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Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us
“Here is a rosary of soaring myth, gripping narrative, and deep wisdom, all told with breathtaking verve that enchants and sweeps us along, from first word to last. A superb, inspiring read.” —GABOR MATÉ, author of The Myth of Normal
From "one of the greatest storytellers we have" (Robert Bly), an urgent invitation to allow the oldest stories—and the Greatest Story—to reshape our own.
There’s an old Irish belief that if you aren’t wrapped in a cloak of story you will be unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent at just the moment a culture worth its salt requires you to become a real, grown, human being.
In Liturgies of the Wild, acclaimed mythographer, storyteller and Christian thinker Martin Shaw argues that we live in a myth-impoverished age and that such poverty has left us vulnerable to stories that may not wish us well. Drawing on the “ancient technologies” of myths and initiatory rites, Shaw provides a road to wholeness, maturity and connection. He teaches us to read a myth the way it wants to be read; provides vivid retellings of tales powerful enough to carry you through life’s travails; and shows you how to gather and reshape your own thrown-away stories. Most vividly, he shares how these ancient technologies led him—unexpectedly—to Christ, “the True Myth,” by way of a thirty-year journey and a 101-night vigil in a Dartmoor forest.
Combining scholarly erudition with nimble storytelling in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Liturgies of the Wild is a thrilling counsel of resistance and delight in the face of many modern monsters.
From "one of the greatest storytellers we have" (Robert Bly), an urgent invitation to allow the oldest stories—and the Greatest Story—to reshape our own.
There’s an old Irish belief that if you aren’t wrapped in a cloak of story you will be unprepared for what the world will hurl at you. You remain adolescent at just the moment a culture worth its salt requires you to become a real, grown, human being.
In Liturgies of the Wild, acclaimed mythographer, storyteller and Christian thinker Martin Shaw argues that we live in a myth-impoverished age and that such poverty has left us vulnerable to stories that may not wish us well. Drawing on the “ancient technologies” of myths and initiatory rites, Shaw provides a road to wholeness, maturity and connection. He teaches us to read a myth the way it wants to be read; provides vivid retellings of tales powerful enough to carry you through life’s travails; and shows you how to gather and reshape your own thrown-away stories. Most vividly, he shares how these ancient technologies led him—unexpectedly—to Christ, “the True Myth,” by way of a thirty-year journey and a 101-night vigil in a Dartmoor forest.
Combining scholarly erudition with nimble storytelling in the tradition of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Liturgies of the Wild is a thrilling counsel of resistance and delight in the face of many modern monsters.
251 pages, Kindle Edition
Published February 3, 2026
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 9, 2026
I do not cry much—hardly ever. It’s not in my temperament, perhaps. But yesterday afternoon, after posting the first version of this review, I came close to tears twice. The first moment was watching Olympic figure skaters Anastasiia Metelkina and Luka Berulava, having just finished a miraculously beautiful pair routine, sink to the ice in an exhausted but triumphant embrace. Then they rose to their feet, each quietly making the sign of the cross. The second moment came just a few hours later, as I absorbed word of the sudden, senseless, and violent death of a 15-year-old boy on the periphery of my acquaintance. Rising from my prayers that evening, I thought back, strangely, to this book, and realized that my perspective on it, and what it seeks to accomplish, had already deepened.
“Being made,” “getting grown,” finding the “Ancient Good,” is a matter of life and death. So terrible are the wounds of the world, so divine is the calling of human body and soul—the mysterious dynamic of the heart between these two realities will either destroy you or turn you into what Martin Shaw likes to call a “praise maker.” And we cannot find that path alone.
Original review follows.
