Cista Mystica

26/10/2025

Cambridge: Arriving in a new place I always allow for a little disorientation, a little vulnerability. If it all lands too four-square and predictable-like I’m keeping the fresh at bay somehow. You have to allow yourself to be on its terms for a while, not the other way around. It’s not auditioning for you.

I’ll take myself for a loping walk, no burbling AI phone guidance, just odd little human-intuited drifts through cobbled lanes and the edges of fields till a shape starts to emerge. Over time that shape may become a pattern or even a routine, but not at first. At first I just wait for the strange relations to come out and make themselves known. There’s some uncertainty and maybe a little melancholy in this approach, but for me it’s the realest thing to do.

How do you arrive in a place? What’s your manner of approach?

I’m not looking to cling to brightly lit libraries, rather stalk the perimeters, looking for the scuffs and the eccentricities. I walk till my feet hurt and I feel a little lost and lonely. When I walk up to high table I want it to feel like a high table. Like Gawain emerging out of the forest into the warming hall of Bertilak’s merrie castle. To be fundamentally gathered in. I know plenty about being the fluttering sparrow at the door of the feasting hall.

The Voyage of St. Brendan with friends

As I wrote last week, I’m on the strolling ground of C.S. Lewis in his final almost-decade in Cambridge. I’ve been reading all sorts of extraordinary things from him – we could make a rope to the moon of his words – but I was very touched to see a copy of a letter written just a few months before his death, in the late spring of 1963, to a young girl named Adele Stoessel, of Port Washington, New York. She seems to have asked him for an autograph and to tell her something about himself. On Magdalene College notepaper he wrote back:

17 May 63
Dear Adele Stoessel
The autograph comes below the letter. I am 64 – a year older than this century – and bald – and fat – with a Boxer dog and a Siamese cat – and I talk too much and I speak too loud – and I don’t like oysters or gin or a crowd – and the smell of the sea is my favourite smell. That’s about all I can think of to tell.
Yours,
C.S. Lewis

It’s fair to say the fella would have had things on his mind so late in his life, but it moves me to feel his playfulness and frankly courtesy to reply to this little one even in his widowed and compromised state. I’ll slip in little details on Lewis now and then as he seems to be moving into this shepherds hut, or at least on the porch. Look, out there, sitting under the lamp, there he is. The pipe is lit and his Three Nuns to***co smoke is drifting irresistibly towards us. A stiffner at the Green Dragon you say? Don’t mind if I do.

Cambridge has a river loping through it, and fields and cattle showing up in the most unexpected places. I like it because sometimes it will suddenly feel like a market town again. It’s resolutely not a city. I like watching all the students zooming around on bikes – mostly young enough to be my children – and their minds filled with lively, unexpected thoughts. This extraordinary cluster of imagination that then, if you pull the camera out a little, empties out into the mystery of fen, forest, huge skies and gasping Siberian winds. There’s great imagination out there also, out in that flat, dark country...

A Cambridge Arrival

19/10/2025

I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
C.S. Lewis

What are you a product of?

Well friends, the temperature on Dartmoor has gloriously dropped, and the recently purchased Aran sweaters are in full effect. The sense of perpetual-motion has diminished – my adrenalin levels are back at a regular modality, rather than lurching to a peak around 8pm every night (i.e. recovering from the Irish tour).

Tomorrow I set out on the winding journey east, to the Divinity Faculty at Cambridge and their dreaming spires, red beer and a little shepherds hut on the River Cam (as I peer out at the distant dream-figure of Lewis, striding cheerfully between Magdalene college and the Green Dragon pub). I gratefully accept him as a totem elder in these next months. At Cambridge there are friends waiting, and libraries to visit, family nearby, a book to be written. I am tremendously grateful. And I’m so pleased to be taking you with me. I hope you’ve packed a scarf and some chocolate.

But before the Cambridge adventures, Hermes. I’m going to continue for a little longer on my Hermian riffing on the Red. I think for many of us with a little Red, there’s a lot to be learnt from Hermes. The diplomacy he has to develop as a messenger rather than blowing his stack every five minutes. Blowing your stack is a hazard of too much red. In fairy tales giants are a great haven of Red energy and sometimes arrive in our dreams when we need extra oomph. But they also tip tables, lash out, drink too much on occasion and generally get lairy. Hermes doesn’t play that way. He understands it, but he’s not prone to doing it.

