A Branch from the Lightning Tree

by Martin Shaw

  Scholars of myth have often sought legitimacy by taking the latter, scientific, approach. In this mode myth may be thought of as a strange never-before-seen moth pinned under glass and described remotely in infinite detail. As in Lao Tzu:This is like pinning a butterfly: the husk is captured, but the flying is lost.2

  Husk in hand, with “flying” abstracted and conceptualized, the moth’s irrational tendency to become immolated in flame is understood in two ways: on one hand, “the irrational in myth is a powerful, regenerative, upwelling of vital energies,”3 and on the other hand, “the irrational in myth is a dark, blind force apt to break out horribly in certain religious and political forms.”4 Tragically, in the ubiquity of such rational dissections the deep-song of myth is utterly lost.

  With great devotion and intensity, mythologist and storyteller Martin Shaw is breathing the flying back into the husk. To do this one must accept that the naive wishing for “regenerative upwelling” and the orthodox horror of “blind force breaking out” cannot be neatly divided; indeed, order and chaos, life and death, heaven and the underworld must be held paradoxically together. In Shaw’s words: “Myth presents the paradoxical view that we are to dwell in the tension of a ‘crossroads’ … that this very complexity provides the grounding of an authentic human life.”

  The one-sided study of the “husk” has yielded as much error as insight; only the wild flight of the living creature of myth can truly dilate and inform the heart. Simply to “know” the stories, even to tell them, is not wholly sufficient to this task; the stories must be carried, always ready, always whispering, always inspiring. Martin Shaw is a great “carrier” of story; he has bravely followed the living moth through the fire; now he stands before us, returned with a smoldering branch from the lightning tree in his hand. He beckons us to follow him, returning through the flames.

  It is experience that most informs the work in hand. Never objectifying or reductive, the image-laden syntax of myth is Shaw’s native tongue. His ability to hold the many tensions of wild associations discloses a mythos that speaks, as he says, “of both the feasting hall of life’s abundance and the desolate tundra of challenge and despair.” For Shaw, myth offers both of these extremes as peak experiences.

  The path before us, then, is both welcoming and daunting. It is a tripartite journey into wilderness, initiation, and myth—three inseparable realms—together they make what I have called “the dancing ground of radical uncertainty.” Approaching myth in this way requires, “an orientation which can open up the way a myth discloses the world and shapes human existence on its own terms.”5 It might be clearer to say a “disorientation,” or at least a re-orientation. Here we shed the stagnant ideas which encumber us. Following Shaw we come at last to myth on myth’s own terms. Making such a shift of understanding requires a reckless letting go of useful and trusted beliefs, as in the timeless words of poet Antonio Machado:Mankind owns four things

  That are no good at sea;

  Rudder, anchor, oars,

  And the fear of going down6

  Unburdened of the tried and true—even “the fear of going down”—this book carries us away from the “safe” confines of the ordinary and accepted into the disclosures of the uncertain, the unprecedented, the untamed.

  The journey simultaneously holds the contraries of solitary longing and relatedness to community, as Shaw tells us: “It’s an extraordinary, indigenous idea that to find an authentic center we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost. To make a place in us for a small, cultivated altar to the bird that flew away.” And, “This intensely mysterious experience is solitary in nature—a conscious break from society—but requires the warmth and subtlety of a return to community to help grow the seeds that can flower from such an experience.”

  A Branch From the Lightning Tree is an unflinching dive into the fiery sea of myth. It is a fierce and generous book, filled with tremendous love—the love of “Dartmoor ponies, circling buzzards, and the North Sea”; of deep silence and deep-song, and above all the deep love of story. The whole work conjures a grand tale of cunning and of grace, of what and where and who we are.

  Shaw follows a trail of old indigenous stories, “myths” that defend wildness and initiation as the only hope for a return to the “culture of wildness.” And if, as you read, you feel that fabulous swan-feathered cloak of those old minstrel magicians gently settle ‘round your shoulders, then, turning, see “white moths are on the wing and moth like stars are flickering out,”7 that is myth’s eternal moment—and suddenly, in that presence:Distance does not make you falter

  now, arriving in magic, flying,

  and finally, insane for the light,

  you are the butterfly and you are gone.

