And you and I sat surrounded by broken glass, smoking these cigars and drinking
Guinness, remember at the top of Grafton Street, and the thing you said,
and I agreed with you said, you know, myth and story is
just the best way to talk about almost everything. It's the indigenous way to
talk about everything. It's the classical way to talk about everything. It's the
Artherian way. It's the Irish way, it's the Russian way, it's the
Aboriginal way. It's what we've always done. There's a very old notion I'm
interested in, which is human beings get made. It's actually a process.
And if you don't have connection to stories, rather like a cloak, then
you are prone to enormous floods of anxieties. You get older as you experience
the dress of life. Despite all the gadgetry, if we don't have this
very ancient technology called the story close to hand, we were unequipped in some
This is Jonathan phel Welcome to the symbolic world. So hello everyone. I
am overjoyed to be with Martin Shaw again. Martin John's been on my channel
before. We've done some events in Ireland and in England. He is a
mythographer, professor at Stanford, wonderful writer, amazing storyteller, and he is
going to be one of the headline speakers for the Symbolic World Summit. So
I'm really excited to be able to continue our exchanges. And so Martin,
thanks, thanks for coming on. Oh, Jonathan, delighted to be here
and very much looking forward to Florida in February. And so, Martin,
you are a storyteller in ways that is difficult for reminding people to understand.
So this is something that I also at first didn't totally grasp and in meeting
you, I started to understand it, which is that you are one of
the few people I don't know left in the world, not many people that
tell stories over sometimes days, you know, like hours, and then sometimes
days. And you are getting ready now to give a version of the Artissey.
Yeah, that's true, Jonathan. I'm going to be telling the truncated
version from Friday night through to Sunday afternoon, really without a breath. That's
the synopsis. That's synopsis. So I'll report back to you how that went.
I haven't told it since before Lockdown. So stories from a Bardic perspective,
they are illrascible animate beings, and they require a kind of courtship if
you're going to tell them. They're not just repertoire. They're not just going
to show up up. And so I found that for the first couple of
weeks, the Odyssey simply didn't want to be remembered by me. It had
gone into a huff, It had gone to the back of Polypemous's cave and
wouldn't come out. So you just have to sit there with a story and
show fidelity to it until finally it says, okay, let's try this out.
But as you will know through our time together, I don't tell stories
in this kind of recital manner. It's very much imagining out loud. So
that interest in spontaneity, that interest in trafficking in wild thoughts, that was
kind of what got me into this in the first place. Yeah, But
so there's a kind of a I guess there's a mix between getting the basic
let's think the basic structure of the story right, you know, you know
you have the element that you can't transgress that, and then weaving through that
with the kind of improvisation. Think of it like a recipe that's been passed
down through a family, and no one is meant to mess with the recipe.
And for the first hundred times you cook it, you cook it exactly
as your aunt told you to do. But on cook up one hundred and
one you discover smoke paprika. And you don't know if your aunt you were
about smoke paprika or not, but you can add that little thing. It's
to do with what they call the sense and the matter of stories. The
matter of the story is what you just described. It's the A to B
to see. But the sense of the story is the genius in it.
And it's why three people could turn up and tell the Handless Maiden, but
there'd be one telling that you would energetically, you'd lean, you'd lean to
them rather than all three. It's not a sort of generic handout. Storytellers
are odd figures who have usually been hurt by the world early on, and
to make sense of a cosmos when most mythology is lying in pieces around our
ankles. Stories of sense making devices, you know, their codes of a
fashion. Well, the Odyssey, I know when I told the ancient stories
to my kids, the Odyssey was the one that just stuck to them.
My daughter, when she was eleven years old or maybe even I think around
maybe even younger, like ten to eleven, she memorized that ABC of the
Odyssey. She knew all the sections. She didn't know, I mean,
she didn't memorize the story, but she could tell you what all the narrative
elements were. And she did it one time at a campfire where she just
kind of enumerated the narrative elements at least of the story. And so I
was really surprised at just how much it's stuck. And so now and you're
rereading it and sitting with it, what insights have you come out have come
out of that time? Well, there's a strong one. If you were
a Mediterranean warrior for three thousand years ago, you lived in what I would
call a claos culture, not chaos. Claos now, claos means imperishable glory.
It means your reputation that lives on once you're gone. And you remember,
to a Mediterranean warrior, that's not heaven you're going to. It's this
far more ambivalent underworld. So you want your reputation to exist longer than you.
