https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=U4BVKOBrnTY
and you and I sat surrounded by broken glass, smoking these cigars and drinking Guinness, do you remember? At the top of Grafton Street and the thing you said and I agreed with, you said, you know, myth and story is just the best way to talk about almost everything. It’s the indigenous way to talk about everything. It’s the classical way to talk about everything. It’s the Arthurian way. It’s the Irish way. It’s the Russian way. It’s the aboriginal way. It’s what we’ve always done. There’s a very old notion I’m interested in, which is human beings get made. It’s actually a process and if you don’t have connection to stories, rather like a cloak, then you are prone to enormous floods of anxiety as you get older. As you experience the duress of life, despite all the gadgetry, if we don’t have this very ancient technology called the story close to hand, we run equipped in some way. This is Jonathan Pagel. Welcome to the symbolic world. Hello everyone. I am overjoyed to be with Martin Shaw again. He is Martin. He’s been on my channel before. We’ve done some events in Ireland and in England. He is a mythographer, professor at Stanford, a wonderful writer, amazing storyteller, and he is going to be one of the headline speakers for the Symbolic World Summit. I’m really excited to be able to continue our exchanges. Martin, thanks for coming on. Jonathan, delighted to be here and very much looking forward to Florida in February. Martin, you are a storyteller in ways that is difficult for modern people to understand. This is something that I also at first didn’t totally grasp and in meeting you, I started to understand it, which is that you are one of the few people left in the world, not many people, that tell stories over sometimes days, like hours and then sometimes days. You are getting ready now to give a version of the Odyssey. Yeah, that’s true, Jonathan. I’m going to be telling the truncated version from Friday night through to Sunday afternoon, really without a breath. That’s the synopsis. So I’ll report back to you how that went. I haven’t told it since before lockdown. So stories from a bardic perspective, they are irascible, animate beings and they require a kind of courtship if you’re going to tell them. They’re not just repertoire, they’re not just going to show up. And so I found that for the first couple of weeks, the Odyssey simply didn’t want to be remembered by me. It had gone into a huff, it had gone to the back of Polyphemus’ cave and wouldn’t come out. So you just have to sit there with a story and show fidelity to it until finally it says, okay, let’s try this out. But as you will know through our time together, I don’t tell stories in this kind of recital manner. It’s very much imagining out loud. So that interest in spontaneity, that interest in trafficking in wild thoughts, that was kind of what got me into this in the first place. Yeah. But so there’s a kind of a, I guess there’s a mix between getting the basic, let’s take the basic structure of the story right. You know, you know you have the element that you can’t transgress that and then weaving through that with a kind of improvisation. Think of it like a recipe that’s been passed down through a family and no one is meant to mess with the recipe. And for the first hundred times you cook it, you cook it exactly as your aunt told you to do. But on CookUp 101, you discover smoked paprika. And you don’t know if your aunt knew about smoked paprika or not, but you can add that little thing. It’s to do with what they call the sense and the matter of stories. The matter of the story is what you just described. It’s the A to B to C, but the sense of the story is the genius in it. And it’s why three people could turn up and tell the Handless Maiden, but there’d be one telling that you would energetically, you’d lean to them rather than all three. It’s not a sort of generic handout. Storytellers are odd figures who have usually been hurt by the world early on. And to make sense of a cosmos where most mythology is lying in pieces around our ankles, stories are sense-making devices. They’re codes of a fashion. Well, the Odyssey, I know when I told the ancient stories to my kids, the Odyssey was the one that just stuck to them. My daughter, when she was 11 years old, or maybe even, I think around, maybe even younger, like 10, 11, she memorized the A, B, C of the Odyssey. She knew all the sections. She didn’t memorize the story, but she could tell you what all the narrative elements were. And she did it one time at a campfire where she just enumerated the narrative elements, at least, of the story. And so I was really surprised at just how much it stuck. And so now, and you’re reading it and sitting with it, what insights have you come out, have come out of that time? Well, there’s a strong one. If you were a Mediterranean warrior from 3,000 years ago, you lived in what I would call a kleos culture, not chaos, kleos. Now, kleos means imperishable glory. It means your reputation that lives on once you’re gone. And you remember, to a Mediterranean warrior, that’s not heaven you’re going to. It’s this far more ambivalent underworld. So you want your reputation to exist longer than you. But here’s the rub about kleos. Kleos is entirely dependent on external validation. You can’t give yourself kleos. Your sense of inner noblyge, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter. There