![[liturgies-of-the-wild-hero.png]] # Liturgies of the Wild: Myth, Maturity, and the Recovery of a Storied Life Martin Shaw’s *Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us* begins from a provocative diagnosis: modern people are not suffering from a shortage of information but from a poverty of worthy stories. We remain surrounded by narratives—advertising, political mythologies, personal brands, technological promises, and the demand for endless growth—but many of these stories do not help us become mature human beings. Some may actively diminish us. Shaw’s answer is not to manufacture a new motivational script. He turns instead to folktales, sacred stories, initiation rites, remembered teachers, wilderness vigils, Christian prayer, and the difficult particulars of an individual life. He asks the reader to recover a **storied consciousness**: a way of perceiving experience in which grief, desire, failure, envy, mortality, place, and praise become meaningful without becoming simple. Published in 2026, the book also records a major transition in Shaw’s intellectual and spiritual life. Known for decades as a mythographer, oral storyteller, and wilderness rites-of-passage guide, he here interprets his long apprenticeship to myth through his return to Christianity and reception into Eastern Orthodoxy. The result is part cultural criticism, part spiritual memoir, part folklore performance, and part Christian testimony.[^1] My assessment is strongly positive but qualified. *Liturgies of the Wild* is imaginative, vivid, and unusually capable of restoring weight to words that contemporary culture has made thin. Its account of maturity as initiation—rather than accumulation—is especially valuable. Yet its mythopoetic method is not the same as historical folklore scholarship, and its cross-cultural range sometimes outruns the contextual care those traditions deserve. Readers should receive it as a gifted storyteller’s book of formation, not as a neutral academic theory of myth. ## The Review in Brief Shaw’s deepest claim is that stories are not passive containers of meaning. They are formative environments. The stories we repeatedly inhabit train perception, establish what we desire, and suggest what kind of future is possible. This is why he calls myths “ancient technologies.” The phrase does not mean that myth operates like a programmable tool. In fact, Shaw repeatedly resists reducing a tale to a single lesson. Myth works through image, repetition, ambiguity, ritual, and imaginative participation. It does not merely inform the reader; it may reorganize the reader’s sense of reality. The book is at its best when Shaw joins myth to concrete disciplines: keeping faith with a place, grieving communally, accepting limits, learning to pray, telling the truth about one’s life, or allowing a crisis to become an initiation. His prose moves by association rather than systematic proof, carrying the reader from a Dartmoor forest to a Russian folktale, from an Orthodox church to an Arthurian wasteland. That style will divide readers. Those seeking a linear argument, tightly documented cultural history, or practical steps may find the book elusive. Those prepared to read it as an oral storyteller speaks—through recurrence, image, rhythm, and provocation—may find it unusually generative. ## What Kind of Book Is It? *Liturgies of the Wild* is nonfiction, but “spirituality” or “self-help” does not adequately describe it. It is a hybrid of at least five genres. ### Mythopoetic Essays The book contains an introduction, thirteen thematic chapters, and an epilogue. Its subjects include discarded personal stories, initiation, death, passivity, passion, prayer, guilt, envy, dreams, limits, evil, and praise.[^2] Rather than proving a thesis through sequential propositions, Shaw thinks through image and story. The term **mythopoetic** is useful here. It refers not simply to writing about old myths but to using mythic language and forms to generate fresh perception. A mythopoetic work asks what an image does to consciousness before asking what proposition it represents. ### Spiritual Memoir and Conversion Narrative Shaw recounts his movement from the Christianity of his childhood, through decades of mythic and wilderness practice, toward a renewed encounter with Christ and Eastern Orthodox worship. His 101-night vigil in a Dartmoor forest becomes a decisive narrative hinge. The book does not present conversion as the rejection of his former work. It reinterprets that work as preparation. This makes *Liturgies of the Wild* a conversion narrative, though an unconventional one. The forest is not abandoned for the church. Instead, Orthodox liturgy gives Shaw a sacramental language through which church, body, story, landscape, and praise can again belong to one world. ### Folklore Retelling Shaw retells or invokes stories