But here's the rub about claos claos is entirely dependent on external validation.
You can't give yourself claos your sense of inner oblige. It doesn't matter,
It doesn't really matter. There is no U in the way that modern people
think about it. It is all about how other people look at you.
So as I come to telling it again, I realize we're living in another
age of laos. And our screens, which are the temples that we now
generally serve in, and our mirrors which we are entranced in. Like Narcissus,
We've replaced we've replaced what we've replaced shelter with comfort, religious shelter to
spiritual comfort. We have a kind of a la carte attitude towards you know,
cosmological, spiritual, religious issues, and we just pick and choose what
we want. So that's been the strange thing, and it often happens with
a story. There's a reason why the Odyssey has now been remembered an active
act of remembering for what twenty eight hundred years something like that. It's because
the Odyssey is happening every day. The issues that are going on in it
are hardy perennials. They don't go away. So the claos thing has been
big for me. And so when you say that that we live in this
new aide of clay art, you mean in terms of the the the likes
and the kind of this this kind of outer approbation of our of our of
our existence. Let's say, like we need to we need to be seen
by the world, We need to show ourselves on Instagram and to have that
kind of Is that is that what you mean? Yeah, it's a kind
of anti John of the Cross. It's an anti still small voice. These
days, if we even get in touch with our still small voice, we
may be getting fake news from our own psyche because because we don't tell stories
anymore, we don't actually do it in the jaw what they call the mead
hall of the jaw. Then stories remain. As there's a poet called Friedrich
Holderland and he says, God's be careful. You have become decorations in their
poems. And the reason it's good to tell stories orally is the stories stop
becoming decorative or witty. They bring their troubles right to your door and they
start to do the work that can only be told when you actually involve it.
So kudos to your daughter qudos to my daughter, who, when she
was about eight knew all of Wolf from Varnishingbach's possible, And I implore everybody,
I'm so thrilled with what's going on with Symbolic World and this whole network
that's happening. YouTube has become a really interesting place. My one petition would
be that when people study your story with you, they go away in small
groups and tell it to each other. Just try it. Take a risk.
Maybe they're a myth tell us amongst you. That's an interesting idea.
We're doing now a kind of intense reading of Bewolf with Richard Rowlin, and
it's it's really insightful because it's something like a Christian reading of bea Well,
trying to help people see the Christian cosmology that a lot of the scholars actually
can't see because they don't know the Book of Enoch and all these weird traditions
in Christianity. But it's a good idea to then maybe take that and be
able to and then retell Baywell. I used to do it too. I
actually memorize the elements of Bewolf and would tell it like at the campfire we
we we'd have this storytelling at the campfire, try to kind of get into
the story. Yeah, I I I'm by the way. I'm very interested
that you and Richard, and thank you for introducing me to Richard's work.
The man has a mind as big as a prairie. He's fantastic and the
two of you together Wow. From next week on Substack all the way to
Christmas, I am telling the Icelandic Saga of King Croft Krackey, which is
the dark twin of Berewolf's. It's darker than Berewolf. Okay, uh,
just as a just as a just in case people were wondering what paganism really
look like. AVO. There you go. And so that's that's an insight
that you Just before we started recording, you mentioned something about that. You
said that you feel like the world is becoming pagan again, but with some
differences. I think the world is turning. The world has to turn pagan
because atheism. Atheism is simply too depressing. And I think the argument of
rationality and in rationality, in irrationality, that's been a big religious argument over
the last hundred years. I think to some degree we're past that now.
I think people are aware, we all serve some kind of temple, and
wherever we put our attention for any length of time, if we look at
it in a certain way, we afford it enough significance, it becomes holy
to us. That's what happens. But I think we are becoming pagan,
but without without the influence of the Olympians, without the wisdom of those you
know, those beings that direct and inform those stories. So I'm not advocating
for it, but claos is a pagan response to the world. Clos is
a pagan response to the world. Imperishable glory is what was going on in
Greek and Roman myth. Therefore, I see through you know, being a
father and having a teenage daughter, what is coming at her endlessly through social
media is an attempt to create just that kind of thing. Yeah. One
of the things that I've been thinking about in terms of the ardissey. You
know, I've been thinking that it is very appropriate to this time now,
because the ardisty is this desire to return home, you know, the sense
of being adrift, being kind of you know, moving around without without having
an anchor, and and you know, encountering all these strange principalities and't the
strange woman and all of this, all of this stuff, but then with
this desire to kind of return home to the hearth, and so it feels
like it's an appropriate it's an appropriate story to tell today because we all seem
to feel that we have we feel alienated, we feel like we don't have
a place to stand, and then we don't even know where to look,
at least for now, where to look to find that home again. Yeah.
