But I’m Not Welsh!
Does it haunt you at night, wondering how one connects with an archetype from the other side of the planet? Not an uncommon ailment, I can assure you; but fear not, it is not grounded in anything concrete and should not affect your ability to connect to the mystery of the tales. The Welsh people of the Middle Ages served to preserve these tales; the truth of the matter is that they are significantly older than the political delineation of the nation of Wales. They are not entirely the property of the Welsh but belong to the islands of Britain and to anyone who connects to them, regardless of one’s position on the planet. The tales arose from the landscape of Britain and were relevant to the inhabitants of these lands then as they are now, but the mysteries contained within them cannot be confined to location. The origins of the tales’ creation may well be locality-specific, but the mysteries they contain are soul-specific—they apply to anyone, anywhere, and any seeker who wishes to reach into the cauldron of the great witch goddess and discover its secrets may do so.
Whether you are on the south coast of Britain, sitting in the sunshine of Los Angeles, or stomping through the snows of northern Sweden, the magic within the tales of the Celtic people does apply; they are relevant. The themes within them can be superimposed onto your own landscape.
Connecting
There is no right or wrong way to connect to the themes within this tale, but what you can be assured of is that it is a journey that will profoundly affect your life and connect you to an ancient mystery that provides tried and tested keys to the spirit. Its primary function is to connect the querent by means of the cauldron to the most sacred and all-encompassing spirit of Celtica, Awen. This awe-inspiring flowing spirit beats at the heart of the Celtic tradition; it sings a song that was old when the world was new, and it brings body and soul into ecstatic rapture. Inexorably connected, the cauldron and Awen entice you into mystery.
You hold a book in your hand that is an account of connection; it is based in the real world of one person in particular: me. My intention for writing this book was to offer a guide, a lending hand, that can brush aside some of the confusing aspects and misconceptions that we may have established in relation to these tales. Nearly two decades of working with the mysteries of Cerridwen’s cauldron have gone into this book; hopefully that will stand you in good stead to explore the mysteries for yourself.
We can be guided to a certain understanding of the tales, led by the hand of those who do know and have swum with the mysteries. However, the voyage of exploration and ultimately initiation is by its very nature a solitary, individual journey. Some humans can be fickle; some will want to be led, to be told, to have it served on a plate. Alas, that method is ineffective—we must approach the cauldron of inspiration ourselves, boil the broth ourselves, be burnt and subsequently ingest the divine drops of Awen ourselves—no one can do it for us.
The cauldrons of Celtic mythology will not boil the food of a coward; the same applies for the cauldron at the centre of this book. A degree of bravery, of stamina, is required to approach the cauldrons of Celtica; they are not to be messed with but should be handled with integrity, foresight, and good intention. To stagger up to the cauldron with much bravado and cast all and sundry into it would be foolhardy; it may boil too quickly, and what may rise from its steam may be a little more than we bargained for. So approach cautiously, having prepared well for the journey ahead, with reverence and respect for the antiquity and heritage of the cauldron and what it stands for.
How to Use This Book
This book is primarily a guide—a friendly hand that takes you on a journey to approach the cauldron. Its primary purpose is to inform and provide insight into the deep magic of the Celtic mysteries. It also serves to educate. Begin by reading the entire book from cover to cover to ensure that you are deeply familiar with the tale—its archetypes, components, and their meaning. You will find various exercises throughout the book; some are contemplative, whilst others require a physical ritual, journey, or action. There is a crossover aspect to the archetypes where one may share attributes with another; this is quite normal and essential to the unfolding act of transformation. However, as a consequence, you will find that the interpretation of one character may affect another, and that some themes may be repeated to a small extent. I have attempted to separate the archetypes as much as is humanly possible; this is a difficult task, for they are not entirely meant to be studied alone. The interplay between the characters and components is essential to the tale, and the crossover point between one character’s influence and another’s is not always clear.
As you use this book, bear in mind the limitations of the written word; after all, this tale was a product of the oral tradition. This book is not intended to be an academic tome; its purpose is largely visionary. As you use it, I suggest that you utilise your own subtle senses, and meditate on the themes as you encounter them. Take time to digest the information, and above all, don’t just take my word for it—encounter the witch goddess and the prophet yourself, for that is my ultimate intention: to introduce you to the heart of Celtic magic.
A Practical Note
I suggest that during the course of your journey through this book and into the themes it contains that you create a space in honour of it. By all means use your current altar, a half-empty shelf on a bookcase, or a little corner of your living room.
This journey is steeped in ancestry and ancestral wisdom; therefore, have photographs of loved ones who have died and pictures or illustrations indicative of your lineage and ancestry. These could be anything from a photo of a mountain range in Wales to a symbol of the red dragon or an old map—anything that connects you to your heritage. In the centre of your space and occupying pride of place should be a cauldron; size is not important, neither is its material—it could be a real cauldron, a trinket, an old brass ornament, or one from a magical store adorned with symbols of the Craft. Spend some time finding the right things.
At the back of your space, behind the cauldron, place three candles or nightlight holders. An incense burner or joss stick holder should also be present. Take your time, and create a space that feels and looks good.
