Speaker 1: Do you know my whole life, no one has ever
said to me. If there's one thing I just can't stand,
it's a great story, it's never happened.
Speaker 2: And so I.
Speaker 1: Encourage everybody to be storytellers. Don't explore a story without
actually telling it, living in the room, living in your jaw,
because something essential gets passed on there. The soul is
not fed entirely by logic. We are fed by images.
We're not fed really by ideas. Ideas are interesting and
we can puzzle on them. But when we want to
be absolutely pollaxed by wonder, it is a story, one
way or another that is going to do it.
Speaker 2: This is Jonathan Psol Welcome to the Symbolic World. Hello everyone.
Speaker 3: It is my joy to be here with Martin Shaw.
Everybody who watches this notes who Martin Shaw's he is.
Speaker 2: He is a.
Speaker 3: Wonderful storyteller, a professor and author, and he was there
with us at the Symbolic Girl Summit this year. And
Martin is also doing his very first online class with
us on Christian wonder tales. He's been spending several years,
I guess by now going back into those ancient stories,
all those weird stories that nobody dares look at anymore
and is going to make them resurface for us. And
so Martin, thanks for thanks for coming, Thank.
Speaker 1: You, Johnathon. Pleasure to be here today. And I am
really excited about this course.
Speaker 3: So why were you attracted to these stories, these Christian
wondertail Like?
Speaker 2: What is it about them?
Speaker 1: I like, because you're not clinging onto them in the
way you may one of the Gospels, for example. There's
a kind of looseness to them. There's a sense that
it's a kind of an abandoned Christian mythology. Really. And
at the beginning of this year, I was on the
smallest of the Arron islands off Island, so it's a
remote island, and I spent some time really on vigil
in the remains of a chapel of a woman called
Saint Gobnet, who is a bee maiden. There's lots of
stories around her, and these stories just me maiden. Yeah,
she's just good with bees. Bees are attracted to her,
honey is Irish Christianity? Yeah, it is a thing, you know,
bees are attracted. There's a story you will have heard
me tell before of a young a young Christian making
his way across island carrying the body of Christ, and
he sees this sort of ecstatic smoke or cloud coming
towards him, and he falls into an ecstasy, and when
he wakes up, the body of Christ has left him,
which is something that can happen to young Christians. One moment,
it's all very up close and personal. Next moment, God
has gone. And in the end it turns out, after
conversing with an angel that the bees have actually taken
the body of Yesua to create a little kind of
be a bee chapel where there's a bee Eucharist and
they serve mead I suppose, rather than wine. But this
monk's life becomes bringing people to the bee chapel and
the presence of Christ. Now for a year. He tells
no one of this delirium that he's lost. You know,
he had one job and he's messed it up. But
the angel says to him, you know, the grief and
the shame you were carrying was far heavier than the
body of Jesus. You should have just fessed up to
this straight away, should have got you in confession. And
the question I always ask my students at that point
is when did you go through something that you considered
a failure that was actually making honey. So we look
back at our own lives and we see all sorts
of things that seem like detours and mistakes and betrayals,
and actually there is a shape and there is a
pattern for it's a lot of the work that you're doing.
Actually it's symbolic world, I think, is sifting that to consciousness.
And these old Saint stories do that, They do that,
and they are they are. I've been working recently, and
I haven't announced this yet, but I've been working. Have
you ever come across a Saxon gospel called the Healand
or the heliand it's it's what you call it, Yeah, Yeah,
it's the four gospels that are ninth cent monastic over
in Germany put together, and it is clearly the story
of the New Testament. But you know, you'd get conscious
Pilot being called a thane, and you would get Rome
being called a hill fort, and you would get Jesus
being called the generous chieftain, and when they sail out
on the lake, they're on a long ship. But this
story essentially is the same. And there is a sense
with these early Saints stories of something like that going on.
You go, oh, okay, these these rifts and motifs that
keep showing up are biblically embedded, but they're in a
landscape that the Celts can comprehend.
Speaker 2: And so are these now that you're looking at.
Speaker 3: Are they mostly coming from from the Celtic traditions?
Speaker 1: Yeah they are initially. They are initially, but we're not
going to stay there. Where we're going to begin is
actually just before the arrival of Christianity in Ireland. We're
going to begin with something called the invasion tales of
the Tour de Donnan, which is really the notion the
island was never created. It just sort of always was
in the Irish pagan mind. It just was always here.
It's incomprehensible to think of a time when Ireland wasn't there. So,
as you probably know from the story, there are various
competing forces for Ireland, one of whom the tour had
de Donnan are really what you would regard as the
fairy people, the people of the she the people of
the hill, the gentry. Down here in Devon where I live,
we call them the Benji. You know, they're all around,
or certainly in folklore and so we're going to begin there.
We're going to look at the temperament and the consciousness
of the stories before Christianity arrives, and little bits of
foreshadowing that you get in those stories. Then in the
first couple of gatherings, I will start to tell very
much in the manner ver Shanarcky of a storyteller. I'll
just tell the stories and see where we locate ourselves
within them. However, and this is important, We're not staying
there for the whole duration. What I'm really interested in
is actually how Saint stories and stories like the heliand
begin to evolve into what in the twelfth and thirteenth
century we come to know as the chivalric tradition and
the Arthurian tradition, which is very embedded really within Christianity.
It's really the notion of no less Obliege that Christ
has rescued you from the dung heap and placed you
to sit with princes, and quite what are you going
to do about that? So there's an evolution going on.
We have the early Irish stories, but then we begin
to bring it into a wider Arthurian context. And if
you're thinking of an Arthurian context that is as European
as it is British after a.