Now, you and I, coming from an Orthodox background, would have
the same take on that, probably that C. S. Lewis did,
which is you're really that nostos. That's the word the yearning that Odysseus has
for Ithaca is nostos. In Welsh, it's called hiraus. It's this,
it's homecoming, but it's more than homecoming. Lewis sensed it when he used
to experience what he in Tolkien called northernness. It's a feeling, it's it's
a it's a feeling. The Jungians would call animal possession. But that's a
grotesque phrase, so forget I ever said it anima possession. But the point
of it is from an Orthodox perspective, from a Christian perspective, that is
the divine world starting to radiate through this one and call to you. But
it's interesting because you will know before you know. The other great text from
Homer is the Iliad. Now, the Iliad is not a story of nostos.
It is a story of war. It's a story of a great conflict
in the great hero of that era Achilles. And Achilles has the choice of
because his mother is a goddess, he knows things about his life he should
not know. And one of the things he knows is he has a choice.
Do I want a small life filled with laos or do I want a
long life but absolutely obscure. And he goes down the James Dean Jimi Hendrix
dead at twenty eight route. You know, but I'm fascinated by this because
now, the first time we met, we ended up talking about the Odyssey,
and mid conversation with you, I had a thought that I will now
repeat because it's significance to me. I think in the oddest we hear an
echo of the arrival of Christ, a foreshadowing. And the reason why is
it's when Odysseus goes to the underworld and he bumps into Achilles, who does
not have good words for him, but he asks Achilles, how's this Clayos
working out for you down here in the dark, and an Achilles says,
sooner be a slave to a poor man than king of the underworld. Now
that is an anti claos move. And as far as I can tell,
the beattitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the sheer, weird achido,
countercultural moves of Christ turn all of that on its head. You're hearing what
eighteen hundred years or something, No, eight hundred really, I suppose with
the Homer before Christ, you're hearing the end of one age and the beginning
of another. What's so mind blowing for me is, you know, Copernicum
was on a trade route, so it's possible that, you know, can
you imagine the Jewish boy is hearing some of these stories, not just the
oldisty, but he might have heard fragments of them. I'm not saying they
influenced him. It's just a mind boggling thought. Yeah, to think that
that would be part of the same kind of storytelling world I've also seen in
in Odysseus, when Odysseus returns home and he he dresses as a as a
beggar, basically as a as a beggar, and then he what he wants.
It seems like he wants his son to recognize him through he wants the
people that he loves to recognize him, possibly through the disguise or or or
he's using the disguise to get back into to the house. There's something about
that also about Christ who who comes as? Who is this king who's hiding
in the in the lowest, the lowest image, you could say, I
don't know if you've ever thought about that. Yeah, more so recently than
before. You know, the last time I told the story, I was
a screaming pagan romantic, so a few things have changed in the last five
years. One thing I'd say, though, is all of the trouble that
Odysseus gets into is because of when he blinds the Cyclops. The Cyclops says
to him, who did this? And Odysseus can't bear leaving without announcing his
achievement. And when he says that, the Cyclops's father, Poseidon says,
right, I've got a ZIP code from Odysseus. Now he's done, and
again, in a reversal of Chlaos. The only way Odysseus can return to
Ithaca. He leaves as somebody and he returns as nobody. And it's only
through that shift does he finally display that wonderful word metis his particular wit,
his particular cunning to get through being contact with his son Telemachus speak to Penelope
and then all the mayhem that then goes on. But that Christ connection is
is really interesting. Yeah, well, I mean it's interesting in the sense
with obviously Christ didn't have that other part and you can see that in you
can see that in Christ. You see the opposite, which is it's interesting
because Christ hides his divinity during the story. He actually he always says people
and he heals people and says, don't tell anyone, you know, you
know, don't tell anyone what I did. This weird. And it's only
as he gets closer to his crucifixion, and it's in the moment when he's
basically been beaten, you know, he's been tortured, he's bloody, and
he's standing there in front of the judges, in front of the Sondrin and
then he says, you know, like I'm that I'm the son of Man.
