.

DARTINGTON: 4th February
Wood Sisters Storytelling Festival, Steiner School, Dartington.
As part of the third School of Myth year course weekend we will be descending on this wonderful little festival to hear the likes of Katrice Horsley, Veronica Conboy, Clive Fairweather, Chris Salisbury and others. I will be telling 'The Handless Maiden' on the Saturday night. Again, google for details.

So, something on bards, imagination and flat out fakery this week. It's part of a much longer piece in a new book i'm working on - so it begins rather suddenly. It's a brief look at Irish then Welsh Bardic practice (most i am not including in this excerpt). Again it is calling for a kind of re-visioning of the word Bard, and a healthy move of the word between sexes and not just for beardy boys with a penchant for cloaks.

So, wishing you a very lovely, warm, occasionally boozy, always sweet-tempered, broody but not despairy kind of Christmas from all of us at the School of Myth. I will try and sneak one last blog in for 2011 but i may be too busy under the mistletoe or cooking an enormous goose for our Norfolk Christmas day. HO HO HO!

POETIC WHIMSY OR DRAWING DOWN THE MOON?

The school was not so much about a geography or grand house (often a hut or home) but focused around the charisma and knowledge of the Ollamh, the big man, chief-poet. Their influence radiated out in all four directions, and when they circuited Ireland amongst kings and nobles, the school, for all intents and purposes, went too. They were intellectually fierce, opinionated and full of the pomp their status conferred. On visiting a dignitary it was not unheard of for an Ollamh to remind their host of their own standing as being like a kind of King or Bishop (Corkery 1998 :32). The word bard was actually used for a lower rank of untrained poet, the word they all aspired to was to be a Fili. A bard in Ireland was more raggle-taggle; a wandering jongleur, teller of tales, maybe, heaven forbid, a singer of songs. There were heavy fines incurred for trained students tarting their gifts in such a way. This naughty underbelly of performing rogues became known as ‘bad fellows’ when they wandered England, or Filous in France.

However, payment for the more noble strand could prove difficult too, even with the amount of praise they rained down on their employees head. If they arrived en masse they brought with them an enormous cauldron entitled ‘The Pot of Avarice’. With this they grandly emphasised the need for payment in gold and silver, or, at the very least, food. This cauldron was made of pure silver, and supported on the points of nine spears. There they would stand at the entrance to the compound. We can see them now, dusk settling, chill in the air, the great cauldron glowing silver in the gloom, the line of poets standing in the mist. They would pass a poem down the line, man by man, stanza by stanza, to demonstrate their recall and honed poetic tongue. A heavy encouragement for praise, a bed, payment.

Over in Wales – a culture less harried by the phrase bard, and preserved or rediscovered or well, made up, by Iolo Morgannwg (or Edward Williams as his birth name, Welsh antiquarian and occasional forger of mystical texts – 1747-1826), we hear of a bardic astronomy: constellations of stars with names like:

The Circle of Gwydion
The Grove of Blodeuwedd
The Hen Eagle’s Nest
The White Fork
The Woodland Boar
The Conjunction of a Hundred Circles

This is all thrilling material, especially when aligned with Morgannwg’s revealing of the bardic dividing of the seasons, ancient chronologies and descriptions of poetic trials. It is less thrilling when we realise that The Barddas, from where this language arises, is certainly a forgery, a fake, either by Morgannwg or texts he studied that were themselves bogus. It is less thrilling when we realise that he was actually doing jail time in a Welsh prison when he started to gather the fragmentary materials from which his fevered imaginings created the above and far, far more.

This is far from just a calculated and unpleasant attempt to deceive, indeed he and another forger, James Macpherson (the ‘Ossian’ poems), did more to preserve some notion of the bards than anyone since possibly the middle ages. Who knows what was going on in the heads when they wrote this down, certainly much creativity and imagination. The mistake is when the artist tries to place the effervescent results of their producing into a space and time that is not authentic. No matter how much we hunger for union and fullness of exploration in these old fragments, a devised ‘whole’ such as Iolo attempts to provide, tends to a fictitious atmosphere – for obvious reasons. So there is a mixed motivation happening. So is this just straight fakery or are they actually reaching to some resource of imagination that is the well of all mystical image, 'fakey' or otherwise?

These days both men would probably have happy careers as great writers of fantasy, or even regarded as ‘channellers’, and scrape a living that way. When something intensely beautiful has been lost but a residual consciousness remains, we will accept even a mimic of that beauty. What makes the work of Iolo really complicated is that he did copy some authentic documents that are now lost, which means, like any great lie, there are hidden fragments of the real within it.

So much of the New Age follows similar lines to the above, and understandably offers much irritation to the scholar and genuine enthusiast. At the same moment, much these kind of fabrications have intelligence and yearning at their core, they have imagination, what they lack is something rooted in difficult personal ground. The truth of a visceral psychic opening. That experience can be far less whimsical, far rawer and hesitant then the easy prose of armchair-mysticism, but we immediately feel its compulsion. I have sat with 14 year old girls around a fire after their first wilderness fast and heard more genuinely bardic utterances than in many glossy books on spiritual matters. I would suggest this is the primary field rather than comfortable 'studied' language - a secondary, but important resource.

The land has things to whisper before we just start charging out our imaginings. When this is in place we sense heavy dark roots behind the words of the poet or teller.

Get dreamt before we think of dreaming.

I wonder if what many of us long for in the figure of the bard is not the courtly reciter of the post-Norman world but the older, more mystical, nature-connected figure of the primordial earth, a world that by its very nature is, as Robin Williamson says, made of the ‘quality of mist and starlight’, something profoundly druidic, magical, but also hard to access in modernity. This very figure was already being promoted rather clumsily by fourteenth and fifteenth century bards in an attempt to stop a steady decline in interest of the form. Some academics insist that their speculation is the root of what we now regard as ‘fact’ about this earlier stage.

For anyone interested in orality, literature and the wildness inherent in both, the later bardic world is problematic. One, for its frozen quality – wildness and creativity grow steadily more absent after it chief concern becomes the history of court and nobles. We get far less of some ecstatic nature poetry pouring through the compositions (this why we get so excited about Taliesin, although he is another figure underneath fierce debate), and more stodgy praise of dignitaries whilst shaking the money tin for another round of drinks. Poetry is rarely vital when tenured.

Secondly, their diminishing of local dialect in favour of a unified, unwavering elevated tongue is absolutely at loggerheads with the bio-regional flavour of this book. We need more burrs and rasps distinctive in language, not less. It may have been necessary at the time to create a clear Gaelic art form that was internationally recognised, but that time is not this time. The regional voice reveals trails back to the soil. We need to go down and specific – to dirt, twigs, streams, family roots, geographic understanding, the spontaneous and natural, than up and general – honouring wealth, status, stilted poetry, the status quo.

We need to take our praise back to the natural world, not offering it to the ‘land’ owner.

We have been cut from our home ground so many times we eventually find ourselves ‘out of our mind’ – our mind, our wild psyche, extending into lakes, hills and dandelions – not just caught in the skull.

Whilst we honour the early stories of reciting by memory 60,000 lines of verse, the practice of darkness as way towards luminous awakening, the love of language and also it’s use as dark speech – a form of verbal combat, it may be appropriate to return to an original source of the bardic inspiration, the land. When we get caught up entirely in the recreation of flowing robes, badly played harps, and forged histories it all starts to feel like a clumsy theatre, surely we are missing the point. And yet still the word bard has vitality to it, it is still animate, is still charged, and so could respond to a re-visioning with the move back to forest consciousness, moor consciousness, ocean consciousness at its centre.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

WINTER'S DOORWAY: Dec 1st.

2011-12-01T05:26:00.000-08:00

2011-12-01T05:01:00.000-08:00

Sweet marie, it's december. How has this happened? The leaves are off the trees and i guess we must consider the possibility that it is early winter. Autumn, champion of seasons has been way to short for me this year. Getting my clothes and rugs together, and coaxing the stories into my crane-skin bag of for this weekends 'COYOTE MAN AND THE FOX WOMAN' weekend, has reminded me of earlier, rather more robust gatherings, long before we considered cosy, lovely residential centers and were entirely tent orientated. Remembering those, and also sensing a distinct change of mood in Dartmoor itself, leads me to this weeks offering - a little remembering of a certain ritual etiquette when entering the wild.

So, come december - i enjoy the next few weeks often a little more than christmas itself. So lots of cooking, music - especially medieval, troubadour and a frisson of Arvo Part, red wine, friends, open fires. I am deeply into the writing of my new book and my current draft of my new Parzival book will be out doing the publishing rounds in the new year.

Archaic Gatekeeper
It’s raining as we start up the loose stoned track up onto the moor from the hamlet of Scoriton. My battered (car door savagely booted the night before by a stray cow – it never got fixed) Saab, although low slung, picks her way gingerly over the loose shale and occasional boulder. My black pearl is loaded with a 16ft yurt, wood burning stove, Persian rugs, a trivet to cook over a fire, several Persian rugs for a floor, half a bottle of Jameson’s whisky, local eggs, and a staggering assortment of smoked bacons and sausage from Ashburton’s finest butcher, Rodney Cleave. Stuffed in the pockets of a battered Harris Tweed is enough dark chocolate to barter your way out of the Underworld itself. About half way up the track we pull over onto the glistening long grass of Tony’s field. Tony is a local farmer – whip thin, skin as brown as hazel nut, utterly generous and with an almost aboriginal look in his eye.

It is the beginning of a years study of myth, initiation and both's relationship to the wild. We gingerly lay the thinning black canvas out over the Saab rather than directly on the wet grass. For now the rain is more of an atmosphere rather than direct assault. As I gaze at the patched up canvas and run my hand gently over its thread, my mind leaps.

For four years that tent had been my home, my roof, my ground. We had been nomadic, starting life up near the Welsh border for a couple of years, before the magnetic pull of my old turf, Devon, got too strong and I headed back to the apple-heavy west. With cat in tow I had found good natured folks who didn’t object to a strange bearded man and familiar living down by the tree line of their land. So for a while I lodged just outside Stoke Gabriel, shaded by a Eucalyptus tree. The final destination for this stretch of walkabout was in the ramshackle gardens by the lodgehouse of the grievously haunted Berry Pomeroy Castle.

It had been an elegant and testing time. Many of us sense mystery, what storytellers call the Otherworld, out of the corner of our eye, but lead lives so busy that it remains a brief intuition, rather than a full investigation. There will always be babes to feed, reports to write, pints to drink, bleary eyed school runs to navigate. Well, when I was in my early twenties I had gone up to Snowdonia to undertake a wilderness fast – four days in a wild place, without food, tent or fire. I’m sure many of you are familiar with this process and so will not overlabour it here. The experience had utterly shaken me to the quick, and a protracted change of life style was necessary.

My tent time was an attempt to orientate myself full time towards the mysteries. I had no agility as a practical man but just about got by, I could gather kindling for the burner, keep the tent toasty over a fierce winter, proof the hide, walk the valleys, copses, and summering lanes of the far west. Somewhere in all this I became a storyteller.

And a storyteller who would still be living in that tent on Dartmoor itself were the legal restrictions not so snare-tight! As it was, towards the end of the time I describe, I had fallen in love and a baby was growing in Cara’s belly. So, at the very bottom of that Scoriton track was a lane, Rosemary lane, and on it lived our small family, babe and all.

My reverie is broken by a yelp. My right hand pirate, Jonny Bloor, is walking swiftly towards me with a mouthful of blood. Whilst erecting the trellis for the yurt and stretching what we call Bunji ropes across them to keep them taught, one flies free and the sharp iron hooked end, with lightning speed, lodges itself in the bottom lip of young Jonny. The Bunji is now removed but a gaping hole pissing blood remains. Never one to miss a ritual opening, I suggest that Jonny lets it drip down onto the soil of the moor as we begin our enterprise. Then fill up the hole with chewing gum soaked in vinegar, or tobacco, or maybe even something vaguely sensible. So Jonny parades the borders of the field with his dripping mouth, ever brave, whilst I notice the rain is picking up.

With the help of another good man, the steel eyed David Stevenson, we soon get our creaky home erected. The occasional bucket is produced for sporadic leaks – very occasional I swear, and, praise allah!, the fire is lit, trivet set and the smell of roasting coffee drifts out from the smoke.

Later our tent fills with people. Cars parked at the bottom of the track, they have wobbled up to us with heavy rucksacks and anxious eyes. Jonny has met them in the darkening rain with a lantern and ruptured bottom lip, claiming I had lost my temper with him. Far from it, but they’re not to know. Still, the burner is valiant – providing life giving heat to our assorted bones. All are here for story, for wild adventure, for the night sea journey.

So focused am I on telling the first nights story I only partially register that the temperature has dropped. In fact it’s freezing, even with grandfather fire crackling out his story for all its worth. I glance up. The roof of the yurt has, utterly silently, flown off and down the hill into the indigo night. So completely caught in the stories unfolding, none of us had noticed its departure. A hundred thousand stars twinkle overhead.

Bust-mouth Jonny is first out the door, scampering like Finn’s hounds after the far distant sight of a crimson guy rope disappearing over the tump. This rather introverted group, with some gentle bellowed encouragement from myself, follow him out, grabbing all manner of hand tools and coils of ropes as they go, steel-eyed Dave sweeping them all on, holding up the rear with a large bill hook.

By now the temperature has dropped below freezing – it’s January. Hands have become numb blue bricks as we scamper after this knackered piece of cloth holding our world together. Finally we catch our whimsical shelter, just before it takes a sub-zero drenching in the bottom stream. The wind is now howling so aggressively that the usual technique of throwing a kind of lasso over the top of the yurt and dragging the canvas across is almost impossible. The enraged wind gods are throwing their spit right towards us and are facing the way the canvas needs to go. In the end two participants are splayed like inebriated spiders half way up either side of the trellis as a brick tied to a rope is hurled just over their delicate heads to land, just for a second, on the other side. Like a swarm we slosh through the heaps of dead bracken to get round and heave our shelter back onto the top of the tent. Frozen stumps of hands pass me boulders in the shuddering dark to support the guy ropes and suddenly the wind drops entirely. All is utterly calm. The story picks up perfectly from where we left off.

Later, when our fellow travellers sleep a mildly traumatised sleep (we will be bathing in a local stream at six), Dave, Jonny and I stretch out on the rugs by the blaze and reflect on what a ferocious gatekeeper of its secrets Dartmoor is. It had laid out some ground rules for our work. Like the ornately carved doorway to an Asian temple, its intricately designed images offer caution to those who enter. Be aware, go respectfully or you may taste blood, be aware, go respectfully or you may lose the roof of your house.

copyright martin shaw 2011

The Sea and the Addiction to Disorder

2011-11-23T03:47:00.000-08:00

2011-11-23T03:24:00.000-08:00

I am moments away from the drive up to Bridport in Dorset, to add an oral storytelling element to their Literary Festival, as well as lean a little in their direction with some of the ideas from 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree'. I look forward to dinner with friends Christine and David, and possibly a mid-afternoon snifter with School of Myth crew man and myth teller Tim Russell - he's currently working on a beguiling Arthurian commentary - involving black lions, a horse sliced in half by a castle gate and a ferocious elemental being with one huge foot - if that gives you enough clues to the story itself, all you folklore detectives. Maybe we can get a little out here on the blog when its cooked.

Here is some more on the Brutus story - on the notion of the great sea voyages that often occur within story, and also habits of personal disruption that some of us perpetually create, i.e. the problem of continually setting off for the wild voyage when the timing is off! I've certainly done it myself. Brutus sets off a great ship, not a leaky raft. Just over a week till our our COYOTE MAN AND THE FOX WOMAN weekend, a few places left - i will be bringing in some extremely gutsy old stories, beautifully laced with paradox. E-mail us today..

The Many Waved Sea Journey
Like the motif of being lost in the forest, the sea journey can indicate difficult inward development, the kind that can only occur when you have lost site of the shore. Rather than a serene meditator, Brutus encounters a variety of weather conditions past the care of the harbour. Nothing has been made secure; he is travelling on instinct not a promise. His world has tumbled down and the only direction he can paddle in is forward, and fast. When we stop and reflect in our own lives, the intensity of the depressions and furies waiting for us can be overwhelming. The savage green waves hit our decks and claim some crew, or weeks of numbness with no wind in the sail. Between here and there is waiting, doubt, exhaustion and occasionally terror. Ask any sailor.

Brutus joins the side of Tristan (of Tristan and Isolde) in his love of the salt-curled garden of the deep. Tristan, when grievously injured, took only his sword and his harp out on a small boat seeking healing for his poison. They seem to be giving us clues about trouble – when you find yourself in it, turn up the heat! But the trouble is not random, without meaning; both reveal the crucible of psychic growth, not just some exterior play of circumstance. Brutus is young to have been marked so severely, and we must remember he is not some wind bruised old sea captain, this is his first journey so far out.

In the fairy tale ‘Faithful John’, a young man similar in age sails out across many thousands of miles to be in the presence of a woman who lives at the edge of the world – he has only seen her image in a painting in a room his father kept locked. What room did our father keep locked?, and what journey did we have to undertake once we got in? In that story we know that the woman responds to gold crafted into delicate expressions of beauty. Gold, especially so refined, always indicates a huge rush of soul development in a story. So that young man took the long inner-journey in pursuit of longing for a woman that loves gold, Tristan went to face either death or healing, Brutus because he has a new life to find, a voyaging.

Three moments showing the great scramble to the waves. What unites them is that they are all events when our internal-radio has received a powerful signal; whether snuffling the grief-ashes or glazed sick with longing, the ocean does not invite mediocre expression. A clear note is struck over the chatter of the market place.

When the nice boy or girl suddenly goes wild, won’t return calls, gets into street brawls, has sex indiscriminately, shuts down entirely, they are pushing for a sea journey. The problem in our time is do they have the Trojans to bring with them, or do they set out alone on a leaky raft with a bottle of brandy and a broken compass?

When the story refers to the ship, the serving men, its general finery, it tells us that this is not a mere boy. Something has been honed, worked out, stretched inside him. There is a focus. Within us is the supporting cast of warriors; they need to be activated, coaxed or positively ordered into putting their muscle to the oar. No doctorate gets finished, no child raised, no language learnt without them. The story tells us something about strategy: that when the time is right to head out it is best to have some skill developed, something that supports us, no matter what hard weather we encounter. The story doesn’t say he ‘merges with the ocean’, or gets pulled under into fierce underswells, he rides the waves. He is neither hypnotised by the ecstatic commingling of nature or so unboundaried by drugs that he can’t stay afloat. The ship isn’t butchered with leaks or drifting in circles. It’s the kind of ship that Ted Hughes sailed when he launched out into a poem: firm, polished and unafraid of storms.

Shaking the Cage: Addiction to Disorder
A shadow of this move is when it becomes addictive; we all know people who become utterly predisposed to turning over the apple cart of their life as a kind of nervous tic – if they cannot taste the brine then they become nervous, afraid of death amongst the dishes and school run. So roll up, new lover, new town, new horizon – a brutal addiction to the act of severance. But as the years roll into decades we find no woman at the edge of the world, no healing in the deep, no kingdom to claim. We are trying to endlessly shake the cage without the deeper message getting through. It’s about timing and a certain internal attention. The intelligence in these stories is the amplification of certain cresting moments - this is the moment to act, not next week not last year. But they also tell of seven years underground adding kindling to a small fire. Accepting wood shavings as payment. Working in the pay of a forest lord. This is all to do with the business of discipline.

The word discipline actually derives from the Roman Goddess Disciplina – a latin noun that indicates training, faithfulness, self-control and determination. Disciplina was especially adored by warriors, and many Roman legions outposted to remote stretches of the empire drew heavily on her qualities of both loyalty and frugality to keep them heart-connected to their mission, and able to adapt to less than luxurious conditions. So to know the moment to set sail, to stay the course, to have warriors at your arm, requires an offering in the temple of Disciplina. Each cramped study with a student up late bent over a difficult text could be said to be a temple to her. Self-knowledge and the ability to be loyal to that knowledge in the crafting of a life that honours it.

Many caught in the addiction to upheaval define their character by their very readiness for movement. We all know the friend who’s face is framed in a bitter disposition, endlessly bringing the conversation around to their endured traumas and their seemingly endless and self-induced changes of circumstances. This temperament can become a prideful scar, no longer appropriate, and regardless of the damage this has caused to those around them. But the stories say that this slower pace, this gifting to Disciplina, leads to sovereignty, a claiming of Queen or Kingship. If you are continually caught in disorder then your aim is off, your boundaries trashed. The call to the ocean journey is not to be made cheap with continual furore. We cannot anchor an inner-kingdom with that kind of hysteria around.

copyright Martin Shaw 2011

2011-11-07T13:38:00.001-08:00

The Moon Haired Being

2011-11-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

Thank you for so many beautiful notes as i slid into my fortieth year a couple of weeks ago. I may not have been able to reply personally but know that you are in my thoughts and affections.

Something brand new this week - more on the story of Brutus - i put a segment from in on a blog a few weeks ago. He encounters a Goddess who tells him of this far off island, Albion (please scroll down to catch some of it)....

Dark Flowering Under the Bear's Fur

There has been much speculation about the name of the deity Brutus encounters at the temple. Some insist Diana, others Artemis, some, worryingly, make no distinction between the two, or believe that Diana is a late, Roman photocopy of the Greek Artemis (She is certainly far older than either of these names). Diana has an entirely independent origin in Italy, being worshipped on the Aventine Hill in Rome, especially invoked as a protector of the harvest against storms. She was also a Goddess of fertility, but somehow holding the virginal aspect that Artemis is so famed for. As the Greek influence grows ever more pervasive in Roman culture, a fusion seems to start to take place. Both become connected to the moon and the wild. Homer refers to Artemis as Artemis Agrotera, Potnia Theron – “Artemis of the wildland, mistress of animals” As well as the mistress of the animals she is also mistress of the hunt, taking life with as much aggression and swiftness as she puts into preserving it. Endorsed by mighty Pan, he gave her seven bitches and six dogs, whilst she hunted down six golden horned deer to pull her chariot.

Her sanctuary at Brauron was the haunt of adolescent girls who were put into religious service to the Goddess for one year. During their rite-of-passage in the temple they were known as arktoi, meaning little she bears. The origination of this name was a rumoured story of a bear that had wandered into Brauron and been killed. Artemis was furious and insisted that from that moment on there was an atonement for the bears death. The young girls learnt and enacted several sacred dances, whilst disguised as bears themselves. It is an extraordinary image that at just a time in our own society that young girls are being roughly sexualised by a manic push for un-boundaried excitement, these young woman were taught to withdraw under the fur of a bear as their body began to bud and change. Rather than a time of erotic display it was a period to align with a tremendous animal power, to allow this flowering to have some privacy and also some cosmology around it. By the time they left that temple into the harsh marketplace of courting they had some sense of their internal value, what they were aligned to, what reservoir of clawed support they had. Our daughters should be so lucky.

Within mythology, virginity can indicate a kind of truth-teller. One not caught up in the lusty grunt of life’s intoxication’s, but sharp minded, with a hard spiritual clarity. It is often less about abhorrence of sex, more someone or some part of us ‘set apart’; impossible to influence by the things of this world. With their fierce associations to the lunar, to taking and protecting life, their ambivalence to men, their sometimes contrary nature, Brutus is lucky to have shown some etiquette at the entry to the temple.

Rather than tearing too many hairs out over her identity, it feels appropriate to acknowledge her otherworldliness and some generosity displayed to the young man. Much human sacrifice was committed in their name, so it is wrong to assume this is some cuddly figure offering some mentoring over a latte.

This is the being that haunted Robert Graves so much whilst living on the outskirts of Brixham in Devon he felt compelled to write his troubled but wonderful “The White Goddess” whilst experiencing abject horror by potential publishers. It will push us on with descriptions of places so wonderful we have no choice but to pursue. As Goddess of the Hunt she is releasing the ‘Questing Beast’ in Brutus. An animal – part serpent, lion, and goat – that once viewed (normally in the glades around Camelot), makes the hunter helpless to do anything but pursue its maddening trail.

Once we encounter it, we experience a flooding of the nervous system with the intangible but ferocious desire to follow its call. This Being with the Moon in her Hair even suggests to Brutus that this is a place that he is meant to offer stewardship to. A home.

How many of us have ever had a glimpse of the beast, or the moon-radiant being, or the possibility that there is some far off kingdom we are to inherit? Maybe some of our anguish is the deep and pushed away knowledge of this truth, a truth that arises in myth again and again. That we have a vast inner kingdom:

"It was a place of bee and boar, great endlessly stretching oak forest, its western tip heavy with apples, its northern point sprinkled white with hoare-frost. It was always ancient, always a dream of a lonely god, always a ground for lovers to get lost in. Its land was not threadbare with human hand, the burgundy soil remained un-toiled, trees bent forward to share their fruit."

(from story)

This is way too much for most of us. It reminds us of the ‘I AM’ poems of the ancient Celts – poetry where you made vast associations between your temperament and the curlew, the nut heavy branch, the indigo sky of a lightning storm. You take up a lot of space, an awful lot of space. No longer is the head bent in either trained piety or shame, but bent back and roaring loud into the hurricane. You are the swift footed wolf-singer, the mud smeared fish that learns to breathe, a mighty procession of snow tipped mountains, a curly god with a harvest of lovers.

To ensure we don’t get into this kind of disorientating trouble we can try two other methods – one is never to get to the sea journey at all, or two, set off so unprepared we never have the accumulated muscle and experience to get to the island. Society is very good at offering both horizontal possibilities – tranced out domesticity or rootless abandon.

The encounter with The Being with the Moon in her Hair is a root experience of true awakening. William Blake and Marion Woodman have followed her lead ruthlessly. And I mean ruthlessly, she is not about many different options, or Albion as a holiday home, she is painting a picture so magnetic in essence that total pursuit is the only option. Hand your casual flirtations in at the door, this is a marriage proposal.

This being will not be met in sexual ecstasy, or in a commune, but in the quiet solitude of the temple in the forest. If you do not bring the appropriate gifts she will not appear, if you have not encountered storms and fear she will not appear. If you are not comfortable with aloneness she will not appear. The nature of this being is complex, many shaded. She is not the goddess of the dance floor, she does not instigate warm, relational, sexy feelings. She is austere, strange, in service to things we cannot quite see, pristine. A being that could strike deep fear into her followers in the days when her name echoed the hills. They could not be sure what would be handed to them – the knife requiring sacrifice or the ruddy beam of a baby. To arrive inappropriately, like the story of Actaeon, stumbling on her bathing, is to be ripped apart by your own ravenous hounds - your own uncontrollable urges. if you’re not suitably cooked she will act swiftly. She is a vast arc of energy holding many extremes.

But the story tells us that when we go looking for vision, when we hold a subtle ear for holy unfoldings, she may just appear. She is not comfortable exactly, and many of those who have received her visioning have not been the most benign of characters or led the easiest of lives. A Goddess of moonlight has some underworld quality; no longer the bright, single imaged, mono infused tv commercial of today. She gives him the vision, sure, but does she tell him the way? That is for him to find. To follow moonlight is a commitment to waning, waxing and fullness, to a path of silvery movement, to uncertain steps of utter faith when the only sound is the death-hoot of the tawny owl. Moonlight is reflected sunlight, and so far less visible then the indelicate strut of the Sun, blazing all before it. So Brutus, to find this kingdom, is to take lunar steps. To stay active certainly, but sensitive to more than just the casual, brilliant aggression of youth.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

Genius on the Margins (image Howard Gayton)

2011-10-18T04:51:00.000-07:00

COYOTE MAN AND THE FOX WOMAN: Dec 2 - 4th.

2011-10-18T04:38:00.000-07:00

Just a quick one this week - just back from a splendid and lively first weekend of the year programme. We seemed to catch the last of the sunlight with a mist coming down on sunday. And remember all attendees - the recommended reading between this session and Decembers is: Singing Story, Healing Drum: Shamans and Storytellers of Turkic Siberia (Kira Van Deusen - Mc Gill-Queen's University Press), Teachers of Myth: Interviews on educational and psychological uses of myth with adolescents (Maren Tonder Hansen -spring journal books).

We still have some spaces for the below, so please feast your eyes .....

Friday, December 2 at 7:00pm - December 4 at 4:00pm
Location
Blytheswood Hostel, Steps Bridge, Dunsford, Exeter, Devon EX6 7EQ

The Westcountry School of Myth presents the second weekend in its year long study of myth, initiation and wilderness. This time we jump into the rich and paradoxical area of the sacred trickster - through Raven bringing the light by stealing a luminous box from the Otherworld, to the birth of the storytelling god Hermes, to a Siberian woman who becomes a fox and can never go home, to the epic love story of Tristan and Isolde. Where do these extraordinary stories reside in the folds of our lives today?

