Speaker 1: I remember saying this once. In your incompleteness is your authenticity.
You don't have to stay there. You know, we're working
on theosis. But in your incompleteness is your authenticity. Get
to know yourself in that fashion, and then know that
against all conceivable odds, God is still inutterably interested in you.
That's my miracle. It's like, how can that fella even
gaze in my direction? You know at this point, but somehow,
somehow he does.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Pejol. Welcome to the Symbolic World.
Speaker 3: Hello there, Well, this is Marty Sure, and I'm afraid
whatever you had planned for January scrap it. I am
returning to symbolic world gleefully with one of the great
stories of our time, the Epic of Passable, the story
of the Holy Grail itself. Over five nights, I will
be telling the tale. These will not be dry lectures
or PowerPoint presentations. These will be wild, old philosophical storytelling
in its deepest dimensions. It is life changing stuff, this story.
I've written a book about it, I've been studying it
for twenty years. I've told it all over the world,
but I have not shared it with you. I've not
shared it with symbolic world. So what else would you
want to do in the great wintering time but to
sit at the feet of this wonderful story and let
me be your guide.
Speaker 1: I'll see you there.
Speaker 4: Hello everyone, I'm here with the legendary Martin Shaw. You know,
it's very exciting. There's a lot of wonderful things happening
with Martin. He is going to give us a retelling
of the Grail story. You can check it out.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 4: It's kind of like a class where every single day
you can sit in the evening with Martin and listen
it to him give you a retelling of Parsival and
at the same time give his insight and his analysis.
Speaker 2: So that's coming.
Speaker 4: But also Martin has a new book called Liturgies of
the Wild, which I was very fortunate to get a
reader's reader's proof, and so Martin, Yeah, it's wonderful to
see you be so successful.
Speaker 1: Thanks for talking to me. Thank you, Jonathan. I am
the longest overnight sensation of all time.
Speaker 2: Ah.
Speaker 4: I'm really happy though, because you know, I'll be honest
with you. You know, you when you kind of converted
to Christianity and especially becoming orthodox of all the people
that I know, I knew that for you it was
a great risk like that that it was very costly,
like at least it could have been very costly.
Speaker 2: And I think it was at the beginning very costly
for you.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 4: And so I admired you for your integrity and kind
of moving that direction. Nonetheless, And I and every time
I see you, every time, you know, every time I
see you publish a new book and then go speak
to these but massive venues, I'm thanking God, and I'm like, God,
thank you forgiving you know, for giving him this in
in in response.
Speaker 1: Oh, Jonathan, that's so amazing to hear. I do feel
on the I feel on the end of your prayers.
That's a beautiful thing. And as we would both, I'm
sure say to anybody watching pray, fir ust please you know,
it's come to the end of the year. Most of
us feel like a crumpled up crisp packet, as we
say over here, and there is some exhaustion. You know,
these are very you can say, you can always say
it's troubled times, but it seems especially corrosive at the moment.
So I am thrilled to be honest, that in the
depths of winter at the time, to be honest, where
some of us can slip a little bit into depression
or even despair, that we would gather for you know,
five nights and go deep into the ground mysteries. I
would find it hard to fathom where else I'd want
to be, to be honest. So, and you know I'm
looking forward to it, and thank you Literatures of the Wild.
This is my slightly larger version as a thick book
is out in February, and I am just about to
announce you will be hearing it first that that will
include a fairly significant American tour. So I'll be in
New York, Chicago, various places on the East Coast, then
over to Stanford University up California, and then finally I
will be with I think probably do we now call
him Deacon Seraphin? Yeah? Have you not? Have you noticed
how blue his eyes are now getting? The bigger the beard,
the bigger the bed, the blue of the eyes. You know,
there's this prophetic energy coming in that I thoroughly salute.
So anyway I'll be with him. I'll be with Deacon Seraphine,
our dear Richard in Texas at an Orthodox arts conference
at Valentine's Day weekend in February.
Speaker 4: That's great, you know, I've been. It's been wonderful to
kind of see the how we call it, I mean,
the rise of the storytellers, or you know that that
people are starting to notice the importance of remembering and
of of knowing, you know, and not knowing in a
superficial sense, but really living in the stories.
Speaker 2: And so I mean, I.
Speaker 4: Guess that's that's why we should start in. I should
ask you, Martin, what is the greatest what?
Speaker 5: Oh good Lord, absolutely.
Speaker 1: Convinced that you have had many symbolic world podcasts already
on quite what the Grail is. I wrote a book
all about this, and it's this book Snowy Tower, Passable
and the Wet Black Branch of Language. And one of
the things I did in that book, which I will
not be doing in our course, is I rather swerved
the issue. I rather served it, because actually, by the
time you get there are three really important literary writers.
When it comes to the story of the Grail. It
would begin very much with cretend Destois, then through to
pass through to Wolfram von Eschenbach, and then the version
of Arthur that we're most familiar with really comes from
Thomas Mallory. You know mort Arthur and then the once
in Future King and that kind of thing. Now what
happens is the stories. This is just me thinking I've
never said this out loud before. They you get a
more daylight version of the Grail mysteries in Mallory, then
you get a moonlight version, you get a more interior version,
you get a more mystical version with Wolfram von Eschenbach,
which is the version that I'm stewed in. So quite
what the Grail is? Well, I don't want to give
the game away. You've got to come with us on
the adventure.