Basically it's like and the you know, the the high priest rips his
vestment. But it's like in that it's it's almost like a very different than
the story of Odysseus, which is that at first he hides it and when
he reveals it, it's in the worst possible moment. It's like it's in
the moment where you're a prisoner and you've been completely humiliated, and now you
say, I am the son of a son of man. It's a wow.
It's a wow reversal. Yes, And it's why as a mythologist,
I just avoided my root system. I avoided Christ for fifty years because he
was nonsensical to me. It's not difficult for me to fall into a kind
of biological resonance with the great heroes of the earlier stories. But Christ is
a much more thin skinned, pressurized kind of individual. Do you know.
It's funny, because I'm a storyteller. Whenever Christ says, don't tell anybody
in my mind in a fairy tale, whenever you say don't do that,
it means who there? Now, I don't think that's what he meant.
But I always smile at those moments because there's nothing more that will be quickly
disclosed, you know, that's a fad that it just it point to think
about, like it could be part of the some of the deep ironies that
Christ manifest, you know, like they're they they appear, especially in the
Crucifixion, but there are the deep ironies in his story where you know,
he's humiliated, but it's treated like a king at the same time. So
it's possible that when he says that he's it's almost like he's saying, you
know, here's a seed, you know, keep it, keep it safe,
and then it grows, and it starts to grow, and it starts
you know, I mean, this is this is very much your bread and
butter, you know, your your bread and beer in terms of what you
love. But the the shock of coming to the Bible profoundly in Middle Age
and recognizing it's this kind of echo chamber where everything is talking to everything else
all the time, and nothing is wasted. There's not a line in the
book I can find that is wasted. Now, there are things I struggle
with constant I think you're supposed to. I think that there's something about scripture
which makes it that there are some stories it's like you can see exactly what
you said, you can see all of these things connecting, and you can
notice that there's this giant web of references that are that are going backwards and
forwards, and so you trust it. But then you come to some bit
where, you know, in the Book of Judges, the man who cuts
his his his mistress into pieces and sends it off to the tribe. It's
like, there are some bits that are so crazy, and you know that
this probably is hiding a very deep meaning because everything else is, but you
can't you can't catch it. You know, it's painful. No, And
I think as modern people, we're wired to like or dislike characters. We
like strong signals, who's good, who's bad, what's going on? And
then the Bible has these stories where supposedly good people suddenly do very strange things.
You know, David is one of them. I'm telling this story,
the Saga of Pinkoff, cracky right through the autumn, this deep Icelandic town.
There's no comedy value, none in fact in the sagas. If there's
too much comedy in you can be sure that that is a continental influence.
That's not that's not how the schools would have told it. But there's this
one character called a Halty the Magnanimous who lives in a bone pile. He's
the only guy remotely approachable. The rest of them are just berserkers. And
then just as you're starting to like him, he bites his girlfriend's nose off
in an argument and continues talking to her, crunching up her nose and saying,
well, you know, I think this is I think this is it
for me and you. I'm just not feeling it anymore. And my heart
sunk at that moment because I thought Halty the Magnanimous was all I had,
you know, he was in my own only moment of warmth in this this
thing. And so the Bible can be like that for me and the way,
you know, I find it an act of will sometimes to remember the
Bible. It's just as if the stories they sort of test you. They
almost want you to forget them. They want you to remember them. I'm
just improvising this, as I said. To learn a story from the Bible
is like when I'm in Divine liturgy and Father Preforous serves me that bit of
bread soaked in wine that looks all to the world like a piece of meat,
you know, all to the world like a piece of meat, and
I'm suddenly in this kind of living iconography. You know, I'm changed.
It's amazing. I don't do you experience this at liturgy? I eat the
bread, this tiny bit of bread, and I am no longer hungry.
I noticed this again and again. I'm always hungry obviously in fastings, in
vestpers and I get in there and I eat and this tiny thing. But
because of what is what it is, it is subsumed in it has this
miraculous effect. Yeah. And in the story of the saints, you have
that, you have story, crazy stories of saints that live only from the
Eucharist. Wow, that's all they eat. Yeah, there there's some wild
stories. Sometimes it's like once a year or something like some really crazy story
about eating the Eucharist once a year and surviving all through. But there's what
you said about the Scripture. There's something. There's something about the Scripture stories,
which it's also because they've been so glossed that sometimes we kind of see
them through the gloss, which is not bad because the raw stories are sometimes
a little too much to deal with. But uh, you can actually read
all the Bible stories from multiple points of view, very much like you could
read the Iliad and you know, sympathize with the Trojans, and so you
could try to read the story, so you know, read the story of
Abraham and realize and read it as if Abraham is not not a hero at
all, and you'll see that the story will tell itself and it will make
sense, and you can do the opposite. So there's this weird thing about
the story, and it's very algebraic. That's why it's difficult to remember.