In my Red years I did dimly remember Hermes and knew he was something to do with storytelling and messages but that was likely about it. For really the only time in my life, myth was background rather than foreground. But boy, was there drama. Having removed the great interpretive tool of my life – myth – everything that happened to me took longer to contextualise. That wouldn’t reappear till a move into the Black years later. As well as the initiatory scuffs and slightly unfathomable sense of destiny I strutted around with, the biggest wallop of the Red was in that most tender of spots, romance.

When at sixteen I fell in love for the first time I was absolutely positively derailed. I was a shambles. And to make matters worse, it was long distance. As we know from the stories, romantic love thrives on absence not presence, so I lived in a state of perpetual, anguished longing. This manifested in daily letters sent to her house about seventy miles away and hogging the family phoneline whispering sweet nothings. It sounds very benign, but in reflection it feels like an extended psychedelic encounter that I would never want to experience again. All of Romeo and Juliet, all of Tristan and Isolde crowbarred its way into our fledgling love and within about seven months the calls stopped getting picked up, and I realised I’d squeezed the life out of this first exploration into love’s oceanic feelings. She was driven up to see me by her mum, I was dumped and that was that. My heart hurt. It really hurt.

Hillman’s Three Hearts

And when I say the heart, what exactly do I mean? The psychologist James Hillman used to write fantastically about three hearts: the heart of the lion, the medical heart, and the confessional heart. The heart of the lion has qualities attached: courage under fire, upstandingness; the medical heart was the throbbing meat that hopefully grooves along in our chest; and finally there’s the confessional heart. This is the one that has authoritative feelings, I feel, also the place where God would disclose information to you: ‘Listen to your heart’. Typically, Hillman actually saw the voice of God as a little invasive to the imagination. Well, certainly the dogmatic, by-rote kind of thing. He saw us leaning way too heavily on the confessional heart, and it causing a kind of paralysis – my feelings are the end of the conversation. That concerned him, because feelings change. We have a change of heart. Hillman proposed a thought of the heart, and that the discipline of such a thing was required for full access to what some call the anima mundi – the soul of the world. (We aren’t quite ready to get into that yet.) When you are fully in an uninitiated Red state you can’t get past your feelings. They are the truth and the only truth.

The agony of love when you have no mythic or religious filter is you assume this depth of feeling is entirely for this other person standing in front of you. Myths say it isn’t. You both radiate something of the Divine world to each other. There are layers and filters and grades of consciousness that in a literate culture would be developed to create a container for the feeling. The girl I fell in love with was not The Woman Of The Golden Roof, or whatever primordial-almost-Goddess figure I assumed she was. I was sickened by what the Jungians call Anima possession. And I took all that longing for the feminine and its connections to mystery, the moon, even to God, and plonked it in the lap of a seventeen-year-old girl with a fondness for stripey tights, patchouli oil and Slayer gigs. That was far too much for her to carry.

A solution could be for you and your beloved to sit side by side with each other enjoy something beautiful together, maybe even something you create. But when you, and you only, are the apple of the other’s eye, you may run into trouble. He’s not Hercules, she’s not Rhiannon of the Wild Horses, though they may be pointing rather wonderfully in that direction occasionally. And for a human being that’s more than enough. That’s companionable. A sickness of the Red without an initiatory fundament is that all your latent longing for such grandiosity will be hurled at someone whose legs will inevitably wobble. I am not at all suggesting give up on Romantic love. But know that in the collapse of mythological discernment we are giving to humans that which belongs to something else entirely. In the end it works for no one. The anguished passions of the Red will likely be one of your associations of it. You don’t want to be rid of it, just don’t stack the wood so high when you build the fire.