Speaker 3: While, right, right, And so you see this fusion of
the Celtic myth with Christianity. But also, I mean, obviously
in the Arthurian tradition you see this kind of French
romance integrate into these into these these tropes. But you
can still tease out, you feel like you can still
see the glimmers of those old Celtic stories in the
Arthurian romances.
Speaker 1: I certainly can. I certainly can. And I mean, if
you're going to if you're going to look at the tradition,
a lot happens really around, as you're saying, with the
influence actually, even of the Moorish poets in mediev and
Spain coming over, bumping into the courtly schools of love,
bumping into eleanor of Aquitaine. And so whilst the appreciative
consciousness you could say, of the Muslim poets is coming
out over the Pyrenees, it's colliding with stories coming down
from the Norman courts of Wales and Britain. Because the
storytellers there primarily were not Saxon, they were Celts, and
so they start to hear about King Arthur, they start
to recognize ways in which the Arthurian tradition, as you're saying,
is a confluence of influences. But you don't have to
look very far before you can see these earlier sixth
century strands that are the ones we're going to be
exploring most profoundly for us will be Gawayne in the
Green Knight. That'll be the final session.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's Oh, that's wonderful. That'll be amazing.
Speaker 3: So moving from early pre Christian you know, Keltic traditions
are the way to Gwain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's it. That's it. And the final the final
session will be around the notion of a rule for life,
which is something in Orthod we're fairly familiar with and
anybody that's interested in Christianity as a sense of how
do you get your life into an organized shape? What
are you going to focus your attention on? And that
is part of the chivalric Arthurian and I think Christian ideal.
You don't have that so clearly in the early Fianna
mythological stories of Ireland. Then when the Saint stories come
with that incredible influence of the desert fathers and mothers.
So you as you know you have talked to Paul
kings North about this. I'm sure what you get in
Ireland in the early days is this terrific Coptic Egyptian
influence that's actually going on, as well as the more
Latinized version of Christianity that begins to creep in via England.
But not it. I hate to break the news, but
not everybody is designed to be a saint in the desert.
Not everybody is. So what we you've got.
Speaker 3: To bounce it up well on paper, Its yeah, just
live in the desert.
Speaker 2: Is that wonderful.
Speaker 1: Thirty years now of leading wilderness vigils in a forest
or in wild places? I know, I know the reality
of that kind of encounter, and it's useful, but it's not.
It's not for everyone. It's not for everyone. And so
what you get within the chivalric tradition is a way
in which people can incorporate a spirituality as much of
the village as of the forest or the desert. I'm
very interested in the word marry. Do you remember, like
merry England Robin Hood, you know, merry England will marry
is a word to describe a lot of what was
going on in Britain in pre Reformation Christianity before the
stripping of the altars, before everything gets very very honed
down within with reason to some degree. I understand kind
of why it happened. It just went far too far,
I feel, so all of that is what's going to
be in this notion of a Christian wonder tale. So
you know, I couldn't believe it, Jonathan. I actually googled
Christian wonder tail a few years. It just didn't exist
as a word. It wasn't there. So we've put it,
we've brought it, we've shifted it to consciousness.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's it's interesting because there are those wonder tales?
Are there also in other places? Right in the Greek traditions?
Do you have these stories, but they've also been forgotten
or they've also been tamed. And if you think of
the stories of Saint Anthony, right, so the very first
hagiography written in the story of Saint Anthony, he goes
into the desert and meets Centaur in a sadder and
talks with the satter in the desert. And it's like
everybody who has an eye of Andy did they even
know about these these wild aspects of the early Saint stories.
I think everything has been tamed, even in Orthodoxy doesn't extent,
a lot of things have been tamed to kind of
fit our Martyn frame of thinking.
Speaker 1: There's a wonderful story about a young lad called Saint Kieran,
and Saint Patrick gives him he's a young monk. He
gives him a bell and he says, this bell will
ring wherever it is that God wants you to create
your little church, your chapel. And so Kieran wanders off
into Ireland and he has high hopes that it'll be
somewhere very beautiful. So he would hang out, I would
imagine in what we would now call Dublin, or he'd
hang out in what we now call Galway, or somewhere
beautiful like Connemara. But he ends up in a deep,
gloomy forest, and sure enough, to his horror, the bell
starts to ring and he muffles it. You know, like
when your phone goes off and you don't want anybody.
You're in church and you're trying to put off. And
I wonder what is it like for us when a
spiritual bell starts to ring, and we muffle the sound.
You know, we do this. We don't want to We
want to be like Jonah, you know, we head off
in the opposite direction of where God is usually telling
us to go. So Kieran in the end honors the
bell and he starts to build his small chapel, and
bit by bit his first students, his first monastics, turn up,
and of course they turn up as a bore tusked bar,
and they turn up as a wolf, they turn up
as a fox, And suddenly Kieran is realizing that the
story of Jesus seems to speak across species. Even the
animals are interested. And so he sits down around the
fire in the forest at night, and for a considerable
chunk of time, the first, the first willing student students
of the Christian religion are the animal presences. And then finally,
bit by bit people start to turn up. And you
get that in Celtic Christianity, in the early Church, many
of the places where even Abby's were created, initially there
is an encounter with an animal. There, there's some profound
encounter an animal, and that would be the place this
woman I mentioned on the scott on the Irish Island
Saint Gobnet. She finds the place that God intends to
her for her by following nine white deer. So you
can imagine the metaphors are so rich, the images are
so wonderful for people, because, as far as I'm concerned,
everybody I meet is a saint in training, you know,
why not? Why not? You know that that's as certainly
as Christians what we're trying to be. So these are
stories that give us, with a little bit of mischief
and a little bit of beauty, you know, a road
to follow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, and how you know?