Because a lot of the more ancient types of epics, they have descriptions and
they'll be like these poetic types of description of emotion. There's none of that
in the Bible. The Bible is just like this happened, this happened,
this happened, this happened, you know, And so it's more difficult to
But once you see the pattern, you realize how powerful it is. It
just takes more, at least for our minds to pierce them. Yes,
and you have to be careful because once if you are a chapter in verse
Christian and you have so sort of calcified your imagination to the point where that
is the only legitimate way those stories can be told or even chanted in our
tradition not even told God forbid the intonation of your own voice and expression could
come into it. You know, this is Martin Luther territory. So so
that has been a struggle for me. Is how far in I mean the
great the great way in recently has been I've been telling and will be continuing
to tell the story of Joseph in Egypt as an underworld to sense story Joseph
in the Underworld, I've been telling the story of Job as the opening of
what I call the Wonder Eye, where actually I think although we think we're
loaded up with questions for God. Of course, in that story, in
the end God doesn't answer any of Job's questions, but he does say,
come have a look behind the veil for five minutes, and then let's see.
Then let's see how chatter you are. So I'm finding my way into
it. I'm thinking a lot about the story of Sampson at the moment,
and others. Oh man, there's a good story of Sampson, is it
is? I think one of the drid Falders said that the story of Sampson
is the closest story to in the Old Testament. Ah, And that's a
that's it. But you have to just see it through the right lens,
which is Samson is trying to join with the stranger. That's what Samson is
trying to do, and so he's this weird character that is moving towards He's
trying to join the margin and the center. Right, he takes the door
and brings it up to the top of the hill. That's basically what Samson
is trying to do, but he keeps messing it up. Right, he
finds he finds honey in the dead lion. That's what Sampson is, right,
but it's like but at the same time, he can't hold it together
and then he has to he has to kill himself. That's in that the
the the honey in the lion, just as the sheer unintellectual power of that
image. That's got to be a Christian group called Lion's Honey or something.
It just it just begs, it just begs for it. But it's it's
I mean, I I came into stories, and I came into when I
would have been in my early twenties. I'd loved them when I was younger,
but I ended up living in a tent for four years. I don't
know if we've ever talked about this. I ended up it became important to
me in the late nineties, when I would have been in my mid twenties,
to see if there were any real pockets of British wilderness left. So
I took off in a black tent without a phone or a computer, and
effectively to the outside world to some degree, disappeared for four years. And
I just wanted to be absolutely undomesticated. I wanted to find what there's an
Irish philosopher, John Moriarty calls it your bush soul. And so when I
went through that experience, I found the best way to talk about it without
the use of ie statements was these old stories. You and I. We
were once in You and I once went walking in Dublin late at night,
and every single person we passed was hurling bottles around, and that you remember,
they're just bottles smashing the whole the whole town was in what you call
seaeous, and he says, we are approaching jubilation. They hadn't got to
jubilation, but they were approaching it. And you and I sat surrounded by
broken glass, smoking these cigars and drinking Guinness remember at the top of Grafton
Street and the thing you said, and I agreed with you said, you
know, myth and story is just the best way to talk about almost everything.
It's the indigenous way to talk about everything. It's the classical way to
talk about everything. It's the Artherian way. It's the Irish way, it's
the Russian way, it's the Aboriginal way. It's what we've always done in
the There's a very old notion I'm interested in, which is we don't human
beings get made. It's actually a process. And if you don't have connection
to stories, rather like a cloak, then you are prone to enormous floods
of anxieties. You get older as you experience the dress of life. Despite
all the gadget tree, if we don't have this very ancient technology called a
story close to hand, we run equipped in some way. Yeah, I
think that there's something. So if you think of something like an ethical code,
for example, right, a series of that, that's fine, we
need those, you know, they're they're important. But a story is like
a tuning for you know what. It find of vibrates and you start to
vibrate with it, and you can actually be transformed without understanding anything, without
knowing why it's happening, without without having any rational explanation for why it is.