I hadn’t met the Black yet as a teenager, not properly, but this level of ache was enough to get me reading poetry and sighing loudly as my friends threw things at me. W.B. Yeats entered my life, one or two fairy tales reappeared, and I found myself pursued by Hermes himself, telling me to cheer up! Here’s his tale...

https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/hermes-and-the-heart

12/10/2025

And suddenly it was done.

Six nights a week and I’m landing on a wee plane back at Exeter Airport. It’ll be about five days I’ve been at home as you’re reading this. All the sweet pleasures of the return have been in effect: the hearth fire, home cooking, the cats, evenings clinking glasses with friends and a great river of sleep – two naps a day at the moment. I still wake up and don’t know where I am. The car’s stopped but I’m still travelling. I have a pile of knitwear and a veritable column of books to remind me of where I’ve just been. I do miss the text from Tommy telling me he’s outside the hotel and the dream-fanglin’ drives through the B roads of ye olde Ireland.

When I’m awake I’m processing what just happened and pulling into shape many of the Saint and Biblical stories I’ve chewed at with you over the last few years. As you read these I’ll be halfway through a two-night run of them at St Lawrence’s Chapel in Ashburton. Can’t wait. It’ll just be a small gathering I think.

I must apologise for not being able to respond to last week’s comments. With Manchan’s death and the final evenings I just hit a wall of exhaustion, and found myself on low-stimulus survival mode. That doesn’t mean I didn’t read them – they are a tremendous tonic for me. I love meeting you there.

When I finally got myself out of bed I strolled the lanes down to St Gudula’s Well to splash some water in my face. In the early autumn light, and surrounded by high green hills and peering sheep, I baptised myself back into my homeland. I brought my imagination back, my enthusiasm back, my seeing back to the parish. These little rituals have tremendous vitality to me. I enclose myself in them. I remember some lines from the Carmina Gadelica and mutter away:

Let peace be with my horses,
Cattle, shaggy flock of sheep,
Peace be on the ripening sheafs
& growing crops.

Everything on high crag
To seaweeded beach,
Belongs to the Trinity.

All good Ashburtonians know that its water is efficacious to wash weak eyes with, and is still visited occasionally for that purpose. The name Gulwell is evidently a contraction of St Gudula’s well, the patron saint of the blind, who’s often represented with a lantern. Older folk used to collect water there, way back in the last century. There’s a story that St Gudula – terribly early – one morning wended her way to church before the c**k crowed and was trailed by a demon who kept blowing her candle out. After calling to God in the frosty darkness, he ensured her light was not to be extinguished.

It is only a month or so till the Merrie pilgrimage to Walsingham, and less than that till I start visiting the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge, so I’d wish for my eyes to be bright and clear, and my light not to be hampered as I wend my way through the dark.

So – back to the proverbial main dish. I hope you have your napkins. I want to pick up the thread from last week’s essay on the Red, Black & White and get behind the Red a little. One of the Red’s associations is passion, so I want to start with a Labrador Inuit story that sees heat as underpinning the earliest days...

The Red, Black & White (Part Two)

08/10/2025

Taking a story for a walk every day has its effect.

It’s now been a month since a long weekend of teaching led into the Dog & Wolf Tour. As you likely read this there are but two nights left. I’m writing this late night from a cottage by a lake/tributary/estuary in the village of Ballydehob, west Cork. Earlier today Tommy and I drove through an abundance of wind and rain and general slosh to land here from Tralee in Kerry. Tonight we were in a kind of wonderful shop/pub arrangement, the legendary Levis where we rolled from Bronze Age myth to Polish fairy tales and a few points between. Great lamb stew.

It’s been an inordinate privilege to travel with Tommy. It’s been very wonderful to sit in the dark every night and hear his ancient stories finding their way into the world. They have spook, wonder and enormous resonance. They have great meaning for me, just not the kind we usually refer to when we use that word. Travelling with a story-companion has kept many personal ghosts at bay.

