What Ails You? A Review of Liturgies of the Wild

Mike recorded a video interview with Martin Shaw about his book. You can watch their conversation here.

“If Oxford is the natural home of Lost Causes, Wales is the natural cross-road between past and future, the natural point d’appui of the invisible currents that stir the tree-tops above the heaps of dry bones.”
—John Cowper Powys

I don’t know if Martin Shaw has ever read or heard of this claim made by Powys on behalf of Wales and the Welsh mountains, but I strongly suspect he’d find it very interesting, and even quite familiar. Wales, and Snowdonia in particular, serve as threshold places for both Powys and Shaw. In their works Wales, both as myth and as fact, contains landscapes with depth, narrative power, and the capacity to interact with human inner life beyond mere topography.

Solo fasting for four days in 1990 on the Welsh mount of Cadair Idris was a turning point that precipitated a mystical, mythic encounter for Shaw—not as a pleasant hike or scenic retreat, but as an intense, consciousness-shifting experience of place that broke him out of his ordinary perspective. He describes this experience as being “beautifully beaten by something bigger than himself,” and it took him four-plus years in its wake, mostly time spent in tents in forests, to begin to unpack it. Indeed, the most precise language for this experience was that it was initiatory.

And I think this influential, but certainly not deterministic, situatedness in place, tied to Wales, leads Martin Shaw to a unique situatedness in time as well. He states in his new book, Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us, that we are “wandering initiatory times without an initiatory language.” What does he mean by this? Well, I take it to mean that, like me, he probably thinks we are living through uncanny, “burn-your-maps,” change-of-epoch types of times, or what Powys described as a period and a phenomenon “whose peculiar luster combines the frivolous phosphorescence of decomposition with the ghostly pallor of the hour before dawn.”

And by initiatory language, I infer that he is referencing the need for artful language beyond divide-and-conquer binaries like right or left—language that doesn’t confuse means and ends, thereby treating interlocutors as people, as fellow subjects, instead of objects to manipulate or seduce. Initiatory language does something to the listener instead of just explaining something to them. Without that language we drift—busy, entertained, informed, but unformed.

We are living through times when things are dying and things are being born. The Welsh symbol for this phenomenon is the Pair Dadeni, or “Cauldron of Rebirth,” and yet, according to Shaw, “That things end” is a great Western heresy. He’s right, but shaking ourselves free of this heresy isn’t easy when so much political fervor arises out of fears that the “Christian West” will end unless the right person seizes power. From an existential lens, the Trump-as-King obsession risks displacing attention from the quieter but more pervasive forms of death and institutional collapse—in schools and hospitals, for example—that have little to do with celebrity politicians.

This is a big problem, and the end result often manifests in limitless distraction. So instead of running around in cars and watching TV and feeling angry, such times instead call for genuine rites of passage and deep, transformative journeys (personal and communal) that require living through. The only way out, so it’s said, is through:

We all have them: moments of crisis or opportunity, sometimes the terror-wallop of both at the same time. We can sail on steady winds; then suddenly the weather turns and the map flies from our hand. These are the dread or blissed encounters that, by their very pressure, can be the making of us. These are life’s initiations. Illness, scandal, demotion—these are hard instructors. If you can bear it, they are going to school you. This isn’t to imply we should go looking for scars, but remain open to learning when trouble shuffles along.

The result of such underworld journeys, as symbolically expressed by Shaw, is “a limp and a gift.” Such times also require the power of story, as story often makes the darkness in ourselves the scene of action and not, like most politics, the darkness we supposedly find in others—especially when those others have been chosen for us by our betters because they happen to live near rare earth or oil deposits that we find enviable. Like Blake’s poetry, stories, which have their true home in the right brain, have the ability to effectuate the “marriage of heaven and hell.”

And story, dear Porchers, is where Martin Shaw excels, both as a student and a teller. Shaw is a well-studied mythologist, author, and oral storyteller known for reviving traditional European myth and folklore as living, initiatory stories. He has a background in drama and spent some formative years living the life of a drummer in a few punk rock bands. Especially since his experience in Wales, he has been deeply influenced by Celtic and indigenous storytelling traditions and by mentors such as Robert Bly. Myths and stories, for Shaw, are presented as transformative and lived experience rather than literary artifacts.

Liturgies of the Wild is the sort of book that FPR readers might tend to recognize not so much as an argument to be assessed, but as a voice to be weighed—listened to for its fidelity to place, memory, and moral formation. To be honest, I’m not familiar with even a third of Shaw’s total corpus (yet!), but I suspect this might be his Book.

Alan Watts was perhaps a little too on the nose when he wrote a book (actually a very good one) entitled The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, but yes—this is a book like that: the book, like Siddhartha or Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance or The Alchemist—a book you can give to your intelligent and good-hearted but basement-dwelling nephew who seems lost. It’s a book you’d return to time and again, with different chapters jumping out as relevant at different times in one’s life.