Speaker 5: I have half a.
Speaker 1: Thought about it. I have half a thought about it.
You will know that the Grail in later versions gets
very much combed out to a point where it absolutely
has to be the holy Grail. And as a Christian
of a mystical disposition, I would be in favor of that,
and I think it has great resonance grail. You know,
it also can relate to a plate. It has a
sense of something that is absolutely abundant. So if the
Grail is in front of you as a large stone,
or a plate or something that's fallen from heaven. It
has an inexhaustible quality to it. Anything you could want
to eat at a grail feast comes in endless supply
from the grail, anything you would want to drink. And
this has its roots in early Celtic probably pagan stories,
I would imagine, really pre Christian, and so a lot
of the scholarship that went on in the twentieth century
about quite what the Grail is they maneuvered round two
or three different positions. One was, this is absolutely a
kind of living Christian mythology that all relates back to
the Last Supper, and probably could be argued that Kreten
just sort of imagined a lot of it up, probably
being very influenced by the oral tradition and hearing a
lot of stories, and then so in other words, it
wouldn't have the backstory of Celtic and Irish myth that
most people suppose it has. You will probably know the
historian Tom Holland who wrote Dominion. Tom Holland kind of
controversially is of the opinion that Kretien just thought it
all up. He was just sort of, you know, a
divine download and he just sort of put it together. However,
one of the reasons I wonder if that is the
case and it is only wondering, is one of the
stories that Kreten wrote down was a story called Lancelot.
He introduces Lancelot and Gawayne and the Holy Grail.
Speaker 2: He's the guy.
Speaker 1: This is where it begins in literature, but not necessarily
in orality. But kret En never finished his story of Lancelot,
and it's not necessarily that he died. It's actually it's
likely that he did not approve of the adultery of
Lancelot with gwenevit in the story, and it was finished
by someone else. Now, if you really are the author
of that story, you just changed the character, change it.
So for me, that is indicative that he was connected
to source is before he wrote some of this down,
although he's incredibly vague about it.
Speaker 2: Hmm.
Speaker 4: And I think, I mean one of the things that
I that I that I think about this is that
there is also a kind of confluence that doesn't necessarily
have to be origin. So one of the things that
Christians do, and I mean not just Christians, but when
most people do, is that if they have a tradition,
for example, about the importance of the cup that Christ
used at the Last Supper. And also there's a tradition
of the cup into which the blood of Christ is gathered,
you know, and you see that in medieval early medieval
images you see the angel that holds a cup underneath
the blood that on the cross, when Christ is on
the cross, you see the blood coming out and you
see an angel that's holding the cup and that is
receiving the blood.
Speaker 1: So you have these.
Speaker 4: Traditions that are there, and then you also have other
images that come from pagan sources, like you know, like
horn of Plenty type cups, cups that are that are
that even if you think of the fairy tale of
the little Part, you know that that makes the porridge,
you know that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: So you have all of these these images that are
floating around.
Speaker 4: In the in the story space, and it's not it
wouldn't be surprising that even people that tell the stories
and seeing the relationships, you know, those will start to
kind of glum together and that even though even though
there isn't a direct origin, that they end up accumulating
these these legends into the story.
Speaker 1: Beautifully put and I think both of us would agree
with Augustine. All truth is God's truth. And so you know,
stories all over the place are filled with images with information, insight, marvels,
and wisdom. Mythology is a phantasmagoria of marvels. There's marvels everywhere.
My life was studying marvels in a way through storytelling
for thirty years. But there's a difference between marvels and hate.
And there's something that goes on in Christianity that seems
to be to do with profound healing. You know, I
think of the Church not originally, you know, it's not
an original thought to me. I do think of it
as a kind of field hospital. I was saying to
Paul vander Clay recently. I said, I think Orthodoxy is
about to become the field hospital of the West. You know,
they'll just be people loafing over the fir me being
one of them. Of course, So I think you're right.
But what I would what I would take issue with,
I suppose is people are always very interested in what's
the one true version of something. Thinking recently about the
difference between the Nativity in Matthew and the Nativity in
Luke and my conclusion is maybe a story that important
deserves more than one version, Maybe we need maybe you know,
that's one of the glories of the Gospel, is the
strange tension that the four Gospels hold us him. And
as I'm thinking now, I'm going I haven't thought any
of this through then the grail in a way and
it's continual, imaginative and holy spirited evolution. It's not meant
to rest on the shoulders of one person or one telling.
It's meant to be furtive in one way or another.
Get this. The last weekend I was lucky enough to
be teaching with the ex Archbishop of Canterbury, Rohan Williams,
and Rowan said. He said, he gave about an hour
and a half where basically, and I hope he doesn't
mind me phrasing it like this, he presented Jesus predominantly
as a trickster figure. It was pretty interesting. And he
said the first thing you need to know about Christ
is how fundamentally unprofessional he is. And he says, just
avoid professionals. And I was like, okay, Coming from the
hex's head of the Church of England, that was a
very interesting thing. And then he went on and told
Russian fairy tales. Can you imagine that Rome Williams in
a storyteller's cloak telling old Russian fairy tales as Christian allegories?
Pretty cool? Yeah, yeah, that's I didn't have even imagined
that ten years ago, but he's that kind of fella.
So coming back anyway, is what I'm trying to get
at is the notion of the Grail as a movable feast.
