No more tame language about wild things.
Cista Mystica Press is established to publish the work and ideas of Dr. Martin Shaw, and a select group of authors. Its concerns range from mythopoetics, romanticism, philosophy, magic, folklore to initiatory encounters with wilderness. The press believes that all these areas have something essential to contribute to the state of our times.
The Night Wages
Bidden or unbidden, initiations come.
The Night Wages is a leap into the mysteries, a deep conversation between father and daughter, a ragged travelogue of a night sea journey to the temple of Aphrodite.
It’s a rumination on how we handle the volatility of romantic love, and how a parent communicates through stories a grief he cannot speak of any other way. Personal and yet mythical, poetic but earthy, this is a new form. The Night Wages provokes archaic images and modern dilemmas, it is the story of someone trying to comprehend the mysteries of their own heart.
Available February 2019. Pre-order The Night Wages.
The Cista Mystica was a secret casket used in the mystery cults of antiquity, particularly in the rites of Dionysus. Contained within on a bed of rushes was a snake, the living god itself, utterly untamable.