The weekends promise a deep jump into the mythic world and the inner, whilst held tight in the mighty, mossy paw of Dartmoor. There are wood burning stoves, hot food, fellowship, laughter and depth, even the chance to tell a story or learn more about the art if so inclined. Why not come and find out what story you are living? Anyone welcome to begin the course at this stage, even if new to the school. E-mail
tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com today

I turn 40 next monday - the 24th - So i turn my head towards one of my deepest allies, old Dartmoor itself, to help me cross the threshold. The decade began in a black tent in a hidden valley - very rich indeed - but i feel filled with gratitude to all the friends i've made along the way. Many of these came through the road of the travelling myth-teller, but many also from just sitting still on Dartmoor and meeting all these inspirational characters that roll into the school. A special thanks to Chris, Jonny, Tina, Tim, Dave, Del, Rebeh, William, Scotty, Sue, Sam, and my good friend Lisa over in California, and Maggie and Luke. Please forgive my encroaching years if i have forgotten a name of anyone who has crewed for us, it's quite possible.

In the spirit of the 'I AM' Celtic poetic tradition (that students at the school put into practice) here is my own kind of variant of that as i approach a winter of following this myth-line of 2,000 yrs of story across Dartmoor (see last entry). For all students finding a piece of land to study for the duration of the programme (or longer) you may want to think of some kind of ritual greeting to it.

View from the Study

I am in the hut. Where language is a lovesick horse galloping inky mad across the bone- white page.

I am sometimes a bird - too often the skalded crow with blood-mouth, or the partridge, fat for deaths pot. My hobbled pedigree ruptures the brittle roof of reeds and eats stars, galloping down their ice language, their hope systems for the stranded hunter. As I gobble the sky I hurl light into soil.

The geese that flew for Parzival I love. The hawk that claimed three drops of their blood I love. The snow it fell to I love.

The hut is a kind of singing. It’s a loose gnotted story, my ramble-bag of low words, sweet feathery intensities. The floor is rutted Devon soil, ochre red, erotic dirt, good to stand upon in bare feet. The walls are big trees – Grimm’s trees, Russian, enormous Irish voyaging stories. The bark shines wet and dark, the roots are rough and deep. Where they hit soil all the flowers of Persia breathe. My fragile roof, patched so many times with my uprisings, threaded with an old woman’s hair, carries tribal rains that drip berry large onto the peaty fire. Water and flame.

The dust on Mirabai’s feet I love. The heavy horse alone in the orchard I love. The woman that lives at the edge of the world I love.

My grasses hum with beehive. I break chunks of honeycomb and offer them up to great Dartmoor. The hut shudders with foamy energy, reaching northwards to coax the rivers – the Tavy, the Plym, the Erme, the Avon, the Dart, and the Teign. I have shells from the green sea threaded in my belt, generous beer in a bronze cup for the spit-wind. I come in the old way. I leave a hollowed out hoof filled with apple-blossom on the turf, I haunch the dream path of the adder up to Hay Tor, Lucky Tor, Hound Tor, Benji Tor, Yal Tor.

The dry-stone wall I love. The moon over corn I love. Branwen of the white breast I love.

At forty years old I bend my head. I come in my fathers boots, and Alec’s, and Leonard’s, and Bryan’s. I carry dark bundles of my mothers hair, and Christine’s, and Monica’s, and Jennies. The blood holds Shaw, Gibson, Causer, Thackery. I come to walk the boundaries. I come to find a myth-line. The territory is the moor – once a desert, a tropical island, a red wood forest. So, shape-mover, what stories do you want to tell? What veins of charge ripple your flank? Where do I place my shoulder, ear and eye? My middle finger taps the tortoise shell that leads us home, I lace granite with whisky and milk. Within the stag’s bone there is a hawkish wine, in the glisten-steps of the morning hare lies the old singing.

Let the tusks of Dermot’s Boar get soaked in the wine of your education,
Let your milk heavy udders splash hot into our story-parched mouth,
Let the wild swan at dawn rise to meet Christ’s dark fire

I ask protection from the good power.

Let all stories hold, heal and nourish my small family. Let they be salmon and hazels for our mouths. Nothing but goodness – no envy, no meaness, no smallness.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

2011-10-11T03:22:00.000-07:00

THIS FRIDAY 8.PM, THE SHIP LEAVES FOR THE MYTH-SEAS

2011-10-11T03:07:00.000-07:00

Just 3 days to the beginning of the year programme up at Heathercombe, residential centre on Dartmoor! Surely even as we speak you are packing sheep-skins to sit upon, Persian goblets from which to drink wine, parchment from which to draw images emerging from the story. Friday evening at 8pm (get there 7 for supper) the ship sets out onto the myth seas. Hope to see you at the harbour gates, just as night settles....we have never been told at the school before stories of queens with three drops of poison in their breast, hunters telling stories for the pelt of a black fox, faithful guides turned to stone, witches who keep a whip hidden underneath their pillow, one door that a father keeps locked to his son.....get in touch with Tina today!!!!at-

tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com

in a perfectly unashamed attempt to give you a taste of the school, i am dropping in an excerpt this week of a segment from a new book i am working on. I want to keep the main ideas under wraps for now - but i can say that it is a kind of myth-line of stories set across Dartmoor's great flank over about 2,000 years. A kind of local 'song-line' for those familiar with the aboriginal world. It's from the earliest story in the book - that of Brutus of Troy (Britain is named after him). Brutus has set sail for adventure, but with a troubled heart. ...come find us this weekend for more of the story!

Brutus and the Woman with the Moon in her Hair
Many seas came to meet him – the salt wall of the storm, the flat blue when no breeze creeps the sail, the jaunty push of the curling wave. All was an education in water. Silence he knew about. The ship was magnificent, two sheafs of oars on either side that almost skimmed the waves. A hundred men, fifty on each side, rowed hard. Their boy leader always gazed ahead – crow like in his focus, but golden in aura. Inside is a storm however, inside is a storm.

After a time they found themselves led by a swift wind to a deserted island. The men contented themselves by feasting and resting on the pearl white beaches, whilst Brutus wandered in past the tree line.

He came to the ruins of an old temple. It could have been a temple for Artemis, or Diana, or some great mistress of the Hunt who’s name is kept safe by badgers. Having been steeped in ritual etiquette, Brutus wasted no time. At the ivy clad entrance he lit three fires, then caught and sacrificed a white hart. He mingled its blood with wine and poured his offering onto the broken altar. The emerald glade protected Brutus from the harsh sun as he muttered his heart felt prayers for guidance. Afterwards he skinned the deer, lay on its white skin and fell into a visionary rest.

Soon a sweet breeze came through the boughs of the green wood. A young woman stood before him, small birds of dazzling colour hummed around her shoulders, the new moon was in her hair and she carried a sceptre with the morning star shining at its very point. On her back was an ornate bow and quiver of ebony coloured arrows, each with a differing star constellation carved delicately onto its stem.

When she spoke her breath was like honeysuckle and her tone strong but calm. She told him of an Island, far to the west, over nine waves. She spoke of it as a place where he would reign and establish a culture.

It was a place of bee and boar, great endlessly stretching oak forest, its western tip heavy with apples, its northern point sprinkled white with hoare-frost. It was always ancient, always a dream of a lonely god, always a ground for lovers to get lost in. Its land was not threadbare with human hand, the burgundy soil remained un-toiled, trees bent forward to share their fruit.

The river water alone was fit for the goblet of a queen, the sows udders was rich with milk, gold glittered in shingle, the stream was fat with pike. She spoke of a place where you could hunt for a thousand years with hawk, horse and hound and not dint the wild harvest. The stag would cross the lonely loch for a hunter who sang at dusk. In spring the meadows were ablaze with wild flower, like cups of honey. In winter the forest gave its seasoned timber to fires that never went out. In that snowy time the cup warmed with mead, belly filled with smoked meats and the tongue uncurled all the stories that bound weather, tribe and place together.

For the roe-deer there was the succulent tip of hazel shoots to nibble on, for fallow deer the ash, elm and hawthorn. Even the rook sang love songs to the worm – their gutterbrawl caw was somehow sweeter on this island. It becomes an incant, a hedgerow ballad, a raised lament. The animals powers were hot here, around, charged.

The young woman had sisters and brothers there. Divinities. Arianrhod – owl faced, ebony skinned, hair like a corn flood. Spider webs pour from her hands as she decides fates webs in our lives, ivy flanks her thighs and rump. She can forgive, and she can be Holy Terror. Cernunnos, moon-lover, horned radiance, dweller of the grove, strong-loined seed giver.
Utterly beloved by the people.

In a land like that, men eyes were firm and untroubled, in a land like that a woman’s mind arched out a hundred miles and knew she a hawk, or a defender of the waterfall. And the name? The name was Albion.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

Gathering the kindling, lighting the lamp: sign up to the year programme today!

2011-09-29T17:18:00.001-07:00

MARTIN SHAW IN CONVERSATION WITH JACOB NEEDLEMAN: Point Reyes Dialogues

2011-09-27T21:10:00.000-07:00

2011-09-27T20:23:00.000-07:00

Well the train finally landed me in deepest Devon earlier today - after a commute from San Francisco to New York to Heathrow to Paddington to Newton Abbot - whilst carrying a full bag of 27 books and luggage. All is green and red and moist and the lanes are misty and the air is scented like a taste of heaven. Autumn.

So the turn inward begins - the Cinderbiting time. I had a last burst of sunshine by spending an intensely busy weekend in California's Indian Summer, teaching at Dominican and Sonoma State universities, alongside a wonderful night presenting 'The Culture of Wildness' for the Numina Center (thanks especially friends Jon and Liza). Jon Jackson also hosted me for a very rich two hours on his 'Sound Mind' radio show - expect archive link soon. Friday night was a packed house in Point Reyes for an evening that included my dear friend Daniel Deardorff. We then all headed off to the wilds for the final weekend of the myth and wilderness course - 30 students strong plus supporting crew. I will remember it for a long time, and especially the guts and heart of one Lisa Doron who put a huge amount in to making it happen. So anyone involved with setting these events up (including radio)- THANK YOU.

High points involved tending a fire for six days up in the yurt by Lake Sturgeon Minnesota as fall settled in, being presented with a bottle of Lagavulin sixteen year old single malt by the side of a hot Californian road (you know who you are!) and delivered with proper bardic incant, flying over Manhattan at dusk just over from LEE SCRATCH PERRY - who was resplendent in glass covered pyth helmet, enormous badges and blood red beard. And the hundreds of new faces and opinions and blessings encountered.

I made a new friend during the trip (of several), Jacob Needleman (Jacob Needleman (b. October 6, 1934 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American philosopher and best selling author. He is professor of philosophy at San Francisco State University. He has published many books, some of which draw from G. I. Gurdjieff.) Jacob and i spoke for an hour on 'POINT REYES DIALOGUES' -his radio show on philosophy and the the soul, which really was a delight. A great connection.

As soon as it is on air (next week)i will set up a link on the main page of www.schoolofmyth.com . I am hopeful we will work together again.

I strongly suggest reading him, a very bright, deep and unpretentious thinker. I promised students that have just finished the first year a fall/winter reading list - here it is. Some old, some new.

CINDERBITER AUTUMN READING LIST
Everywhere Being is Dancing - Robert Bringhurst
Towards Psychologies of Liberation - Mary Watkins and Helene Shulman
Hafiz and the Religion of Love in Classical Persian Poetry - Edited Leonard Lewisohn
From Scythia to Camelot - C. Scott Littleton, Linda A. Malcor.
Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children - Michael Newton
The Achievement of Ted Hughes - Edited Keith Sagar
Soil and Soul: People vrs Corporate Power - Alastair McIntosh
Robert Bly In This World - Edited Thomas R. Smith
Medieval Dream Poetry - A.C. Spearing
Singing Story, Healing Drum: Shamans and Storytellers of Turkic Siberia - Kira Van Deusen
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight - Translation Simon Armitage

That should get you through till christmas if read well. get a Cinderbiter group together and bring books you love to the pub and the roaring fire. Get an old harris tweed with pockets full of hipflasks and chorizo and mayan gold. See last autumns post for all the skinny on the Cinderbiters - the School of Myth wild readers group.

SIGN UP TODAY FOR NEXT UK YEAR PROGRAMME! BEGINS IN LESS THAN A MONTH - CONTACT TINA OVER AT
WWW.SCHOOLOFMYTH.COM

A new essay piece on the issue of shame - working with the old Knightly notion of 'never lose your sense of shame!' - a controversial idea in modern times. Expect a reference or two to Parzival as it's coming from that wider work.

Shame’s Rough Music
The old belief is that a shame culture keeps us in check by claiming “ we have our eyes on you! We see what you do, so behave!” (a society of curtain-twitchers), which then develops into a guilt culture; when you have internalised that pressure so successfully that you no longer need external forces to create that behaviour, so you carry that accountability within yourself.

There is an old British shaming tradition, known all over the isle as ‘Rough Music’. In specific areas it was also called Sherriking, Riding the Stang, Stag Hunting. If an affair was going in the village, a case of suspected incest, wife or husband abuse taking place, then a mob would gather outside the homestead bashing tin pots or iron sheets; anything that made an infernal racket. It was often reserved for suspicions of a sexual nature. The suspects would literally be drummed out of the district. For wife beaters, a bag of chaff was laid on the door leading up to the house. Chaff comes from the thrashing of corn, hence the implication.

Some commentaries on Rough Music imply that it arises from the old pagan belief (at the heart of this story) that when relationship fails between two people then the crop struggles, animals die, and the land withers. It’s a protective warding off. George Ewart Evans reminds us of the story of an old Swiss tradition where a farmer and his wife would lie in the ploughed furrows of the field and make love, to ensure that the seeds would sink deep into the fertile earth.

The root of shame lies in sudden unexpected exposure. We stand revealed as lesser, painfully diminished in our own eyes and the eyes of others as well. Such a loss of face is inherent to shame. Binding self-consciousness along with deepening self-doubt follow quickly…Shame is without parallel a sickness of the soul. (Kaufman 1980 :11)

The psychologist Gershen Kaufman tells the story of Maggie, a young woman returning home late one night, whilst her parents have been up worrying about her. In the middle of a conversation with her mother her father appears with a pair of scissors and cuts her long hair off. This is a horrendous image. There is also a tie into Herzaloydes’s ‘fooling’ of the son. The difference is Parzivals naivete, he does not at first experience the shame, but Maggie is a young women living in a secular world, she knows full well the implication of the haircutting. Young buds of sexuality, connections to roots of trees, ruddy follicles on the back of the roe buck, fragments of stars all live within her hair. And in one fell swoop of panic, the father attempts to eradicate all relationship, all grounding to that ecstatic world for the daughter.

In my final year at secondary school the headmaster insisted my own hair was cut a total of seven times, as a signal to younger pupils not to attempt the grandiosity of growing their hair. So I was now a mascot for shame, his rules imprinted over my own for all the world to see. Shame inflicted publicly often has a particularly deep resonance.

My own experience was one of profound diminishment, I could barely make eye contact or raise my head to look forward for some time afterward. This was, of course, gradually replaced by a kind of lunatic optimism and hysterical cheeriness. However, It does not take much for an echo of that experience to ‘seemingly’ recreate itself , and the old facial tics of shame return. I somehow seek it out.

There is a cautious arc of trust that exists between us and the deeper friendships we develop, but with that trust comes vulnerability. When that trust is seemingly betrayed, we experience what Kaufman call’s “the breaking of the interpersonal bridge” – we feel isolated, impudent, melancholic – who were we to think we ever deserved friendship anyway?

There is also the possibility of an addiction to shame.

Ghastly as it sounds, it is possible to be drawn into a toxic, addictive shame. We actually engender situations that inflame the old patterns. We are so familiar with the emotions we enter when shamed – it gradually dictates our whole word view – that it becomes a macabre confirmation of the social standing we have elected for ourselves. It becomes a form of hiding. In old Norse stories we have the image of the Cinderbiter – one who lies hidden in the ashes of a fire. Whilst these stories have many positive associations for that role, in this instance it is worth asking; what are my ashes that hide me from the world? What shame keeps me from emerging? For many of us addiction to all that glorious food – which then becomes layers of fat – becomes a way of staying hidden in the ashes.

At the same time, Lewis Hyde (Hyde 1998 :187) reminds us that the Greek term for shame is Aidos, a word that contains wider associations of reverence and modesty. To lack Aidos is to take a chainsaw to an old oak grove, to snub an invitation to Odin’s feast, to leave the venue as Neruda reads. It means no sense of the vertical road, no awareness of the rugged powers that infuse the tusk of the boar. Ultimately it gives permission for the most extraordinary abuse of the earth’s resources.

Martin Shaw Copyright 2011

Home Away From Home: US Autumn 2011

2011-09-14T05:08:00.000-07:00

We Make the Road by Walking

2011-09-14T04:41:00.000-07:00

It's 6 am ish and i cradle black coffee and coax the woodburner in my yurt by lake Sturgeon = all this can only mean i am at the Minnesota Mens Conference. Old friends and new are flooding into Camp Miller. The Great Mother Planning Meeting in Vermont was terrific - keep posted for a wonderful and diverse bill of teachers emerging for next June up in Maine. Tony Hoagland read poems, we drank wine and drove gingerly (not at same time) around the huge fissures that the recent floods have left in many Vermont roads. I hope those communities heal quickly.

PARZIVAL AND RADIO: I will be on Caroline Casey's show this Thursday afternoon (evening 10pm in UK) - to listen simply go to:

http://www.kpfa.org/listen/

and click on to the live stream or later podcast. We will discuss Parzival and all sorts of mythic and cosmological delights. Always a pleasure to collaborate on air with this generous host. Here are my on the road traveling engagements over the next 2 weeks. Many don't have direct phone numbers but in these days of fancy-pants technology, i'm sure you can track down said venues/people. I am very much looking forward to speaking with Jon Jackson next Tuesday on KOS FM and at for the Numina Center in Santa Rosa in Thursday night (see below). The Myth and Wilderness weekend in Point Reyes has long since sold out, but the friday night event in the town itself has a few seats left. Come! Ok, more soon, i need a feeder log for this fire to tick over while Danny and I go tell fairy tales in the lodge.

Tues 13th - Sun 18th
Minnesota Mens Conference, When the Waters Rise: Men and the Work of
Renewal
John Lee, Malidoma Some, Martin Shaw, Robert Bly, Daniel Deardorff, Ed Tick

Tues 20th Sept - 7.00pm
'Sound Mind' radio show KOS
FM with Jon Jackson, Santa Rosa, California

Wens 21st
Sept- Dominican University,
7-9pm, An evening of myth, storytelling and
discourse.

Thurs 22nd
Sept - (daytime) 12.00pm Interviewed by philosopher
Jacob Needleman,
KWMR

(evening) 'The Culture of Wildness' - myth,
poetics and conversation, 7.30 pm Numina center, Santa Rosa (Church of
the Incarnation)

Friday 23rd Sept - (daytime) 10 -1 , Sonoma State
University, leading session for MA Depth psychology students.

(evening) 7.00pm, Point Reyes Presbyterian Church, The Six Swans fairy tale

Sat/Sun 24/25th
Sept - Weekend
gathering on Myth and Wilderness,
Point Reyes (waiting list only)

2011-09-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sign up: Year Program begins Next Month!

2011-09-07T10:46:00.000-07:00

Bags packed, red leaves coming down from old trees, passport in Levis, hipflask in jacket - it's time for my early autumn wanderings abroad - friends to meet, forests to wander, lakes to swim, old stories to tell. Leaving my little family for even a little while is a tight hit to the heart, but means there will be traveling bags of exotic treasures on my return.

SCHOOL SIGN UP!
The year program begins next month up on Dartmoor - there is much excitement between me and the crew about all sorts of new elements arriving whilst the strong initiatory skeleton holds strong. We need to hear from you TODAY to get your place at the fire. Visit

www.schoolofmyth.com and get in touch with nimble Tina as soon as is possible. We would hate you to be disappointed.Seriously, it happens, last minute won't cut it, get to that email!

Today is from my continuing work on the story of Parzival - the boys first encounter with Camelot - even without maybe knowing the story well i'm sure you can get what you need from the below and forget what you don't.

The Shield of Swift Insight

He encounters the Red Knight. Lust, grief and now anger (Jeschute, Sigurne, Ithir) – an astonishing trio of introductions on such a brief trip. Maybe in our lives it takes many years for this succession of encounters. The knight is a mirror of display, ferocity and skill. Parzival wants what he has. He is like the three knights in the forest but with even greater flamboyance. In our time, Parzival is in the front row at a rock gig, staring up at the brooding lead guitarist, he is in an empty movie theatre thrilled by the action hero. We all understand what this feels like. The Knights indigence and fury has created a hole in the psyche of Camelot that allows someone from the very edge, a fool, to stroll into its very centre. The boy does not find cosmos but chaos.

In the early examples of kingship, some Kings were never allowed to leave the tribal hut in case they witnessed the Sun, something that to their people they actually appeared to be. If the King was to behold its radiance, he would feel diminished, and the crop would fail. What an agricultural kingdom cherished above all was repetition and order, a defence against the seemingly random waxing and waning of crops, deer heavy forest, drought. It was crucial to have a consistent, vigorous sovereign at the very centre of the kingdom to mediate between celestial and earthy currents. It was clear that the universe was an antagonistic, unruly spirit, and it was the ritual of sovereignty that wrestled it into a cosmos.

At the same time this primeval consciousness understood that the fluid assemblage of boundaries between order and chaos was a crucial element for the nature of renewal, something absolutely essential to the nature of sovereignty, Arthur’s Knights are continually heading out into the forest. There is always a door to wild adventure at Camelot, Arthur often refusing to feast until an adventure arrives. This incanting between the Court and Forest plants a cosmology over the simply geographical, a mythology of relationship.

If it is true that myth is a collision of ruptures, then this image of Camelot amok can be seen on an immediate level as when our own foundational stones – health, identity, job, family are challenged. It is extraordinary how we build our castles in the sand, one sweep of the briny wave and over they go. It is another moment in the story telling us that the only sense of security we have is a false sense of security. As we realise that there is something red, angry and heavily armed waiting just outside the front door for us, the story suggests that it is only some marginal energy in us that can arise and take it on. Maybe the Parzival in us can only be born in the very second the wine is poured on Ginover’s dress.

Some problems are way beyond our storehouse of knowledge or lived experience. There’s nothing in our assorted memory’s that can prepare us for it. A world inflamed by climate change. As I write this a tsunami is dominating all news as it breaks off the coast of Japan. It is times like these that we look to the edges, the otherly borders, and the genius that abides there. It is from there that the 'fool' comes, like David with his sling, on the back of a donkey, green as grass.

Some things in our lives cannot be solved by looking at them directly. By always following a literal thread.This is again a problem with Western forms of addressing challenge. We need a shield from where we see around corners, not staring directly into the face of Medusa less we be turned to stone. Myth gifts us this. The answer that is a slow opening spiral rather than a rapid arrow. Otherness is our guide.

The shield of swift insight is the drop out of the rational altogether. It is catching the story of the peregrine and the breeze, the myriad interplay between constantly erupting mythic forms, the erupting bricolage that chaos and cosmos breed when thoroughly tangled at the boundary line of the kingdom. Brilliance abides there. It is the lucidity of rupture, mesmeric threads of leafy illumination and loamy cunning.

Many of the lasting images in myth come from this granary of otherness. They were not rattled off by an act of will, but land un-bidded when we drop down and underneath ‘normal’ thought and language altogether. At some point they break up and into the dry plain of vocabulary, shaking the syntax with sparkling drops of morning dew. These are the images, the stories, the insights that last. The words that have roots attached, or that leap, like rash ponies towards stars at the very edge of our vision. This is why the poets matter.

We court chaos when we brick up a wall between Court and Forest, establish a fictitious divide between wildness and discipline. The greater our ‘forgetting’, the more immersed in the literal, then the shields insights become harder to access. Like any muscle or sense, it requires daily exercising, stretching, expanding.

Allowing yourself time to settle into a Russian fairy tale is to help that muscle memory establish itself. Figuring out, on a daily basis, who’s temple do we most frequently visit? We’re all worshipping something. What stands behind my compulsions, my work, my home arrangements? This is the beginning of developing a slyer eye for the big picture. The next time you are roused to argument check out what is speaking through you, what collision of deity and imagined hurt are colluding to provoke you? These are all blurry images on the shield of swift insight. The more it’s polished, exercised, the clearer the scene.

A poetical imagination is not really about writing anything down, or composing sonnets. It is a way of seeing, and the most natural result of any truly mythic experience. The greater the challenge, the more crucial its sideways, underneath, round the back view. Big hitters like Jesus and Buddha seem to take themselves to trees and deserts to really get soaked in this.

Martin Shaw Copyright 2011

Kettles Ready

2011-08-23T15:56:00.000-07:00

WEARING DOWN THE MOON

2011-08-23T15:25:00.000-07:00

So i hear the earth is moving in the U.S., safe and good things wished to all friends (and otherwise) over there. I have spent a more sedate and very wonderful week with my daughter being outlaws and learning to cook outlaw food on outlaw fires, watching fireworks over Plymouth hoe (bay), eating way to much popcorn at yes, the Smurfs movie (she wanted Kurosawa but i insisted), wandering the woodland trail and lots of story. Story, that, on the rare occasion that she slept, led me back to my own reading of old classics like Bruno Bettelheim's 'The Uses of Enchantment', Heinrich Zimmer's 'The King and The Corpse', and Marie Louise Von - Franz's 'Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales'. I look forward to some autumnal (sorry, that word again) study specifically with fairy tales, and some group work out of it - how does that information sit thirty years (or more) later? Whilst i don't go along with every word there is some true gold in all three of those books for anyone interested in the business of exegesis of story - a tricky ground.

An excerpt this week from chapter seven of 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree - 'Deer Woman and the Velvet Antlered Moon'. In this Siberian story the Moon falls in love with a young woman who looks after a remote herd of Deer. When he charges down on his chariot from the night sky she changes shape into many different objects until he is worn down enough (and tied up) for a slightly less intense conversation to begin between them. This is a little of the commentary that i would hope can be enlarged to a wider thought on love and courtship.

Hiding
It is a genius clue that when the gift comes, the Deer Woman hides. The myth-world’s frequency is different from that of the human, and much tearing and thunder can commence when the two worlds square up to each other. Destiny is an awesome thing. James Hillman tells the story of the great Spanish bullfighter Manolete (1917- 1947), who as a boy “clung so tightly to his mother’s apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him”4

His clinging was an attempt to jump down the hole, to buy himself time until he had developed a container strong enough to bear the gift offered. Come adolescence, he ran towards his gifting, and towards his death. Gored by the bull Islero at age thirty, he died, his funeral the largest Spain has ever seen.

It could be that Manolete sensed his destiny, the glory and the sobriety of it, and bought all the time he could before the pulse became too persistent to ignore. For others, the price of relationship to the moon is that they are unable to reenter the village, its light grows dim around other people. An artist’s studio can be seen to be an attempt to “catch beams.”

Of course, when we are overwhelmed, we attempt to return to safe ground—when the Deer Woman is confronted by the Moon, she runs back to her father’s tent. However, as in many initiatory stories, he’s not there. The father and the tent represent her grounding in her community, her childhood, and her humanity. The container remains, but this time she has to be the negotiator, the elder, the one with wit. Sometimes, when making a painting, I will occasionally slip into ground so new and unexpected to me that I panic and paint over it, calming myself with more “negotiated” gestures. Like the surface of the moon, I don’t recognize the landmarks, I can’t see any footprints. So I try to drag the Moon back into my black tent of tradition, comfort, and warmth. I too will try to familiarize the otherness of the experience into something that can gradually be integrated into a body of work. Try as I might, I’m not an astronaut yet.

The Deer Woman stays safe by a kind of mimicry, an invisibility that preserves us in all sorts of situations—at school we imitate the teacher and his or her “light of knowledge,” and gradually learn to hide our own peculiar, idiosyncratic opinions. If they should pop out, we would become visible and vulnerable, so better to ape what is bigger and brighter than us.

This kind of activity, while potentially life-saving as we grow, can become a castrating and unconscious habit if carried into adulthood. Of course the Moon is looking for her, not an imitation of himself. But in this case, she bides her time and wears him out.

Of course, there could also be a straight avoidance of intimacy in her hiding. Better to munch a lettuce leaf and practice detachment than get down into the muck of relationship and have to deal with its unwieldy shadow.

The Great Thief
It could be said that to know the moon is to be connected to thievery. Even the Moon’s glow is stolen sunlight, reduced 500,000 times. Not content with stealing sunlight, the moon also has a penchant for pilfering color. The gold of a cornfield or the crimson of a rose are quietly replaced by greys and blues when moonlight’s fingers fall on them. A lover of letters, the Moon steals into books read at dusk—as we read in the gloom, words become indistinct as he scoops them up and carries them off. Night is the time of break-ins, affairs, slow time-ruptures to the agitated clock of light. At the same time, we know that the Moon replaces everything the next day, just as we left it, so he appears a cheeky thief rather than a savage robber. The Moon is also a friend to lovers; his inky sky covers them as a blanket, but his light offers a slender trail to the sweetheart’s door. So to draw down the Moon brings a certain wiliness.