Now I am writing this Saturday morning – tonight is Cork, Sunday Waterford, Monday Dublin, then home. There’s been selkie skins and devils with golden hair, boys asleep in Hebredian ashes and girls growing their hands back, there’s been the heartbroken up in the Moon Palace and the restored praying by the seal hole, there’s been stories of Dartmoor goblins and Green Knights, of Sidhe women who are also deer, of strange old men who look like crows and women who look like youth, of storytellers who journey to the Underworld and serpents that shed their skin and girls riding goats waving spoons, of secretive, ugly one-eyed men who dance beautifully in the solitude of the forest and at least two women who are secretly foxes. My red-bead rope of story crossed much of Ireland and back, and I hope is doing its work in a few hearts and minds here and there. These stories are a secret treasury, willingly shared.

A Night For Manchán

But here’s the thing: I’m reeling at the just-happened death of my friend Manchán Magan, who I owe a great debt of gratitude for opening up Ireland as a place to teach in the first place. His journalistic oomph of encouragement opened doors, and a friendship has persisted since. We’ve strolled the streets of many Irish towns late at night, had long car journeys, sipped pints, a few breakfasts here and there. The chat never dropped or dulled, there was always the crackle of thought around the fellow. Manchán had voltage.

This is a chat where we talk Moriarty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8_AqSN9u2c&t=492s

I’ll miss him tremendously, and it’s all particularly acute when it slams into a tour telling the kind of stories he so dearly loved. He was sending over translations of obscure old Irish names up to the days before he died. That was typical of him and his enthusiasms. He feels everywhere on the island, and also gone, gone, gone beyond, set out on the trail of truth as the old saying goes.

*

Into The Myth-Colours

Now – something different. This will take a few weeks! An autumn journeying...

https://martinshaw.substack.com/p/death-life-and-the-road

And – OUTLAW STORIES: Saturday 11th & Sunday 12th October, Ashburton. Devon people! A two-night run of stories of prophets, saints & rebels. Old hermit stories and biblical tales. Many being told for the first time. Different stories both nights. Join us for the adventure: https://www.eventbrite.com/cc/outlaw-stories-with-martin-shaw-4702113

The Red, Black & White (Part One)

02/10/2025

🔥Hello folks - news just in, two special events in store next week when Martin lands back in the (Devon)shire, fresh from his Ireland tour with Tommy Tiernan 🔥

We are delighted to announce two nights of OUTLAW STORIES with Martin Shaw, at the legendary St Lawrence Chapel, Ashburton, Devon. Each night is crammed with tales of visionaries, outlaws and the early saints, biblical stories, wild ideas and personal ruminations. The only plan is to take Martin’s imagination on pilgrimage and see what happens.

This will be a thrilling ride. Come for one night, or come for both. Shaw takes us into the heart of what he calls Christian Wonder Tales. Filled with meaning, humour and mystery, these stories are an inheritance many of us simply didn’t know we had.

Saturday 11th & Sunday 12th October, St Lawrence Chapel, Ashburton, Devon, 7.30pm-9pm

Tickets:

Two nights of OUTLAW STORIES with Martin Shaw at St Lawrence Chapel, Ashburton, Devon

28/09/2025

'To tramp long miles in wind and rain, to stand wet to the skin and hungry and footsore…such must have been the daily fate of many amongst the humbler minstrels at least.'
Sir Edwin Chambers

Well, I’m mercifully not footsore or soaking wet, rather warm-bedded and refreshed, but I would have known a fair bit about the position of the ‘humbler minstrel’ on and off over these last three decades. Back in the last century, when I realised I wished to swoon into the old stories of these North Atlantic islands I took myself off to live in a tent for four years. I’ve likely rabbited about this.

Over those years I would have lit a thousand fires, and by each fire I sat and absorbed stories. Few distractions: a cat on the bed, the bed being a single mattress on two pallets. Rain on canvas, a stew slow-cooking on the burner for a couple of days. Living in a circle. I had my Stonehenge-piled collection of books and the door open a slip so I could see the wind ruffle the heads of the trees in the valley below. There was no latch on my door, just a thick wrap of felt, and a discreet cough on the path from the occasional announcing visitor. The stories slipped in and out, like horses over the hill.

This is all in me when I stand up and start walking the myth-worlds. We all have events tattooed into us – events that can be made present simply be summoning them. Some a dread horror, which may require banishment of a kind, but others, like these, are a sustaining candle in the darkness of things.

