“There are few tales worth remembering that don’t have uncertainty woven into them. Without uncertainty we have mission statements, not myth”
A beautiful find from Emergence magazine, from which we run an extract below, written by the storyteller and modern mythologist Martin Shaw. The issue’s theme is storytelling - providing “regenerative spaces of creation and renewal.”
MARTIN SHAW: NAVIGATING THE MYSTERIES
The correct response to uncertainty is mythmaking. It always was. Not punditry, allegory, or mandate, but mythmaking. The creation of stories. We are tuned to do so, right down to our bones. The bewilderment, vivacity, and downright slog of life requires it.
And such emerging art forms are not to cure or even resolve uncertainty but to deepen into it. There’s no solving uncertainty. Mythmaking is an imaginative labor not a frantic attempt to shift the mood to steadier ground. There isn’t any.
But—a major but—maybe there’s useful and un-useful uncertainty. The un-useful is the skittish, fatiguing dimension. The surface of the condition. The useful is the invitation to depth that myth always offers. Because if there’s uncertainty, then we are no longer sure quite what’s the right way to behave.
And there’s potential in that, an openness to new forms. We are susceptible to what I call sacred transgression. Not straight-up theft but a recalibrating of taboo to further the making of culture. Let me give you an example of what I mean.
In a Hebridean story I call Cinderbiter, a serpent is wrapped four times around the world. Its head is a few miles offshore from a Scottish island. The only way to appease it has been to supply the creature with sacrifices. To satisfy a killer with killings, goes the stressed-out daytime logic.
But this cannot continue, the island is running out of victims. The exhausted islanders are all out of ideas. Sequestered in the drama rests a boy who lies by a fire dreaming. Hearing of the many attempts to meet this peril, the lad uses night intelligence, not day, to save the island.
He steals three things.
He steals his father’s speediest horse.
He steals three embers from an old crone’s fire.
He steals the king’s boat and strangely allows himself to be tipped into the belly of the beast. He then locates the liver. He cuts the liver open and places the crone’s embers inside. The serpent then ejects the boy and dies flamboyantly. As he collapses, his teeth become the Faroe, Shetland, and Orkney Islands, and his liver becomes the still smoking island we call Iceland.
Cinderbiter’s unconventional instincts save the day. His transgressions, forged in his dreaming state, have a genius that the islanders can only gawp at. And we swiftly move from a story of insurmountable dread to a creation story: the formation of the Scottish Islands and Iceland.
It’s a refreshing narrative and only possible with openness to unexpected approaches. The warriors have been dealing with the outside of the situation, but Cinderbiter navigates it from the inside.
So when we face uncertainty, we should be open to the quixotic and the unconventional. Culturally we need to be Cinderbiters at a moment like this. It’s the Cinderbiter in us that would query the word “uncertainty” anyway. So, let’s re-imagine it.
…What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage. And is our life not a mystery school, a seat of earthy instruction?
There are few tales worth remembering that don’t have uncertainty woven into them. Without uncertainty we have mission statements not myth. We have polemic not poetry, sign not symbol. There’s no depth when we are already floating above true human experience. And true human experience has always involved ambiguity, paradox, and eventually the need for sheer pluck.
Uncertainty doesn’t feel sexy, I admit. It can derail confidence, make us neurotic, doubt ourselves. But mythic intelligence suggests we have to negotiate such terrain for a story of worth to surround us. I don’t say this lightly; it has real testing attached.
The Handless Maiden, alone in the dark forest—she knows uncertainty. Odysseus, trying to get back to Ithaca—he knows uncertainty. The Firebird caged by a Russian Tzar—she knows uncertainty. Uncertainty is a jittery passport to the kingdom of the living, inevitable for all.
Having lived half a century in its energy field, I make no pretense to like it much. But understand it? See its value? I do.
But to navigate mystery is not the same thing as living with uncertainty. It doesn’t contain the hallmarks of manic overconfidence or gnawing anxiety. It’s the blue feather in the magpie’s tale. Hard to glimpse without attention.
There’s no franchise or hashtag attached. Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.
As humans we’ve long been forged on the anvil of the mysteries: Why are we here? Why do we die? What is love? We are tuned like a cello to vibrate with such questions. What is entirely new is the amount of information we are receiving from all over the planet.
So we don’t just receive stress on a localized, human level, we mainline it from a huge, abstract, conceptual perspective. Perpetual availability to both creates a nervous wreck.
The old stories say, enough; that one day we have to walk our questions, our yearnings, our longings. We have to set out into those mysteries, even with the uncertainty. Especially with the uncertainty.
Make it magnificent. We take the adventure. Not naively but knowing this is what a grown-up does. We embark. Let your children see you do it. Set sail, take the wing, commit to the stomp. Evoke a playful boldness that makes even angels swoon. There’s likely something tremendous waiting…
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