is no you in the way that modern people think about it. It is all about how other people look at you. So as I come to telling it again, I realize we’re living in another age of kleos. And our screens, which are the temples that we now generally serve in, and our mirrors, which we are entranced in, like Narcissus, we’ve replaced shelter with comfort, religious shelter to spiritual comfort. We have a kind of a la carte attitude towards, you know, cosmological, spiritual, religious issues, and we just pick and choose what we want. So that’s been the strange thing. And it often happens with a story. There’s a reason why the Odyssey has now been remembered, an active act of remembering for what, 2800 years, something like that. It’s because the Odyssey is happening every day, the issues that are going on in it are hardy perennials, they don’t go away. So the kleos thing has been big for me. And so when you say that we live in this new age of kleos, you mean in terms of the likes and the kind of this this kind of outer approbation of our existence, let’s say, like we need to be seen by the world, we need to show ourselves on Instagram and to have that kind of, is that what you mean? Yeah, it’s a kind of anti-John of the Cross. It’s an anti-still small voice. These days, if we even get in touch with our still small voice, we may be getting fake news from our own psyche. Because we don’t tell stories anymore, we don’t actually do it in the jaw, what they call the meat hall of the jaw. Then stories remain as there’s a poet called Friedrich Holderlin, and he says, God’s be careful, you have become decorations in their poems. And the reason it’s good to tell stories orally is the stories stop becoming decorative or witty, they bring their troubles right to your door, and they start to do the work that can only be told when you actually involve it. So kudos to your daughter, kudos to my daughter, who when she was about eight knew all of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parseval. And I implore everybody, I’m so thrilled with what’s going on with Symbolic World and this whole network that’s happening, YouTube has become a really interesting place. My one petition would be that when people study a story with you, they go away in small groups and tell it to each other. Just try it out, take a risk. Maybe there are myth tellers amongst you. That’s an interesting idea. We’re doing now a kind of intense reading of Beowulf with Richard Rowland, and it’s really insightful because it’s something like a Christian reading of Beowulf, trying to help people see the Christian cosmology that a lot of the scholars actually can’t see because they don’t know the Book of Enoch and all these weird traditions in Christianity. But it’s a good idea to then maybe take that and then retell Beowulf. I used to do it too. I actually memorized the elements of Beowulf and would tell it at the campfire. We’d have these storytelling at the campfire, try to get into the story. Yeah, by the way, I’m very interested that you and Richard, and thank you for introducing me to Richard’s work. The man has a mind as big as a prairie. He’s fantastic. And the two of you together, wow. From next week on Substack all the way to Christmas, I am telling the Icelandic saga of King Hróf Kráki, which is the dark twin of Beowulf. It’s darker than Beowulf. Okay, just in case people were wondering what paganism really looked like. Et voila, there you go. But that’s an insight that you, just before we started recording, you mentioned something about that. You said that you feel like the world is becoming pagan again, but with some differences. I think the world has to turn pagan because atheism is simply too depressing. And I think the argument of rationality and irrationality that’s been a big religious argument over the last hundred years, I think to some degree we’re past that now. I think people are aware we all serve some kind of temple and wherever we put our attention for any length of time, if we look at it in a certain way, we afford it enough significance it becomes holy to us. That’s what happens. But I think we are becoming pagan, but without the influence of the Olympians, without the wisdom of those, you know, those beings that direct and inform those stories. So I’m not advocating for it. But kleos is a pagan response to the world. Kleos is a pagan response to the world. Imperishable glory is what was going on in Greek and Roman myth. Therefore, I see through, you know, being a father and having a teenage daughter, what is coming at her endlessly through social media is an attempt to create just that kind of thing. Yeah. One of the things that I’ve been thinking about in terms of the Odyssey, you know, I’ve been thinking that it is very appropriate to this time now, because the Odyssey is this desire to return home, you know, the sense of being adrift, being kind of, you know, moving around without having an anchor and, you know, encountering all these strange principalities and the strange woman and all of this stuff, but then with this desire to kind of return home to the hearth. And so it feels like it’s an appropriate story to tell today because we all seem to feel that. We have this, we feel alienated. We feel like we don’t have a place to stand and that we don’t even know where to look, at least for now, where to look to find that home again. Yeah. Now you and I, coming from an Orthodox background, would