#13 | Gambling with the Knuckle Bones of Wolves - Martin Shaw (School of Myth)
“No more tame language about wild things.”
I’m very excited to introduce my guest today - prolific author and mythteller Dr. Martin Shaw.
I first encountered Martin’s writing in the foreword to Stephen Jenkinson’s book Die Wise, and was immediately hooked by the elegant and unruly prose that leapt from the page. I found the same ecstatic spirit in Martin’s popular essays and numerous books including Scatterlings and the more recent Courting the Wild Twin.
Over the years, we’ve crossed paths at numerous teachings and locales, from a small island off the coast of British Columbia, to a 1000 year old pub near Dartmoor National Park in the UK, where he lives.
Martin has spent many years as a wilderness rites-of-passage guide, and honed his craft as a mythteller learning directly with the greats Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade... among many others.
I knew that one day I needed to speak to Martin about his time in the mythopoetic men’s movement, alongside his teaching house Westcountry School of Myth - who are self-described as a “school of courtly love disguised as a monastery for elegant pirates.
In our interview today we discuss range of topics: from a bardic role of the mythteller, why we are in the underworld (but don’t know it yet), and how this time of coronavirus might be an invitation into our collective initiation.
* ADDITIONAL TEACHING *
As an exclusive bonus For Supporters, we’ve recorded a raucous mythtelling with Martin Shaw where he shares the story of The Lindworm.
You can gain access to listen now by choosing any option on The Mythic Masculine Patreon.
From there, you’ll be invited to the Patreon-Only Group in the Community.
LINKS
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SHOW NOTES
Why we are in the underworld
The rite of passage, encounter with the spirits
Four years on a mountain
Role of a mythteller
Iron John & The mytho-poetic men’s movement
Weaving of story into rites of passage
Heading to America, robbed at the airport
Meeting Bly, Hillman and other leaders
Wilderness years of the men’s movement
Ancient roots of story
Understanding pornography from a mythic perspective
Awakening the true erotic
Men’s relationship to nature is a relationship to the feminine
The world seeks to be admired by you
We make things holy by the quality of attention
Defining Myth-ecology
Hating the word archetype
Mythology of gender
Getting eaten by the wild
The goddess of limit
Not spiritual imposition by spiritual invitation
The time of the wolf
FULL TRANSCRIPTION
IM: [00:03:08] Martin Shaw, welcome to the show.
Martin Shaw: Thank you very much.
IM: Would you please begin by sharing a glimpse at where you are in this moment?
Martin Shaw: Certainly. It is early evening in Dartmoor National Park in Devon. I am in my old stone hunter’s cottage next to 500 acres of old-growth forest, old oaks. There is a river at the bottom of my garden called the Dart River. About half a mile away there is a Celtic hillfort where I spent an inordinate amount of time.
IM: This is a particular time in the world right now as well. We were just chatting briefly earlier, and you mentioned that the streets were fairly empty. I wonder if you might describe what is the feeling tone of these days there.
Martin Shaw: Well, some would call it empty, but you could also look at it as pregnant. You could also look at it as pregnant, which I'm a great fan of. You look up in the air, I can't see any planes. I can't hear any cars. I am down to my last bottle of wine. I've got one duck egg for breakfast tomorrow, and I've just done 14 days straight, simply to be reunited with my daughter. So, there's a kind of a spaciousness around, at the moment.
My background…one of the things I've been doing for a long time is wilderness rites of passage, so I'm familiar with long periods alone in forests or by rivers, on the top of mountains, sort of in the old sense of the phrase “crying for vision.” And whilst I don't pretend for a second that, as a culture, everyone is doing that, it is certainly a curious moment, let's put it that way.
IM: You wrote a piece a little while ago which I really enjoyed, and I can't remember the exact title, but it said something like, “we are in the underworld, and we don't know it yet.” I wonder if you'd speak to that from when you were writing it at the time, which was before coronavirus and the whole lockdown and suddenly here we are. There were a number of phrases in that were haunting in their beauty. I would just love for you to reflect upon that now.
Martin Shaw: I think the first thing I should let you know, Ian (because very few people will know this), is that on the morning I even found out about the coronavirus, I had just walked into the cottage from a 101-day ceremony in the forest next to where I live. For 101 days, I'd gone there in a very simple, humble way and just listened. I went in around the time of all the extinction/rebellion stuff, and people were asking me to go to London and make lots of social commentary on it, and I knew in my gut I needed to do something, but it was not going to be in the public eye. It was going to be a private form of listening. So, I underwent something that I call calling songs, and it's very simple. I went to the woods every day with a calling song. I would tell a story, recite a poem, but in some way give it libation and then I would just see what showed up, what was drawn to it.
As that encounter deepened, I moved into a place I recognize very much from wilderness vigils where your own imagination starts to brush up against something that is more than entirely human. By the end of it, I was well and truly in the mysteries. I had just literally crawled out of that encounter when someone said, Oh, there's this thing called coronavirus, I don't think it'll last for long.
