Martin Shaw – The Sanctuary of Vindos

What’s in a bard’s skull? A topography of lands and dreams and stories and mythic figures from Martin Shaw’s local Devonian story-hunting ground and across Britain to as far away as Crete, Africa, Scandinavia, Siberia. Courted, incanted, summoned, they come to inspire, converse with and possess the bard.

The book takes the form of three ritual journeys in the Devonian landscape wherein Shaw offers up physical gifts and storytelling to court the land into opening, conversing, to spilling forth the visions he and the world need to hear.

It differs from his previous publications in its recording of raw thoughts and experiences rather than more refined reflections on mythic material. Sometimes this leads to brilliance and at others borders on self indulgent rant. There are a few pokes at ‘pagans’ and ‘eco-hippies’ some might find offensive.

The first journey leads along the river Durius and tales include ‘Vita Merlini’ and ‘Rhiannon of the Horses.’ Merlin comes swimming up his local watercourses ‘good rivers all’ but full of ‘effluent’ he ‘drank sloughed off the fields’ and puked up ‘outside Taunton services’ protesting about being reduced to an ‘archetype’. Shaw agrees he is clearly ‘not fucking Gandalf.’

At the end is a particularly striking scene during which Shaw is called to crawl into the ‘pitch-black belly’ of a ‘butchered horse’ by Childe the Hunter (a character from Dartmoor’s legends who got lost hunting through the snow and slew his horse and climbed inside it to keep warm but no avail).

This drives Shaw into his next journey – a one hundred and one night vigil in a ‘nest’ ‘in a thirty foot circle, perimeter articulated by flour and whisky’ in a Dartmoor grove with a ‘little hazel bush’ in the middle where he sits and calls.

What he seeks are stories not for a ‘horse time’ but for a ‘wolf time’. This leads to his possession by old man Vainamoinen, a dialogue with his great-great uncle Hamer Broadbent, a Christian missionary in Russia, and his ‘big dream’, his ‘great, lumbering fuck of a dream’ of Wolferland – Doggerland in the shape of a wolf (some of this is recorded in his previous book of that name).

This section ends with an Old Testament style vision and nine words that will ever be imprinted on his mind that lead to his conversion to Christianity.

Throughout Shaw is haunted by a rider on a ridge but he does his best not to look. ‘I don’t have time for this… Horseman pass by.’ He appears again talking backwards and is warded off – Shaw isn’t one for courting dark things.

The final journey leads up to Big Rock and singings of the songlines of Devon and Shaw’s final taking of every story he has ever told for a walk and offering them up with myrhh, henna blossoms, a vineyard, his ‘plait, a foot of hair cut away’ as a grand finale resulting in a final vision. And what does he see?

*SPOILER ALERT* ‘A great gathering of humans and animals… all the originals of this place… And suddenly, there he is. The rider. My teacher. The one who has stalked me this whole time. And finally he speaks. And finally I understand. What was dark sound has become new wine.’

This passage gave me goose bumps. It reminded me shiveringly of my first meeting with my patron God, Gwyn ap Nudd, an otherworldly huntsman. Shaw never reveals who this rider, his teacher is, but he is led not to devotion to a pre-Christian deity but to ‘crawling into God’.* *SPOILER END*

This book is highly recommended to all who are not only lovers of myths and stories but wish to enter into them and be initiated by the figures within on a deeper level. It speaks of the trials and tribulations and triumphs of courting old tales, of holding vigils, of honouring the land, of awakening its songlines.

To me it forms the grand finale of a series of books charting Shaw’s life and work as an animistic mythteller before his conversion to Orthodox Christianity.

*Shaw’s conversion to Orthodox Christianity, like his friend, Paul Kingsnorth’s, came as a big shock to me. Whilst I totally understand their being claimed by Jesus their choosing to convert to a black and white religion with binary theology that has oppressed countless peoples and their traditions and stories and deities is beyond my comprehension.

Over the last few days I have been taking some time out from writing my novel in progress, In the Deep, after completing the second draft and realising some of the content has strayed from the imaginal into the imaginary. Not being sure how to remedy it I turned for insights to one of my favourite mythtellers Martin Shaw. I found the wisdom I needed in his video ‘On the Fall and the Underworld’ where he warns to be aware of engaging with avatars rather than divinities themselves, giving the example of ‘Baba Yaga with her teeth pulled out’. I had fallen afoul in this mistake in some of my later scenes with the winged serpents.