have the same take on that probably that CS Lewis did, which is you’re really that nostos. That’s the word, the yearning that Odysseus has for Ithaca is nostos in Welsh. It’s called hiraieth. It’s this, it’s homecoming, but it’s more than homecoming. Lewis sensed it when he used to experience what he in Tolkien called northernness. It’s a feeling. It’s a feeling. The Jungians would call it anima possession, but that’s a grotesque phrase. So forget I ever said it. Anima possession. But the point of it is, yeah, from an Orthodox perspective, from a Christian perspective, that is the divine world starting to radiate through this one and call to you. But it’s interesting because you will know before, you know, the other great text from Homer is the Iliad. Now the Iliad is not a story of nostos. It is a story of war. It’s a story of a great conflict in the great hero of that era, Achilles. And Achilles has the choice of, because his mother is a goddess, he knows things about his life he should not know. And one of the things he knows is he has a choice. Do I want a small life filled with kleos, or do I want a long life, but absolutely obscure. And he goes down the James Dean, Jimi Hendrix, dead at 28 route, you know. But I’m fascinated by this because now the first time we met, we ended up talking about the Odyssey, and mid conversation with you, I had a thought that I will now repeat because it’s significance to me. I think in the Odyssey, we hear an echo of the arrival of Christ, a foreshadowing. And the reason why is it’s when Odysseus goes to the underworld and he bumps into Achilles, he does not have good words for him. But he asks Achilles, how’s this kleos working out for you down here in the dark? And Achilles says, sooner be a slave to a poor man than king of the underworld. Now that is an anti-kleos move. And as far as I can tell, the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, the sheer weird, Aikido, countercultural moves of Christ turn all of that on its head. You’re hearing, what, 1800 years or something, no, no, 800 really, I suppose, with Homer before Christ. You’re hearing the end of one age and the beginning of another. What’s so mind blowing for me is, you know, Copernican was on a trade route. So it’s possible that, you know, can you imagine the Jewish boy is hearing some of these stories, not as the Odyssey, but he might have heard fragments of them. I’m not saying they influenced him, it’s just a mind boggling thought. Yeah, to think that that would be part of the same kind of storytelling world. I’ve also seen in, in Odysseus, when Odysseus returns home and he dresses as a beggar, basically, as a beggar, then what he wants, it seems like he wants his son to recognize him through, he wants the people that he loves to recognize him possibly through the disguise or he’s using the disguise to get back into the house. There’s something about that also about Christ who comes as, who is this king who’s hiding in the lowest image, you could say. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought about that. Yeah, more so recently than before. You know, the last time I told this story, I was a screaming pagan romantic. So a few things have changed in the last five years. One thing I’d say, though, is all of the trouble that Odysseus gets into is because of when he blinds the Cyclops, the Cyclops says to him, who did this? And Odysseus can’t bear leaving without announcing his achievement. And when he says that, the Cyclops, his father Poseidon says, right, I’ve got a zip code for Odysseus now, he’s done. And again, in a reversal of Cleos, the only way Odysseus can return to Ithaca, he leaves as somebody and he returns as nobody. And it’s only through that shift, does he finally display that wonderful word, metis, his particular wit, his particular cunning, to get through being in contact with his son Telemachus, speak to Penelope, and then all the mayhem that then goes on. But that Christ connection is really interesting. Yeah, well, I mean, it’s interesting in the sense, which obviously Christ didn’t have that other part. And you can see that in Christ, you see the opposite, which is, it’s interesting because Christ hides his divinity during the story. He actually, he always says, he heals people and says, don’t tell anyone, don’t tell anyone what I did. This weird, and it is only as he gets closer to his crucifixion. And it’s in the moment when he’s basically been beaten, he’s been tortured, he’s bloody, and he’s standing there in front of the judges, in front of the Sanhedrin. And then he says, I’m the son of man, basically. And the high priest rips his vestment. But it’s almost very different than the story of Odysseus, which is that first he hides it, and when he reveals it, it’s in the worst possible moment. It’s like, it’s in the moment where you’re a prisoner, and you’ve been completely humiliated, and now you say, I am the son of man. It’s a wild, it’s a wild reversal. Yes. And it’s why, as a mythologist, I just avoided my root system. I avoided Christ for 50 years, because he was nonsensical to me. It’s not difficult for me to fall into a kind of biological resonance with the great heroes of the earlier stories. But Christ is a much more thin-skinned, pressurized kind of individual. Do you know, it’s funny, because I’m a storyteller, whenever Christ says, don’t tell anybody, in my mind, in a fairy tale, whenever you say, don’t do that, it means do