Mooney's Mythic Podcast

Mooney’s Mythic Podcast

Past the equinox, Sarah reflects on telling stories in the woods and the prayer she’ll make next time. She also talks about unwrapping a bubble-wrapped six-year-old part of herself, and joining the fierce Savage Sisters Morris side. In the story pot: The Princess’s Blankets and Tam Lin. Then a furious poem from Extinction Rebellion co-founder Stu Basden, recorded at the Green Gathering, and an invitation to come back to life together.

Music: Queen Space Baroque, “Ritual Door” (opening titles) · Tarisha, “Deep Into the Earth” · Wyndreth, “My Mother’s Savage Daughter”

Support Wyndreth: the writer of My Mother’s Savage Daughter is living with dementia. Please give if you can:👉 https://www.gofundme.com/f/my-mothers-savage-daughter-needs-our-help

Come and join me:

* 🌲 Mythic Wander, Friday 23rd October. Get in touch for the location.

* 🐺 Women Who Run With the Wolves, Glastonbury, seven Tuesdays from 3rd November (I said the 2nd in the episode, but it’s Tuesday 3rd!)

* 🕯️ Story Wintering, online, once a month

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Opening music By Queen Space Baroque

Online workshop Thursday 6:30–8:30pm https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1998740818593?aff=oddtdtcreator

Samhain telling of Donkey Skin in Glastonbury, 30th Oct

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1998949432563?aff=oddtdtcreator

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Sarah previews The Synthphonic Orchestra ahead of Friday’s Rose Concert, then reflects on cycles — vision quests, moon time, community rhythm — before telling a Loathly Lady tale: three princes, a dried well, and the old woman who asks only for a kiss.

Music: The Synthphonic Orchestra, “Love Remains”

Upcoming: Rose Concert (Fri 11th, Glastonbury Town Hall) ·

Autumn Threshold Gathering online, next Thurs, 2-for-1 tickets on Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1998740818593?aff=oddtdtcreator

Women Who Run With the Wolves (Glastonbury, late Oct) ·

Greek myths (details soon)

Loved this? Send it to one person who needs the story today. Keep the kettle on for the pod — Patreon (Mooney’s Mythic Podcast).

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Opening Track Ritual Door One by Queen Space Baroque

Gathering us all up in this pod, talking about myth, magic,

Featuring Malin Lewis 'Hiraeth'

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

In the thick of the heat, Sarah sits with Donkey Skin — the dancing, the impossible dresses, the prince as the first green shoot pushing through — and finds a way to move difficult feelings like toffee instead of chewing them over. From there: treasure held underground, the last auk’s disappearance, a garden as mirror for self-care, and a folk song recorded to defend Felton Common from Bristol Airport. Ends with a grounding meditation to root you in the earth and let the sun in.

Music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque. “The Goose and the Common” by the Common Land Choir.

Sarah will be telling stories at Priddy Folk Festival (four sessions in the children’s tent, half eleven and three) and at Tolpuddle Festival the following weekend.

This autumn she’s running two courses in Glastonbury: Women Who Run With The Wolves (Tuesdays, 7 weeks) and a Greek myth wintering course (Wednesdays, biweekly). She’s also playing a gig with Ted Waters on 30th October at St Ben’s, Glastonbury.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Opening music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque

Sarah records this episode in the aftermath of an accidental encounter with cactus acid and two visits hospital having her eyes rinsed out with saline — which turns out to be the perfect portal into a meditation on salt, flavour, and what we’re worth.

Moving through Cap o’ Rushes, Donkey Skin, a North American corn myth, and the story of the giant turnip, this episode asks: what are we hiding under the donkey skin, and can we begin to dance in our own radiance again? Sarah weaves personal reckoning — the places where we make ourselves small, the six-year-old still reaching for something she never got — with fairy tale as inner map.

A Summer Solstice episode in the truest sense: everything revealed, shadows and all. Closes with a live guitar fragment of the Detectorists theme tune.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Opening music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque

Sarah records from a closed curtain, a lit fire, and the aftermath of two hours of singing on an empty stomach — and discovers that drooping under the weight of your own blooming is a perfectly good reason to stay in. This episode wanders through the names of old roses (Rosa Damascena, Deep Secret, Hidden Harmony), stumbles into Edward Young’s 244-page night poem and ends up with Edgar Allan Poe, Christina Rossetti, a new collaboration with the Synthphonic Orchestra, and the news that the Latin root of semen means hope. The tangents are the point.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Sarah recreates a medieval landscape for the Arthurian myth of Lanval — the knight overlooked at Arthur's Pentecost feast who wanders to the river's edge and is called into the mist by a Lady of the Fae. With atmospheric heavy lifting from the Avalonian Free State Choir singing Gaudette and Dragonfly performing La Belle Dame Sans Merci.

Intro music: Ritual Door No.1 by Queen Space Baroque.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

Opening music by Queen Space Baroque

Sarah returns from a day storytelling and running a poetry workshop inside a men's prison — an experience that cracked her open.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com

But first, a story she didn’t get to tell in her Women Who Run With the Wolves group last week.

From there, Sarah moves into the myth she and theatre director Joanna Proctor have chosen as the heart of a new immersive mythic experience they’re co-creating: Echo and Narcissus. Stripped of her words by Hera, able only to repeat what she hears. Him, raised without mirrors, learning to see himself only through the reactions of others — and never quite satisfied. Sarah tells the story with stillness and depth, then unpacks why it speaks so urgently to now: the loneliness of needing external reflection to feel real; the inner voice that cannot find its way out.

Sarah shares brainstorming notes from her day with Joanna, including the question that really got her: What do we reject when we remember we are worthless? And she reads aloud her own visioning of the evening — origami birds, torn pages, the line from Clarissa Pinkola Estés: “If you don’t go into the woods, your life will never begin.”

Also mentioned: A new Women who Run Wih the Wolves group in Glastonbury Story Wintering group coming soon, in person and online.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sarahmooney.substack.com