Martin Shaw

Mythologist Martin Shaw uses timeless story-wisdom to examine our broken relationship with the world. There is an old legend that says we each have a wild, curious twin that was thrown out the window the night we were born, taking much of our vitality with them. If there was something we were meant to do with our few, brief years on Earth, we can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key. In Courting the Wild Twin, Dr. Martin Shaw invites us to seek out our wild twin — a metaphor for the part of ourselves that we generally shun or ignore to conform to societal norms — to invite them back into our consciousness, for they have something important to tell us. He challenges us to examine our broken relationship with the world, to think boldly, wildly, and in new ways about ourselves, as individuals and as a collective. Through the use of scholarship, storytelling, and personal reflection, Shaw unpacks two ancient European fairy tales that concern the mysterious wild twin. By reading these tales and becoming storytellers ourselves, he suggests we can restore our agency and confront modern challenges with purpose, courage, and creativity. Courting the Wild Twin is a declaration of literary activism and an antidote to the shallow thinking that typifies our age. Shaw asks us to recognize mythology as a secret weapon — a radical, beautiful, heart-shuddering agent of deep, lasting change.

Courting the Wild Twin

A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE is centered around several key elements: 1. It features four texts and commentaries ? Welsh, Russian, Siberian and Norwegian myths that explore the process of leaving what is considered safe and predictable and journeying out into wild, uncertain areas of nature and the psyche in search of new insights. The four stories have at their center a man, woman, and adolescent. 2. A narrative of why the author gave up a large musical publishing deal with Warner Brothers to spend four years living in a tent in the wilds and over a decade facilitating wilderness rites-of-passage for others. 3. Shaw's eloquent insistence that without a renewed attention to myth and the initiation process we are only partially equipped to reestablish a complementary relationship with the living world. 4. The core of these stories are paradoxical in nature, far from the clumsily perceived ?hero' myths, and point towards Trickster, or Coyote, as a way of existing in a world ambivalent to the insights of what you could call traditional knowledge. A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE is unique in the field of myth and ritual in several ways: 1. It carries an ?in-the-field' narrative of several hundred men and women who have gone out into wild places to fast for four days and nights. Not in the Amazon, or in Mongolia, but in a place that is indigenous to them, that grounds the experience in the wider context of their lives, rather than a one-off event that can be hard to reconnect with. This is part of a growing mood to get to the bones of initiatory experience, rather than the cultural affectations. The stories illustrate both the grandeur and struggle of this often subtle process. 2. Unlike many of the big mythological sellers (i.e Bly's IRON JOHN or Pinkola Estes WOMEN WHO RUN WITH WOLVES), A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE is not a gender piece, but focuses on both men and women's movement into wildness as part of the bigger awareness of climate change and ecology. It presents the old stories as keys into any debate on these issues, that the ability to think metaphorically/mythologically loosens the grip of literalness, and can ?re-enchant' our perspectives. 3. As a wilderness teacher Shaw has noticed that the real point of crisis that is emerging is the return to community, rather than the time out in the wild. This is turning of rites-of-passage on its head: Shaw reasons that the rites-of-passage process requires three stages following an initial Call to the Soul: (i) Going out of the Village, and the severance from ordinary life and the stepping into the image-laden language of myth, story, ritual; (ii) Into the Forest, baring the soul to extraordinary forces, receiving the sacred wound, bonding with the living world; (iii) And Back Again, return to community, the performance of identity, and the confirmation in and of the Soul. A BRANCH FROM THE LIGHTNING TREE invokes Robert Graves work on the White Goddess, and the Crow poems of Ted Hughes-it is a combination of practical knowledge, imaginative insight and passionate storytelling that gives Shaw's book its persuasiveness and power. At times incantatory, at times novelistic and poetic, he writes as someone who has been to these places, undergone these trials and tested himself at the extremes of lived experience.

Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness

A Branch from the Lightning Tree

In "Scatterlings" Martin Shaw walks the myth-lines of seven stories based in and around his homeland of Dartmoor, England. Rather than the commentaries on such tales being primarily balanced against other literary sources, Shaw uses what actually occurs on these walks as the main source of information on the tales. The swoop of raven, the swamp, the thinking that moves through him, all form a knot of relationship between the land and the story. As he walks he tells the story of the place back to itself. This is a highly unusual move for a mythologist, an aspiration to use speech as form of animistic relationship, of binding, of praise to a place. In a time of rapid migrations and climatic movement, Shaw asks: how could we be not just from a place but of a place? When did we trade shelter for comfort? what was the cost of that trade? What are the stories the west tells itself in private? "Scatterlings" also takes us on a wonder through the wild edges of British culture, a story of secret histories: from the ancient storytelling of the bardic schools to medieval dream poetry, from the cunning man to animal call words, to Arabian and steppe Iranian influence on English dialect. Through its astonishing journey, Shaw reveals to us that when you gaze deep enough into the local you find the nomad, and when you look deep enough into the nomad you find the local. "Scatterlings" is a rebel keen, a rising up, to bend your head to the stories and place that claim you.

Getting Claimed in the Age of Amnesia

Scatterlings

Bardskull is the record of three journeys made by Martin Shaw, the celebrated storyteller and interpreter of myth, in the year before he turned fifty. It is unlike anything he has written before. This is not a book about myth or narrative: rather, it is a sequence of incantations, a series of battles. Each of the three journeys sees Shaw walk alone into a Dartmoor forest and wait. What arrive are stories – fragments of myth that he has carried within him for decades: the deep history of Dartmoor itself; the lives of distant family members; Arthurian legend; and tales from India, Persia, Lapland, the Caucasus and Siberia. But these stories and their tellers don’t arrive as the bearers of solace or easy wisdom. As with all quests, Shaw is entering a domain of traps and tests. Bardskull can be read as a fable, as memoir, as auto-fiction or as an attempt to undomesticate myth. It is a magnificent, unclassifiable work of the imagination.

Bardskull

J.R.R. Tolkien

The Silmarillion

The Night Wages

In Snowy Tower, Dr. Martin Shaw continues his trilogy of works on the relationship between myth, wilderness, and a culture of wildness. In this second book, he gives a telling of the Grail epic Parzival. Claiming it as a great trickster story of medieval Europe, he offers a deft and erudite commentary, with topics ranging from climate change and the soul to the discipline of erotic consciousness, from the hallucination of empire to a revisioning of the dark speech of the ancient bards. Ingrained in the very syntax of Snowy Tower is an invocation of what Shaw calls 'wild mythologies' -- stories that are more than just human allegory, that seem to brush the winged thinking of owl, stream, and open moor. This daring work offers a connection to the genius of the margins; that the big questions of today will not be solved by big answers, but by the myriad of associations that both myth and wilderness offer.

Parzival and the Wet, Black Branch of Language

Snowy Tower

"With potent, lyrical language and a profound knowledge of storytelling, Shaw encourages and illuminates the mythic in our own lives. He is a modern-day bard." – Madeline Miller, author of Circe and The Song of Achilles At a time when we are all confronted by not one, but many crossroads in our modern lives—identity, technology, trust, politics, and a global pandemic—celebrated mythologist and wilderness guide Martin Shaw delivers Smoke Hole: three metaphors to help us understand our world, one that is assailed by the seductive promises of social media and shadowed by a health crisis that has brought loneliness and isolation to an all-time high. Smoke Hole is a passionate call to arms and an invitation to use these stories to face the complexities of contemporary life, from fake news, parenthood, climate crises, addictive technology and more. Shaw urges us to reclaim our imagination and untangle ourselves from modern menace, letting these tales be our guide. More Praise: "I can still remember the first time I heard Martin Shaw tell a story. The tale that emerged was like a living thing, bounding around, throwing itself at us there listening. I had never heard anything like it before." – Paul Kingsnorth, Booker shortlisted author of The Wake "Martin Shaw’s work is so very beautiful. A new animal. His love of images is deep and contagious." – Coleman Barks, author of The Essential Rumi "Through feral tales and poetic exegesis, Martin Shaw makes you re-see the world, as a place of adventure, and of initiation, as perfect home, and as perfectly other. What a gift." – David Keenan, author of Xstabeth "Shaw has so much wisdom and knowledge about the old stories, it emanates from his pores." – John Densmore, The Doors

Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

Smoke Hole

Tony Hoagland

Dramatic new retellings of Celtic poetry’s great lyrics and legends Cinderbiter collects tales and poems originally composed and performed centuries ago in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, when notions of history and authorship were indistinguishable from the oral traditions of myth and storytelling. In the spirit of recasting these legends and voices for new audiences, celebrated mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw and award-winning poet Tony Hoagland have created extraordinary new versions of these bardic lyrics, folkloric sagas, and heroes’ journeys, as they have never been rendered before. In long, shaggy tales of the unlikely ascensions of previously unknown heroes such as Cinderbiter, in the shrouded origin stories of figures such as Arthur and Merlin, and in anonymous flickering lyrics of elegy, praise, and heartbreak, these poems retain at once the rapturous, supernatural imagination of the deep past layered with an austere, devout allegiance to the Christian faith. Shaw and Hoagland’s collaboration summons the power within this storehouse of the Celtic mind to arrive at this rare book—distinctive, audacious, and tuned to our time and condition with a convincing resonance.

Celtic Poems

Cinderbiter

The new western way of war from Vietnam in Iraq -- Theories of the new western way of war -- The global surveillance mode of warfare -- Rules of risk-transfer war -- Iraq: risk economy of a war -- A way of war in crisis.

Risk-Transfer War and Its Crisis in Iraq

The New Western Way of War

Daniel Deardorff

Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness

Critical Assessments

Marxist Sociology Revisited

Ethan Sterling has been through many trials in his life including losing his father when he was just six years old. After he joins the marines at age seventeen, Ethan quickly excels, wins medals for bravery, marries, and is commanding ten soldiers in Afghanistan by the time he is twenty-three. But when a road accident instigated by guilt sends him to heaven's gate, everything changes for Ethan. After he is offered a choice to either fight an army that is being sent by hell to invade heaven and humankind or enter heaven and be at peace with his family, Ethan faces a monumental dilemma. If he accepts the difficult task and wins, he will return to Earth to reunite with his wife, son, and the life he left behind. With help from a small army from heaven that includes Noah, disciples James and John, his deceased father, and others, Ethan takes a risk and embarks down an uncertain path that he hopes will not only changes his own fate, but also that of his family and mankind. In this fantasy novel, an American soldier killed in a road accident arrives at heaven's gate where he must face an agonizing choice with the power to transform the future.

Heaven's Gate

Percy Dearmer

The English Carol Book

Ethan Sterling has been through many trials in his life including losing his father when he was just six years old. After he joins the marines at age seventeen, Ethan quickly excels, wins medals for bravery, marries, and is commanding ten soldiers in Afghanistan by the time he is twenty-three. But when a road accident instigated by guilt sends him to heaven’s gate, everything changes for Ethan. After he is offered a choice to either fight an army that is being sent by hell to invade heaven and humankind or enter heaven and be at peace with his family, Ethan faces a monumental dilemma. If he accepts the difficult task and wins, he will return to Earth to reunite with his wife, son, and the life he left behind. With help from a small army from heaven that includes Noah, disciples James and John, his deceased father, and others, Ethan takes a risk and embarks down an uncertain path that he hopes will not only changes his own fate, but also that of his family and mankind. In this fantasy novel, an American soldier killed in a road accident arrives at heaven’s gate where he must face an agonizing choice with the power to transform the future.

Martin Shaw

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