The Crown of the North: Arianrhod, Part Three

"When coincidences pile up in this way, one cannot help being impressed by them – for the greater the number of terms in such a series, or the more unusual its character, the more improbable it becomes."
--Carl Jung

"I no longer have the luxury of co-incidence."
--Julian Betkowski

The poem I keep thinking of--who walked between...

Two nights ago, the stars seemed again to wheel.  I watched one fall, bright, fierce. I noticed, before I went inside again the reflection of light against a metal bike-gear I've kept as a pendant for no apparent reason, its 19 points later noticed as the same number of years the ancient druids required for training, the same number as Iolo Morganwg's ring of stones.

Yesterday, I performed a bardic ritual of water, as directed in the training materials for the Druid organisation I've joined. I sometimes do these out of order, sometimes read one, do the practices later in the week, or sometimes do them just before reading the next one, as today.  And there's the poem, who walked between..

Outside last night, owls called to each other from the trees in the misty woods not far from the house.

I returned inside, read Tarot for a friend of great affection. There, in the center, her wheel.

Dreams last night, the leaving of the gods from the world of mortals--not leaving, but withdrawing a gift, withdrawing something we need but have failed to earn.

Woke thinking about a question in my head about another goddess who appeared to me briefly, to test me I now realise.  She's appeared to others lately, maybe chasing one person far away.  Soon after, good news, and just as I respond to it, a massive bird-of-prey dances oddly outside my window, as if it to say "notice me. Notice us..."

Synchronicity, as conceived by Jung (a sometimes useful, but otherwise often restricting man), was relationship or meaning conceived between "acuasal" events.  Something happens, something else happens, they seem to be related even though they were caused by different things, and seem perhaps related to something meaningful.

Don't bother with that.  It's the same to say this: Try to find something out, open yourself up to knowledge, and it's all there.  Something or someone guides you when you ask for answers.

VI. Related Deities and Entities

Blodeuwydd:

I mentioned in my last post that the one character in the story of Arianrhod from the Mabinogion who is most important in understanding Arianrhod is Blodeuwydd.  Her names mean Flower-Aspect and also, later, Owl.  She's worshipped by some as a goddess of springtime and sometimes seen as the maiden aspect of a triple goddess, sometimes (but not always) including Ceridwen and Arianrhod.

Arianrhod's three denials of Lleu were of a name, arms, and a mortal wife. Gwydion aids Lleu in the procurement of all three by magic; first, by conjuring an elaborate illusion of inept shoemakers so that Arianrhod will leave her castle and witness Lleu striking a bird; second, he creates a vast phantasm of ships attacking Caer Arianrhod so that she mistakenly commands Lleu to be armed to defend her; thirdly, Gwydion and his uncle Math conjure a woman out of oak and plants so that Lleu can marry outside of Arianrhod's geas.

This third geas, though, is more than a mere denial of Lleu's ability to find a mate.  Woven throughout the stories and myths of multiple Celtic heroes and gods is the concept of Sovereignty, the right and authority to rule the land.  In almost every story of which I'm aware, this right and authority is derived not from the gods or brute force, but from a woman who stands both as the representative of the land and also the conveyer of the gods' will.  

In some stories, the woman who grants sovereignty is the queen; in some cases, she is a goddess represented by a woman or an animal (often a horse, and if you'd like a bit more of the mating-as-animals theme from earlier, you don't have to look far), and in one specific case, she is formed directly from the land herself.

You can think of Sovereignty another way.  If you are familiar with the Old Testament at all, you may remember multiple stories of how the god of the Hebrews repeatedly withdrew his "blessing" from them for breaking their covenant with him.  That is another kind of sovereignty, and this notion appears repeatedly in Celtic stories, particularly in one incredibly important to modern druids, the Battle of Trees.

In it, and similar variations, two armies are at war, one headed by a great warrior with a shield of alder (alternately depicting alder or actually made of alder); this army was the kingdom of Annwn, the Underworld (but not necessarily of the dead).  The other army, the Kingdom of Don (that is, Arianrhod's mother), has a great female warrior.  Neither of these warriors could be conquered by conventional means, but the bard, Taliesin, on the side against the kingdom of Annwn, was able to identify the great warrior as Bran the Blessed, a god of Alder (and also appearing in an earlier branch of the Mabinogion), and the army of Annwn is defeated. [Fun fact--Taliesin also is a companion of Bran in the Mabinogian...he gets around.]

