Cista Mystica

28/12/2025

Being but men, we walked into the trees
Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
For fear of waking the rooks…
Dylan Thomas

In the old Asterix comic books there was always a fear the Celts mentioned, that the ‘sky would fall on their heads’. An abundance of good fortune would always invite the opposite to swiftly distribute its energies into the community. The sheer vivacity of a decent Christmas always has me looking over my shoulder and talking quietly, evoking that brilliant Thomas line about ‘fear of waking the rooks’.

In the last three weeks three of my friends have buried their mum, step-mum and another their dad. I met the last on the street just a minute ago, and he said something like: I’d be just as sad if he’d died in April, but he’s still close right now this Christmas, so put down your bags and come to the pub. He’s brought his sorrow into the bustle and poignancy of Christmas, with rooks-a-swirl, sky-falling and all of it. Let it all in. Clink the glass, eyeball the embers, stroke the dog.

I have a bit of the old Celtic fear myself heading into 2026, being an ‘old Celt’ and all. The big book finally coming out, the tours, the work at Cambridge, the sheer degree of opportunity – modesty aside – it gets me whistling through my teeth. I can see the tent pegs of the sky being slowly removed by a spirit-hand and the whole thing preparing to land on my curly head. Whenever there’s a significant advancement of opportunity in my life it spins me out a little. And there’s always some cost.

It’s not imposter syndrome, just a bigger playing field. I went twenty years storytelling without a mic on my lapel, and for a while I loathed the amplification. But then – as recently as the recent Irish tour with Tommy and a brilliant sound engineer – I grew to grow into the possibilities vocally offered. Don’t have to shout all the time. It took a while, but it’s about adjusted into the new situation. Please pray for me that I can actually absorb and enjoy all of these good things.

And one thing I do know, is that the bloody rooks are always woken, softly spoken or not. It’s their gig. And especially around Christmas.

Yesterday I was in the east, up in Norwich. There’s been some illness in my own family that required attendance, and now I’m back, but not in that warm cosy zone we generally wish for. I feel anxious – this may have changed by the time you read this – and the juxtaposition of stress and jolly can create such an out-of-body sensation.

On the train journey back and forth I saw hundreds and hundreds of faces, many worn or clearly struggling. It was like a Rembrandt street sketch. The fact the trains were full beyond capacity certainly wasn’t helping, and people had packed as if they were taking at least three months off. I was surprised to see the return of the enormous rucksack, rather than something with wheels on. I do love wheels on a long journey.

But carrying some burden myself, I was oddly moved to be part of this large, struggling mass of bodies trying to get home. The visible distress mirrored my own state and it was an odd kind of relief.

To state the obvious, there’s something rather climactic about Christmas. It brings everything to the surface. Joy, loneliness, gluttony, sacrifice. I can sometimes feel all of that within an hour. I’ve never been able to produce ‘on demand’ romantic feelings on Valentine’s Day, equally I’m never quite sure what Christmas will produce. I find myself awake in that tough stretch between three and five-thirty am, attempting to pray, drifting, stressing, coming back. Turning the pillows, fretting. Alone. The glee of Old Scratch circling the bedroom...

The Balance of Frivolity

18/12/2025

Last call for the Christmas post folks! ✨The Cista Mystica grotto is brimming with parcels of stories & delights, ready to load up the sleigh. Final orders in by 6pm (UK time) today to catch the UK Christmas post 🔥✨🔥✨🔥
drmartinshaw.com/cista-mystica-press/

11/12/2025

There was once a young harpist of tremendous skill, playing for a group of monks at Clonfort, St Brendan’s monastery. Though he enjoyed playing for the monks, he kept craning his neck around to see if Brendan himself was listening. It was Brendan’s confirming gaze he sought. The musician spoke up:

- It would be a delight to play for the great man, I have three tunes especially I think he’d like.

An older monk smiled at his enthusiasm but replied:

- Brendan is not in the mood for human music, nor has he been for seven years. He actually has two balls of wax with a thread between them, and every time he hears music, he places them swiftly in his ears.

The harpist regarded this as the kind of challenge he liked. Biding his time, he slipped through the monks, eventually found Brendan and enquired if he’d listen to him. Brendan gave him permission to play inside the church after the lad persisted. On doing so, Brendan immediately put the balls of wax in his ears. The harpist piped up:

- I’d prefer it if you were not inoculated against my music in this way.

