Ecstatic Myth

A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace in Wildness by Martin Shaw

A Branch from the Lightning Tree is a brilliant exploration of the relationship between myth, culture, and the wild--both in landscape and language. Dr. Shaw's rich storytelling gifts are displayed as he presents seven texts and commentaries as diverse as Irish, Siberian, and Romanian Gypsy. This astonishing, extraordinary and highly imaginative book offers seven branches from the Lightning Tree of Initiation. Each branch is an invitation that breaks us from the trance of the everyday and further into both the complexities and joys of the deeper life we were born for.

Martin Shaw is a mythologist, storyteller, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide based in Devonsire, England. Shaw gave up a lucrative music contract to pursue the study of myth while living for four years in a tent in the wilds of the Welsh border. An international teacher, he tours the United States and Canada annually and is visiting lecturer on Archbishop Desmond Tutu's Leadership program at Oxford University. To find out more on Martin's work, please visit: www.schoolofmyth.com

It was Joseph Campbell whom first sucked me into the study of myth, but it has been all Martin Shaw over the last several months. I heard him give an absolutely marvelous talk on the Emergence Magazine Podcast (Season 2 "Mud and Antler Bone" July 9, 2018), of which I just had to discuss on my God Fodder Podcast (Season 1, Episode 13 "Mythological Fodder" Dec 11, 2018). So I went out and bought his book on Ecstatic Myth. I admit that I haven't finished it yet, nor am I even all that close. It's a book I am savoring as I read in fits and bursts, and only when I have the time to truly soak in deep thought and let his words stir, agitate and resonate within.

Shaw is all about journey and quest in this book--the process of going into the core of our being and conversing with what we find there, in both our ugliness and our glorious potential. I am especially drawn to his perspectives and wisdom about Initiation, "the very process of living (which) requires leaving what is familiar, e.g. the womb, and venturing out into a world of uncertain outcomes." Immersed in a writing project which offers me a slew of uncertain outcomes, namely, whether or not it is even publication worthy, I am intimately aware and sensitive to the plights of initiation.

If you're up to going down, down, down into the mysterious world of myth and storytelling that Shaw is so masterful at, then this might be the kind of book for you. I've found it to be (so far) very accessible, adventurous and intriguing. The more awake I become to the many different views and ways of nurturing one's spirituality, the more I appreciate the role that myth has anchored my understanding of ancient texts and scriptures.

Ritual and myth are coded steps that can help facilitate our movement through such awakening times. These old stories remove some of the abstraction in crisis, and keep us focused on the half-concealed path, rather than complaining that we're so far from home in the first place. Liberated experience, originality, breaking shackles can result from following this route. The element that varies from individual to individual is how conscious we are that we're in it.

Is it any wonder that our love of experiencing a great film or novel is likely the result of this ancient craft of myth-making and storytelling? As Campbell so wonderfully presents in his work and Shaw exemplifies here, if story has been important to your life and a catalyst for personal change and transformation, you really ought to get your hands dirty and dig into the gifts of myth.

Myth could be said to be a collision of ruptures. From this perspective, our rupture, our ruin, is our axis mundi, our place of orientation, our holy hills, our cathedral...Mythic understanding is subterranean; it lives underneath...it tells us that the full gamut of feeling is to be experienced. Wildness is the capacity to go into joy, sorrow, and anger fully and stay there for as long as needed, regardless of what anyone else thinks.

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Photo by Josep Castells on Unsplash
Photo by Peter Forster on Unsplash

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