that. Now, I don’t think that’s what he meant, but I always smile at those moments, because there’s nothing more that will be quickly disclosed. That’s an interesting point to think about. Like, it could be part of some of the deep ironies that Christ manifests. They appear, especially in the crucifixion, but there are these deep, deep ironies in his story where he’s humiliated, but he’s treated like a king at the same time. So it’s possible that when he says that, it’s almost like he’s saying, here’s a seed, keep it safe, and then it grows, and it starts to grow. This is very much your bread and butter, your bread and beer in terms of what you love. But the shock of coming to the Bible profoundly in middle age and recognizing it’s this kind of echo chamber where everything is talking to everything else all the time, and nothing is wasted. There’s not a line in the book I can find that is wasted. Now, there are things I struggle with constantly. I think you’re supposed to. I think that there’s something about scripture, which makes it that there are some stories. You can see exactly what you said. You can see all of these things connecting, and you can notice that there’s this giant web of references that are going backwards and forwards. So you trust it, but then you come to some bit where in the book of Judges, the man who cuts his mistress into pieces and sends it off to the tribe, it’s like there are some bits that are so crazy, and you know that this probably is hiding a very deep meaning because everything else is, but you can’t catch it. It’s painful. No, and I think as modern people, we’re wired to like or dislike characters. We like strong signals about who’s good, who’s bad, what’s going on. And then the Bible has these stories where supposedly good people suddenly do very strange things. You know, David is one of them. I’m telling this story, the saga of King Hoth Crackie, right through the autumn, this deep Icelandic tale. There’s no comedy value, none. In fact, in the sagas, if there’s too much comedy in, you can be sure that that is a continental influence. That’s not how the schools would have told it. But there’s this one character called Halti the Magnanimous, who lives in a bone pile. He’s the only guy remotely approachable. The rest of them are just berserkers. And then just as you’re starting to like him, he bites his girlfriend’s nose off in an argument and continues talking to her, crunching up her nose and saying, well, you know, I think this is it for me and you. I’m just not feeling it anymore. And my heart sunk at that moment because I thought Halti the Magnanimous was all I had. You know, he was my only moment of warmth in this thing. And so the Bible can be like that for me. And the way, you know, I find it an act of will sometimes to remember the Bible. It’s as if the stories, they sort of test you. They almost want you to forget them. They want you to remember them. I’m just improvising this as I said. To learn a story from the Bible is like when I’m in divine liturgy and Father Paphoreus serves me that bit of bread soaked in wine that looks all to the world like a piece of meat, you know, all to the world like a piece of meat. And I’m suddenly in this kind of living iconography, you know, unchanged. It’s amazing. I don’t do you experience this liturgy? I eat the bread, this tiny bit of bread, and I am no longer hungry. I notice this again and again. I’m always hungry. Obviously, I’ve been fasting since Vespers and I get in there and I eat and I eat this tiny thing. But because of what it is subsumed in, it has this miraculous effect. In the story of the saints, you have crazy stories of saints that live only from the Eucharist. Wow. That’s all they eat. Yeah, there’s some wild stories. Sometimes it’s like once a year or something like some really crazy story about eating the Eucharist once a year and surviving all through. But there’s what you said about the scripture. There’s something about the scripture stories which it’s also because they’ve been so glossed that sometimes we kind of see them through the gloss, which is not bad because the raw stories are sometimes a little too much to deal with. But you can actually read all the Bible stories from multiple points of view, very much like you could read the Iliad and, you know, sympathize with the Trojans. And so you can try to read the story of Abraham and read as if Abraham is not a hero at all. And you’ll see that the story will tell itself and it’ll make sense and you can do the opposite. So there’s this weird thing about the story and it’s very algebraic. That’s why it’s difficult to remember because a lot of the more ancient types of epics, they have descriptions and they’ll be like these poetic types of, you know, description of emotion. There’s none of that in the Bible. The Bible is just like this happened, this happened, this happened, this happened, you know, and so it’s more difficult to, but once you see the pattern, you realize how powerful it is. It just takes more, at least for our minds, to pierce them. Yes, and you have to be careful because once, if you are a chapter and verse Christian and you have so sort of calcified your imagination to the point where that is the only legitimate way those stories that can be can be told or even chanted in our tradition, not even told, God forbid the intonation of your own voice and expression could come into it, you know, this is Martin Luther territory. So