from several traditions: Arthurian romance, European wonder tales, Russian and Sámi narratives, biblical episodes, saints’ lives, and Indigenous teachings. He is an oral storyteller by vocation, and his primary interest is not textual reconstruction. He asks how a traditional story remains alive in contemporary speech and experience. This is important for evaluating the book. Folklorists often investigate variants, performance settings, communities of transmission, and historical change. Shaw’s method is more interpretive and initiatory. He follows the tale into personal and spiritual life. The method can disclose meanings overlooked by purely classificatory study, but it can also detach a story from the cultural conditions that gave it form. ### Christian Spiritual Theology The later chapters increasingly engage prayer, repentance, evil, praise, Christ, saints, and Divine Liturgy. Shaw explicitly states that myth is not a substitute for Christian faith. He understands the Gospel as historically true while also inexhaustibly symbolic.[^3] The book therefore differs from religious perennialism, which treats traditions as equivalent expressions of an underlying truth. Shaw’s direction is Christological: the many stories do not remain an undifferentiated spiritual collection but are gathered, sometimes uneasily, around what he understands as the decisive Christian story. ### Anti-Manual of Formation The publisher categorizes the book partly under inspiration and personal growth, but it resists the standard self-help promise of optimization. Shaw offers no morning routine guaranteed to produce enlightenment. His recurring themes—ordeal, limit, mortality, apprenticeship, service, and long attention—oppose the fantasy of rapid self-invention. It is better described as a book of **formation**. Self-help usually asks how the self can obtain a desired result. Formation asks what practices, communities, obligations, and encounters might reshape the self that is doing the desiring. ## What Does the Title Mean? The title joins two terms that modern culture often separates. **Liturgy** comes from the Greek *leitourgia*, historically associated with public service and later with the common action of worship. In Orthodox theology, Divine Liturgy is not a religious performance watched by an audience; it is the shared work of a gathered people through prayer, Scripture, gesture, offering, and communion.[^4] **Wild**, in Shaw’s vocabulary, does not mean chaotic, impulsive, or opposed to discipline. It names what has not been fully domesticated by utility: the more-than-human world, the irreducibility of a story, the mystery of God, the strangeness of a vocation, and the dimensions of experience that cannot be converted into content or commodity. The phrase *liturgies of the wild* therefore suggests repeated, embodied practices through which human beings become answerable to a reality larger than preference. Storytelling, mourning, fasting, prayer, pilgrimage, initiation, and praise may all become liturgical when they order attention and bind the person to community, place, ancestors, creatures, and God. The plural is significant. Shaw is interested in many formative actions. Yet the book’s Orthodox turn also prevents the title from meaning that every spontaneous encounter with nature is automatically sacred. Wildness requires discernment. A forest may disclose beauty, but it can also contain danger, projection, and fantasy. For Shaw, mature spirituality requires both enchantment and discipline—what the book figures as the tension between earthly “mud” and animating “breath.” ## Summary: The Main Points Because this is an essay collection rather than a continuous narrative, its argument is best summarized through its recurring movements: - **We are formed by stories whether or not we recognize them.** A culture that neglects inherited myth does not become story-free; it becomes more vulnerable to commercial, ideological, and technological narratives. - **A discarded personal history can become meaningful without becoming heroic propaganda.** Shame, privilege, failure, obscurity, and contradiction are not narrative waste. Honest attention can transform a private anecdote into something useful to others. - **Maturity requires both earth and spirit.** Human beings are creaturely, limited, aging bodies animated by imagination and divine breath. Discipline without inspiration becomes sterile; inspiration without form becomes instability. - **Initiation follows a pattern of severance, threshold, and return.** A person leaves an established identity, undergoes an ordeal or interval of uncertainty, and returns carrying a gift or responsibility for the community. - **A crisis does not become initiation automatically.