Initiation on a scale never yet experienced is arriving. Not choreographed by humans, but by the earth itself. Climate emergency. In a time of initiation we need an initiated language.

A time like this has no guarantee of wisdom if we can’t decipher its sacred braille.

All Those Barbarians holds up the primeval role of the storyteller as a key in such deciphering. It encourages us to get educated, and quick. What you have in your hands is a wayward kind of teaching manual. Not really a book, rather a tent with seven doors, containing stories both ancient and utterly fresh. Its call is urgent, that we as modern people could remember the way humans and the earth talk back to each other. That we risk magnificence. That we risk grief. That we could speak an almost-forgotten-tongue.

In All Those Barabarians, Shaw offers a unique weave of myth and ecology as a response to the growing crisis of meaning in these times. A rogue philosophy of how to settle into the divine havoc of being a true human being. Gathered over twenty years, these ruminations are a tent we shelter in as a night-storm rages, as we consider both the darkness and the dawn.