#mythtelling

[abby-or-smth]

mythteller?? so my ass just lies

You will be randomly assigned a NightWing name. Spin this wheel for your prefix (first part of your name) and then spin this wheel for your suffix (second part of your name).

(I got the name Marveladvisor... It's tolerable)

[innervoiceartblog]

(via The Radical Power of Storytelling - Yes! Magazine)

Despite the distractions and anxieties of the modern world, we still have the powerful capacity for wonder.

The business of stories is not enchantment. The business of stories is not escape. The business of stories is waking up.

~ Martin Shaw An excerpt from: ‘Courting the Wild Twin’ by Martin Shaw

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 U.K. He has been a wilderness rites of passage guide for twenty years. His new book is Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, March 2020)

[zuvluguu]

Beneath the raven feathers of Shamanism and the oak bark of Druidism… Beneath the Mongolian Steppe and the Four Great Taoist mountains… Beneath the Rainbow Serpent Skin of the Aborigine… Beneath, woven within, carried on the breath of sung Haida hymns… There’s a seed point from which all sacred rituals, knowledge, and awarenesses sprout from… there’s a common tap root drinking from the river beneath the river where the Earth dreams the world into being with the help of Spider Woman weaving at her loom.

The mythtellers call this Earth Speech… The Hopi and Daneh of the SouthWest U.S. call it the original instructions given to us by Creator… My Babas of the Himalayas spoke of them as the original understandings… The aborigine of Australia call them the original songlines… I’ve heard say that to the ancestral clans of Northern Europe these were known as the original seeds…

Each tradition has dressed them within the robes of their colorful culture and the path to tapping the river beneath the river are much the same… a way of listening to the Earth Dreaming… attuning the subtle conversations and relationships in nature… being silent… observing… regarding all of nature, the animals, weather, and plants as our teachers….

The ancestors share, don’t mimic our traditions, seek what we sought… relationship with the subtle. In doing so you don’t acquire information, you remember your own songline connected to the tap root to the river beneath the river and hence it becomes your own.

In other words, this isn't knowledge you learn, it's wisdom you become.

[thebooklook]

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst

If you want an incredibly in-depth look at oral history, oral storytelling, anthropology in the American North-West, Haida history, famous Haida mythtellers, and also some Haida myths then this is absolutely the book for you. A Story as Sharp as a Knife is massive, but it needs that pagecount to adequately cover every topic it's trying to address. If you want a simple translation of some of the myths, then this isn't the book for you. If you want a deep understanding of the culture and it's poets, this is practically a textbook on the topic. The Haida are a culture, not an interesting collection of myths, and you'll be much better informed if you read Bringhurst's work. If you have the patience for such a large book, it's incredibly interesting.

[dagongreyjoy]

Readings for 2020

I aim to read a book a week, with ten poetry books to be also read along the year. I’ve chosen not to ration along fiction/nonfiction and other lines, except poetry, and just choose whatever I want to read. 

I’ve also excluded academic stuff (at least in my field) from this list. Only 62 left to go!

Main Reads:

The Pre-Raphaelite Tragedy by William Gaunt

The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Time’s Traveller’s Almanac edited by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer

Mythe et Épopée I. II. III. by Georges Dumézil

She-Wolves by Helen Castor

The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen

Into the Unknown by Alexander Maitland

Inventions of the Middle-Ages by Chiara Frugoni

The Assassins by Bernard Lewis

The Southern Gates of Arabia by Freya Stark

Poetic Edda trans. by Carolyne Larrington

The Tin Drum by Günter Grass

Letters from Iceland by W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice 

Kolyma Tales by Varlam Shalamov

Les Bouts du monde by Roger Willemsen

The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn

The Collected Works of Kahlil Gibran

Bosnian Chronicle by Ivo Andrić

The Cloister and the Hearth by Charles Reade

The Early Romances of William Morris

Feudal Society by Marc Bloch

The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry by Walter Pater

Behind the Wall by Colin Thubron

The Wanderer and Other Old English Poems

Getty Apocalypse

Winchester Psalter Miniature Cycle

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

Journaux de Guerre 1939-1948 by Ernst Jünger

Auriez-vous crié "heil Hitler" ? : Soumission et résistances au nazisme : l'Allemagne vue d'en bas (1918-1946) by François Roux

