In Conversation

Manda: This week’s guest, Clare Murphy, is an Irish story-weaver, an author, a teacher, a trainer and a storytelling consultant whose clients include the Premier League, the National Theatre, climate change scientists, first responders and limbless veterans. She’s a gatherer of world mythologies who seeks out the untold tales, the ones that were covered up by the hierarchies of blandness that came after them. She finds these and blows off the dust and breathes new life into them, so the rest of us can step off the beaten track with her and find new ways of being that could take us forward. Clare’s a magician with the spoken word, a fire spinner who understands the age old magic of our voices, and the ways a few words can shift us into new, expansive ways of seeing and being.

Manda: At the time we spoke. Clare had just completed the third edit of her book, The Spanking Goddess and Other Discarded Tales. And actually, no, she doesn’t tell us about that. We may have to record an adjunct to this podcast, or you may have to read the book. There’s a paragraph in an otherwise relatively well known myth in which one of the goddesses does what it says on the tin. It’s kind of fun. I will put a link in the show notes. Anyway, I don’t have edit envy. I’m at 40,000 words of the new book, and that’s maybe less than a quarter of the way through. So anybody at the edit stage, I’m endeavouring not to throw envy at them. Anyway, she was gearing up for her one woman show, which is called We All Came By Boat, which is going to be in Bristol 15th to 19th September at the Wardrobe Theatre. And yes, there is a link in the show notes. So that’s where we’re heading, into the world of language and magic and myth weaving, and the oldest of old stories brought forward, so that we can weave them into something new for the 21st century that will spark new light in all of us. So there we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Clare Murphy, gatherer of myths and weaver of entirely magical stories.

Manda: Clare Murphy, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. I have been looking forward to this for so long! Tell us how you are and where you are on this gorgeous summer day.

Clare: Hello Manda Scott. I have also been looking forward to this. I am standing on wooden floorboards in my house in Bristol and I am fizzy. I’m fizzy this morning because I’ve been hanging out inside myth all morning, because I thought that was the best way to get ready for our chat. So I haven’t looked at any emails, I haven’t gone near the phone. I haven’t gone near the inter-dimensional space. I’ve been in the other inter-dimensional space, so I feel really good.

Manda: That’s glorious. I am so envious. I’ve been dealing with dumper trucks all morning, and in between that, wrestling with a podcast schedule that suddenly fell apart. So before we started recording, you taught me two words of Irish, which I am going to try and pronounce without absolutely murdering your language, which is ‘Cupla focal’. Did I get it right? Which means ‘what’s the story?’

Clare: Well, no, it means ‘few words’. These are the cupla focal.

Manda: Oh, I see, right. There we go.

Clare: You’re thinking of what’s on my mug, which is “Cad é an scéal?”

Manda: That means ‘what’s the story?’ All right guys, so I already screwed up the Irish. Irish is such a gorgeous language. And you do sound like you should be way deep in Clare somewhere. Bristol is too close.

Clare: I know, I know, but your Irish is lovely. Because of course you’re coming from the Scottish, your relationship to the vowel sounds, you know, you find it easier to swim in those waters. And also any attempt to bring a language that has struggled back to life, the language will appreciate all your efforts, you know?

Manda: Yes. And we’re already deviating from what we thought. But I taught for a while at the vet school in Dublin, and periodically they would have an entire surgical lesson in Irish, if the surgeon spoke then everybody spoke Irish and it was the most gorgeous experience. To just feel it flowing through me, it made my marrow light up. It was very similar to when I was in Devon doing the Masters, which was ten years ago, when I used to go to Caroline Hillyer’s place. And she had worked with a bunch of Oxford forensic linguists (who knew such a thing?), and they had worked back to the old proto Gaelic that was the root of all the others. That would be the language that the Boudican tribes would have spoken. And she had written songs in that language. And I swear to you, there would be a group of women just in a village hall on Dartmoor singing these songs and absolutely that made my bones melt. It was so deep in the fibre of who we are. And Irish feels like it does. Scots as well, but I didn’t grow up in the Scots Gaelic part. I used to go there, but you know, we were south of Glasgow, which is a bit tame. But Irish is so gorgeous. Anyway, we’ve already deviated. So you have just got to the third edit of your book. Have I got book envy or have I got book envy?

Clare: I mean it’s only my first book though. You’re on book what? 11?

Manda: Twenty one. One of them’s not been published. I’m sorry to tell you, it doesn’t get any easier. And the number of edits never gets any less. I think we did 17 on the last one. But you’re doing not fiction, you’re not going to have to go back and completely scrub an entire storyline and start again. Tell us. I’ve already lost how to say it. Tell us what the story is, tell us about your book.

Clare: So the title is The Spanking Goddess and Other Discarded Tales, and it’s a collection of Irish myth. So I’m retelling. I’m not inventing, but I’m retelling Irish myth. And it’s the myth that I was never raised on.

Manda: The ones that got lost.

Clare: The ones that got lost, the ones that got set aside, the ones that got overlooked. And, you know, because I see all your incredible books, you know about Fionn mac Cumhaill and Cú Chulainn. You know about these big epic heroes and I’m sure loads of your listeners do. So Fionn mac Cumhaill, for those of you who don’t know, is considered a human hero warrior class. And Cú Chulainn is considered a demigod and he’s a half human, half god. Those are the stories we got raised with. We got raised with Saint Patrick. We got raised with the salmon of wisdom, the children of Lir tragedy. And so you’re told those, by the time you’re seven you know all of those.

Manda: Wow.

Clare: Which is questionable, right? Like you wonder what that’s doing to the psyche when the thing that you’re raised on is violence and tragedy as your primary myth.

Manda: But you also had, Cú Chulainn was taught by women. I mean, you had warrior women in there. It wasn’t all violence and tragedy.

Clare: You did. Yes, you did have warrior women in Scotland. And so the greatest warriors in the world were on the Isle of Skye.

Manda: Yes, yes.

Clare: And so Cú Chulainn, when he realises that he’s going to become this, there’s a prophecy that he’s going to become this epic hero, and he needs to find the best teacher. And he finds one woman and she’s not good enough. So he makes his way up to the Isle of Skye, and there’s two women who are competing warriors. So you’re right, the women are in there, but they’re still sort of the backdrop. And he dominates them in our version. But in the book I found a brilliant woman from the Isle of Skye called Swire. And she collected this in 1909, and I only found this out because I was on a boat near Elgol on the Isle of Skye, and I got chatting to a boatman who started telling me about the connections between Skye and Egypt. That there is a theory that one of the warriors that trained with Scáthach ends up ruling Egypt.

Manda: Oh, cool.

Clare: But he tells me about her book. I go and find her book, and I find a version of the Cú Chulainn myth. Because your Cú Chulainn stories are very different from ours, which is so radically different because he doesn’t defeat Scathach, he doesn’t pin her to the ground and put a sword to her throat and demand what he wants. They actually achieve peace and friendship through hazelnuts.