So, I am oddly sensitized, at this particular moment, to the notion of vigil, the notion of solitude. Before that, I'd written an article called We're in the Other World and We Don't Know it Yet, where I had a feeling that on a subtle, chronic level, we were shifting, culturally, societally into all the attributes, which as a mythologist I identify the underworld, not the other world, but the underworld. What I couldn't have anticipated was how literalized that was going to become within a few months.
IM: How do you know/how do we know that we are in the underworld? What are the indications?
Martin Shaw: [00:08:09] Well, this isn't quite answering the question. I'll go round in peculiar circles, but it's not out of disrespect. It's just the way that my mind works.
One of the things that you know if you're in the underworld is that you are dealing with a big word. You're dealing with the word initiation. A big question at the moment for a lot of people, and bearing in mind we are only seconds into this experience, and the question I'm being asked all the time, virtually now, is: Are we in an initiation experience? Does it deserve the title?
And actually, my response is: yes, that we are. But it's not an initiation that is curated by human beings. So, in other words, you can't relate it for too long to say a village-type ceremony or something coming from an Indigenous culture. We do not have a circle of well-seasoned adults walking us from one end of this to the other. We are in much wilder, more unpredictable territory. And this initiation is being curated by the earth itself. So that's the first thing, is let's take the human-centeredness out of the notion of what means initiation.
Secondly, and this is a question for everybody, and I cannot answer it as a general mass, is initiation means specificity. It means specificity. So, the question for all of us in about a year's time, not now, in a year's time, is this: what have I and we been initiated into?
So, those are the kinds of things that I'm curious about at the moment. Even though I would claim (and it's just my opinion), even though I would claim that this is an initiatory moment, I'm not claiming it is what you could call in the long run a successful initiatory experience.
So, think about this. Three guys go off to war. Everybody, I think by and large, would say that war, in the way that most people understand it, is an initiation. The three men come back. One of them commits suicide. One of them becomes an alcoholic. And one of them decides to do some work with their soul. But they all had the initiation.
We can't fixate just on the encounter. We have to fixate or think or brood on to how we curate and grow with it after. What's so unique about what is happening now is that I never personally have seen…we are being called en masse to enter this experience. So, in other words, there aren't people waiting for us back home, cheering us on, having gone through this already. We're all in this, so I'm not pretending for a moment that it isn't chaotic, it isn't messy and there isn't a lot of fear. What I do know is that when those things are in place, when you really do feel that the world potentially is being turned upside down, that for me is attributes of the underworld.
IM: Well, I'd love to keep that arrow in the air for a moment and actually circle right back to I understand your own encounter where you were driven or possessed to spend four years, I believe, in a tent, out, and that kind of encounter. What drew you to that encounter as part of this longer arc of your ability to recognize this time and what had called you.
Martin Shaw: Okay. So, we're going back in time a little bit, a couple of decades. I, in my early twenties, when I was about 23, I ended up fasting for four days and nights near, not on top of, but very near a mountain in Wales in Snowdonia called Cader Idris. On the last night of this long, protracted, rather boring, occasionally terrifying experience, I got absolutely catapulted into an encounter with what people would regard as spirits. It lasted about eight hours, and that's only eight hours in our dimension of time. I was over there forever, you know?
When I came back, I suddenly realized, as the poets say, I had to change my life. I had to turn my head entirely in the direction that that experience was pointing me towards. Thank God this was just before multitasking. I didn't have a phone in my pocket. I wasn't a father. I didn't have a computer. There was no email. I just left. In those days, you could still just leave. So, I left and was lucky enough to come into the sort of the orbit of two men who really deserve being mentioned.
One was called David Wendl-Berry, is called David Wendl-Berry (who's a wilderness guide), and an astonishing teacher called Nicholas Twilley, who as well as being a drummer, just has a deep sense of the soul of things. So, I had models as a young man. I do feel that men, generally, we need to see something sort of displayed. We like to see something exteriorized before we really go, “God almighty, I could try to become myself in that way.”
So, I went out of view, Ian, for four years, really to deal. I basically spent a year chewing on every day I'd spent out there fasting. During that time…I had an eight-year apprenticeship as a wilderness visual guide. People would think of it as the word vision quest, with David Wendl-Berry. And then, imperceptibly, I realized that the way I wanted to talk about these deep encounters was through myth, because if I talked about them directly, one of two things was going to happen. A, people would think that I'm mentally ill or B, you've become a charismatic, guru-type. And both of those things actually are not attractive to me. So, I realized that stories could flag up the reality of my consciousness without it constantly having to be about me. Does that make any sense? So that's where this began for me.
IM: I think it was Robert Bly in Iron John who said that the, I think he might use the phrase mythic imagination or that modern culture has really lost its mythic imagination. Part of what I'd love to speak to in this podcast is to begin to re-animate the listener's understanding of what that actually means. Because for so many, the word myth, even these days, usually means something that's not true. Or something that didn't happen. “Oh, it's a myth.” And yet, the way that you use myth and this more older tradition of myth-telling is a very different understanding of what myth is. I'd love for you to just illuminate your understanding of what it is to be a myth teller and what are you in service to?
Martin Shaw: It's always hard when I'm asked these questions to genuinely reinhabit my response and not trot something out because there's immediately a thousand soundbites at my disposal, and I won't do that.