Speaker 3: I mean I've been obviously been talking about this. I'd
like to hear how do you Because for a lot
of people, these stories they're actually embarrassing, right, They're embarrassing
to them because okay, so he get to bell and
or you know, like animals come to the campfire. You know,
the modern mind becomes cynical very quickly.
Speaker 2: And so what do you, how do you?
Speaker 3: What do you think their way back into these stories
are how can we as you know, modern people that
drive cars and have cell phones, how can we dive
back into these stories?
Speaker 1: Well, they're not for everybody. I think that's the first thing.
If you really have no instinctial interest in them, then
you'll find some other way to live, some other temple
to serve in. I feel very strongly about Christianity in general.
Actually we should just let the stories be the stories
for a bit. We should stop whashing them over the
head with allegory or theory or even too much theology.
I'm of the old tradition that Holy Spirit goes where
he will. And actually these stories are luminous, their stained
glass apparitions, loaded like the layers of an onion with
information and disclosure. So I never try too hard to
persuade anybody of anything. I let the stories do the work.
And I think as soon as you've got animals in story,
animals that talk, and you've got bells that ring, we
know we have ented the marvelous, and we know that
we have entered a terrain that for me is telling
me a deeper truth about my life than statistics ever.
Can you know? I was listening to the I've just
been praying in a church this morning, and beforehand, I
was listening to the radio. And as you know, well,
the world is filled with invasion and war at the moment,
it's all we hear about and I needed. I know
from mythology that if you gaze too long at a monster,
it will reduce you to ashes. And the correct mythological
approach is to have a shield, and you gaze at
the trouble through its reflection on the shield. And these
stories do that in a fashion. I have lots of
friends of mine that have been involved in activism work
of one kind or another and are simply burnt out
by it because there's no artistry to their approach to it.
They just fall into despair. So I find these stories
really nourishing, really protecting in a strange way. They protect me.
But it's what the Mexicans call the river beneath the river.
And if somebody is constantly using a certain analytical part
of their mind, that is all well and good, but
it's not something that Ian McGilchrist would be interested in.
It's not that great or what James Hillman called the
poetic basis of mind. Most of us want to hear stories.
Do you know my whole life, no one has ever
said to me. If there's one thing I just can't stand,
it's a great story. It's never happened. And so I
encourage everybody to be storytellers. Don't. Don't. Don't explore a
story without actually telling it, living in the room, living
in your jaw, because something essential gets passed on there. So,
to go back to your original question, I think initially
most people are very happy to settle by a fire
or even buy a computer screen and get told a story.
But there can be a slow, protracted, nervous breakdown of
your usual way of thinking. Quite honestly, I'm famous for this. Yeah,
you know, so I can't apologize. I can't apologize for that.
Speaker 3: I like what you're saying in some ways, to some extent,
explaining it is not the right way, because there is
a mystery which is real, which is that these stories,
like I say, from the fairy tales, these legends, all
these types of stories, they they contain elements which to
the everyday life and to the mundane life seem completely absurd.
But nonetheless, that type of storytelling is universal. It's universal
in every culture of all time. There are stories that
have these elements in them. And not only that, but
you know, you tell a fair tale to a child
and the child immediately loves it and is more attentive
to it than he would be to a munday and story.
Even though if you break down the elements in the story,
they like in terms of everyday causality, it's ridiculous, like it's.
Speaker 2: Why is there talking wolf? Why?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: What?
Speaker 3: Like?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: You've never encountered these things?
Speaker 1: Uh?
Speaker 3: So there is you know, even just how can I
say this, Like even just if we look at our
experience of the stories from being a child to being today,
there is something necessarily precious about them by the very
fact that these stories exist, that they've been told over
and over and that, like I said, even though you know,
when you join Peterson has this famous thing, it's like
you watch Pinocchio and you see Pinocchio being swallowed by
a whale, turning into a donkey speaking to a cat,
and you never ask you never, you're never bothered by it.
You never think, well, that's that's that doesn't make sense?
But why because obviously you'd have never like Haank. So
there's a deep there are deep analogies in us that
res in these stories, even though we don't even though
we don't understand that.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I think it comes to that very strange
notion that we find all over the world that humans
have a soul, and a soul. A soul is not fed,
it seems, it seems that the soul is not fed
entirely by logic. And usually in our life the times
we feel most profoundly alive are in times of great
distress or great wonder. But in some way the soul
seems to wake up. And traditionally, in many cultures that
are ritually savvy, that don't have an understanding of, you know,
initiation mythologies, the slow process of growing into a human being,
we are fed by images. We're not fed really by ideas.
Ideas are interesting and we can puzzle on them, but
when we want to be absolutely pollaxed by wonder, it
is a story, one way or another that is going
to do it. You and I would have been in
church on Sunday in the midst of the story of
the divine Liturgy, that very slow, ancient dance that we're
all part of. And the truth is, don't tell anybody.
Sometimes I don't want to go to church. Sometimes I
wake up and I think, oh no, here we go again.
My feet are already aching. But something will happen in
the second usually in the second hour of the liturgy,
where I will fall backwards into the arms of the
story of the liturgy. Somehow. I never know when it's
going to happen, never know, can't guarantee it. But something
happens and I get lifted out of my mundane, worried,
neurotic mind, and for a period of time I experienced
something like grace. And then I can't sustain it, and
so I come back and under the same irritable rat
bag that I was before I went into church. But
I find that stories give me. I'm forgiven me. If
I've said this before, you know you end up. I'm
sure you experienced this saying things and you're mad. Have
I said this already in the last five minutes. You
experience in stories pin pricks of eternity. And actually, as
a mythologist and a storyteller, I lived on pin pricks
of the eternal for twenty five years in the stories
I was telling. And then you know, and I do
have to say this, entering Christianity, it's not pin pricks anymore.