Manda: How did they do that?

Clare: So there in the middle of this epic battle, which is night and day, day and night, and there are all kinds of wild sounds. Because these warriors are trained. She knows all the feats. So she can do the salmon leap and the feet of the cat and the feet of the shield and the precision throw and the hero’s scream and all of this. So what you hear, the soundscape coming down from the mountain over those days and nights is horrific. And her daughter is trying to get them down, because first she reckons that Scathach will kill Cú Chulainn, and that’ll be sad because he’s the greatest warrior she’s ever seen in all her years as Scathach’s daughter. Then she’s worried that they might kill each other, in which case that’s the end of the school. So the daughter, she thinks about everything she knows about her mother, and the first plan she comes up with is to milk a deer and make deer’s milk cheese.

Manda: That’s hard.

Clare: And she wafts the smell up the mountain. That doesn’t work. So she slaughters a deer and roasts the meat, hoping that the smell of the meat will lure them down. They’ve been going for nearly a week. Doesn’t work. And then finally, she’s walking around at her wit’s end and she sees the hazelnuts. And she knows and you know and I know that the hazelnut is the nut of wisdom, that it’s part of the otherworld realm, and that the wisdom contained in a hazelnut drops into the river and it’s swallowed by the salmon and that’s how the salmon of wisdom happens in Ireland. And so back then, that idea that the hazelnut had held it’s wisdom. So she sees the hazelnuts, she grabs them, she roasts them. She slaughters another deer, she roasts more deer meat and she stuffs the hazelnuts in, and so the smell of deer meat and hazelnuts wafts up the mountainside. And both warriors stop.

Manda: So cool.

Clare: And they think to themselves, the hazelnut will give me the wisdom I need to defeat my foe. So they come down the mountainside, they sit down at the table. Silence. They’re all blackened and bloodied and bruised, right. And they each eat in silence. And as they crunch into the hazelnuts, they’re waiting for the wisdom and waiting for the wisdom. And then it arrives in their minds, really clear: I have met my equal.

Manda: Yes!

Clare: I will not defeat this foe. And Scathach reaches her hand out and Cú Chulainn takes her hand and they swear fealty to each other in that moment. And they are bound in friendship and a type of loyalty. And they swear that even if the sky might fall, they will come to each other’s aid. And that only exists in Scotland. And I put that in the book.

Manda: Wow. That makes all the hair on my head and my arms… Oh, that’s so cool. And I hadn’t heard that one.

Clare: No, it’s in a tiny little aside in the front of her Legends from the Isle of Skye book. So you have to go digging.

Manda: Wow. So it’s been an oral history for centuries. I want to write the novel of that now. And I’m writing something else.

Clare: She collected. Yes, do please.

Manda: Because yes and they don’t have to become lovers. They understand that they’re equals. And the wisdom is we are better together.

Clare: It’s interesting, isn’t it? And I’m curious because you’ve written so many books and you’ve swam in that water, because you just said I want to write that book. How many stories right now are trying to get your attention?

Manda: Many, many, many, many. And, and my attention is very fractured because, you know, fires and dumper trucks and chicken chaos and world. But yeah, that’s an interesting one. Was it Elizabeth Gilbert who wrote about a poet and the poem would come rolling down like tumbleweed. And if you didn’t, sometimes she would run in from the fields and write it backwards to get it down before it went on. And if you didn’t, it would go on to somebody else. And I have heard stories of people who’ve had an idea for a book, and then they’ve read that book. And it’s an obscure idea, it’s not, you know, man murders woman who falls in love with somebody else, which seems to be everybody’s standard book. It’s really completely weird and then it’s there. And I have five, six, part finished books sitting on my hard drive. If somebody picks one of them and finishes them, it’ll be my fault if I haven’t got around to it.

Manda: So there was a newspaper article where a guy was a forensic osteologist, what he did was, in the days before AI could do it, he would look at a skull and he could build the face. He was the best in the world, and he was invited to France to build the face of a king whose tomb they had. And while he was there, they showed him what they’d rescued from the tomb, because we went to visit in the end, Faith and I, and it’s the most ugly monstrosity of a tomb you have ever seen. It had marble cherubs all over it, and it was black and white marble. It was disgusting. And it had been there since 1400 something. And every time there was another wave of revolutions, the Huguenots or whoever, they would come in with the mallets and they would smash the tomb to bits, which I think was an act of good taste, but then the monks would build it again, equally bad. But each time they would rescue the bones and hide them and then bring them back. And it was the King, Louis the… Something small… And his wife and seven knights who had been buried with him, which was a huge honour to be buried with the King. But all the bones had got mixed up in all these multiple destruction of the tomb episodes, so they handed in this box and went, sort it out, hey? You recognise bones. So this is the king, we have pictures of the king, I can build you his face no problem. This is the king. His wife died in her early 30s in childbirth. She was a very small woman with bird like bones, here’s his wife. Seven knights. So they start sorting out the bodies and they can identify six of the knights. They get to the last one and he says, this is a woman. She died in her late 50s or early 60s and she had been trained to wear full armour from a very early age. Because it changes your bone structure, you’re wearing 60 pounds of solid metal. And he said, this was Marguerite de Valois and this was Joan of Arc. And they closed the tomb and they threw him out of France, and they never let him back in again. And nobody knows what they did to those bones.

Manda: And I read that in The Independent in, I don’t know, 2009 or something? And I emailed my editor at the point; this is my story, you cannot let anybody else do it. This is mine, I’m having it. I have to finish what I’m writing now, I get that, but I am having this story. And she went, you realise I can’t actually do that, don’t you? You have to, you have to! Nobody else can have that story. And it turned out, as far as I can tell, there was not a single other novelist in the world who ever read The Independent. So I did get to write that story and it’s very exciting and so that’s the idea. I don’t have any claim on any other ideas now. That that one the Gods held for me. So that’s it. But yeah, lots of stories. Anyway, we were talking about your book, and I got sidetracked.

Clare: Well, do you know the words? I’ll teach you some more Irish shall I?

Manda: Yes, yes! And all the listeners.

Clare: You’re going to love this one: Iambas forosnai. And it’s something you’re very familiar with, actually. It’s the fire in the head.

Manda: Oh, okay.

Clare: It’s the light of inspiration and it’s all the way through Irish myth. And there’s all these different things written about Iambas Forasnai, that you have to stand in a certain position to get it. You know, there’s one written where the poet had to stand on one leg and close his eyes and roll his tongue back, and then the Iambas would hit him. And then there’s some texts around the Iambas being illegal; it’s so powerful you can’t be doing it. But I was talking with a friend of mine, Adam Houlton, who’s a writer based out in Cardiff, he runs Goosegog Books. And he found a similar word in Welsh, which is, I’m gonna leap for it here… So Welsh people, please send us in your comments… but it’s something like AWEN. There’s a word for it in every language, but that’s what you’re feeling and I’m feeling whenever we dance, when I get on stage and I tell myth, which is one of the great joys of my life, and I’ve been very lucky to do it for 20 years. But when I get there, I call it dancing the Light fantastic.