Kindly, Brendan removed the balls of wax, and gestured for the harpist to play his three pieces. The lad put all his feeling and technique into the music, summoned every last upswelling of soul he could muster. He was determined to move the great man. Maybe a tear, or a smile, or at least a misty glance at something none of us could see. When the beautiful music finished, Brendan quietly reinstalled the balls of wax in his ears. This was not the kind of response the musician was used to. Still, Brendan sweetly said:

- May you get into heaven playing such music. A blessing on you.

The harpist appreciated this, but responded:

- That’s very kind. But I have to ask about the balls of wax. Did you not enjoy it?...

Read on:

Don't Listen To Everything Out There

01/12/2025

✨December is upon us! We're delighted to share news of new arrivals at Cista Mystica Press in time for the Christmas post ✨

Fresh in – a handsome new edition of Stag Cult and the Bardskull hardback. Stag Cult was a bit of a hit over at the London Review of Books a few years ago, and I’m very pleased with our edition.
To celebrate their arrival, I will be sat in the library with my quill and copies will be signed until Christmas, and can also be ordered along with a limited edition hand-printed Inner Seer book bag in the Christmas Visionary Bundle https://drmartinshaw.com/product/christmas-visionary-bundle/

Suggested dates to place orders to catch the Royal Mail Christmas post:
Thursday 4th Dec – AUS/NZ/Non-EU
Wednesday 10th Dec – US/CAN/EU
Thursday 18th Dec - UK

✨✨✨

01/12/2025

Tonight’s lightning has put out
Our artificial light. A candle serves,
If not to read by, clear enough to pray.
- Kathleen Raine, A Winter Night

“We are not pristine little islands, unassailed by influence, heading relentlessly to existential individuation, but tug boats delightedly banging into each other in the bay-of-life. God doesn’t want us as lonely as many of us wind up being.”

Making Adjustments

About thirteen years ago I sat outside a Welsh pub with the poet Tony Hoagland. Tony was the far side of a wilderness vigil up in Snowdonia, so was more than entitled to a pint. I’d picked him up from Bristol airport then we’d wended our way through innumerable little lanes and B roads till we found ourselves triumphantly up in the hills.

Tony had repeatedly asked to be taken to the most profoundly ancient, knee- quakingly, fairy-filled spot that I knew for his vigil. The most mystical grove. I knew exactly the place. As we stood in its misty dimensions, late afternoon, surrounded by oak trees and strange little gusts of wind he looked at me and laughed, “You have got to be kidding me.”

Fair to say, Tony was led to a more suitable spot about a mile away, with views of both Caer Idris and the Irish Sea. For four days there was barely a peep out of him. For a character that could be as extreme as Tony, it was touching to see him exhibit a touch of self-care when it came to his fasting spot. When all glamour of having some big Otherworldly experience has died down, it was longing for a much more grounded encounter with himself, the earth, maybe even God that he was after.

Anyway, the pub. It was at this pub that we started working on Celtic poems and stories together. Mostly I interpreted them and Tony arranged them on the page, so generally they were in stanzas of some kind. Once every few weeks we’d read them to each other on Skype, and adjust accordingly. We both loved the experience, and I learnt an awful lot from it. How to parade sentences from every kind of angle before they settled their feathers.

Well, Tony is in the Other Place now, and it’s early morning in Devon. The sun has risen over the high hills and the sheep look grateful, thick coats half riven with frost. There’s a little bit of blue sky but it won’t be lasting, which Tony would have liked.

Tony loved a grey day, with nothing much happening. Nothing to pull you from the desk away from the delight of playing with words. This wouldn’t suit everybody, but for our man, it was perfect. He worked hard for his success and I’m pleased to say he got plenty of it. He’d often start writing early-doors in bed, four or five cushions behind him, lamp on, hair – what was left of it – like startled tufts of bog-grass, his laptop precariously on his duvet, beavering away at his anarchic and oh so brilliant lines. Then later, the revisions, many revisions.

I’ve loved these last couple of weeks of closing my door on the world, and just bedding in. I’m engaged in endless small but deeply satisfying tasks of housework, often moving piles of books from one side of my library to another. I have a little colour code system for them, but when I really start to work up a steam they do go wandering onto the wrong shelves. I’ve brought down a bunch of old Celtic poetry books, the kind we used to work on, and I’m having another dive, all these years later. I can see Tony on the sofa, suggesting turning two stanzas to one, or sighing happily at all the relentless teenage angst of the love poems. This is part of my work, to walk through the door at the bottom of my cobbled yard and out onto Skellig Michael, or Narnia, or an Icelandic longhouse.