It's a great river that you've vented. You've entered what
was hinted at and alluded to in many other stories.
Suddenly you've gone from you know, milk to meat, as
Paul would say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but why do you think why do you think then,
I mean, this is a.
Speaker 2: Big question, but you know we can polk at it.
Speaker 3: Why do you think then that so many of the
wonder of Christianity has been reduced?
Speaker 2: Right? Why is it that Christianity has.
Speaker 3: Been made so mundane when if you look at the
very elements of it, if you look at the story
of Jesus, crucifixion, the resurrection, the communion, the Eucharistic meal,
all of it is completely out of whack, like.
Speaker 2: There's nothing, there's nothing.
Speaker 3: How could something like that become kind of moralistic mundane?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Is there is there nothing we can't pull the
stinger out of? Eventually? I think I said it a
few minutes ago that I think to come close, to
come close to story in the way for a modern
person to come close to story involves almost a kind
of nervous breakdown of that conventional ways of thinking. And
I think to really approach what a Christian is is similar.
It certainly has been for me. It's been an extraordinary process.
But when I look, if I was to critique, and
I'm not really qualified to do it, but I will.
If I was to critique modern Western Christianity, a lot
of the time it seems to activate the will you know,
that evangelistic, great commission esque feeling that we have in
the West. Western Christianity feels very extroverted to me. It
feels a very extrovert version of the Christian experience. Orthodoxy
doesn't really And when it is as much an effort
of will as it is an experience of love, then
I think you lose contact with the wildness of the
thing because you are trying to make it. You're trying
so hard to make it accessible. In a strange way,
you are no longer asking anything of anybody. Now what
I mean, I would have heard you. Actually, you and
I were talking recently. You and I were talking recently
about this situation that the church often seems to be in,
where we are mimicking a culture that no longer cares
for us. And you said to me, you said, look,
if I want to go to a rock concert, there's
a much better rock concert I can go to than
the one that I'm going to get in my local parish.
I'll just go and see Pearl jam or I'll see
you know, I'll just do that, and so I think
we have become photocopied and photocopied and thinned out. We
have lost, as many other people have said, predominantly over here,
Tom Holland, we've lost our weird and a positive example though,
of a change, would have been last Saturday. I would
have been with my spiritual father, father Bereforous, with a
whole group of young katakumin, so young guys, predominantly men
that are going to enter the process of moving into Orthodoxy.
And one of the reasons I asked him, I said,
you know why you hear is predominantly because the situation
calls something. It's calling something out of them, it's calling
more out of them, which is a chivalric gallant position.
Christianity is very strange because on the one hand it
has this great emphasis on humility, but on the other
it has this emphasis that your steps in this world
matter and have consequence, and you have to proceed like that,
but not being annihilated by your own ego. So I'm
going in all sorts of directions from your original question.
But you and I follow a God who was born
a fugitive. He dies in an outlaw, and then he has
the audacity to return. That's wild information. That's very very strange.
It's very strange, but it has become thinned out, domesticated,
and so coned over. We can't seem to hear hear
the message of it anymore. It doesn't seem to get
anybody excited.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think you.
Speaker 3: I think your point also, you know this idea that
it engages the will, because one of one of the
things that happens in that case is that we feel like, Okay,
now we master this, you know, and now we're going to,
like you said, make it available to others because we
you know, we've got this, you know. Whereas in fact,
the story of Christ, you know, and the life, the
liturgical life is is something which is constantly transforming you, right,
It's constantly changed. It's constantly bringing you into insights and
you know, personally inside in your life, but also cosmic
insights and insights about others, and insights about you know,
and participation into things that keep growing and keep getting bigger.
And so yeah, I think that's interesting if you if
you see yourself rather in the story right in the
flow of like we're part of this astounding story. We
have the chance to have a little parcel, you know,
of Christ and to live that out.
Speaker 2: In our in our in our life.
Speaker 3: That is definitely it seems like a way into you know,
a way into the mystery.
Speaker 2: But on the other hand, I also see, how can
I say this, like, I also see.
Speaker 3: The opposite, right, I see people who make it all
about themselves as well, right, make it all about their.
Speaker 2: Story, like their own story.
Speaker 3: And so it seems it seems like what we need
is something like a like, yeah, this balance between this
this life that I'm leaving but as it is angered
or in the in the river.
Speaker 2: Of a of a greater cosmic story.
Speaker 1: At the same time, I've been thinking recently about the
because I'm working on this Saxon Gospel, not because I
need not because we need it particularly, but just because
it's a wonderful bit of storytelling. It's incredible. But I've
been thinking about the Saxon relationship. They're very heavy on
the notion of fate and destiny. Fate and destiny, it's
a Scandinavian thing, it's a Saxon thing. And someone was
saying to me recently, they said, well, as a Christian,
what do you make of all of that? And I said, well,
I want to be as surrendered to the mind of
Christ as I possibly can. So as a Christian, I'm
trying to enter the river fully that and go in
the direction he wants. But I will wiggle my kayak
as I go. So in other words, it's this, it's
surrender to the life that God wants for you. But
at the same time, I would presume He has infiltrated
you with intuitions, gumption, a little bit of personal stamina
to move your you know, move your craft. I'm not
in a sort of blissed out state all the time.
