About this episode
Please Support Our Show: Join us on SubstackLove KnotWork Storytelling? Your financial contribution helps me pay the amazing team that puts this show together.With your paid subscription, you'll be invited to our next mythically inspired online writing retreat on June 25!Subscribe to our newsletter Myth Is MedicineOUR STORYA magical tree grows apples that assure the fertility of the community, but suddenly the fruit stops appearing each morning. The story, which comes from the Nart Sagas of the Ossetia region in the Caucasus Mountains, includes an initiatory journey, a marriage, and is ultimately about the union of the land and the sea. OUR GUESTStephanie MacKay is the founder of Mythology Club and is co-founder and Director of Fianna Wilderness School. She specializes in ancestral knowledge, earth-based skills, ceremony and myth. Stephanie has a degree in literature, which has been enriched by over 15 years of transformative practice and study. She has delved deep into the realms of myth and initiation through trainings with Animas Valley Institute, Haven Institute, Wilderness Awareness School, and over a decade of study with Martín Prechtel. Her work is deeply informed by the time she spent in Alberta collaborating with Blackfoot and Métis elders as a part of the Rediscovery Initiative. She has held the role of senior guide and director at nature-based organizations across Western Canada. Stephanie is dedicated to uncovering the vestiges of intact cultural origins within the body of old European mythologies. Drawing from the wellspring of these old mythologies, she seeks to uncover the hidden pathways that lead us to our cultural origins—reviving traditions long forgotten and holding space for the rehydration of ancestral wisdom.Find her at www.stephaniemackay.ca and facebook.com/MythologyCultureRememberedOUR CONVERSATIONFirst questions to savor when you first receive a story: Where do you place yourself in this story? What image stands out for you? Can we meet the story from a place of soul?This story is connected to a Celtic story from the Isle of Skye, “The Cup of Healing.” The Narts are connected to the Celtic peoples through Indo-European migration.The contrast of working with myth for the purpose of psychological insight, compared to the more ancient, animist, land-based understandings of the storiesThe power of romance in the creation of the world. In this story, she is water goddess, he is a warrior of the land.John Colarusso, translator of the Nart SagasStephanie’s work with First Nations elders of the Haida, Blackfoot, Métis.