All this talk of thievery could have scared the Deer Woman: would she want her own color, her essence, so consumed? We see a strong reaction to the bluster of the potential suitor. Can you remember being with someone who cast so much light that your own couldn’t be seen? Like a hip-hop star covered in bling jewelry, the moon so far offers no real relationship, only adoration. The Deer Woman has been alone long enough to know that she doesn’t want that. And so it begins. She refuses calls, rain-checks dates, and has always just left the party when you arrive. This just intrigues and frustrates you more, until, like the moon, you find yourself frantic and sweating, searching under animal skins and through friends’ address books trying to track her down.

Just when you are finally turning away, you hear her voice from the top floor of a crowded restaurant, and there you go, charging in among the tables again. Her faint voice is a tiny clue that this is a courting rather than a flat refusal. Once the Moon’s grandiosity is lessened, and he is wrapped in the cords of the world, when he even faces something approaching mortality, he and the Deer Woman really start to communicate.

How can she trust such an energy? Surely better to stay in her glorious isolation. But the Moon Man also offers an image of largeness, flamboyance. His arrival has broken the steady rhythm of the animals and the frost: he offers an outwards expression, to be seen. In the tangle of our own relationships, the rambunctious partner offers a challenge to our inwardness—we despise but are attracted to this rambunctiousness. In the myth-world, all these characters reside in us, and so we could say that the Deer Woman—solitude loving wilderness being—and the Moon Man— mighty, galaxy-shining, tide-altering—are trying to reach an accord with each other. The Road of Solitude and the Road of Voice have found a crossroads.

All of us sense that many types of love exist. There is that first burst when we feel immortal and beloved in the eye of our sweetheart, huge and extraordinary. It is as if this sensation is propping up some fantastical posture of our own importance. The love is really about what we are experiencing—a sense of connection, support, and ardor—still centered around the self in some way. A relationship based on this pattern seems to have roughly a three-year life span. The crunch time is the possibility of a less self-centered love emerging, one rooted in compassion. Instead of trying to frantically draw your self-esteem from your partner, you instead, like the Deer Woman and the Moon Man, start to appreciate the other’s separateness, the intense beauty that is theirs alone—that they have desires, dreams, and idiosyncrasies that are not about you. This mystery can be so daunting that we allow the other to pass out of view forever. The Deer Woman never seems to be caught in the former, that instinct body is always pushing for a place of real appreciation, she’s not looking for props.

Copyright White Cloud Press 2011

2011-08-18T03:05:00.000-07:00

Come and Study with Us: THE YEAR PROGRAMME

2011-08-18T02:28:00.000-07:00

Please see above Californian friends - Thurs 22nd sept, NUMINA CENTER, Santa Rosa, alongside events at Dominican and Sonoma universities, various radio interviews and Point Reyes open evening on the 23rd. The final weekend of the myth course is entirely filled, but contact Point Reyes Bookstore (the wonderful Lisa Doron) if you'd like to be on the waiting list.

Thank you for the very warm response to last weeks entry. Over 400 'shares' on Facebook, and many e-mails of support. Please keep sending it along to anyone it would benefit.

Down here in Devon rain is sloughing in from the high moor. We appear to have gathered in the last of the potatoes from the soil in our tiny (really tiny) garden, but are forming ambitious. if folly-led expansion ideas for a positive eden of veg appearing in various dustbins and wound round fences for 2012. The land feels as if it is gearing up for the move into early autumn. I find it all impossibly beautiful but i know that irritates all the summer people who are quire rightly hanging onto every last moment of sunlight before the move into mulch, mist, long walks and red beer. So i won't say more on it till late September at least.

I'm off for an early meeting this afternoon with friends the storytellers Chris Salisbury and Sue Charman (and directors of...) regarding the Westcountry Storytelling Festival 2012, for August next year. Interesting plans afoot. I'll also be over in Vermont in three weeks having similar meetings with Caroline Casey, Tony Hoagland and other esteemed colleagues for the shape and beauty that will become the Great Mother Conference 2012. It's great to see in this era of utterly slashed creative fundings wonderful uprisings of fiery language and powerful art.

So i want to offer an invitation to consider coming to study with us at the school for the up coming year programme. A chance to do something vital, occasionally troubling, sometimes hilarious and always engaging. It's a step outside normal, tick-tock time and into something robust and eternal. It will serve you well. Contact Tina at www.schoolofmyth.com, and she can put you in contact with me for a chat if you'd like a first hand account of what the great adventure offers. Jump in, jump in. Wake up that sweet pirate hurling coins at the moon.

It's always a true boon to get a sense of sign up early, the whole 'last minute' thing is a total drag for balancing the books.

Some of what it offers is laid out below.

The dates below are for the Westcountry School of Myth year programme beginning in October. Underneath that is an excerpt from a new interview - all of which can be found at:

http://www.schoolofmyth.com/interviews.html

Oct 14th to 16th 2011

Dec 2nd to 4th 2011

Feb 3rd to 5th 2012

April 6th to 8th 2012

June 22nd to 24th 2012
.

What does the School of Myth offer?

Let me just say what a huge variety of student we get - from professors to artists to surgeons to street musicians. As long as you have a love of story and nature than this is a good place to come - regardless of experience.

What makes the school unique in Britain is a very developed relationship between rites-of-passage and the myths that we believe are linked to that process. So if we experience many initiations in our life, then these are stories that we need, regardless of age, to orientate ourselves in challenging times. For those that want to experience a wilderness fast then we offer that (from summer 2012), and then those who would rather take a more gradual pace can experience the year programme without the fast in Snowdonia. We ask: what myths speak to you? Why? How can they be carried and expressed?
So here’s some of what we provide -

Foundational Stones:

A spacious exploration of the relationship between myth, wilderness and the psyche. We also reclaim the artificial divide between ‘culture’ and ‘wildness’ - all decent initiatory practice is a culture of wildness. We believe that discipline is the dance partner of wildness. We are based on residential centres within Dartmoor National Park, and under canvas when the weather is good. We offer what I would call foundational stones to becoming a storycarrier. Each weekend is one of these stones - with plenty of study between sessions to deepen your practice. How you integrate and express the stories is up to you - this is not a course entirely about storytelling remember-but the old belief is that find some way of communicating the radiance and murk of your own walk through life. Areas around story we explore are:

Story is a Sharp Knife:

Story not as allegory, repertoire or form of psychology but as an independent energy. How do we nurture it if it decides to be told by us? Recognition of your inner- eco system, your own weather patterns, your character, and how they relate to the grand characters that radiate through these stories like jaunty tigers. So we develop an appropriate relationship with story. Some would say a very old one.

From the Comparative to the Associative:

Not just the comparison of one myth to another but a move into a much more varied eruption of information - the condition of our souls, the wider history of culture, the sweet intelligence of the wren. We are less interested in the notion of harmony - that all myths are telling the same story - and far more engaged with the pursuit of polyphony, independent bursts of multiple insight, from both teacher and student alike. Harmony is a western pre-occupation, useful sometimes but not at the expense of certain unique insights. So we are very engaged in a constant emerging conversation. We bring in some myth theory - Eliade, Segal, Zimmer, Hyde, Von-Franz, Kane, but are very tuned to what is actually revealing itself right there, in the moment. For those that read we provide an exhaustive reading list, but for those that don’t we have other means. I’ve worked extensively with folks with dyslexia and autism too, giving their situation a mythic as well as diagnostic appraisal. From my way of seeing they are in the realm of the Magician - those that see in a different way, and need to be approached appropriately.

Myth is Nothing to Do with a Long Time Ago:

It’s about a place that you can inhabit at almost any time - Blake’s ‘eternity in a grain of sand’. It’s why a story seemingly three thousand years old can seem to be speaking to the nature of our lives today. It is! They are partially referring to inner realities that are ageless, hence their impact right this very second. At the same time I offer a caution for making stories entirely personal - the anthropocentric can become a form of brutality to stories - i believe there are little dark nests within them that are entirely for the pleasure of the gods, not just about our nutty love lives. It’s a fine line the mythteller treads.

Myth is also promiscuous, not dogmatic. It’s a bed hopper. It’s not designed for tablets of stone in my opinion, but moves through history with fluidity, catching but also challenging the mood of the times. When it becomes too dogmatic it becomes toxic - but I think that’s an anxious human response to the stories rather than the origination point of the stories themselves. I don’t even think many stories arrive from a human point of view. Many of the stories I love are when you are suddenly seeing through the eyes of Raven, or caught in the foamy curls of Irish sea.

The Pastoral and Prophetic:

At the school we study what we call prophetic rather than pastoral stories. These are stories that hold paradox and grit equally, that have hard material within them. Romanian Gypsy, Siberian, Gaelic and onto Arthurian Romances - it’s that enquiry that links them. They are certainly all initiatory stories, that’s a great focus to the year.
In that huge question that frequently gets asked: “what stories do we need now?” we say, “the prophetic!” Stories of shape-shifting, relationship to crafty animals and lonely stretches of river, the emergence of the feminine, stories with both the Trickster and the absolute simplicity of love for the earth at their core.

Place and the Arising of Value:

Re-consecrating a relationship to five miles around where you actually live. Walk its boundaries, become an apprentice to its mythologies. When you find its stories - either a local folktale or a personal experience, don’t write it down with words but by image - a kind of visual map. That’s how I learn all stories; not by script. Offer libations, beat the boundaries, get into walking. Blake found all of this in the east end of London. What are the songs of stewarding this place down through time?, the ploughing, market, crofting, ferrier songs? The songs of the fisherman leaving before dawn from Brixham? Cities have their deep histories too.

So we ground ourselves as well as leap into the imagination - what is the story of that watering hole, that rowan tree, that stretch of grass between two abandoned buildings. We encourage a little grandiosity - become the resident storycarrier of your milage - as Gary Snyder say’s “be famous for five miles” These are bio-regional times we are moving into - we care about eating local food, being connected to our surroundings. Well, what about the stories? Local folklore? Grimms and the Russian fairy tale world are great to jump into, but not at the expense of a localised experience. Seek both.

Magical Privacy:

In an era of frantic networking and frankly too much information about things that are actually not that important we offer space to carve out some interior time. To cook in your own images, feelings, compulsions. To wander the moors, to get wet, to warm by the fire sipping hot tea, to have fellowship with us but also some delicious solitude.

The Dagara of Africa believe that when something is made public it is already in decline - so all really potent acts of magic are done in private. That thought has impacted me a great deal. I think we are in danger of becoming addicted to disclosure. So we like to assign projects to students that are never revealed to each other! Never shared to the human community - only buzzards and long grass - to them you can talk all day.

I am working into this idea a great deal at the moment. I think many people are longing for a deeper life.
So that’s a taster of what we get up to. Lots of time in nature, lots of time by the fireside, great fellowship with your fellow travelers - it’s one hell of an experience, truly. You won’t get a diploma worth a damn in commercial terms but you may just get a swan feather cloak of story, culture and deep belonging placed around your worthy shoulders. What would you say is of the most value?

It’s a place of study and transformation. Many of our students have gone off and become wonderfully authentic storytellers, almost all are causing some kind of trouble in the world. This makes us very happy. Some fall so mad in love with our nomad life they become part of the school crew - visionaries, cooks, musicians, poets - it’s unbelievably sweet at times.

Martin Shaw copyright 2011

ENGLAND: WHEN THE WILD BECOMES FERAL

2011-08-11T05:28:00.000-07:00

WHERE ARE THE ELDERS?

2011-08-11T03:44:00.000-07:00

So we in the UK are bearing witness to the inevitable: when you have a profound lack of elders, coherent rites-of-passage and lack of vision for its youth - the move from a culture to a society (at best) to survival. Our trance-obession with the Olympic games (odd mythic reference in all of this) has robbed funding for many small communities for centers and arts activities of any sort. So many festivals and centers that work with young people have been axed - including myth, poetry and storytelling.

An awful implication in much of the UK media coverage is that the world these folks are reacting against is somehow sane, or fair. It's not. It's already crazy, already an insult to the soul, already seemingly hopeless, already impossible to invest in. And when you are no longer invested - already flattened out by absolutely no prospects - then a riot seems an exciting place to be. Adrenalin, chaos, a brief flush of potential power before the deadening nothingness of your daily life returns. These scenes are mimics of the initiatory need to wrestle death (see below) - the thieving is a manifestation of a society utterly drained of chivalry, but it is not the root of the disquiet, the deepest motivation. And of course, who really gets damaged? the localised community, not the banking fat cats, but the exhausted Indian shop keeper, the mother on her way home from a twelve hour shift at the supermarket.

In terms of media is it easy to sideline the straight up fact that this is a spiritual crisis - before anything else. This is just a hint of a kind of climate change of the soul, an impoverishment of possibility. Meanwhile the bankers ruin continues, not one of them goes to prison, the old guard ride on, waving through the carriage window at the little people.

Guess what Mr. Cameron - working with youth long term involves more than just sports. More than running shoes, expensive stadiums and a career where you are retired at thirty. More than just horizontal, aspirational jargon. We have to move downwards into the intensity of our collective griefs before any thought of an upswing. I could go on with this, but it is a scene i'm sure most reading this understand only too well. We need to re-find a story with inspiration, depth, vocation and beauty. We appear to be living in a time where we are vigorously defended against having an experience of our own beauty - what does it really look like? So many like myself have worked with at-risk youth for years with local government and found our hands covered in red tape just when any real movement of the soul has seemed possible.

When beauty becomes indistinct, when any psychic compass has lost its truth north, then these scenes are no mystery, no mystery at all. That's part of me running around with the looters, part of us, face covered as we enter an archetype too powerful to control. This isn't a Goddess time, a Zeus time, but a Trickster moment. But where Trickster abides, weird luck is possible. If you have the eyes to see it.

Tariq Jahan, the father of one of three killed in a hit and run defending their communities from looters, delivered a strong and incredibly non-judgemental eulogy for both his beautiful son and a call for peace. Inspirational and some real eldership in a moment like this.

A Conference with Soul and Heat:
So with the Minnesota Mens Conference approaching from the 13th-18th September - 'When the Waters Rise: Men and the Work of Renewal' this is a personal call to any men involved with community or youth work to seriously considering attending and lending their voice to the conversation. Go to www.hiddenwine.com TODAY and get involved. The issues that instigated what has come to be called men's work are at the very center of why England (and many other parts of the world) are in huge crisis. This is a conference that will be directly addressing the huge upswell of pain and confusion many of us feel - of any age.

Anyone who knows me will know my huge respect and involvement with women that are doing similar work. I think this will be a crucial conference and if you are sitting in a sofa nuzzling a brew considering attending then please don't be so passive, get off your lardy ass and step up. We need you. This is a moment to seize.

There will be contributions by Robert Bly, Malidoma Some, John Lee, Daniel Deardorff and many others. The food is good, sauna hot, lake cool, forest with the occasional bear, and a 100 of the most interesting men you could hope to meet.

Here is an excerpt from my new book 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree' - looking at the roots of rites of passage and some personal experience of working with youth. If it is useful then please forward on to other folks, groups and communities. These are times that are calling out for the best and most ingenious (interesting word) in all of us.

When the Wild becomes Feral

We understand that some sort of devotional life has existed between humans and animals and landscape for millennia. From an indigenous perspective, neglect of ritual forms creates a kind of chaotic sickness or malaise that invokes a very real sense of dislocation from the wider community. These ritual forms are the secret history of the world: they are medicine. To face the world without them is to walk naked into a blizzard, to enter a desert without water.

If, as a young person, you were not absolutely clear what the full breadth of the word community meant, the chances are you may think nothing of trashing it.

There was a time when the link between animals, humans, and the land was fluid, magical. The perception of community would extend out, both into the landscape and through the stories seeping up from the burial grounds of your ancestors. The swift raven, the sharpened axe, the soft hairs on a mouse’s belly, all were interconnected if you looked long enough. The anchors of story, ceremony, and hard living kept you held in this awareness.

At a certain point in your development, normally around fourteen, this perception would take on an even deeper reality as you were removed from your domestic concerns, village ties, and family and taken out into the lonely open spaces or deep forests. Just at a time when the youth thinks they have seen all the adults have to offer they are catapulted out of what is familiar and into “the world turned upside down,” the initiatory zone.

As a young man, the only conscious initiations I or any of my friends experienced involved proving ourselves in playground fights, boasting outrageously, and pretending we’d had sex when we hadn’t. We would make dens out in the woods behind the estate, occasionally visited by girls, and we would all take pride in our ramshackle shelter. It felt vital to have a place built by hand, away from the concrete. Rain would sluice through the ceiling of branches and twigs and we’d sit there with blunt pen knives whittling spears in anticipation of the elders who never came. Some instinctive soulfulness was at play, and in our own way we cultivated it.

The stories were invented rather than handed down, but came through time in that small area, getting scarred knees, covered in soil and listening to the ghostly sound of wind in the trees. Girls were intensely mysterious to us, and made our throats hurt and our faces hot if we met one we liked. We knew they had their own hideouts in the woods, but we were rarely invited. Something was hidden in their camps that had to do with the moon, long grass, and their contrary nature of which we could only speculate. We were wild pagan kings, green wood bandits, mad for life and drunk on adventure.

As we move from childhood we experience a kind of leap. We know that at adolescence, the average male has up to thirty times the normal amount of testosterone coursing through a body struggling to catch up. He glimpses somewhere up ahead the capacity to bear greater responsibility, have children, to contribute to a wider community, but rarely achieves this gracefully. This second jump has always been complex, and its innate vulnerability has required the birthing canal of initiation to anchor the individual into their new, wider role.

In my own life it was a time of intense questioning and profound difficulty. Flailing about, my friends and I took risks, climbed drunk up the sides of tall buildings, fell in love with unobtainable girls, got beaten up, all the good stuff. We were expanding, stretching our wingspan in rooms that now felt too small. Furniture was always going to break. We were moving through a gateway, but the doorkeepers and the world they represented seemed grey, repressed, and bloated. Where is the mystery in going straight from school to college to job to mortgage? What wider perspective, what beauty cuts through that ghastly procession and makes you howl with the joy of being alive?

Waves not Caught
So we see a huge momentum entering at this stage, but a complexity in how to handle this great surge. If nothing is presented to the youth at that crucial stage, if no Arthur, no White Buffalo Women, no Elder appears, then the energy loses focus, eats disappointment and becomes self-centered, because the world it’s heading towards seems dulled or greedy. Mythology, as we will see, helps us into adulthood by showing us a picture wider than our own self-absorption. It’s as if adolescence is a moment when a wave is higher than usual, when some power makes it crest, peak at a point where far off views are seen, other vistas, not just the churning sea. Dreams are more vivid, possibilities endless. A healthy community catches that moment, and allows a container both for its power and impact as the wave crashes down again. Initiation matches the upsurge of energy by offering something of equal magnitude, a sense of appointment in life.

The sobriety of this mishandling means that the wild parts of us become segregated, marginalized, or only appear when we’re drunk. Wild consciousness gets limited to an AC/DC record, a survival skills workshop, a one-night stand. Rock’n’Roll holds that wildness for many of us: I love it myself, but its obsession with youth points towards boys and girls who remain uninitiated, whose perception of wildness cannot grow with time. It becomes a frozen moment, fondly enjoyed, but as unacceptable in your “grown up” life as a wolf in kindergarten.

The job of the elder is to be nuttier, more curious, occasionally fierce and more connected to the eccentricities of wildness than the youth ever dreamed. More than anything, the elder has seen some rough pattern to their life and knows how to express it through a story. This carries tremendous hope with it.

Wrestling Death
There is a fear of death in continually idolizing youth, but it quietly and continually moves through our community regardless. Part of that heroic teenage expansion lies in drawing close to the winged stranger, seeing that one day, possibly soon, there will be an end to all this. Every ram-raider, every teenage life-threatening prank is an unconscious, archaic desire to come close to that dark wind. By the third or fourth day without food on the mountain, you start to hear death shuffling around through the trees. Initiation creates a boundaried opportunity to step nearer the kingdom of death and be called back to the living by the singing voices of the elders.

Traditional wisdom holds that death requires a kind of courting in much the same way you’d court a new love. You send her gifts, whittle a cord of ornate words to hopefully, possibly, land in a gleaming bouquet at her feet. This is a form of archaic gambling, to construct strange little dances to honor her, never to ignore her.

Youths are meant to wrestle death in constant, boundaried endeavors that help the sun rise one more day. That great wrestling is the one of several secretive reasons our world keeps turning. Death finds it charming. The Great Raven Woman appreciates panache. She is a constant companion, and sends you little vibrations every day in the form of miniscule endings. She is entwined with and in love with life. She adds poignancy to endless summer days, also tapping her cane when you think this grief/joy will last forever. They say she has the kindest eyes and is always immaculately dressed.

All she asks in return is a little acknowledgement, a little style and affection in how you address her. The initiation of wilderness is a clear wave in her direction, a leaving of golden apples at her feet, of sewing her claw marks into the hem of your dress. It opens a dialogue that should inform the rest of our lives, rather than meeting her all at once, rather abruptly, at the end.

In my own work with at-risk teenagers, I have met many adolescents who grew up with no father in the mix. Sometimes, due to their brutality, it was just as well they were out of the picture. Part of my job was to scour housing estates, older brother’s crack dens, arcades, and bars to locate them when they failed to turn up for an appointment and convince them to get in the car without any kind of physical altercation.

On two occasions I saw one of them climb out of a second floor bedroom and jump rather than engage with me. Another time, one pulled the end of the car gear stick at sixty miles an hour in an attempt to off-road the vehicle (it almost worked). Another climbed out on a ledge over a raging river and threatened to leap if I asked about his father again. Most of these young ones seemed to fill the space of absence with two very different feelings about the father.

To some, the father became heroic, above the squalor they endured, clever to have escaped, even if that was to prison. With every personal misery they were suffering, the dream myth of life with the father was amplified. Once in awhile, the father, usually so as to apply for more government benefits, would offer them a weekend in Birmingham or wherever he happened to be. A temporary glow would come over the youth, only to be frozen into contempt upon returning to the over- worked mother, livid boyfriend, turbulent home, alcoholic uncle. It’s a different context, but I think of Fran Quinn’s words:

I love you so much I will hold onto anything, even your dark and angry face

The other road taken was denial of the father, loss or fear articulated as rage, perceiving him only as a monster. Either of these roads is thin and lacks balance, but that can be hard to grasp in the suffering trance they’re caught in. That thin road—he/she’s like THIS, and only THIS—can enable emotional movement but lacks soul. In an environment that refuses the necessary reflection, we scurry for ways to transcend the absence. We can ride that animosity or fantasy for decades, and let it infiltrate our lives in a hundred different ways.

The Ritual Cut or a Perilous Wound
Adolescents already possess a defined sense of mythology, although they don’t verbalize it as such. As with Baba’s children, whom I discussed in chapter two, in the absence of ritualized forms, adolescents’ initiatory route takes a kind of shadow form. The trauma they experience instigates change but not necessarily growth. It’s not that these young people lack identity; they have defined, handed-down archetypes from their life experience, environment, and family. They are often more established in their sense of themselves than some of the more affluent teenagers I sometimes work with.

Jake, a fourteen-year old, had an unshakable sense of his own identity as hell-raiser, sex offender, and bully. Caught in an almost hypnotic desire for his underworld experience, e.g., Prison, he would often be found stealing cars the same afternoon he had been in court after yet another warning. For Jake, prison was the river he had to cross to become a man like his father, to bear the same tribal scars. The street mythology was more authoritative than anything society could throw into the situation to calm it. If you’ve been raised by wolves, why would you listen to an old English sheepdog? Despite everything attempted to stop him, Jake escalated his misdemeanors until he was sent down.

Street perception of people and situations involves tremendous subtlety. You have to bring a kind of “edge-seeing” into every situation, read body language, act instantly, know how to bluff and spot weakness, and get what you want. Forcing youth to the periphery of society, it creates the necessity of the intuitive. Opportunity lies in grasping it. I’ve always been interested how at- risk youth can often grasp the underbelly of a story quickly, the hidden motivations behind the characters actions. The edginess of their position means that they are often looking into situations while simultaneously watching their own back, learning to look both ways.

They are Baba Yaga's children, accelerated into experiences they are too young for and lack the blessing and support of elders to make sense/soul from. But even in the shadowy world they inhabit, we see Yaga’s intelligence at play, the survival drive, the canniness, the desire for initiatory experience.

They get it, but in ways that take them too far into the burning grounds, so that a ritual cut becomes a perilous wound for which they lack the salve that would clean it from infection. That ritual cut is meant to be flooded with the mythic imagination. As the skin heals underneath, a hundred bright images from the myth–world scurry into their blood stream. Without it, the wound congeals and we fall into disappointment.

I discussed this situation with a Crow Elder, who suddenly turned to me and said, “That (the at-risk teenagers) is where we find our leaders!” He recognized what was crying out underneath the masks and made it his work to find it, honor it, and inspire its bearer towards leadership in the community. Such youths see the shit of the world because they have had it rubbed in their eyes from the moment they could crawl.

Much has been written about the need for reintroduced rites of passage for such individuals. In my own experience, hours or afternoons in their company weren’t enough. A walk or a story wasn’t enough. What was needed (and rarely happened with so much health and safety red tape) was a complete removal of everything that was familiar to them, in order to walk the real initiatory road. Estate, gone. Drugs, cars, and status, gone. Family, gone. They needed the Uncles with the Clay masks, ropes, and blindfolds. The Aunts that lead them into the red center of the Women’s Hut.

Some strong, serious ritual act needs to come in, to alert the soul that something real is happening. The poet Timothy Young, experienced in this area, says that if you teach boys to hunt with skill and respect, some energy enters them that hones their natural ferocity into something grander and more useful.

Geoffrey Canada describes running a martial arts evening in Harlem. Does he go in as lamb, or as a therapist? No, he goes in as a lion. Pacing up and down, he draws the attention towards himself and the work, towards activity, and for a moment the lure of the streets is dimmer.

I’m trying to bring magic into the lives of these kids. To bring a sense of wonder and amazement. I can feel the students losing themselves and focusing on me. I have crowded all the bad things out of their minds: The test they failed, the father who won’t come by to see them, the dinner that won’t be on the stove when they get home. I’ve pushed it all away by force of will and magic.4

So we follow the archaic clues: severance from the estate, district, gang connections, sexual partners, and drugs, and follow the thin trail towards possibility and challenge. This is a true Rebel move. The marks of street life are still consensual, preordained in their way, but the way of the Mountain is unique and uncertain.

The initial response to that kind of uncertainty is anger, and many at- tempts to escape from the program. Over the years we have found youths trying to hitch their way out of Snowdonia, ducking in the amusement arcades when they were meant to be fasting, with much smuggling of Class A drugs in their rucksack. When the dust had settled, however, and no way home was apparent, slowly they began to gather round the nightly campfires. When they began to realize the intensity of the rite-of-passage they were undertaking, and the fact that it didn’t seem completely “safe,” they began to see it as a challenge, one they’d have to raise their game to get through.

These “terrors of the streets” often turned out to be scared of the dark, petrified by wild animals, rigid with fear at the thought of encountering a spirit. This was a new set of obstacles, different from those they were used to. As the days progressed and their defenses dropped, they started to look like children again. Suddenly we adults were the only ones with any information about the road they had elected to take. Separated from peers and intoxicants, often going through drug with- drawal symptoms, they started, slowly, to see the characters of the myths we told as being like them, standing at the edge of the unknown. They saw they were stepping into a life of uncertainty, odds seemingly stacked against them.

Those first few days on the mountain, getting ready to go out, it all felt like bullshit. But when I couldn’t get a fix and we knew we were into something serious, I started to listen to the stories we were hearing at night, all bears and wastelands and stuff. The dark up there was worse than the streets, terrible man, it felt like it had been there forever. If I’d known how it would be out there alone I would have run away.

John, rite of passage participant

Martin Shaw Copyright 2011

The Wandering Ground

2011-07-31T01:41:00.001-07:00

2011-07-31T01:40:00.000-07:00

Back from the Heavy.

2011-07-31T01:08:00.000-07:00

# new interview on 'interviews' page of http://www.schoolofmyth.com/

I'm recovering from the grip of a fever. My mum and dad came down to visit us and we all trooped out to an old cove that we've swum in for at least forty plus years, before i was born. My father lost his wedding ring in its depths about twenty five years ago and we have been trailing the waters looking for a gold gleam ever since. Something in the cold of the water, heat of the day, chill of the wind and some other more internal factors got their fangs into my shoulder and i then spent 24hrs shuddering with a raging temperature, and another 48hrs dizzy, crazily dreamed and laid out before coming back.

So, part of the recovery of that is to walk the tors of Dartmoor, which i will be setting out to to do as soon as this post is written and i avail myself of some breakfast. Actually, i think i'm going to have to have another sleep first (!) - not quite back yet -but i'm on the way.

So School is out for the summer, but the year course begins in October - with some new elements coming in - NOW is the time to get in touch via our website if you wish to join us up on the moor. Don't delay friend.

This next section is from more on Parzival, and the fierce prophetess of the forest, Cundrie.