You're being transformed because because you're actually you're identifying with the characters, you're
you're or you're or you're not identifying with the characters, and that's putting you
in a space where you're basically it's more like music. You know, you're
more vibrating with the pattern. And then at some point, without knowing it,
you find that your perspective has been transformed. Yeah, and now what's
going to happen on that thought, what's going to happen in a few hours
in my life is I'm going to get seventy people responding getting tuned at different
polyphonic parts of the story of this is not just one part but many.
It's a little bit like watching someone having acupuncture and they go, I'm not
feeling much here, don't feel anything there. Oh my god, that's where
it is. That's where the trouble is. Now. The thing that turns
a myth from a reenactment fair or a seance into something that's actually happening in
the room now, a living myth is exactly that proximity to wonder, that
proximity to the story do its cathonic work on you before you've had someone allegorize
it to death or tell you what it means. One of the things that
I liked about the Exodus series that you did with Jordan and our mutual friend
James or and others is that I was impressed at how much pandemonium, intellectual
pandemonium was going on. I was so pleased that that hadn't all been cut
out and we just had the bits where you were all concurring and agreeing and
nodding sagely. It was kind of messy, and that really is it's saving
gresce we you and I and maybe Jordan, And if we should do one
on the Obyssey, Oh yeah, just putting it out there, you know,
of in normal If you want to understand how we in the West tick,
you cannot get there without stories like the Obyssey. Yeah, that's a
great idea to do a reading of the artisty and to kind of go through
the images. I would love to do that. We should definitely organize it.
Tell me about the conference. So okay, so I'm speaking told me
what you know, and so I've been doing this now for what seven years,
I guess since twenty sixteen, slowly building up let's say, helping hopefully
helping people see the world differently. I would say that's the thing that I've
been doing, you know, also in line with some of the things my
brother has been doing as well. And now what I'm what I've noticed is
that there are people that have been able to transform the thinking. And it's
impressive to what extent they have been And I'm always surprised because for a large
part of my life I felt like I was a freak, that it was
a freak that thought in a very strange way and that nobody could understand.
And now all of a sudden, there are these people that are that are
thinking this way. It's transforming their their their thinking. So the idea is
to meet in person. Really, it's to to instead of just doing this
online thing, to actually come into the same space, you know, to
to to meet each other and also to participate in There'll be different streams they'll
be There'll be a artistic stream, so artists will have a chance to meet
each other, exchange about their work, look at how they can you know,
use this kind of mythical thinking in their work. There'll be one which
is more like the home how to include these this way of living in your
home, symbolic living, symbolic thinking in your home life. And then there'll
be obviously the universal history path, which is, you know, people moving
closer to how to reinterpret history in a way that that connects it with myth.
Uh and then you know, realizing that myth is the driving power of
history. To be honest, that without the myth behind the history, you
know, we don't care about these stories like the Bay. The boring historical
things have no no spark if they're not anchored in something that is transcendent or
something that you that you can care about. That's why all the ancient people
would connect their story to Troy and two and to the Bible. It's like
they had to connect to the ancient mythic past. So basically we're going to
be there. There'll be some music, you know, and then obviously they'll
be They'll be you speaking, will we have discussions, will be Father Stephen
de Young, who I don't know if you've heard some of his So I
just feel like even just having the three of us together is going to be
pretty explosive, but then other people there, it's gonna be great what it
is. And I've also seen you know, you've got vesper Stampa, You've
got you got you know, coaches are with your rolling Neil the grade like
that. Oh, I mean this is this is I go. You know,
I buy a ticket for this being in the audience if I wasn't on
the stage for short Man. Yeah, so you know, I'm really looking
forward to it. And uh and in some ways, you know, I
think that this, you know, rediscovering the ancient way of thinking and and
and living, that's the key to the future. It's it's not easy to
connect it to the modern world. Sometimes it's it's difficult to know how to
deal with the technological world and kind of want to go back into this mythical
world. But we have to work through it, right, we have to
find a way to connect them together or else, or else we're going to
lose ourselves. So we are and I think I think, you know,
of course, from a distance, everything looks different from a distance. You
know, when I try and explain to my friends that I'm an Eastern Orthodox
Christian, a Russian Orthodox Christian. Right now, that's not a popular look
in Europe, I can assure you, ah. But from the it looks
like one thing. From the outside, it just looks like these odd shaped
bubal onions and strange looking things, and everybody's standing up and what's going on.
But you get in there, you get inside, and it's nothing to
do with a long time ago. That's one of the great secrets of myth.