  And so long as you haven’t experienced

  this: to die and so to grow,

  you are only a troubled guest

  on the dark earth.8

  INTRODUCTION

  LOOKING FOR LIGHTNING

  Around four-thirty in the morning, I realized the tent was on fire.

  I say tent, meaning the bleached-thin, smoke-yellowed tipi that was one of two tents in the camp I called home. The lodge poles collapsed in the flames and, as they hit the ground, I, sleeping in the other tent, woke bolt upright and ran out into the rain. My whole world was on fire, a hundred secret things up in smoke.

  For four years I’d lived under canvas, through some hard winters and abundant summers, and over this time had placed every significant crumb of beauty I could find in that tent. It was all in there: owls’ wings, deer, goat, and sheep skins, Irish gold, lumps of Tibetan turquoise, Persian camel bags, fifteen-year-old love letters, delicately boned foxes’ skulls, a word-hoard of medieval poetry. All intricate things, dearly loved.

  It was unsettling to watch this reverse alchemy occur, gold to ashes, and as I stood hobbled and naked on the sidelines, I saw the most disturbing image of all: my grandfather’s sword bending in the heat, its ceremonial handle glowing, changing shape. I jumped into the flaming debris, grabbed it, threw it onto the wet grass and hurled myself to safety, landing badly.

  Several hours later, I examined the sword. In the thin dawn light I could see how ludicrous it now looked: buckled, robbed of all its ritual pomp, charred and bent. Over the coming months, a strange thing happened: that runt sword took on more significance than the rest of the pile of ragged abundance put together. I began to question my compulsion to gather beauty altogether. The remains became a clearer place to pray from. A lot went up in flames that night; it was almost a relief.

  So that bent sword took on more mythic resonance than any of the pomp and ceremony I had genuinely but self-consciously placed in my tent. The Ash pit was a place for my fury to live, my small nature, my exhaustion, my wellspring of malice. The bent sword was a gnarly rope that dropped me further into an Underworld I was still trying to flutter above.

  We all carry “fire” stories in our lives. We’ve all leapt through flames, lost cherished possessions, watched lovers quietly close the door and disappear. We all sense why the black seed of those moments carry more learning than every degree, every lottery win, every raise in stature we may encounter. Turning the ashes in our hand, we may recognize the swift currents of the myth-world.

  But how did I end up there to begin with? Half a decade before, I had dragged myself to the mountains of Wales and spent four days and nights without food, tent, company, or fire. I was doing something men and women have done for thousands of years: heading out into the bush seeking healing and clarity. After the fourth day, in the middle of the night, spirits came and my world got turned upside down. In the darkness of a Welsh valley everything changed. A door opened and I crawled through it. When it finally grew light, I knew I couldn’t go back to the life I’d had before.

  When I was twenty-three, my rock band had secured one of the larger publishing deals Warner Brothers had signed that year. A three-album deal was every young music
ian’s dream. Since I was sixteen, I had lived a nomad’s life, following wherever the music led: through Europe, (I was playing in Berlin when the Wall came down), appearing in squats, clubs, and halls from London to Prague. Lacking any academic kudos, I clung to the mesmeric patterns of the drum as a way of making sense of myself. After many false starts and narrow escapes, I felt the wind change, and the much longed-for deal appeared. The day I returned home with it sealed, my wife left—taking the dog and the deed to the apartment.

  Within six months I was living in a men’s hostel above a garage on the outskirts of London. There was no kitchen, a filthy, shared bathroom, and small rooms where men went slowly crazy. Underneath the hostel, a mechanic dismantled old cars day and night. I could often hear weeping from the next room, and sometimes a hand would suddenly attempt to open my heavily locked door. I had few appointments.

