This interview took place on January 11^nd  2008. Interviewer is Daniel Deardorff, mythologist and author of 'The Other Within: The Genius of Deformity in Myth, Culture, and Psyche.'

Martin and Daniel lead workshops and retreats entitled 'The Bones of Initiation' in both the US and the UK. Daniel is also the founder of the Mythsinger foundation and director of the 'Living Myth, Living World' year program in Washington state.

I think that all depends on what you do with the stories, how you handle them. If you make them concrete or monotheistic then they create boundaries and limits around a culture; we choose this and not the other. Mythic consciousness is a many layered beast, and a superficial reading can make assumptions about it being an attempt to create a 'group mind' whilst ignoring the immense flights of imagination contained within it.

  On a very basic level, in the modern era it's a hugely 'wild' idea to entertain the possibility that a mythological layer even exists, that is not purely defined by the psychological, that even has some kind of contact with a supernatural or 'Otherworld'. You've already separated yourself from the pack by playing with that idea.

  When myth is allowed its primary expression it feels deep, illuminating and expansive. When, as happens, it is melted down into dogmatic concrete, the mercury flees and we are left with something that feels contracted, manipulative and fearful. Hitler’s hacking up of Germanic stories and esoteric folklore is an obvious example of this kind of abhorrent spell making.

Myth points towards relationship with leaping salmons, hermits and bandit queens, its is a move both outwards into an extended perception of community, and down into the wet roots of ancestry. It points towards existing in, and, in fact, thriving in paradox-we both could give dozens of examples of this, that this is a move towards knowledge of the soul. That is a huge move towards a genuinely wild consciousness. The wildness lives in the deeper implications of the stories and the imaginal brushfire it can bring to our lives.

Myth is a roadmap between the rational and the tacit. We could call that a psychic accord with the Sun and the Moon, the 'Village' and the 'Forest'. Initiation, as a kind of informed crisis, is trying to facilitate the same process. Whether in tribal rites-of-passage or some upheaval in our every day life, some mossy part of the soul is attempting to reach up through the rupture of the experience and forge a new relationship. When we have these experiences-bereavement illness, sacking, divorce,-without a container of stories or an aware community, the tendency is that the message gets lost, it just becomes 'bad luck' rather than a kind of dark illumination. Jesus taught in images- parables all the time-it opens up the whole body to the message, the pictures feed the body not just the head.

  So myth is a kind of teaching vehicle for the initiatory process we inevitably follow through a lifetime. It provides nourishment for all us hungry soul crows, pecking at the door of possibility!

  There has been such attention to the arch of the sun, success and ascension these last 150 years, it is a natural and good thing that the work of Jung, Tillich, Graves, Bly, Hyde and now yourself should try and pull us down towards the soil, earth and the shadows. I feel a physical relief just saying that. It is however, an ancient idea. Tribal initiation is an attempt to create an authentic and informed human being before they take a position of authority; the stories say this comes from knowledge of the wound, wandering in dark woods, looking for home. This is far from the idea of college, gap year, senator, president!

Whilst visualisation has its place, even a shamanic legacy, and is useful for connecting to a sense of a personal mythology, I think certain core elements separate the two. Myth is a kind of ever collapsing current of information that has moved through communities for millennia. It collapses in the sense that there is a fluidity to it, it reconfigures the psychic energies of the era and keeps moving. It still carries, like some kind of elixir, all sorts of hints and clues to a vilifying relationship to the planet and cosmos.

  It also brings the distilled intelligence of many cultures, something that can only expand anything you could come up with alone. It gives a set of steps and depth to our lives that a purely visionary experience can’t: myth has those huge, wet, roots I mentioned as well as its mercurial qualities. Whilst a guided meditation can really open the imagination, I believe to really flourish, to grow corn, we need a wider container.

  Occasionally people ask if Hollywood is an adequate platform for mythic ideas, and I think generally the answer is no. For the most part we get a thin residue from the old stories, something to put us in a hero-trance, but lacking the complexity and depth of something like Parsival. The old stories have an emphasis on suffering and imagination, which is connected to the struggle to live a life of elegance and service in uncertain times. Do we really think that much has changed in the human psyche?

  That’s not say that all that is archaic or indigenous is to be celebrated, whole cycles of myth are so blood soaked that it would be unwise to hold them up as a mantra for contemporary living-in fact, judging by the way things are right now, that’s probably what’s happening in our unconscious, due to a lack of conscious mythic insights. Those old Dragons feed on a sloppy mind and are buoyed up by lethargy-Whaaam! In they come to gobble the energy of anyone half asleep. That’s when we get Tribalism not myth: paradox is squeezed out, trickster is ignored and so wreaks havoc, the whole world gets divided into Crows and Doves. This is the thinking of a child, and so we get fed kids fantasies not nourishing myths- they are not the same thing.