Myth, when it is functioning efficiently, is not really to do with
a long time ago. Those stories do not get remembered. The stories that
get remembered are the ones the day that was not like the day before,
and when you didn't have endless iPads or even literacy, you had to decide
what am I going to choose to remember. It was a conscious act of
will. And as you were saying a few minutes ago, stories like the
tuning fork they do something to you. I'm very interested in the notion of
no bless oblige, which really translates as if you are noble, you have
to act noble, and to act noble you really need to be around stories
that externally show you through symbolic images, what that looks like and without consuming
that. It's very hard to stay focused on it. And so you've been
on a path like a maas of massive transformation, you know, in your
own personal life then obviously also even I imagine even your readers, there's been
change in that world, like who's coming to the workshops all of that,
And so I'm curious to see you know, you're the change of your perspective
and how it has changed your vision of storytelling. You feel like the way
that you see stories or that you engage with stories, the change in the
past few years. Yeah, and I think I can stum it up pretty
quickly, actually, I would say, and I'm moving between a sort of
a mythic and a religious perspective, and there's almost no difference in the world
that I live in. Myths showed me everything I needed to know about the
conditions of living. Different gods and goddesses. Show you the betrayals, the
healings, the strange nuances to it all. It shows you the planning field.
It's phenomenal how to live. It was the missing element for me.
And that I have to say is the Christian narrative. It's the Christian story
because it's so it actually turns a lot of the myths before it kind of
on its head because of this last you'll be first antichlaos kind of thing going
on, this huge enormous consciousness where we're not just venerating trees and bends in
the river and all the thousands and millions of little ellaheens and messengers that are
moving around us. We're making a claim that we're in contact with the being
that is infused in that, but also completely outside of it as well.
That was just kind of too big for me. But in the absence of
that, my life, I suppose, up until, you know, up
until a few years ago, had the familiar kind of chaotic fault lines of
not how that essential kind of binding agent that is Yesua sot a lot has
changed. It's not as if my life hasn't been nourished and informed and blessed
beyond measure by these stories. But the reality is, and this is hard.
Lot of Christians don't like me saying what I'm about to say. The
reality is, you know, I'm with Augustine. All truth is God's truth,
and I think that a lot of these stories, there could be some
story way up from the Inuit and they and I respect this. They may
not want to see it in this way. But from my point of view,
many myths and stories are filled with pinpricks and hints of this great story.
And so I feel that I was on a kind of drip feed for
a really long time, and the thing that my heart was swooning for over
and over in these stories was something that I could never depend in defend him
public, but was actually this sort of terrifying revelation that actually it was the
you know, the Aslam of my youth wishing to announce itself. I went
on a vigil for one hundred and one days. I went out into a
Dartmoor forest, and at the end of it, I had a profoundly eviscerating,
beautiful, unimaginable, almost encounter with Christ, but in the one place
I never expected to meet him. I went out there thinking, well,
by the time I finished this, I'll probably be married to the wild in
some way. And I came back married to Christ. And I realized that
both of these weddings are facing each other. It's a strange thing to say
as someone I'm not a classicist. We're talking about the Odyssey. I'm not
a classicist in England. If you're a classicist that's kind of connected to a
class system, really connected to a certain level of school that you would have
gone to. I didn't go to schools like that, But I have a
real experience understanding and many decades long involvement with indigenous and shamanic stories. Oddly,
they're much much closer to Christ figures than ones that you get in the
West. They understand very well, the idea of the suffering healer, they
understand very well. The one that you're not looking at is the one that
is actually kind of binding and through an act of love and sacrifice, bringing
you life to the tribe. So I was aware of these things, but
now, of course I see the For example, I see, you know,
the crucifixion as the supreme poetic event of human experience. But I I
it was as if I was just not allowed to see it until I was
almost fifty. It was like this, and then God said, and now
now, and for the last two years, my Jovian wonder eye has been
opened. But for some reason he wanted me to get all this other stuff
in me too, And so I'm in this thrilling and unexpected You know what
midlife is like? You can feel like you've seen all the movies worth possibly
seeing. So to be in this new world where I'm meeting. I like
what Paul vander Clay is doing. You know, he's a very interesting man
with all his sort of cross associations. You see. I come from my
dad as a preacher. My brother is a pastor. I'm very familiar with
all of this. But at the same time, because of Orthodoxy, I've
been opened up to I grew up in church. All the action was in
the pulpit. Now the action in the liturgy. You know, the pulpit
is the only moment. It's the sermon. It's the only moment where you
can sit down. He's like, yeah, okay, sit down. This
is just me for five minutes, and everybody you know stand awry wisdom and
we're off. You know. So I kind of know where I am,
but I also don't know where I am, which is a wonderful place to
be. And I think that what you said, you know, the idea
that in some ways you had to pack all this other, all this other
stuff in you. I think in some ways, you know, this might
will seem a little maybe I'm pushing it and whatever, whatever, people think,
but that it seems like to me that's the role that I perceive that
you can have right now in this moment, which is you know, you
use the word the word rewilding Christianity. There are different ways to say it.