Cundrie is a sybil, “one who offers divine council”. The very first sybil, Sibylla of the seventh century B.C. had a harsh tongue in her head; her prophetic utterances would cut deeply into the complacency of the enquirer. She would speak flatly of famine, disease, war and would chastise heavily whoever came forward with a question. Heraclitus observed that the prophecies were delivered from unsmiling lips –it seemed a heavy role to carry. Still, it was claimed she lived for 1000 years, so maybe she was just conserving energy.

A fascinating detail is that the prophecies did not indicate a possession state – she retains her lucidity even while a spirit wind sweeps through her. In Sibylla we locate two great forces conjoining, the cosmos and the women. But even in this conjoining, the crucible of soul is wide enough to hold both in a tapestry without annihilating the personal or shutting down the cosmic. In our exploration of how to hold and express wild mythologies, this is a crucial detail. Remember the vision quester, hypnotised by Caer Idris, or Parzival tranced by the blood on snow? They lack Sibylla’s expansive container, that holds the arduous tensions of the two. It is only in later centuries that this mediation seems to be compromised by a later Sibyl’s working in Apollo’s temple; there we find descriptions by the poet Lucan of “a rabid jabber poured from her foaming lips...the groans and loud babblings as she gasps to draw breath; doleful howls and wailing fills the cavern”. This image does not suit the eloquence of Cundrie.

Sibylla herself was part of no organised establishment, she rode independence like a snorting horse, scattering freely her troublesome images. Another detail is that she didn’t speak them – she sang them.

Cundrie is emphatically showing Parzival the route downwards. Like most of us, he encounters grief and trouble with the sense of ‘It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!’ Even as we head down into the muck we can see dawn breaking beyond the next set of hills. Hallelujah. The stone has been rolled away. This is James Hillman’s territory of irritation, even claiming that we are entirely christianised as a society if we operate with that sense of relentless optimism. The textual qualities of the descent – the scents, colours, the terrible insights – get lost if we are always paddling away from the flood. Drown, say’s Hillman. Drowning pulls us into the barnacled insights of Neptune; we are finally in a murky, half-lit world where we have to move very slowly. Soul is as interested in our retreats as our frantic jerks forwards, but this is a very hard notion to accept.

To allow the drowning is like a preparation for ageing. It is to watch certain things disintegrate but identify with the light rather than the bulb. Parts of us break off and become irritable crows, stuck water in old pipes, filthy trees by a busy freeway.

Camille Paglia claims that the west is addicted to the notion of climax. Every story ends with a wedding, certainty, radiant contentment, the return from exile. This is not always the ending in tribal stories. Horse drown, tipis burn, babies crawl out into the snow. The endings are sometimes ghastly. But the old myth tellers also know that the end of a story always wanders into its beginning, so the characters will reconfigure before long, find their way back to the warmth of the story fire. It’s a kind of bluff.

As a mythologist I have to follow the notion of drowning with another factor. The underworld jewel. The magical instrument, potion, gift or idea that somehow returns with the initiate. It is true that some part of them has died down there, and the old initiators insist that until there has been a dying down there in the depths, then there will be no gold, no culture-hero, no return. When we dive and surface too early then we carry a mimic, a faux-object, a non-event. Exchange is the thing, something has to be placed in the tobacco stained fingers of the Underworld Gamblers.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

Salty Stories and Winged Opinions WENS 6th JULY

2011-07-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

2011-07-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

Well the big news has been the Ashburton carnival. Our little home town has seen float after float parade by our very front door. This year, however, we were ready. Chicken laced in herbs, burgers purloined from Dartmoor cattle, two steaks from the very same beast, ice cold beer, a very good french red and a bottle of Ardbeg. And that's just for the kids.

So we had a big feast as they waddled wonderfully by (or maybe that was us). We were all decked out in Elizabethan costume that Cara suddenly produced on the second glass of red. Later we gathered by the fire for banjo and Cahon (spanish drum) as the children set up a sound system playing Burning Spear and Wagner. Well, all but the very last bit of that happened.

So wednesday is the much discussed 'Ecology, Myth, and the Notion of Hope' day with myself and Alastair McIntosh behind Schumacher College on the Dartington Estate. So, with that in mind i include a review from some years back of McIntosh laying out some interesting thinking whilst pretending to review a book. See what sticks. You may have heard him reading 'prayer for the day' this month on radio 4. I will be bringing Hebredian folklore and poetry. This weekend is also the very last gathering of the year course up on Dartmoor -under canvas, round the fire. Saturday is 'walking the story' - a literal walking into the wllderness and catching the mirrors of your own living myth, with some strong ritual and gritty tribal stories to see us on our way on the Sunday. I can't believe the year has flown so fast.

Elijah or Elisha? A Shamanism for Today

Alastair McIntosh

Published in The Christian Parapsychologist, Churches' Fellowship for Psychical and Spiritual Studies, 13:4, pp. 119-122, 1998.

This piece comprises a review article of Shamanic Experience: a Practical Guide to Shamanism for the New Millennium and Where Eagles Fly: A Shamanic Way to Personal Fulfilment, both by Kenneth Meadows, Element Books, Shaftesbury, 1998 editions, both £9.99, respectively ISBN 1 85230 226 7 (196pp) & 1 86204 284 5 (249pp).

I have a problem with reviewing these two books for this journal. Meadows claims to have produced a “distillation of ancient wisdom” that he calls shamanics - shamanism freed from “regurgitations of ritualistic practices and superstitious beliefs.” His listing of what such shamanism offers the practitioner is distinctly self-centred. Yes, human love and cosmic ecological harmony is mentioned in a rather abstract other-worldly sense, but the more tangible benefits that he advocates seem to focus on such levels as being able to “develop practical skills in personality profiling,” “discover personal gateways to greater power and mastery over your life,” and of course, how to “improve your personal relationships.”

From a Judeo-Christian point of view, then, I would say that Meadows has “freed” his topic from too much, and thrown out the proverbial baby. That “baby,” I would venture, is the cultural psychotherapeutic function of shamanism as a dimension of applied prophetic theology. Meadows himself does not attempt to place shamanism in a Biblical context. That’s fair enough because his audience, clearly, is New Age. The less-politically aware segments of that broad kirk, stimulating and irritating in near-equal measure, will doubtless feel well served by these books. But for the purposes of this particular journal and for some of the more grounded New Age itself, I should like to make a diversion. Allow me, then, to use my space not to recount how, supposedly, to “see the aura,” find your power animal or make a prayer arrow - but to take the opportunity to suggest in which directions a Biblical shamanism might be explored. A book or a PhD is waiting to be done out there, and this might be an outline for it.

Shamanism is important to the “Christian parapsychologist” because the experiences of most of the Hebrew prophets can be more deeply understood with the help of its perspective. Ezekiel, for example, had to be fortified, first with a remarkable vision of totemic creatures and crystal; then with the courage not to be afraid “of their words, though briers and thorns surround you and you live among scorpions” (Ezekiel 1 & 2:6). His vision, of course, finds echoes in Revelation (especially 4:6-8 on the Apostolic power animals), and his tree of life echoes Genesis and the Garden of Eden where it comes back in right at the close of the New Testament as being that which engenders the “healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:2).

Another shaman, who appeared to understand the psychodynamics of sound, was Joshua who also set up a standing stone in a grove to mark the new-found monotheism of his people (Joshua 24:26-27). Jacob did likewise with the stone used as the pillow during his archetypally classic dream of the axis mundi ladder linking Earth with Heaven (Genesis 29:11-22). And of course, we Scots know from our legends, which must be true, that this very stone is our Stone of Destiny, originally fallen as a meteorite on the Holy Land and coming to us via Spain and the ancient Scots from Tara’s Hill in Ireland.

Readers of this journal should remember, though, that Old Testament was not always so supportive of megaliths. In Exodus 34:10-15 the standing stones are smashed because of their association with “sacred poles” which, according to a Jerusalem Bible footnote, were emblems of Asherah (Astarte, Ashteroth), the Goddess of love and fecundity. Clearly, the jealous patriarchal God had not yet woken up to his anima in Sophia or Hokmâ of Proverbs 8 etc., still less with Christ’s own identification with this feminine personification of the Holy Spirit in Matthew 11:19. In his Answer to Job Jung would have it that this was because humankind had not yet completed its work of humanising the tribal Yahweh into growing up into the full consciousness of what it means to be God outside of the eternal pleroma.

The shamanic Moses, of course, had his Heaven-sent manna and his magical rod, famously calling in Numbers 11:29 upon “all God’s people” to stand with him as prophets. Indeed, that chapter is a classic portrayal of the shaman’s struggle. There we see the visionary who has stepped outside of the ordinary consensus-trance reality of being enslaved to the “treasure houses of Pharaoh,” who has seen God’s way to a “promised land” of social and ecological wellbeing (if you forget about the original inhabitants thereby displaced) “flowing with milk and honey,” and now has to wrestle with ministering to the dependency-culture sickness of his people in an effort to heal the self-internalised wounds of their inferiorisation under slavery.

Turning now to Elijah, his job was so badly paid that he had to be fed by ravens on his travels (1 Kings 17:4). The raven is a power creature symbolising enlightenment - it looks through death into the rebirth of life eternal. Elijah’s power was tied up with that essential shamanistic accessory, his magic mantle (1 Kings 19:3; 2 Kings 2:7-15). This is found in traditions as geographically far-flung as Native America and, as we know from Martin Martin’s 1695 account, in what were probably the consciousness-changing practices of the bardic schools of the Celtic world.

And then there is Jonah. He provides an example of the storms sent by the unconscious and their consequent archetypal reconstellation in the “whale” when prophetic calling is evaded (Jonah 1-2). Jeremiah had similarly tried to evade his initial calling, protesting to God that he was “only a boy” (Jeremiah 1:6). Isaiah’s initial excuse was his unworthiness being a “man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). And Moses in prophetic reluctance protested disability, complaining: “I have never been eloquent ... I am slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Exodus 4:10).

The lesson from all this is that when that Jungian deep Self, known in the bible as “the Lord” calls, our narrow little egos are not their own. The common task of the prophet, shaman or bard is to constellate an alternate reality - to articulate a renewed poesis or making of reality to salve the soul of his or her people.

In marked contrast to the reluctance of Jonah and others was the attitude of Elijah’s successor, Elisha. He seems to have positively relished and pursued his calling. He asked Elijah if he could inherit a double dose of power. When the old man dies, Elisha finds this request is granted: sure enough, the mantle also proves magical on Elisha’s shoulders. He tries it out and manages to divide the waters of the River Jordan and cross over. With dry feet Elisha then makes off to ascend Mt. Carmel. But as he passes through a village, the children tease him about his baldness. In a passage about which not many sermons are preached, we then see this double dose of shamanic power rush to his head. Elisha’s male ego is affronted. He turns round and curses the children in the name of the Lord. In response, two she-bears come out of the woods. They tear apart two and forty of the little miscreants. And Elisha continues on his way, apparently without remorse (1 Kings 2).

Let me turn now to the point of having made this detour in reviewing Meadows books. I have a problem with this kind of material because it is not grounded, first and foremost, in the calling to address social and ecological justice. As Jesus proclaims in his Luke 4 mission statement (in which the “acceptable year of the Lord” or “Jubilee” pertains to the “land ethic” of Leviticus 25), the prophet who is “not recognised” in his own land must, nevertheless, hammer on about these altruistic ideals. Unlike such New Age gurus as Deepak Chopra, Jesus never said you could have both spirituality and worldly success; quite the contrary. That is where the more will-o’-the-wispish edges of the New Age are at odds with a prophetic theology and so cannot, I believe, in any deep analysis, lay claim to shamanic practice. If it does, it risks being the shamanism not of Elijah, but of Elisha. It risks fuelling ego out of control.

In saying that I do not wish to be damning of Meadows. On the contrary, books like these are often a good starting point to draw the reader into more serious literature and practice. I well recall, after all, having my own appetite for the mystical originally whetted in boyhood on reading that dubious populist “Tibetan” mystic, Tuesday Lobsang Rampa! After all, it was more thrilling than anything that Calvinist Sunday school on the Isle of Lewis was capable of coming up with!

Also, my critique, were it intended to be damning, would overlook the fact that much of the New Age nourishes those who, in a bygone era, would be called the “simple faithful.” Whilst simple faith is in many ways dangerous and delusional, it can also have a widow’s mite-like integrity to it that belies all the smart-Alex scholarship that people like me sometimes give the impression of indulging in with reviews like this. Yes, we can take a “holier-than-thou” attitude to the New Age ... but if we apply the same standards of criticism to most of the depleted flocks in the mainline churches, do we see much better by way of patterns and examples?

The greatest of all the Biblical shamans was, of course, that parabolic God-Man who taught in parables and made the whole of his life into parable indicative of the life, death and rebirth structures of deep reality. By their fruits you shall know them, said this celebrant of the joy of God whose very first miracle, according to John 2, was to contribute the equivalent of 900 bottles of wine to the party. That’s the sort of thing I so admire about a grounded shamanism! It rids the people of their various uptightnesses that stifle life. Jesus emphasised that we do not live from “bread alone” (Matthew 4:4), yet before preaching he always put first his concern to see that the people had bread (Mark 8). It is from such roots as these that prophetic theology nourishes a theology of liberation. It is to such roots that the “Christian parapsychologist” might most richly look to find a shamanism for our times.

Alastair McIntosh is a fellow of the Edinburgh-based independent “green” think-tank, the Centre for Human Ecology. This article consolidates footnotes to his poetic contribution to Nature Religion Today, ed. Pearson, Roberts & Samuel, Edinburgh University Press, 1998.

Imps and Beardies

2011-06-30T15:32:00.000-07:00

barefoot fishing bliss (with new pal Jonas)

2011-06-30T15:30:00.000-07:00

Finally home for awhile.

2011-06-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

Around 4.30 am two mornings ago i finally paid the cab driver and crawled into my own bed after a nifty 18 hr journey involving..drum roll please.. one speed boat, 3 coaches, three trains, two flights and a final taxi through the devon lanes as dawn broke. Found out the driver went to the same primary school as me, just 20 years before.

I was just back from Norway with Coleman Barks and Lisa Starr, having fun at the Festival of Silence outside Oslo, and then a couple of days on a remote but utterly wonderful island retreat. Fish roasting over open fires, wine, chocolate and hrs and hrs of sea waves and poetic talk. Both Coleman and Lisa read like Lions. We made the most of our time together - Myself and Barks 'liberated' a bottle of Apple Brandy and sat up in the weird half light of a norwegian 3am discussing Wordsworth, John Lee Hooker and a certain kind of Norwegian snail i had found - enormous. I guess you had to be there. I liked the Norwegians though didn't stay long enough to detect the 'Viking' spirit as such, these folk seemed more like the groovy objectors to pillaging that opted out. Played with some of the musicians often associated with the ECM record label - holy moley those cats can burrrn.

So it's ALISTAIR MCINTOSH and myself next wens- (scroll down for details) at the chicken shed, behind Schumacher College, Dartington, and then the final weekend of the Year Programme that weekend after. The tues after that i open for the one and only, main man, folk legend MARTIN CARTHY (alongside Katheryn Williams, Green Garside, Mike Heron and Robyn Hitchcock) at the Eden Project in Cornwall before sprinting back the next night for an evening of storytelling in Mortonhampstead up on Dartmoor.

So just a little note today, self explanatory....

Books that Choose Their Owners
It’s early autumn and I’m in Uptown in Minneapolis, in the American mid-west. Unusually I have an afternoon to spare and am in a favourite bookshop. On a high shelf I spot a book of African myths and folktales.

I reach up to pick it out, but it’s so high it proves difficult. A tiny little volume to its left keeps jutting out instead, trying to attract my attention. I repeatedly push it back in again and grope for the larger book. Finally, almost like an act of defiance, it pops right off the shelf and I catch it. I peer onto its cover. ‘Folk Tales of Devon’ by V. Day Sharman. The cover photo is of a local Devon Blacksmith’s forge from the late 1940’s. My father as a child played by it endlessly, often when he should have been at school. The photo also leads up a lane to a house (just out of eyeline) my family longed to buy. The very world of story and poetry was opened up to me by a dawn walk with my father through that very photo’s scene thirty five years ago. And now, in the land of Cowboy and Indians, Macdonalds and John Coltrane this book had literally leapt into my lap. I pay the man and hurry to my lodgings.

Stories are not repertoire, or glued to the heavy ink of the page. They are promiscuous beings that occasionally elect a particular woman or man to speak through. If they pick you – even in the afternoon in a mid-west bookstore – it’s wise to tell them when they want to be told.

Martin Shaw copyright 2011

BARDIC SECRET: Nearing cut off date for application

2011-06-21T03:48:00.000-07:00

Reseeding Language: The Panegyric Tongue

2011-06-21T03:11:00.000-07:00

Well, no sooner have the bags been unpacked from my grandmothers funeral and before that the U.S. trip i find myself refilling them for a trip to Norway to teach alongside Coleman Barks and Lisa Starr at the Festival of Silence this weekend, just outside Oslo. The mechanics of this meant obtaining a day turn around passport from the office in Peterborough, up near my parents. Hand over the dosh and a a four hour wait. Still, thats it done now for the next ten years.

So here is something of an enticer for the 'Entering the Bardic Secret' retreat in August (see above). There are always exceptions to what i write below, but the main points are worth considering i think - in general it's a call for a kind of freshening up of the word Bard really (especially that it applies to both genders (and passing adders and learned sparrows) - the thought that it's a kind of mens club is appalling to me, even if thats what history has pathetically attempted from time to time). I know this freshening process is already underway in certain bardic orders and huzzah and kudos for that. There is a cut off date approaching with this retreat - july 15th, so apply now or forever hold your peace. If you haven't worked with me before i will require a letter stating your intention in undertaking it and previous experience. Contact
schoolofmyth@yahoo.co.uk today.

We could look at what the word bard really means. Bard in the way many people use it, and I have myself, frequently, is a woman or man poetically alive to the mysteries – and having the facility to translate that into some expression of art. As time moves on the historical reality often becomes somewhat different. I will mention a few of those differences, whilst also suggesting that the force of a word should not be bound by its historic content exclusively – it could indeed be re-seeded, wrought anew.

Firstly, over the centuries the working bard sometimes developed into creatures of court, not of the forest, paid to construct verse in a very specific, un-spontaneous, rather laboured form that confirmed the wealth and prestige of the lord, his family and history. In other words, they were on tenure. Secondly, and a crucial point, is that the bards crafted verse of a specific cadence, a cadence they worked very hard to master, but in doing so, completely annihilate their local, regional speech patterns. If you aspire to bio-regionalism this is a disaster – the bardic verse rhythms do not hold the mutterings and wyldish syntax of a specific area. Be it Welsh or Scottish it can be hard to find much difference. It is an elevated language, which has its beauty, but the price is severe. There is a weightlessness, a cutting of the bard from their home ground.

A storyteller friend of mind speculates that the elevated language may have been a way of delivering hard truths in a form that ensured their safety, rather than in their more spontaneous, local tongue. A kind of ritual protection.

Thirdly, the image of the bard as kind of singer is a fiction – these really were not songs. Studying the meter and breaks of the verse it is clear that whilst they were to be accompanied, it would have regarded as rather common to call them songs. Still, that doesn't have to count for a jot now does it?

Fourthly, bardic speech swiftly became frozen speech. It was claimed that you could take a praise poem for a Leinster king of the 8th century, and, given a quick touch up here and there, present it as a 16th century panegyric (Bergin 1912 :206). There are dazzling displays of technique down the centuries, but less inspiration. The ground of image they are permitted to use has been so negotiated it loses much of its joie de vivre.

So are we to rid ourselves of the word ‘bard’ ?, has my rather depressing act of journalism robbed us of the beguiling story that has been wrapped around them these last few hundred years? I don’t think so.

We could claim the name, re-sacrilise it to the porosity of wild intent, ground it again in a hundred yards of dark earth. We could expand the role of the bard to a complete reversal of its previous ambitions – to laden its speech with the inflections and knowledge of a range of country say five miles around where we works and live. This is not to be luddite, but to playfully reclaim the power of the word, rather than academically strike it off the list.

Much is still admirable, from the astounding feats of incantational memory to their retreats in total darkness. A graduated bard would have mastered 60,000 lines (Macalister 1991 :122) of verse. We have an account from as late as the 18th century from Martin’s Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (Martin 1934), “They (the poets) shut their doors and windows for a day’s time, and lie on their backs with a stone upon their belly, and plaids about their eyes being covered as they pump their brains for rhetorical enconium or panegyric; and indeed they furnish such a style in this dark cell that is understood by very few…”

The focus of the bard was the preservation of language, the anchoring of history and wider knowledge of genealogy and heraldry. It seemed they had to cover much inner ground before the emergence into the wider field of court life. At its best it originally offered an emphatic kinship to the earth and a genuinely prophetic undertow. A bard was not orginally a career move, it was not really even about composed poetics; they were a beautifully carved totem of bone and heartbeat that absorbed the lucid curls of inspirations foam and the heat of animistic companionship.

My wondering is just what happened to that inner development when faced with the rigidity of the courtly system?

The greatest poet of Shiraz, Hafez, was a kind of bard, and composed incandescent lines of attack on the hypocrisy of “faking a religious faith” (Lewisohn 2008 :70). He is an exemplary focus on the true bardic spirit and would bear intensive study for any student of wild intelligence.

Bearing in mind the linguistic restraints, one of the strangest things I ever heard was that, were he alive 1000 years ago, Ted Hughes would have been a Bard. Pardon? Hughes carried the dialectical strain of rural Yorkshire through his poetry his whole life, revelling in it, a boar in dark mud. From this point of view he is absolutely, resolutely, cut from the cloth of the travelling minstrel, ecstatic, Seanchai, Cunning Man, not the tired clichés of a paid up, please the boss, court poet.

....And yet, from the common perception of the Bard as wilderness seer than he fits the bill with a bow wrapped around it. He even took what we could just about regard as a bardic chair when he became Poet Laureate, although the effect that had on his poetry is hotly contested.

When we look at how we generally speak, the bardic perogatives are hardly high on the list. We know we mostly speak a language with the fat trimmed off. If it veers off down esoteric pathways then we are clearly pretentious rather than attempting to hold delicate ideas within a tender net of words. Lets stop awhile here, and stalk the rebel notion of being a mongrel bard, a lucid reclamation of ...

And for the next stage you will have to sign up for the retreat!

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

Hoagland, Shaw and some good things.

2011-06-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

2011-06-14T01:26:00.000-07:00

FOX AND DIS-INFORMATION AS A RITUAL TOOL

2011-06-14T01:10:00.000-07:00

(Thanks for photo Natalie).

Something on the fox this week.

This entry is dedicated to the life of my grandmother Christine Gibson - a loving, wily, beauty of a woman. Love you gran.
Her funeral is tomorrow, so a long drive to old Lincolnshire awaits - but will be worth it many times over for a celebration of this woman's rich and extremely long life. Back in her beloved Alec's arms, abliss in the bee loud glade. x

Down in Devon, our great Trickster is Fox. I met fox the first time not in the wild, but in the sprawl of south London – it’s first trick. It was about 4.30 in the morning and I was leaving my small shared flat in Brockley to spend a day fasting and walking in Epping Forest, about an hour outside the city. As I turned the key in the lock I heard a slight sound in the dark and there it was. A male fox – a dog, reynard, or tod fox, whatever you wish to call it. Despite growing up in a fair amount of rural splendour I’d never seen one before. It had a glowing brownish red coat, black legs and ears, resplendent tail with a swish of white at its tip. Given the tail as well, it seemed about four foot long. It rotated its ears and sniffed.

There was a good few moments of eyeballing where I tried to take in as much as I could of it’s atmosphere and appearance before it strolled – not bounded – slowly round me and further into the small garden. The walk I was on was preparation for a four day fast, which meant that from that turn in the lock till my dusk return I was in an tacit sort of ritual – that I would experience a flood of information about my life; a sort of prophetic hall of mirrors. To see a wild animal, least of all the fox, within several seconds of it beginning, was quite a moment.

The day was long, bewildering and tiring. I had started to resent the lack of food and my mind was a buzz with conflict, about as far from being ‘at one with nature’ as it is honestly possible to get. I was sheltering under an Elm from sheets of rain, when suddenly, a fox burst from the undergrowth with a still twitching squirrel in it’s mouth, elegantly flashed past and was gone. That woke me up, grounded me, and got me past the twitching squirrel of thoughts that I’d been carrying. I followed the fox trail and got terribly lost, only finding a road some time on. Later that day, in a café in Liverpool Street Station, whilst tearing chunks from a burger and shovelling down fries, I turned over the meetings with town and country fox in my mind. I still am. Over the years fox has been a frequent but distant visitation.

Fox knows about giving dis-information, ask any Devon farmer. When hunted it will deliberately run through a flock of sheep, just to break the flow of its scent to the hounds, creating confusion. When hunting it will hide in a bush and mimic wonderfully the anguished squeal of a rabbit, often bringing out a nursing mother or old buck to see what is happening. Their death usually. Still, rabbits are smart too, so the fox only has a minute or two till they get used to its voice and start to ignore it. Fox plays the same trick imitating baby lambs, with ewes wandering off anxiously towards the sound and the mercy of fox. Up in the Snowdonia valleys I have sat at night sipping coffee on a dry stone wall and heard this eerie game.

Fox is a great storyteller, and good with character roles, as we have just seen. They have a five octave range and up to twelve different sounds to produce when adult. Like the fairy they despise iron – the gamekeepers say they can smell it. If caught in an iron trap, they, unlike a dog, will make no sound of complaint, but steadily gnaw through their own limb rather than be caught. They’re tough that way.

Fox loves spreading rumours about its strength and genius. To this day, locals will claim that when fox kills a goose, it slings it over its back and trots off – impossible but wonderful. Another great storyteller, Shakespeare, recognised kin when he saw it and gives thirty one praises to fox scattered through his work. A very old piece of Devon folklore is the notion that when fox is troubled by fleas he takes a piece of wool in his mouth and starts to step slowly into a stream. The deeper it gets the anxious fleas crawl through the fur and eventually end up on the wool when only its head is above the water. Once all on he drops the wool and is free of the itching.

Fox’s cunning is such that it has a somewhat ambivalent reputation – in the myth-world it frequently steals Coyote’s food, or nips off with the sun, or outwits the wolf. The Japanese love the fox – called Kitsune - and celebrate its intelligence, magical juice and, mythically at least, it’s long life. Really powerful foxes in their stories are in possession of nine resplendent tails. For a fox to become a human all it has to do is place a human skull over it’s own face. One final piece of vital information from the Japanese is this: any woman encountered alone, at dusk, could be a fox.

That explains a lot.

Myth is full of dis-information as a ritual tool – remember that story of Bluebeard? A youngest sister marries a man with a long, flowing, dark blue beard. A powerful man. He has to go travelling and offers her the run of the castle. He encourages feasting, company, cheer, good times. He gives her a heavy ring of keys to each room – but just that one thing. Do not. Under any circumstances. Use the little ornate key that opens the room underneath the castle. Of course she can’t help herself, is magnetised to use it. Inside the locked room she finds a floor awash with blood, and many other old wives of Bluebeard hanging like smoked meat on hooks from the wall.

Remember that childhood of Finn MacColl? He meets Finegas, a hermit waiting by the bank of a river, waiting as it was prophesied that he would catch the Salmon of Knowledge in the Boyne. When eventually he catches it the hermit sets young Finn to roasting it – but just one thing. Do not. Under any circumstances. Eat even the tiniest morsel of the fish. Of course not! The last thing on my mind. Whilst roasting this fish, Finn blisters a thumb on the bubbling skin, brings it to his mouth and absently tastes the fish. In a second he takes on all the knowledge that the Hermit was waiting to receive. But when the Hermits returns he reveals that he deliberately went away for this very moment to occur.

Remember the story of the Handless Maiden? When the maiden’s husband is called to war she sends him the happy news that she has conceived a child. On the way to the battle front the messenger is lulled into a sleep by a dark spirit who contorts the message to it being that she has birthed a changeling – half dog. The King bears up well, sends his love back and to ask for whatever she requires. The message is again distorted; he’s furious and demands the heart and tongue be ripped from the maiden as proof that the woman is dead. From this awful news the maiden and child have to go into hiding, and the King spend seven years wandering the deep forest looking for them.

The key Bluebeard gives his wife opens the door to seeing the hidden horror of her husband, the instruction not to taste the Salmon is to invite the possibility that Finn will, the slandered message of her husband leads to her ultimately growing her own hands back and his wandering in the woods weathers him into an appropriate husband. The dis-information often comes in a way that on an immediate level seems ghastly but on the biggest picture is vital for the wider unfolding of the story.

Mythic dis-information is a very sophisticated way of understanding the human psyche. It understands that we don’t always respond to strict orders, and that the results of our choices are rarely black and white – all three of the above stories hold tremendous paradox within them. Like fox these dis-informers break their scent, pretend to be another kind of animal, story, piece of information. Whether we wander out into the jaws of fox or slink off some other route, within myth, it is always in service for the wider stream of the story and the growth of the individuals within it. It’s rarely all good and rarely all bad.

