Cerridwen, sometimes referred to as the Old One, is a shape-shifting lunar deity, a master magician and an herbalist. Though she can take any form she wishes, she favours of a woman or a great white sow, a clear symbol of the Moon, linking her to the Roman Diana. Like Diana Cerridwen is one of the great witch deities, the Keeper of the Cauldron of Knowledge. She also has associations with Hecate, the goddess of all the witches.
Reference to her first appears in the Book of Taliesin, a compilation which may date as far back as the ninth century AD. According to the myth she is married to a giant by the name of Tegid Foel, living near Bala Lake in North Wales. The couple had two children – a daughter called Crearwy, meaning beautiful or light, and a son called Afagddu or Morfran, though in some versions of the story the two are given as brothers. Afagddu is as ugly and dark as Crearwy is fair and beautiful. There is an obvious symbolism here in the division of nature into two complementary but contrary principles, summer and winter, day and night, female and male.
Cerridwen is the goddess of dark prophetic powers. In her Cauldron she brewed a potion granting the gift of wisdom and poetic inspiration. Gwion Bach, later to become Taliesin, the noted Welsh poet of the sixth century AD, is said to have accidentally tasted three drops from the Cauldron, instantly giving him great wisdom and insight. Following in this tradition the Welsh Bards refer to themselves as Cerddorion (the sons of Cerridwen).
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Afagddu's ugliness is prerogative to his success and high intelligence (as a recompense). He achieves this by quaffing a cauldron of the Triple Muse that has simmered for a year and a day from below from mephitic jets of chewed toadstools and warmed from above from the breaths of the 9 Muses (seasoned by season with a brew of the sacred magical herbs ivy, hellebore and laurel, in accordance with the planetary motions). The cauldron itself contained a mash of barley, acorns, honey and bull's blood.
ReplyDeleteAfagddu eventually grows up to be swineherd royale to King Guaire of Connaught. His rival is Gwion who accidentally tasted the elixir when a drop bubbled onto his finger and Cerridwen tries to destroy him, adopting many guises - But thereon hangs another tale. In his poem 'Kadweir Taliesin' he mentions the cauldron 'of the 5 Trees.' Taliesin himself was a Second Coming of Gwion.
Cerridwen is also the White Goddess of Life-in-Death and Death-in-Life. The Welsh bards described her as a Grain Goddess. Robert Graves in The White Goddess explicates upon the etimology of her name (and speculates that Arianrhod is another of her aspects). J. A. MacCullock in Religion of the Ancient Celts equates her with the Sow Demeter (who is succeeded by Rhiannon). She had a cast in her left eye that has been recorded in the Romance of Taliesin.
Sir James George Frazer records her existence in parts of Germany and France as a spirit-of-the-corn Cat Goddess.
In Christianity from as early as the thirteenth century the Virgin Mary herself becomes the cauldron or source of inspiration. Long before this she had already been invented by the Saxons, Angles and the Danes who brought very similar versions of her over to England with them.
Graves points out Cerridwen's close connection with Sycorx in Shakespeare's The Tempest in 'Herclues on the Lotus' in The White Goddess.
We clearly share the same interests. :-)
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