You will know that in terms of the origins of
the Arthurian stories, there's a fairly convincing argument that some
of the images come from the Caucuses, and so they
would have moved through warriors that would have been part
of the Roman army that then would have settled in England,
but would have been telling stories from the Caucuses, which
have all sorts of mythologies of ladies of lakes and
swords and stones, and that gets integrated into Celtic story.
Are a promiscuous bunch, you know, we just wander around
and we go, well, what have you got? You've got
a sword? Oh, that would be amazing in that story.
And we go and we dream about it, and we
think about it, and we fast on hills about it
and sooner or later that sword may well arrive, you know.
So what we've got, what I'm trying to encourage us,
is we have something with the Grail that is vital
and alive and talking to us to this day. You know,
it's it's a verb. You know, it's it's a movement.
Speaker 4: I think that a lot of things in what you said.
One is that especially well, first of all, in terms
of Christ like that. You know, when the the Gospels
in the early centuries, there was a movement to consolidate
the gospels, right, and to create one gospel. Yeah, and
so some of the early Christians they were trying to
move in that direction, and ultimately the Church resisted that
and left the four Gospels as is. And if you
look at the image of Christ in Glory with the
four Evangelists, you know, with the four beasts, there is
this sense that in fact, we see Christ through these
four representations, and that Christ remains in some respects remains
hidden behind, you know. And at the end of the
Gospel of Saint John, he says, you know, if all
the books, if if everything hasn't done it written, not
enough books in the world would be there to would
be able to to to to fill that. And so
there's I think that there's something interesting about the Grail
as well in that in that sense, is that the
fact that what the Grail seems to represent as the quest,
as the thing that is the thing you want the most,
as the thing, the thing that will truly transform you. Uh,
you know that will bring you beyond yourself. You know
that it's true that that can only be represented in
multiple ways.
Speaker 2: It even though.
Speaker 4: It has us, every one of us has that in them,
but it won't appear the same two different two different people.
And so it seems to make sense that there are
these different tellings and there is a aspect of.
Speaker 2: The veil that has remained veiled.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, yes. I always have a question of
three questions with my students when we're getting near the grail,
I say, what do you love? What will it cost?
How much you prepared to pay? And that's usually rummaging
around and a lot of the myths and stories that
we care to remember. So I agree with you for me,
as soon as somebody says it absolutely is this, this
and this A lot of my as I said, that's
all sunlight, no moonlight. You know, there's no dream time
in it. There's no dream time in it. And the
thing that's so interesting about Wolfram who the first thing
you need to know about the Grail stories is that
they're written initially in French, not Latin. That's huge because
that's saying this is not just a prop up the church.
These are stories to be told in the court to
people at en Anda of Aquitaine, to young men who
may well become warriors and try to figure out is
there a way of being in the world and defending
in the church which is not just a brute on
a horse. That is not That actually brings forward with
the notion of no bless oblige, but no doubt about it.
Kreten is still very much a creature of court. But
the character who we're going to explore through the telling
of Passable, this guy Wolfram von Eschenbach, is not a
creature of court. He is a knight. He's a real knight.
And you get that in his elaborate descriptions which I
have to rush through of you know, armor, getting on
and off horses. He just goes into outrageous gossipy detail
because he's German, and you know what the Germans are
like they think, well, we'll take the French model but
will improve it. You know, he's a minisinger, he's a
singer of love, he's a Troubadau. He's around the same
time as Kreten Detroit, But like Kreten, he hides and
obscures his sources. And he says, oh, I got this
all from a French poet who got it all from
a Middle Eastern astrologer who actually saw the story of
the Grail in the night sky. So he opens it
up like that. Personally, as someone that has sat almost
weekly with Passival for about twenty years, I think a
lot of I think a lot of that is wolf
Ram's razzle dazzle. I don't think it's absolutely rooted. It's
his charisma as a story teller. I don't think tremendous
root system in it leading all the way back to India.
But that doesn't mean that people won't write those books
because it's fun. It's great fun.
Speaker 4: What is the relationship? Where how do you understand the relationship?
Because you could have that, say, the story of the
Grail in a in a more religious sense, right, you
could have this idea of the legend you know of
the cup that Christ used at the last supper, there
was maybe you to gather his blood at the at
the cross, you know, and that became a kind of
you know, a vessel of immortality or however you want
to think about it. So you could have this, had
this mythological you could have had this mythological story you know,
be told and retold. But how does it connect to
the the chivalrous aspect? Do you think, like the relationship
between the knight and the lady you see it in
Cassandertois that it's a that it's a that is there
right at the outset.
Speaker 2: It's very important. This this this.
Speaker 4: This ambiguous relationship that the knights have with their lady.
Speaker 1: You know, they have.
Speaker 4: To to to to give to their lady, but not
too much, like they have to go on adventure, but
they also have to care for their lady. Like what
does that have to do with the grail? How do
you how do you connect these things together?
Speaker 1: You get it? I mean one word would be a
certain kind of sensitivity. But let's go back to where
that notion of what they call the far distant lady
comes from. And irony of ironies, which it's delightful to
me at that At the moment, especially in England, everybody
is so terrified of Islam as if nothing good ever
came out of it. There it's all, you know, it's
all become a kind of mono thing at the Islam,
Islam Islam. But of course what you get in Moorish
Spain back in the era that these stories come from
is Islamic diplomats who would come over the Pyrenees and
they would talk in the French courts, and you couldn't
be a Muslim diplomat if you weren't a trained poet.