* * *
There was once a boy who dwelt with his mother and father in a wide cultivated valley. Sometimes, his mother would take him beyond the green hills to his grandfather’s wilder kingdom by the sea, where he would wander in the mornings through misty forests, picking berries, and in the evenings play chess with his grandfather by the crackling hearth. Yet there was a nameless sadness in this boy, an unspoken fear, one his good parents, who gave him so much and shielded him from all outer darkness, could not understand, any more than the boy could himself. Then hard years came. The boy’s grandfather died, and exile followed: the boy’s father, seeing his livelihood among the fields of black and gold diminish and poverty threaten, sought a more secure fortune in a distant city, and the boy left his childhood home forever. Deep loneliness fell upon him in this new place, where the people were numerous, but all seemed busy in search of money and seats of power, things the boy little understood. Soon he found a book of stories, and his dreams grew bright with unseen lands as fair as those he had left, and almost more real to him than his waking life. But he also found a darkness in these worlds of imagination, a darkness that reflected his childish fear and grew in him silently. Some years later he left all to seek his own fortune, carrying away a small red stone that his mother had pressed into his hand. He studied under men and women wise in the world, and found success and praise in his every endeavor, but his dreams and darkness followed him. Yet in his studies, he also discovered the nature of the red stone from his mother: that it was, in fact, a seed of paradise. And a fresh hope blew into his life, that he might by this seed restore what he had long lost. So he planted it in the land of his exile. Not very well, for the soil was hard, and the boy knew almost nothing about gardening. For a long time, there was no sprout, and the boy spent his days hunched over that little bit of soil, his head often clouded with darkness. What did finally appear seemed a sorry plant indeed, and in it, the boy could see nothing of paradise. But he knew that this was his only hope, so he remained by it. As it grew slowly larger, as its branches began to reach outward, birds began to gather there. Around its stem he built a chapel, and he sang to the birds songs the wind had taught him, which he believed to come from his lost home. And he hoped that one day the tree would grow so tall that he could ascend by it, and leave the vaporous darkness behind, and find among the stars his own true country again.
What is the end of this story? I don’t know yet.
Martin Shaw advises us to tell such stories about ourselves, to take our dreams seriously, to let ourselves be “made” by the right myths. There are some readers who will dive into Liturgies of the Wild expecting an argument or manual of some kind, takeaways conducive to bullet-point format, and will end up frustrated. Shaw is not above a little preaching, but his approach to truth is typically allusive, wandering through personal anecdotes and ancient narratives that bleed freely into one another. His decades of meditation on life and story may have been brought into new focus by his self-startling conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but the “mossy face of Christ” he adores is a presence, not a thesis. And he wants us all to share in that presence. Boil away the rich Martin Shaw-ness of it all, and perhaps the residue is just religious truisms; but that approach would be to miss the point. This book is for people who want to take a journey with Martin, whose particular genius is to remind us, with the most charming whimsy, of what may we already know to be true but perhaps have not given due attention.
As I sit in my little study beneath a cheap reproduction of the Panagia Portaitissa, and under the bowed gaze of Charbel Makhlouf, I again ponder the image on the dust jacket of Liturgies of the Wild. I have often prayed in this study for a guiding star, for the peculiar path that will lead me most surely to the Ancient Good. Where are the wise elders in this day, the men and woman whole-formed and clear-sighted? Shaw would not claim any title like staretz or spiritual father for himself, and we too would be unwise to attribute it to him. Give him a decade or two in trail of the Cross. But what he suggests here is the possibility that we can deepen our lives and bring them into contact with Divine Ground by simply accepting our own littleness, by sinking our minds into the great silence of the heart and waiting for illumination. Some things “can’t be said with effect until they’re known, and God has his timing for that. How do we find something we were once gifted by grace? We can’t. We simply can’t. But we can take heart from the fairy tales….” The old stories teach us patterns of spiritual maturation; they give us metaphors to interpret our course into the trackless waters of the future. And there must be few more genial and gifted guides to those stories than Martin Shaw.
If I have a critique, it is that Shaw does not sufficiently consider what his own Orthodox tradition calls prelest, delusion. Much he says, especially in his chapter on evil, resonates with Evagrian psychology and the later tradition, but he dismisses the hesychastic suspicion of dreams and imagination with barely more than a hand-wave. He is clearly aware that “enchantment” can go bad, and as this issue goes to the core of his Romantic project, I wish he had devoted more space to marking spiritual pitfalls. How often are the stories we make of our lives fundamentally false and self-serving? But as the flame lit at his baptism licks over ever more of his life, perhaps he will have more to say on discrimination in future.