I often think that a Christian is required to be
both steadfast and restless in a way. When you read
the Gospel of John, it's hard to pick it out,
but right at the beginning the Gospel of John, he's
he's writing not just for Christians, but he's writing that
you stay a Christian, that you stay a Christian. So
the notion is that Christianity has an active principle to it.
There's a movement in the story. It's very hard. As
you get older, your mind gets calcified with certain ideas,
and one of the most dramatic things for me about
my conversion to Christianity was in the middle of my life,
having to sort of dissolve a lot of what I
previously thought was absolutely established in my thinking and in
my character.
Speaker 3: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's the stories that we remember, the stories
that we come back to are filled with those crossroads moments.
Myths are very rarely about the day that was, just
like the day before. They're not those stories are not
worth remembering, certainly not in an oral culture. We remember
the story where something unexpected happens on the way to
the fair, you know exactly.
Speaker 3: And so when you look at these these Christian wondertail
that you're exploring, or you know, the Saxon Gospel and
these these this kind of fusion that's in between that,
are there something that you've seen that you're almost thinking, Okay,
I can't I even I can't touch that, Like that's
where it's too weird, that's I don't understand it, like
the connecta.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I would. I would say. An interesting question
for me over the last few years has been as
a as a Christian and as a storyteller and a mythologist,
are there certain stories that are just not feeling right
to tell? Anymore. Yeah, And actually I would have to say,
there's a couple in the Scandinavian pantheon that are just
so dark and are so woven in with witchcraft, it
is not appropriate for me to get my energy behind
them and bring them into the world. It doesn't mean
that I don't appreciate them in a in a rather
macabre fashion, but I'm not putting my I'm not putting
my my energy behind it. It's it's too inculcated in
a wildly different Does that make sense, No, you have to.
You're going to feel at some point not all roads
leave up lead up the mountain to Muhammad. Not in
my book, you know. So there are certain stories that
I may even consider translating or having written down. But
when you tell a story that engages another kind of
energy altogether, and so with the Saxon Gospel, they're cleaving
so clearly to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John that's fine.
To the early Celtic wonder tales, the Christian wonder tails,
they again have all sorts of similarities to things that
you're reading in the Gospels, and there's no taste in
your mouth that feels that the message has got so mixed,
it's lost its divine ground. Now I haven't encountered that.
Speaker 2: Okay, well I mean that. Yeah, that's that's fascinating.
Speaker 3: And these stories were they how are they preserved? Like
are they were they preserved actively? Or are they like
there's just one book somewhere in the library that they found,
you know, in the nineteenth century, Like were they preserved actively?
Speaker 1: They're all over the place. There's lots and lots and
lots of books from the late nineteenth and early twentieth
century Saint tales, accounts of the early saints. Now, the
thing is they're written without a tremendous amount of imagination,
so it's very easy for your eyes to go dead.
You have to be a storyteller. You have to be
a professional in a way to glean what is actually
going on and go, okay, does put this work in
a room? Is this story inviting me to be related
to it? One of the things in stories that is
interesting is when you come to a part that makes
you uncomfortable or you don't like. When I'm training storytellers,
the first thing I say to them if they're hearing
a story from me for the first time, which bit
can't you remember, and at some point someone will say, yeah,
there was a red rider, then there was a right rider.
Was there another rider? I said, yeah, there was a
black rider. And whatever you forget in this story initially
is your point of investigation, because it's the part of
you that shuts down and says, I'm not ready for
that information. I'm not ready to hear that at the moment.
And so in a way, it's not what you remember,
it's initially what you forget as a storyteller that pulls
you further in. That's the invitation. So as I always say,
spiritual information often arrives with dismay, and it's stories that
confound me on occasion or upset me that become a
pebble in my shoe that over time I have to,
through the slow labors of storytelling, bring it into my
body in psyche, so better I understand it.
Speaker 2: Hmmm.
Speaker 3: And so can you give us an example of a
story that was your blind like blind with your blind
by like a story that you it took you a
long time to be able to see properly.
Speaker 2: That's a tough Q.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's I'll go for a I'll go for a
massive story. I'll go for a story that we're both
familiar with, passival. So passival is is is a grail
epic passival. Depending on how the word is spelt, you
get different versions of it, some that are French, some
that are German. The one that I really like was
written composed at least by a man called Wolfram von Eschenbach,
who was a German. He was something called a minisinger,
a singer of love who the Germans, you know what
the Germans are like. They see what's being done somewhere else,
and that vivl improved this, and so they saw what
was happening with the with the troubadours, and then they
get the menacing is. So there's a lot of intro,
a lot of influence of schretend Detroit and others. But
the story of passival, Passival as a character actually, for me,
for the first half of the story is deeply unattractive.
And he's he's almost repellent. He's naive, he's boastful. He
commits one, one audacious mistake after another. In fact, they
say in it Wolfram says he made an art of
his failure. He made an art of his failure. And
it's only in the second half of his life, when
actually he has an experience where he could have he
could have healed the ailing grail King, but is not
experienced enough to do so. It's in the second half
of his life that he tries to find as an
act of will something he was initially given as an
act of grace, which is kind of impossible. But often
earlier on in our life we are afforded all sorts
of opportunities that out in the wastelands of our forties,
fifties and sixties, that all seems to have gone away.