To think in myth, for me, is a moment, a moment in your life of such depth that you realize the facts of the matter don't carry the story of the matter. The old phrase (I'm sure you have it in America) in England we have this “cutting to the chase.” That cuts the soul as well as anything else. Prolong the chase, prolong it in your romantic relationships, just prolong, prolong, prolong! I'm not a fan of the quick route, so for me, a mythic understanding to life is not perpetually seeking answers, but it is your capacity to wonder and as an oral storyteller, to wonder on the tongue. To wonder into time and space. Because actually you find that when you wonder out loud, stuff happens to your mind that doesn't happen when you are just quietly processing. Language does something.
There's an old idea in many fairy tales that if you can't articulate your desire, you almost don't deserve to have them. You almost don't deserve to have them. When you give them…(Rilke would think of it like this and Bly would think of it like this)…when you give them winged language, when they take flight, then you've just gambled with the knuckle bones of wolves. You've displayed yourself to the universe for a moment. You'll know you're on the right track because you start to piss people off. You won't be smooth anymore. You will have opinions. I'm not saying for a second you're a tyrant or a bully. It's nothing like that.
But actually, stories and the carrying of stories do come with a price tag. I find this with my students. I've said this many times before: the general sensation when a young scholar turns up at my door, usually the subtext is this phrase: “I want to be heard.” I want to be heard. There'll be a bit of a wrestling match around that, but then the stories really get to work on them, and the efficacy of the stories gets to work on them to a point where usually by the end of at least the first year with me, it's moved. The question has shifted on its axis or the statement from “I want to be heard” to “How do I speak?”
Because myth says…I know this is a generalization, but I'm going to stand by it...myth encourages the notion that language has a radical agency to it. There's those old Inuit poems of when words were like magic, that actually you shift your relatedness to everything through speech. But the stories have to know if you're serious. The stories, as far as I can tell, are living, troublesome beings. The thing to notice, if you're interested in stories, is if there's areas of the stories that are utterly mysterious to you. If they are absent from your psychic life, think twice about telling them yet, because as soon as you start that incant, to some degree you are encouraging that being to your door and that's when you need your libation program sorted out and the rest of it.
I'm in service…I wrote a little essay the other day called “Keeping the Smoke Hole Open.” In Siberia, if you want to assassinate someone in ancient Siberia, the first thing you had to do was close the top of the tent so God couldn't see what you were about to do. The notion was that if you close the smoke flap, you lose your connection to the divine world. To be honest, I could give you all sorts of highfalutin descriptions of what I'm in service to. But really, what my kid would tell you I'm in service to is keeping the smoke hole open.
IM: Beautiful. You encountered somewhere along the line then the what maybe what's understood to be the mythopoetic men's movement, I understand. I wonder how that came about from your own four years in the tent to rites of passage guide to being gotten by myth and when did that encounter now happen with the men's movement?
Martin Shaw: [00:21:45] It was independent, actually. I was living in my early twenties in a men's hostel in London. Things were pretty desperate, pretty grizzly. I got given as a birthday present, I was given a library card so I could go and get books out. So, I go to the library and sure enough, this would have been a few years after it had come out, there's Iron John, A Book for Men, Robert Bly. I take it home and first of all, it's familiar in a way because I'm Anglo-Irish, I've grown up in Devon, I've been around the mythopoetic my whole life. My father is still in his 60s, we have a good relationship. Same with my mum. This is the water I have been baptized in.
What was interesting, though, for me was how Bly…the amount of poetry he brought in was extraordinary, and I had never seen a fairy tale be taken so seriously as he took it. That the whole book, the whole narrative of the book, can be divided into sections and explored as a form of a knowledge of the psyche. I thought it was really exciting.
You will know that at that time, the sort of the wonderful three-headed monster of the mythopoetic movement was Robert Bly, James Hillman, and the great Michael Meade. Just for any of your new viewers or listeners, actually, I want to make it really clear, Meade was not the junior party in this. He is a brilliant and learned man, and he...if you bear in mind for a second, both Hillman and Bly were famous by the time the men's movement got started. Bly’s won the National Book Award. Hillman has written Revisioning Psychology. We're all in shock from these amazing statements, but Michael Meade is not so well known, but comes in off the bat and restores story to its absolutely central position in that movement.
For characters as bullish as they were (and I say that with a big smile), the fact that they managed to hold it together as friends and under that kind of pressure for so long, well, all I can say is there's millions (I'm serious), millions of men out there that deserve to thank them for that.
IM: What did you find yourself then? I mean, here you are in Devon. I understand that you've found the book and suddenly was it you've headed to America at some point to encounter them directly?
Martin Shaw: No, no. There's a longer, a little bit of a longer story. I'm living in this man's hostel. It's funny, Pete Townsend from The Who was living across the road, a very different lifestyle to me living on 75 pounds a week. But I loved it and I saw that what I knew was as a wilderness rites of passage guide, I'd never seen anybody take that mythopoetic frame and put it or integrate it into wilderness rites of passage, which is a very particular thing, and we wouldn't know about it in the West if it wasn't for two people: Stephen Foster and Meredith Little and the School of Lost Borders. They absolutely, categorically are the ones that in the early 70s revived this or introduced it to a Western climate.