For now, there is much to be found in the affirmative path. It is a rich feast indeed to which Shaw beckons us.
“Being made,” “getting grown,” finding the “Ancient Good,” is a matter of life and death. So terrible are the wounds of the world, so divine is the calling of human body and soul—the mysterious dynamic of the heart between these two realities will either destroy you or turn you into what Martin Shaw likes to call a “praise maker.” And we cannot find that path alone.
Original review follows.
* * *
There was once a boy who dwelt with his mother and father in a wide cultivated valley. Sometimes, his mother would take him beyond the green hills to his grandfather’s wilder kingdom by the sea, where he would wander in the mornings through misty forests, picking berries, and in the evenings play chess with his grandfather by the crackling hearth. Yet there was a nameless sadness in this boy, an unspoken fear, one his good parents, who gave him so much and shielded him from all outer darkness, could not understand, any more than the boy could himself. Then hard years came. The boy’s grandfather died, and exile followed: the boy’s father, seeing his livelihood among the fields of black and gold diminish and poverty threaten, sought a more secure fortune in a distant city, and the boy left his childhood home forever. Deep loneliness fell upon him in this new place, where the people were numerous, but all seemed busy in search of money and seats of power, things the boy little understood. Soon he found a book of stories, and his dreams grew bright with unseen lands as fair as those he had left, and almost more real to him than his waking life. But he also found a darkness in these worlds of imagination, a darkness that reflected his childish fear and grew in him silently. Some years later he left all to seek his own fortune, carrying away a small red stone that his mother had pressed into his hand. He studied under men and women wise in the world, and found success and praise in his every endeavor, but his dreams and darkness followed him. Yet in his studies, he also discovered the nature of the red stone from his mother: that it was, in fact, a seed of paradise. And a fresh hope blew into his life, that he might by this seed restore what he had long lost. So he planted it in the land of his exile. Not very well, for the soil was hard, and the boy knew almost nothing about gardening. For a long time, there was no sprout, and the boy spent his days hunched over that little bit of soil, his head often clouded with darkness. What did finally appear seemed a sorry plant indeed, and in it, the boy could see nothing of paradise. But he knew that this was his only hope, so he remained by it. As it grew slowly larger, as its branches began to reach outward, birds began to gather there. Around its stem he built a chapel, and he sang to the birds songs the wind had taught him, which he believed to come from his lost home. And he hoped that one day the tree would grow so tall that he could ascend by it, and leave the vaporous darkness behind, and find among the stars his own true country again.
What is the end of this story? I don’t know yet.
Martin Shaw advises us to tell such stories about ourselves, to take our dreams seriously, to let ourselves be “made” by the right myths. There are some readers who will dive into Liturgies of the Wild expecting an argument or manual of some kind, takeaways conducive to bullet-point format, and will end up frustrated. Shaw is not above a little preaching, but his approach to truth is typically allusive, wandering through personal anecdotes and ancient narratives that bleed freely into one another. His decades of meditation on life and story may have been brought into new focus by his self-startling conversion to Orthodox Christianity, but the “mossy face of Christ” he adores is a presence, not a thesis. And he wants us all to share in that presence. Boil away the rich Martin Shaw-ness of it all, and perhaps the residue is just religious truisms; but that approach would be to miss the point. This book is for people who want to take a journey with Martin, whose particular genius is to remind us, with the most charming whimsy, of what may we already know to be true but perhaps have not given due attention.
As I sit in my little study beneath a cheap reproduction of the Panagia Portaitissa, and under the bowed gaze of Charbel Makhlouf, I again ponder the image on the dust jacket of Liturgies of the Wild. I have often prayed in this study for a guiding star, for the peculiar path that will lead me most surely to the Ancient Good. Where are the wise elders in this day, the men and woman whole-formed and clear-sighted? Shaw would not claim any title like staretz or spiritual father for himself, and we too would be unwise to attribute it to him. Give him a decade or two in trail of the Cross. But what he suggests here is the possibility that we can deepen our lives and bring them into contact with Divine Ground by simply accepting our own littleness, by sinking our minds into the great silence of the heart and waiting for illumination. Some things “can’t be said with effect until they’re known, and God has his timing for that. How do we find something we were once gifted by grace? We can’t. We simply can’t. But we can take heart from the fairy tales….” The old stories teach us patterns of spiritual maturation; they give us metaphors to interpret our course into the trackless waters of the future. And there must be few more genial and gifted guides to those stories than Martin Shaw.