that has been a struggle for me is how far in, I mean, the great way in recently has been I’ve been telling and will be continuing to tell the story of Joseph in Egypt as an underworld descent story, Joseph in the underworld. I’ve been telling the story of Job as the opening of what I call the wonder eye where actually I think, although we think we’re loaded up with questions for God, of course, in that story in the end, God doesn’t answer any of Job’s questions, but he does say, come have a look behind the veil for five minutes and then let’s see, then let’s see how chatty you are. So I’m finding my way into it. I’m thinking a lot about the story of Samson at the moment and others so it’s working but you’re right here you take on Samson. Oh man, this good story of Samson is, it is, some of, I think one of the Church Fathers said that the story of Samson is the closest story to Christ in the Old Testament and that’s it, but you have to just see it through the right lens which is Samson is trying to join with the stranger, that’s what Samson is trying to do and so he’s this weird character that is moving towards, he’s trying to join the margin and the center, right, he takes the door and brings it up to the top of the hill, that’s basically what Samson is trying to do but he keeps messing it up, right, he finds, he finds honey in the deadline, that’s what Samson is, right, but it’s like, but at the same time he can’t hold it together and then he has to, he has to kill himself. That’s in, the honey in the lion just as the sheer unintellectual power of that image, there’s got to be a Christian group called lion’s honey or something, it just begs, it just begs for it but it’s, I mean I came into stories and I came into myth when I would have been in my early 20s, I’d loved them when I was younger but I ended up living in a tent for four years, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this, I ended up, it became important to me in the late 90s when I would have been in my mid-20s to see if there were any real pockets of British wilderness left so I took off in a black tent without a phone or a computer and effectively to the outside world to some degree disappeared for four years and I just wanted to be absolutely undomesticated, I wanted to find what, there’s an Irish philosopher John Moriarty calls it your bush soul and so when I went through that experience when I went through that experience I found the best way to talk about it without the use of ice statements was these old stories, you and I, we were once in, you and I once went walking in Dublin late at night and every single person we passed was hurling bottles around, I don’t you remember, they’re just yeah yeah bottles smashing, the whole town was in what you call, Shane Messini says we are approaching jubilation, they hadn’t got to jubilation but they were approaching it and you and I sat surrounded by broken glass smoking these cigars and drinking Guinness, do you remember, at the top of Grafton Street and the thing you said and I agreed with, you said you know myth and story is just the best way to talk about almost everything, it’s the indigenous way to talk about everything, it’s the classical way to talk about everything, it’s the Arthurian way, it’s the Irish way, it’s the Russian way, it’s the aboriginal way, it’s what we’ve always done in the, there’s a very old notion I’m interested in which is we don’t, human beings get made, it’s actually a process and if you don’t have connection to stories rather like a cloak then you are prone to enormous floods of anxiety as you get older, as you experience the duress of life, despite all the gadgetry if we don’t have this very ancient technology called the story close to hand we’re unequipped in some way. Yeah I think that there’s something, so if you think of something like an ethical code for example right, a series of, that’s fine we need those you know, they’re important but a story is like a tuning fork, you know it kind of vibrates and you start to vibrate with it and you can actually be transformed without understanding anything, without knowing why it’s happening, without having any rational explanation for why it is you’re being transformed because you’re actually, you’re identifying with the characters, or you’re not identifying with the characters and that’s putting you in a space where you’re basically, it’s more like music, you know you’re more vibrating with the pattern and then at some point without knowing it you find that your perspective has been transformed. Yeah and now what’s going to, on that thought, what’s going to happen in a few hours in my life is I’m going to get 70 people responding, getting tuned at different polyphonic parts of the story of, this is not just one part but many, it’s a little bit like watching someone having acupuncture and they go I’m not feeling much here, don’t feel anything there, don’t, oh my god that’s where it is, that’s where the trouble is. Now the thing that turns a myth from a reenactment fair or a seance into something that’s actually happening in the room now, a living myth, is exactly that proximity to wonder, that proximity to the story doing its cathonic work on you before you’ve had someone allegorize it to death or tell you what it means. One of the things that I liked about the Exodus series that you did with Jordan and our mutual friend James Orr and others is that I was impressed at how much pandemonium, intellectual