That's pretty cool. And they turned up and they would
they would have ecstatic Persian poetry at their disposal that
praised the feminine as a vehicle for encounter with divine ground.
In other words, you could have a religious experience through
a romantic encounter and not promiscurities, not just eros. It's
more so, ironically, is this these courts of love were
witnessing this what you could call appreciative consciousness coming across
the Pyrenees in the shape of these Muslim diplomats, and
they said, ah, this is the missing bit in the
tenderizing of our warriors and storytellers. So, in other words,
if we're going to start looking at something like the grail,
first of all, the grail and its relationship to the feminine,
its relationship to the land, its relationship to people in distress,
we need to build a kind of body, an appreciative
body of thought, around it. And so there's a lovely
phrase in the early Troubidoor tradition where where they say
before they say we had the bread, now we have
the knife. In other words, the French poets pre this
Islamic influence. They understood sex that they didn't understand more,
they didn't understand romance. We had the bread, now we
have the knife. In other words, we no longer tearing
the bread with our hands. We're no longer raping women
in fields when we go past them on our horse.
We're sitting down getting our loute out, and you know,
singing them a poem. So things start to change. I'll
just give you an example. This is the very first
I can do this out of my head. This is
William of Potiers. I think he says this, This is
the first Troubadoul poem. In the sweetness of spring, words
turn green and the birds sing on each in their
own particular Latin. And I think about this sweet war
that we brought to an end when you gave me
your faithful valley and your ring. I want my God
to let me live long enough to have my hand
under your cloak again. Boom. I want my God to
let me live long enough to have my hand to
your cloak again. So you get the divine world and
the romantic and everything is happening at the same time.
But what we know is at the twelfth and thirteenth century,
there was a real need for you know, the Crusades
had been going on. There was a need for young
men that were not going to be monastics, but in
some way had to feel connected to deep religious vocation.
We meet people without quests in their life. We meet
people that have no grail, and we recognize them because
they are lost, you know, they're lost in the wasteland.
I see it all the time. I see the deficit
of these stories around me a lot.
Speaker 2: Hm hm, there is, It seems there is also.
Speaker 4: I mean, because you were talking about this this Moorish
you know, these Spanish poems that were coming, I wonder
if you'd think there's also a relationship between Bernard of Clervaux,
you know, and his kind of high devotion to the Virgin.
Speaker 1: Absolutely.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's where the Temps themselves like because of Bernard,
because he wrote their rule. There was a very very
strong devotion to the to the Holy Virgin in the
early kind of crusading nights.
Speaker 1: Yes, and that's that in the end, is where that
ends up in the troubado Or tradition, because first of all,
it's a very volatile thing to do. That Troubadoor tradition
believed that romantic love could only exist in adultery. It
couldn't happen in a marriage, because marriages were things of convention.
If you think of the word a more amo r
if you turn it round roma, that is societal obligation
and the intoxications of love, which is writ large for
example in the story of Tristan and is Older, which
they all loved. That means a degree of scandal. That means,
you know, passion overriding protocol, and that cause pandemonium because
every time you try to live out a Troubadour poem,
you were going to get unstuck by the head of
the household, that's right. So what happens is they take
that glorious re emerging of care for the feminine, shall
we say, poetical appreciation of the feminine, and they begin
to focus it towards Mary for sure.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and you, I mean, what is your insight about that,
because I mean a lot of people later will make
a relationship between.
Speaker 2: The Grail and the and the Virgin, you.
Speaker 4: Know, as the containers, as this kind of feminine container.
Do you see that in the Grail tradition? Yes, I do,
I do, and I on a very It's funny. I
have a career as an academic and I have a PhD.
But the older I get, the more I try and
shake it off me, you know, for whatever, I just
try and sit there and allow whatever tiny imagination God
has given me. I just try and let it be
free range these days. So a thought that I do
have is that I often think of the Grail as
Mayory's womb. I think, well, the most important thing is Christ,
and that little fourteen year old girl, or however old
she was, she's the grail carrier for me because it's Christ,
you know.
Speaker 1: So I see that. And the Church, as you know,
has a slightly ambivalent relationship to the Grail stories for
some time because on the one hand, they are aware
of their importance. They know it's part of the formation
of the warrior caste and chivalry is pointing towards Christian experience.
But as we've said, it's something it's not something that
is hidden under people that can speak Latin. It's being
spoken in French, it's being spoken in German.
Speaker 2: There is a.
Speaker 1: Sense that people that are not clerical can have, you know,
a very powerful encounter with vocation. And ultimately, you said
it a few minutes ago, service, who does the Grail serve?
If you're not in service to something bigger than yourself,
then you're not on a quest that is big enough
for you.
Speaker 2: You know, I was.
Speaker 4: I was marked because you know, we just finished the
Dante's Paradiso. Wow, you know, until we just finished that,
finished that class, and I had read it maybe ten
years ago last time, and so it was great to
read it again. And I was really marked by the
way at the end when Dante describes the great mystic rose, right,
the one which is the gathering of all the saints together,
it was difficult not to notice that the shape of
that mystic rose was actually like a giant cup.
Speaker 2: The way that he describes it.
