The hidden power in mythic stories of desire and love - Stephanie MacKay
Episode 526, released 12th November 2025.
In this week’s show Lian is joined by Stephanie MacKay. Stephanie is a mythologist, wilderness guide, and cultural craftswoman devoted to the long, slow work of remembering how to belong—to land, to lineage, to story, and to each other. As founder and director of Fianna Wilderness School, she has spent the past 15+ years guiding rites of passage, seasonal myth circles, and nature-based mentorship rooted in the wilds.
Listen or watch on:
Transcript is here: episode526transcript
Stephanie’s work braids together her Celtic ancestry, years of deep study with Martín Prechtel and the Animas Valley Institute, and a fierce love of story as medicine. She is dedicated to uncovering the vestiges of intact cultural origins within the body of ancient European stories. 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 reawakening the deep cultural wisdom carried in our bones
Whether she’s guiding wilderness quests, tending seasonal myth circles, or walking the long road of cultural regeneration, Stephanie’s devotion is to the deep remembering of who we are and how we belong—through mythic threads that call us back into sacred relationship with the world.
In this episode, Lian and Stephanie explore how old stories court the soul. They touch Angela Carter’s Red Riding Hood and Stephanie’s visceral surprise of feeling Eros as a living thread, the way Lian was moved by Skeleton Woman and the Fisherman’s skin against skin, and what union in stories like these is really calling us towards.
They trace how desire becomes devotion: noticing where longing really points, letting projection soften so love grows more human and more sacred, and beginning with small ceremony that says ‘yes’.
Listen if you are moved by myths of great love or sense that what you hunger for is older and deeper than romance.
We’d love to know what YOU think about this week’s show. Let’s carry on the conversation… please leave a comment below.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
How Eros in fairy tales reveals the soul’s appetite for the sacred, and why that changes how we read love stories in ordinary life
Why projection makes partners carry the sacred, what breaks when they cannot hold that projection, and what becomes possible when the sacred is welcomed directly
What happens when you treat ceremony as a first language, even a few words and an offering, and let the next step show itself
Resources and stuff spoken about:
Visit Stephanie’s website
Fianna Wilderness School website
Join UNIO, The Community for Wild Sovereign Souls: This is for the old souls in this new world… Discover your kin & unite with your soul’s calling to truly live your myth.
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Thank you!
Lian & Jonathan