pandemonium was going on. I was so pleased that that hadn’t all been cut out and we just had the bits where you were all concurring and agreeing and nodding sagely, it was kind of messy and that really is its saving grace. We, you and I, and maybe Jordan, and if you, we should do one on the Odyssey. Oh yeah. Just putting it out there, you know, if you want to understand how we in the West tick, you cannot get there without stories like the Odyssey. Yeah, that’s a great idea to do a reading of the Odyssey and to kind of go through the images. I would love to do that. We should definitely organize it. Tell me about the conference. So, okay, so he’s like, I’m going to speak in this conference. I know what the title is. I don’t know what it means. You know, and so I’ve been doing this for now for what, seven years, I guess, since 2016, slowly building up, let’s say helping, hopefully helping people see the world differently. I would say that’s the thing that I’ve been doing, you know, also in line with some of the things my brother has been doing as well. And now what I’ve noticed is that there are people that have been able to transform their thinking and it’s impressive to what extent they have been. And I find always surprised because for a large part of my life, I felt like I was a freak that, look, I was a freak that thought in a very strange way and that nobody could understand. And now all of a sudden, there are these people that are thinking this way, it’s transforming their thinking. So the idea is to meet in person, really. It’s to, instead of just doing this online thing, to actually come into the same space, you know, to meet each other and also to participate in, there’ll be different streams, there’ll be a artistic stream, so artists will have a chance to meet each other, exchange about their work, look at how they can, you know, use this kind of mythical thinking in their work. There’ll be one which is more like the home, how to include this way of living in your home, symbolic living, symbolic thinking in your home life. And then there’ll be obviously the universal history path, which is, you know, people moving closer to how to reinterpret history in a way that connects it with myth and then, you know, realizing that myth is the driving power of history, to be honest, that without the myth behind the history, you know, we don’t care about these stories. Like the boring historical things have no spark if they’re not anchored in something that is transcendent or something that you can care about. That’s why all the ancient people would connect their story to Troy and to the Bible. It’s like they had to connect to the ancient mythic path. So basically we’re going to be there, there’ll be some music, you know, and then obviously there’ll be you speaking, we’ll have discussions, there’ll be Father Stephen DeYoung, who I don’t know if you’ve heard some of his. Yeah, he’s amazing. So I just feel like even just having the three of us together is going to be pretty explosive. But then having all the people there, it’s gonna be great. Well, it is. And I’ve also seen, you know, you’ve got Vespa Stamper, you’ve got Nicola, you’ve got, you know, Coatar, Richard Rowling, Neil deGrade. I mean, this is, I go, you know, I buy a ticket for this. I’d be in the audience if I wasn’t on the stage for Shortman. Yeah, so I’m really looking forward to it. And in some ways, you know, I think that this, you know, rediscovering these ancient way of thinking and living, that’s the key to the future. It’s not easy to connect it to the modern world. Sometimes it’s difficult to know how to deal with the technological world, and kind of want to go back into this mythical world. But we have to work through it, right? We have to find a way to connect them together, or else we’re going to lose ourselves. So we are. And I think, you know, of course, from a distance, everything looks different from a distance, you know, when I try and explain to my friends that I’m an Eastern Orthodox Christian, a Russian Orthodox Christian right now, that’s not a popular look in Europe, I can assure you. But from the it looks like one thing from the outside, it just looks like these odd shaped, bauble onions and strange looking things, and everybody’s standing up and what’s going on. But you get in there, you get inside. And it’s nothing to do with a long time ago. That’s one of the great secrets of myth. Myth, when it is functioning efficiently is not really to do with a long time ago. Those stories do not get remembered. The stories that get remembered are the ones the day that was not like the day before. And when you didn’t have endless iPads, or even literacy, you had to decide, what am I going to choose to remember, it was a conscious act of will. And as you were saying a few minutes ago, stories like the tuning fork, they do something to you, I’m very interested in the notion of noblesse oblige, which really translates as, if you are noble, you have to act noble. And to act noble, you really need to be around stories that externally show you through symbolic images, what that looks like. And without consuming that, it’s very hard to stay focused on it. And so you’ve been you’ve been on a path, like a massive massive transformation, you know, in your own personal life, then obviously, also, even I imagine even your readers, there’s been change in that world, like who is who is coming to the workshops, all of that. And so