If I have a critique, it is that Shaw does not sufficiently consider what his own Orthodox tradition calls prelest, delusion. Much he says, especially in his chapter on evil, resonates with Evagrian psychology and the later tradition, but he dismisses the hesychastic suspicion of dreams and imagination with barely more than a hand-wave. He is clearly aware that “enchantment” can go bad, and as this issue goes to the core of his Romantic project, I wish he had devoted more space to marking spiritual pitfalls. How often are the stories we make of our lives fundamentally false and self-serving? But as the flame lit at his baptism licks over ever more of his life, perhaps he will have more to say on discrimination in future.
For now, there is much to be found in the affirmative path. It is a rich feast indeed to which Shaw beckons us.
February 6, 2026
Dear Martin,
I have been waiting for someone to write this book. I’m glad it was you.
Signed,
The Wolf
I have been waiting for someone to write this book. I’m glad it was you.
Signed,
The Wolf
February 9, 2026
A powerful piece of work. Martin is an excellent writer and has clearly led a very rich life. There are nuggets of real wisdom in here. A fresh energy you can really feel, inspiring. I listened to the audiobook, he reads very well.
He combines various telling of old stories with Christian ideas and his own life story. I'm interested in Christianity and open minded but not a Christian myself in the official sense, I don't think you have to be a Christian to appreciate the book
The main thing that troubles me is that part of his encouragement to embrace Christianity is to do with connecting to a deeper, older story that can root us in this world that has become rather rootless. That makes a lot of sense, but Christianity, pretty much all of the main churches as far as I can tell, claim to offer in fact the only real way to ultimate salvation. But if what we need to do is embrace old stories that root us in a particular place, what is someone from a non-Christian society to do from this perspective? If a hindu Indian decides to go deeper into their own tradition from a Christian perspective this is taking them away from the true message of God. From a Christian perspective such an individual is obliged actually to turn away from their traditional stories. There is a rich tradition of stories about Krishna for example that give millions of people a deep sense of meaning and connection to God, but for a Christian these are simply false. I think Martin Shaw is more than capable enough as a writer to address this and hope he does in the future as I'd be very interested in what he has to say about it. I imagine he doesn't personally hold such an intolerant view but unfortunately that is the official Christian teaching and is what a majority of Christians believes. I'm following Matin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth and some of these other writers promoting Christianity and they all put emphasis on the need to root into something older and deeper, and promote the Church for this reason (among others), but a bit frustratingly skip over the many difficult aspects of Christianity, and often seem to imply the only reason people in the west would choose not to be a Christian is because they've become alienated from themselves and are lost in a rootless abyss of technology. But Christianity never presented itself as the story to root a particular culture and has always claimed to be universal, this is a problem that predates the modern highly technological age.
Having said all that I really do enjoy the way the writer weaves Christian stories into his work and I think his interpretations are a lot more subtle than the way most Christians think about them. Obviously these stories are deeply a part of our culture and we need to spend time inhabiting them at least with an open mind to understand better who we are
He combines various telling of old stories with Christian ideas and his own life story. I'm interested in Christianity and open minded but not a Christian myself in the official sense, I don't think you have to be a Christian to appreciate the book
The main thing that troubles me is that part of his encouragement to embrace Christianity is to do with connecting to a deeper, older story that can root us in this world that has become rather rootless. That makes a lot of sense, but Christianity, pretty much all of the main churches as far as I can tell, claim to offer in fact the only real way to ultimate salvation. But if what we need to do is embrace old stories that root us in a particular place, what is someone from a non-Christian society to do from this perspective? If a hindu Indian decides to go deeper into their own tradition from a Christian perspective this is taking them away from the true message of God. From a Christian perspective such an individual is obliged actually to turn away from their traditional stories. There is a rich tradition of stories about Krishna for example that give millions of people a deep sense of meaning and connection to God, but for a Christian these are simply false. I think Martin Shaw is more than capable enough as a writer to address this and hope he does in the future as I'd be very interested in what he has to say about it. I imagine he doesn't personally hold such an intolerant view but unfortunately that is the official Christian teaching and is what a majority of Christians believes. I'm following Matin Shaw, Paul Kingsnorth and some of these other writers promoting Christianity and they all put emphasis on the need to root into something older and deeper, and promote the Church for this reason (among others), but a bit frustratingly skip over the many difficult aspects of Christianity, and often seem to imply the only reason people in the west would choose not to be a Christian is because they've become alienated from themselves and are lost in a rootless abyss of technology. But Christianity never presented itself as the story to root a particular culture and has always claimed to be universal, this is a problem that predates the modern highly technological age.