The best I have to say is writ-large in the Backalong of my stories. The best I have to say is in tucking my boat in behind Christ. Wherever I am in the world, at night I fall into the shape of prayer as I fall asleep. Fall into the ancient Christian Mynde, fall into the garden, take the rock from Cain’s fist, dismantle Babel, let the flood be a flood of beautiful story not catastrophe, walk like Ruth and Naomi back out of the Underworld.

All the monsters of now – we are adrift in them – are trailed and negotiated in these tangle of tales that spill out of my blossomed but most imperfect jaw each night here in Ireland. It’s a teary privilege to carry them. I follow my storytelling God out onto the hillsides, stages, taverns and lecture halls and try to tell as much of the truth as I can stand, maybe a little more.

Can I gently suggest you light your thousand fires? Hopefully you already have.

These are vicious times, that need Star-Blanketing. It’s not unnatural to seek depth.

Sit with a story over the winter and learn it. Be gentle with yourself for at least an hour a day. Check up on a friend. Do something humanised and human-sized in the monstrous-sized calamities we hear about daily. That’s my advice. All of that can be a kind of praying. Vocalise beauty, manifest care.

This is all about mythic ground...

Finding Luminous Ground

24/09/2025

I am adrift with the mountain Ben Bulben,

I gaze up at the heroic spine, defiant it is,

Its purplish cloak and thousand scars

Flank scattered with warriors and poets,

Hounds and laughter,

Jaunty in the fog, whistling their joy.

Never did I think I’d have a hotel room with one enormous window, and that the window would look out over a sacred mountain I have told endless stories about. Ben Bulben, scene of so many Finn MacColl stories: so much mystical drama, lofty yip and grievous unfoldings in those tales. I lie in bed with my coffee and I gaze and I gaze. Fifty-three years to get here.

It is hard not to despair at the world sometimes, with its bigotry, hatred and wicked ambitions, and then there are days like these, getting to sit at the foot of Ben Bulben. Getting to move from the world of men to the earth of holy stories. Some small act of spiritual resistance in the face of madness.

But before the mountain, I must take us back a week, back earlier on this bang of storytellin’ across Ireland. Back to Galway. Back to the storm.

A Week Earlier

The sea is smashing amiably up against the hotel window, or that would be how it sounds. Old heroes are riding snorting red horses back and forth on the road between Barna and Galway. Seaweed stink, Guinness slurp and the pipes, the pipes are playing defiantly on the dark wind, crow-rattling the oaks outside my room. There’s a storm going on and it’s waking up all the old stories. The only sensible thing to do is brew us a coffee and sit here listening to it all. 6am.

Inis Oirr

We got the tour launched on Inis Oirr. I always feel the reward of a previous trip when I return to a place. To be back on the island, this time with friends and welcomed into the snug of cosy bars, strolls on the sand, a scoop of clam chowder, it’s warming to the old soul. The burr and crack of native Irish speakers.

Our first night of telling is chaotic but lively. Lots to be learned and there’s that distinct squeeze of stress that I associate with starting anything worthwhile. Phones going off, broken glasses, and a heated and relentless discussion in the front row that seems to buzz on for at least ten minutes. I can both see and hear a woman rocking back and forward, repeating, ‘I have to get out of here, I have to get out of here,’ over and over.

Sometimes the old stories flow into this world, and sometimes it’s more like breaking and entering. You have to hold your nerve and just keep going. Rather like the times we’re in. Attending to the grace is a radical act.

By the time you read this we will have done six more storytellings, six more fires lit, six more journeys out into the myth-world...

Coming Home To The Hut Of Ourselves

14/09/2025

Things I’ve learnt recently. Never, ever visit London when there’s a transport strike and the sun has decided to come out just when you’ve switched-up your autumnal, tweed-laden wardrobe. A bus from Paddington to South Bank, overly stuffed upon stuffed with snarling, yellow-fanged passengers drifting in and out of trance states on their phones (likely to distract from the hideous sardine-can surroundings) with shrieking bells and harsh flashing lights. Well, that would need a sturdier soul than me to describe as pleasant.