I’m curious to see, you know, your the change of your perspective, and how it has changed your vision of storytelling, you feel like the way that you see stories or that you engage with stories that change in the past few years? Yeah. And I think I can sum it up pretty quickly, actually, I would say, and I’m moving between a sort of a mythic and a religious perspective, and there’s almost no difference in the in the world that I live in. Myth showed me everything I needed to know about the conditions of living. Different gods and goddesses show you the betrayals, the healings, the strange nuances to it all. It shows you the playing field. It’s phenomenal. How to live it was the missing element for me. And that, I have to say, is the Christian narratives, the Christian story, because it’s so it actually turns a lot of the myths before it kind of on its head, because of this last will be first anti-Claos kind of thing going on this huge, enormous consciousness where we’re not just venerating trees and bends in the river, and all the thousands and millions of little Elohims and messengers that are moving around us. We’re making a claim that we’re in contact with the being that is infused in that, but also completely outside of it as well. I that was just kind of too big for me. But in the absence of that, my life, I suppose, up until, you know, up until a few years ago, had the familiar kind of chaotic fault lines of not having that essential kind of binding agent that is Yeshua. So a lot has changed. It’s not as if my life hasn’t been nourished and informed and blessed beyond measure by these stories. But the reality is, and this is hard, this lot of Christians don’t like me saying what I’m about to say, the reality is, you know, I’m with Augustine, all truth is God’s truth. And I think that a lot of these stories that could be some story way up from the Inuit, and they and I respect this, they may not want to see it in this way. But from my point of view, many myths and stories are filled with pinpricks and hints of this great story. And so I feel that I was on a kind of drip feed for a really long time. And the thing that my heart was swooning for over and over in these stories was something that I could never defend in public, but was actually this sort of terrifying revelation that actually it was the, you know, the aslant of my youth wishing to announce itself. And I ended up, I went on a vigil for 101 days, I went out into a dark more forest. And at the end of it, I had a profoundly eviscerating, beautiful, unimaginable almost encounter with Christ. But in the one place, I never expected to meet him. I went out there thinking, well, by the time I finished this, I’ll probably be married to the wild in some way. And I came back married to Christ. And I realized that both of these these weddings are facing each other. It’s a strange thing to say. As someone, I’m not a classicist, we’re talking about the Odyssey. I’m not a classicist. In England, if you’re a classicist, that’s kind of connected to a class system, really connected to a certain level of school that you would have gone to. I didn’t go to schools like that. But I have a real experience, understanding and many decades long involvement with indigenous and shamanic stories, oddly, they’re much, much closer to Christ figures, that ones that you get in the West, they understand very well the idea of the suffering healer, they understand very well, the one that you’re not looking at is the one that is actually kind of binding and through an act of love and sacrifice, bringing new life to the tribe. So I was, I was aware of these things. But now, of course, I see the for example, I see, you know, the crucifixion as the supreme poetic event of human experience. But I, it was as if I was just not allowed to see it until I was almost 50. It was like this. And then God said, and now, now, and for the last two years, my Jobian wonder eye has been opened. But for some reason, he wanted me to get all this other stuff in me too. And so I’m in this thrilling and unexpected, you know what midlife is like, you can feel like you’ve seen all the movies worth possibly seeing. So to be in this new world where I’m meeting, I like what Paul Van der Kley is doing, you know, he’s a very interesting man with all his sort of cross associations. You see, I come from my dad is a preacher, my brother is a pastor. I’m very familiar with all of this. But at the same time, because of orthodoxy, I’ve been opened up to I grew up in church, all the action was in the pulpit. Now the actions in the liturgy. You know, the pulpit is the only moment is that the sermon is the only moment where you can sit down. He’s like, Yeah, yeah, okay, sit down. This is just me for five minutes and everybody, you know, stand around wisdom and we’re off, you know, so I kind of know where I am, but I also don’t know where I am, which is a wonderful place to be. And I think that we’ve got to be I think that what you said, you know, the idea that in some ways you had to pack all this other all this other stuff in you, I think in some ways, you know, this might will seem a little maybe I’m pushing it and whatever whatever people think but that it seems like to me, that’s the role that I perceive that you can have right now in this moment, which is, you know, you use the word the word rewilding Christianity, there are different ways to say it, but there is something in the other myths which