Life of William Morris I & II by J.W. Mackail

The Pre-Raphaelites by Aurélie Petiot

The House of Borgia by Christopher Hibbert

The Prince in Splendour: Court Festivals of Medieval Europe by Richard Barber

The Grasmere Journal by Dorothy Wordsworth

A Story as Sharp as a Knife: The Classical Haida Mythtellers and Their World by Robert Bringhurst

In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin

Mani & Roumeli by Patrick Leigh Fermor

Seeds of Change by Henry Hobhouse

The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution by Mark Roseman

We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Voyageurs Arabes ed. La Pleiade

The Writer’s Map Huw Lewis-Jones

Coventry by Rachel Cusk

Lesbians Nuns by Rosemary Curb and Nancy Manahan

The Closed Doors by Pauline Albanese

The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa

Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Becoming Eve by Abby Stein

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

The Pre-Raphaelite Dream by William Gaunt

The Book of Legendary Lands by Umberto Eco

Icelandic Folk Legends by Alda Sigmundsdóttir

Poetry:

Selected Poems of Yevtushenko

Golden Treasury of English Verse ed. by Francis Turner Palgrave

Selected Poems of Edward Thomas

Selected Poems of Wilfred Owen

Selected Poems of Rupert Brooke

Selected Poems of Anna Akhmatova

Georgian Poetry 1913-1915

Selected Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

If not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho trans. Anne Carson

The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

[chrislanier]

#haidastories 1/13 Wanted to put out some brief notes on a cluster of works by and about Haida artists that have been a source of deeply rewarding preoccupation over the past few months. This book collects Haida poetry from the early 20th century, with particular emphasis on two poets/mythtellers, Ghandl and Skaay. The sense of visionary imagery, and the spiritual ethics expressed in their work, is truly extraordinary. https://www.instagram.com/p/CLPwIE5hQt9/?igshid=15qjp4fe0sor3

[starwarsmythology]

Master Mythteller @broodone’s stunning OFFICIAL SEQUEL TRILOGY ART 🖼 *Thank You* dude, seriously — I hope you know and can feel that through your art, countless people have connected (and in my case re-connected) with @starwars in the most primal, immediate way — this goes waaay back to the cave painting days sir. Myth on cave paintings/carvings, and through your work, you carry that tradition forward in the best way possible 🙌 *Thank You*! 🤘😃 #Myth #Nature #Jung #BrianRoodArt #JosephCampbell #Adventure #Monomyth #StarWars #Universe #TheMandalorian #StarWarsTrilogy #LupitaNyongo #PrincessLeia #JohnBoyega #BobaFett #LukeSkywalker #PedroPascal #Lucasfilm #GeorgeLucas #Samurai #Western #Fairytale #Fantasy #WWII #WildWest #Dagobah #Kijimi #80s #RalphMcQuarrieArt #Timeless @starwars @starwarsmovies @starwarskorea @starwarsespanol @starwarsjapan @starwarsrussia @starwarsnewsnet @josephcampbellfoundation https://www.instagram.com/p/B3REA2pAGzk/?igshid=w9mq0hflbk82

[mythologicalfact]

#Hollywood movie and their #indianmythology connection . 1. #intersteller . . . Like, comment,Share and Follow @mythologicalfact . . . . . #movies #movie #film #films #videos #hollywood #goodmovie #instagood #instaflicks #timetravel #instatravel #timetraveler #time  #bhagavata  #bhagavatam #bhagavatapurana #raevathy #kakumudi #hindudharma #hindumythology #indianmyth #mythteller #mythological #fact #myth #vishnu #scifi

[innervoiceart]

Dr Sharon Blackie – Cultivating the Mythic Imagination from Sharon Blackie on Vimeo.