  The “deal” crumbling in my hands, burnt out, and drinking heavily: this was my condition when I got up to Wales. I practically flung myself at the mountains. I couldn’t put up a tent or make a fire if I tried, so going without them should not have been too much of a hardship. Much was waiting for me out in the forest.

  I returned to London and found myself standing in the office of the head of A+R, returning the contract. This was not the scene I had imagined as an aspiring musician. So now, bereft of wife, home, and career, I left London with £8 in my pocket.

  Up on the Welsh border, I lived in a caravan, then roomed in a farmhouse, and then spent four years outside; a year for each day I’d fasted on the mountain. I wanted to live in a circle, to be closer to animals, to attune my rusty ears to the waterfall. Woefully unequipped I had set out, a rooky ecstatic, ablaze to meet the shaggy gods of Old England. For the next decade I jumped headlong into what is known as wilderness rites-of-passage, serving a five-year apprenticeship in the work, and then letting the spirits of the living world become the teacher. It was as if my head was a radio picking up signals from Saturn. I took myself back up the mountain for more retreats, some in complete darkness, or without water. It wasn’t glamorous, but rather a hard, sometimes boring, sometimes terrifying aspiration towards a practice indigenous peoples have utilized for thousands of years: Initiation.

  Don’t ask me to give the Latin names of particular plants; I don’t know them. I’m working on it. What I came to understand was far more internal at first. If my head was tuned to a cluster of new radio signals, gradually the signal came in stronger, clearer, more distinct. Wild nature’s language was indecent in its fecundity and devastating in its bleakness, its tongue completely uncensored to any projection I might bring.

  What I can speak of is the kingdom of wood lice, badgers, elder, nettles, brambles, roe-deer, and ivy that gave feral lectures endlessly into my fool ear, the shattering cold of the waterfall that was a morning shower, and bellowing out ancient stories from the black hills of Wales, the source of the stream. I can speak of stunning October mornings with the ragged door of my tent pulled aside—frost on both sides of the canvas as the kettle wheezed into life atop the ruddy kindling and the burner. I can speak of the blue-black nights where Dionysus walked the hidden valley below the tent.

  With zero practical experience of living outside, I made endless mistakes. The applauding crowds of rock’n’roll were long gone, their only legacy a permanent ringing in the ears—applause from a gig that ended a hundred years ago. Gary Snyder I was not. Axes were blunt, jeans constantly caught on barbed wire fences, snares empty.

  Dreams came nightly like rowdy bears crashing into days where I struggled to cope with hand tools, tried to light wet wood, shivered between continual extremes of hot and cold. I was a righteous mess, with no apparent skills. Somewhere in this process, the threads between human community and where I found myself grew thin. I couldn’t find the vocabulary to articulate the changes I was experiencing. I felt intensely vulnerable and very lonely. What I looked for was some archaic language that would expand words and frame images so beautifully that I felt connected to human folk as well as kestrels and mud. What I found was myth.

  Myth is promiscuous, not dogmatic. It moves like a lively river through swarthy packs of reindeer, great aristocratic families, and the wild gestures of an Iranian carpet seller. Myth is not much to do with the past, but a kind of magical present that can flood our lives when the conditions are just so. It is not just the neurosis of us humans trying to fathom our place on the earth, but sometimes the earth actually speaking back to us. That’s why some stories can be hard to approach, they are not necessarily formed from a human point of view.

  As a child, I’d grown up in a strange house, with depression and beauty in either hand. We had no car, no phone, no television, no money, but many books. My father’s moods could fill the house in an instant, slide under doors, and become a second roof. Melancholy is an energy I know well. But one morning he woke me in the dark and we walked Devon lanes together. As he recited by heart Persian poetry, the sun came up. My father speaking poetry made the sun come up! That image of mad grandeur sustained me for ten years. My mother fed me books, and when she had finished a witches moon had crested in the night sky. My mother’s stories made the moon rise! I owe them much. It was a house with dark corners but resources. As I grew, sadness and ecstasy has made an accord within me. It’s a legacy I won’t refuse.