** Without interpretation, accompaniment, and return, suffering may remain only trauma. Initiation requires that what was learned become serviceable beyond the isolated self. - **Remembering death intensifies rather than diminishes life.** Mortality breaks the spell of endless postponement and gives urgency to love, vocation, repentance, and gratitude. - **Passivity can disguise itself as preparation.** Endless research, fantasy, or visible busyness may conceal refusal. The folktale hero often begins by accepting a small, concrete summons rather than waiting for complete certainty. - **Passion must be refined rather than suppressed or indulged.** Desire becomes humanly meaningful through specificity, restraint, risk, fidelity, and acceptance of another person’s otherness. - **Prayer is embodied attention, not merely verbal request.** Silence, posture, repetition, song, candles, icons, fasting, and communal worship train the person to receive rather than manage the divine. - **Guilt can move toward repentance, while shame tends to imprison identity.** The purpose of confession is not endless self-accusation but restored relationship and changed action. - **Envy is a failure of praise.** Comparison makes another person’s gift feel like evidence of one’s deprivation. Naming envy and learning gratitude can redirect its energy. - **Dreams require discernment and labor.** A vivid dream is not automatically a revelation. A genuine vision persists, demands ethical response, and must eventually take durable form in the world. - **Limits are conditions of depth.** Attention, place, craft, love, and prayer all require exclusions. The refusal of limit produces breadth without intimacy and stimulation without transformation. - **Evil should neither be sensationalized nor dissolved into abstraction.** Shaw treats it as a force of division, compulsion, imitation, and relational obstruction, often concealed within what a culture calls normal. - **Praise is a culminating discipline.** To praise well is to perceive specifically, bless without flattery, and become capable of delight in what one does not possess. - **The “ancient good” is not a fantasy of returning to the past.** It is the recoverable capacity for reverence, courage, hospitality, restraint, story, and holy attention within present conditions. ## Principal Figures and Their Characteristics This book has no fixed cast of characters. It moves among autobiographical people, religious figures, and protagonists from traditional tales. The following are better understood as **principal presences** within Shaw’s argument. | Figure | Primary characteristics and role in the book | |---|---| | **Martin Shaw** | Narrator, mythographer, former musician, wilderness guide, and Christian convert. He presents himself as an apprentice as much as an authority: someone whose vocation is repeatedly revised by story, place, teachers, and prayer. | | **Wallace Black Elk** | Oglala Lakota teacher and formative elder. He represents a relational, site-specific wisdom in which language, weather, animals, ceremony, and responsibility remain connected. His presence initiates Shaw into a more animate understanding of the world. | | **Jesus Christ, often called Yeshua** | The theological center toward which Shaw’s mythic journey turns. Christ appears as historical person, divine mystery, wilderness-tested teacher, storyteller, and the pattern in which death and transformed life meet. | | **Parzival** | The gifted but immature Grail knight. His first failure is not lack of courage but lack of compassionate attention: he does not ask the wounded Fisher King the necessary question. His later wisdom joins ordeal to genuine interest in another. | | **The Fisher King** | A wounded ruler whose suffering is bound to the condition of the land. He represents pain that cannot be healed through conquest but awaits recognition, relationship, and the right question. | | **The hunter in the Firebird tale** | A questing figure drawn into danger by beauty and desire. His mistakes become part of an initiatory path rather than evidence that the journey should never have begun. | | **The Firebird** | Radiance, disturbance, imaginative fire, and the summons beyond passivity. Its brilliance is dangerous when pursued without grounding. | | **The faithful horse** | Counsel, patience, embodied intelligence, and steadiness. In relation to the Firebird, the horse represents the discipline required to carry vision without being consumed by it. | | **Akanida, Daughter of the Sun** | A bearer of pattern, song, beauty, and cultural gifts. The hostility she provokes reveals envy as resistance to another person’s radiance; her continued making becomes an answer to diminishment. | | **The sister of the six swans** | Fidelity, silence, costly labor, and restorative love. Her work for her enchanted brothers represents devotion that must endure misunderstanding without collapsing into display. | | **The Pedlar