Thank you so much for your interest in enrolling in Martín Prechtel’s The Knotted Sword! The October session is full. Please keep an eye out on the website and in your email for the announcement of the new Spring class in 2027. We hope to be able to meet you and welcome you to The Knotted Sword soon. All blessings!  

First Class: Face to Face with Old Stories

In every one of the many approaches that I, Martin Prechtel, have taken to teach people face to face, each has always been carried to fruition by means of learning through stories: old soul-raveling stories. That is how I was taught.

For the non-modern people I grew up with and those with whom I was given the rare cultural conditions to molt into a relatively useful spiritually oriented village adult, all their intricate life-supporting ritual in those villages, any of the practical learning and all culture-centered life learning, was kept alive and learnt by the people by means of story. Even in their shallowest non-essential hi-and-bye speech, everyday language was always masterfully tailored into story. There was no simple word for ‘Yes’ or ’No’: if asked if you wanted a cup of coffee: there was a formula that required the speaker to explain the nuances of how they might or might not want a cup of coffee. It would be a story. It was considered obscene to deliberately make the road short, efficient or impersonal.

There were a gillion magically relevant ancestor stories, even more almost important stories, even more strange, small, worthless, necessary, crazy village stories, every kind of stories, but there was definitely no story that was The Only Story: no Torah, no single word of a single god, no New Testament, no Ramayana; just stories of a million trunks and branches, roots and shores. Everyone had some answers, no one had them all, and certainly no one had The Answer, but everyone had some stories, some even had the ‘right’ questions.

We weren’t taught to get the ‘right’ answers, hell we weren’t taught to search for answers! What we were taught was how to learn and that learning how to learn was the most important thing to learn to keep the seeds of life and culture alive. And that learning how to learn meant noticing, discerning, paying attention to what shined in everything; how the small and the large gestated in the storied backbone of the universes and became whatever it became; all the looks and natures of its interdependent incarnations and in what story did it live in now. There was no learning with the Tzutujil Maya or the Keres that consisted of learning how to extract ‘data’ from a story, or from a situation, or an experience, the land, or a species, or life.

The stories were definitely the college where nature taught us and where we hopefully learned, but we never removed ideas from a story any more than we would take a baby from his mother, we didn’t mine stories to isolate wisdom as a component without the whole of the story they came from coming along too.

It was as if each story was a whole mountain in a range of story mountains. Each story, like each mountain, had its own neighborhood environment, its own rock core, its own system of watercourses and headwater springs, its own plants, birds and beasts, and these were the great spiritual ecology of the story’s culture and the story’s living heart of ancient complexity, and it was all these together that we learned and kept together, but the learning we did that was taught us by the story we didn’t ‘take away’ from the story. This ancient style of learning did not tear the story apart; the story was left alive and intact with itself. To us the stories were alive and by being allowed to live their own independent destinies, they gave our very bodies and souls life in their telling. They gave us life in this special way of telling. That is what I want to happen for people in my new school. For these story mountains were not dynamited with objectivist analysis to mine the precious rare parts out of the cultural relevancy of the story’s unwieldy mythological matrix to be used as refined ideas, as rare earth components in civilization’s discourteous blast-off to anywhere but learning to be at home well here on Earth. For us, if the stories were the important ones, they were home. Wherever they were we were at home. And as far as I’m concerned, they still are home for us all, especially the prehistoric souls of the disenfranchised modern human.

But this kind of learning was rather practical, for it depended entirely on our ability to hear and see what was there in the story. Whatever of the Big Things I learned, it wasn’t any of my teachers who taught me them, because they knew that the Big Things could not be extracted from life’s incredibly big story to be handed over like that. What I learned, I learned because my teachers taught me how to learn through story: both the tribal story told and the story the Holies in Nature told that we lived out as life, both seen and understood as that ancient story ritualized and remade into tellable tales.

What I want to get across is that it is not only the content of a story, or the nature of the story that teaches, it is the ability of the people to learn from such a story. It is not the responsibility of the story to teach big things to the people: it is the responsibility of the people to understand the big things that are in the story; that is what makes us people: human beings. It is the responsibility of intact human culture to teach its people how to learn in this ancient born-in-the-bone way how to be taught by a story.

Learning how to respectfully learn by narrative, from ancient narrative, is something gone from modernity’s narrative. The modern monster has been starving for ages and causing the starvation of the heart and soul of both rich and poor and cultures recently absorbed; for the mentality of the modern age has been around a long, long time running like hell to escape the pain of being itself with enough technology now to pave the asshole of the moon, with about that much direction. While meanwhile, right here on Earth, there are amazing amounts of stunning folktales, a wealth of wonder-tales and heroic spirit accounts and more, (albeit mostly published in bad truncated versions, or poorly written down and hidden, stored like rubbish in academic vaults or practically invisible in old micro fiche tableaus, and I know for a fact, loose in cardboard boxes in the basement of the Kremlin!) whose comprehension should belong to us all, rich and poor alike, for this is the truest inherited wealth left us by our forgotten ancestors everywhere. Without our tales and our ability to understand their bigger meanings, the dilemma of how to be a human with no story worth living in, when addicted to a pre-sorted artificial track made by modern people deliberately pruned of their natural-born ability to learn how to recognize their own amazing ornate magical souls who were made to live and love, still remains.

So, friends, I’m thinking, maybe we could begin to learn again what some of our ancients did know: how to learn and find what’s missing in our existences through diving into the old stories that have been left us for just exactly this purpose: the emergency of culture loss and no home for our ancient souls! I want to teach my version of this.

From where I stand, this story learning ability is the real wealth. Even the ‘richest’ individuals today seem bound up in a kind of poverty, for poverty is not being poor, it’s when what you have gives no joy and has no worth and is never enough.

This story wealth belongs to us all. It is this kind of understanding that is the real wealth because it makes our decisions as humans good for the world beyond our own time and makes us know the majesty of being a real soul alive beyond all the fakery, and makes what we have on earth reveal its wilder core through an older more natural eye.

The reason this course is named The Knotted Sword is a riddle, one that praises one of our ancestor’s brilliant strategies to resuscitate forgotten knowledge. It’s a story of course; a story which we’ll tell, gods willing, when we get to it.

For now, I’m just going to say that this new flesh and blood face-to-face class of mine, to be convened right here in the red dust of New Mexico, called The Knotted Sword, is just a try, a humble attempt, an experiment to see if my own strategy to resuscitate a forgotten way of knowing how to be a human being through forgotten ways of seeing and hearing what has been overlooked in ‘common’ overlooked stories can flower in the lives and hearts of a few who want to cultivate such things back into view in this time of a non-sympathetic worldwide digitalized life-equals-business unethical-ethos whose battleground-mind would have us all devoured from within by consuming an empty storyline that can’t hold a human up. It is amazing what substantial hidden gifts some of our predecessors, who seeing what was coming, tried to leave behind to cause us to survive ourselves, and the mess we’ve made deliberately disregarding those gifts. Time for the beauty to jump up and live again.

All blessings,
Martín Prechtel