Clare: So if I’m there, the myths are there, the audience are there, we all go together, we all come back at the end. And everything is moving as it needs to, right? And there’s lots of work and prep and everything has to go into that. But you still don’t know if it’s going to happen. Musicians know this really well. But then we all enter the light fantastic. We all get a touch of that Iambas Forosnai. We go to the place where the myths are and we come back at the end.

Manda: Yes.

Clare: And I think really good books do that. Really good books work as a portal, as a threshold, and we need to go to that space. Like you have at least 11, 12 more ideas just waiting behind the idea you’re currently working on. I have no doubt, because I saw your eyes light up as you were like, which one do I tell her about? Once you start crossing that threshold regularly, it becomes more about what do I bring back that’s useful? What do I carry that’s useful?

Manda: Sure. Yes. Writing doesn’t become easier, but the process becomes much more familiar. And therefore for you, when you’re on the stage, there’ll be a trust in the process now, I guess. Even though it might fall apart this time. I think it’s like teaching. Lou and I are often ‘what are we going to teach?’ In the afternoon. Not a clue, but we’ll know when we get there. And no plan ever survives first contact with reality. So yours? I’m sure there’s no point planning in the end, it’s just not going to happen.

Clare: You can prepare.

Manda: Yes, that’s different.

Clare: It’s good to have plans, I’ve had lots of plans. And of course the show itself, The Spanking Goddess, she had a fixed shape, but I ended up moving the stories around. So the structure itself was fine, it kept, but then I tried loads of different versions, because storytellers have no fourth wall. So we have constant live relationship, we try for right relationship with audience, which means that it’s alive. So it has to be alive, which means you can’t recite. Well, you can recite, but you have to be open to that thing that happens when you teach, of something arises and you go, this seems important now. And you draw from all your experience, don’t you?

Manda: And you’re drawing from who’s there. It’s the energy in the room, that’s the thing. And a different audience will will bring you different things and you will take from them or weave with them. It’s not a give and take, it’s more of a let’s weave together, however much the audience is conscious of what’s happening. And it feels to me that as we move into whatever it is humanity is evolving into, that consciousness will become sharper and more fiery and more aware of what it’s doing so that that flow becomes more expansive. Tell us about the spanking goddess, though, because this is the show you showed me earlier, the spiral of your design of the show.

Clare: I showed you the new show, which is coming next month, the pictures were. We All Came By Boat, which is kind of the next iteration after Spanking Goddess.

Manda: Okay, well, tell us about the book, tell us about the show later. Tell us about the book first, because the book is the Spanking Goddess.

Clare: Yeah. So the book is 30 myths, 29/30 still deciding.

Manda: You’re on edit three and you still deciding?

Clare: Well, I need permission on one. Every story in the book comes from multiple sources, many, many, many, many, many sources. And this one only comes from one, so I’m just waiting on one source permission.

Manda: Okay, cool.

Clare: But featured in the book are things like the Maggot Goddess, Caoránach who…

Manda: I want to know.

Clare: Comes from a maggot that was found on the shin bone of Fionn mac Cumhaill’s mother, and he was carrying her shin bone in his bag. And you’ll notice that his bag was the crane skin bag that was made by Manannán mac Lir. Now, for your listeners, Manannán mac Lir is the god of the sea, the god of the oceans, and his bag that he fashioned.

Manda: After whom, hang on, after whom the Isle of Man is named.

Clare: After whom the Isle of Man is named, of course. Yes. So he was between the islands, of course, because he’s the ocean. But he definitely played on all of the islands. So the crane skin bag, when you open it, if the tide is out, the bag will look empty. If the tide is in, you’ll be able to see everything in the bag. And in the bag is the hip of a whale, so the the rib cage of a whale. It has the king of Lochlann’s shears, it has a shield, it has Manannán mac Lir’s shirt. It has these enormous items that all fit inside the bag. And there’s this oral tale that was gathered up near Lough Derg. And it was Fionn mac Cumhaill and Conan, one of the warriors, busy having a chat. And there sat by the edge of the lake and the bag falls open and Conan can see the bone, and he knows it’s a human bone. And he says who’s that? And Fionn says, my mother. That’s my mother. And Conan starts laughing and says, which one? Because it was commonly known that Fionn was birthed by one and raised by two.

Clare: And he had three mothers, really. He had Muirne, Bodhmall and Liath Luachra. And Liath Luachra and Bodhmall are the two women of the forest, are the ones that taught him how to run faster than a deer, how to catch a duck in flight, how to learn the songs of the forest. And he says, you know, he mentions which mother it is and I just wanted to keep her close. So he has her shinbone. And Conan sees on the shinbone something’s moving. So he grabs it and it’s a maggot. And he says, I bet this would come to something great. And he flicks the maggot, and when she hits the lake, she starts to grow. She doubles in size, she doubles in size, she doubles in size, she doubles in size, she doubles in size until she’s so huge. She is this massive maggot goddess.

Manda: Wow.

Clare: And Conan’s just standing there not knowing what he’s done, you know? And she swallows him and he goes right down her gullet and the acids inside her body are burning him. And so he’s naked now, and he’s inside her stomach and he finds his knife and he cuts his way out. He just cuts everything he can find. And suddenly it’s cold lake water, it’s not the stomach acid and it’s kissing his face. And he swims to shore and Fionn pulls him out. And he puts poultices all over his body. And once he knows Conan is alright he starts laughing, because there is not a scrap of hair left on Conan’s head.

Manda: All burned off!

Or anywhere else on his body. Conán Maol, bald Conan. It’s all burned off. And there are some that say that he killed her, that he killed the Caoránach. But there’s others that say you can’t kill her, that she comes back every year and she grows larger every year. And the story is telling you, you have to be careful if you find yourself on the edge of Lough Derg. Now, if you sit with that story, so it gets it gets told a lot that it was Saint Patrick. And Saint Patrick comes along to Lough Derg. You know, this happened with Christians who came along and re-mythed.

Manda: Yeah, they just have to steal everything.

Clare: There’s this remything process which happens. And you’ve been part of this remything, of bringing Boudicca back in, of bringing bolder mythological thinking. But there’s always been this shifting in mythological narratives, those in control and power deciding which symbols get kept.

