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

Laura Mei

I don't believe our prayers always land on this side of the river. I believe in a receiver, even though what may wind its way back to us is in some costume we never expected. Stories can actually be a kind of praying: a back and forth between us and the earth and its myriad dimensions. This is absolutely not the same thing as a wish list to the heavenly. If you think you've only got yourself for company, you are on the quick road to crazy. I'm not telling you what to pray to — the celestial or otherwise shape of the thing. But find something to adore and keep talking to it. It'll regulate anxiety at the very least. It won't remove grief or useful remorse. But the grind of chronic or acute fear can find its expression as an alchemical progression, not a final destination.

Spirit lifts, soul deepens. Spirit is a spark, soul is a drop of water. Spirit is a great idea, soul is deep-knowing. We absolutely need both. Liminal information is often irrational, hard to decipher, imagistic not conceptual. It is often unsettling because it rarely conforms to the norm; it never smooths anything over. It distills slowly, is reluctant to rush. That's the point of the old vigils — to be broken open and shaken up by the great forces of the universe. Spirits are canyon deep and as varied as snowflakes.

What we exile must be courted back with beauty; it must be met with respect, education, and imaginative intricacy. An alchemy of character is possible when such a journey is undergone.

The night world is not processional tidy steps and objective outcomes, but potent with insight, uncertainty, and the need for dream-skill. The skill is witnessing the depth intelligence that dreams offer. The great plunge into soul’s magical disorientations. That's how the earth tends to talk to us. When we move into underworld time, mythically the first thing to go is often the lights. This is a shadow or even pitch-black zone of encounter. Nothing is how it seems on the surface of things, we have to get good with our ears. Our eyes alert us to the wider situation, but it's our ears that alert us to the personal, the particular, the micro in the macro. This tends to be when the heart is alerted. We have grief, anxiety, and fear — those gatekeepers of the place, roving ever more readily amongst us. Either chronic or acute, acknowledged or not, they are present at our table. So what happens when the underneath, the chthonic, the shadowed material starts to become more and more visible in our lives? We start to fess up. I think even to operate for a second in the underworld without being annihilated, we have to operate from both wonder and grief — at absolutely the same time. One does not cancel the other out. It is the very tension of the love tangle that makes us, possibly, a true human being. There in that very contrariness something gets forged; something that is neither this nor that. The thunderbolt that simultaneously destroys and creates.

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