  As I grew older, the stories seemed to stay at a discreet distance but still remained visible if I turned my head at unusual angles. Every failure at school, every violent episode, every occasional triumph had a character from some story hovering in the experience. These chivalrous companions, invisible to most, pulled me towards a strange education. The cost of the education was high: to others it was a tattered rag of dead-end trails, mediocre-to-appalling school grades, inflammatory relationships, divorce, and poor career prospects. Now let’s be clear: the experiences in themselves are not to be revered; the gold is in the context, the mythic frame that provides us with the discipline to divine clear water from the mud of our lives.

  So I come with a story that is both hugely normal and yet strange. I was born in an urban world, underpinned by religion in my family’s case, yet every step I tried to make towards the steady life shrugged me off like a clumsy rider. Even rock’n’roll proved too corporate a posture to abide. I’m not from an exotic place, I’m from your street—I’m the kid with bad hair and introversion, not a glamorous figure. I have no tales from the Amazon or the Great Plains, no handed-down cosmology, just a puzzle of stories and the difficulty of trying to live in this world.

  The Otherworld is also much closer than we think; it has no perception of First and Third World countries, the fat West and the thin East, but seeks relationship right where we are. It doesn’t care if you feel unworthy. All I know is that some of its tendrils live in myth, poetry, ritual, and the wild, and some of what I know I offer in this book.

  This is not a book purely about rites-of-passage. It’s more about wildness itself: how it flutters between language, landscape, and ritual—always elusive, always mercurial. The language hopes to allow paw-prints and bird song to bound through its jungle of words. As a book, it faces in two directions—as both an offering to the human community and to the Otherworld. It has no truck with what is neat, shorn, and obsessed only with usefulness. It holds towards the reality of Spirits and that such energies have lived in the ground, running water, and forests of this world since we were a twinkle in the Holy Maker’s eye.

  The real advice it offers comes from the practice of immersion in wilderness and the genius of stories. Keep this in mind, for here you won’t find long lists of how-to’s. The gifts to work with are impacted in the images so as to activate your unconscious as well as your conscious mind. The images hold a keen intelligence that is our guide but does not offer a complete cosmology. That intelligence is also a great advocate of questions, rather than just evangelical answers. We shouldn’t trust any writing on wildness that is entirely sober and lacks questions.

  A
culture is no better than its woods.

  W. H. AUDEN

  It’s an ecological world we live in, and the heart of ecology is mythology. With this in mind, it’s possible we could re-vision through story a kind of curious genius that wraps us back into accord with the great tapestry of the earth. In short, we could remember what story we are actually in.

  In life we are born into a certain family or societal perspective. Gifts and curses are handed down, often with survival tips and particular cautions. A web of consensual information frames our vision. As we grow and wander from the nest, we are catapulted into any number of situations that can cause this original world view to hemorrhage, often through an unforeseen crisis. These are seen as initiatory events—events that fundamentally shape you. For thousands of years, tribal peoples orchestrated rites-of-passage that evoked this “crisis” in a ritual context to equip youth with a mightier perception of such experiences as they grew older. The Elder grew from the bereft. This has been called the Road of the Village and the Road of the Forest. We recall the association with ego and soul.

  We have always turned to the moon-heavy knots of forest, desert, and bush for initiation. Shakespeare sent certain characters in his plays into the woods for transformation. Merlin split his mind in two out in the Forest of Caledon and returned on the back of a great Stag. We know the forest generates fear and trial, but we once understood that contained within that experience was crucial growth for the human community, for the village.

  The initiatory patterns in both ritual and myth seem to loosen our fixation with the plough and the tablecloth, to dissipate the trance of wage, fame, and affirmation: they offer vision, not possession. The ego, trying to frame such an experience, will find it often miserable and frequently terrifying, not realizing that at times it must die in order to reconstitute itself and re-emerge in a fresh way, blinking into a wilder, more robust shape.