  The stories in their fullness are a call to wake up; to examine our lives and motivations, to forge relationship with impossible odds.

Blake, and this was also an idea picked up by William Stafford, holds to this;

   I will give you the end of a golden string

   Only wind it into a ball

   It will lead you in at Heavens gate

   Built in Jeruslem’s wall

There is actually a golden string that has been moving through this world since time began, and it has your name on it, it is bespoke to you. The job of a life is to find it, hold it’s energy, and follow it to Jerusalems wall. Notice how delicate a string is, it could snap at any time without subtle attention, we have to keep it away from professional golden string cutters!

Culture is a good word, a noble thing, but I’m troubled by it always being attributed to cities or the main frame of society. Thoreau says;

‘in literature it is only the wild that attracts us’ and he’s damn right.

  Wildness has a sophistication and a beauty all of its own, one that has educated us for millenia, an education of the soul if you like-education as

Educere-to lead out. Wildness is needed to dance Flamenco, I’m not talking about a moshpit chaos-it carries intelligence and discipline.

There is a train of thought, that, being a Celt, I would call the Bardic imagination that is thousands of years old, and for me is a strand of Blakes string. We can find it in stories of Taliesin and Boudicca, up through the Arthurian courts, over to the Moors of Spain, onto the poetry of Hafez and Yeats and Dickinson and the great, wildish minds of Snyder, Woodman and Campbell.

  So the Culture of Wildness is a profound re-establishing of relationship between the wildness in landscape and words, often with ritual (storytelling, ceremony, art) as a glue between the two. This isn’t some small thing; this is a serious attempt to be connected and excited about life-to be in love with the Lord and Lady of the Four Quarters. This requires huge study, giving up a lot of play-time, handing in our dummy and sweets at the door.

  As a wilderness rites-of-passage guide I’ve noticed that the return to the community is becoming the most hazardous part of the experience, many people feel unsure what they’re returning too. A marginal experience like a      Vision Quest can become a marginal life, if you don’t have support and education to help blossom the wyrdness of what you experienced up there on the mountain. Wilderness work was and is a huge jump towards the kind of consciouness that all these great thinkers and mystics speak of.

  For a mystical experience to live though, it needs protection and integration-hence the emphasis on story as Swan Feather cloak, an incubating period.  So much of my work is facilitating the move out into wilderness ritually, and then creating a really rich nest of education to grow those mighty wings and sharp beak. We all need to be braver in the world, I know I do, so we need immense resources.

It was largely a good thing I think. I was one of those people I’ve just mentioned that was unable to re-integrate when I returned from fasting in the wild- I gave up a large publishing deal as musician, accepted a marriage was over and headed out of London to the country. For four years of this period I lived nomadically, in a Yurt, in a number of locations. I needed a regular, less dramatic relationship with nature than these huge jumps into initiation process that I’d been having.

  I went very deeply into the stories, got lonely, the tent burnt down, I carried on, adapted to living in a circle with flapping walls in the middle of winter. It’s good to feel piratical or gypsy-like, and that time provided that. A lot of nonsense fell away and I’ve loved the tent life ever since.

I learnt to tell stories under canvas or by a fire. I also read a vast amount of Neruda. I mean vast.

I am unable to give sound bites but I would say it is connected to a radical need to find visceral, profound relationship to the wild again-both the planet and in ourselves. This is no backward step-mythological thinking leaves psychology trailing to catch up-we need a love affair again with landscape and the cosmos, to not just operate out of a perpetual, gnawing anxiety; that’s an insult to the gods.

 With that comes a sense of service. With someone as grandiose as myself  I need something to be part of, to bring out the best in me, not just peddling off my own self aggrandisement.

There seems to be a growing absence of tenderness these days, it seems unequipped to move at the speed of our ‘infinite progress’, if we feel connected-to each other and the land-and celebrate that in powerful, beautiful and binding ways, then that tenderness and affection can grow in a way that feels authentic. Hah! wildness and tenderness are friends!

  I would finish by saying that ceremonies and ideas without wildness in their center have a very limited shelf-life. That’s just the sound of the human mind going round and round trying to figure something out. We need to be curious about what rivers and ancestors have to say. We also need the courage to believe that we maybe can contribute something to this strange tapestry. Be wolfish, sweet and fierce, carry bags of ancient texts around, memorise Yeat’s, become a Pirate and make a longship of your desire with which to sail into your unfettered ocean of mercurial possibilities. As Shakespeare liked to say;

Avaunt you Cullions!