Now that your space has been built, we can resume the journey. A ceremony of dedication will be found at the end of part 1.
A Note on Pronunciation and Text
Welsh is a tricky language to learn and requires acrobatics of the tongue. However, do not be daunted by the strange words that follow; they are not as difficult as you may think. They merely require you to abandon the normal patterns of your current language. By this, your mouth will need to move consciously and with an awareness of the words you utter. The Welsh language is lyrical; every letter of every word is important and must be pronounced fully and with due attention. With this in mind, every Welsh word that appears in this book will have a phonetic pronunciation to accompany it and can be found in the glossary at the back of this book. A concise pronunciation guide will be presented at the end of the book for your perusal.
Various texts and manuscripts have been consulted in the writing of this book; all references are provided within the main body of the text as footnotes and within the selected bibliography.
• • •
I write this book in honour of my ancestors, in honour of the cauldron and the great witch who devoted herself to its creation. I write it in honour of the prophet and the great poet Taliesin, who inspires my life and is a vital component of my spiritual adventure. I write in the hope that the bright light of inspiration will shine from your brow, and that in return you too will honour and keep the magic of our Celtic ancestors alive and well.
I challenge you to explore and devote a period of your life to the study and exploration of the iconography and magic of the prophet, the witch, and the cauldron. I hope that by writing this book I may provide you with certain tools to facilitate your journey into the magic and mystery that lie with
in this remarkable and life-changing tale.
So come, let us make haste and light the fire that will burn beneath our cauldron as we venture into the heart of Celtic magic.
Kristoffer Hughes
Isle of Anglesey, Wales
november 2011
[contents]
1 Morris-Jones, Taliesin, 253.
Part 1
The Cauldron Born
• • •
My song arises from the cauldron of Cerridwen,
Unrestrained is my tongue, a repository for inspiration.
Taliesin
• • •
Prior to any exploration of the themes and mysteries contained within the myth of Cerridwen and Taliesin, it is pertinent to explore the background of the story. Therefore, this section will focus mainly on a general overview and introduction to the tale and its history. The landscape that gave birth to the tale will also feature here, providing images and details of a place that instigated a myth of this nature. I will explore its relevance to the Pagan traditions of today and provide an explanation of how it survived the ages and how it was to finally settle in written form. The conclusion, I hope, will provide you with a vivid account and understanding of the colourful history of the tale and an appreciation of it as a living entity in its own right.
What Is the Story?
Retellings of the tale, both traditional and modern, will follow in part 2, but to begin with, indulge me in a little exploration of exactly what the story is, where it came from, and how it has survived the ages. I always think a little imaginary journey is an effective means of grasping something that you may not be familiar with as yet, and even if you are well versed in the tale, it will act as a little refresher to the imagination. So I shall begin by taking you on a little sojourn into the story to provide you with a visualised image of its contents before we begin to explore it.
Imagine yourself as a raven. The rays of the midday sun shine on the immaculate, deep blackness of your feathers; the deep, croaking prruk-prruk-prruk sound of your song rises from your lungs to echo about the valley below.
A vast lake stretches beneath you, the sun’s rays tickling its mirrorlike surface, hardly rippled by the gentle breeze that swims down the mountains on either side. On the southern banks of the lake, smoke arises from a well- tended fire, over which sits the largest cauldron ever seen. As you swoop down, you note the contents of the cauldron; steam bursts from the bubbles that form on the surface of the boiling liquid. Nearby a young boy coughs loudly and rubs at his stinging, smoke-filled eyes. He pokes at the fire as if rebuking it for sending its smoke in his direction. He climbs the steps nearby and, with a spoon far too big for him to realistically handle, resumes his endless stirring of the great cauldron. Watching him is a man of astounding ugliness; so ugly, in fact, that you recoil in midflight. Yet to soothe the shock you note a maiden sitting gracefully, weaving flowers as beautiful as she is. She notices you and gazes up, her beauty rising to meet you, caressing your spirit like a warm blanket on a cold winter’s night.
You spiral, catch a thermal, and rise naturally into the blue sky, allowing the spirits of air to take you at their will. The sylphs carry you to the northern banks of the lake until movement below causes you to leave the embrace of warm air and descend quickly and efficiently to the creaking branch of an old oak. Below you, a woman gazes up and sends a greeting to you; you respond with your usual harsh yet beautiful cackle. The woman has presence; she is imbued with something that you do not understand, yet you feel it—it is an old power of some kind, older than the valleys and lakes, older than the yews in the gardens of the dead.
She carries on her arm a basket woven of the finest willow; it is full to capacity with a selection of plants, flowers, barks, seeds, and fruit. She bends down to greet a meadowsweet flower and calls to it by name; she sings a song to it that you do not understand, yet its beauty compels you to descend to a lower branch to take a closer look. The woman looks up, her song unbroken, and looks directly into your right eye and winks at you. A smile breaks over her face as she reaches down with immense grace and gentleness and plucks the flower from its stem. Still singing, she casts it into her basket. Her bare feet hardly make a sound as she leaves the little grove of trees and heads for the cauldron.