So, what's going on in my young, mad mind is what Bly is doing and Meade is doing and Hillman is doing and all of those guys…and actually to be fair, I also want to speak up. I read Clarissa Pinkola Estes just as much as I did Bly. I read Marion Woodman just as much as I did [Bly] or the woman in a way that stands behind them, who's Marie-Louise von Franz, without which Iron John would be a very different book.
I just thought the whole thing was unbelievably exciting. I just couldn't believe that the waywardness of these ideas were allowed to exist. I thought they should all be in prison, you know? So, what I started to do on the desolate hillsides and moorsides of Britain was to tell stories when I was leading groups.
And then I heard of a very long-running conference that Bly ran called the Great Mother Conference, which is moved all over America. It’s very old. It's the oldest conference of its kind, started in the mid-70s. I found out that there was a way you could apply for a scholarship, but you had to get something called an email. And I was like, Oh fuck. I don't know what an email is, but I managed to track down what an email was from my tent, sent this thing off, and then I remember a friend rang me up and was like, You've got this thing, you've got to go to this place called America.
Now, I'd never been to America before. America, for me, is where you all sailed off from Plymouth Dock. You know, you don't live in the underworld, but you certainly live in the other world. You live where we sent all our heroes to recover and to die. For me, every time I'm in America, I'm always aware I'm in a kind of other world, for my temperament.
But anyway, I fly over. The whole thing is unusually excited. I get robbed at Newark airport. First thing that happened is that I miss my flight. I get kicked out, so I’m sleeping on the street outside the airport, and I'm woken up by a guy with his hand in my bag next to me and he's got my passport. Great move. This is my first conversation in America and he looks at me and says, Thank God you're awake. And then spun me this incredible trickster story about how he was actually an incredibly successful lawyer who'd also missed his flight and all his family had suddenly died and he realized he had no money and he just had to get back to Georgia. He was dripping with sweat as he was telling me this.
And do you know what I did? I kept the narrative going with him. I kept the storytelling going, Ian. I said, Wow, this is terrible. This is terrible. I said, Look, I want to help you, man. I really want to help you. So, you just give me the passport back. (I don't know where that's going to go). But listen, here's a few bucks. God bless. So he leaves and I am shattered by this experience. That's my first conversation in America.
Then three hours later, I'm on the little flight from Newark up to Portland, Maine. And the next thing that happens, I've met, within the space of about an hour, it seems, I met Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, Galway Kinnell, and on and on and on, and they just sort of held me down really and just looked after me and changed my life. I was different after that encounter. It's a nine-day conference. I went on to lead it for 10 years. I just retired last week and what a blessing that was.
Bly, as a man, was very powerful, very brilliant, bit of a bully on occasion, tremendous leader. More than anything, what I loved about Robert, and this for me was a very unusual thing, Robert Bly is someone that would change his opinion in an argument if you were good enough, if you were convincing enough, because Robert used to pick his scraps sometimes in public. So you've gotta be made of stern stuff when you're in front of the congregation and you're getting roasted. But if you can pull that off, if you could display that kind of courage under fire, he is your faithful companion for life and extremely generous.
But what I noticed about him earlier on was he will say something outrageous, as he's often said, just to see what happens. But if you can, if not exactly match it, but counter it, you would often see him soften, quieten, turn it around in his soul, and on occasion, he’d say I've got this all wrong. I got this all wrong. And that for me, watching a grownup, whether it's a man or a woman, function like that, was impressive to me.
IM: What did you encounter in the culture of America then that you didn't maybe anticipate, particularly around men's work and this whole idea of the men's movement?
Martin Shaw: [00:31:06] I come into men's work in…you could call it the “wilderness years.” You really, really could call it the wilderness years. Sort of mid-2000s. In 2006, nothing is happening. You've had this original triad and all sorts of other teachers that I could mention as well as Hillman, Bly, Meade, but they’re the ones most people are familiar with. You've had the explosion of Martín Prechtel on that world, in which most people are still recovering from just the kind of genius he is. You've got Malidoma Some coming in. You do have, with the men's work…and again, it's praise to Meade with Mosaic…a genuine understanding that it sucks if it's white land all the time.
They did as best as middle-aged guys can be. They really tried to get the memo. But by the time I arrive, all the guys, I guess, that were in their forties when they encountered this are now in their mid-sixties. The danger with all conferences is that it becomes a place where you get your annual tune-up, you get to do the sweat, you get to cry with your guys. You get to hear Robert, who you love, and then you go home again. Let me tell you, buddy. That counts for nothing in my world, or very little, because it doesn't grow corn once you're 50 feet from the conference.
I was young enough…I mean, I'm embarrassed almost by the fact that I got any airplay at all at that age. I just cringe. But I did have chutzpah and I was able to stand up and I was able to say to Robert, This is something…this lacks content now. This actually lacks content. What Meade brought, what Hillman brought, what Robert Moore brought, what they all brought was content. You learned stuff. It wasn't always about deep feeling. Deep feeling was not the shrine is that we all hunkered under. I like those moments, but for me there, you can't choreograph them. That's the divine spirit, that just happens. So for me, there was a little bit of a lack of content about it.