Manda: The Romans did it, to be fair. It’s not just…

Clare: The Romans did it, the Greeks did it. The Hebrew priests did it in the Jewish faith, like it’s been done all over. But what they do is they tell, you know, this is the older myth and they just eradicate what was before. So there’s a version of that with Saint Patrick, which I don’t find that interesting because it gets too much air time. And I think Caoránach is a nod to something far older, that Ryan Eisler got to in The Chalice and the Blade, you know, that she wrote back in ’89. Which is that we had a more sentient mythology, we had a more integrated, indigenous, connected, alive mythology. We moved into a dominator coloniser mythology because of various powers, right? Depending on how far back we want to go. And we’re emerging out of that now. And so I wanted to put the Caoránach in the book because all the old serpent symbols are really important.

Manda: Yeah.

Clare: Right. And you know this, but I’m going to stop talking in a second, I get too excited. But if the mythological reference, if the symbol in the myth disappears, our relationship to it in the real world is very badly damaged. So look at our waterways right now; serpents are tied to waterways. So, you know, we, I think, have a duty of care, as people who carry myth; you and me and everyone else who’s interested in myth. Is to go back in and say what’s missing? So that’s what the book is; it’s a trail of breadcrumbs for all of us. And I’m hoping somebody reads it and goes and finds 30 more, right, because we need it, don’t we?

Manda: Yeah. Yes. And let’s deepen into this. I want to know more of the stories in the book, but waterways and connections to serpents, but also there’s something about the maggot that is the cleansing and it’s the carrion eating. In the way that crows and ravens are and battlefields and everything of death and life. So I’m exploring ideas. We are treating our waterways so badly. I don’t know, I’m sure it’s not the same in Ireland, but it definitely is the same where you’re in Bristol now. How can we help seed the stories to create what you were describing with the fire and the illumination and the give and take of the flow of energy, that inspires people to step beyond the rigid confines of our current culture? Into a place of caring and heartfelt ness and embodiment and actual connection that gets us beyond all the headmind stuff and into the core of who we are. Do you find that happening when you’re live and with a show and telling the stories?

Clare: Yes, and. So I did a story about quantum physics and mythology, and it was called Universe. And I remember this guy coming up to me in Sweden afterwards. He was one of the musicians who played before me on the stage, and he said, all of my life I’ve been afraid to look at the night sky, I find it terrifying. This is the first time I feel a sense of love for the sky. I was like, what? So there’s that direct thing, which is story. Not just myth, but story builds pathways of empathy, always has. So it does that through releasing oxytocin in the brain. Also dopamine, you get rewarded. So we automatically feel for whatever is in the story, right? And that is something that we need to be mindful of and be practising, because what we’re being bombarded with is a lot of really toxic stories. A lot of stories of despair, and everything is ending and breaking and there’s no way out. So mythology never went away. Folklore never went away. But it did migrate into mass media. Always people with power are going to be very clever about these kinds of things, some of them very clever, some of them unintentionally stupid, but using it in a clever way. So first of all, be careful what you listen to. So it’s often referenced in Celtic mythology, and stop me if I go too far down too many rabbit holes; there are seven ways in to the soul. So the seven pathways to the soul: the ears, the eyes, the nose and the mouth.

Manda: So two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth makes seven. Yes.

Clare: And as you know, they took the head of the warrior whenever they won because they believed the soul of the warrior lived in the head. So what I take from that is it’s really important what travels down these seven sacred highways, these seven sacred roads. So what we eat really matters. What we smell really matters. What we see really matters. What we listen to really, really, really matters.

Manda: And what we say. Because that also.

Clare: And what we say, what stories we carry. So coming and listening to myth, or reading. Like your book, Any Human Power. We’re going to circle back to that, because you’ve done with a novel what people do with myth on stage. So we need to circle back to that, because you’re a threshold walker, right? I drank that book. I drank it like water.

Manda: You’re a wonder. Thank you.

Clare: So we need to train ourselves on good myth, good story. Be careful what you listen to. I’m not saying avoid the news, I’m saying be rigorous in who your storytellers in your life are. So, like Carole Cadwalladr is a really good source for objective news, or Novara media. Be sensible, because your ears are sacred, right? But the other thing is how can we rebuild these pathways to make water sacred in England again? And I’d say it’s already happening.

Manda: That’s true. There’s a lot of people working very hard.

Clare: It’s so exciting. And you’ve got to remember too, everybody feels terrible. Like everyone listening to this podcast feels terrible, we’re all feeling terrible. And we feel this burden. And I mean, I’m ex Roman Catholic, so I feel especially bad about everything.

Manda: I don’t know, your Pope’s doing amazing things at the moment. Of all the people in the world he’s doing really cool stuff.

Clare: Not my pope, but fair play to him. Not my pope, not my religion anymore. They had a good run. But we all feel terrible, and we feel very responsible. And it’s a bit like the trick of making the individual recycle, but not making Coca-Cola recycle.

Manda: Yes quite. Or not making the fossil fuel companies do anything because we’re all busy doing our tiny little bit. Yes.

Clare: So when you say how do we rebuild the pathways in the individual? I say they’re already there. So you’ve got a woman in Bristol called Meg, who’s a poet and a performance artist, and she married the River Avon.

Manda: Oh, cool.

Clare: You’ve got Paul Powlesland, who runs lawyers for nature, and he’s been cleaning up various rivers. The environmental agency tried to fine him for cleaning up the river Roding.

Speaker 5: What?

Clare: Yeah. You know, bureaucracy is a wonderful thing. England’s very good at bureaucracy. But Paul Powlesland, and forgive me, Paul, if you’re listening to this, because I don’t know how to pronounce your last name. I’m going to pronounce it like an Irish person. He went into court one day and brought a vessel of water and swore on the River Roding, because he understood law. And so instead of having to swear on a Bible that he didn’t believe in, you have to swear on something that you hold sacred, and he held water sacred. And what he’s done is he’s telling a different story. He’s an English lawyer who holds water sacred. You’ve got Surfers Against Sewage. You’ve got the new TV show that came out, dirty water.

Manda: Dirty Business.

Clare: You’ve got Jeremy Clancy, this filmmaker who’s making a piece on the river right now. So actually, I think, especially people that listen to you, people are already doing it. And we’re emerging from this passiveness. We’re emerging from being a part of a machine, being a cog, being individual, having to do it, capitalism, all of that stuff which told us go it alone, don’t help anybody else. And you start to see the human mycelium network is connecting and it’s picking up speed. So I would say, what stories we tell, you and I. So storytelling is an act of transmission and you can transmit absolutely anything directly from your body into your listeners body. I’m going to jump slightly sideways here. But Oracy is a lot older than literacy. So literacy is only, mass literacy is only about 500 years old, but literacy itself as a human act.

Manda: Hundreds of thousands probably.

Clare: I mean, well, literacy, the writing is debateable, right. So if you’re going for cave paintings, yes, you’ve got hundreds of thousands. If you’re going for writing as script, thinking of ourselves in terms of words and sentences beyond symbols; maybe 10,000 years. But Oracy definitely older than literacy. It’s the big sister, but it’s often treated as the little sister, right?

