Liturgies Of The Wild

When was the last time you felt a sudden, almost embarrassing aliveness in your body—an owl’s call at midnight, a hard-to-name ache in grief, a flash of beauty so intense it made you restless? In Courting the Wild Twin, Martin Shaw argues that those jolts are not random. They are your wild twin trying to get your attention. The business of stories, he says, isn’t to enchant or distract you; it’s to wake you up—out of numbness, out of polite despair, out of the Moon Palace of watching life but never touching it.

Shaw contends that modern culture lives under a spell of speed, certainty, and abstraction. The antidote is relatedness: to place, to story, to the exiled parts of yourself, to the more-than-human. Relatedness breeds love, love excavates conscience, and conscience changes behavior. But relatedness doesn’t come from punditry or hot takes; it comes from myth, ritual attention, and the perilous courtship of what you have banished. Shaw frames this courtship through two untamed fairy stories—The Lindworm and Tatterhood—and then offers an "Underworld etiquette" for our era of climate grief and civilizational unravelling.

What You’re Actually Courting

Your wild twin, in Shaw’s telling, is the exiled sibling thrown from the window the day you were born: the risk-taking, beauty-adoring, ruin-threatening, gift-bearing half of you that won’t settle for a domesticated life. Shaw first scented his own wild twin as a six-year-old in a muddy woodland den, and later in the owls that ring his Dartmoor cottage at frost. He felt it fiercely during heartbreak and vigils in wilderness. The wild twin doesn’t promise safety or peace; it carries duende (Federico García Lorca’s name for the fatal intensity that comes when the fact of death electrifies art and life). You don’t conquer this twin; you court it with fidelity, imagination, and skill.

Two Old Stories as Field Guides

Shaw walks you through two European tales that act like mirrored maps. In The Lindworm, a queen disobeys an old woman and eats a forbidden red flower, birthing both a radiant prince and a black serpent who is hurled into the forest. Years later, the serpent returns demanding, "Older brothers marry first!"—devouring brides until a shepherd’s daughter takes a year and a day to prepare: sewing twelve nightshirts, laying baths of ashes-and-water and of milk, and demanding the serpent shed twelve layers of scales before she scrubs his raw flesh to humanity. In Tatterhood, a niece’s golden ball at the forest’s edge brings an old woman who prescribes another red-and-white flower ritual, leading to twin daughters: one radiant, one hairy, goat-riding, spoon-wielding Tatterhood. After ogres and witches steal the fair sister’s head, the girls voyage north for years; finally, a prince unlocks Tatterhood’s beauty by asking the three questions she tells him to ask: Why the goat? Why the spoon? Why the hood?

Why These Stories Matter Now

The twin tales teach how to relate to the wild in two modes: exile (The Lindworm) and proximity (Tatterhood). They model practical rites of preparation (the wedding shirts), acts of fierce tenderness (scrubbing with ashes before bathing in milk), and a language for transformation (questions that open a soul rather than close it down). Shaw insists these are not metaphors to admire at a distance; they are instructions you can practice—slowly, without shortcuts—to temper the personality from persona to presence.

Underworld Etiquette: Listening Over Looking

Shaw then turns to our times—climate crisis, culture wars, and exhaustion—and says plainly: we’re already in the Underworld. It looks deceptively like ordinary life, but our language hasn’t caught up. In the Underworld, the primary sense isn’t sight but hearing. He retells an ancient Greek rite of Hermes: speak your question into the god’s ear, then leave with hands over your ears; the first words you hear outside are Hermes answering. We’ve been looking at melting ice; we haven’t been hearing what the world is saying specifically to us. That hearing cultivates accountability.

A Candle in the Nightworld

“In that darkness, we remember what we love the most. That itself is the candle.”

From this stance, he offers paradoxical courtesies: stop saying the earth is doomed (that’s hubris and bad manners to the gods), but approach the truth that things end (hold grief and wonder together). Choose amor—specific love of particular places—over a floaty, everywhere-and-nowhere eros. Rescue a "third thing" in conflicts (the magpie’s blue feather) rather than collapsing into right vs. wrong.