of Swaffham, or John of the Dreams** | A seemingly ordinary person who acts on a recurring dream and discovers that vision requires travel, risk, interpretation, and a return that benefits more than the dreamer. | | **Baba Yaga and other wild elders** | Threshold figures who do not conform to sentimental ideas of nurture. They test courtesy, courage, perception, and readiness; their danger is inseparable from their capacity to initiate. | | **Saints and desert teachers** | Witnesses to disciplined strangeness. They unite prayer, renunciation, service, and intimacy with creation, preventing “wild Christianity” from becoming merely aesthetic individualism. | The distinction between archetypal figure and historical person matters. Parzival can legitimately bear multiple interpretations because he belongs to a long literary tradition. Wallace Black Elk, however, was a particular Oglala person located within a history of colonial violence and contested Christian mission. Treating both simply as interchangeable “wisdom figures” would erase an ethical difference the reader must preserve. ## The Book’s Historical Development ### Publication *Liturgies of the Wild* was published in the United States by Sentinel on February 3, 2026, in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats. The American hardcover is 256 pages. Ebury Vine issued the British edition in the same year.[^5] The book arrived as a bestseller, bringing Shaw’s work to a wider audience than his earlier mythopoetic publications. Its thirteen chapters make visible the book’s architecture. It moves from story and initiation through mortality, desire, prayer, guilt, dreams, and evil before concluding with praise and “the ancient good.” The sequence resembles a formation process: recover a story, enter ordeal, confront the forces that deform desire, accept limits, and return capable of praise. ### Shaw’s Earlier Work The book grows out of roughly three decades of oral storytelling, teaching, wilderness vigils, and writing on myth. Shaw founded the Westcountry School of Myth, developed courses in oral tradition and mythic life, and has held academic teaching roles while remaining deliberately associated with performance and place-based practice.[^6] Earlier books such as *A Branch from the Lightning Tree*, *Scatterlings*, *Courting the Wild Twin*, and *Smoke Hole* established his characteristic concerns: wildness, initiation, personal story, ecological imagination, and the refusal to reduce myth to allegory. *Liturgies of the Wild* does not abandon those concerns. It places them within a more explicit Christian cosmology. Shaw has described his earlier identity as that of a “pagan romantic.” His return to Christianity developed gradually and became decisive around a 101-night Dartmoor vigil shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic. His eventual entrance into Eastern Orthodoxy surprised some readers who had interpreted his earlier work as an alternative to organized religion.[^7] That biographical transition is essential to the book’s history. It explains both its energy and its controversy. For some readers, the Christian turn completes Shaw’s long search for a sacred center. For others, it appears to subordinate the plural wildness of myth to a single doctrinal destination. ## The Longer History Behind the Book ### Romanticism, Folklore, and the Search for Lost Wholeness Shaw belongs to a long modern lineage of writers who turn to myth and folklore as a response to industrialization, abstraction, and disenchantment. European Romanticism treated folk traditions, medieval literature, landscape, and imagination as correctives to the narrowing tendencies of instrumental reason. The nineteenth-century collection of folktales was entangled with nationalism, philology, colonial classification, and the construction of supposedly ancient cultural identities. In the twentieth century, C. G. Jung read myths as expressions of archetypal psychic patterns; Mircea Eliade emphasized sacred time and ritual repetition; Joseph Campbell popularized comparative heroic structures; J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis defended myth as a serious vehicle of truth; and Robert Bly helped carry mythopoetic practice into poetry and adult formation. Shaw inherits much from this lineage, particularly its conviction that myth is not obsolete entertainment. But its history also supplies reasons for caution. Comparative mythologies can become so eager to discover universal patterns that they flatten local meaning. Scholars of myth increasingly emphasize cooperation between comparison and close attention to language, performance, history, and community.