Speaker 4: He describes it as this kind of this rose, but
that goes up on the sides, and you know, and
that the divine revelation is in the middle, and it's
like an it's kind of like an mpth empathy, but
you realize it. It's like a it's like a cup,
like a flower, and it's also like a cup. And
the Virgin is of course that one who's the highest
and is mentioned as being the highest in the in
the image.
Speaker 2: And so you know, I.
Speaker 4: Don't know does Dante have does does Dante have a
connection to the grails story?
Speaker 1: Almost certainly I couldn't produce it out of my head
at this moment, but you would think he might. He might.
It must have been there somewhere. Okay, So let's think
about the grail in terms of the relationship between desire
and longing, because in a way, certainly in the story
of Passaval, he can desire a second crack at the grail.
I don't want to be too much of a plot spoiler,
but he hasn't encounter earlier on in his life. He's
not quite ready for that moment, and the real digging
for passable will be this one question, how do you
find by an act of will something you once encountered
as an act of grace? Is that even possible? But
all the way through passaval is the story of it
begins with the desire of a young man, and then
as an older man that moves into spiritual longing. And
spiritual longing is absolutely not the same thing. My desire
is to do with books, as you can see around me,
and my desire these days could be met fairly frequently
and immediately. However, longing and we learn this in the
Irish tradition. They always say that you will experience something
back from longing, but it'll rarely come in the shape
that accept you are expecting. Comes in some other way,
comes in some more refined way. God is not going
to necessarily give you what you want. He's going to
give you what you need. And the juiress that Possi
is under takes us back to a very essential thing
in all myths. No pressure, no diamond, No pressure, no diamond.
Until you are forced into certain crisis, certain kind of
acuity of circumstance, you're not really going to be able
to get past the inebriation of your passions and into
something deeper. So it's a story that never lets us
go in a way, it's a story for somebody that's ninety,
it's a story for somebody that's sixteen.
Speaker 2: You know, do you think that I mean related to
Do you think that in some.
Speaker 4: Ways failing to recognize the grail or failing to be
able to grasp it is part of the story that
it almost has to happen to the hero so that
he can ultimately reach that true longing.
Speaker 1: My question will be halfway through pass of all, the
question I'll ask everybody is what question have you failed
to ask? What questions do you failed to ask? Give
yourself a few days to think about that, because I
can guarantee you somewhere there's been a great abdication. You
will have had a moment of tremendous potential that then
sailed away. And the wonderful thing that we learned from
fairy tales is that often these opportunities will come around again.
When you think, for example, in folk myths, oh, once
upon a time there was three brothers, there were three sisters.
One of the ways you can enjoy that is the
first two times the invitation to the quest comes, you
blow it, or you're too focused on having a career
or whatever it is. But the third time it comes around,
which could be when you're sixty five, it's a matter
of life and death. And so the younger brother in you,
the younger sister in you, is the one that's going
to have the adventure. And so I like the fact
that the door of mercy is still open a crack.
And going back to what you just said, in a way,
it's crucial that Passaval doesn't know the question. There'd be
no story. He's too young in a way to know
the question. And it reminds me of a story that
you and I really love, Gawayne and the Green Knight.
Whereas I always feel at the end Gawayne for the
rest of his life, when he reaches on the back
of his neck, there's that scar tissue. Man, that's going
to be better than any book award he ever wins,
or any podcast or any anything. Because you know, I
remember saying this once, in your incompleteness is your authenticity.
You don't have to stay there. You know we're working
on theosis, But in your incompleteness is your authenticity. Get
to know yourself in that fashion and then know that
against all conceivable odds, God is still inutterably interested in you.
That's my miracle. Like, how can that fella even gaze
in my direction, you know at this point, But somehow,
somehow he does.
Speaker 2: Yeah, your insight, I think is because it is mysterious.
It is mysterious when you look at some of these
stories that there is an aspect of failure, you know,
especially in Sir Gawayne, because he ends where he feels
like he hasn't succeeded, like he has a he has
a kind of shame that he carries, but all the
other characters are telling him, no, he did great. You know,
you're you're you're wonderful. And so that.
Speaker 4: I I you know, I think that my my my
modern self. It's used to watching, you know, movies with
heroes and used to watching you know, Sylvester Stallone finish
with a you know, uh uzzi shooting down all the
bad guys. You know, there's something about it that is disturbing.
You know, this this this this weakness that is so
on on the forefront of the story. But I think
that you what you've just said is giving me insight
into that is that in some ways, it's it's we
as Christians.
Speaker 2: We don't believe that we're sufficient.
Speaker 1: You know, no, that there is Yeah, I notice over now.
You know, almost thirty years of working with groups of people,
you never bring a room together in solidarity when you
just give them victory stories. Never. What is astonishing is
when somebody stands up and says, for better or for worse,
I'm struggling and I'm struggling with this.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 1: That doesn't mean that you are just behaving in a
typical kind of often talk about the addiction to disclosure
that we seem to have these days. I'm not talking
about that, but it is your capacity to just stand
up and be real. And so you know, I am exhausted,
and I mean there's a lovely irish expression they after
the Shannon. The storytellers often begin a story with this note.
They say, how can I be with you if I
am not sad? And everybody just goes oh, And there's
just a place at the table for our sorrows and
our incompleteness and our confusions. But we persist anyway, and
so you don't get drowned in it, but you allow
it a place at the table and so. You know,
in the old Irish myths they always have these fellows
called so and so say con of the hundred battles. Well,
part of having a hundred battles is not that you
succeeded every time, but you made your failure sufficiently insightful
and beautiful that it becomes something that you can give
other people.