The contents of her basket are cast into the shimmering, bubbling belly of the cauldron—each item in turn is lifted and honoured as she sings to it and, with a gentle throw, casts each one into the liquid. She smiles, she sings, the boy stirs, the cauldron bubbles.
• • •
And so we set the scene for the exploration of our little tale. It concerns an epic journey of a woman intent on bestowing qualities of virtue and intelligence, wisdom and decorum on her son, who, alas, was born with an ugliness so great that neither she, nor anyone else for that matter, could cast a gaze upon him without being repulsed—an unfortunate turn of events for a mother whose fruits were not what she expected. But being well versed in the art and craft of magic, she assured herself that all would be well, a solution could be found. What follows is a roller-coaster ride into a full-blown journey of initiation and transformation concerning an innocent from a nearby village who succumbs to the unusual request of a powerful woman to stir her cauldron for an entire year and a day.
If your imaginary journey as a raven were to continue, it would eventually witness a great cracking of the cauldron, the boiling mixture condensing rapidly and exploding. Unfortunately its untimely expulsion causes three blessed drops to land on the callused thumb of the innocent stirrer. He sucks his thumb and is instantaneously bestowed with the wisdom and sciences of all the worlds. He knows the future, the past, and (of course) the present, and he knows the fury rising in the basket bearer as she witnesses the calamity. The young lad has stolen the magic intended for her son; she is scorned, and her fury erupts. A chase ensues; in the guise of various animals, the humans lose their shape, adopting another, running, swimming, flying, eating! As a consequence of all this running about, swooping through the air, and stuffing her face full of corn, the woman finds herself with child. And as the sun and moon dance their perpetual parade, you as the raven witness the birth of a child whose brow radiates with such a light that you cannot look at it for fear of being dazzled.
In a Nutshell…
If you were to retell this story in its most basic form, it would, I guess, take you about five to ten minutes, yet those short minutes would be filled with immensely powerful magic and mystery.
The tale can be summarized and broken down into small, bite-sized pieces. And in that proverbial nutshell we have the following components:
• a witch/wise woman/mother
• a simmering cauldron
• an ugly son and a beautiful daughter
• a husband
• an innocent young boy
• a blind man
• three divine drops of liquid
• a shapeshifting chase
• consumption followed by conception
• birth
• a child of great beauty, power, and wisdom
Our story concerns a woman who can be perceived as a witch, a sorceress, an herbalist, and a goddess. Her son, the motive for her relentless foraging and spellcasting, is the ugly one called Morfran Afagddu, meaning “utter darkness.” Her daughter, Creirfyw, the fair one, is the shining light of beauty in our story. Then we have Gwion Bach, the stirrer, who is the main protagonist; Morda, the blind man employed to keep the fire lit; and a husband called Tegid Foel, after whom the current lake in the town of Bala is named. Finally we meet Taliesin, he with the radiant brow, the embodiment of the substance brewed within the vessel of the witch goddess Cerridwen. This nonhuman character, the enigmatic cauldron, is the heart of mystery; it is all-powerful yet deadly, transformative, destructive, and inspiring. It sits in a central position within th
e tale, affecting everything that surrounds it.
The Power of Myth
The Celtic tales arise from a time when the islands of Britain had not been segregated into neat little parcels, perfectly delineated by borders and invisible boundaries. The old tales and legends were alive and thriving during a time when there was no such thing as England and Wales; such concepts had yet to be invented. As a consequence, the tales continue to sing of a misty period in time—before the Romans came, long before the Saxons and Normans invaded—when we all shared the same language and relished in a common mythology based on the land and the relationship the tribe had with it.
Mythologies act as keys to the lucid awakening of the spirit; cultures the world over share a surprising commonality within their mythologies. In the British Isles, the similarities between the British and Irish myths are obvious: they share similar themes and contain identical traits and archetypes that have common attributions with their opposite cultural counterparts. Within these myths, it was generally accepted that a mere mortal—a simple human being—by a series of transformations, challenges, and initiations, could become the epitome and embodiment of wisdom and magic.
According to the great mythologist Joseph Campbell, mythology is “an organization of images metaphoric of experience, action, and fulfilment of the human spirit in the field of a given culture at a given time.”2
Culture is fluid, moving constantly, like a stream—streams that become rivers, rivers that flow into deep lakes of communities, becoming rivers again, flowing and feeding the land and the people. Culture and cultural expression have been given the capacity to move beyond physical boundaries as our world shrinks, as people become closer owing to the advancements of our technologies. To journey back to the time of the Iron Age, before the advancement of Rome and its empire, we would discover that what was culturally specific to the tribes of the Ordovician people of my lands would not necessarily have been reflected on the American continent. Mythologies arose that were specific to the land and the interaction the tribe had with it, but that changed—what would have been an eight-day walk from one region to another now takes less than an hour. The spanning of oceans that would have taken weeks of peril and risk can now be leapt in a matter of hours. As our society advanced, so cultural expressions advanced, developed, and became applicable to new times and new people, until they found themselves being recited and whispered to folk on the other side of the globe.
From the Cauldron Born Page 2
