Mythmaking and the True Myth – A Conversation with Martin Shaw

Martin Shaw is a writer, mythographer and Christian thinker. He’s Visiting Scholar at the Divinity Faculty of Cambridge University, and a Fellow of the Temenos Academy. Author of seventeen books, Dr Shaw is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth and founder of the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University. His book Bardskull was described as “rich and transgressive” by Erica Wagner in The Sunday Times and was Book of the Day in The Guardian. A hugely respected oral storyteller, Shaw has toured internationally numerous times, and led symposiums at both Oxford and Cambridge University, Robert Bly describing him as “a true master, one of the very greatest storytellers we have.”

Born in 1971, Shaw grew up in a house without a television, phone or car, but plenty of books. From one perspective he would have been seen as poor, but he’s quick to point out that he felt culturally wealthy. A Devon lad, he walked long stretches with his father and read voraciously. He cites many of the women in his family as “spiritual powerhouses.” As a teenager he slam danced to Fugazi and rode a skateboard. Leaving school without qualifications he entered a pirate life as a musician, touring and recording extensively with various punk rock bands over the following decade. Crippling tinnitus retired him at twenty-six, followed by a four-year period living in a black tent on a succession of English hills.

It was during this period of intense introversion that Shaw first fasted on the top of a Welsh hill. This experience proved so shattering that he then trained in wilderness rites-of-passage over the next eight years. Myths and folklore proved the native tongue for Martin to communicate these initiations, and many of his early books are a weave of what he calls ‘the myth of a landscape, and the landscape of a myth.’

After the tent came a different kind of study, Shaw completing his PhD in patterns of metaphor within rites of passage, specifically working with Irish and Siberian folklore. In his last year in the tent three men arrived asking to know more about what he was up to, and twenty-one years later his school has gone from strength to strength. His Celtic poem translations with Tony Hoagland have been published in Poetry International, The Sun, Orion, The Mississippi Review and many others, and his catalogue and conversation with Ai Weiwei was published by the Marciano Arts Foundation. His book of Lorca translations (with Stephan Harding) are entitled Courting the Dawn, and anthology of the Irish philosopher John Moriarty is A Hut At The Edge Of The Village. His works include Scatterlings, Stag Cult, Courting the Wild Twin and Smoke Hole, his first, A Branch From The Lightning Tree, winning the Nautilus Book Award. Lightning Tree was the first of its kind to weave myth and rites of passage so overtly together proving influential to a whole generation of storytellers and wilderness guides. His more recent work is what he describes as a developing “Christian mythopoetics”—a reminder of the depth and mysticism latent in this middle-eastern mystery religion. Shaw converted to Eastern Orthodoxy after a 101-day vigil in a Dartmoor forest. He still lives nearby to the wood, writing and teaching. The Irish Times call Martin “a seanchaí, an interloper from the medieval.”, Charles Foster adding, “there’s Shaw and there’s everyone else.”