And for all…I want to throw in another idea, is actually in myth, if you have too much soul, you go crazy. There's idea number one. Everybody wants a more soulful life. Well, really think about that, because in Greek myth, what you actually want is psyche and eros. You want the soul, which you could think of that as the watery depths, the great poetic depths, but you need fire. And again, that was something that Meade would do, he can initiate, he will spark up.
So, to be honest, when I got there (and this was a particular conference in the Midwest), I was a little distressed by the fact it felt actually too comfortable for me. And the rituals…well, I'm certainly letting it all hang out today…the rituals were…because these are my friends, these people are my friends, were a little theatrical. They were like conference rituals, whereas I was coming out of long, long periods in the bush, and that's a whole other thing when you got the wilderness nibbling at you week after week.
However, I want to stress this. What I really encountered from the men's work was the guys that had been doing it a long time were really fabulous beings. They were encouraging of younger men. They didn't need to be rock stars. They were not looking to just affirm you, but bless you, and I made friendships there and I saw behaviour modeled that I've never forgotten.
Actually, as I'm talking to you, I'm realizing that the reason I really needed to be there was not to do with being noticed by one of these people. It was because I was a young dad. In fact, my daughter was the age that your child is now, and I needed to sit quietly by the fire every night with guys that were 15/20/30 years into it. How do we display upstanding-ness? How do we display courage under fire? What does it really mean to move from a mentor to an elder? These were the conversations that were freely given. So, I want to counter my earlier gripes about the conferences with the wisdom of actually those two or three back rows of men that had been doing it for a long time.
The reason the mythopoetic stuff works, in my opinion, for men is because its roots are ancient. It's ancient. It is a good thing. You sit in a room full of men in the half-light and hear a story. God almighty, you're into magic before anybody said a word, just the physical reality of that. And of course, what happens is we're all hungry for it. Women are desperately hungry for it. Men are hungry for it. All the gradients of gray between those two genders are too, all the colours. So, yeah.
IM: I'm recalling a pub actually, that we sat in, I think maybe five years ago now, I believe it was in Devon or Totnes, and I think the pub itself was maybe 1100 years old or something like that. I remember I asked you, I think at that moment too, about this time as we sort of just brushed the surface and I said, Hey, I'd love to talk with you at some point about those days and the movement. You said to me then, if I recall correctly, “Nothing will change unless men are willing to talk about porn.”
Martin Shaw: Yeah.
IM: Something like that.
Martin Shaw: Is this that moment?
IM: Might be that moment! I've always been curious about that because conversation spun out and continued on. But I'm curious again, there was something in that that you felt really clear about and I would love maybe, if this is the moment…
Martin Shaw: Yeah, let's just be clear right now. I'm not immune to the lure of porn any more than anyone else is. So, this is not Moses sitting here in judgment. I think my take on it is quite simple, before we get into other issues around porn.
One is that I think if you really get hooked into it, I think it freezes your sexual imagination. That's what I think it is, which is why I have this peculiar theory that porn is funded by the evangelical movement. Because in a way, it makes, it actually…do you know what? Okay. This is happening to me right now, this is my thought: porn domesticates, by and large. It tells your sexual imagination…it rewires you in a way that does not require that, not just these ghastly words like being present, but actually just your full, imaginative awakeness to the moment. I could go on about this for hours, but that's my essential take on it, is that we need to be wary of anything that corrals and secretly anesthetizes the eroticism of anybody. Boom.
IM: Mmm. I love that. It domesticates. I mean, I'm curious again, how does this jostle with the general conversation with men, and in particular related to around this whole idea of soul work and the rest that it's somehow generally thought of in addictive terms, that the partners that are upset but often tolerate it and all this and men carry up deep shame around it. But there's something else that you're speaking to, I think, even like mythically illuminating the consequence.
Martin Shaw: That's it. I don't want to get into a…there's plenty of other places you can go to have a conversation about is it good, bad, or indifferent for anybody to look at porn? That's not really the thing. The thing for me is the concern that you actually…and just to be flat, there are many people that would disagree with me on this point. Hillman wouldn't agree with what I'm saying now. He'd have another brilliant, very different thought. But for me, by and large, as I said, it's a kind of sedative. There isn't an aphroditic quality to it. And again, Hilman would say there is, so don't take my word for it.
Secondly, we are in a moment in time where we need the gods present in as many different dimensions of our life as possible. Specifically, one of them is the bedroom. I've been telling an old fairy tale a couple of days ago about a young king who has a guide with him. Think of Merlin. For one reason or another, the guide is frozen into stone. The young king puts the guide next to the bed where he and his wife will make love. The entire time, the years that they make love there, is the shadow of your frozen guide. You make love in the shadows of the frozen being.
So please don't think I'm here to be a party pooper. This is not the issue. It's not disapproval or any of that. It's just making sure your guide is alive and you're not working through frozen shadows.
IM: I'm really curious about this idea of the erotic. In particular, I find your writing quite textured and quite erotic in a way that I can feel this kind of unruly wildness in the way that you write. It's a very sensual, often, and so I feel like there's something in what you've tapped or your capacity to articulate. I mean, is it with that eroticism present? That's what I'm so curious about.