Manda: Yes. And we recently discovered that whales have a language similar to Chinese, and they have accents. And so it probably goes back long before we were recognisably human, doesn’t it? We could tell stories.

Clare: It goes back to what you said really early on. You talked about the feeling in your body when you listened to that language being spoken, whether it was Irish or whether that was a really ancient form of Gaelic, that was spoken here in the time of Boudicca. Because frequency, and the quantum physicists will back us up on this, frequency carries knowledge, right? So sound frequency carries knowledge. And it was only 2011, and this was part of the universe show that I made. In 2011 the Planck telescope in the European Space Agency were looking at the background radiation of the universe, because you know, you do that on a Monday. And they were picking through it and they noticed a sound wave that they hadn’t detected before. So they tracked that sound wave back across time and located it to the when of oh, I might get the number wrong, 280,000 years after the Big Bang. And it is the birth song of the universe. It’s the sound of the universe singing in creation. And you and I that swim in the oceans of world mythology, we know that most world myth has silence, darkness and sound as part of our origin story. So quantum physics is always busy, it’s always catching up. But they’re good about it. They’re good about it. They’ll admit it, you know.

Manda: They’re all mythologists too. They do know that.

Clare: And they get more and more spiritual the longer they stay in quantum physics, unsurprisingly.

Manda: Yeah, for sure.

Clare: But I say that because the act of oracy is incredibly powerful. So what we say matters. But we are bombarded in a way our ancestors never were. By more information, not knowledge but information, far more information than maybe all of our ancestors combined, in our life.

Manda: And gut level stuff designed to trigger the parts of us that are easily triggered. It’s not even useful information. It’s all designed to put us off balance.

Clare: It is maybe, but it’s also just, oh, look, we have a new thing, let’s play with it.

Speaker 5: Yeah. Okay.

Clare: And let’s shout. But what’s happening is a cumulation, a sort of increase in density, of the bad stories that were already gaining traction through like the Hollywood machine and things like that, you know? Which is, it’s the overdose of the hero’s journey, right? We’ve been mass consuming the hero’s journey since about 1972. I’m saying all that because stories are an actual transmission. Every single human on the planet has this ability. And you can transmit whatever you want. So the question is, like you said earlier, what comes out of your mouth is important. That’s sacred. And you can literally place courage into a heart of another person, or you can place fear.

Clare: I’ll tell you a little story of something that directly happened to me. There’s things that have happened to me in my storytelling life that are so shocking. So I’m telling in a school, I’m teaching storytelling in a school in Birmingham, and I’m working with ten and 11 year old boys and we’re working in the library. And one of my techniques is I tell a story, and then I get them to tell the story and play with the story. And one of them is the storyteller, and one of them is the director, you know, and then they swap. But everyone in my workshops gets the chance to be a speaker. And we just do it simultaneously. Because once you start finding your ancient oral self, the power there is unbelievable. So anyway, I’m going around and I’m pointing and saying you’re the storyteller, you’re the director. And then I get to this boy and I say, you’re the storyteller and his friend goes, miss, um, he doesn’t talk. And I said, that’s fine. And I turned to the other boy and I say, you’re the storyteller, you’re the director and I look at the boy who doesn’t say anything, and I say, but you’re the observer. And he nods. And I go grand. We do the exercise, I come back and I’m asking people’s opinions. So I ask the boy who’s the storyteller and how was he as a director? And I turn to the observer and I say, and how did they do? And he says, well, miss, I thought he was actually a really good storyteller and I thought being a director looked really hard. And I was like, all right. And I walked on. And the teacher came right over to me and she got me into the corner and she’s like, what did you just do? And I was like, what? What?

Manda: Because he’s never spoken.

Clare: He’s a selective mute.

Manda: Wow.

Clare: He doesn’t speak. Hasn’t for four years.

Manda: But the stories, the stories are so powerful.

Clare: The s-t-o-r-i-e-s, they work around trauma. Not always, but they work around heartache. They work around despair. I have endless stories like that of things that have happened, for myself included, but for other people. So storytelling is an act of transmission. So to all of your listeners, like I carry stories of people you interview of these amazing projects that are going on all over the world. Because when someone here in England hears that, or maybe they hear about Paul Powlesland and the lawyers for nature, and they go, well, if he can do that, what can I do?

Manda: Right. Right.

Clare: And it becomes contagious. And I’m more interested, as everything breaks, I’m more interested in we stitch each other back into the collective fabric.

Manda: Yeah. And I’m thinking you said oxytocin and dopamine, and definitely. But I think also serotonin. Because that serotonin mesh of connection is what we’re missing. That’s the hollow ache in our heart that we don’t have. That’s when Frances Weller says that the first time we open our eyes, we’re expecting to see 40 pairs of eyes looking back through the firelight at us with care and wonder and honouring and cherishing. And what we see is probably a white room and we’re lucky if there’s a pair of eyes at all and they don’t care about us. And that. That connection and that sense of being seen and honoured for who we are and loved for who we are and welcomed into the wider web. That’s what we crave. And that’s what the dopamine will never fill. But stories, stories can help us place ourselves in the web and give ourselves a sense of anchoring. And I could put the hazelnuts in the venison and waft it up the hill. That would be a thing I could do. I could grow the hazels. I could gather the nuts. I could call in the deer. Whatever it is that gives us a sense of being and belonging and possibility that’s different to the narratives that are being spun in the outer world.

Clare: And the collector of the hazelnuts is as important as the maker of the pond, is as important as the tender of the chickens, is as important as the grandmother who’s stirring the pot. So in Ireland, England, Scotland, Wales, America, Turtle Island, so-called America, Australia so-called. We have been telling stories that only have singular heroes.

Manda: Yeah.

Clare: And there’s no belonging then for everybody else, there’s no belonging then if you’re not willing to go out and kill something. There’s no value or worth. And actually most other mythologies, and this is what you’re getting at with your work; I mean the role of crows and dogs in Any Human Power. So just to sidestep, I thought that book was not a fiction. I just wanted to read it because you’d written it. So I went and grabbed it and I was like, oh, it’s probably about how to fix the world and I don’t know if I’m ready. I don’t know if I’m ready, for ages. And then finally I said, I’m just going to pick it up and I’ll do what I do with all books: I opened it in the middle and I fell into the pages and went, what is this? And I went back. And then I met the crows.

Manda: Right. First page, in fact. Right.

Clare: And I went, oh, oh, I’m going to stay here. I tried very hard to read it slowly. It was very difficult. Matthew was laughing at me because it was so good. I was like, I have to put it down, put it down, make it last longer.

Manda: I have not paid Clare to say this, listeners.

Clare: No, but my point is, my point is, is that you recentered humans. They were very important your humans, and you had an ensemble, which I loved. But the trees and the crows and the dog had agency. And it’s not that hard to do.