We're in a much harder place. So passer all was
a story. For many years. He was not attractive to
me in the way Robin Hood would be attractive. He
was not attractive to me in the way that bear
Wolf would be attractive. But in the end I realized
me with my own catalog of disasters and mistakes, he
was telling me far more about the walk of my
own life than any of those wonderful high faluting heroes
ever could. And so then then what I had to do,
Jonathan imagine this Wolfram's Wolfram's Story is one hundred and
eleven pages of gossipy high German Medieval High German. You know,
most of it's just descriptions of suits of armor and horses,
and I had to take them. I had to take
those four hundred and eleven pages and over a period
of about a year, inculcate them into a language that
round a fire for two and a half days I
could tell without people going into a trance of boredom.
But by the end of it, I had wrestled like
Jacob with the story, and I had recognized my own
failings and smallness of spirit that Parsival has. But also
I had forgiven myself in a way, because in the
way in the story you have to forgive Passaval. But
it's only when Parsival actually is in the process of
he meets a holy man who gradually reveals to him
what a disaster he's made of his own life. It's
then and the possial himself says, I need to ask
for forgiveness. And I always say in that part of
the story, this is the moment when something grandiose Impossival
died and something great was born. And I think all
of us are human beings, at some point are going
to encounter that reality. So the big one for me
was possible. What about you, Have you ever had a
story that you struggled with?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think that it's funny that you say that.
You know, it's funny that you mentioned that, because I've
also noticed that when I I mean, obviously I love
the Bible stories, but I've also noticed that there are
some Bible stories that I don't remember, and especially there
are some parts of Jesus's story, for example, that I
tend to forget some of the things that he said,
which some of the parables that don't make sense or
that seem to say the opposite of what Jesus is saying. Yeah,
And you know, for example, like for the longest time
when I was when I was young, there was a
part of Jesus, the part where he says where he
praises the Pharisees, well, he doesn't praise them, but he says,
you know, he says, don't do what the Pharisees do,
but listen to them before their sitting in Moses' sit
you know. And as a kind of young rebel, you know,
punk punk rock kind of teenager that's say, in my
up to my twenties, like I could I couldn't see
that part.
Speaker 2: I just couldn't see it.
Speaker 3: And then at some point in my mid twenties that
text hit me. It was like and I read it
and I thought, what what I Jesus says that? And
I thought, I've been reading this story for years and
I've never seen it like I because I've never seen
that Jesus says that, or I've relegated to some dark
corner where it doesn't it doesn't matter. And so that's
Those are the types of things that I've that I
pay attent that I pay attention to, for example, even
in terms of just insight into into how profound those
stories are. Like there's a part in the Gospel where
Jesus sells Peter to bring a sword to you know,
at the at the Last Supper, you know, and I
always just would completely ignore that because the part where
Jesus tells Peter not to strike the Roman soldier that
makes sense story wise, like it makes total sense, But
you don't remember that Jesus told Peter to bring the
sword in the first place, because that part bothers you.
It doesn't it's not doesn't give you that knife clean,
you know, Like Francis of ASSISTI Jesus that you expect, uh.
And so even especially in the story of Christ, are
the places where elements of Christ's story of things that
he said or things that he's that he's done that
wouldn't stick, just wouldn't hold in my memory are the
are the ones that have brought me further because they've
compensated for my own tendencies.
Speaker 4: You could say, I think you've raised something very important, really,
which is what is what are those stories trying to
do to the reader, Because you imagine that any keen
editor would have spotted things like this immediately and bit
by bit by bit removed the pebbles from the shoe.
Speaker 1: But they're not in there, And so you come out
if you really are concentrating as you're reading, you're going
to come out of it, not usually with the fulsome
glow that I would receive from an epic myth. I
come out of the biblical stories aware that something powerful
and rather disturbing has happened that I've only half glimpsed.
I've been asked a couple of times. They've said, you know,
when you pray, does Jesus sort of stand in front
of you in that iconic way where you know, he's
literally facing you like an icon, And I say, not
at all. He's a figure moving through the tree line,
you know, I just catch glimpses. He's thrilling. For me.
I never ever feel christ like ever. So that's interesting
because here's a thing. One of the questions I had
before I was a Christian was, how on earth do
you follow a figure who is entirely perfect? How do
you figure? How do you follow a figure made of light?
Because you would know, in conventional mythologies we have very
nuanced gods and goddesses. No one is going to Zeus
or Dionysus or Athena or Grendel for you know, an
experience of complete emphatic, you know, luminous wholeness. So that's
been one of the challenges for me. I was talking
to someone recently and they said, well, reading the Bible
is like having a bath, you know, and sometimes the
bath feels rather hot as you get into it. And
the language is clean. As we've discussed before, it very
rarely describes, if ever, the inner condition of anybody. You've
got the surface thing, you know. And then this happened,
and then this happened, and then there was this and
then they went onto the hill. And as a storyteller,
I want to break down in tears because I'm thinking
this is going to be very difficult for me to tell.
Speaker 2: I have good news.
Speaker 1: Though since I've seen you last, I have started to tell, say,
for example, the stories of Genesis up to about the
Tower of Babel, and they are fullsome wild, beautiful, disturbing things,
even told orally, but they're not chapter and verse. But
the I cleave to the you know, I cleave to
the narrative. There's a limit to poetically how far I'm
going to go with it. But yeah, I love it.
But as you're saying, I forget, I forget because the
Bible seems to be sometimes contradictory. I realized a few
years ago I was never going to get a clear
sense of half of what Jesus was saying until I
did the slow labor of the Old Testament, because he
is continually everything is talking to everything else. In Russian
fairy tales, if you're trying to get close to the firebird,
she's often in a cage in the wild. If you
touch the cage, there's thousands of invisible strings that go
off into the forest and everything suddenly becomes luminous and alerted.