How to Use This Summary

What follows are six big, usable ideas: how to find and court your wild twin; how The Lindworm teaches you to educate what you’ve exiled; how Tatterhood shows you to live beside the untamed without banishing it; how to behave in the Underworld; and how to speak to the times through the living craft of myth-telling. You’ll meet old women who step out of trees, red and white flowers (and the hidden black one), a serpent brother, a goat-riding girl with a wooden spoon, and a set of practices—from sewing metaphorical shirts to naming "twelve secret names" of a beech—designed to restore relatedness. If you let them, these stories will start talking back. That’s the point.

Shaw says your life has a secret companion—the wild twin—that longed for you the day you were born and got exiled when you entered the house of good manners. You don’t domesticate this twin; you learn its scent, its tastes, and its limits. You court it like a difficult love: slowly, attentively, and with risk. Ignore it, and it becomes hostile. Court it, and it carries the key to your vocation, your eros, and your courage.

What Is the Wild Twin?

The wild twin is the feral, regal, not-hooligan wildness that lives just outside your gate. It hides your laptop and sends a thousand geese over your tent at dusk. It forgives more quickly than you, whispers mercy through the gardens you’ve neglected, and puts chocolate in your nephew’s pocket. Shaw first felt it as a boy trudging to his woodland den, later in owl courts around his cottage, and most sharply in heartbreak and exhaustion. The twin doesn’t make you safe; it makes you ecstatic—which is almost painful. It won’t accept a half-life.

This isn’t just personal psychology. Across cultures, stories say: the day you were born, your twin was flung into the woods and has been lonely for you ever since. Someone saw her on a Dorset beach in winter; he rooms in a South Chicago abandoned house. It’s an archetypal reality (compare to Jung’s shadow or Robert Bly’s "long bag we drag behind us").

How to Recognize Its Footprints

You feel it when language grows fur and light, when you name a star "Flint of Whale Bone Dream" and it feels right—when words seem to be speaking through you, not just from you. You feel it when your careful plans rupture: a hunger for heat and opinion sends you down from the Inuit "Moon Palace" of watching to the dusty market square of living. You feel it in duende—the "slap, limp, grit" of a life that has tasted both love and mortality. Poems are not written by the woman who got the last kiss, Shaw writes; they’re written by the one who didn’t. Your restlessness is a clue.

Courting Practices (Not Conquests)

Shaw favors fidelity over fireworks. Courtship means: keep showing up to a place (Blake’s streets of London, a Devon tor), a story (The Lindworm twelve times), or a practice (fasting alone for four days in a wild place). Speak your desire out loud like the queen who walks at dusk, breathes her wish into a double-handled cup, and flips it onto the soil. Then, accept consequence: sometimes you’ll grab the red flower first. Don’t rush; stories "distill slowly" and often deliver images rather than concepts. If the old woman steps from a tree and tells you to sew twelve shirts, start sewing—understanding will come through the hands.

Beauty is the lingua franca. What you exile grows hostile; what you court with beauty grows curious. In The Lindworm, the family doesn’t send hunters for the serpent; they send poets and musicians to make a hay nest in the castle belly. Beauty doesn’t demand or diagnose; it invites. Shaw warns that real beauty isn’t glossy—it’s gritty, like Lorca’s bent old flamencos with gold teeth who "drag the time-bound into the timeless."

Risks and Ethics

Wildness attracts everyone, but it’s not a lifestyle brand. Shaw cautions against fetishizing the red flower—burning down your life for drama. Rites of passage and mythic work let you "taste the red" without wreckage. He calls this tempering (from Old English temprian—to moderate excess): the ongoing tuning of your instrument so presence replaces persona. Expect bruises and missteps; the twin may slap your ear and kiss you in the same breath. But not searching at all? That’s missing life.

Practice

Name one place that reliably unsettles and enlarges you (a riverside, a stand of beeches). Visit it weekly. Speak one honest desire aloud. Leave a small gift of beauty (song, bread, a poem). Keep the appointment for a year and a day.