Like fox scenting the iron of the trap, it understands the multiplicity of truth – those snapping jaws are the straight ahead, one answer, get to the point, three step perspective of literalism. The thing to remember is the intention behind it –within these stories it is to lead towards a kind of sacred education, an ending of naivety, a greater capacity for life. It is in service to life. That is key – when dis-information falls out of story, or society falls out of its story, it can become simply deceit.

In much of my twenties, any time spent around the fire with Native elders was rarely spent in the ‘straight talk’ of the West or any kind of elevated ‘spiritual’ language. Any question asked was rebuffed, rebooted, turned on its head, fell into silence, scuffed, cuffed, flew three times round the room and was answered two hours later in an entirely different conversation. They were quite rightly suspicious of straight instruction, something that hadn’t brooded in the psyche a little, rather than just leapt from brain to brain. There would be no wildness present in an answer like that.

To the literal mind, myth itself is a profound form of dis-information. There can be no truth in its images - A hedgehog, standing on a rooster, playing the bagpipes? Try to be serious! But the image, with it’s wayward intelligence distrusts the societal rush to the concrete picture and uses the brilliance of metaphor to disable (at least briefly) the triumph of logic. Logic is not the enemy but a dance partner.

## We need all deposits for Alistair McIntosh and Bardic Secret weekends NOW please! venues to book etc. E-mail today
schoolofmyth@yahoo.co.uk

Martin Shaw copyright 2011

MAIDENS OF THE CASTLE

2011-06-09T05:31:00.000-07:00

Woman is Hot Moon Gazing on Water

2011-06-09T05:12:00.000-07:00

Hey, two entries in one week - whatever next. Lightning Tree is out by the way, and looking fine - please go direct to
www.whitecloudpress.com

Carrying swiftly on from the horse magic commentary i include something on a character called Condwiramurs. There will be bits and pieces below that may be hard to follow without knowing the story but i think the gist is there. On his travels (and letting horse take the reigns) Parzival comes to a castle besieged - inside it is this formidable women, who will be the love of his life. That's not a phrase you seem to hear much anymore, but in this case it's a fact.

I know god will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that he didn’t trust me so much
Mother Teresa

Soul seems given to retreat, wet feathers, far distant storms, is in love with elegant paintings in shadowed rooms, closing doors on busy parties, eats melancholy as a form of beauty, inward – Spirit far more linear, rousing, specific rather than associative, outward. However, on a direct, emotional level of the story Condwiramurs is showing plenty of spirit too, plenty of heat. No one is entirely one without the other. Rigid definitions of the two lead us straight back to the ego anyway. Although forced into a position of seeming retreat, it has occurred through her refusal to marry for anything but love, to remain resolute amongst pressure and expectation. To a contemporary mind this is admirable, to a 12th century mind it is extraordinary, indicative of an enormous change in cultural perception.

Many musicians, artists and writers have crossed that small bridge to the castle. It is the moment when sparks of talent, blown on by the rigours of repetitive practice, open finally to the great oceans of sound and brilliance we find in Shakespeare, Delius and O’Keefe. It is no coincidence that the castle is found next to the vast open sea. In Russian fairy tales it can be a moment when a young man following a thread lain by a Firebird throughout his life, has to call on briny powers of the sea to search its depths to find the wedding dress of a formidable princess. It is a moment late in Yeats life when all the extraordinary lyricism of his early work slows into a simpler cadence, but with words that are a thousand miles deep.

So when we meet the Maiden of the Castle, the ‘Guide to Love’, our story implies that she calls us to activity, to prove ourselves. They said in medieval times that it was appropriate to only be romantically involved with a man that had proved himself in battle three times. They also say it kept the men active and the women chaste! So what in us has to be defeated? We have examined erotic lethargy for one, but what about a life entranced only to wealth, status, or political expediency? Our own imaginations can fill that out tenfold. But there is cost and there is risk involved in getting near the Maiden of the Castle.

Thinking of Maidens of the Castle, woman holding a clear value structure quite independent of external pressure we could mention Simone De Beauvoir, Catherine the Great, Juana Ines de la Cruz, Eleanor of Aquitane, Emily Dickinson, Rosa Parks, Emmeline Parkhurst, Maria Montessori. These women are great columns of energy radiating sideways into culture. Without Joan of Arc following the source of this energy through celestial voices and then leading France to victory, then King Charles VII would never have lain his recumbent arse on the throne. I think of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, who, as young women threw herself into the horrific aftermath of world war two by helping not only concentration camp victims but Germans piece together a new for themselves, and go onto write the seminal “On Death and Dying”, or the Empress Theodora, labouring with heart and soul to make Constantinople a city of elegance and women’s rights – closing down forced prostitution and engendering equality for women in the divorce courts. These are real women, sweat and blood, conflicted, brilliant, not caught in the stained glass of a troubadours adoration or the dismissal of the secular.

In the 14th century, Padmini, the princess of Chittor, lead her courtly ladies to suicide rather than surrender to the king of Delhi. Two hundred years later Chittor was besieged again, this time to the Mughal emperor Akbar. Hugely outnumbered, the men surged out of the castle to certain death, whilst again the noble women took their own lives by leaping onto a fire rather than submit. The most renowned of all is the Rani of Jhansi, a 19th century freedom fighter. As a child she studied archery, self-defence and horsemanship. When her husband died and the British announced their intention to dissolve the state and deny her sons right to inherit, she threw herself in with the resistance. She became a terrifying but beautiful figurehead for the movement. She led from the front and women started to join up as warriors. When finally outnumbered by the British, she, in keeping with her sisters in history, refused entirely to surrender and died on the ramparts of a fort near Gwalior. The British were forced to remark on her as “remarkable for her beauty, cleverness and persistence.”

There is nothing passive about Condwiramurs. She has a hand in the soil as well as the stars. She is more than a vehicle for heavenly devotions, she’s right in and amongst it, thrashing out the kind of life that she actually wants to live. She is also smart enough to reach into that part of herself that is ready to go out and take on her enemies in combat, an energy that in this story is called Parzival. We remember in the old Norwegian fairy tale ‘Valemon and the Wild Third Daughter’, the third daughter depends on the masculine strength of the Bear to break from her parents castle, but later in the story his life is saved by the feminine strength she provides to break him from enchantment. All of this is going on inside us all the time.

One of the most magical images from a true ‘Maiden of the Castle’ is from ‘The Handless Maiden’

The young woman’s father, a struggling miller, makes an ill informed deal with a predatory spirit over his daughters soul. When the Dark Man comes to collect, the young woman puts on a white dress and surrounds herself in a circle of white chalk. He can’t get near here. Next time round, the chalk and dress is refused her, and she grows filthy, defiled by the dirt of the world. But as he approaches she begins to weep – the kind of tears you or I weep probably only a few times in our whole lifetime. A grief comes out that seems to connect us to the grief of the oceans, the moon, the tides and the private sadness of the owl. The tears are leaping spirits of protection that clean her body as they course down it, and again the predator is foiled, her grief is such he can’t get near here.

This business of a predatory spirit in the psyche is not to be underestimated, that as we have already seen, is in the task of denying life, growth, the unruly festoons of brilliance that emerge from these castle maidens. Both women seen to have access to a vast reserve of feminine strength that is connected to ritual practices undergone thousands of years before they were born. As mythic beings they see the pinpricks of the eternal everywhere, and with this in mind, they show us how to behave. How can the maiden know of the chalk and the dress and the tears, where can that come from but some deep place unbidded?

To be near the Guide to Love is also to commit to a courtship rather than instant gratification. Remember the three nights together before consummation? There is an ancient idea that within you lives an ecstatic man or woman, and to wake them (and in doing so open those imaginative tracks to the God’s and Goddess’s of romantic and erotic love) requires certain internal energies to rise up and mingle with each other before our physical bodies do. This way the myth-world that stands behind you and the myth-world that stands behind your beloved get a chance to get a good look at each other before jumping into the realm of earthly delights. A particular alignment takes place. It creates a room for imagination, for speculation, for longing and desire. This mirrors the very beginning of our story, with Herzaloyde gazing out from her tower.

We recall in the Siberian story of ‘The Deer Maiden’, the moon himself falls in love with a ‘far distant lady’ who tends her fathers herd of reindeer out on the tundra. An elaborate dance occurs between the two of them until finally the moon gifts the young women twelve different names for its phases, names that inform and edify the tribe that she comes from. Had he just swooped down and whisked her off none of those names would have been revealed – there would have been no gift. Ecstatic and soulful art is created from the burning ground of the courtship.

Longing is placing emphasis on time and waiting. In my work as a wilderness rites-of-passage guide longing carries us both towards the initiatory mountain and sustains us on the return. Its very intangibility is a kind of preservative. A preservative in the sense that it stays, slightly from our view, it quickens our arts, sharpens our eye, but stays just beyond our grasp. The many images of pursuit of a white deer in myth are illustration of this very engagement - the ‘questing beast’ of the forests of Camelot. In the Arthurian stories, Camelot, an image of order, society and chivalry, always has an eye for what lies beyond its grasp - that could be the ‘Lady of the Fountain’, or a hundred different quests. There is an understanding that we need to range out past familial borders. Of course, the deepest understanding is that the ‘Lady of the Fountain’ - the source of bountiful renewal lives inside us - but that complex inner journey is mapped out through the outer tapestry of the stories. The detail of Condwiramurs wearing her hair up even though the marriage is not yet consummated is very lovely. It deflects the eyes of the world whilst the inner-marriage prepares itself. Like Campbell’s suggestion “be a tiger disguised as a goat!”, it has some privacy to it.

Martin Shaw copyright 2011

GREAT MOTHER CONFERENCE 2009 (just left 2011)

2011-06-06T11:15:00.000-07:00

HORSE MAGIC

2011-06-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

So here i am, scurried up in a corner of a highschool in Vermont, waiting for a ride to the airport and iron bird home. My boots are scuffed, hair awry and i am hiding under my scarf trying to avoid any more chat. A delightful day though telling stories and doing ritual out in the forest with many wonderful students.

Something simple today - just some adoration and thoughts around the horse. In the wider essay it comes from a moment when Parzival lets his horse take the reigns when approaching the castle of Condwiramurs - his 'guide to love'. Ok, i need to be scooped up in a sweet grass smelling blanket and flown home by gentle swans with a pina colada hidden in their many feathers. I throw golden apples gently to all my friends in turtle island, especially two elves.

.....The horse within myth is often regarded as some seasoned energy that we ride throughout our life; not entirely wild, not entirely domestic. It is the horse that preserves life, our life, in the face of many adversities. It maybe appropriate at some other time to ride the back of a wolf (a different force again), but it is the horse that navigates the wild trails of young adulthood. With its associations of the field and stable the horse also holds a sense of something inherited through the village, the family, the mentor. A wisdom that has been diffused through the steady gaze of many folks over a long span of time.

So the horse leads him to a castle owned by a woman besieged. What does it look like for a horse to take the reigns in our life? Maybe we are less controlling, less manic, more open to the opportunity of the day. Rather than charging from meeting to meeting we take a slower road, a less visible, more rambling route. We visit ruined chapels in France, grind our own coffee beans, make a point of always catching the dusk. This is the beginning of a more interior journey for Parzival.

And what of the beast he rides? It is hard to conjure an animal with a more profound relationship to humans. They have been at the forefront of tribal expansions, the steady plough of the soil, a gift fit for a Queen. They come at a price: hard to break in – but once achieved can become an ally for life.

The Celts were an essentially nomadic people and so particularly venerated the horse. Even as recently as the last century there was the Crying of the Mare ceremony in Herefordshire (Welsh border), and there is still the Mari Lwyd ceremony in Glamorgan. At the first of these, reapers left a small patch of corn in the field and shaped it roughly into a horse. The reapers then tried to cut the horse by artfully aiming their sickles at it. The greatest and most accurate of the reapers sat in a place of honour opposite his master at the harvest feast. The skill of the reapers arm, the spirit of the corn and the magic of the horse were all held in ceremony.

The Mari Lwyd involves a kind of jovial shape-shifting. A group of wassailers – singers of magical songs, would move through a hamlet or village and amongst them was a man who’s face was covered by the mask of a horse. It was wise when confronted by this archaic scene to load them up with red beer and good bread.They can still be found.

Horses are also to do with sound and movement. Under the floor of a seventeenth century house in Bungay in Suffolk, forty horse-skulls were found, incisors resting on oak or stone. The reason – acoustics. The skulls gave the dancing feet a greater resonance, lyricism, power. A true British contemporary nomadic culture, the Gypsies, had a ban on eating horse meat – it would seem to evoke madness. In the 19th century the Gypsies used them to check their owners were really dead. A servant would lead the horse to the side of the grave for several days and call the deceased three times by their name and ask them to come to dinner. Any good man would have been up and out of the soil in a second.

In hidden parts of Scotland there would be secretive gatherings of the Horseman’s Society – a horse cult who would certainly have been branded witches if made public. As an initiate you were led blindfolded to an alter – usually a bag of corn–by two initiated men. Lain upon the alter would be bread and whisky, and standing behind them would be the head-horseman, the equine magician. They were lead a tricky path while blind which served two symbolic purposes – one that it showed the ups and downs of a man’s life, and two that it was the contrary process of a young horses training; if you did not obey instructions then you would feel pain – the magic fell apart if the ritual was not accurate. The made a long and poetic oath to the society, culminating in these words:

And if I fail in any of these obligations that I go under at this time or hereafter, I ask to my heart’s wish and desire that my throat may be cut ear to ear with a horseman’s knife, my body torn to pieces between two wild horses and blown by the four winds of heaven to the uttermost parts of the earth; my heart torn from my left breast and its blood wrung out and buried in the sands of the sea-shore.
(Evans 1966 :231)

At a certain point the initiate would be given what is called the Horseman’s Word. It is tempting to presume that this was some word that could be whispered into the horse’s ear for a result of instant compliance. But here is the twist.

The word is never revealed to the horse.

The word was, in Evan’s words, “lived rather than used”. It was a binding psychic anchor that reached back through many remote cultures to the primordial root of magic and trust that abided with humans and horse. It was not about dominion but relationship, kinship, totem, earth magic, seasonal incantation. It was a carrying of magical privacy.

The horse also holds relationship to some fierce and proud feminine Goddess’s : Epona, Artemis, Diana, Hecuba, Hegate. People have lived and died for these names I so casually list.

The old ploughman lived with their beasts, the Clydesdale, the Percheron, the Haflinger, the Chestnuts, the Gypsy Cobs, often sleeping in the bothy above the stables. Their dreams and the horses formed a tangle. Many of these men carried the ability to ‘Jade’ a horse. You had to be careful with this as if viewed you quickly would be branded a horse-witch. It was the gift to stop a horse completely in its tracks – to seemingly paralyse it. Jading was to do with a particular odour the horse detected, which you then subtly invoked if you wanted it to halt, or twisted its head skilfully away from the scent if you wanted it to move. Done well, to the astonished observer it seemed miraculous. So we see a little of the Trickster in the Horseman’s bag.

In our story Jading is the last thing on the boy’s mind. He follows its pace. After a time we have the strange image of the blustery bridge and Parzival leading his horse across due to its nerves. This is an initiatory opening, and its entry points are often narrow and require some humility – hence getting off your horse. This place of the heart, of romantic and erotic love, is under siege. In the lives of many today, what is placing our hearts under siege?

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

ECOLOGY, MYTH AND THE NOTION OF HOPE JULY 6TH

2011-05-23T03:57:00.000-07:00

IMPORTANT GATHERING. Send smoke signals, e-mail etc.

2011-05-23T03:25:00.000-07:00

OK folks, today is nothing but a full on, unbridled attempt to get you to come to the upcoming day gathering with Alastair McIntosh and myself, on July 6th, at the Chicken Shed (better than it sounds), just behind Schumacher College, Dartington, Devon. For any old students of the school, this and the Bardic summer school are absolutely designed to keep pushing forward of study of that which is fiery, mysterious, earthy, celestial, bawdy and true.

To book a place please ring 01364 653723 or send name, contact details and full amount made out to ‘the school of myth’ at Tregonning House, 27 Eastern rd, Ashburton, TQ13 7AP.

You are probably aware of Alastair through his many articles and at least three books, Soil and Soul, Hell and High Water, and Rekindling Community. This man is not a statistic wagging doom-monger, but an impassioned, lucid, occasionally furious, often hilarious, mystical and truly bright thinker. He is a poet, great prose writer and very decent teller of tales. He is also very busy which is WHY we are so lucky to have this day gathering with the man on some extremely deep and important issues, washed down with story, poetry and a good dollop of informed speculation. McIntosh's work is a genuine joy to read - so far past most attempts to handle ecological and psychological material it's not true.

I have come to his work very recently, and include a section of an essay i had just finished when i finally started to read him. And readers of his work will understand why i immediately loved it - he's pulling at many of the threads below, but very fleshed out and thought through - hence this gathering. This segment is part of a larger essay examining the diversive mythic impulses that live within us, regardless of how political correct we think we may be on the surface. It's also a caution against assumptions of leftish harmony - i like a bit of harmony when it arises naturally, but not at the entire expense of wildish discourse. Where this essay will lead in the end is an expansion on what the word harmony could mean...

Don't waste time being offended by the following, unless its worth consideration - i place myself entirely in its line of thought too.

.......

More than ever, the young folks I meet are often incredibly informed and activate as regards climate change. They are done with going on retreats into wild places, examining their navels, they are out there making a very real, very practical difference. I find this incredibly exciting. It makes me want to work harder. They have their ‘quest’, and it is the biggest one imaginable, to save the planet. However, the very oldest tools we have for crisis – stories - tell us that without an inner journey, that underworld knowledge, those hard scars from the Witch, then the outer life won’t quite align itself. This is where they come unstuck. This reflective work doesn’t offer the clear picture of the heroism of planet saving, it’s murkier, conflicted and hidden. To do with your own clogged oceans and toxic skies. No reward attached, no news report or twitter from your cave on the mountain.

There is a kind of smugness in us lefties that can be unpleasant. Our aspirations are seemingly just, but we still carry a subterranean trail of compressed ambitions and toothy animal drives with us – these can be harder to spot than those in the mainstream. We are more sophisticated at hiding, or we channel our grandiosity into wider causes. We pass the talking stick at meetings, speak ‘from the heart’ and always remember to do the recycling. We organise rallies and strut up and down our own ‘green’ towns and ignore actually going to that acutely depressed working class district five miles up the road. We leave all that stuff like soup kitchens and aid to the poor to the Christians we view as so spiritually unsophisticated. We funnel our kids through alternative schools for ludicrous fees that rarely prepare them for the intensities of modernity, and all the while do we think we are free of hierarchy, of judgement, of ambition? I think not. We’ve just stuck a rainbow coloured jumper over the armour.

We seem rightfully proud of our ecological credentials, our diligent harangues at local government and expensive organic produce. But this isn’t a sign of soulfulness, just an activated will. It’s crafty to suggest that these good deeds are of themselves spiritual but I don’t altogether buy it. Who exactly are they benefiting? Where are the poor, the marginal and the elderly in the mix? I see much of this hypocrisy in myself. It’s not enlightenment, just the same impulse system our parents had to keep up with the Jones’s, just moved a smidgeon to the left. It also has that whiff of ‘we’re all getting on Noah’s boat and the rest can drown’. It can be stiff with judgement though delivered with a queasy ‘namaste’.

At it’s worst it becomes a kind of profound self-absorption, something the New-Age recognises in its target audience. We read half a chapter of the Gnostic gospels over soya lattes and think we are ready to demolish the King James Bible.

Moving into a mythic perspective, which requires the interior world, saves us from continually trying to address the situation from linear, statistical, clock time. Attention to the eternal as well as the historical is a key insight into the inner situation around climate change. Stories give us images that have a genius that statistics and rallying do not. Statistics are bad for your health. They lower the immune system. Ted Hughes claimed that too much prose writing in neglect of poetry made him sick. Everything happening out there is somehow happening inside us too, so we as human animals could benefit from looking both ways. That soul work that maybe their parents did, or older siblings, that they are ‘done with’? could just be a key. The deeper story of ecology is wild mythology, and that realisation holds tremendous promise.

Are we addicted to harmony? This is very dangerous. Sign in at the door to collect your hemp year planner. Actually, scratch that, lets all ‘live in the moment’ with Eckhart Tolle and his enormous bank account. But, wherever you choose to live, or lifestyle you embrace, your inner figures – Warrior, Shrew, Queen, Hermit, will accompany you. They may have no intention of signing up for your politically correct lifestyle, and will burrow up into the most benign of situations, waving guns and bibles around. Well, maybe not a bible, but at least a book on raw food recipes. A mythological imagination would help us to comprehend what glides underneath our outwards compliance like hard eyed sharks. When life is truly regenerative it is a swarm of opinion and passions, not statistics and a kind of subliminal Puritanism. Harmony could be enjoyed when it arrives but not pursued. That doesn’t mean rough agreements aren’t needed – of course they are - but not so as they crush wild pockets of insight.

When people are anxious, when it seems some dark beast is coming to gobble our world, they have a tendency to look for something absolutely fixed, as a talisman against the strain of uncertainty that these challenges represent. Obsession with unified fronts, an assumed collective belief, harmony with a rod, often comes from fear. We feel overwhelmed and so are comforted by imagined absolutes. Even when we appear so very radical.

Terror of the end of time masks a true realisation that much is going to have to die – old habits and a childish dependency on the idea of harmony. As far as the gods go, right now is a Trickster moment we’re living in, more than Goddess time, Zeus time, or any other kind of time. We need to get clear on that.

The mythic is to do with polyphony – independent bursts of imagination arising in response to the mystery of existence – the doors to many temples are open. In other words, it’s promiscuous, allergic to dogma. The polyphonic is also the entrance to the ecstatic for many cultures –the colliding patterns of log drums and vocal chatter trip the intellect up until it falls headlong into spirit-time. The Trickster is always a polyphonic Bricoleur, a strategic heretic who conjures new art from this sometimes bruised assemblage of eruptions. A Bricoleur is an artist that assembles creation from things that wouldn’t normally be expected to fit together. It is an unusual beauty that emerges. We don’t hear polyphonic music on the radio, it’s tough on the ears.

When a room erupts with imaginative thoughts after the telling of a story it is present. Steamy, outraged and joyous opinions burst from the tongues of those present. And the Bricoluer starts to assemble a new boat on the messy sea. To aim always for harmony is to concrete up a fertile trail to the mythic. We lose many new insights. Myth, with its endless variations, comings and goings, erupting crisis’s and labyrinth like dilemmas, its wayward orchestrations of sudden brilliance, is the oldest, most inventive, and wonderfully anarchic vehicle we have for approaching today’s challenges.

But the answer will not come from one story but from many. A big problem will not be solved by a big answer.

As for myths place in this, It comes from wily Siberian folk tales, to Indian love stories, from the tacit whispers of the desert at night to great epics like this (Parzival). It will not be one beautifully held chord on a synthesiser but guttural and lucid eruptions from all corners of the myth-world. We, like shape-shifters, will have to contort to help create new dance steps from these implicit disclosures. It will not be a moment, but a slow residue of unruly insights. If we are lucky.

copyright Martin Shaw 2011

ECOLOGY, MYTH AND THE NOTION OF HOPE
Invoking the Bardic Tradition Today

An exploration of social, environmental and spiritual transformation with Alastair McIntosh and Martin Shaw

Wens 6th July 10 – 5 £60

Acclaimed author, environmental activist and poet Alastair McIntosh, alongside mythologist and wilderness rites-of-passage guide Martin Shaw team up for a days exploration of what could be meant by McIntosh’s term “bardic engagment”. He views the words as more than just poetry, but as the very essence of life’s primordial fire, as love made visible, applied to the needs of the challenges we face today. This kind of soulful awakening is what they aim to explore, and its implications to ecological concerns and personal accountability.
Shaw will start the gathering by telling an ancient Hebredian tale to give us a mythic perspective on theme, and offering insights as the day progresses. Alastair will lead a presentation, and his wider perception on the word ‘bardic’ to include the arts and spiritual practice. This will take much of the day. There will be both formal input and informal discussions and small groups. This promises to be an extremely rich and fruitful experience- do not miss this one!

Alastair McIntosh is the bestselling author of ‘Soil and Soul’, ‘Hell and High Water’. Described as “truly mental” by Thom Yorke of Radiohead and “life changing” by the Bishop of Liverpool, he has bought a genuine wild intelligence to many pressing cultural questions of our time.

Dr. Martin Shaw is author of the critically acclaimed ‘A Branch From The Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness’. Robert Bly describes him as “a true master. One of the very greatest storytellers we have”, the Independents Rosie Boycott, “visceral and highly imaginative.”

In more depth..... FROM ALASTAIR

We stand at a challenging time for movements that seek to advance social justice and environmental sustainability. Poverty remains ingrained even in the UK. Our country remains constantly at war. And the political progress that had been achieved on tackling major environmental issues like climate change has gone into reverse. People who don’t care have never had it so good. Those who retain the capacity for empathy, for altruism, and a concern for future generations worry, and with good cause. What has happened to the dream of an alternative society? Where stands the deep work for love, justice and peace?

In his book about climate change, Hell and High Water, described as a source “to quarry for inspiration” by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Alastair distinguishes between optimism and hope. He argues that while cause for optimism on the things that matter to us may have dimmed, we must never let go of hope. But what are the roots of hope? How do we get in touch with that fire of life that can feed inner meaning for our work even at times when it struggles outwardly?

From his campaigning work with land reform and environmental protection described in his earlier book, Soil and Soul, Alastair believes that outward political action on its own is not enough. We need that deeper source of hope if the oil in the lamp of life is neither to sell out nor burn out. One way into that, and one way of expressing it, is through bardic work. Alastair sees the bardic tradition as something that can be alive and working in us today. It is more than just poetry. It is the poetic fire of life, life as love made visible, applied to the needs of people and place in today’s world. It is that shift in consciousness, and the things that bring about that shift, which opens us to seeing the spiritual interiority and not just the physical or social exteriority of what concerns us.

During this day Martin Shaw will layout mythic themes, tell a story and convene the event. Most probably Alastair will start with a presentation looking at where we stand, and giving examples from his own work of what he means by bardic engagement. He uses this term to mean the arts and spirituality in general, and not just “poetry” as such. There will be space for both formal input and small group discussion.

Alastair McIntosh is best know for his work on Scottish land reform and helping to stop the proposed Isle of Harris superquarry, but underpinning these concerns has been a passion to convey the meanings of community, and how our work comes unstuck and egocentric if it is not grounded in the sacred. His books have variously been described as “world changing” by George Monbiot, “life-changing” by the Bishop of Liverpool, “inspirational” by Starhawk and “truly mental” by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. He is a Fellow of the Centre for Human Ecology, a visiting professor at the University of Strathclyde, and has guest lectured such unlikely groups as the Russian Academy of Science, WWF International, the World Council of Churches, Lothian and Borders Police and, for the past 15 years, on the Advanced Command & Staff Course at the UK Defence Academy.

Drum Brothers. And elf. June 2010.

2011-05-18T03:02:00.000-07:00

Hounds of Love: Oct Myth Conference 2009

2011-05-18T03:00:00.000-07:00

MAGICAL PRIVACY

2011-05-18T02:27:00.000-07:00

Well, i know as a fact that the first boxes of Lightning Tree have left the printers this morning and are heading off to all sorts of destinations. It may take a little while longer via White Cloud, Amazon etc, but we are almost there.

I include two snaps above. One of myself, David Darling, poet laureate Lisa Starr and Coleman Barks mid-story at the first school of myth conference 'The Wild Hawk in the Lovers Garden', back in October 2009, and the great John Densmore and myself (with some kind of little fairy that i just met) outside the legendary McCabe's music store in Los Angeles last June. I Include them for this reason: June 24/25th Coleman, Lisa and myself will be in Norway at the Festival of Silence (they have obviously never heard us when the wine is poured) and teaching myth and poetry near the fjords in the following week, secondly John and I are about to do a collaboration of myth, poetry and percussion, somewhere, soon. Ok, that's enough, you can find the rest out yourselves, but it's all within the next 8 weeks.

Todays excerpt is from my continuing work on Parzival, and the notion of privacy. This may seem weird giving use of facebook etc, but i think most of us understand the balance between useful disclosure and the need to hold certain material back. This isn't a condemnation at large, but trying to hold these tensions within my own life. Magical privacy is holding that tension as the push towards networking grows in intensity. Many good things come out of speedy communication -Hermes is present -this is really a caution against a kind of playground popularity contest and its relationship to the focus so often on the 'outer' life.

HEY, please check out two flyers below todays post - for 'entering the bardic secret' summer school and 'ecology, myth and the notion of hope' with Alastair McIntosh. Please get in touch today if attending - places limited on both.