Having said all that I really do enjoy the way the writer weaves Christian stories into his work and I think his interpretations are a lot more subtle than the way most Christians think about them. Obviously these stories are deeply a part of our culture and we need to spend time inhabiting them at least with an open mind to understand better who we are
February 6, 2026
I wasn't sure what to expect going into this book. I didn't know if I should prepare myself for a fairytale breakdown like we get in a lot of Shaw's other work like Smoke Hole or A Branch from the Lightning Tree, or if we were going to get another transcendental mind-melter like Bardskull. What this book turned out to be was a honing and distillation of all of Shaw's previous work and thinking (plus some new stuff). What we get here is every blessed thought and insight he has gleaned over the hard decades, now baptized into his new life as a Christian.
For those worried that he would chuck all of the old storytelling and give himself to some sort of tame, dishwater Christian Living book, don't be. This is Martin Shaw at is brightest and sharpest.
For those worried that he would chuck all of the old storytelling and give himself to some sort of tame, dishwater Christian Living book, don't be. This is Martin Shaw at is brightest and sharpest.
Review of advance copy received from Netgalley
Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the ARC.
Unfortunately, this book is not at all what I expected from the description. There are some strong sections and I enjoyed On Death and On Passivity. However, it became increasingly meandering/hard to stay with as it progressed, and increasingly focussed on Christianity and Christian interpretation. A religious lens on storytelling and mythology is obviously fine but not something that I would have picked up if it were made clear from the outset. I struggled to finish this book but hope it finds its audience as the writing is good and there is wisdom in there waiting to be pulled out by the right reader.
Unfortunately, this book is not at all what I expected from the description. There are some strong sections and I enjoyed On Death and On Passivity. However, it became increasingly meandering/hard to stay with as it progressed, and increasingly focussed on Christianity and Christian interpretation. A religious lens on storytelling and mythology is obviously fine but not something that I would have picked up if it were made clear from the outset. I struggled to finish this book but hope it finds its audience as the writing is good and there is wisdom in there waiting to be pulled out by the right reader.
February 7, 2026
Brilliantly written. A weave of ancient tales and profound wisdom for the every day. Highly recommend the audible version. The stories really stick with you creating deeper meaning to life.
“To live entirely without prayer would leave us less a human being. Prayer changes our relationship with pretty much everything. In the end prayer isn’t something we do it becomes something we are.”
“To live entirely without prayer would leave us less a human being. Prayer changes our relationship with pretty much everything. In the end prayer isn’t something we do it becomes something we are.”
February 6, 2026
A beautiful book. An important book. It will take me some time to digest this, and many re-readings.
If you are interested in the intersection of myth and reality, religion and life, you must read this. A blessing.
If you are interested in the intersection of myth and reality, religion and life, you must read this. A blessing.
Review of advance copy
A body of work to nourish and replenish with every draw from its depths, for traversing one’s tales of being made through unmaking. An invitation into the contemplative, transformative, wily wilds: into practice, ritual, and prayer as doorways toward maturation, becoming, and the Sacred Story. Ultimately, a beckoning to brighten one’s consciousness—to partake in the relational nature of one’s stories, told and, perhaps more importantly, untold, as progenitors of myth and peppered with it. And through it all—the suffering, the jubilation, the isolation and connection—somewhere between the mud and the heavens, stay cackling, stay salty and deep.
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