But there is something in the other myth, within these shamanic stories,
in these ancient myths, which can can help us see the story of the
Bible afresh and again, because in some ways it's giving you tax and it's
giving you ways into it that a lot of people have glossed over through their
kind of systematic theology, you know, like this is this leads to this,
to this, and Jesus died for your sins and if you believe in
him, you go to heaven. You know, that kind of stuff where
it's like you've actually stopped looking at the at the crazy things that Jesus does
and the crazy things that are in those stories. You you will be aware.
And I think we have to kind of certainly in this kind in England,
we have to off our caps to Tom Holland, the writer in his
book Dominion. Tom was the first guy that was saying, actually, despite
the propaganda, England in the West in general, is profoundly Christianized. Now
I go along with that for a while. But the problem is we have
Christianized civically and culturally. We're not spiritually anymore. We're not This is not
Christian culture, and so the cross isn't quite We've got that bit, but
we haven't got that bit. So I love the fact that he yourself,
Paul Kingsnorth, lots of others are talking about the fact that we have.
We can't be taking our cues from a culture that doesn't give a shit about
us anymore, because we just get more and more thinned out, diluted,
apologetic. We're sort of you know, look at me, look you know,
whereas actually people. I meet people all over the world looking for a
deeper life. And the more we take our cues nervously from a culture that
at best has amnesia, if not active hostility to these stories, the better.
But we need to retell them, not not anethetize them or put in
little cues to make them politically correct. Forget that. We just need them
in their pure genius, raw form to be, to do their work,
to let God do his work. You know, I think something's happening.
I have to say it I think something's happening. I've never born in the
early seventies. I've never seen a moment quite as pregnant as this one.
I've never known so many people talking about things like this. I think you're
right, you know, I think that the way that I see it is
something like a like an arc you know. It's like we're actually there's a
contraction of Christianity. But in that contraction, the people that care about it
have to do it so deliberately that it cannot be accidental anymore. It can't
just be something we're surfing. You just can't be So we have to look
into it deeply. We have to. We don't have a choice. And
so because of it, it creates this weird little this this this smaller but
brighter group of people that can see each other. And are you know,
I'm amazed, like you said, Like you know, if you would ask
me to predict Paul Kington North and Martin Shaw, you know, five six
years ago, I could not have predicted it. But then when I see
when I see that coming over the horizon, I'm like, yes, that
that that's that's it, like, and I can see that, like you
said, I can see things coming together. Uh, and so it's exciting.
I mean, what what other life would you want to lead? It's
exciting to be to be in a world that is semi hostile to you,
but then being surrounded by a round table of amazing nights' is like what else
would I want? Yeah? Yeah, I think I think we're all in
agreement. The church needs to become a lot again, you know, I
think really and if people don't think we're in a moment of tremendous peril,
they are simply not paying attention. They're not paying attention. All the ingredients
you want for a phenomenal myth are occurring in real time right now. You
don't need to be nostalgic. You didn't miss out. There was There's no
other golden age of myth that was more more engaging than this. This is
the moment. And so find your place at the table. And I say
that to everybody. There'll be some kid right now watching us on a phone
doing some shift, you know, his third shift at McDonald's. We're talking
to you, you know, we're talking to you. Locate locate that and
a blessed o please in you and see what kind of trouble you can get
into. You know. That's amazing, Mart and I think that that is
the best place to finish our conversation and thank you for everything you do all
a pleasure. I can't wait to be with you again. It's going to
be amazing. I can't wait. I can't wait for all of us to
be at the Symbolic World and people take your queue, you know, get
your tickets. I'm going to do my plug and come meet us at the
Symbolic World at the end of February. We are all excited to see you
there, so thanks. If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go
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