However – it was all smiles when I met for a great lunch with the sterling team at Ebury Vine, the new Penguin imprint who are putting out Liturgies of the Wild in the UK, as the book had hit the coveted number one slot in new release religious pre-orders. Many of you did that, and me and my publishers on both sides of the Atlantic say a huge THANK YOU. penguin.co.uk/books/477131/liturgies-of-the-wild-by-shaw-martin/

Suddenly it is two days later and I’m in the noon plane to Dublin. Buckets of rain – the city is on power-shower mode. I scamper from doorway to doorway and buy a rain mac and a possibly unnecessary hat from my favourite shop Kevin & Howlin. I slip and slide my way to Ulysses Rare Books emporium, again, and gaze, yet again, at their super lovely copy of Thomas Kinsella’s large edition of The Táin. Can’t spend that kind of money.

The pub next door, The Duke, was frequented in the mid-eighties by my friend Liam Ó Maonlaí and his band Hothouse Flowers. They had no money for pints being teenagers but loved to go dancing with good hair and wore outsize Grandad shirts and yes, hats. The landlord endured them and then they became properly huge for a few years. My friends and I also flopped around in massive shirts and read Yeats conspicuously in parks to startled swans. I’m wondering if Liam is about today for the just-a-minute of a day pint. I decide against it and have an espresso.

Of course I am here for the Between Dog & Wolf tour with my friend and favourite outlaw-stand-up-storyteller Tommy Tiernan. tommytiernan.ie/an-evening-of-storytelling/

I keep catching glimpses of an old fella in a shop window then realise it is myself in this new rain mac that I don’t recognise. He looks distinguished enough but about twenty years older than myself but IS actually myself. I think about the last few days and the amount of niggly little tasks required when you are leaving home for a month or so. Endless, and still I bet I’ve left a dish in the sink or forgotten to do the bins. The cats are taken care of, that’s the main thing.

For now I have the privilege and the pressure of doing little but thinking about stories for the next four weeks. This is the dream I tell you – my version of running-away-to-the-circus, the willy-wonka ticket of spiritual liberation in a world gone mad. There is no distinct plan or set list for these nights on the storytelling road – more the Backalong mode of prescription-in-the-moment. A folktale, a poem, a memory, a long tangly dream-myth of a thing, a saint tale or Yeshua-story. A what-ails-ye for the hours we are all assembled in the one place.

I will continue with this travelling-mode of writing over the next few weeks, whilst also leaving stories here we haven’t likely explored before...

martinshaw.substack.com/p/the-road-west

Deirdre of the Sorrows

22/06/2025

On alchemy:

Its beauty lies just in its materialised language which we can never take literally. I know I am not composed of sulphur and salt, buried in horse dung, putrefying and congealing, turning white or green or yellow, encircled by a tail-biting serpent, rising on wings.

And yet I am!

James Hillman

Hillman’s great hero, Henry Corbin, said that where there is only logic you will find a place strewn with dead angels. Corbin an academic and mystic, Hillman a brilliant shrink (as he would put it), both believed in a world ensouled and personal fidelity to an art-making that reached out and touched such vivacity.

Today in Bologna while nursing a double espresso I saw a beggar slip by the window of my comfortable, air-conditioned cafe. Something was wrong with her arm and her face was covered in Kabuki-like white paint, she rattled her tin and alarmed tourists who hurriedly stuffed coins into it, before she scuttled down a side alley into whatever Underworld she had arisen from. And I don’t say it lightly – the Underworld word – it was like something rearing up from the down below into this world of lofty Renaissance ideas. She was just the kind of person who would be making a bee line for Jesus. He never neglects to address the Underworld of his times, the leprosy of his times, the dementedness of his times. I’m not sure I can always say the same.

As you may remember from last week, here in Bologna I am running a parallel narrative of arriving in Rome almost twenty-five years before. Then a young painter with half an instinct for a Christianity I hadn’t yet encountered, but that I’ve now articulated to some degree in my essay on The Merrie. As I wistfully did the maths I realised that twenty-five years in the future I would be round about seventy. That gave me a sepia-tinged, soft, happy-sad feeling of the passing of time. This quickly drained away when I realised I was still terrible at adding up.