[^8] ### Myth and Ritual The book’s language of initiation and liturgy also enters a century-old scholarly discussion about the relationship between myth and ritual. Earlier theories often tried to identify one as the origin or explanation of the other. Contemporary approaches tend to be less totalizing, studying the ways narrative and ritual interact in particular communities rather than assuming a single universal structure.[^9] Shaw is less concerned with causal origins than with formative function. A story and a ritual can cooperate to move a person through crisis, establish memory, or bind a community to place. This is a defensible practical insight, provided it is not mistaken for proof that every culture understands initiation in the same way. ### Orthodoxy and the Sacramental Imagination The word *liturgy* becomes increasingly precise as the book develops. Eastern Orthodox worship joins Scripture, icon, incense, chanting, bodily gesture, fasting, calendar, and Eucharist. Shaw describes discovering in church the depth and interiority he had previously located primarily in forests and near the ocean.[^10] This experience supplies the book with a historical religious home. The natural world is not divine in itself, nor is it merely dead material. It is creation: real, charged with meaning, and distinct from its Creator. Shaw’s “wild” Christianity is therefore sacramental rather than simply pantheistic. Its theological promise is the reunion of beauty, discipline, body, place, and worship. Its risk is romanticization. Orthodox Christianity is not only aesthetic mystery, ancient chant, and saintly wilderness. It is also institution, doctrine, authority, ethnic history, political compromise, and ordinary parish life. A mature evaluation of the book should ask whether the attraction of liturgical beauty remains accountable to these less enchanted realities. ## Critical Evaluation ### What the Book Does Exceptionally Well First, it restores **imaginative density**. Shaw can make a familiar moral problem strange enough to be seen again. Envy becomes not a minor social irritation but an atmosphere that freezes gratitude. Passivity becomes a refusal of summons. Praise becomes a disciplined form of perception rather than emotional decoration. Second, the book offers a compelling account of **maturity**. Modern institutions often mark adulthood through age, employment, consumption, or legal status. Shaw asks whether a person has endured transformation, accepted limits, become responsible for a gift, and returned capable of service. His model of severance, threshold, and return is not universally sufficient, but it is illuminating. Third, he understands that **religion is embodied**. Belief is formed by posture, rhythm, beauty, repetition, silence, fasting, singing, and shared time—not only by agreeing with propositions. This insight is both theologically serious and supported by contemporary attention to ritual as formative practice. Fourth, Shaw refuses to make myth harmless. The old stories contain cruelty, appetite, death, impossible tasks, predatory forces, and ambiguous helpers. Their usefulness lies partly in giving symbolic form to experiences that therapeutic or managerial language may sanitize. ### Where the Book Requires Caution The prose sometimes treats “modernity,” “technology,” or “the culture” as if each were a single agent. The diagnosis is rhetorically effective but analytically imprecise. Digital platforms differ from medical technology; urban life differs across class and geography; many modern communities maintain dense ritual worlds. We may be not myth-impoverished so much as **myth-saturated and myth-unconscious**. The cross-cultural range also creates a problem of **provenance**. A tale is not merely an archetypal pattern available for universal use. It belongs to languages, tellers, ritual settings, historical pressures, and living peoples. Shaw’s reverence is evident, but reverence does not eliminate asymmetries of power or the possibility of appropriation. This is clearest in the role of Wallace Black Elk. Shaw presents him as a decisive teacher, while Wallace’s own opposition to organized religion was shaped by Christianity’s destructive involvement in Native communities. Shaw’s later Christian conversion cannot be narrated responsibly unless that colonial history remains visible.