Speaker 5: Hm hmmm.
Speaker 4: So I want I want to I want to shift
a little bit away from the grail. People can can
follow you on that on that front when the course comes.
And I want to talk a bit about the new book.
You know you've written.
Speaker 1: Where is it twenty? How many books? Twenty not twenty?
I would have written about seventeen. And then they're not
all huge, They're not real huge, you know.
Speaker 2: Still that's quite that's quite a bit.
Speaker 4: And so.
Speaker 2: What is it? What is what is it about this book? Is?
What is it that you're working on in the digis
of the World.
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this earlier on and I was thinking,
I was I was having a I was having a
kind of I was like Seraphin of Sarov meets J. R. R.
Tolkien in a bar in Chicago, and they have an
arm muscle and that's lituragures of the wild. In a way,
it's it's somewhere. It's kind of the place where wild
orthodoxy meets English mythopoetics, and it's a bit of an explosion.
It's a book. It's a book about a very simple
premise that lives behind all myths and stories. How do
we become fully human in the time of our friend
Paul would say, in the time of the machine? How
do you become an angel in that machine? That's a
lot of what in a way. Someone wrote to me
the other day very kindly about it, and they said,
Paul gives us the diagnosis, you give us the remedy.
Now who knows? Who knows? I wouldn't be so inflated
as to say that. But the book certainly is a
counsel of resistance and delight in a very difficult time.
And so what the book is full of is stories,
myths and ideas that are both Christian and probably in
you know, wider traditions like fairy tales. But the premise
all the way through is how do these what do
these stories have to say about envy? What do they
have to say about passivity? What do they have to
say about sex. What do they have to say about
you know, passion, and on and on and on and
so for me, as you can see by us to
all king, I'm somebody a bit of a slippery salmon
in my thought process. But this book is not like that.
This book is surprisingly Anglo Saxon in its discipline, in
the sense that you can go to a particular chapter.
Let me have a look, now, Okay, yeah, there'd be
a chapter on death, there'd be a chapter on guilt,
there'd be a chapter on limit, which for me, limit
is really interesting. That's part of the joy for me
of Orthodoxy is I think we live in a culture
which is all about feasting and never about fasting, and
I've been a loyal proponent of that indulgence my whole life.
So Orthodoxy is hugely useful for giving me something much
bigger than me to bang up against. And finally, the book,
the fifteenth chapter is about our capacity to make praise,
to be praise makers. If you know you'll know this.
In the old Celtic description of a saint, they said, well,
if nothing else, you felt different after you'd been in
the presence of a saint. The world felt freer, more creative,
and there was more possibility about your imagination had largened
at that moment. William Blake always says Jesus is the imagination.
It's a great line from Blake. He says, you can't
be an art you can't. You can't be a Christian.
If you're not an artist, you can't be. And what
he means by that is not that you have to
get the watercolors out, really, but that your head is bigger.
You know, your head is bigger. You see the lustrous
strangeness of this world that he says is good is
very good, and it is a very good world. A
lot about my work, a lot about the book is
about moving your vision from seeing things to beholding things.
So it's in that romantic spirit, but it's also an
urgent book. Took three years to write. The whole time
I know you, I've been reading writing it. In fact,
there's an abandoned chapter on job which you're in. I
describe there was a night that I remember very fondly
when you and I were getting to know each other,
and we sat there with smoking enormous cigars and drinking
guinness in Dublin. Do you remember on Saturday night. It
was kind of wild, like drunk. There was a lot
of glass.
Speaker 2: There, bottled against thrown and it was a wild Yeah,
it was wild.
Speaker 1: And so you're in. You're you're in there, You're in
the version. So if anybody pre orders, you get the
hidden chapter on job which is not in the book
with Jonathan's in it. Come on, you've got it. You've
got to back your brother here, you've got to buy
the book to read.
Speaker 2: That's ready to re ordered the book.
Speaker 1: There's also one of my wild drawings as well that
you get as a free download. So that's what the
book is about, literatures of the wild. It would be
very useful for Christians that are feeling their way into symbology,
feeling their way into myth and going, okay, is this
a guy I trust that can walk me into this
whilst my faith remains, you know, ever deepening. It's a book,
But on the other hand, it's a book also for
many many people that are only just now even beginning
to the glimpse the possibility of Christianity saying, have a
look at this. The most important thing is in any
real way, it's not selling anything. It's just not selling anything.
You just won't get that from me. I don't sell
in that fashion. You know, there'll be enthusiasm, but that's
not the same thing as the cold eyed the cold
eyed seller, you know. So it's I'm really proud of it.
I'll tell you what, Jonathan, I've just been in a
small dark room recording the audio for three and I'll
tell you what. If you can't stand by. If you
can't stand by the book, you're going to find out
in those three days, you're just going to hit a wall.
Speaker 3: In it.
Speaker 1: There was someone from Aenguin who I never met, never
saw them. They were just a disembodied voice in my headphones,
listening from another part of the world for mistakes. So
every now and then I just suddenly hear croissant. Croissant
saw me parent, you know, telescope telescope. You know, when
you're reading one hundred pages a day, that's not a
natural thing for anybody to do, even a storyteller. So
I'm really pleased with it. It's probably the only book
in the world that has endorsements from Gaba Matte and
Rodrea on the on.
