Martin Shaw on the Mythical Response to the Pandemic
From the Emergence Magazine Podcast
Emergence Magazine is a quarterly online publication exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Each issue explores a theme through innovative digital media, as well as the written and spoken word. The Emergence Magazine podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories, and more.
As part of Emergence Magazine‘s recent series of online conversations with our contributors, mythologist and storyteller Dr. Martin Shaw joined us to read from his new book, Courting the Wild Twin and talk about his recent op-eds for the magazine on the mythical response to the pandemic. In the moderated discussion that followed with Emergence executive editor Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Martin answered questions from the audience and shared his thoughts on initiation, agency, and the move into the mythical. Our task now, he said, is to look at the prayer rug of our own lives as the mythic ground that we each stand upon.
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Listen to the rest of this essay on Emergence Magazine’s website or by subscribing to the podcast.
Martin Shaw, PhD, is an acclaimed scholar of myth and author of the award-winning Mythteller trilogy, The Night Wages, and Life Cycle, his conversation and essay on the artist Ai WeiWei, was recently released by the Marciano Arts Foundation. Shaw created the Oral Tradition and Mythic Life courses at Stanford University and is the director of the Westcountry School of Myth in the UK. He has been a wilderness rites of passage guide for twenty years.