Overwhelming Love or Something Like It

I’m going to share a few here, see if you remember some of the feelings that are so bursting from these lines. In this first poem, there’s a Welsh young girl searching for her fella. Even the birds get involved – a hint of ancient Bardic verse – and a sense of youthful determination...

We Are Not Meant to Be So Lonely

23/11/2025

It’s a funny old world when the notion of a pilgrimage seems oddly radical, but last weekend at Walsingham, that was how it felt.

And we got our work cut out for us: anyone that made it likely wrestled Storm Claudia all day Friday just trying to get into Norfolk. It was about eight hours all in from Devon, and it’s fair to say I was a little deranged by arrival. I met old companions for a fat-headed, creamy Guinness in the back room of The Bull as we stared wide eyed and compared harrowed notes on the buffeting winds, scandalous detours and endless sheets of black rain. We had friends coming in from Canada, Holland, Scotland and all over, so we were praying them safe through the fury.

I was also Keeper of the Keys at St Seraphim’s Orthodox chapel, so in the swirling dark of early evening I was shown the ropes by Joanna – a friendly face – in the rock’n’rolling weather. That little chapel would provide me with tremendous, prayerful solace in the good natured but relentless bustle of the weekend. After a tossing and turning night I was heartened to see a few of us had actually made it through the weather and were gathered for a little pilgrim walk up to the Slipper Chapel.

From Henry III onwards Walsingham became a major shrine in Northern Europe, and a place visited by Kings, Queens and a steady stream of folk looking for peace, healing and depth of feeling. It was a name familiar to Christians all across Europe. Pilgrimages were of course good for business: inn keepers, shoemakers, boatmen to name but three all felt the benefit. There was a route from Shoreditch all the way to Walsingham, roads often being repaired by charitable work from the Religious Houses.

The Milky Way was known as the ‘Walsingham Way’, because the stars were meant to illuminate the pilgrim paths, known as ‘Greenways’. This was a period when the very roads of England were made holy by crosses going far back as Anglo-Saxon times. Some marked their way to shrines, needed when crop was high across the fields and you couldn’t see a thing. There was estimated to be more than five thousand crosses accompanying our tracks and roads at one point.

Well, like pilgrims of olde, we eyed each other friendly-like and prepared to walk to the Slipper Chapel.

My sister Anna gave a beautiful welcome and some reasoning for what we were about to do, and then off we all shuffled, the day suddenly much calmer, and the fields shimmering bright with all that fallen rain. Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, and all sorts of folk simply seeking a deeper life.

I managed to find a bed for a couple of hours, and then it was time to be back at the Parish Hall and for the wider day to begin. Spotting my mother, father, brother, sister, heroic nephews and one beautiful niece in the assembled horde brought a delighted smile to my face.

First up we had Lucy Cooper giving us some wider context for the whole notion of pilgrimage. Lucy is a fabulous writer, and also editor at the small press Cista Mystica. She walked us through some of her own considerable experience of ‘intentional strolling’ (maybe I just created a new phrase), and gave us all a lovely flavour of the west of Britain. Afterwards we chatted for a little while around the strange rebirth of interest in Christianity, and the urgency of our times. In the absence of my old friend Paul Kingsnorth I talked a little about the abiding notion of the Machine, and the possibility of being an Angel in the Machine ourselves. How do we move from the Machine to the Merrie?

Small Intentioned Steps Matter

Please don’t mistake this for me assuming one stomp across some soggy English fields eradicates the endlessly displayed and often terrifying spiritual turbulence of our age. But even so, one has to direct one’s feet somewhere, and this is, after all, Good News.

When you are lost in the forest it is tiny little breadcrumbs, small intentioned steps, that can lead you home. Circling darkness, and only focusing on circling darkness can lead to absolute paralysis. The weird titillation of paranoia. Drink some freshly squeezed orange juice, put on a James Brown record, spend an hour polishing your shoes. These things help.

I repeated something at the Merrie I wrote here a few weeks ago – the Devil hates a hand-made life.

Demons Want To Be Needed. Don’t be a life coach for a Demon’s self-esteem issues. If you want to disturb a Demon, a Machine, or a Monster, think about making a hand-made, human-sized life. Sometimes things are simpler than we may think. Find the Angel in the Machine, not just the Demon. Be the Angel in the Machine if you can. It’s radical to be a pilgrim...

Cheering On The Saints To Come

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