A gracious king and queen can’t conceive. A forest crone instructs the queen to speak her desire and eat a white flower—not the red. The queen eats the red first anyway and births not one child but two: a radiant prince and a black serpent hurled from the window into exile. Years later the serpent returns, bellowing "Older brothers marry first!" and devouring brides—until a shepherd’s daughter prepares for a year and a day, then asks the serpent to shed twelve layers of scales, scrubs his raw flesh with ashes and water, and finally bathes him in milk. Dawn reveals a man with an ordinary, durable beauty. Restoration follows. It’s an unforgettable, workable map for how you deal with what you’ve banished.

Stagnation, the Forest, and the Red Flower

Shaw highlights the story’s opening malaise: a life-preserving but not life-giving court. Everything’s fine, nothing thrives. The cure doesn’t come from more diplomacy; it comes from the wild. The queen is told to walk at dusk and name her longing—out loud, to soil and air—and then breathe into a cup and flip it. This is ritualized speech, desire with etiquette. Then comes transgression: she gobbles the red flower anyway. Shaw refuses moralism; the red flower (Dionysian heat) awakens life, but it births consequence. We live between flowers—castle and forest, white and red—and must be adult enough to hold the tension.

Courting the Exile with Beauty

When the prince meets the serpent at every crossroads, the family doesn’t send soldiers. They send musicians, poets, storytellers and build a hay nest in the castle belly. Beauty—not force—courts the exiled home. But the serpent still devours brides. Shaw reads this unsentimentally: trust and vibes aren’t enough. The wild won’t be tamed by a soundtrack. Something more exacting is needed.

A Year and a Day: Tempering

Enter the shepherd’s daughter, who asks for time. An old woman walks out of a tree and instructs her to sew twelve nightshirts adorned around the heart and to prepare baths of ashes-and-water and of milk, with two steel brushes. The girl spends a year pricking fingers, learning delicacy and stamina. Shaw calls this tempering rather than one-and-done initiation: ongoing tuning that burns off excess and makes you taut enough to hold beauty without bursting. (Compare to Victor Turner’s liminal rites: severance–threshold–return; Shaw adds patience.)

From Persona to Presence

On the wedding night, the girl says, "You shed a layer; I’ll shed a shirt." No one has asked the serpent this before. It’s an aikido move: call him on his beauty and his capacity to change. Twelve layers later, he’s a blubbery worm, not yet a man. Then the pain: scrubbing with ashes (grief) and water (tears), before bathing in milk (kindness). "Less is more" arrives not as a slogan but as a flayed body meeting mercy. Shaw connects this to late Yeats or Johnny Cash—scales dropping until a presence can stand there without costume.

Red, Black, White—and the Hidden Flower

Drawing on Victor Turner, Shaw maps the tale’s color logic: red (heat, individuation), black (cooling, Underworld sobriety), white (balance, culture-raising). The West loves red; it wants to skip black and sprint to white. The Lindworm insists you can’t. Shaw adds a provocative twist: there’s a black flower the crone never mentions—soul—that blooms only after you’ve tasted both red and white and accepted consequence. It’s what you bring the Ferryman to prove you actually incarnated.

Try This

In a stuck relationship, stop "calling out" and experiment with "calling on": ask for one scale your partner could shed and name one shirt you’ll remove in turn. Set a shared ritual (a weekly walk, an hour without screens). Keep it for twelve rounds.

The Lindworm makes a stark promise: what you exile will hunt you; what you educate with beauty, grief, and kindness can become kin. Restoration follows—not perfection, but a straighter barley, a higher salmon leap, a brighter star. That’s as good as it gets.