Manda: And the salmon.

Clare: And the salmon. Oh my God, the salmon. Oh. And she doesn’t get why the salmon is a big deal till everybody else is like, sorry, who came to visit you?

Manda: Yes!

Clare: Do you know what I mean? And you did that. And I think that’s what this time is calling for. And it’s not that hard to do. As in, it was hard to write the book, I’m sure, but it felt like it just flowed out of you. I mean, you wrote it so quickly in my mind.

Manda: 17 edits, Clare. Remember that.

Clare: I can’t believe that.

Manda: You should have seen the first draft. It was very different.

Clare: Well, that’s the process, isn’t it? You’re distilling. You’re distilling and distilling.

Manda: Distilling and get a good editor. Those things. People are listening who are writing, get the editor you trust who when they go, you’re just gonna have to throw that away and do something different you believe them and you don’t fight.

Clare: Yeah. Editors that maybe say nice things at the same time as saying you have get rid of all that?

Manda: Yeah. Of course. Yes. A good editor will always do that. Yes. This bit’s amazing. That bit maybe not quite so much, but yeah.

Clare: Would you tell us a little bit about your relationship to crows?

Manda: Sure. I have a big long crows feather tattooed on the inside of my right arm, that then fragments at the top and becomes multiple separate crows. And I got it done on the 10th anniversary of when I started teaching, which was more or less about six months after the 10th anniversary of when the first Boudicca book came out. What do I need to say about crows that would be useful? The Crow is the guardian of one side of the northwest gate on my altar, on our altar, the teaching altar. And so I honour the crow every morning for standing in the black and white place of clarity; for their integrity, for their helping me, showing me what clear intent is, and for being the bringers of intuition. And yet also the crow, it’s more complicated than that but let’s not go into too much detail. If my heart is feeling disbalanced or not alive in the way that I want it to be, that it can be alive, then the Crow is one of the aspects that I will call on to  bring aliveness back in, because they stand at that interface between life and death. They are there to to make that journey back and forth so that we can make the journey back and forth. So that when we make it in one direction and probably not coming back into this life, it’s an effortless journey. And we can make it with with excitement and a sense of adventure, which our culture just doesn’t have.

Manda: And other cultures know that. And we used to know. Caesar said of the Britons, that they treat death like they treat taking off a shirt. And it’s really hard to fight battles against people who don’t care about dying. You know, that’s the Berserkers in the Norse warrior lines. It’s someone who genuinely doesn’t care is really hard to fight, if you’ve got people on your side who really don’t want to die. Once you get two lots who don’t care, then it’s a whole different thing. And the new book that I’m writing just now, there’s a group of people who can’t die. They’re not people. They’re emanations of the soul of the planet, taken physical form. And it’s not going to be fun being immortal on a dead planet. And so how can they also help us to fix things? And they see death as a gift. Humanity arose, in the mythology that I’m creating, humanity arose because one of them discovered a way back to the source and led 13 x 99 others. And that was death. Going back to the source and then being reborn and having had that renewal and aliveness and not the jadedness of actually having been alive for several million years. And have got, you know, however long until the sun dies to go. And they’re deeply honouring of and to an extent envious of the capacity to go back to the source and then return.

Manda: And I think how can we? One of the books that hasn’t come out yet is called It’s Only Hell If You Remember. And, and that’s somebody who’s working in Silicon Valley and actually does die, but then they bring him back because they’ve managed to work out how and he’s there, he’s at the source and he gets dragged back. And at the boundary the question is, do you want to remember? Because if you do, it’s going to be very bad. Or we can let you forget. And he goes, no, no, I need to remember. And then he’s back alive again. And I will write that at some point if I ever get the time, because we need to understand that death is not… a lot of, I think, the pathology of our whole culture is the pathologizing of death. And we even manage to pathologize birth, which is just… I’ve got friends who are doulas who are very, very, very upset at that. But then I’ve got friends who are death doulas (hello, people!) who are trying to help people, you know, we invite into life and we escort into death and it’s a cycle.

Clare: And we used to know this. You said that it was said of the Britons that they took off their life, they entered death like they were taking off their shirt. And we see that across cultures. We’ve got the Sheela na gig. And the Sheela na gig is a very perplexing symbol. For those of you who don’t know her, she’s a woman, she’s clearly a woman but she doesn’t seem to have breasts. She seems to have quite a skeletal torso. Her legs are splayed wide, her arms are going under her hips and pulling open her vulva.

Manda: Her vulva, which is huge.

Clare: Which is huge, and she’s bald. And there’s all of this talk about what is she, what is she? And she’s managed to survive, though her stories haven’t.

Manda: Have they not at all?

Clare: Well, no, not really. Because she’s attached with the Morrigan. She’s attached with the Cailleach.

Manda: So always women associated with death and life.

Clare: Exactly. And so she’s birth and death in the same body. She’s the gateway. So in Inanna, it would be Ereshkigal with Inanna if you’re looking at Sumerian. But that’s like what you said, is our gateway in and out of death. And by you spending time with the crow and you being in right relationship with that, when you write about it, you make people less afraid of death.

Manda: I hope so.

Clare: There is a potential to ancestrally be able to remember back pre Roman, here, into we did have this knowledge before.

Manda: Yeah. And it’s only 2000 years. I mean it’s not that long.

Speaker 4: It’s only 2000 years. That is nothing. Come on. Mythologically, you know.

Manda: Yeah, yeah. It’s 100 generations. That’s almost within living memory, isn’t it?

Clare: Yeah. And if we weren’t afraid of death, how would we live? And so I think that there’s a tiny bit of that mythological resonance that comes through in your work, that leaves these incredible breadcrumbs for people. Because if we are less afraid, then we’ll do better things.

Manda: Yeah. I hope.

Clare: But right now, it’s just very scary. So we got to look for the stories. My grandmother used to have a, it was called a commonplace book, but what she did was she would collect fragments of newspaper and poems and quotes, and I still do that all the time. And she had this newspaper cutting from post Titanic.

Manda: Oh, wow.

Clare: And there were four people on the Titanic, and they couldn’t get in the lifeboat and they were watching the boat go down and they were facing their death and they were terrified. And there was a woman and three men, and I don’t remember their names, but the woman looked over and she saw that one of the men was smiling, and he was very calm. And she said, why are you smiling? And he said, well. She said, we’re gonna die. And he said, yeah, but to die will be an awfully big adventure.

Manda: Oh, that’s it, that’s it. The adventure. Yes!

Clare: And she ended up surviving. She ended up getting picked up by a lifeboat and she ended up living. He died. He had been a producer of theatre, I think, his name escapes me. But that little cutting was in the paper and my grandmother was sitting with that her whole life.

Manda: Right. The awfully big adventure.

Clare: The Awfully big adventure.