Martin Shaw: [00:42:21] Yeah. You know, Ian, you're right. It comes from the four years in the tent. It comes through long periods not being tremendously erotically active with the opposite sex. But realizing, wonderfully, that that doesn't bolt down an erotic relationship to the world in general.
Now, I'm not going to go on about this because already I can hear it as a franchise. Already I'm bored. If I was listening to this, I'd be bored at this moment. I’d go, Oh God, it's another “resensualize your every day.” Forget that.
But the truth is it did happen and the way it happened is something I'd recommend too. If you are feeling a bit domesticated, if your prick has turned to jelly, which is an odd…isn't that an interesting thing that that's happening? Do you know, here's a phrase for it, Ian. I hope you leave this in. I've got an Irish friend who's a comedian and in Ireland, the cases of impotence is said now so rife for men of my age, is called soft mickey. We've got a case of soft mickey. We've got a case of soft mickey.
And you know what? You can pop a blue pill, but you want to try learning by heart five stanzas by Pablo Neruda. Try that fucker before you do anything else. There's some lines by Neruda: the women lie in cornfields with their hands on their hearts dreaming of pirates. God almighty, that's beautiful. It's beautiful. Already I’m different, already I'm changed. So that's all I'm saying. In your private life, be as outrageous as you want to be. I don't care. The only time I get involved is when the imagination itself is checking out.
IM: There is a meandering to this erotic tale, and for me it's really about trying to understand maybe what happened to the mytho movement, whereby it seemed to almost spiral in on itself and some ways largely go underground. Except for, I understand the conference kept going for a number of years and maybe still going until maybe with this coronavirus it might be ended, but I also feel myself as a younger...when I came to this myself (Iron John), it was 2015 and there's a whole fantastic story, actually, how I also encountered the book for the first time, from going through my grandfather's things after he died, when I was cleaning up his apartment. So, it's a fascinating tale there.
But there's something about turning towards the world that I feel is something I recognize again and again in your writing and what you seem to be advocating for, this awakening of a love for the world again. Which also I think is paralleled in…previously on this podcast, I interviewed Charles Eisenstein, and he has been speaking about the sense of the shift of this archetype of relating to mother as a mother, the archetype of the mother, to a lover. That there's something about this awakening of the lover, and particularly for men in this time. How is that a part of the invitation that's being asked for?
Martin Shaw: Well, that's great. I love that train of thought because I think one of the reasons I was always so drawn to the women that wrote mythopoetically, as well as the men, was because I knew something about my relationship to nature was tied up to my relationship with the feminine. And actually, I really needed to find out about that and will remains so.
For me, I'm pleased, there is…mother to lover. Mother to lover. It's funny, because I've been leading this thing for years called the Great Mother Conference and I'm just imagining it now. Well, maybe the next stage we’ll call it the Great Lover Conference. Or though I can see all forms of mayhem galloping from that thought, but maybe that's what needs to happen.
There's a philosopher who I love called Gaston Bachelard, and he wrote one of the greatest books that anyone has ever written called The Poetics of Space. Bachelard says, “The world seeks to be admired by you.” The world seeks to be admired by you. Now that is lover statement, that is lover energy. Reading that in my little tent 20 years ago meant I realized I could start to court the earth in a way that in the past I would have wanted to court a woman.
Of course, what's interesting is then when you do meet a physical person, a woman, they can smell the difference. They can scent…they can catch that there isn't desperation in any of this. It's very playful. So, it's an interesting thought: the world seeks to be admired by you.
One of my practices…again, I've talked about this many times, but it never gets dull, in a way…is give something you love 12 secret names. Look at it from 12 different angles because, actually, we make things holy by the quality of attention we give them. That's how we make holiness. We give it attention.
Years ago, I was in a hut talking to a group of men (they were Vietnam vets) about the impossibility of the return for them from that war. I brought the notion up of could you find something that you just chose to name and name and name…keep looking for the beauty? And at that moment, a hawk flew into the window and died. And we were all so heartbroken at the death of the hawk and the weirdness of it in the moment. Each man went outside and whispered 12 secret names into the ear of the hawk.
That's the kind of thing, on a very small scale, that I really believe in. It's not a concept for me. That's just a reality.
IM: Mmm. This phrase, “myth-ecology,” has come up, I believe, in your writing, on your website of your school, and I don't know if I'm saying it right. Myth-ecology. And that does seem to be this braiding…
Martin Shaw: Yeah. I just made it up, man. Myth-ecology, myth-ecology, myth-ecology. Try it a few times. It's not…usually whenever anyone sort of creates a word, it lasts for a fraction of a second and I didn't care. That's fine. If that happens, I don't care. But it is appropriate, actually, for the work that I've been doing because I'm in love with the moment in stories where suddenly the earth speaks through the story. In other words, if we're interested in, right now, in how do we talk to the earth? For me, we, across species, weave stories back and forth. There are stories out there, not an unlimited amount, but there are stories out there that have for me a myth…even, I can't say it…a myth-ecology texture to it. These two things are woven together, so that's organically ended up as my work.