Speaker 5: The same background. So I'm pleased about that, you know, And.
Speaker 4: Are they Let's say, is Penguin framing it as a
as a Christian book or a here's here's.
Speaker 1: Some amazing information for you. We've been talking for a
few years now about a kind of Christian renaissance, but
publishers may be int in that, but the rubber has
to hit the road with statistics. And this book, Literatures
of the Wild, is launching in the UK a wonderful
new imprint of Penguin called ebrey Vine and ebra Vine
is explicitly Christian, and Litagures of the World is one
of several books they're launching it with, and they have
a whole bunch of statistics about, you know, the the
phenomenal increase in young people, especially buying bibles, you know,
the whole It would have been talked about a lot
on your podcast already, but yes, just to let you know,
it is unadorned in its Christianity. But I'm pleased to
say there wasn't one adject they never there's no adjective
taken out, there's no clip clipping, there's no neatness. The
only thing that they paid real attention to. They had
a wonderful editor, but the things she paid attention to
was I herself said, I'm new to mythology, walk me
through it, you know, keep holding my hand from beginning
to end. And I wouldn't be famous for that. So
if you're new to this, this will be a bridge
of a book.
Speaker 2: That's great.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and in some ways it I mean, is it
Is it the first book that you've written since you're
a conversion or was there a book before?
Speaker 2: There was a book of the story of your of your.
Speaker 1: They're a little thing I did. I did a translation
of The Back Eye, but that was I wrote that
before before the conversion. I wrote a little book called
Stag Cult that was around that period of time. But
it's been the big project. It's been the thing that
I've been laboring on. And I have Yeah, I have
Rod Drea to thank actually for that, because Rod sort
of outed me to the entire world at a very
tentative point in my conversion experience. And one of the
positive things of which there have been many about that,
was that his publisher at the time and his editor
became interested in the story, which led to the book
getting written.
Speaker 5: Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: And now it's been three years.
Speaker 4: You know, there's been We've had a lot of people
kind of appearing, you could say, coming out of the
mist appearing. And so what's your vision and what do
you see coming forward? Do you feel like they're you know,
because there is a obviously, there are people going back
to church, there are people buying the Bibles, you know,
But do you do you sense that there is a
deeper vision, that that there are enough people Christians that
are able to kind of see it as more than propositional,
as a as a kind of almost like as a
mythic vision.
Speaker 1: Yeah. The the most interesting symbolic world episode I've seen
for a while is the one with you and Deacon
Serafin as we shall now you know, oh blue Eyes
as I like to call him, You and blue Eyes
talking about American religion and what happens when you focus
emphatically on a born again experience and that becomes the
pivot for everything else. Because, as we all know, anybody
that's ever been a Christian, if you remained in that
state the whole time, you'd be a nervous wreck. Even
Hildegarde Bob von Bingen needed a day off, I'm telling you,
you know. So what do you do when it's not
like that? What do you do when you're in the
territory of Jonathan Cross, and it's a great idea. You know,
you'll feel God most acutely when he's absent, or he
feels to be absent. So in other words, I appreciate
the excitement and the spirit of the moment. To make
a distinction between spirit and soul, Spirit is very much
the sense of possibility, but soul is the dip into
something that has to be sustainable and long term. So
I couldn't I couldn't say quite what is going on
in England. Protestant Christianity is in a very very strange position.
It doesn't really it's they've sold the farm. Really, they
don't barely know what they are, although I have lots
of Protestant friends and some wonderful Anglican priests very close
to me. So on the one hand, you have something
becoming compost and needing to be composted and then the
green shoots can come. And on the other hand you
have this phenomenal uptake of interest in things like Orthodoxy,
which have never ever really showed their face, not in
my lifetime, not in any real way. We did have
the wonderful Metropolitan you calistos Ware and Metropolitan Anthony. But
by and large, this is a new energy and it's
it's different colors, you know, visually, the power of the icons,
et cetera. I've just been with our mutual pal, dear
Heather Pollington. She's so great, isn't She's rage is our
whole family that everyone's so adorable. I want to commend you,
Jonathan for the amazing people that you have around you.
I just I was thinking about it the other day again.
My second favorite Symbolic World episode. It's so genius is
pirates and monks.
Speaker 2: Of course you would like that, my whole heart.
Speaker 1: And you said, such a fantastic thing and it you said,
you said pirates arragents of disruption, monastics arragents of continuity.
But you're who is your amazing friend Andrew?
Speaker 2: You have never met, are you?
Speaker 1: Andrew? On a number of occasions. But Andrew has the
voice of one hundred year old man. That where does
that accent come from?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 4: His it's actually his accent is because when he was
young he had a speech impediment. Oh and what he
did is he developed a way of speaking with which
was almost singing, which was rhythmic. And that is how
he was able to get beyond his speech impediment and
learn to speak normally. But that left in him this
very peculiar accent. And what's wild about it is that
he's the only person.
Speaker 2: In the world that has that accent. His children have
that accent.
Speaker 1: How glorious.
Speaker 4: There's gonna be a there'll be a goldline of English
that will develop downstream from him.