The old forgotten pre-Christian mythologies and philosophies of the West – from the magical stories of Celtic Ireland to the soul-centred mythtellings of Plato in ancient Greece – are rich, complex and beautiful. They offer up a world in which everything is not only alive, but has purpose and intentionality of its own. A world to which each incarnated soul chooses to come, for a reason: to fulfil its own unique calling, and to offer up a gift which can only be expressed through relationship with and participation in that animate world. Carrying the fire, carrying with us the image that we were born with, that we brought with us when we chose to come into this world. It’s time to reclaim those old, indigenous ways of being in the world – to reclaim the foundation-stones of Western spirituality, and bring them back out into the world where they belong. Founded in authentic scholarship as well as committed, embodied practice in the mythopoetic and other creative arts, Sharon Blackie's work is above all about finding our way back into the mystic – about delving into the mysteries of wild psyche, and finding a deep, embodied sense of belongingness to this beautiful, animate Earth. sharonblackie.net

[innervoiceartblog]

Who is the Wild Twin?

from Cista Mystica

(’Courting The Wild Twin’ out March 12th, 2020)

I first caught the perfume of my wild twin by walking with muddy boots through wet grasses to my scrubby woodland den as a six-year-old. As the trees swirled I caught a scent and started to cry without understanding. I wove a pheasant feather in my hair. I hear it now in the owl court who hoot across the frost grass and moon-touched lawns of my cottage. There’s more than book smarts in that chill delirium. These are not domestic tones, not corralled sounds, but loose as Dartmoor ponies on the hill. They give me ecstasy. Not safety, not contentment, certainly not ease, not peace, but ecstasy. It’s almost painful. Makes me restless.

I also felt the wild twin when I lost the girl I loved the most. I felt it when attending the sickness of another. I felt it when exhausted, heart-sore, bewildered and despairing. I felt it when I attended to the sorrows of life in all their radical, unruly agency.

The wild twin is not unique to me; you have one, everyone has one. That’s the message from the old stories. That the day you were born, a twin was thrown out the window, sent into exile. That it wanders the woods and the prairies and the cities, lonely in its whole body for you. It rooms in abandoned houses in South Chicago. Someone saw her once on a Dorset beach in winter. They are always asking after you.

It lives in the feeling when the ruddy mud of the Nile squeezes between your toes, when moonlight slips from the mouth of a heron, when you play cards with a delightful villain. It’s going to push you towards ruin on occasion, and has a lot of generosity towards kids. It will hide your laptop and send a thousand wild geese processing over your tent on an October dusk. The wild twin is the vintner of the blood-wine of your many private battles, and sells it in highly prized bottles to remote Armenian queens. It is incorrigible, melodramatic, and has only your best interests at heart.

Know your twin and you will become distracted by fiery angels languishing round the water cooler, you will beat your palms to drums no one else can hear and subtle ideas will fly from you. At least that’s what I hear. The wild twin doesn’t fetishise surety, embezzle guarantees or even really believe they exist. It hides chocolate in the pockets of your scruffy-haired nephews and whispers forgiveness as it walks through the gardens we have neglected to tend. It hands us a spade.

I believe that in the labour of becoming a human, you have to earnestly search this character out, as it has something crucial for you with it. It has your life’s purpose tucked up in its pocket. If there was something you were here to do in these few, brief years, you can be sure that the wild twin is holding the key.

Wildness attracts everybody but appears to be in short supply. Not feral, not hooligan, not brawling, but the regal wild. The sophisticated wild. So you should be gathering by now that this book is about locating your long-abandoned twin and courting it home. We’re going to use two old fairy tales to do it. And note the word court. This is a protracted affair, this locating, with the possibility of many missteps, bruised shins and hissed exchanges. Though they long for you, the twin may not broker relationship easily if you’ve been separated for many years; she wants to know you’re serious. We’ll cover the complexity of such a reunion as we go. They want to give you a bang on the ear and a kiss on the lips all at the same time.