Do you know, I don't know if you've seen it, but I'm making little videos for kids at the moment who are trapped at home. It's so unbearable for me that these little cherubs are locked up with their mad families, like mine. I thought, Oh wow, okay, I'll do it. I'll do it. And of course, it's the one thing…I love it because it's the end of all credibility if you're trying to be impressive, but it's so much more important to speak to little kids because they're the little sprouts. What I've noticed though, in telling those stories for children, is how many stories that I tell involve the changing of shape. A woman that is really a fox, a woman that is really…a man that is a bear, etc., etc. I realized that organically and unconsciously, I've been led in that direction.
Here's a secret of mine. I hate the word archetypes. I never use it. I think it's grotesque. It's unsexy. There's no image to it. If you've got to say something like that, you could use the word primordial. A primordial energy. But archetype for me, it's like a make of car. “The 2020 archetype.” [Laughs] So, I would encourage everybody to come up with something different.
To be honest, one of the things I struggled with in men's work was rather stiff, formalized patterning of male behaviour. Because I knew when I was a kid, actually, I found it very hard to sort of emotionally stay in the shape of a little boy for more than 10 minutes. You're experiencing this probably with your child right now. They want to kind of lurch or leap into some other shape, so I am organically disposed to a wider, more fluid and playful display of the human character. I'm just more porous, I suppose.
Here's another point for the history books is that, actually, if you think about the 1990s, two massive books come forward. One is Iron John. The other one is Women that Run with the Wolves. And what that does is it sets up myth for the main discussions around gender. And we all ate from that table. This is a place where you learn a lot about being a woman or being a man, etc. I knew when I was getting into this, this was not going to be the main thrust of what I thought about.
The main thrust of what I was going to be thinking about was probably our own delicious, troubled, grief-strewn relationship to the earth. And ironically, I think I was probably up-to-date with that. That was probably the right memo for me to get. For a long time, myth became a shorthand for gender exploration, and that's good, but there's a lot of it already about, so it's not going to be a place where I put that much of my time.
IM: I really appreciate that articulation of how the orbit of men's work seemed to continually revolve around like the human and the personal and the personal psyche and all the rest of it. I feel like going back to the conversation around initiation and the rite of passage and the whole thing, you did use a phrase actually in, I believe it was on the website for the School of Myth, around the vigils that are offered through the school. I think you spoke to this sense that the idea that a fast is only about one’s own ability to see themselves differently, right, is maybe interesting, but not that much of an achievement. I mean, that's how I took from it. But that there's a different kind of orbit that is meant to be reconstituted, and that seems to be revolving around the relationship to perhaps the soul of the earth, if that's even a fair…yeah? And, and I would love to speak to that.
Martin Shaw: [00:54:11] I said earlier on that in one way or another, I feel stewed in the mythic traditions since I was a kid. Through my parents, through my geographic location, through the bottom of my garden. There's this river and the poet Ted Hughes (who in England is extremely well-known) used to fish and fishing was an enormous thing for him. It was a massively erotic form of hunting, and he's a controversial figure, but you're bumping up against that kind of thing all the time. There's only 10 miles away from here is where Robert Graves wrote the first iteration of the white goddess when it had the wonderful title of “The Roebuck in the Thicket,” which not many people know about, but he was in England at the end of the war and he wrote it here.
So, I've always been around it. I recognized the genius of what Robert [Bly] and others were doing, but I actually had a slightly different root system. And that root system is essentially bardic. And the bardic mode is that at a certain point, you go out and get absolutely reforged in the natural world. You don't go out with any expectations about becoming a nice guy or a more responsible member of the Iron Age community you're in. You go out to see if you get struck by lightning or not. The stakes are very high.
And of course, anybody listening to this will go, well, hold on, isn't that what the Lakota do? Isn't that what the Choctaw do? Isn't that what the Miwok do? Well, you’d be right. The kind of devouring nature of Western culture where we're basically going out to get fixed with nature as a backdrop is abhorrent. It's natural when you recognize that culturally, we are adolescent. That's where we are.
It's very weird for me that nine times out of ten, if someone is going out into the fast in the forest, even if they are 65 years old, the root issues around it are adolescent issues. There are still doorways they need to step through. Whereas in actual fact, rites of passage, it's a much broader world than just the adolescent to the adult. But because we are so frozen in the groove of devouring, we go out and we go, well, okay, I'm going to devour this now. And the wonderment of the vigil, the horror, the divine horror of the vigil is it eats you. You get eaten. Gobble, gobble, gobble. That's why I love it so much.
IM: I think it was actually in the opening of Die Wise, the book by Stephen Jenkinson, where I first encountered your words, but you had a phrase something like speaking to people going abroad and gobbling ayahuasca as another attempt to find their own selves differently. But I wonder what is it about that consumptive nature that is perhaps showing itself up, even now as the world itself seems to be, like you said at the beginning, instigating some kind of threshold to rite of passage of which it's easy to continue to hold humans at the centre. And yet there seems to be something else afoot.