Manda: Cool. Yeah. And yes,that. People look at me like I’m crazy, but it’s the biggest adventure of your life. You’re preparing for it from the moment you’re born.

Clare: And it happens to everyone.

Manda: Bringing everything so that the moment you step through, you have no regrets.

Clare: Yeah. So that you can move on to whatever it is that you’re moving on to, you know. So this is the idea that myth is still really relevant. The idea that myth got put away in the 1500s or the rise of the industrial revolution. And why would we need myth? Because it’s just children’s stories and, you know, we have rational thinking and Descartes. Has a lot to answer for. There’s another show coming, which I’m going to make with all of that. But myth is supposed to keep company with reality, so that we can harmonise into these. So I can look at a crow, because I read your book and I actually greet my crows. I’m very verbal now. I talk to everybody. I talk to my plants, my trees, everybody. I don’t speak fluent tree but sometimes I can sense my way in. And every everyone is alive. It’s just we’re the only species on the planet that’s busy going, no, we’re all alone. Cover my ears. There’s no one else here. So I think the role of myth right now is, for white Westerners, like pretty much everyone else has it sorted, you know what I mean? But for us lot, it’s to weave us back in to being able to notice the crow.

Manda: And everything else all around. And whatever the gateway is. Some people don’t like crows or someone was afraid of the starry night. That’s amazing. But then you got them to connect with the night again, which is astonishing.

Clare: Through the story. One of the origin myths, you know.

Manda: So there’s a dumper truck just arrived outside my window. Can you hear it? We’ll just keep going because I don’t want to stop. I don’t want to stop, Clare, we have so much else to talk about. Tell us a little bit. Tell us the myth of Chicago. Because I remember you told me it as you understood it when we first talked. And it’s so exciting. And people won’t know it. Just give us give us that. And then we’ll talk a little bit about your show.

Clare: I’ll give you a little bit, but I want to say very clearly that it’s not one I tell a lot. So I’m going to tell it in a conversational way, not in a big myth way. But I do want to mention the woman, the first writer in the world, that we understand to be the first writer, was a woman and her name was Enheduanna. And Enheduanna, we know she existed because she wrote her name into the story. ‘I, Enheduanna’ as she wrote The Myth of Inanna. But the reason she wrote the myth was that her father, he was Sargon the Great, they always had these great epithets, and he had colonised a bunch of different tribes. There was no unity and he needed a myth to unify them. And so he called on her, and she made herself the high priestess of Inanna. But what she did was she took a vegetative deity, a goddess in charge of plants, and she elevated her up and she created this mythology. Now, this is another job of remything, which we’ve been doing for hundreds of thousands of years.

Manda: And creation of deities. We’re very good at that.

Clare: So Inanna is on the upper world, and she has to go see her sister Ereshkigal in the underworld. And to do this, she has to pass through these gates and their thresholds. And at each of the gates she’s met by gatekeepers. And at each of the gates they say, if you want to pass through here, you have to pay. And so she takes off her crown to pay at the first gate, and she takes off her earrings to pay at the second gate. And she takes off her perfume at the third gate. And then she takes off her dress, and she takes off her belt, until she’s down to just herself and there’s one more gate to go. And so she has to take off her skin. To enter the realm of Ereshkigal she has to die and die she does. And her skin is hung on a hook, and her meat and bones are off to the side. And there is Ereshkigal, Ereshkigal the goddess of death. Ereshkigal, who is bent over squatting because everybody who dies is birthed through her body. So she’s in constant agony because she’s in constant labour.

Clare: She’s squatting and screaming and crying and sweating and bleeding, and she’s really grumpy. And above ground, Inanna’s maidservant, who is also her closest friend and ally, this woman, she doesn’t hear back from her, and she knows that she needs to send somebody down. But none of the guards can go into the realm of Ereshkigal, and there’s only two beings that that can go. Because to pass through the gates, you can be neither male nor female. And so the handmaiden cleverly sends these two winged beings that are non-binary, and they fly through the gates and they can pass through, and they get down to the realm of Ereshkigal, and they see Inanna hanging on a hook. They see her skin. And they see Ereshkigal squatting in her agony, and she’s just screaming “the pain, the pain!” And the two little beings, they buzz around her and they go, oh, the pain, the pain. She looks up at them, buzzing around her and she says, “oh, the blood, the blood!”. And they look at her and they, they say, oh no, oh no, the blood, the blood. And it’s the first time anyone has shown her compassion. And she is so moved by these two little non-binary beings that she says, I’ll give you a gift. You’ve given me this. What do you want? And they went, we want that, we want that skin.

Manda: And those bones.

Clare: And with a drop of water and the skin of Inanna, and those bones, they take it and they bring her back and she’s resurrected. And Ereshkigal goes back to giving birth to death, to birth, to death of the world.

Manda: Forever.

Clare: Forever. Thank you for your labour.

Manda: Yeah.

Clare: But Enheduanna chose what she wanted to centre. And she centred agriculture, the turning of the seasons, the inevitability of death, the inevitability of rebirth. And then, and this is my interpretation and several other storytellers interpretations, which is this idea of compassion at the heart of suffering.

Manda: Yeah.

Clare: I think I told it to you because we were waxing lyrical, but that’s like 5000 years old, Manda.

Manda: Exactly. And everything, I mean, not all the stories in the world arise from that, but the core of the ideas of who we are as human beings are wrapped up in that. And nobody’s fighting anybody. And there’s no heroic mythology happening. There’s caring for the immortal being that is processing all of life and all of death forever.

Clare: And there’s a role for everybody: the handmaiden, the non-binary being, the goddess of death, the goddess of life, the rain. Everybody’s role counts.

Manda: The gatekeepers are really important in there.

Clare: The gatekeepers are really important. The jewellery. We need all the roles, you know? Like even if you look at our lives, like as writers and makers, you know, if you get famous enough or whatever it is, you sort of get pushed up, up, up, up above other people as if you’re more important. And it’s this constant thing of separate, individualise. But actually what’s more important is that we are all weaving this new fabric in. So we’ve got the Paul Powleslands who are cleaning up the rivers. We’ve got the Surfers Against sewage, we’ve got Meg Avon, we’ve got you. We’ve got thousands of people that you’ve interviewed, that are just going, right this bit’s important, this bit’s important. We keep sewing it back in. Got that woman up somewhere outside of Nottingham I think. And she just got so upset about the trees. She started planting trees and she’s she’s planted over 5000 trees only over a couple of years. Do you know? So we have the water guardians, we have the tree protectors. They’re all now starting to find each other. And now we’re seeing momentum.

Manda: I hope so. Yes, yes, we can do this. Tell us about your show.

Clare: My new show. What kind of a crazy artist makes a show while finishing a book?

Manda: I guess you didn’t think there were going to be multiple edits, did you? And people don’t when it’s their first book. Next time you’ll know.