Magical Privacy: Getting the Lion Back

This Hermit’s hill has always been dear to me,
Also this hedgerow which keeps me hidden
Partially from the gaze of the wide horizon
Giacomo Leopardi

Mise mono ja nai
(‘this is not something we show to people’)
Zen saying

The possibility of low level fame through internet networking or implied media pressure seems to be provoking a kind of epileptic fit of friend making (i suspect i may have to change that phrase), groping madly towards the next addition to our wonderful tribe of complete strangers. It has hit a frantic nerve in modernity to be witnessed, visible, the centre of the wheel. A fame for no other reason than simply being here. The old saying goes, if you aren’t seen clearly by thirty people (a typical size of an old tribal group), then you will try and get the attention of thirty million to compensate. We are addicted to disclosure.

This phenomenon is a ghost memory of the mythic notion that we are designed to live a life of vocation, intensity and a little style. When that instinct gets caught in the slipstream of the need for busyness and the ‘next big thing’ it starts to distort, right down at the root. Our vocation becomes demonstrated by how many demands there are for out time, our intensity by how many new experiences we manage to cram in, and the style gets relegated to our six monthly up date on the latest phone. This is not the life that myth is hinting at.

At the beginning of this section I inserted the phrase “ Mise mono ja nai – this is not something we show people”. It originates from the Zen sentiment of not allowing visitors to a Zen training establishment – it’s simply not appropriate. There is more going on there than the desire to draw in more students and increase the temple coffers. Not everything is available, all the time. What a relief.

I remember as a young boy in bed hearing the front door close as my father strode out on one of his many late night walks. I would gaze up at my rain spattered window and wonder. I had no idea where he would go or when he would be back, criss-crossing the town we lived in and often ending up on the small streets that he had grown up on, twenty five years before. The dark allowed strange thoughts to get space in his head, answers to questions he barely knew he was asking. To my five year old mind the message this intimated was the night was an ally, that certain deep moods could not be met by other people, that part of our life ‘belongs to the wild darkness’ and that part remained private.

A church needs shadowed areas, dappled light, a balance between the lifting burst of the worship and the candle lit soulfulness of silence. We can accommodate the rousing togetherness of spirit, but seem far more unsure with the profound quiet of the soul. Brightly lit churches, meditation centres and yoga studios feature young, breezy teachers in recently swept rooms with no possibility of a crows muddy print on the linoleum. The sermons/sessions connect us to community, light, aspiration, charity works, our ‘highest good’. The problem is that the shadows we carry with us become indistinct, are made to wait in the car or the porn downloaded on our computer. The soul, as different to spirit, seems to be a network of shadows, like dozens of rooks over a winter field.

A window without curtains is a life always on display, the talk shows clamour for private material feels ultimately degraded, too much time by an open door is an insult to many sacred things.

The Dagara of Africa believe that when something from the inner world becomes public it is already in decline. Power at its most potent is private not public, tacit not explicit. Magical consciousness has to accommodate shadows or it has immediately made its potency finite. Some vital energy is drained from us when we disconnect from moon-like rhythms of visibility. Certain thoughts arc out like boomerangs and are not to accomplish themselves in speech – rather to hurtle back into the nourishing dark of our own quiet. We get damaged by too much daylight.

Not so long ago, I had the great honour of being the guest storyteller at the summer solstice celebrations of a north Californian tribe, The Miwok. Entering the longhouse at dusk was like stepping way back in time. The fire at its centre, the smoke billowing upwards, the gnarly columns of wood supporting the structure, the children’s eye’s mischievously peering over the flickers of the embers, it seemed a moment quite outside of normal time. The ritual dances ensued, lead by young boys and girls, secret words got spoken that helped the earth stagger onwards another day. We were all caught in some enormous prayer. But it was a prayer that engaged listening as much as speech.

I was at the back of the hut playing an earth drum for the ceremony. This is a crescent of earth that you stand upon whilst beating a pulse with a large, heavy staff. Above your head is the spirit hole, where at a certain point that only god can handle the spirits pour through from the Otherworld into this one. As the hours progressed and we moved deeper into the night it became clear that the Miwok’s relationship to speech and listening is very different to westerners. There was no enthusiastic rallying of the troops, no rousing sermon, rather the quietly spoken Ed, a man who spent large periods of time seemingly in contemplation of the wider picture, working, as we all were, at an entirely different pace to clock-time. When he spoke, the words were carefully chosen, conscious that raven, ocean, long grass and the thin legged Heron were also present to his language. There was tremendous space.

This was nothing to do with English being a second language or a lack of eloquence, quite the opposite, it was an eloquence of the wild, many openings to the living world within it. This way of being gave me time to loosen my psyche out into the wider landscape, it gave me time to settle into place. It was also a clue towards a way that the private and public can meet without this sense of diminishment – but it comes with a big price tag, stepping out of clock-time, the very tick tick tick of modernity.

On my home ground of Dartmoor there is a place I love to walk. I get up to Venford lake and stride out in the general direction of the Dart gorge, past the Bronze age settlement, and several old stone circles. My hope is always a glimpse of the tors –Bench Tor, Bel Tor, Yar Tor, and hidden, surrounded by trees on the other side of the river, Lucky Tor. The air is rich with oxygen and mossy scent. I have spent countless hours walking here alone and with loved ones, camping, leading wilderness fasts, praying. It begins with a panoramic view of the south moor, with just a hint of the bleaker north moor in the far distance, and then the slow path down to the river, with dappled shade from the oaks as you descend. After you pass the old Rowan on your left it gets steeper still, the gorge littered with fox holes and the air loaded with the rush of the rivers roar. You always begin the journey cold but by this point are laden down with jumpers tied around the waist and coats hidden under bushes to pick up on the way back.

I always look at the large incline ruefully, remembering the epic struggle of loading wheelbarrows full of rucksacks, lanterns, tents, supplies and wood and staggering up its ancient curves. After a four day fast just walking up with a staff can be brutal.

On the return journey I sometimes visit Buckfastleigh abbey, on the edge of the moor. Several times a day the monks enter the abbey from a hidden door, walk to the choir stalls with their habits over their heads, and, start to sing in Latin. No collection box, no sermon, no interaction with anyone present. The church is cool, shadowed, understated. But that sound – the chanting that has moved around and around that place, hollowing out some quiet entry point for the presence of holy feeling – that is extraordinary. Again, I move out of clock time. Again I see a hold way to hold privacy and the community. I believe that the circling call of the monks benefits the surrounding area, even for those that never visit the abbey, just in the way that the Dart endlessly churning through the moor towns does, its foam laden cadence splashing blessings on its rough bank.

The abbey is my re-entry point to the human village after alone time on the moor. It is spacious enough to accommodate my wild aura whilst touching my soul very deeply. I don’t worry about arguments about Church-ianty and wilderness, I just enter the truth of the sound. I love the mossy face of Christ. I seem to remember him heading out into the woods on more than one occasion. Born on the margins surrounded by animals, speaks a relentlessly strange doctrine, kicks the corporate bloodsuckers out of a sacred place, fasts in the wild, likes a drink, befriends hairy desert men and dark eyed prostitutes, goes to his death on a donkey, and, just when you think you’ve got him pinned down, starts showing up when he should be in the tomb. Disgraceful behaviour. Is there something we’re not getting here? If you want an image of Trickster behaviour, then you are looking at it. He is a dark fire.

Despite the push towards relentless, slightly glazed networking and rash levels of exposure, many people seem to want a deeper life. There is a dis-connect between what is bring enforced upon us through advertising, and for what we secretly hunger. In Coleman Bark’s work on Rumi he writes on what he calls “Lion Energy”

Each Lion is his own path, and he wants everyone to take total responsibility for himself or herself. The lion in a human being is almost without cowardice, and doesn’t long for, or expect, protection. The Lion is a Knight out in the wilderness by himself…being a lion is not fitting in, only to that which he generates and validates from within.
Coleman Barks. (Barks 1991 :pxi-xii)

The story of Parzival says that there is a Lion is us: a Lion that opens its vast jaw to the feasts of court, the tangles of the forest floor, the intrigues of culture, the thin road of the pilgrim. It has spirit-appetite. This Lion is independent; wilful, focused, sometimes harsh - it cannot be bought. It longs to wrestle with God. The Lion consumes emptiness and space with just the same vigour it settles on fresh meat. Rumi’s lion is in the business of saying no. He will eat desert and tundra, experience all kinds of heavy weather, but will not shoulder the trite, facile or domestic.

Martin Shaw copyright 2011

AT LAST: THE LONG AWAITED SUMMER SCHOOL

2011-05-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

JULY 6th - THE NOTION OF HOPE

2011-05-14T13:41:00.000-07:00

2011-05-12T01:26:00.000-07:00

THE SCHOOL AND THE LAND

2011-05-12T01:08:00.000-07:00

Todays contribution is something entirely new - part of a book to come somewhere down the road. If you glance to your right of this column you will see a link to the school face book page. On it are several videos of me talking about both the Lightning Tree book and the school. If you enjoy them i would ask that you pass the links onto other folks. We rely entirely on goodwill, so this would be a tremendous help as we spread the word.

Come late Sept/early Oct UK Year program begins again - HERE ARE DATES: Wildwise indicates camping, Blytheswood residential.

Oct 15-16th Wildwise
Dec 2-4 Blytheswood
Feb 3-5 Blytheswood
April 27-29 Blytheswood
June 27-29th Wildwise

Although you can join programme at any point, deposit for the whole year - 250 pounds is required. So the deposit takes fifty pounds off the price of each weekend - paid in advance. This way you could say join in February, and complete course by attending first two weekends of next year. For more details ring 01364 653723 or

tina.schoolofmyth@yahoo.com (try there first i would suggest)

It is odd that in the growing Western preoccupation with organic food, yoga and un-feisty thoughts we often neglect myth as another kind of food – a literal soul food. Maybe we sense that its full fat, often barbecued and calorific content would create too much disturbance in the den. But It could be a crafty way of getting some protein into your internal eco-system without risking heart disease.

It was awareness of this kind of soul-poverty, a cultural deprivation, even within all of the material abundance many of us possess, that led to the forming of a hedge – school down here in Devon. The idea with a hedge school is quite literal – an Irish idea that you assemble some kind of rough structure against the side of a hedge and begin to teach underneath it from whatever skills you have. It’s all very simple, and comes from a time of tremendous hardship.

Many friends suggested this wasn’t a good idea, or to wait for some kind of government funding, or possibly an arts council grant. I do not compute this kind of thinking. No pirate could stomach its cautious implications, its lilly-livered, half-wish of an idea. Even In a county positively overflowing with spiritual sorts – and packed programmes on bodywork, psychology and vegetarian cookery there seemed little hope for a wayward, no qualification at the end, headlong immersion into the nature of myth, wilderness and rites-of-passage. And the lure? the sweet centre to get folks to sign up? At its centre was four days with an empty belly, headache and nightmares, glued to the side of a ghostly Welsh mountain in the pouring rain.

Well, it appeared my friends may be right. For the first year the school had three students. I was partially catering as well as teaching, running back and forth with plates of food. Cara was the real engine room of the kitchen, eyes weeping from chopped onions (well, that’s what she tells me). The next year was a big step upward – we now had four students. Big time. Any profit amounted to a six pack of cold beer and a packet of fish’n’chips after everyone had left on the Sunday night. I clearly remember the first time I had enough money left over to buy a book on the Monday morning. I still keep it close by.

The early years were intense. We’d rise at dawn, grab towels and walk in silence through a mile of forest down from our raggedy tent till we got to a small river. We always began the course in the depths of winter, just to increase its edge. We would go down backwards into the water, float to the very bottom, get a good soak of icy rapture, before back to fire making, cups of hot tea, and the days unfolding curriculum. There was absolutely no time off: myth, ritual, poetry and a little food, hard at it between 6am and 11pm. Much of the time was spent traversing gnotted forest, jumping into the ocean with wild flowers, chocolate and poetry for Mannanan Mac lir, or deep in the clutches of some esoteric old story. It seemed quite wonderful to all of us. We were a strange Fianna, following the moon trail of the bone white stag.

Next time round we had thirty folks and a waiting list. Were I to tell you of what was required to move it so dramatically in numbers it would require another book. The truth is that we were never size-ist. Were that Hedge school still three in number, no doubt I would still be there, sheltering from the rain, telling indecent jokes, drinking tea and teaching as best I can.

We have blessed beyond measure by the folks that become immediate family – like something from the old stories. Remember Jonny Bloor? – not only was he the schools very first student, he went on to become a right hand man: leader of music, general encourager and apprentice poet. In fact all three of the first years – Scott, David and Jonny, went onto play vital roles within the emerging school. Chris Salisbury the outdoorsman and storyteller, brought a wealth of practical forest knowledge, experience of the performative side of storytelling and a calm eye. Tim Russell the pirate philosopher with his Nart sagas and troubling insights. The women started to roll in too – Sue, Sam, Tina, Reba, Maggie, Ronnie and beyond. What a gift, a continual deepening. Storytellers, organizers, poets, gardeners, artists, they brought it all. We are adrift with cooks that play the banjo, mechanics that tell the epic of Gilgamesh, surgeons that have remembered they are really bandit queens, grief counsellors that have not stopped laughing, life coaches that have not stopped weeping. We have been buffeted by weather, death, illness, financial scrapes, wayward leadership (ahem), but, for anyone dreaming of a more complicated, unwieldy life we are right there. Not an arts grant of funding application in sight. Why not come find us?

And what of Dartmoor, the seat of the school? Dartmoor has been submerged in ocean, a tropical island, a red wood forest, and over time, an interlaced consortium of wild and domestic interaction. Its surface is highly ridged with human impressions. Go down to Merrivale just before dawn in May and you’ll see a double row of stones near the road side. As it gets lighter you will see that the stones point devotionally to the star cluster of the Pleiades rising up from the east. These jagged eruptions guided the seeding and the harvesting of precious crop, five thousand years past.

It’s not hard to detect the remnants of corn-drying barns, longhouses, the banked up reaves which marked the fields, the cromlech tomb of Spinster’s Moor, the stone circles of Scorhill and Grey Wethers, the standing stone of Drizzlecombe, then down through the dreaming into the hillfort at Hembury, then Lydford and its Anglo-Saxon patterning that still lives under its street design today, the clapper bridges and stannery routes, or old Brentor church - wrenched and groaned into life atop a volcanic outcrop in the 12th century, caught on a ley line that stretches from Cornwall to East Anglia.

Most of the tors were originally people: Bowerman out hunting with his dogs, interrupted a coven of witches who promptly turned him and the hounds into stone. Vixiana the Witch was hurled into a swamp and the grandparents say that the grassy bristles sticking out are from her hairy chin, just feet beneath the surface.

There is barely a copse, stretch of lane, or fecund outcrop that lacks a name and a story. Three hundred and sixty five square miles of intrigue and layered myth. But even Dartmoor, seemingly so permanent, is a shape-shifter, just like the story’s are. The red-ochre soils we enjoy here today are the remnants of what was once a kind of desert sand, carried by flash floods down from the highest points of the moor. Our chalk is a reminder of when the moor was completely covered by sea and was covered in limestone.

It has been cultivated, abandoned, mined, regenerated, feared, shorn bald of its tree crest. From a human eye it has been both cramped and lonely, fertile and barren. It carries a word-hoard of story, is a vascular intermingling of animals intelligence’s. It is its own wild consciousness, it’s own fluid mythology, whatever shape a particular millennium places upon it. These are just temporary bumps along the way, little snippets of clock time pecking at its great, eternal tumps.

Copyright Martin Shaw 2011

HERE SHE IS- time to wander the furry edges of your darkling imagination

2011-05-05T01:44:00.000-07:00

LIGHTNING TALK

2011-05-05T01:31:00.000-07:00

Half way through the Tagorefest. Good night in the Great Hall on tuesday evening - packed, and lots of Rumi from Duncan MacIntosh and choral and ecstatic chants from Chloe Goodchild. I was telling stories - 'The She-Wolf in the Midnight Orchard' or as many call it, 'The Handless Maiden'. I can't tell you how much i loathe that title.This woman is a lupine surge of holy intensity. I missed and continue to miss Coleman but read a little Rumi on his behalf - he is recovering well and we hope to be on the road in Norway by the end of next month. Back there today for Andrew Motion and Simon Armitage - do you have his translation of Gawain and the Green Knight? Hope so.

Here's another bit of taster from 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree'. The context is some reflection from myself on some years i spent living outdoors and its relationship to the bigger wilderness fasts i was engaged with. Please surprise White Cloud Press by pre-ordering! They aim to have it on the streets in about three-four weeks.

# please note: when i talk about storytellers below i am not just referring to writers and tellers but a much wider, stranger group - a storycarrier, rather than just teller. We are all in this.

THANK YOU for words of encouragement re: doctorate and my general work.

After the Mountain: Four Years in the Black Tent
Once winter sets in, the wood-burning stove rarely goes out. In a climate as wet as Britain’s, mold can play havoc with damp canvas, and any tent dweller is constantly sourcing supplies of dry, seasoned wood to see them through the hard months till April. You become accustomed to continually scanning the surrounding hedgerows and copses for any kind of kindling to spark up life-giving heat. To re- turn before dusk with a cord of wood, to light the paraffin lamps, to brew up coffee and warm yourself by the stove are immense pleasures: Wild rabbit in the pot and potatoes in the embers, and reading Cold Mountain poems by the Chinese hermit Han Shan.

Any tent can take awhile to heat, so there’s often a bottle of Lagavulin whisky amongst the axes, billhooks, and rope to sip as the tent creaks into warmth. Weather is to be relished, sworn at, combated, and ultimately worked with. You quickly learn who has the upper hand, and you follow its directives respectfully.

The years in the tent were nomadic; I moved around, but the first location supplied plenty of fallen timber in the surrounding land. What came to my attention, in a field just past the stream, under the barbed wire fence, was a huge oak that had been struck by lightning. Lying on its side, perfectly seasoned by now, it would be, I knew, a very beautiful source of heat for the upcoming winter. Bow saw and rope in hand, I would make my way to the great beast, take what I needed and head back. I could never get too greedy on each trip, as the return journey required too much manoeuvring to carry more than an armful at a time. The wood itself was bleached by weather, almost like driftwood, and burned ferociously. Collecting it was like arriving at the lair of some prehistoric deity with muscled limbs in all directions, and a huge ancient trunk. My time with this tree went through heavy snows, baking summers, and endless British rain. Under a full moon it seemed to glow.

A fire from this source always felt sweeter, more precious. When I fed wood cut to size by the billhook into the hungry mouth of the iron burner, I would sit back and close my eyes, tracing the journey I’d just been on. Words came, mad poems, ornate drawings. After grappling the wood back over the stream and under the fence, some weird excitement would emerge and prowl across the energy of the written word, looking for nests.

Nomadic Voices
Early on I spent a week at a travelers’ camp up on the border between Wales and England. There on the highest field of a well-meaning farmer’s land were a grizzled assortment of Irish travelers, vagabond English, and a small group of traditional Albanian gypsies—a rare mix. The Gypsies, settled for a season or two, were planting the earth, repairing caravans, and traditional wagons, and, apart from berating me to get a haircut, were generally friendly. In the evening they would sit on buckets around an open fire, smoke, and play music, often switching languages as they did it. The stories they told were highly speculative and veered wildly between epic sagas and rough little street tales, packed with intelligence.

What I gained from this experience, in addition to the haircut, was a certain elegance in living outside and a sense of connection to ancestry. It felt precious even then; ten years on I doubt I could even find such a group in England again. As the Gypsies’ music pirouetted defiantly up toward low clouds and old gods, their sons and daughters were focusing their attention on getting an apartment in town or getting a job that paid more than minimum wage. It’s not my business to judge that, because I haven’t lived their life. So I continued wandering and looked for myth tellers, what the Gaelic peoples call the Seanchai—tellers of the deep words. I was lucky enough to meet a few of these people, whether they knew what they were or not.

Their stories were not simple allegories, they were like small bushes of flame. I might hear them up at base camp at Caer Idris, or on a smoke trail from a visiting Mayan, rarely from an “professional storyteller.” I was dazzled, edified and despairing at ever being able to catch some of that nourishing eloquence in my own small beak. I would stagger back to the black tent and watch the word magic bounce around the breathing canvas. Everything that came out of my mouth seemed stumpy, blunt, and factual. It was embarrassing. No wonder my wife had left!

I continued my own journey of listening to the living world. This time it involved being sealed into a small dark structure, like a miniscule sweat lodge, up in the forests of Wales, miles from anyone but my base camper, without food or water. Unable to see my hand in front of my face, or sit up, I was left in the pitch black, clutching three crow feathers and already thirsty. This time the journey was profoundly internal. Deprived of visual light, within a day or so images began to appear across the blackness, like waking dreams. The imagined straight line of time dissolved into something much more profound. The lodge filled with sparks of light and whiskery old voices, the structure itself shook violently. Whole chunks of my future, at that point seemingly unlived, passed by me that night. During the twilight of the second night (not that I could tell), immense storms rolled in from the Irish ocean and set about my tiny structure, assailing it for hours at a time.

When my vigil was done and David, my base camper and long suffering mentor, appeared, I found that trees had come down, the long grasses had flattened, and my tent was awash with water. We made the long and treacherous descent through the forests to David’s car. When we arrived, there was a note from a ranger, worried that the owner had gone out to commit suicide—a popular pastime in that part of Wales. Well, we were both alive in the literal sense, but truly, some part of me had gone up there to die. I remember talking to a Choctaw medicine man about a Lakota friend we had in common, when he said, “Do you
know why he gets so much love? When he walks into the pow wow everyone knows he has died, over and over again.”
As the months moved into years it became clear that the vision-language of tribal people was not just an anthropocentric invention, but arose from a continual openness to the still-latent energies hidden in brook, desert, and moor. I would return from my fasts to the black tent, the old cat, the lightning tree, the witches moon, and wonder.

The Land is a Huge, Dreaming Animal
Places long to speak: great polyphonic blasts of forest oratory or the thin keening of the hemlock. I tried to bathe my head in the golden chatter of holy places, and sometimes caught a word or two, sometimes silence, sometimes a whole stanza of some great epic, buried in the granite of a Dartmoor Tor. The earth’s rough harmonies are more than the metaphors of this writer, but the primordial, root relationship between us and the living world. I have begun to suspect that underneath the ancient caves, buried arrow heads, and mineral deposits, the continents of this world are huge, dreaming animals.

Any gatherings on Ecology may benefit from myth tellers from each country attending and sharing culturally specific stories, so the animals underneath the countries have a chance for the image-language to speak for them. I think these animals have quite different characters and desires.

We could say that earth is relaying a lot of information right now, and not all of it is accessible with statistics and logic. I believe it is a call to the prophetic within us—a big word. The pastoral-creative work designed to appeal and comfort mass civilisation completely lacks the receptivity for the task.

However, without a process similar to the one I am describing, it would be very difficult to engender the psychic readiness required. To be clear: to function in their deepest vocation, the storytellers/ teachers/ poets should stand in the ground of prophetic image, a scarecrow of words, pushed by invisible winds. There’s a great deal of grandeur in that statement, and all sorts of problems, but I’m sticking with it.

2011-05-01T05:26:00.000-07:00

All the chains came off.

2011-05-01T05:15:00.000-07:00

Happy May Day!

I have become a doctor since i last wrote, last thursday in fact. After a lively viva, six years and fourteen days of work was rather wonderfully confirmed and my PhD was set free, a galloping horse over hills of fiery words. I feel happy.

Don't expect a note of my odd thinking to change or get trimmed at all. Free at last.

Coming up: this tuesday i am chairing a lecture by the wonderful Dr. Leonard Lewishon, one of the world's leading scholars on Sufism on Hafez, Tagore and the Persian world. 2.30-3.30, Barn Theatre, Dartington Estate, Devon, UK. That evening i am part of a bash in the estates Great Hall on Rumi - i'll be telling fairy stories, rude Nasrudin jokes and a few handpicked Rumi poems direct from Coleman. Chloe Goodchild and Duncan McIntosh will also be adding lots to the mix.

More soon. Today is gardening: dark soil in hand, weeding, planting and enjoying the first hint of sweet rain in a long while.

Regards all,

Dr. Shaw x

ON THE WAY TO THE GARDEN

The garden is breathing out the air of Paradise today;
I sense this friend of heavenly
Nature, and myself, and the genius of the wine.

It's all right if the beggar claims to be a King
Today. His tent is a shadow thrown by a cloud;
The sown field is his room for receiving guests.

The meadow is composing a story of a spring day
In May; the person who knows lets the future
And its profits go and accepts the cash now.

Please don't imagine that your enemy will
Be faithful to you. The candle that stays lit
In the hermit's hut flickers out in the worldly church.

Make your soul strong then by letting it drink
The secret wine. You know that once we're dead,
This rotten world will press our dust into bricks.

My life is a black book. But don't rebuke
Me too much. No one can ever read
The words written on his own forehead.

When Hafez's coffin comes by, it'll be all right
To follow behind. Although he is
A captive of sin, he is on his way to the Garden.

— The Angels Knocking on the Tavern Door
translated by Robert Bly & Leonard Lewisohn
HarperCollins, New York, 2008, pp. 31-32
Also: The Winged Energy of Delight, p. 397

Oil on Canvas, 4ft by 5ft, 2010

2011-04-15T02:41:00.000-07:00

Navaho drum patterns and Who b-sides - a conversation with Joe Strummer.

2011-04-15T02:27:00.000-07:00

Ancient Greece was very Rock'n' Roll

2011-04-15T02:08:00.000-07:00

I found this momento last week (lost and almost binned between two other pieces of paper) of the very first time writing a book was mentioned - at this very dinner. When Strummer suggests something is a good idea you tended to pay attention, I was still living up in the tent at that time, so i had been picking the straw out of that panama hat. We were a bottle into some very good french red and east African Funk is chugging along in the background. An informed man - lots of love Joe, whatever pirate ship you are sailing through this inky black and wine-rich universe on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xg2b6gt7WCY

is the link to a YOUTUBE clip on the inspiration behind the new book. There are others if you just type in 'Martin Shaw mythologist' - please check them out, pass them on, get them moving or join us on our Facebook westcountry school of myth page.

I am up to Dartmoor in a few hrs to begin the school's PARZIVAL weekend - car is full of paraffin lamps, wine, lots of Islamic poetry, chocolate and one black bear skin. If you can get to the Blytheswood hostel on the road between Mortonhampstead and Exeter by 8'oclock this evening we could just squeeze you in.

I am laying out another excerpt from the book below and will add more soon!
Adios amigos,
Martin

In the myth world, Apollo is an example of a young leader society could still just about swallow. Seen in Greece as the God of the Sun, he strides about, instructing us,“Nothing in excess.” His name carries associations of brightness, purity, the whiteness of swan’s wings, advancement of medicines and the laying down of laws. He also rides the approval of his father Zeus, as the favorite son. A player of the lyre, his music is perceived to calm the most ferocious beast, to transform wildness into a passive and benign state. Every botched business decision, ecological crisis, messy break-up he experiences is viewed from an enigmatic distance, where his feathers never catch in the tricky glue of emotion. He is corporate man, par excellence; lacking the terrifying swings of Zeus’s temperament, he remains in control: early to bed, early to rise. His love of logic and clarity are presented to us as soon as we enter nursery or primary education as a defining way of being in the world. Universities, media, and in- dustry are fueled by a hundred million little versions of this energy field. When you imagine his face, what can you see? I see a kind of glowing and cheekbones.

When we think of Jung’s statement,“Man doesn’t become enlight- ened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious,”4 we become grateful that there are other gods in the Greek pantheon. The question is, has anyone told society at large? The characteristics of a person under the thrall of Hermes will almost always be perceived as muddy, unclear, and morally dubious next to the impersonal radiance of Apollo. Like a kind of mythic robocop, Apollo men are enforcers of a senatorial consciousness received from their fathers. Firmly in the Descartian camp (as much as a god can be), they can create conditions of ecological havoc. Some gods originate from beneath the soil, but not this one.

Sky men and women proliferate in leadership. Although they may possess the organizational skills, discipline, and logic to suc ceed, we sense something terribly thin in them. It’s as if their shoes are the only thing stopping them from floating several inches above the ground. They don’t engage the earth somehow. I recently gave a lecture to leaders from around the world on mythological thinking. As long as there were handouts and coffee, things went well. However, when we moved into the realm of grief and loss as part of the leader’s lot, the room fell oppressively silent. Five minutes before, all were offering very informed perspectives on the subject, but when it turned inward, to intimate material, nothing. I was practically hounded out of the venue.

For them to admit difficulty, or confusion, meant instant loss of status in the group. The branding power of potential shame was too intense to risk vulnerability. To speak openly would appear to be “confessing.” Interestingly, six stayed to talk after the end of the rather fraught lecture. Given a more secure space, they freely ranged into a conversation of great depth and feeling.
Culturally we like to assume our artists (from a distance) are disciples of a very different god, Dionysus.

Dionysus is another son of Zeus, but one who canters through rain-washed valleys while Apollo flies overhead. At first glance, Dionysus appears almost diametrically opposed to Apollo. He is associated with the inebriation of wine, the rupture of mystical experience, the timelessness of love- making and spasmodic,crazed,passionateoutbursts.Weknowthat at the moment of his mother Semele’s death, Zeus tore Dionysus from her womb and sewed him into his own thigh, where he grew till birth. This strange, auspicious incubation points to a kind of unexpected nurture on the part of Zeus. A fascinating conjecture is that the name Dionysus may mean “Zeus Limp”—Zeus’s wounded aspect manifested in this particular son.