Martin Shaw: Yes. I mean, isn't it interesting that the whole reason why we're all on lockdown is because we can travel to so many places these days. My question for me today is, Are we actually over-connected? Am I over-connected? Is this an opportunity to actually limit…the way I think about it is at the moment I'm sitting with the goddess of limit. I'm sitting with the goddess of limit. It is unwise for me or anybody else at this second to say anything too emphatic about what is happening.
Cause you know, guess what? We don't know what is happening. And again, when we try and deliver our pithy little statements, what we are doing is trying to stabilize a moment that we need to sit in the enormity of it. We need to be uncomfortable. I am profoundly uncomfortable despite my, in a way, my ease in the first few weeks of this. It's getting more acute now, and as a guide, as a wilderness guide, you never encourage people to speak too readily, too quickly about the encounter because you don't know what it is yet.
You are neutralizing, you're pulling the stinger out, effectively, if you make two moves, too quick. So that's the distinction I made earlier on between, yes, on the one hand, I do believe we're in an initiatory experience, but I don't necessarily know how well that's going to go for us. The initiation is not coming from the human, but the more-than-human and the thing for all of us individually to chew on is what is it an initiation into?
The way I see it is we've had this general pandemic, but all of us at the moment are not celebrating or investigating it in the way that a village does. We are like little hermits. We're like little…each house right now, there's millions of houses which are like these little alchemical cells. Where all sorts of things connected to this are getting played out in our family dynamics. It's all present, if we just have the eyes to see the thing. Some of those alchemical experiments are going to boil over. Some of them are going to make gold. Some of them, the fire will go out beneath them. So, that's an odd set of images. But that's how I see this at the moment.
IM: Based on your experience guiding people in that liminal space, how can people be at the ready right now? In a meaningful way, without trying to make sense of it too quickly, but to be engaged in some fashion, with some sense of skillfulness?
Martin Shaw: [01:01:10] Again, all I'm interested in right now is anything that has a great deal of love at its centre, or some major wisdom. The rest can go to hell. I’m just looking for love and for wisdom, and that's what I wish for everybody else.
So, remain curious to what is going on around you. There are many people at the moment…my email's full of a well-informed spiritual types saying, “Oh, this was always going to happen because of the degradation of the West. I hope you feel good now. Look what's happened.”
For me, that is an irresponsible, useless thing to do to people right now. I am interested in not spiritual imposition. I'm interested in spiritual invitation. This is an invitation, man. I know it's terrifying. I know we are scrabbling to catch up with the encounter. It could be argued that the only reason this is happening is because we have so viciously reneged on initiations and rites of passage between us and the wild. But this is the moment that we are in. And I just know right now we need…so in other words, what I'm saying…I'm rambling a bit, Ian, but what I would say is, let's just sit down and see what happens next. You know, stay curious to it. But let's not issue, including myself, too many protestations about it.
IM: Hmm. I think we're getting close to the completion here. I'd love to maybe end with a story. I think I caught just a bit of it, but it was the sense that we are out of the time of the horse and into the time of the wolf. And I feel maybe that might be an appropriate myth to leave us with.
Martin Shaw: Okay. I'd love to do that.
Once upon a time, there were these three brothers. They were the sons of a czar, a Russian czar. The oldest two who called Dimitri and Vasily. They ride off on their horses, they’re playboys, really, and they go missing. The youngest son, who no one has any time for really, goes out looking for them, he’s kind of the runt of the litter, really.
The lad is on his horse (he’s called Ivan), and he comes to a huge, dark forest. In the front of the forest there is a rock, and it says this. It issues what you would call an initiatory statement. “If you go left…if you go left, you will die, but your horse will live. If you go right, the horse will die, but you will live.” So, if he goes one way, he dies. Goes the other way, the horse dies, something like that.
So, I'm afraid for horsey. He makes a decision that he's going to go right. After a couple of days, he's pulled off the horse by a wolf that gobbles up the horse and he's sitting there hyperventilating, and the wolf looks at him and says, “Listen. If you want to find your brothers, you are going to have to give up riding on the back of a horse. That horse, that is all the domestic sensibilities, all the stuff you've grown up with. It's not a time for the horse anymore. This is going to be a time for the wolf. I run differently. I breathe differently. I think differently. Get on my back.”
So, the young lad gets on the back of the wolf and is catapulted into one disastrous encounter after another. Wonderfully, in stories, you sometimes learn by your mistakes. All of the time, whilst he's actually trying to find his brothers, he gets caught up with all sorts of encounters with animals, disputes with kings, and eventually someone called the fair Ilana, who lives at the very edge of the world. Other stories they'd sometimes call her Vasilisa. And if we were in Russia, Ian, right now, if I even mentioned the word Ilana, everyone in the household would sigh. [Sighs] Alana has arrived.
It's the combination of the boy that rides the back of a wolf, the wolf itself, and the woman from the very edge of the world that in the end brings back unity between the centre of the kingdom and the wild edge. So, you no longer have the false dichotomy of culture in one hand and wildness in the other. What you have, through their shenanigans, is a culture of wildness, and that's I think, really, right now what we need is a deeply beautiful Aboriginal reality.
IM: Mmm. Thank you, Martin.
Martin Shaw: It’s a pleasure.