[^11] The tension does not invalidate the relationship or the book, but it should not be converted too quickly into providential foreshadowing. The book’s Christian culmination can also narrow its earlier plurality. A Christian reader may understand Christ as fulfillment; a non-Christian reader may experience the same structure as absorption. Shaw states his commitments openly, which is preferable to hidden universalism. Still, the interpretive cost should be acknowledged. Finally, the book offers formation rather than evidence-based intervention. Mythic reframing can be powerful, but it cannot replace psychiatric care, trauma-informed therapy, historical investigation, ecological policy, or political organization. A symbolic reading of depression, addiction, or social harm may deepen understanding; it should not erase medical, economic, and institutional causes. ## The Book’s Value in Modern Life ### Recovering Agency from Algorithmic Stories Digital platforms do not merely distribute stories. They select, repeat, intensify, and monetize them. Their preferred narratives reward outrage, speed, imitation, personal branding, and endless consumption. Shaw’s insistence on slow stories, embodied places, and difficult limits provides a practical counter-formation. The lesson is not to abandon technology for the forest. It is to ask liturgical questions of technology: What actions does this platform make habitual? What kind of attention does it reward? What desires does it rehearse? What image of the human person does repeated participation produce? ### Reframing Life Transitions Job loss, migration, illness, divorce, retirement, grief, conversion, and midlife change often dismantle identity before a new form becomes visible. The initiatory pattern of severance, threshold, and return can help people interpret such intervals without pretending that every suffering was designed for their benefit. The crucial modern insight is the **return**. Personal transformation is incomplete if it becomes private spiritual capital. Whatever is learned must re-enter relationships, work, community, or service. ### Restoring Death Literacy Modern societies often outsource dying and mourning to specialists. Shaw’s attention to mortality and communal grief resists this concealment. Remembering death can reorder priorities, deepen gratitude, and make reconciliation urgent. This is not morbid fascination. It is an ethical discipline. A life aware of its limit may become less easily captured by trivial urgency and indefinite postponement. ### Developing Ecological Attention Shaw’s emphasis on place encourages a shift from “the environment” as an abstract issue to actual watersheds, seasons, birds, weather, farms, streets, and neighbors. Ecological responsibility begins partly in perception: people rarely defend what they have never learned to notice or praise. But attention must lead toward material responsibility. Love of landscape should affect consumption, land use, energy, politics, and relationships with Indigenous sovereignty. Otherwise wildness becomes an aesthetic refuge for people whose economic life continues to damage the places they admire. ### Renewing Religious Practice For Christians, the book may reopen Scripture and worship as participatory realities rather than collections of information. Shaw is especially persuasive when describing prayer as a bodily apprenticeship and liturgy as a meeting of heaven and earth. For doubters or readers outside Christianity, the book can still sharpen questions about ritual, reverence, community, and ultimate commitment. Its value does not require agreement with every theological conclusion. It asks what practices make a person capable of sustained attention, truthful speech, repentance, courage, and praise. ## How to Use the Book Responsibly *Liturgies of the Wild* is better practiced than consumed. Several approaches preserve its gifts while addressing its limitations: 1. **Read slowly and sometimes aloud.** Shaw’s prose has oral rhythm. Hearing it makes its repetitions and tonal shifts more intelligible. 2. **Track the provenance of a story.** When a tale matters, learn where it comes from, which version Shaw uses, who has told it, and how its meanings have changed. 3. **Map a transition without romanticizing it.** Identify severance, threshold, and possible return, but do not assume that suffering was necessary or secretly beneficial. 4. **Name the stories currently forming you.** Include workplace narratives, family legends, national myths, advertising, political media, and technological promises—not only ancient tales. 5. **Practice one meaningful limit.** A limit on consumption, visibility, speed, or digital interruption can create the conditions for depth. 6. **Make praise specific.** Praise a person, creature, craft, or place in concrete language. Specific praise trains perception and resists envy. 7. **Retell stories in community.** Myth loses something when reduced to private interpretation. Conversation reveals meanings no solitary reader owns. 8. **Pair symbol with evidence.