Dionysus leads a trail thick with both murder and ecstasy. He is dangerous, conflicted, sexy, and loose. While uninterested in the clear path of responsibility, he is allowed by his sheer strength of personality to access odd emotional pathways, to have a psychic life, to create music, ritual, art, to even break new ground in these mediums. His relationship to the muse sometimes offers fame as a side dish. We are thrilled/horrified by Dionysian behavior, the lack of boundaries, the outlandish music, the one-fingered salute to convention. If his talent is recognized and success arrives, the Dionysian individual can incinerate quickly. We walk past an apart- ment party and see Joplin, Cobain, and Dean sharing margaritas as the block burns.

Then the wine men rise up
Wearing deep purple belts
And hats of defeated bees
And they bring goblets filled with dead eyes,
And terrible swords of brine,
And with raucous horns they greet one another
Singing songs of nuptial intent
Pablo Neruda5

Daniel Goleman talks about the necessity for “emotional intelligence” in the workplace; beyond the practical skills of your particular occupation, you need to be able to sense, handle, and articulate both your own and your colleague’s emotions. Goleman identifies the raw nerve endings in the desire for perfection, status, and success, and rather than suggesting you walk away completely and join an ashram, he proposes a palatable integration of both ends of the mythic spectrum. He writes: “The ancient brain centers for emo- tion also harbor the skills needed for managing ourselves effectively and for social adeptness.” Disturbingly, he also notes a decline in this kind of integration: among young people especially they are two horses pulling swiftly away from each other:

As children grow ever smarter in IQ, their emotional intelligence is on the decline. Perhaps the most disturbing single piece of data comes from a massive survey of parents and teachers that show the present generation of children to be more emotionally troubled than the last. On average, children are growing more lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and aggressive.6

Goleman is telling us that these poles appear to be growing farther apart than ever, that among a coming generation a perpetual dislocation is emerging between logic and feeling, with neither side handling or assisting the other.

Crafting a Temple
This disturbing situation turns us back to our sources: the old sto- ries. Hidden in the folds of Apollo’s wings we find a key. For three months a year, Apollo would turn his temple at Thebes over to the worship of Dionysus. Astoundingly, these two seemingly opposite, right brain/left brain forces were honored in the same vicinity. We know we aren’t gods, but could we be a temple?

James Hillman employs the phrase “Divine influxes” to describe the winged forces that sweep through us but are not purely con tained by us. We need to identify our visiting gods and goddesses and build an appropriate container for their incursions. It is our very contemporary arrogance to think that we can pick and choose them. In the case of Apollo and Dionysus, each seems to mutually recognize the benefit of the other. In fact, in our discussion of age and leadership we see that to aspire to both longevity and creativity, we will have to have both present. Without Apollo’s focus and long- term direction, the purely Dionysian individual risks addiction and early death. Without Dionysus, one can feel distant from the pulsing heart of life, successful but dry.

Artists famed for their wild bursts of inspiration often served steady apprenticeships as draftsman or illustrators for years—
Willem De Kooning and Franze Kline among them. To break from form, they first had to explicitly understand it. It feels fruitful for us to look at characters who have allowed Apollo’s discipline to sustain their vocation for decades, honing and amplifying it. They provide a very different model from the late twenties burn out.

Antoni Tapies and Cy Twombly, to name but two, are turning out some of the most vibrant work of their careers in their seventies and eighties . Their temples appear to have been built slowly, with both granite foundations and delicate little chambers ready to accommodate any peculiar bird song they may awake to. To brand them purely as Dionysus’ children is too sweeping. The kind of wildness they present, the wildness of elders, is not the crazy sweep of a double-headed axe but the lyrical footwork of the capowera dancer.

WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE

2011-03-29T03:09:00.000-07:00

2011-03-29T02:53:00.000-07:00

Todays entry was inspired by a great photo of my friend Anna Molitor's niece happily riding the shiny black back of model spider with a tentative expression on her wildish face. She seems in on some little secret that the rest of us have forgotten. The commentary i am working on comes from a moment early in the story of Parzival (only two and a half weeks away for the myth weekend -we need final deposits now!). The boys mother, devastated by her husbands death and the grandiosity of court, takes him off to the forest, where he is not to know of his noble past. When he falls in love with the sound of jubilant bird song, she orders the birds to be strangled. She senses the call to glory and adventure in them. The wider commentary makes clear sympathies with the mother, not an outright condemnation - it's a very complicated situation.

When a Bird is Strangled

There is a wisdom to the White Queen’s turning away from Courtly life. A clawed hand has thrown another good man onto the ritual flames. We feel her grief and her compulsion to save her son from going the same way. Accordingly he receives an austere upbringing. Limited views, restricted diet, cold water thrown on the old, wily stories of adventure and trouble.

On the other hand he grows up in abrupt proximity to the living world. Some vital part of him is free – not to be whittled into courtly shape – but to expand into the murmuring of the dappled forest. With this, his mother has given him a great gift. Still, as he arrives at adolescence, he cannot help but turn his gaze upwards. What beautiful song first caught our ears, made us dream of wider views and growing wings?

We strangle a bird when we give a child no stability, little attention, no cohesive advice, no boundaries, no love. Children need to be children for sure – some mystical teachings say it takes seven years for the soul to land fully in a child’s body, but they also rejoice in elegant language, elevated questions and mythic image, it helps the brain develop. The access to pornography from a young age takes a beautiful, many voiced firebird from the upper branches and strangles it in dark hands.

Recall the story of Hansel and Gretel.

Once upon a time a wood cutter and his wife grew so hungry that that decided to ‘lose’ their children in the great forest, - so they could keep all the food. The children wandered lost. They came to a cottage made of gingerbread, sweets and sugary things and they were very excited, and hoped this would give them the nourishment they craved. An old woman let them in, with a promise of the softest of beds and most delicous of foods. She was both a Witch and a cannibal.

She locks Hansel in an iron cage and keeps Gretel as a slave. Hansel stays alive by pushing a bone through the bars, and, as the Witch is shortsighted, she thinks it’s a finger, that he is too skinny to eat. Finally she trys to push them both into the oven, but Gretel will not go easy, she adopts a strange position and claims she can’t fit. The Witch peers in to check the width and that it is hot enough, from where Gretel appears from behind and shoves the Witch right in and locks the oven door. The children finally escape on the back of a swan across a vast expanse of water and live well on the Witch’s riches.

Gretel’s wit is inspiring; how do we show our children to ‘not go easy’ into the Witch’s oven?, to use Hansel’s cunning to fool the dark one. What is the oven? It is whatever deadens young souls, what rots value by chewing on sugary nothingness, what makes children feral not wild, what annhilates goodness and passion into horizontal, carniverous, deadining want. What encourages betrayal, deceit and ultimately disappointment. Herod stands nearby the Witch, poised with the order to kill the babies.

There has to be a fight back.

Against a multitudinous assault of ghastly sweet lures lain in wait on the internet, television and veritable empire of technology aimed for young minds. The forest does not have to be a place of rigidity, retreat and cold, demonic presence’s.

It is a domain of rapture, of wider fellowship with the box-elder and the robin, of secret camps and high branches that open onto honeyed sunlight. It is a place of the ancient ebony beetle and the scat strewn track of the roe buck, silvery rivers and steep muddy banks filled with fleshy worms and overhanging oaks with slumbering owls in its archaic branches. It is a place of a poachers fire and soil smudged kids gathered round it, Cumberland sausages groaning on sharp sticks above the embers. It is a place for myth telling; when a story leaps from a grandmothers mouth then up into the nest of a Goshawk roosting her eggs, gets wonderfully enmeshed and then lands like soul-water in the thirsty mouths of the little vagabonds.

It is a place where a young boy, face daubed with charcoal patterns is just telling the story of his first trip to the stream all on his own, and of a sudden a stag breaks from a clearing in the far distance – in a porous, eternal eruption, the little lads story joins with the mythology of the animal powers, both are blessed by each other and enter one galloping rhythm, for an everlasting dream they are hairy brothers.

Forest schools place birds back on trees. What seemed dead can reassemble, re-constitute, can start to sing again. This is one of the deepest secrets of myth. What seems dead in ourselves is often just in exile, hibernating or entranced. The startling intelligence of the forest is a great place for a young cub to see an infinitely deeper mirror of their own dignity and strength than the thin, radiating box of a computer. To my delight, schools like this are appearing at speed all over the United Kingdom.

Originally developed in Sweden, it is specifically aimed at the under sevens. So all that time that the child’s soul is slowly assembling in their raw boned frame, they are exposed daily to beech trees, fresh air, practical skills – the ability to track, listen and attune to the forests earthy spluttering’s and conversational raptures. It becomes home.

Statistically the kids are seen to be less stressed and with a far greater ability to concentrate – they have become, like the story, ‘listeners.’ When removed from the speedy edited, primary coloured world of kid’s television, some agitation seems to remove itself. They can go at their own shambling, magical little pace. A friend and colleague of mine, Chris Salisbury, with his organisation Wildwise, is continuing to transform hundreds of children’s lives by this opening of the young soul. Some of these kids turn up carrying bags of strangled birds. When a gathering with them ends, the branches are filled with the jubilant cries of chicks, just hatched.

copyright Martin Shaw 2011

2011-03-15T16:13:00.001-07:00

MYTH IS A COLLISION OF RUPTURES

2011-03-15T15:56:00.000-07:00

Last chance saloon for the "Red Eared Hounds' weekends, with Robin and myself, we are down to the last few places. Friday night gig with Robin begins at 8pm at St Lawrence's Chapel, Ashburton, tickets on the door 10 pounds. for workshop and gig 130 pounds, ring 01364 653723 and hope they've not gone.
Hard for me to say anything approaching intelligent this week as i have been working on my new book so hard i am a growling, tusky loon of befuddlement. The horrendous situation in Japan got through though, and i send much love to anyone over there right now.

Here is this weeks taste of the upcoming " A Branch From The Lightning Tree" - older readers will have read bits of the below in earlier entries...

Myth: A Collision of Ruptures
The word “myth” carries a variety of association too wide to explore fully in this book. The stories we will explore may be described as initiatory myths: they follow the archaic progression that rites-of- passage also offer; they are indeed two strands from the same rope. I use the word myth to describe a story that instigates an intense, personal reaction and at the same time a wider range of relational awareness.These are visions of what we call eternity, or outside daily time, and have little regard for catagories of folktale, fairy tale, or myth. From this perspective these categories are secondary functions.As I have written, myth is promiscious. Just as we start picking out wedding rings and carving its meaning onto tablets of stone, we find it in the bed of another tribe, society, or civilization, enjoying a quite different set of associations.

What we can say is that initiation myths often deal with rupture. How secular society accomodates rupture is an interesting question—the word indicates a break or fissure in the surface of appearances. In the myth world, it is not the steady road of societal affirmation that defines us but rather that we orientate ourselves through hierophany—a sacred rupture. Myth could be said to be a collision of ruptures. From this perspective, our rupture, our ruin, is our axis mundi, our place of orientiation, our holy hills, our cathedral.

Myth has also had its critics, Roland Barthes describing it as “an abnormal regression from meaning to form, from the linguistic sign to the mythical signifier”4.

I would argue with Barthes that a sign is something that has literal significance laced upon it, whereas a symbol has a far wider web of connection. Within the realm of story a sign denotes, a symbol connotes. When images from the un- conscious or myth are seen only as signs, they are robbed of their transformative power; their use as psychic guides is erased. It can only point towards a breakdown of the imagination when we interpret a symbol as a sign.

Mythic understanding is subterranean; it lives underneath. A woman who is really a seal, a Dragon obese with conquest, a bridge that is a razored sword—it is rash to suggest these doorways are falsehoods; they provide a poetic space for the imagination to flood into. Rather than frozen, they are vast-collapsing and refiguring with every consciousness that encounters them. Barthes’s position arises when we are deprived of the real thing—when the myth stiffens into religion or certain ritual techniques are used to subvert the conscious- ness of large groups—this seems to me his real bone of contention.

Initiatory myths are clear that real story is not designed for societal crowd control, but that they are forged in the great smelting ore of earth consciousness—not just the human. Are myths literally issuing from rocks, lightning storms, and snowflakes? Is it possible that what we call myth is an arc of imagination that rises from the awakened mind and at some invisible but tangible moment collides with the arrival of plant, mineral, or star conciousness? What also is the sound comunicating from concrete, fumes, and electricity? Do they engender a kind of twisted mythic arch, or does the vital, truly mythic synthesis require contact with an unmanipulated natural force?

What is Wild?
To be in touch with wildness is to have stepped past the proud cattle of the field and wandered far from the twinkles of the Inn’s fire. To have sensed something sublime in the life/death/life movement of the seasons, to know that contained in you is the knowledge to pull the sword from the stone and to live well in deep woods in fierce winter.

Wildness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civiliza- tion but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from a moonlit lake. It will wear a suit when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. Its sensing-nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns. Myth tells us that the full gamut of feeling is to be experienced. Wildness is the capacity to go into joy, sorrow, and anger fully and stay there for as long as needed, regardless of what anyone else thinks. Sometimes, as Lorca says, it means “get down on all fours for twenty centuries and eat the grasses of the cemeteries.”5

Wildness carries sobriety as well as exuberance, and has allowed loss to mark its face.

Martin Shaw Copyright White Cloud Press 2011

2011-03-08T02:29:00.000-08:00

THE SHAGGY HOOVES OF VISION

2011-03-08T02:00:00.000-08:00

So the countdown to the Lightning Tree release date is on in earnest. Rumors abound of a twitter campaign- apparently little snippets from the book are flying about, and if you go to www.whitecloudpress.com you will be able to actually download chapter four - "Gambling with the Nuckle-Bones of Wolves". There will be an interview about the book and some you-tube clips up on www.schoolofmyth.com soon too.

Bad news- Coleman Barks can't make the Tagorefest at Dartington Hall this May - we were doing an evening of Rumi and stories together. Doctors have told him the man needs more rest time for a gent of his age and stature, so he, with great regret, is having to stay home. I will keep you posted on the new schedule for that evening.

Todays Lightning Tree excerpt is on the business of vision- and how to articulate it on return from any deep opening of the soul, in this case the wilderness fast on the mountain.

...What emerges is not thinned out by the language of the masses, it is a torrent, containing angular, magical trains of energy. Like a collapsing iceberg or a fox in the hen house, it is volume, action, tearing, biting, smashing; how does such an experience fall into the neat little confines of everyday language?

When approaching the Horse of Vision, we could say it has four great Hooves:

1. The Strong Bite of Antlered Language The language of wilderness is an experiential teaching from a non-human realm, and therefore its impact is not primarily to the rational, easily digested intellect.
2. Opening to the Fierce Empty To receive its message, an emptying out is required. Full up as we are with domestic concerns, job, and relationships, fasting assists us to slow down, open up, to be aware of our own emotional currents. We need to lose the distractions.
3. A Scattering of Darkness To go without food, company, books, watch, or phone for four days can be hard, even terrifying.
4. Holding Gentle Cunning Don’t be naïve. You are returning to a world that hasn’t been where you’ve just been. Don’t risk potential loss by trying to share the experience too early. Don’t spill the soul-gold over coffee, even with a friend.

Community and Reclaiming Time
Finding community is a tricky thing. Community could live at least partially in the imagination, rather than continually forced into the literal. Our community should involve long dead poets, sharks teeth, the heavy frost on a Scottish glen, the erotic trim of a Bedouin tent. We could reach a wider perspective on the word rather than attempting to wrestle it always into concrete solutions, petitions, finger wagging, committees, living in a tiny house of comrades arguing over who last bought the toiletries and who stole the tofu from the back of the fridge.

Communities could also be to do with reclaiming time: it seems to have a harsh, worried pulse to many people. It is useful to reach back through it to a community of ancestors. I don't mean some vague concept but in the work of vitalising folks down the centuries. It is naïve for us to claim personal impoverishment when we are connected to the legacy of Emily Dickinson, Taliesin, Patti Smith, Delius, Mirabai, Black Elk, Wolfram Von Eschenbach, and John Coltrane. We could find a specific soul-teacher from history and follow that lead. This will also broaden and deepen time around us, and in the same moment make us more genuinely present.

It’s quite possible to completely re-experience time. Start by regarding the coming of night as a regular move into the eternal, the end of clock time till the sun rises the next day. Take questions to the night, questions that could never accomplish themselves in the agitation of daylight. Become a night walker, invite it to become an ally. What are the scents and impression that night brings? What Goddesses glide through the open window? Night as a disorderly community of dreams, sudden fears, and sideways epiphanies. Allow the art you make of your life to beguile the Moon to wander to your bedside and start to talk. This allows us to flood into the wisdom of shadows and the indistinct blessings that midnight offers. It’s a grave mistake for us to only associate wisdom with the daylight hours or “light of knowledge”; we isolate ourselves from half the insights that twenty-four hours carries. Night as an ally is to understand that it follows different deities to well-mannered day: Lillith, Nyx, lusty Pan, and his disgraceful fantasies. The ‘”Luna” -tics have taken over the asylum. At the same time, that very hoard of impulses can cut to the marrow of all sorts of worries and amplify all sorts of truths that we can’t get near in the daylight hours. Night is the entering of a temple.

James Hillman claims that reaching back through history becomes a kind of osmosis, that you can merge into the leafy mulch of mystical texts and hard ideas, that you can become thousands of years old. This is another invitation to shape/leap. So we extend community by actually retreating backwards.

Become an apprentice to the way Caravaggio handled color and don’t worry about having an original thought for at least five years. Allow yourself to feel strange and slightly magical. Compose poetry that is irritable and fiery, that runs to hundreds of lines, then learn by heart and recite to nearby jackdaws. Write letters again, and find the oldest mail box you can to post them from. Decide that your hips are an altar to old Romanian Goddesses and take up belly dancing. Give out library cards as birthday presents. Run a three-week course from your porch on the relationship between the Aztec temples and Gypsy gambling games from medieval Wales. Don’t go easy on yourself.

One genius of story is that it refers to an inner community. Study of myth on the Return is a practice that assists in a kind of internal literacy. The intelligence of the image is placed within the violent range of emotions a participant will surely encounter, and a rich language emerges to articulate these often-warring factions within the psyche. Myth reveals that these inner impulses are not easily “managed” (Even Arthur struggles to hold the Round Table together). So the Return is a dedication to an inside as well as outside community.

Joy Breaks Out at News of Associative Blogspot.

2011-02-26T04:24:00.000-08:00

ASSOCIATIVE MYTHOLOGY

2011-02-26T04:04:00.000-08:00

http://mythsinger.com/blog1/2011/02/25/initiatory-language/

is the link to a new blog spot edited by Daniel Deardorff and myself, entitled "Associative Mythology", the phrase coined by Daniel for the kind of wide angled openings we explore in myth. There is the finished segment on Derrida and metaphor i placed here some months back and several new pieces from Mr. D. We're both excited about it so please pass it on.

Here's an interview with the great Marion Woodman, i think there is a new documentary on her life called, i think, 'Dancing In the Flames' which has got to be worth checking out. Anyone looking for more Lightning Tree excerpts just scroll down for two, more to come. I will balance the Woodman interview with one by Dr. Robert Moore in the next week or so, which is equally interesting.

Taming Patriarchy

The Emergence of the Black Goddess

An interview with Marion Woodman

1 | 2

Interview

WIE: In your books, you've written quite extensively about the relationship between "the feminine" and "the masculine." What do these words mean to you, and how does the relationship between them express itself in our lives?

MARION WOODMAN: As I understand it from my work with dreams, there are two energies in our bodies, just as there are two energies controlling nature. There's a very active, analytical, logical energy symbolized by the sun and a synthesizing, relating energy symbolized by the moon. In our bodies, as in nature, we are dependent upon this balance of energy between day and night in order to live. In the caduceus, the "logo" of the medical profession, these two energies come forward as two snakes that start together from the bottom and climb up through the various arcs until, at the top, they are about to kiss. Well, in our lives, these two energies are working all the time to find this balance. The words that I would associate with the feminine energy are "presence"—being able to live right here, in the here and now; "paradox"—being able to accept what appears to be contradictory as two parts of the same thing; "process"—valuing process as opposed to putting all the value on the product; "receptivity" and "resonance" in the body—having a body that is like a musical instrument, open enough to be able to resonate, literally resonate with what is coming both from the inside and from the outside, so that one is able to surrender to powers greater than oneself. So, for example, a dancer may perfect the instrument as much as he possibly can, the muscles can be as strong as it is possible for them to be, and the whole body will be as highly sensitized as technical work can make it, but still, the greatness of the dancer lies in his ability to surrender to the power of the Divine as it is coming through in the music.

WIE: And that would be an expression of the feminine?

MW: Yes, exactly—the word "surrender." The principle of the feminine is openness to life, death, rebirth and the unity of all things within that cycle. It's the world of nature, you see. And that's the world that's striving so hard now to be recognized.

WIE: What is the expression of the masculine, then?

MW: The masculine—to contrast it with the feminine images that I've used—tends to leap ahead to the future, to some idealized future. It tends to make things into black or white; it tends to look at life as an either/or situation instead of being able to hold a paradox.

Now here I must point out that I don't think "patriarchy" and "masculinity" are synonymous. I think that the patriarchy has become identified with power, and that as such it kills the masculine just as much as it kills the feminine. So patriarchy exaggerates the either/or, exaggerates the black or white. But the masculine is simply analytic, and it simply recognizes the either/or. It's more focused than the feminine in that it can go for a goal; it can discriminate between what is essential to that goal and what is not essential. It can discern, can use the sword, can cut off what is not essential to the action at hand. And these are positive attributes as long as they are in relationship to the feminine. I see these two energies as being in both men and women, and the masculine will always be in relationship to the feminine, so that it will be protecting the feminine, honoring the feminine and recognizing the values of the feminine. The feminine is the "being" side, and the masculine takes that "beingness" out into the world. It can also be the meditative "connector" inside, meaning that it can connect the soul to the Divine. A woman who is writing, for example, needs the masculine to begin her process, to put the words on the paper in a logical, informed way. She needs those masculine discriminatory powers to open the way for the Divine to come in, take over her arm and let her writing happen, and she also needs the masculine courage and strength to allow herself to be taken over. In that moment, she's trying to discriminate between the personal and the transpersonal. That can be very frightening, and that's where masculine courage and strength are required. It takes tremendous courage to surrender at that point. Now, this is as true in a male artist as it is in a female, so my point is simply that there's a divine marriage going on between the feminine and the masculine in every creative process.

WIE: In a condition of balance, or wholeness, what is the relationship between the feminine and the masculine energies, not only in the individual but in society as a whole?

MW: In the individual, as I said, it is a harmonic balance where the values of the feminine are defended and honored by the masculine. Now that is so far beyond where our society is that it's hard to imagine it at that level, but maybe the example of a relationship or marriage might help. Suppose a woman decides that her marriage is no longer a big enough container for the person she's becoming. She holds the value that she has to grow into her full maturity as a woman, but she is related enough so she doesn't want to hurt the soul of her husband. She may use a sword to get out of the marriage, but she learns to use it with love. Because if you get out of a relationship or a job that you've loved with hatred, you damage your own soul as much as you damage the other. It's this relatedness between the masculine and feminine that is so important, and that's a very hard balance to find when you're at a transition in life. There has to be the masculine courage to make a cut if it has to be made, but there also has to be the feminine love that respects the soul of the other. Now in our society the same thing applies, but so far, most people are depending on anger and violence to try to make these cuts, and so there's no balance at all between the masculine and the feminine.

WIE: What would the relationship between the feminine and the masculine be like under ideal circumstances?

MW: Well, think of a person like Gandhi, for example, where you have that magnificent femininity along with incredible masculine strength. Or take an example from the theater world: Garbo developed a strong masculine side and became all the more feminine, all the more attractive, as her own inner masculine brought out her own inner feminine. The more a woman develops her masculinity the more feminine she becomes, and the more a man develops his femininity the more masculine he becomes.

So to answer your question, I see this condition of balance in mature people who know what their own values are because they've worked very hard to discriminate between what belongs to their own soul and what does not belong to their own soul—mature people who value their dreams and who recognize that the soul has its own pattern and its own life to live, and who give it a chance to live that life. But in order to do that, they would have to be in touch, as I said, with their own inner imagery. And they'd have to be in touch with their own inner feelings, which is a frightening thing to say in a society where most people are cut off at the neck and honestly do not know what is going on at a feeling level in their gut or their kidneys or their heart or any of the other parts of their torso. And that's the tragedy, because then it erupts in rage. There's no discrimination. The masculine doesn't have a chance to come in with any kind of discriminatory action; action becomes acting out. In a society where citizens are in balance, they have those emotions—that rage, for example—but it is contained until it can be put into cultural forms such as a play or a dance. That's what culture is. It's holding the passion at a vital point until it can be put into a civilized form. But in our culture, there's a tendency to not even attempt to hold the container, to give creative form to the tension between these opposites. Instead, let the bombs or the knives or the bullets fly, and act out the rage. And where are the values in that?

WIE: Are you saying that the more civilized form of expression you're describing could potentially extend beyond personal creativity to animate the structure of society itself?

MW: Of course, and that does happen periodically on the planet. I mean, there have been cultures, when they've reached their peak, where that balance was in place. But mind you, even that keeps changing. And now, I think we're moving toward one planet, and the transition is ferocious because we have to go through that terrible breaking up of these old patriarchal patterns in order to find the new ones.

WIE: In your book Dancing in the Flames, you describe the figure of a black goddess or Madonna that has been appearing with increasing frequency in the dreams of many contemporary men and women, and you describe this as an indication that the feminine is "push[ing] through from the very depths of the collective unconscious like a universal force that speaks individually and culturally." What exactly is happening here, and what does it mean?

MW: Well, as I see it, we've lost touch with the feminine, with our feelings in our bodies and with the planet itself. Now, collective dreams are presenting new challenges. For example, lust in the body now needs to be united with love in the soul. The Judeo-Christian tradition has split the body from the soul, and so now these dreams of the black goddess are bringing up the image of a very lusty, passionate woman who values life and is in love with life. For example, I'm looking out the window now, and all the buds are coming out and the flowers are all bursting forth in the garden, and there's that luscious, delicious sense of loving—loving and living—that is the recognition of the birthright of life itself, in which lust and that love are expressed together. And this is one of the most crucial problems of our culture: Too much feeling is repressed in our own "human earth"—which is to say, in our own bodies. For many people, "playing it cool" is the biggest, most important thing; one should not get heated up over anything. In other words, they cut out the passion: then life becomes boring until they explode in a fit of rage.

Now I'm not suggesting that the black goddess is an ultimate goal. The ultimate goal, in terms of the feminine, is to bring up that dark energy until it finds its civilized form, and to bring the white goddess off of her pedestal, her idealized pedestal that keeps women in an inhuman frame in the minds of most men. Idealization confines her to a heavenly state that must eventually flip into a demonized state because, in its incompleteness, it's simply inhuman. So the goal is to bring the white goddess down from her pedestal, to bring the black goddess up from repression, and to bring them together—lust and love together. And again, that's for both men and women, because both men and women have this tragic split in their femininity—and in their masculinity.

WIE: How do we know that the goddess is, as you're suggesting, an emergent, impersonal, feminine cosmic force that is revealing itself to an increasing number of human beings with the intention of revolutionizing human life and consciousness?

MW: I don't. I don't know that. How could we possibly know? All I can say is that I believe that God—masculine spirit and feminine matter—is speaking to us directly through our dreams. Dreams, being metaphorical, being the connection between the spiritual and the physical, are the language of the soul. And I've seen messages from this black Madonna in hundreds of dreams, and they all seem to have a creative intent in the life of the person to whom they come. So I see the black goddess as representing a cumulative insight that will eventually have an impact on the planet. It's not just happening here, you know; it's happening all over. And this goddess is, by the way, beloved in India—Kali, the goddess of life and death, of creation and destruction, is the most revered Hindu goddess. But our country hasn't dealt with Kali at all because we don't like to think that death is part of life—even though we've just finished with winter! I mean, if we gave any thought to it at all, we'd know that death leads to new life. So I don't know, but I think we have to learn to accept mystery, to accept that the Divine is mysterious and that if we think we know everything, we are grossly deceived.

WIE: The radical feminist theologian Mary Daly has written that "'God' represents the necrophilia of patriarchy, whereas 'Goddess' affirms the life-loving being of women and nature." Do you agree with the assertion that patriarchy is inherently destructive, whereas matriarchy is inherently beneficent?