My youngest son poached my publisher’s copy as he departed the other day, heading south to live out of his car while trying to make a splash in the world of professional disc golf. He saw my copy of the book blurbed with praise by one of his heroes, Iain McGilchrist: “From our greatest living storyteller: a validation of all that is awe-inspiring and implicit in a world where we are confined by the explicit and banal.” I suppose he sensed that this could be his Book. He made a good choice.

Between powerful introductory and concluding chapters, which feature the presiding spirits of Wallace Black Elk and Parzival respectively, Liturgies of the Wild offers chapters on topics such as “Death,” “Guilt,” “Evil,” “Passion,” “Initiation,” “Prayer,” and “Praise Making.” Shaw himself admits that “all chapters might not speak to one at the same time, or be needed at different moments in our lives.” This admission feels less like a disclaimer than a quiet confession of faith in maturation: books, like landscapes, reveal themselves as we are ready for them.

In fact, maturation is a central theme of this book—which should make all women, young and old, eternally grateful if they catch their husbands, boyfriends, or sons reading this tome. Years ago, Bill Kauffman introduced me to the music of early rocker Tonio K (who took his stage name from Thomas Mann’s 1903 novella Tonio Kröger, which is a really interesting thing to have done), and Tonio K wrote and sang about the world we’re living in now as a world in which “men won’t grow up and the women get so hard.” We’re stuck, it seems, in perpetual adolescence. If I were to blurb this book, I’d say it’s a book that will help men mature and women avoid hardening.

Something that was very interesting to me—and impressive—is that Shaw borrows an initiatory schema of one of his great mentors, Robert Bly, and reprises it into something genuinely new, which is what all good teachers, like Bly, would see as the highest form of respect coming from a student. It takes a certain amount of daring, too, but I’m glad he did it as the distinctions are important.

Both Shaw and Bly work within a mythopoetic and depth-psychological tradition, yet, as I see it, their varying use of the seminal colors black, red, and white reveals a crucial difference in how they understand myth’s function in modern life. Bly, author of the famous Iron John, tends to use these colors symbolically, treating them as markers of interior states within an interpretive framework: black often signifies depression, grief, or the shadow; red evokes blood, passion, eros, and the life force; white gestures toward insight, purity, or transcendence.

Shaw, by contrast, treats black, red, and white not as symbols to be interpreted, but as living presences and initiatory forces that act upon the soul. “Black” in Shaw is not merely “the shadow” or sadness, but the fertile, terrifying darkness of the wild world—the forest, the cave, the underworld—where one is undone and remade beyond personal psychology. “Red” is not just passion or vitality, but blood sacrifice, ancestral memory, and the dangerous pulse of life that demands risk, allegiance, and consequence. And “white,” rather than a simple emblem of clarity or purity, manifests in Shaw’s work as bone, ash, frost, or ghostliness, marking the always-near proximity of death, spirit, and the underworld rather than just resolution or enlightenment.

What matters about this difference is that Bly, in his work, ultimately invites readers to understand myth, while Shaw insists they be claimed by it. In Shaw’s vision, black, red, and white are not tools for self-improvement, but thresholds that confront the listener with ecological, ancestral, and spiritual realities that cannot be safely domesticated. This shift, I think, has profound implications: Bly’s approach tends to make myth serve modern individuals, whereas Shaw’s approach asks modern individuals to serve myth, restoring a sense of reverence, danger, and obligation that he believes contemporary culture has largely lost. And service—even, and especially, in its most sacramental form, listening—is where Shaw ultimately places us in his concluding chapter, as he relates the Grail tale of Parzival with its penultimate culmination in the “sweet, simple, hard-earned hymn of a question” that, in its depth and sacramental simplicity, begins stitching the world back together.

And what is this central and mysterious arcanum of a question? Parzival, in his new, hard-won wisdom, found only after many journeys and mistakes, asks the Fisher King: “Uncle, what ails you?”

I suggest that, with the centrality that both Martin Shaw and Simone Weil give to this question of Parzival’s (Weil’s version appearing in her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies Towards a View of the Love of God,” translated in my copy as “What are you going through?”), we have good warrant during this time of epochal change to begin instituting a new end-of-life Christian mythos of sorts.

I very humbly put forth that we get rid of that old story that has us (at least Catholics), upon our deaths, showing up at the pearly gates and meeting St. Peter, who vets us a bit on moral code-ism and things like Mass attendance and our love of the Church until we finally hear the ding and get buzzed in to hang with the saints. And I suggest we replace that with a new framing that suggests that, upon our deaths, we’ll see St. Peter, and instead of receiving that canvassing on piety and morals, we are invited by the Prince of the Apostles to ask him the question that shows we’ve kind of understood what this whole shebang—this whole thing called life on Earth—was fundamentally about.