** Use mythic insight alongside historical research, professional care, scientific knowledge, and institutional analysis. ## Final Assessment *Liturgies of the Wild* is not a neutral introduction to mythology, a systematic theology, or a conventional manual for personal improvement. It is a work of mythopoetic Christian formation written by a storyteller whose vocation has moved from forest vigils toward the Divine Liturgy without ceasing to hear the forest. Its central achievement is the recovery of story as a serious mode of knowledge. Shaw reminds us that facts alone do not tell us how to inhabit grief, recognize a summons, endure uncertainty, resist envy, accept mortality, or praise what we cannot possess. Human beings require forms that educate desire as well as inform the intellect. The book should nevertheless be read with historical and ethical alertness. Stories are never ownerless. “Wildness” can become a romantic projection, and ancient wisdom can become another commodity when detached from the people and places that carried it. Christianity’s power to gather stories must remain accountable to Christianity’s history of displacing them. Read with those cautions, *Liturgies of the Wild* offers something rare. It does not promise escape from modern life. It asks us to become more perceptive within it: more capable of limit, more honest about death, more responsible for our stories, and more precise in praise. Its governing question is not “How can I optimize myself?” but “What kind of human being is this story asking me to become?” That is a question worth carrying into the woods, the church, the city, and the glowing screen. ## Related Reading - [[The Wesleyan Quadrilateral|The Wesleyan Quadrilateral: A Method for Faithful Discernment]] - [[Theodicy - The Trial of God|Theodicy: The Trial of God in a World of Suffering]] - [[The Brothers Karamazov - A Review|The Brothers Karamazov: Freedom, Guilt, and the Terrible Burden of Love]] - [[The Discipline of Nuance|The Discipline of Nuance: Thinking in Higher Resolution]] - [[Memento Mori - A Timeless Reminder of Mortality]] - [[Comedy]] - [[Conscience]] - [[Casey at the Bat]] - [[Sarcasm - The Art of Saying the Opposite]] - [[Hokum - The Charm of Nonsense]] - [[Invictus by William Ernest Henley]] - [[It Tolls for Thee - by John Donne - A Reflection on Connection, Mortality, and Modern Implications]] - [[Ennui - The Art of Existential Boredom]] - [[Diogenes of Sinope]] - [[Carthago Delenda Est]] - [[Ichabod-The Vanishing Glory — A Historical and Scholarly Exploration]] - [[John Milton-The Voice of the Blind Seer and Defender of Liberty]] - [[Home]] --- ## References [^1]: Martin Shaw, [*Liturgies of the Wild: Myths That Make Us*](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741189/liturgies-of-the-wild-by-martin-shaw/) (New York: Sentinel, 2026). [^2]: Martin Shaw, [*Liturgies of the Wild*—official sample](https://cdn.penguin.co.uk/dam-assets/books/9781846048913/9781846048913-sample.pdf) (London: Ebury Vine, 2026), contents. [^3]: “[In *Liturgies of the Wild*, Martin Shaw Takes on Myth and Christianity](https://orthodoxyinamerica.org/2026/03/03/in-liturgies-of-the-wild-martin-shaw-takes-on-myth-and-christianity/),” *Orthodoxy in America*, March 3, 2026. [^4]: “[The Liturgy](https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/doctrine-scripture/sources-of-christian-doctrine/the-liturgy),” *The Orthodox Faith*, Orthodox Church in America; “[Liturgy](https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/Liturgy),” *St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology*. [^5]: Penguin Random House, “[Liturgies of the Wild by Martin Shaw](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/741189/liturgies-of-the-wild-by-martin-shaw/)”; Shaw, [official UK sample and copyright page](https://cdn.penguin.co.uk/dam-assets/books/9781846048913/9781846048913-sample.pdf). [^6]: Penguin Random House, “[Martin Shaw](https://www.penguinrandomhouseretail.com/author/?authorid=2345060).” [^7]: “[Martin Shaw and Felix Marquardt on Religious Conversion, Being Vulnerable, and the Power of Myths](https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/comment/2023/07/05/martin-shaw-felix-marquardt-on-religious-conversion-being-vulnerable-and-the-power-of-myths),” Theos Think Tank, July 5, 2023. [^8]: Daniela Merolla, “[Myth, Theory and Area Studies](https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00130.x),” *Religion Compass* 3, no. 2 (2009): 226–238. [^9]: Robert A. Segal, “[Myth and Ritual](https://academic.oup.com/book/519/chapter-abstract/135274425),” in *Myth: A Very Short Introduction* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Clyde Kluckhohn, “[Myths and Rituals: A General Theory](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/harvard-theological-review/article/abs/myths-and-rituals-a-general-theory/6F453D3C437E29485C0573CA0E70B2E4),” *Harvard Theological Review* 35, no. 1 (1942): 45–79. [^10]: “[In *Liturgies of the Wild*, Martin Shaw Takes on Myth and Christianity](https://orthodoxyinamerica.org/2026/03/03/in-liturgies-of-the-wild-martin-shaw-takes-on-myth-and-christianity/).” [^11]: Jon M. Sweeney, “[Liturgies of the Wild](https://www.spiritualityandpractice.com/book-reviews/view/29761/liturgies-of-the-wild),” *Spirituality & Practice*, 2026.