And I find the Bible a bit like that. It's
got all of these tendrils attached to it, but it
doesn't quite honestly, as someone that's grown up with Homer
and Shakespeare, other than the song of the Songs or
job it doesn't always give me what I'm hungry for
as a word person, but it gives me something deeper.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but the figure of crazy is it's definitely what
you said is very insightful because in scripture, all the
other characters have a light and a dark side, right
they You can read almost all the Old Testament stories
and you know, I actually encourage people to do that
as an experiment, like read the story of King David
from the point of view of King Saul. Like you
can do it, and you can see that King Saul
sometimes if you can make actually King Saul right to
some extent in some places where it's like, you know,
I don't know about David, he's he's a little shady.
Speaker 2: You can do it. Even read Exodus from the point
of view of the Pharaoh and.
Speaker 3: Realize that, you know, he's got his reasons for what
he's doing, and so each all the characters. Actually, although
the descriptions are sparse, the characters are actually quite complex.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and even in the New Testament.
Speaker 3: You see you see Saint Peter, Saint Paul, you know,
in the way they present themselves, you can see like
their warts, you know, even though they're saints, you can
kind of see their warts and.
Speaker 2: How and their excesses.
Speaker 3: But Christ is like, ah, it's it's annoying because on
the one hand, like you said, he's he presents the
perfect person. But then at the outset, that perfect person
doesn't look like the way you think it should look,
and so and so he also has like all these
multiple aspects that we that's why we struggle to see
it because we we think we have a particular point
of view.
Speaker 2: We think Jesus should.
Speaker 3: Be like I said, he should be Saint Frans of
ASSISI knights with everyone, hippie dippy Jesus right, or he
should be you know, like telling people off, telling them
their real truth, you know, getting them, you know, getting
them the message, making sure that that uh uh.
Speaker 2: And and it's like if I like one of those,
then I.
Speaker 3: Struggle to see the other because it's so complete and
so there's always this prism that I can't completely see
through because it has because it has all these facets
that are that that don't seem to usually belong together.
Speaker 2: Maybe that's the way I think.
Speaker 1: That's exactly exactly right. You can't draw Jesus with one line,
you know. I think as a child, I really wanted
him to kind of morph into John the Baptist, you know,
I just really want I really like John the Baptist,
or I really like Elijah, you know, I really like
those kind of guys. And then he's a bit too
Sometimes he's a bit urban for me. But then he's
back out praying early in the forest in the morning.
You don't know what he's up to. You can't you
can't pin him down. And on the one hand, Christ
is willing to talk to everybody, but beware if you
talk to him, beware because he's gonna he's he's going
to confront you with something. He will expose you. I
say this to people all the time. I live in
a state as a Christian of intolerable exposure. It's it's
dreadful for me. It's it's a constant, low level humiliation
because I'm because because of all things that we're describing,
you know, mythology wonderful though it is, offers you a
lot of places to hide, and it allows you to worship,
as Paul would say, the unknown God. You know, that's
what I did for years. I just lived. Romanticism is
a push towards Christian experience, but it's not quite it
most of the time. I was. I was finishing a
book the other day and I wrote something that I
thought was meaningful to me. I said, every experience of beauty,
in every experience of beauty, we are being prepared for eternity.
In every experience of beauty, we are being prepared for eternity.
I believe that as a Christian, certainly those glimpses of something,
and it's whise the Romantics say. You know, truth is beauty.
Beauty is truth. Beauty shows you what you want to
defend in your life, what you're going to stand for,
how you earn your name. Again, this is the chivalric tradition.
This is a very Christly way of living, I think.
But yeah, the Bible, my goodness me, the bits that
we forget. I often pick it up and I feel
like I've never read it before. On that note, fill
me in. How was it for you? Because you and
Jordan and was James all there the other week doing
Genesis about it? What was it?
Speaker 2: We did the gospel? Yeah, we did the gospel story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I mean it was daunting, you know, because
the gospels also because it's like the Gospels, like all
the Gospels, it's so large. It was quite daunting, and
I was I was worried about it. But in the end,
I felt like we had just the right type of
people there and.
Speaker 2: We were able to.
Speaker 3: You know, respect the text as much as possible and
to kind of bring out and because we went through
the entire Gospel, like we got, we tried to deal
at least with the story in terms of the story
of Christ.
Speaker 2: Tried to deal with all the elements of the story.
Speaker 3: I feel like the complexity of Christ came out, you know,
and some of the difficult aspects of the Gospel too.
We had Dennis Frager there, you know, Jewish guy who
pointed out some of the things that are difficult for
them to see in the gospel, did it very respectfully
and everything, and so it was it was great. I
can't wait for people to see it. I think that
some I think that some Protestants will be annoyed with
it because we don't preach the Gospel, like not once
in the sense that they would hope, like, we don't
present the way to be saved in the entire you
know whatever. Ten hours of discussion, we basically just look
at the character that's appearing on the text. And like
for John Ravaki, who grew up even grew up in
a Christian home and went away from Christianity, we went
through the text and he felt like he had never
encountered Jesus before. He said, he said, I'm encountering a
Jesus that I'd never noticed. You know, I'm He thanked
all of us, He said, thank you for bringing me
along on this journey, because all of a sudden he's
seeing Jesus in a in a fresh light. And I
think that that's maybe if we did anything good, that's
the best thing that we did.
Speaker 2: H And I think it's the same with.
Speaker 3: You with what you're doing in terms of you know,
I I've been asking you ever since you became a Christian.
I've been like I've been always asking the same question,
like are you reading the Bible?
Speaker 2: Are you reading the Bible.