Where The Lindworm deals with what was exiled, Tatterhood shows you what happens when the wild twin grows up inside your household. A niece’s golden ball at the garden’s edge brings a forest girl and her hawk-nosed grandmother to court. The crone prescribes the same red/white flower rite. The queen eats the red first and births twins: a fair, radiant girl and Tatterhood—a tiny hairy girl in a tattered hood, riding a goat, brandishing a wooden spoon. The sisters are inseparable. When Christmas Eve unleashes witches and ogres who steal the fair sister’s head, Tatterhood sails north to the Hags’ longhouse, reclaims the head from a rusty nail, and chooses years of voyaging before a double wedding. The prince unlocks Tatterhood’s transformation by asking three questions—because she tells him exactly what to ask.

The Golden Ball and Early Kinship

Robert Bly writes that a child begins with a "golden ball" of undivided energy that adults steadily siphon into obedience. Not here. The niece plays every day where hedges meet twig and spell, tossing the ball with a forest girl as if in prayer. This is right-relationship: frequent, playful contact at the edge, not a headlong flight into ferality. The old woman—Mearcstapa, boundary walker—arrives not as a menace but as a midwife of fertility, demanding the royal bed be dragged to a dirt-floored stable and that bathwater be carried—deliberately, four-directioned—onto the earth. This is eros grounded, not abstract philanthropy.

The House Learns to Keep Its Tatter

Courtly plans try to separate the twins; nothing works. Energy moves like fast water between them. Over time the castle adjusts to the "great awakener." Tatterhood’s braying intelligence spills tales of Moroccan silver and Irish gossip into the hall. No mass incinerations; plenty of delight. Shaw underlines a key difference with The Lindworm: this wild twin isn’t exiled; she’s near, and her presence makes the house wiser. You can learn to live with your unruly genius.

Initiation by Witchcraft (The Good Kind)

When the fair sister buds into womanhood, the Underworld shows up properly: witches, giants, ogres come howling. Amid the fray, a witch tears off the girl’s head and replaces it with a calf’s. Tatterhood doesn’t panic: better animal power near than "the violence of unready love." She knows where the head is: hanging on a rusty nail in the Hags’ longhouse. Shaw asks you to honor this as a deep feminine education: What wisdom seeped into the maiden’s hair while she hung in that smoke? What songs, jokes, and philosophies prepared her for amor not just eros?

Years of voyaging follow—north, always north—until a widowed king and his charismatic son befriend the salty sisters. Love erupts. Tatterhood declares, "Older sisters marry first," and demands a double wedding. Even here, the household must accommodate complexity: when one part of you marries, the whole den writhes for balance. Shaw loves this.

Three Questions That Open a Soul

On the flowered lane to a simple chapel, Tatterhood turns to the prince: Why don’t men ask the questions that open a woman’s soul? Then she gifts him the questions to ask: Why the goat? Why the spoon? Why the hood? He answers: because they aren’t what they seem. The goat is a Castilian steed; the spoon a rowan wand; the hood a crown of dog rose and antler. Tatterhood transforms—not into a Disney princess but into a "beautiful, ordinary" woman with bundled hair like a dark torrent. The key: she teaches her beloved how to see and speak to her true form.

Relational Skill

Tell your partner the three questions that open your soul. Then ask theirs. Practice answering weekly. Update as you change.

Tatterhood’s wisdom is fiercely contemporary: keep your tattered genius in the house; let it fight the ogres; accept the witches’ schooling; sail long enough to grow salty; and teach people how to love you by giving them the questions to ask. The wedding—like the work—lasts for years.

Shaw says we’re already in the Underworld. That’s why so much "practical" talk feels off. The nightworld requires different manners: listening over looking, paradox over platitude, beauty over bludgeon. He proposes a brace of courtesies for citizens of a collapsing story.

Reevaluate "Practical"

Western practicality—fix it, fast—got us here. What would practical look like to an Amijangal elder or a Haida carver? It would look like ritual, prayer, story, and beauty—applied, not abstract. In Shaw’s phrase, the earth is weary of our practicality. Try manners instead: courtship of place, reciprocity, and the humility to ask, "How do you wish to be loved?" (Compare to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass.)