Any question like “What ails you?” or “What are you going through?” that demonstrates the centrality of putting ourselves into another person’s place, both literally and imaginatively (as that’s really something of the essence of the imagination, which Blake referred to in its ultimate sense as Jesus Christ), wins the ding. Powys, who thought this power was easier to cultivate in Wales than other places, describes the same thing in these words: “I refer to the power of projecting the sensory apparatus of our own soul into the reactions of others, so we can feel with certain emotions and feelings that are quite alien to our own.”

To bring in Thomas Mann again, his novel Doctor Faustus gives us this exchange:

“Do you think love is the greatest emotion?”
“Why, do you know a greater one?”
“Yes,” answers Adrian, “interest.”

I’m staying with this as this is a distinction with a difference, especially for our time. This use of the word interest over love is, to me, very Parzivalian and very much needed for these initiatory times. My deceased friend, the novelist Stephen Vizinczey, glossed this exchange thusly:

“Interest is the last thing we’re willing to grant to one another, for the more we know about others, the more we’re forced to recognize that they’re not extensions of ourselves. We love people with all our hearts so long as we can conceive them as shadows in the universe which centers around us—shadows dominated by our sensations and feelings, not their own.”

Dostoevsky foregrounded and summarized this same epochal insight in The Brothers Karamazov, when the saintly Fr. Zosima confesses: “I love humanity, but I am amazed at myself: the more I love humanity in general, the less I love people in particular—that is, individually, as separate persons.” In ending with the story of Parzival, Shaw gifts us with a watchcry for the epoch we are entering: basic interest and service toward other people. “What are you going through?”

Finally, there is a subtle subtext in this new book—and elsewhere in his work—that feels deeply authentic and relevant to those of us here in America, and on the Porch. It is, at heart, the humble suggestion that America—particularly America understood as a mythic and psychological terrain—has not yet learned how to inhabit itself.

Shaw, an Englishman steeped in the “Matter of Britain,” writes as one who, when he travels here, feels as though he has crossed into the Otherworld—“literally the place you enter when you sail west in mythic stories.” America, for him, “isn’t just another landscape—it feels like crossing into a mythic realm.” Traveling westward evokes not merely geographic displacement but a deep interior unmooring. This sense of dislocation animates Liturgies of the Wild’s central concern: what happens to a people when story and place are severed. Shaw recalls “an old belief in the Celtic world, that if you aren’t wrapped in the cloak of story and the cloak of place, you are liable to experience huge rushes of angst as you age.” That sentence alone could serve as a diagnosis of modern American restlessness and hypermobility, for when this cloak is missing, we substitute: “When this is absent, we’re going to take facsimiles over nothing at all. We will create stories that simply support the narrative of endless, exponential growth rather than the caution and limits that have always supported traditional mythologies.”

This is not nostalgia, nor is it a call to resurrect an “ossified faith.” Shaw writes not about retrieval for its own sake, but, again, about maturation—something that takes place through a process he also calls “tempering.” Again and again, the book circles a deceptively simple question: “How do you make a real human being?” His answer is neither ideological nor programmatic, thank God. It is, as I wrote at the outset, initiatory. Shaw’s own initiatory formation threads through the book, particularly through his encounter with Wallace Black Elk. Black Elk believed that life itself was a “master class in site specificity,” of listening acutely to what God wanted us to be and allowing circumstances to shape us accordingly. Shaw himself wanted, he admits, “to be like the old man with the Pipe.” What he learned instead was patience—how to become himself, and how to become a custodian rather than a conqueror of story.

That same sensibility shapes Shaw’s approach to Christianity, which he describes provocatively as “a liturgy of the wild.” This is not an attempt to paganize the faith, but to re-situate it. “Inhabit the Time and Genesis of your Original Home,” he urges. Or, as Wallace Black Elk once put it: “Myths told me about life; Jesus told me how to live that life.” Shaw insists that Yeshua “pushes against two particular enchantments: passivity and disconnection.” Faith, like myth, is meant to be embodied, located, and enacted.

There is a sober realism here as well. Things are bad and we want quick solutions. Shaw, however, knows that urgency is rarely born from comfort. “We—as is the case in so many stories—have to encounter the underworld before sufficient urgency is engendered.” Modern people, he suggests, “don’t understand the stories like we used to. I think our bait used to go deeper.” Without depth, we find ourselves, memorably, “walking backward to our own graves.”

Liturgies of the Wild will frustrate readers looking for a tidy thesis or a policy prescription. That is precisely its strength. It is a book meant to be read alongside a journey, a season, a grief or a reckoning. Shaw has “absolutely devoted” himself, he says, to mythology for twenty-five years, but the devotion on display here is, ultimately, to people and places—especially those still capable of forming real human beings. Like a bubbling cauldron, the book offers guidance without guarantees, asking only that we stay long enough for the work to take hold.

Image Credit: John Varley, “Panoramic View From Cadair Idris, North Wales” (1833)