Speaker 1: Well, if I'm not concentrating, I think he's English. I
just think he's rich, you know. But it is. It's
like some straight I imagine he went to a very
odd private school on the borders of Wales with only
five students, you know, and one guy called, you know,
Dr Cornelius, who just taught by candlelight, you know, and
just gave him deep esoteric wisdom. But it but Andrew
and Deacon Seraphin and the wider on somebody, it's just
so amazing. It's so, isn't it. I Mean, if we
think for a minute about the notion of the shame,
it's such a senseless act of beauty symbolic world, because
you are doing this Sarkedo move where you're making something
that is beautiful and useful and nourishing to thousands of
people with the very mechanics that can seem so dreadful.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have to be honest with you, Martin.
Speaker 4: I feel gratitude every day when I think of you,
when I think of Paul, when I think of Andrew,
when I think of the concern for him and Heather.
In some ways, my entire life I suffered in silence
in the hopes that I could have people like that
around me, and without even without doing it on purpose,
almost it happened without my direct action. I feel like
now I have these this amazing band of friends that
are that I really want what's true and beautiful and good.
Speaker 1: I always have that feeling from you that when we're
together you handle things really lightly, and I mean that
in a good way. I don't see you. I don't
see you as a sort of a Grendel or a
my pressures, my precious, you know, I don't see that.
I see you just being open. I sort of slightly amazed, because,
like me, we haven't come into this as children. You know,
you and I are not bounding around in our early thirties.
We're like becoming old fellas. You know, we're becoming old fellas,
which is why storytelling is so important because you can't
be a decent storyteller til you're about sixty five. Anyway,
there's good news for all of us. But I just
wanted to slip that in. How I want to slip
in again this notion for anybody that's wondering, you know,
be an angel in the machine. You know, just find
your way to keep turning the current towards grace and beauty,
and these things are going to be very good for
your health.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's I mean, that is so important because it
you know, even myself, I can feel moments in myself
when I feel jaded, when I feel cynical, and you know,
there's anger at how at the direction some of the
directions of the world is in. But it's true that
everything that life giving is there in the celebration is there.
And finding those sparks, you know, and and these stories,
you know, the stories that you the Grayil story you know,
and the stories in your book, there are little places.
Speaker 1: Where we can remember what it is you we're here for,
you know, Thank you. I've just led a pilgrimage to Walsingham,
which is a very merry and I told blind tobit.
So I'm now doing a big oral storytelling of Blind Tobit.
I've been telling Ruth and Naomi. I've been telling Joseph
in the Underworld. I've been telling Jacob and Esau, which
is a mind blower. Wait you wait to see me
with my teeth into Jacob and esl the hairy boy,
you know, yes, and then and then I sort of
get to Jacob's well, and then we've got the women
and you know, the woman at the wall. Anyway, it's
just glorious. So I'm strongly suspecting that my next body
of work, God willing I have a long life, will
be to just start at Genesis and pursue Wow.
Speaker 2: That, oh God would be so precious. Wouldn't that be amazing.
I really hope that that's what you do next. That
would be wonderful. Thank you well, Martin, thank you so
much for everything you do.
Speaker 4: And uh, and I can't wait for the next moment
that we're having another Guinness together.
Speaker 1: Well we will be, because I am going to be
with you next month in London. Yes, and tell me
about that, because I'm a chair, I'm your chair that evening.
So you said, no, I'm kidding. Uh, it's not that
kind of chair. I'm just kind of posting the thing
for Temenos. What are you doing? What are you up
to in England?
Speaker 4: Yeah, so I mean I'm going I was going there
for meetings and then people at Temenos Academy. The Teminos
Academy for people don't know, is King Charles one of
King Charles's foundations. Uh, you know, it's a it's a foundation.
It's kind of like neoplatonic Christianity, a desire to to
to have a deeper corner kind of metaphysical vision of Christianity.
And so they reached out to me. I know you've
spoken there with there before. And what I want to
do is I want to talk about microcosm and macrocosm.
Speaker 2: You know, because we use it as a theory.
Speaker 4: People talk about it, but often it's said without being
looked at and without people being able to see the
examples and how they play out fractically in the person.
And so hopefully I'll have a crowd that we'll be
able to sustain a little more of a high brow
discussion on that question. And so yeah, so people should come.
It's it's January twenty eighth, twenty eighth.
Speaker 5: That thing let's figure this out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, get it right.
Speaker 5: You very rarely get me looking at a computer.
Speaker 1: You no fashion thought it is twenty seventh, Tuesday, the
twenty seventh.
Speaker 4: It's the twentieth, yes, okay, all right, so it's the
twenty seventh, yes, okay, so yeah, so it is. It's
January the twenty seventh in London. We'll put a link
also in the description if you want to want to join,
and so there are a lot of great things you
can participate in order Martin's book. We wanted to hit
the best seller list, and if you pre order it,
that's how that's how that happens.
Speaker 1: Yeah, believe it, believe it or not, it could happen.
And you you fellas could you know you could do that,
could do it. That'd be amazing thing. Yeah, so pre
order the book.
Speaker 4: Sign up also for the Grail week where we're all
going to sit and uh and and have some whiskey sit.
Speaker 1: With yeah yeah, yeah, every night. I've got the cigar
and the whiskey. Already good.
Speaker 5: All right, Thank you you, Martin, pleasure everybody.
Speaker 4: If you enjoy these videos and podcasts, please go to
the Symbolic world dot com website and see how you
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