Lorca claims that the goblin of trouble, duende, is this thing that evokes such a twin. Duende is knowledge that this all ends, that our wings have rusty blades attached that scrape the dusty limits of the dirt. I wrote a moment ago that the perfume of the wild twin provided me not with a sense of safety but with one of restlessness. The world pushes you into poetry by withdrawing something, not giving it. The greatest poems are not written by the woman who got that last kiss; they are written by the woman who didn’t. And in that absence, that heart-sore knowledge, dwells the duende. The grit, the limp, the slap, the push- back. We begin to understand why polite society has exiled the wild twin.

But the cost of its absence is so terribly high. We exist in its consequence.

No twin, and we, as Robert Bly used to say, preserve life but don’t give life. There’s not the holy rashness that invokes the spiritual energies of the universe. The wild twin rolls the dice a little. Without eros, without risk, there’s no culture worth making. So this is a dangerous business, calling out to these brooding, exiled energies. But truth be told and nailed to the tavern wall, it’s far, far more dangerous not to. I’m not sure we ever really, properly, catch up with our wild twin, buy matching sweaters. The pursuit is the thing, the glimpse is the thing, the jolt of their quixotic nature may be barometer enough for one lifetime. But never to search? Well, that’s missing out on life altogether.”

~ 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. His new book is Courting the Wild Twin (Chelsea Green Publishing, March 2020)

Orders for UK: Wordery or Amazon.co.uk Orders for USA: Chelsea Green or Amazon.com

[starwarsmythology]

Master Mythteller @broodone’s stunning OFFICIAL ORIGINAL TRILOGY ART 🖼 *Thank You* dude, seriously — I hope you know and can feel that through your art, countless people have connected (and in my case re-connected) with @starwars in the most primal, immediate way — this goes waaay back to the cave painting days sir. Myth on cave paintings/carvings, and through your work, you carry that tradition forward in the best way possible 🙌 *Thank You*! 🤘😃 #Myth #Nature #Jung #BrianRoodArt #JosephCampbell #Adventure #Monomyth #StarWars #Universe #TheMandalorian #StarWarsTrilogy #LupitaNyongo #PrincessLeia #JohnBoyega #BobaFett #LukeSkywalker #PedroPascal #Lucasfilm #GeorgeLucas #Samurai #Western #Fairytale #Fantasy #WWII #WildWest #Dagobah #Kijimi #80s #RalphMcQuarrieArt #Timeless @starwars @starwarsmovies @starwarskorea @starwarsespanol @starwarsjapan @starwarsrussia @starwarsnewsnet @josephcampbellfoundation https://www.instagram.com/p/B3RDxzvAAN7/?igshid=1d6hgucgb97hg

[starwarsmythology]

Master Mythteller @broodone’s stunning OFFICIAL SEQUEL TRILOGY ART 🖼 *Thank You* dude, seriously — I hope you know and can feel that through your art, countless people have connected (and in my case re-connected) with @starwars in the most primal, immediate way — this goes waaay back to the cave painting days sir. Myth on cave paintings/carvings, and through your work, you carry that tradition forward in the best way possible 🙌 *Thank You*! 🤘😃 #Myth #Nature #Jung #BrianRoodArt #JosephCampbell #Adventure #Monomyth #StarWars #Universe #TheMandalorian #StarWarsTrilogy #LupitaNyongo #PrincessLeia #JohnBoyega #BobaFett #LukeSkywalker #PedroPascal #Lucasfilm #GeorgeLucas #Samurai #Western #Fairytale #Fantasy #WWII #WildWest #Dagobah #Kijimi #80s #RalphMcQuarrieArt #Timeless @starwars @starwarsmovies @starwarskorea @starwarsespanol @starwarsjapan @starwarsrussia @starwarsnewsnet @josephcampbellfoundation https://www.instagram.com/p/B3RDhQbA6lh/?igshid=1jipfz8wbyxjh