Eighty baby, eighty.

Ok, better make the most of it then.

I’d left Rome and gone into tent life for four years. It was about billhooks, cords of rope, rain on canvas, rabbit for the pot. All virtual social communication was handled by an alchemically red phone box on the main road between nearby villages. I had plenty of books to read, and the endless visionary gawp of watching weather bound through the valley below the tent – squalling rain, stuttered snowstorms, and a furtive sun that gradually turned my canvas from monastic black to a rather washed out grey. I could drive, and had – mercifully – friends, I worked a bit, so it was a tempering in solitude but not complete isolation. And the only way to talk fulsomely about what was happening inside of me was myth. Anything else was a little feeble. Like Hillman’s example from the beginning of today’s essay, I knew I wasn’t a mystic knight living in a forest in the middle of a great quest, but at the same time I knew I WAS...

Bologna Part Two & An Italian Fairy Tale

15/06/2025

When I travel I like to have a word or idea to be thinking about as I go, it’s my crossword puzzle. And this week it’s an old Sufi saying:

Alchemy is the sister of prophecy.

Alchemy. A common word these days, but with all sorts of implications. I’m not thinking of the external technologies of the medieval gold-maker, more alchemy as images of the soul working-on-itself, that precarious road that bubbles and hisses and submerges and then finally transforms lead to gold. These stages, both alarming and sublime, that as a Christian gradually lead one into experience of God. A theosis that walks – with grace – from the raw to the cooked. Alchemy is a very lively metaphor in the way I’m thinking about it. And for me, metaphor is not a waspish belittlement but a place for imagination to live. They are alive with association, that’s the point of them.

Alchemy can be described in a couple of sentences or puzzled at for a lifetime. I’m cautious about what I’m doing here, as when we think we understand something we tend to dismiss it. I teach it occasionally on post-graduate courses, and even the little I know has taken many years to absorb. Please note: I’m not advocating a turn to Gnosticism or slowly poisoning ourselves on fumes in a hut in an Italian forest. But I don’t think contemplating this saying will do us any harm whatsoever.

Real prophecy – a discerning of the spirits of the age – will likely require the fluidity of alchemy, the holy-spiritness of movement to accommodate its diagnosis. When you have only prophetic proclamation and no response you have all rock and no roll. So prophecy gets at the deeper truth of circumstance that-in-turn provokes changes in our inner condition (this could be seen as alchemical movement) as a response. Prophecy is a doing word. We have to be still enough to discern the prophetic, and open enough to the change it can provoke. No openness and I just tend to create my next set of panicky rules and regulations.

So I’m thinking about prophecy as an unearthing of this is what’s going on. The big reveal. Also we have prophecy in the plural; the pile up of layered realities that take a form solid enough to finally be spoken in to. And prophecy also as warning rather than a slam-dunk immutable future. Prophecy as prompt for possibility. Sometimes. Sometimes it is a ship crashing into an iceberg, two minutes before. I don’t know if prophecy is always as dramatic as the association of a message from God, more something a little less grandiose, a sober joining of the dots. Maybe an angel assisted the thought process.

And just for the record, a frequency that’s entirely prophetic is exhausting and finally hard to build on. You need the pastoral too.

I’ll come back to this later.

Bologna: The Red City

I’ve been travelling this month, and am now in Bologna. Not Canada, or Ireland, or Devon or Cornwall, or Bath or London, but Italy. A city known as being red (the colour of the houses), fat (the consequence of the delicious food), and bright (having an ancient University). So I become a chubby, sun-burnt guy with an overactive mind. What else is new? I hear you mutter.

Alchemy is the sister of prophecy: maybe it’s also a thought that the more alchemically aware of our own inner-nature we are, the more accurate our read when we lick our finger and to see which way the wind blows. Outer reflecting inner.

Bolonga is a great place to be thinking about such things. Everywhere is murals, mosaics, shadowed churches, flickering candles, sandy coloured backstreets leading to unexpected, leafy gardens...

A Fulfilment In Bologna