Speaker 3: Story because I have this I have a dream of
one day sitting there, you know, and listening to you
tell me a Bible story and I, you know, I
know it'll make me see it in a way that
I haven't seen it yet, and so I find that
extremely exciting. And I think that's why I'm excited also
about you know, this Christian Wondertails class that you're going
to give for us, because I think you have a
unique capacity to make things shine in the light that
they're not used to seeing, things, like make normal things
seem very very odd in a way that fords his
people to pay attention again.
Speaker 1: You know, yes, do you remember do you remember the
image when there's the conversation amongst the disciples about should
they pay tax or not and Jesus sends it. I
think he sends Peter out to collect a fish and
there's the coins in the mouth of the fish. And
I always think about the fact that Peter, as a fisherman,
has caught thousands of fish by that point, but he's
never caught fish with coins in its mouth before. And
That's what I'm trying to get to with these stories,
is like, this is going to be the time you hear,
you hear the story and there's the coins in the mouth. Beautiful,
very much part of that fairy tale way of viewing
the world. You know, a lot of what we hear
about the moment with contemporaries of ours is the idea
of re enchanting Christianity. Now, for me, enchantment is a
nuanced word. You know, it's really nuanced, and I'm not
always mad about it. I see Christ usually as a
wakeer upper rather than an enchanter. But I do believe
that it would be a wonderful thing to sit in
the presence of these stories again and trust them as stories,
let them do the work for you, let them do
the work, and that maybe your imagination on occasion can
gleam and there is a little bit of Holy Spirit
in it and something unexpected can happen. I've just started
a course actually that you were kind enough to be
part of. The other night the skin Boat and the
Star in England, We've got there's seventy of us. There's
seventy of us slowly making our way from creation tales,
Genesis and other stories into the big epics like Tristan
and is Older and Passival all the way Finally, what
we do on the very final weekend is we take
stories from the student's own lives, especially not their own
but maybe their aunt's, uncles or grandparents, and we say,
give us a ten minute story from your family, relatively unadorned,
that has these mythic threads that we've banged into over
the year. So we start big. We start with the
macro and we end with the micro. And I would
like God willing the Christian Wonder Tales experience is interesting
for all of us. If it is, there's all sorts
of things that we could develop with symbolic world.
Speaker 2: It'd be great. Yeah, it's great. I think that. I mean,
we definitely.
Speaker 3: I really enjoyed, you know, collaborating with you and I
feel like we're on the same team.
Speaker 2: You know. It's weird to be on a keen now
are a sudden?
Speaker 1: Isn't it odd? How we've you know, water finds its level.
There's I always have the images you and I. It's
a very fond memory for me as the two of
us drinking guinness and smoking cigars in Dublin about eighteen
months ago. We're just getting to know each other and
you were talking to me about you know becoming an iconographer,
and that you suddenly had the luxury of time on
your hands and you could listen. You could listen to
the great stories and the dress and gradually, bit by bit, providentially,
those things gather around you. And which is what all
the all the myths always point to one essential thing
in our lives. We are going to experience trial and tribulation,
but in other words, the underworld. But can we come
from it with a gift for others? And at its best,
what we're all trying to do is to turn the
complexity of our own life into decent compost that something
beautiful can grow from. I really believe that, and so
it's exciting for me that you're right. We do have
a team. They're all sorts of folks that we could
mention that are emerging from the forest, from the tree line,
and the strangest of ways, always something to contribute. Great.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And so I mean I look forward to this
class everybody you know, and we'll put a link obviously
in the description if you want to join. It's going
to be an amazing time. I can't wait to see
how it comes together. I will definitely be taking the
class myself and Martin. I always look forward to seeing
you again and to learning from you. You know, I've
been paying attention to Martin quite a bit. I mean
he kind of knows that, like he just trying to
see how he's you know, because I'm explained the stories, right,
I try.
Speaker 2: I I'm an okay storyteller.
Speaker 3: But you know, when he came to the Symbolic World,
those who've watched the videos that we're there the Symbolic
Girl Summit, it's it's universally accepted that Martin stole the
show from everybody, including Jordan Peterson, that it's like it
was all about of all about Martin because he just
the way you told the story was so captivating, and
so so I encourage all of us to learn from
him and the people watching.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you can learn from Martin.
Speaker 3: You know, we can all become storyteller to to some
level at least, you know, and then and then provide
that those little coins to the people around us.
Speaker 2: So thanks for what you're doing.
Speaker 1: Thank well, Thank you, Jonathan. It's very generous and I
will take that to the bank. I appreciate it. I've
just wanted to finish really with echoing what you've said
is that it's very rare in human history that storytellers
have earned any kind of money from it. So I
just recommend everybody listening to this not to get caught
up with Oh, so he's saying, I have to become
a professional storyteller. The traditional place for stories is around
the hearth. It's with your family, it's with your community,
it's with your church, it's with your friends in the tavern,
it's when you're working in the fields. Don't don't be
seduced by microphones. Don't be seduced by having to create
a website. Don't think like that, because in a strange way,
you offend the stories if you try and monetize them
too quickly. Let them, let them talk to you, let
them have their way with you. So yeah, thank you
for having me on. I love being part of this
and onwards.
Speaker 2: All right, we'll see you. So thanks.
Speaker 1: Hello there, this is Martin Shaw inviting you to come
and join me for Christian wonder Tales, my first online
course with Symbolic World. It is a secret history of
things that we're going to be exploring from the early
Celtic saints and heroes of antiquity all the way up
to the chivalric tradition of Arthur, round table, Merlin, the
whole thing. What do stories like that have to tell
us about the moshpit of our own modern lives? One
over four gatherings, We're going to find out. I promise
you this, it will not be boring.