I also discovered, at first to my surprise, that Martin, whose works are deeply Pagan and animistic and based in his experience of extended wilderness vigils recently converted to Orthodox Christianity. I felt less surprised as I learnt about how this happened in relation to the rest of his personal journey in his dialogue with Mark Vernon ‘The Mossy Face of Christ’. Following a one hundred and one day vigil in a local wood in Devon he had an Old Testament style vision and retired to bed to hear 9 words that led him to the conclusion he must return to his ‘original home’ which was Eden. This was followed by a series of intense dreams featuring Jesus and the son of God moving into his life in a similar way to which He wrecked the temple in Jerusalem. Martin grew up in a Christian family and his practice already resembled that of the Desert Fathers and the peregrini who set out for wild places to find God.

Of course I could not help but relate this to the conversion to Orthodox Christianity of his friend, Paul Kingsnorth, whose writing I also admire, in particular ‘the Dark Mountain Manifesto’ (which was written with Dougald Hind in 2009). Kingsnorth writes of his experiences in ‘The Cross and the Machine’. Here he speaks of carrying an Abyss within him, of needing ‘a truth to surrender to’. He did not find this during his time as a Wiccan priest. Following a series of dreams he found it in Jesus and in Orthodox Christianity and his Abyss was filled.

‘In Orthodoxy I had found the answers I had sought, in the one place I never thought to look. I found a Christianity that had retained its ancient heart—a faith with living saints and a central ritual of deep and inexplicable power. I found a faith that, unlike the one I had seen as a boy, was not a dusty moral template but a mystical path, an ancient and rooted thing, pointing to a world in which the divine is not absent but everywhere present, moving in the mountains and the waters. The story I had heard a thousand times turned out to be a story I had never heard at all.’

There is much in both Shaw’s and Kingsnorth’s experiences I relate to as someone who received a calling to devote their life to a Brythonic god – Gwyn ap Nudd. The shock of a deity who was not expected stepping into one’s life and coming along and turning everything upside down. Inititally resisting. Submitting to the call in spite of being unsure what it means and being terrified what others will think.

I’ve also been tempted by Christianity. Like Kingsnorth I rejected it but still found myself hanging around churches and I additionally had a calling towards monasticism. As I approached my 35th birthday I was desperately aware this would be my last chance to become a Christian nun but I didn’t take it. I also had a couple of encounters with Jesus whilst working as a cleaner at a local Catholic school. His presence was everywhere and whilst I was cycling home I saw His face before me trying to mouth something in Middle Eastern. He then turned up at our dining table and I told Him politely I was already taken by Gwyn.

Looking at Shaw and Kingsnorth’s converstion to Christianity I can fully understand the need to respond to this strange and rebellious and self-sacrificing God-become-a-man, to take up the cross, to walk in a 2000 year tradition that has its book, its churches, its liturgy, its mysteries, its mysticism. That Christianity provides better trodden and more accessible ways to deeper truths than we find in modern Paganism and Polytheism as we have little over fifty years of development (if one claims Wicca and Pagan Druidry as points of origin).

Although I feel this impulse Christianity is not for me and the Christian God and his son/incarnation, Jesus, are not my God(s). I belong heart and soul to Gwyn.

As a polytheist nun who recently founded an online polytheistic monastery, the Monastery of Annwn, (of which Gwyn is the patron) I wish whole heartedly we had longer and more explicitly sacred texts than the fragmentary material from medieval Welsh literature, longstanding prayers and rites, systems of meditation, moreover physical monasteries. But we don’t. So our small group is having to make things up as we go along – sharing and co-writing prayers, joining together in meditation, discussing our experiences, putting together rituals. Our deeper truths too are there. We’re touching on mysteries and finding our mysticism. I believe this can be done just as well in Polytheism as in Christianity with a little patience.

I find it interesting to note the cross over between the impulses towards a rewilding of Christianity with the likes of Shaw and Kingsnorth and the call for more depth and discipline within Paganism and Polytheism with the Polytheistic Monastic movement.