Clare: I didn’t understand how much life force goes into a book. But I have made this show called We All Came By Boat, which is set on these two islands, all these little islands which have been here for at least 12 days and years, since Doggerland. You know Doggerland?

Manda: Dogger, Fisher, and German Bight. Yes.

Clare: Yeah. And that water, that tsunami hit about 12,000 years ago and cut off this land here, these rocks, from that bit of rock over there. And I wanted to make a show to celebrate the mythologies of who came by boat to these islands, this island, and the one next door that I’ve spent a lot of time on. And so it’ll be at the Wardrobe Theatre, which is this beautiful theatre in Bristol that has just adopted me.

Manda: Oh, yay!

Clare: And invites me to bring my shows there. And it’s got the most lively audience. You’ve got people who’ve never been to the theatre before going there. You’ve got all kinds of shows that head up to Edinburgh that start there.

Manda: Are you going to Edinburgh, do you think?

Clare: I did last year. I took Spanking Goddess and I want to go next year. I’ll go again next year. But this year I have to focus on the book.

Manda: The book to write. Okay.

Clare: But The Wardrobe’s got this seating where you’re down at the bottom and the audience is raked up on these deep seats. And so it’s just gorgeous. So September 15th to 19th and it’s brand new this show, it’s brand new.

Manda: And can people listening buy tickets? If they’re anywhere near Bristol or even in the UK?

Clare: Yes. You can buy tickets online, the wardrobe theatre.com.

Manda: You’ll give me a link and I’ll put it in the show notes.

Clare: I’ll give you a link and you’ll put it in the show notes, because neither of us are good at remembering the digital world when we’re in this world.

Manda: Yeah, yeah.

Clare: But yes, you can of course buy tickets online. The last run sold out, so maybe buy an advance. You can try and get them on the night as well.

Manda: Okay, but best to buy in advance.

Clare: And I tend to hang around after the shows because I absolutely love what happens to people’s heads after they hang out in myth. Because it, you know, it’s what you were asking about earlier and there is such a hunger for myth on this island. And there are myths way pre-Roman and pre-greek. You know, I wonder about the kind of English psyche, the having to live in somebody else’s mythology for so long, having lived in Greek and Roman. And you know, they’ve got some good stuff, they got remythed a lot. But there are myths and stories and folklore on this island that are mind blowingly good.

Manda: You’ve told us some of them; hazelnuts and giant maggots.

Clare: Yeah, well, that’s over the next island over. But this island, on England, you know. And I think there’s a lot of people turning back towards it and making from what was already here. So I’m glad to be part of that. There’s people like Lucy Wright and Zakia Sewell and lots of people looking to like finding Albion, you know. Have you come across Lucy Wright’s stuff?

Manda: No. And I clearly need to.

Clare: She’s doing all kinds of things. I think she wrote the manifesto Folk as a feminist issue, but she’s doing these beautiful installations using folk iconography. And you can just see, there’s this new generation coming up that are that are going, hang on, there was loads of good stuff here before. What can we use?

Manda: Brilliant.

Clare: And it’s what you say on your podcast. You say, we’re going through this breaking point, we’re going to lose a lot of things. What do we want to leave lying around that people are going to pick up? And we don’t want the olds. We don’t want the stories we’ve been living with, we want the stories from before and the stories from to come.

Manda: Yeah. And how do we knit those together? How do the stories from before give us the tsunami to create the stories to come that will touch the people of now?

Clare: That will make us all be in right relationship. And we can, you know, we can, but we’re going to need everybody.

Manda: We are. And I could talk to you all day, as we know. But that feels like a really, really good place to stop for now. We will come back for sure. Clare, we will do many more podcasts together, because I could imagine just an entire run of just talking to you, but that would be self-indulgent.

Clare: That’ll be us two sat in a corner with a giant pot of tea and just like a pile of books going ‘have you heard this one?’

Manda: Did you hear that? Yes, yes. And this is what somebody said when they heard this story, and this is what they went out and did. And this is who they became. You’re an amazing and wonderful woman and I am incredibly grateful to have met you and to invite you onto the podcast. And I look forward to another conversation. And in the meantime, anybody and everybody who’s near Bristol, go see the show. And when is the book going to come out?

Clare: The book’s going to come out in spring, Dublin, March 16th, and in Bristol I’ll be inviting you to the launch in Bristol, probably in April. But yeah, it’s going to be fun. I’m going to tell stories at the launch. There’s going to be no sitting. There’ll be no sitting at a book launch of mine. I’ll invite you along, I’ll let you know when it’s coming.

Manda: We might do a podcast about two weeks before so everybody knows. Pre-orders. Your publisher will like it. Right. Thank you.

Clare: It’s an honour.

Manda: And there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Clare for the magic of her words, for her utterly encyclopaedic understanding of all of the myths of all of the world. I’m sure she doesn’t know exactly every myth, but it is coming pretty close. And in a world where, as she said, we are so assailed by all of the digital stuff, the AI slop and the stories designed to trigger parts of our amygdalas that bypass our conscious minds so that we just react and react and react. Where attention is a commodity, where it’s entirely likely that if the AI tech bros get their way, affection could become a commodity to be doled out by the AI. Here is actual life. Here are the oldest of stories brought into new life that works today. Here is the antidote to all of the slop, to all of the triggering, to all of the stuff out there. As Clare said, we can choose what we listen to and what we say. And I love her idea of the seven sacred vessels, the ways in and the ways out. Two ears, two eyes, two nostrils, one mouth. Listen, see, smell, taste, inhale and speak. It reminds me a bit of one of those incredibly Californian things, I think the three agreements, something like that. And one of them was I will be impeccable with my words, inner and outer. And impeccable didn’t mean perfect, it just meant I will do the best that I can with the stories that I tell myself, of myself, to myself, and about myself within and without. And then the stories I tell about other people within and without. And the stories I tell about our place in the world, within and without.

Manda: And here we are in ancient, I think, Irish mythology if I was listening right, seven is just as much a magical number as three. And we do have choices still. So let’s make the most of them. And using our attention impeccably, there’s a link to Claire’s website in the show notes. There’s a link to buying tickets for her show and a link to her doing the TEDx in Galway. As and when there is the potential of a link to the book, I will put it in the show notes. It’s coming out April next year, March in Dublin, April in the UK, I think, and very likely we will have Claire back to talk more about the book and perhaps actually to tell us the myth of the title, given that I managed to forget about it this time around. I’m sorry. Dumper trucks outside the window, all that kind of thing.

Manda: Anyway, there we go. That’s it for this week. Huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot and for this week’s audio production. Thanks to Lou Mayor for the video production, to Anne Thomas for the transcript, to Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech. For managing the dumper trucks, for helping the pool become a pool again, and for all of the conversations that keep us moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants really to get to grips with the magic of words, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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