Listen Like a Hermesian

Hearing, not seeing, is the deep sense of the Underworld. Shaw recalls an ancient rite to Hermes: whisper your question, then cover your ears till you exit the sacred square; the first words you hear are the god’s reply. Apply this to climate grief: stop scrolling the ice-melt and start asking, "What is the earth saying specifically to me?" When you truly hear, accountability follows. Seers are often blind for a reason.

Hold a Live Paradox

Shaw demands we carry two contrary truths at once. First: Stop saying the earth is doomed. It’s bad manners to the gods and a sedative for the privileged. It adds performative poignancy without useful hardship. Second: Approach the truth that things end. Not with spiritual bypassing, but with annihilating love for what you didn’t know you loved till it was going. In that spearpoint between wonder and grief, a third way appears (Shaw cites Irish sovereignty rites: yoke two wild horses pulling opposite, and the royal road to Tara emerges). That’s Underworld maturity.

Choose Amor Over Everywhere Eros

Eros opens you to sensation; amor ties you loyally to a bend in the river, a specific tor, a parish hedge. Amor makes you sick with missing and brave in defense. Shaw says song needs an address (Tom Waits). Be "famous for five miles" (Gary Snyder). Without specificity, we become ecological gigolos—flower to flower—never husbands or wives to place.

Rescue the Third Thing and Slow Down

In arguments, look for the magpie’s blue feather—a third possibility beyond right/wrong. Use mythic language (Neruda in Parliament, as Shaw jokes) to reflect Medusa without petrifying. And reject shortcuts. Under the motorway lies a road, under the road a lane, under the lane a track, under the track an animal path. Find the animal path. Most of our crises snarl from the pathological desire to arrive instantly. Adult work takes a year and a day.

Two Practices

1) Weekly Hermes: ask one question at dawn, then listen for the first words you overhear. Journal and act. 2) Place-courtship: choose a five-mile radius. Learn one plant name, one piece of folklore, and one story per month. Repeat for a year.

It’s not enough to love myths; you have to speak with them. Shaw offers a craftsman’s kit for telling living stories in the nightworld. It’s humble, slow, and stubbornly local.

You Are Enough (Really)

The biggest mountain is believing you must be a Robin Williamson (the Scottish master-teller who once paralyzed Shaw with awe) before you can begin. You don’t. Shaw started with a three-page Russian fairy tale, whispered it to safe rooms, and played a drum to bridge memory lapses. Three years in, he put down the drum and stood on both feet. Stories want you—not performance perfection—present. Presence comes when you have footing on your own mythic ground.

Myths Are Robust and Hungry

Old stories are promiscuously contemporary: they’re meant to tangle with what you saw on the way to work. Add flavor, don’t change the recipe. Get from A to Z faithfully, but let your genius color the path. And feed the story like a guest: dress well when you tell; leave food or wine in a secret place; build it a hut (even a shelf) to rest between tellings; don’t crowd it with too many rivals; invite it to speak in dreams; wait years if needed. A real story will wait for your thinking to catch up.

Place: From and Of

Be a cultural historian of where you stand. Shaw distinguishes being "from" a place (ancestry) and "of" a place (psychoactive reciprocity). You can become "of" late in life. As with lovers, learn how the place wishes to be loved, not how you prefer to love it. That means repetition, listening, and letting amor organize your days. (Readers of David Abram or Wendell Berry will nod here.)

Name Twelve Secret Names

Shaw failed for years to write a triumphant Celtic "I Am" poem. All he could speak was damage. Then he started beholding: walking to a beech and whispering twelve names that arose from its exact way of being—not dictionary labels but witnessed qualities. Twelve was always enough. He found that when he quietened and beheld, the world answered. This is the opposite of dictating the earth’s fate; it is relatedness in practice.

Remember

“You are not here to be anything that you want; you are here to be something quite specific.”

If you carry even one story in your jaw, you’re part of an ancient covenant. The gods, Shaw says, tell stories about us around their embers. Give them something worth repeating: not just drama, but sacrifices that lengthen the common good, fidelity to a five-mile radius, and the humility to keep sewing shirts no one asked for until the scales begin to drop.