MW: Again, I think patriarchy has become destructive. I think that when it started out in ancient Greece, there was an attempt to bring the nation to consciousness. That was a very important step in the evolution of humankind. But now it is connected to power—power over nature, power over other people, power over our own bodies—and people identify themselves in terms of power if they're in patriarchal thinking. So patriarchy has lost its sense of relatedness and its sense of love; it's on a wild rampage now. But I cannot agree that matriarchy, in itself, is the solution. I think that unconscious matriarchy can be just as vicious as patriarchy. If a person is taken over by the negative mother archetype, the voice inside continues to snarl, "Who are you? Who do you think you are? You can't really achieve anything. You are nobody." That voice is a broken record that goes on and on and on inside the brain, and it can come from the feminine just as much as it can come from the masculine. So I simply cannot accept Daly's statement. It seems to me that we've all got to strive toward consciousness. And it's not any longer about being subject to father/patriarchy or mother/matriarchy. It's about finding ourselves and taking responsibility for ourselves as mature, grown-up human beings. That's what I think this big transition is about. We're moving out of being children and adolescents, and we're being forced into the responsibility of making mature decisions—or we're not going to survive as a planet.

WIE: In this issue's interview with Sam Keen, the author of Fire in the Belly, we presented him with your view that within each of us, male or female, there are both masculine and feminine energies that need to be brought into balance if we're to become whole. Keen responded: "There are two kinds of people. Those who divide the world up into two columns and those who don't. Why start with two columns? Why start with making your basic concepts about the human psyche goose-step along? I think that's a kind of intellectual tyranny. It's totally unhelpful for me to say, 'Now I've got to get my yin balanced with my yang. Am I too yang or too yin?' If all I can think of is 'I've got to do this or that,' if all I can think of is masculine or feminine, it's a shotgun to my head. That's why I don't like Jungianism and why I detest the idea of archetypes." What is your response to Keen's criticism?

MW: I've learned to accept the fact that there are energies in all human beings that can wipe out the personality, and personally, I think it's wise to have some idea of what those energies are. That would be my comment on the archetypes. I mean, what is the point of living if there is nothing but a bread-and-butter, walk-on-the-ground flat world? And as for having to divide everything up into yin and yang, I didn't do any dividing up into yin and yang. We're living in a world that is divided into yin and yang. There is masculinity, there is femininity; there is night, there is day. And energy functions like a magnet: opposite poles attract and like poles repel. So I think that if you want real passion in your life, you need to recognize that the so-called opposites are passionately attracted to each other. Without that differentiation, you lack the "fire in the belly"—and life isn't worth living without that fire.

WIE: Yet with regard to opposites, you've also written: "Let us . . . try to avoid the patriarchal either/or and move into the feminine both/and. In that paradox, the mystery of being human lies." Could you explain why, in your view, the feminine is "both/and" and the masculine is "either/or"?

MW: As I explained earlier, it's the patriarchal either/or that splits things in two, that is continually setting up differences, whereas if you were to look at nature as an expression of the feminine principle, you'd find that in one little patch of ground there are a hundred different living organisms working together to bring the planet to life in spring. The whole world of nature has this incredible both/and ecosystem, so that you don't have to get rid of these things in order to have those things. It's not either/or. You accept the black, the white, the red, the pink; you accept it all as one. And the true masculine, as I understand it, honors that.

WIE: You've also stated that "The opposites are complementary, not contradictory. They are partners in the dance of life—partners, that is, in the ongoing interplay between the observer and the observed. This dance, this interplay cannot take place in a world of absolutes, for such a world has no room for differing modes of perception—only for a patriarchal God who is himself the observer and the observed." Why is it that absolutes leave no room for differences?

MW: Well, absolutes bring forward their opposites, but the poles are so far apart that they can't even recognize that they're two sides of the same coin. So that if, to use an example we've already spoken about, you idealize women on one side, you're inevitably going to demonize them on the other. When a woman "betrays" you because she cannot live up to the ideal that has been projected on to her, there's a tendency for men to see her as a betrayer, a seducer, an evil witch who would suck out their insides—right? So, with absolutes, the poles are so far apart that it's always an either/or, black-or-white situation. You can't bring them together. Whereas from a nonabsolute perspective, the poles are not so far apart. Because from that feminine perspective there's a human dimension, and the human dimension is imperfect. And within that imperfect world, differences are not only possible but are in fact essential to make life interesting. If, on the other hand, you're in an absolute world where what you want is perfection—for example, the Nazi world that wanted the perfection of the human race—there's absolutely no room for the play of opposites and therefore no room for the dance. The dance goes on between differing values, and there is a mystery at the center of the dance. The still point at the center of the dance is that mystery, and it keeps changing. And that's what's so interesting about life—that even the still point keeps moving. As your perception evolves, the still point moves.

WIE: Hitler's ideology is no doubt one of the most horrifying examples we've ever seen of the dangers that can result from adherence to an absolute view. But at the same time there have been other figures throughout history who are known to have espoused what could also be called an absolute view with the aim of achieving a decidedly different outcome. The Buddha, for example, to the best of our knowledge, aspired to a kind of perfection and encouraged his followers to do the same. Would his teaching of enlightenment have had the same kinds of implications that you've been speaking about?

MW: I can't speak to that because I'm not steeped in Buddhism. But I do know that when, for example, Christ talks about being "perfect," that word means "wholeness." It's not about cutting off everything in yourself that's not acceptable; it's about bringing out everything in yourself that contributes to the wholeness of who you are. Instead of being perfect in a very tiny area of yourself, you'll be attempting to be a whole human being, and that does place a limit on the goal of perfection.

WIE: But if, as you suggest, an ultimate or absolute view does inherently negate the rich interplay of opposites that make up the world we live in, at the same time couldn't it also be said that the feminine, as you've defined it, inherently negates an ultimate or absolute perspective that always transcends everything?

MW: Yes, I would say so. Now bear in mind that I am speaking from my own point of view, and I don't pretend to be a philosopher or a theologian. But the word "transcend," as it's used by most people, means to come in from above, to see everything from above, and that's the use of the word that I'm responding to. For me, though, the word "transcend" can also mean seeing everything from below. Most addicts, for example, find their healing by going down into the trauma that caused their emptiness in the first place. As they learn to love themselves and honor themselves with their own imperfections, their hearts open. They can love themselves and other human beings. They transcend the hell they could not endure, not by flying up and out of life but by moving down and into life. Then heaven and hell cease to be polarized opposites. Paradoxically, they are one. I also see the black Madonna as "transcending from below." In other words, the feminine energy of the planet itself, if you think of it as a volcano erupting from the very bowels of the earth, is transcending our normal life's existence. Think of the great waves that come smashing in. That power that is erupting from inside and below can be just as life-renewing as an angel touching down from above.

WIE: On one hand, it seems completely understandable that, as you've said, a rigid adherence to absolute notions can easily lead to a dangerously disembodied, exclusive and alienated relationship to life. But on the other hand, couldn't it be said with equal validity that it's only when we're willing to transcend all notions of opposites—including those of "masculine" and "feminine"—that we can experience a perspective and a relationship to life that's truly all-inclusive?

MW: Yes, that is right. But even so, I think I'd still stay with the metaphor of the dance. Energy moves because it is attracted to something. We are magnetized by otherness. Eventually, we realize opposites are not in opposition. They are in love. They attract, they unite, they create new life. The key is to hold the still point in constant movement. If you're really dancing with a partner, there is a still point between you that is always holding no matter how fast or how far you are moving on the floor. And if you're throwing a pot on a wheel, however fast it's moving, that still point has to hold or your pot blows up. And so the two energies, the centrifugal and the centripetal, the masculine and the feminine, have to be in balance. Balance is all.

RESCUED HERMITUDES FROM THE FIERY MAW

2011-02-24T11:12:00.000-08:00

2011-02-24T10:47:00.000-08:00

So, the hippies i know are all telling me spring is starting to spring whilst my rock'n'roll friends insist it is still the depths of winter - curtains drawn, poker game and whisky on the table. I know what i think.

me and the tribe were clearing out the hut today - our largish shed/storytelling hut/painting studio. It contains my ancient woodburning stove from my days in the tent - bleached white in places from the heat. Shovelling in various incriminating letters and court demands to get it started, i glanced at the crumpled paper i was pushing in. I found a bunch of poems from the tent days, which i managed to procure from the flames greedy licks. I place one here before i lose them again. I'm not sure it is all that great, but i was pleased to see one contains a line from this weeks section of 'A Branch From The Lightning Tree' - well, a similar image anyway- i didn't know it had been in an old poem. Weird that line about paper into the stove too, bearing in mind the circumstances.

Black Tent Poem 1

Crumbly autumn comes
The hermit lets the water spill from his hands
The papers drift into the leaf banks and the frost
no publisher or abbott will coo over the smoulders
gaze at the legacy of sixty nights by the angry cairns

He claimed a vessel of problems
collected from theology and old magic
built humming structures around their thick air
made love with ferocity to what many thought forgotten
His solitude was the hardest song he ever wrote
sent to the moving herds of the open plains

Snow will come soon
and the small doors let in hail
but for now the only heat is from more papers fed into the stove
radiating small circles of red into the dusk
and the fox moving at distance
stills herself, and moves forward towards the glow

I reckon i was probably reading a lot of Han Shan around that time. Anyway, here is a small chunk of the upcoming Lightning Tree book - this one from the Irish tale 'The Birth of Ossian' -in it Finn MacColl is wandering the highways and byways looking for his lost love, Sadb.

The Currency of Longing, the Malignancy of Disappointment
A steady focus on something absent, out of reach, or lost to us, acquaints us with a very particular kind of edge, acquaints us with Saturn as well as an Underworld goddess. For some of us, the loss of Sadb is the loss of youth. “And little enough you cared for her when she was yours,” says another story from the Fenian cycle. That loss leads to identification with some part of us that is grizzled, listless, wandering. It is the very fate that ensures Finn as a hero rather than just a “defender,” a culturally sanctioned holder of borders. It is an encounter with the Magpie brother of Parzival, or Gilgamesh meeting Enkidu, our precious degree swept into a snow drift.

To broaden the psyche and become a real human being requires more than the adoration of the court; some dark arrow has to enter our flank, like William Cowper’s stricken deer:

I was a stricken deer, that left the herd
Long since; with many an arrow deep infixt
My panting side was charg’d when I withdrew
To seek a tranquil death in distant shades
But some energy arises that pulls us from the magnetic trance of death:
There was I found by one himself
Been hurt by th’archers...
With gentle force soliciting the darts,
he drew them forth, and heal’d, and made me live.

Daniel Deardorff, commenting on the above lines, advises caution in expecting the holy rescuer, or paraclete, to arrive in physical form: “One must bring to bear a much wider imagination than accommodated within the ratio of reasonable, daylight thought.”11

By this token, any number of experiences could have wrestled the darts from Finn—some troubled dream, another forest bereft of his beloved. But it is the role of Wanderer, Grief-Man, that tempers us into such a shape that the gift can appear. If Finn had attempted to hide his limp, his ravaged stump, surely it would have congealed and rotted many years past. The marginality of grief strikes a chord of relationship between the Trickster and the King; we sense Finn has become “real” in some way. Deardorff makes an overt connection between the two: “The King/Jester polarity is embodied in the contrary person of the Mythic Trickster.”

It’s an extraordinary, indigenous idea that to find an authentic center, we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost. We make a place in us for a small, cultivated altar to the bird that flew away. The story tells us that as long as we deny the sorrow road and neglect the chamber of crow-feathers, we refuse the possibility that the God contained in the experience will speak back to us. How many of us are wearing long coats to cover our darts and clotted veins? How many of us refuse Cowper’s “leaving of the herd” and deny the encounter with the one with “gentle force?”
We exchange the currency of longing for the malignancy of disappointment. Longing pushes the imagination outward—toward deeper inflexions of insight, peculiar creative leaps—while disappointment is a diminishment, a closing, a reduction. Remember Rilke’s “Wherever I am folded I am a lie.”12 We deny the incubation of longing by refusing to grieve, and anticipating this, we never fully invest anyway. This leads to the great sense of numbness we hear of in modern life. We touch with a gloved hand, our passions become hobbies, and we keep an eye fixed always on the door. If some feeling should come through, it carries the distortion of possession; we grab in order to be fed rather than to feed, and are startled when another relationship crumbles in our hands.

As a twelve-year old schoolboy, Carl Jung was once lost in thought while contemplating a glorious sky, radiant sunshine glittering on a cathedral roof, and became overwhelmed with the perfection of the moment. His thoughts drifted upwards to god and:

Here came a great hole in my thoughts and a choking sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: “Don’t go on thinking now! Something terrible is coming . . . I gathered all my courage, as though about to leap forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on his golden throne, high above the world—and from the under the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.13
The key, of course, is that the turd still emerged from a divine rear: in the shattering of the cathedral a new shape of worship becomes possible, one that brings all our “dark shit” with it, to sort through our prima materia.

The difference between longing and disappointment lies in having the wisdom to know where the turd/heartbreak/sacking fell from: do we erect a new, deeper church, or do we scuttle from the debris, disillusioned, an atheist to trickster insight? Our ideal falls asunder, the image wrecked at lightning speed. We are saved depending on whether we place the experience in or outside the church. It would seem, on one level of imagination, that Trickster lives not in the incident itself, but in how we live with the incident, living, like Wolverine in the old stories, off the flakes of skin from his ass through another merciless winter. Integration and attention are central.

Martin Shaw 2011 copyright White Cloud Press

www.cararoxanne.co.uk

2011-02-14T13:59:00.000-08:00

DEVOTIONS TO THE COURT OF LONGING

2011-02-14T13:25:00.000-08:00

Well, after a few weeks of writing briefly about my travels i want to lay something out with a little more heft this week. This excerpt is from the upcoming, revised "A Branch From The Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness" out in April 2011 on White Cloud Press. They are taking advance orders already from their website at a very decent price.
This commentary comes from the story "The Deer Maiden and the Velvet Antlered Moon". It's a Siberian story about the Moon falling in love with a woman who looks after a herd of Deer, far out on the tundra. Through her cunning she gradually wears him down (he's a little too much to handle as a deity can be) till he lists 12 different names for stages of the moon throughout the year- as a devotional gift to her and her tribe before setting back off up into the inky night sky. The full commentary, story and wonderful illustrations by Cara Roxanne will be in the new book.

Wooonderful Grimm's weekend up on the moor - i hope all students are now hitting the two study handouts we have sent over
and awaiting the next set of homework. Remember to come and find us on Facebook - just click that thing on the right of this page.

Moon Comes Gliding
We’re going to explore the story in two ways now, from the perspective of relationship and of the Moon as an Initiating Deity. Some of the transitions will be swift.

The first point of interest is that the Moon in this story is considered Masculine. In European myth we normally associate the Sun with the masculine—rationality, activity, thrust and vigor—with the Moon connected to intuition, stillness, receptivity and mystery. It feels a like a welcome change to enjoy this twist, to wrestle the moon back from the women awhile, and wrench the sun from the men. The word Moon actually derives from the German der mond, connected to the word “man.” This has a very different ring than the la luna of the Spanish, which seems much livelier, less dense. Actually we find male moon deities in many places: Tecciztecatl of the Aztecs, Mani of the Germanic tribes, Thoth of the Egyptians, Tskuyumi of the Japanese, and Rahko of the Finns are just a small selection. So this time the Moon is male, and curious. Wandering his nomadic route over the heavens, he has become fixated upon this similarly “alone” woman, not sheltered by the hearth or warm in a lover’s bed.
Sometimes when we see someone holding solitude elegantly, when they possess the particular qualities that make our head spin, we summon our chariots, “shine” to our fullest, learn a tap dance and go charging into their splendid isolation, not realizing they may be relishing their space.

To attract a deity is no small thing. It is a shamanic labor to head out to the ice, forest, or vision pit, seeking to entice a spirit: bride or husband. Whether she knows it or not, she has created enough elegance and space around her to beguile the Luna God himself, a Lord of Night. Many unexpected things come to us at night; many storytellers only tell in the slow time, when the fragile shell of hours breaks and the moon egg of enchantment arises.

The Irish always say that the Otherworld is as interested in us as we are in it, and this descent of the moon is an auspicious image of just that. Indigenous artists often understand that a huge percentage of their gift comes from “somewhere else”—the mythological, religious, and cosmological realms of that Otherworld region. When we start orienting ourselves towards the community of stars, night, and moon, surpassing the human, the impact of that new relationship can be overwhelming.
When moon energy starts to flood our life/home/deer herd, its very force and lack of “human-centeredness” can tell our instinct (the deer we ride) to start digging a hole to jump down. It can cause us to spend two days and nights without sleep working on a novel with no hope of a publisher, to forget our nephews’ names, to stop tipping waiters. It’s not about grounding, it’s about leaping. Dylan Thomas, never famed for a balanced hand, writes:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms

He makes a flurry of connections between his vocation as a poet, a raging moon, and the lover’s bed as a nest of grief. His bounding soul knows all about the midnight tundra where he encounters the lightning of his work. His poems are for those very grief lovers, his tribe, who:

Pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art3

Maybe art feeds the moon as much as it does human beings.
We suspect that Jeff Koons is unfamiliar with this intensity, whereas an abundance of its light poured from the brush of Ken Kiff or William Scott. We know that Mark Rothko laid down layers of very thin paint so that hundreds of little pricks of light illumined his work—moon light. This very old artistic pursuit requires a developed inner life, a steady psyche to ground such huge invocations. Rothko’s death by suicide raises questions about his ability to sustain the vast energies he awakened. If we just stand still and soak the energy up, we’re often dead by twenty-eight, blazing and consumed by our “lunacy.”
So we can see the Moon as a vertical connection in our lives, but also as something contacted through solitude, intensity of task, broadness of community—owls, mist, streams, bracken, and up into the cosmos.

Hiding
It is a genius clue that when the gift comes, the Deer Woman hides. The myth-world’s frequency is different from that of the human, and much tearing and thunder can commence when the two worlds square up to each other. Destiny is an awesome thing. James Hillman tells the story of the great Spanish bullfighter Manolete (1917-1947), who as a boy “clung so tightly to his mother’s apron strings that his sisters and other children used to tease him”4
His clinging was an attempt to jump down the hole, to buy himself time until he had developed a container strong enough to bear the gift offered. Come adolescence, he ran towards his gifting, and towards his death. Gored by the bull Islero at age thirty, he died, his funeral the largest Spain has ever seen.

It could be that Manolete sensed his destiny, the glory and the sobriety of it, and bought all the time he could before the pulse became too persistent to ignore. For others, the price of relationship to the moon is that they are unable to reenter the village, its light grows dim around other people. An artist’s studio can be seen to be an attempt to “catch beams.”
Of course, when we are overwhelmed, we attempt to return to safe ground—when the Deer Woman is confronted by the Moon, she runs back to her father’s tent. However, as in many initiatory stories, he’s not there. The father and the tent represent her grounding in her community, her childhood, and her humanity. The container remains, but this time she has to be the negotiator, the elder, the one with wit. Sometimes, when making a painting, I will occasionally slip into ground so new and unexpected to me that I panic and paint over it, calming myself with more “negotiated” gestures. Like the surface of the moon, I don’t recognize the landmarks, I can’t see any footprints. So I try to drag the Moon back into my black tent of tradition, comfort, and warmth. I too will try to familiarize the otherness of the experience into something that can gradually be integrated into a body of work. Try as I might, I’m not an astronaut yet.

The Deer Woman stays safe by a kind of mimicry, an invisibility that preserves us in all sorts of situations—at school we imitate the teacher and his or her “light of knowledge,” and gradually learn to hide our own peculiar, idiosyncratic opinions. If they should pop out, we would become visible and vulnerable, so better to ape what is bigger and brighter than us.
This kind of activity, while potentially life-saving as we grow, can become a castrating and unconscious habit if carried into adulthood. Of course the Moon is looking for her, not an imitation of himself. But in this case, she bides her time and wears him out. Of course, there could also be a straight avoidance of intimacy in her hiding. Better to munch a lettuce leaf and practice detachment than get down into the muck of relationship and have to deal with its unwieldy shadow.

The Great Thief
It could be said that to know the moon is to be connected to thievery. Even the Moon’s glow is stolen sunlight, reduced 500,000 times. Not content with stealing sunlight, the moon also has a penchant for pilfering color. The gold of a cornfield or the crimson of a rose are quietly replaced by greys and blues when moonlight’s fingers fall on them. A lover of letters, the Moon steals into books read at dusk—as we read in the gloom, words become indistinct as he scoops them up and carries them off. Night is the time of break-ins, affairs, slow time-ruptures to the agitated clock of light. At the same time, we know that the Moon replaces everything the next day, just as we left it, so he appears a cheeky thief rather than a savage robber. The Moon is also a friend to lovers; his inky sky covers them as a blanket, but his light offers a slender trail to the sweetheart’s door. So to draw down the Moon brings a certain wiliness.

All this talk of thievery could have scared the Deer Woman: would she want her own color, her essence, so consumed? We see a strong reaction to the bluster of the potential suitor. Can you remember being with someone who cast so much light that your own couldn’t be seen? Like a hip-hop star covered in bling jewelry, the moon so far offers no real relationship, only adoration. The Deer Woman has been alone long enough to know that she doesn’t want that. And so it begins. She refuses calls, rain-checks dates, and has always just left the party when you arrive. This just intrigues and frustrates you more, until, like the moon, you find yourself frantic and sweating, searching under animal skins and through friends’ address books trying to track her down.

Just when you are finally turning away, you hear her voice from the top floor of a crowded restaurant, and there you go, charging in among the tables again. Her faint voice is a tiny clue that this is a courting rather than a flat refusal. Once the Moon’s grandiosity is lessened, and he is wrapped in the cords of the world, when he even faces something approaching mortality, he and the Deer Woman really start to communicate.

How can she trust such an energy? Surely better to stay in her glorious isolation. But the Moon Man also offers an image of largeness, flamboyance. His arrival has broken the steady rhythm of the animals and the frost: he offers an outwards expression, to be seen. In the tangle of our own relationships, the rambunctious partner offers a challenge to our inwardness—we despise but are attracted to this rambunctiousness. In the myth-world, all these characters reside in us, and so we could say that the Deer Woman—solitude loving wilderness being—and the Moon Man—mighty, galaxy-shining, tide-altering—are trying to reach an accord with each other. The Road of Solitude and the Road of Voice have found a crossroads.

Collapsing Imagination
We’ve mentioned an artist’s studio as a place to catch beams, our own wilderness place where we can attract lonely deities. Forget “artist” as someone being tied to oil paint or video installations, and rather envision that part of yourself that is not snared in insurance documents and loves sitting quietly alone for an anti-social amount of time.
When the attention in our lives is all focused on the First Body—the tribal concerns of mortgage, status, and how our peers view us— then the tundra of the Nomadic Heart gets smaller.

That tundra literally starts to disappear before our eyes: condos appear in the woods and, one after another, the deer are stillborn. When the tundra is gone, the Moon Man looks down and sees nothing but television static. He sees no moving herd of art, no antlered words, no runway of strange dances and ecstatic prayer on which to land his chariot. So the mythological collapse begins and the threefold, archaic body gets thinned and stretched until only the concrete remains. With the Nomadic Heart tuned out, and the Moon-Calling Woman ignored, our psychic orbits shrink, and we give ourselves permission for the most unimaginable acts, in the name of Daniel Deardorff ’s horrified “infinite progress.” We are no longer connected to hooves, tides, or night energy.

Any hunter will tell you that much of the action occurs on the periphery of your vision; Bushmen will sit for hours stilling themselves to pick out the stealthy animals moving at the edge of what they can see. Neruda could do this with words, pulling a wriggling, startling metaphor from a bush of thought. In the understandable hysteria around climate change, a similar stilling is required. All these stories of shape-shifting are an indication of a healthy psyche, rupturing the consensual into a new constellation. Therapy can be a wonderful way to magically shrink us into our specific neurosis, dislocating our grandeur and god-juice into little childhood boxes. A useful stage perhaps, but we see Taliesin, Cuchulainn, or at least Seamus Heaney waving distress flares at this point.

Our story points towards huge events: relationship with a deity, a mythological being, but also our having the hard cunning to draw it into manageable chunks to guide the process of living. The animal self and the lunar self find an accord, an arch of imagination that creates the impossible tension called a good life. Psychology cannot contain mythic thought entirely, but provides a good meadow place between village (everyday) and forest (mythological) consciousness. Hafez says: Drink the ruby wine and look upon the moon-browed face. Contrary to the religion of those, see the beauty of these.5
Or to remember Yeats: The power that awakens the mind of the reformer to contend against the tyrannies of the world is first seen as the star of love or beauty.6

Devotions to the Court of Longing
Solitude opens the door of longing—invisible longing, which connects to the Otherworld, which calls down the Lord of the Moon. A conscious spell or wish is contained in this story for a marriage of the three energies.
When we live in a society that is determined to sate longing instantly, a door to the myth-world closes. Some incubation is lost and our messages never arrive at the tundra and the moon because the village instantly supplies the gift.
My father tells this story: As a child and aspiring musician, he walked the several miles from his house on weekends to stand at the window of a music shop, gazing at the drum kits he couldn’t afford. For a long stretch, his imagination had to construct a kit out of the old sofa he would pummel for hours at a time. But some hound of tenacity was born in him, a longing for something just out of reach. Years later, when I wanted to pick up the drums too, he engineered a similar process. From eleven onwards, I had sticks and much encouragement, but no kit of my own. I would walk the two miles from my house up to the creaky, damp old hall where his kit was and practice. After five years of this, I wandered downstairs on my sixteenth birthday and found a very elegant second-hand kit waiting there, ready to be set up. I’m still playing it, twenty years later.
Something of that yearning has sustained a long and edifying relationship for both of us with the drums, and also a shared language. The long walks we both took, the financial scrapes, the adoration of the appearance and sound of the instrument, and the calloused hands are all devotions to the Court of Longing.

I want to leave this chapter with words of Fran Quinn. It’s important to be depressed and alarmed about the things of this world, but tedious to the Gods if we stay there too long. In these lines, sense the three orbiting energies all at once, and take courage.
Now in time-warp speed a whole new testament begins:

dedications, visions, cathedral cities
as death reveals himself to be a joke that lightens our way
to the feast.7

MARTIN SHAW 2011 copyright White Cloud Press.

2011-02-08T03:46:00.000-08:00

GRIMM'S FAIRY TALES AND THE ART OF MYTHTELLING

2011-02-08T03:10:00.000-08:00

So i begin with a last call out for the Westcountry School of Myth's up coming weekend Feb 11th to 13th (170 pounds, residential Fri 7pm to Sun 4pm) - on Grimm's initiatory fairy tales for men and women - 'The Six Swans' and 'Iron John', up in the mossy climbes of Dartmoor at the cosy High Heathercombe residential centre.

We will explore the ancient stories and their multiplicity of association, and also include a brand new session on the business of mythtelling itself- from both practical and esoteric perspectives. The food will be excellent, company beguiling and the fire always hot. Please ring 01364 653723 TODAY (not tomorrow) to book a place by the fireside.

We will explore potential differences between myth, folktale and legend and then promptly ignore those differences and let the images do their work. Time allowing we will also look at three very different perspectives on how myth reveals itself in the early 21st century. So a weekend rich in story, theory, fellowship and the wildly experiential.

I have been back about a week in the UK and shaken off the jetlag. Last bit of the trip was also terrific- great to get a blast of a truly cold, truly snowy winter - thanks Minnesota. 50+ plus men gathered in the wonderfully named Mound and we thrashed through old Nordic tales, Bardic poetry and some simple but profound ritual. Robert read from his soon to be released new book of poetry 'Talking Into the Ear of a Donkey' and raised the whole weekend to a new level of poetical excellence. Thanks to Tim Young and the Minnesota Singing Men for their organizing and general soul-crafting - it was good and punchy.

I dived into a snowdrift to check if it was a metaphor - it wasn't- and received a lovely little ritual cut to the forehead from the Ice. Looked exactly like i had been bottled, which made for interesting discussions at customs. So i am sensing the first little
buds hear and there, and the first occasional scent of a spring breeze. This means we must make the most of what's left of the hibernatory winter. I am surrounded, SURROUNDED by half open books working on my Parzival text- revolving around shame,
medieval courting rituals and the paralysis of the erotic imagination - should be some read i hope.

A few interesting reads from the study: SAVAGE GIRLS AND WILD BOYS: A history of Feral Children by Michael Newton, OUR MAGNIFICENT BASTARD TONGUE: the Untold History of English by John McWhorter, SAVING THE APPEARANCES: A Study of Idolatry by Owen Barfield (One of the Inklings), ORIGINS OF THE SACRED: The Ecstasies of Love and War by Dudley Young, THE LAUGHTER OF FOXES: A Study of Ted Hughes by Keith Sagar.

Hope to drop in some new essay chunks and ideas later this week or soon - in the meantime i must put my Headmasters hat on and say gruffly 'ATTENTION ALL COMING TO ROBIN WILLIAMSON, MARTIN SHAW WEEKEND. DESPITE YOUR MANY E-MAILS OF ENTHUSIASM, ONLY DEPOSITS ENSURE A PLACE - DON'T BE DISAPPOINTED- PLACES REALLY ARE LIMITED' Good-that feels better - i like giving Saturn room to roam.

See you on Friday by the fire......