in the shamanic stories in the these ancient myths, which can can help us see the story of the Bible afresh again, because in some ways, it’s giving you tax and it’s giving you ways into it that a lot of people have glossed over through their kind of systematic theology, you know, like this is this leads to this leads to this and Jesus died for your sins. And if you believe in him, you go to heaven, you know, that kind of stuff, where it’s like you’ve actually stopped looking at the at the crazy things that Jesus does and the crazy things that are in those stories. You you will be aware and I think we have to kind of certainly in this country in England, we have to doff our caps to Tom Holland, the writer in his book Dominion. Tom was the first guy that was saying, actually, despite the propaganda, England and the West in general is profoundly Christianized. Now, I go along with that for a while, but the problem is we are Christianized civically and culturally. We’re not spiritually anymore. We’re not. This is not a Christian culture. And so the cross isn’t quite we got that bit, but we haven’t got that bit. So I love the fact that he yourself, Paul Kings North, lots of others are talking about the fact that we have we can’t be taking our cues from a culture that doesn’t give a shit about us anymore because we just get more and more thinned out, diluted, apologetic. We’re sort of, you know, don’t look at me. You know, whereas actually people I meet people all over the world looking for a deeper life. And the more we take our cues nervously from a culture that at best has amnesia, if not active hostility to these stories, the better. But we need to retell them, not not a necrotize them or put in little cues to make them politically correct. Forget that. We just need them in their pure genius, raw form to be to do their work, to let God do his work. You know, I think something’s happening. I have to say it. I think something’s happening. I’ve never born in the early seventies. I’ve never seen a moment quite as pregnant as this one. I’ve never known so many people talking about things like this. I think you’re right. You know, I think that the way that I see it is something like an arc. You know, it’s like we’re actually there’s a contraction of Christianity. But in that contraction, the people that care about it have to do it so deliberately that it cannot be accidental anymore. It can’t just be something we’re surfing. It just can’t be. So we have to look into it deeply. We have to we don’t have a choice. And so because of it, it creates this weird little this this this this smaller but brighter group of people that are can see each other and are you know, I’m amazed, like you said, like, you know, if you had asked me to predict Paul Kings North and Martin Shaw, you know, five, six years ago, I could not have predicted it. But then when I see when I see that coming over the horizon, I’m like, yes, that that’s that’s it. Like, and I can see that, like you said, I can see things coming together. And so it’s exciting. I mean, what what other life would you want to lead? It’s exciting to be to be in a world that is semi hostile to you, but then being surrounded by a roundtable of amazing nights is like, what else would I want? Yeah, yeah, I think I think we’re all in agreement that church needs to become a lot again. You know, I think really, and if people don’t think we’re in a moment of tremendous peril, they are simply not paying attention. They’re not paying attention. All the ingredients you want for a phenomenal myth are occurring in real time, right now. You don’t need to be nostalgic. You didn’t miss out. There was no other golden age of myth that was more and more engaging than this. This is the moment. And so find your place at the table. And I say that to everybody. There’ll be some kid right now watching us on a phone doing some shift, you know, his third shift at McDonald’s. We’re talking to you. You know, we’re talking to you. Locate, locate that noblesse oblige in you and see what kind of trouble you can get into. You know, that’s amazing, Martin. I think that that is the best place to finish our conversation on. Thank you for everything you do. Oh, a pleasure. I can’t wait to be with you again. It’s going to be amazing. I can’t wait to I can’t wait for all of us to be at the symbolic world and people take your cue, you know, get your tickets. I’m going to do my plug and and come meet us at the symbolic world at the end of February. We are all excited to see you there. So thanks. I want to invite you all to the very first symbolic world summit. Over three days, we will finally meet in real time and real space. And everyone from this little corner of the Internet will be there to explore the theme of reclaiming the cosmic image. Of course, I will be speaking, but there will also be Martin Shaw, who is an amazing mythographer, Father Stephen DeYoung of Lord of Spirit fame. There will be Richard Rowland from the Universal History series, Vesper Stamper, Nicholas Cotar and Neil deGray that you’ve all seen on my channel here and there. For entertainment, we have everyone’s favorite apocalyptic band, the one and only Dirtcore Robbins. This event will be the chance of a lifetime to capture and embrace our current moment. So join us from February 29th to March 2nd, 2024 in Tarpon Springs, Florida. Visit the symbolic world dot com slash summit for more information. And I will see you there.