The poet Robert Graves and others have pointed to the story of this battle (bloodless in most accounts, fought in words-as-weapons rather than metal) as another story of sovereignty.  Learn the name of the god behind an army (or kingdom's) power, and that power diminishes.

But also, piss off a particular god(dess) tied to the land, and the land turns against you, as we can learn in the stories of the Irish goddess, The Morrigan.

Arianrhod refused to grant not just sovereignty, but the means of gaining sovereignty, to Lleu.  Gwydion and Math attempt to get around her geas by summoning the land itself in the form of a goddess, and she rebels, too.  A line of kings ends, the magicians behind them fail (but have revenge upon the woman, having first turned her from wood-and-plant to woman, now from woman to owl).

But the matter of Arianrhod and Sovereignty is not complete, either, without discussing three other divine beings associated with sovereignty and related to Arianrhod.

Maelgven and Dahut:

You may not know these names, so let me tell you another story:

A King encounters a sorceress, a woman named Maelgven from apparently another world, a Queen from over Sea.  They fall in love, and she offers him her hand if he kills her husband.

A war ensues, the King and the woman succeed and then flee together on a sea-horse (not the undersea sort, but a horse which rides through the sea, a Morvarc'h, the same sea-beast from which the Merovingians--a French royal line--is said to be descended from ).  They have a daughter, Dahut.

Maelgven disappears at some point; perhaps she died, perhaps she went back to the north, or perhaps she wandered the forests of Bretagne. Before this, though, she asks King Gradlon what he sees in their daughter.

"I see you," he says.

"Then she will be ever thus," she answers.

The King, Gradlon, founds a city upon an island called Ys, ruling for an unmentioned time until the locks and gates which protected the city failed. In some tales, Dahut steals the keys to the gates and gives them to an enemy, in other tales she opens them herself; in every story that we have, it is Dahut whom is blamed.

As the gates fail, the city floods, King Gradlon mounts his sea-horse and rescues his daughter.  But his sea horse begins to fail under the weight, and Dahut leaves (again, either returns to the north or to the sea).

The "sunken city" motif is common in Celtic myth, enough so that it's almost impossible to argue that there wasn't some city of some importance in which a woman with some sort of sorcerous powers lived.  Some conflate this with Atlantis; I don't.

The Breton story of King Gradlon and the Queen from over the Sea is a founding myth of Bretagne.  There was a historical King thought to have been Arthur who sailed across the ocean from Britain to Bretagne (old celtic lands from before the migration into Britain/Ireland, re-settled by "insular" celts as the Anglo-Saxons invaded).  Gradlon doesn't seem to be Arthur, but an older king, who, in essence, earned the favor of the Queen of the North by killing her husband but then, later, lost that favor when his daughter (in the myths, exactly the same as the Queen) turned against him. 

Just because there's an island castle involved doesn't make them the same.  But there's another thing of great interest here.  There's been significant research on this story suggesting that Dahut is similar to the irish Li Ban or other spirits, or an other-world figure or goddess ("la femme d'autre-monde"), primarily by two french/breton authors. But interestingly, these same authors who make this case most strongly (Le Roux and Guyonvarch'h) also discount the existence of Maelgven, primarily because of their belief in the Irish origins of the myth and also later Christianisation. They suggest Maelgven was added later.

An aside on Christianisation:

Christianisation is a problem you'll run into all the time with questions of this nature; some argue that everything which has come through the christians is tainted, while others look to liberate the actual truth and the hidden gods and goddess from the christianized myths.  I'm of this second group.

Almost every myth we have of the Celtic gods and goddesses passed through Christian hands. Druids were slaughtered or went into hiding (there's a possibility that the Ovates survived as witches and then cunning-men), and the only other celtic "priest" class, the Bards, continued on as lorekeepers for the Christian kings.  And so all the lore, Irish, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Scottish, can be said to have been "tainted."

More difficult, the oldest recorded myths were collected in the 12th century.  Lots of scholarship has shown the myths were older (anyone suggesting otherwise needs to explain why christian monks or christianized bards would conjure myths out of whole cloth full of pagan beliefs, being certain to face charges of heresy and death).  But there are epic arguments about parallels, etymology, and history which will "conclusively" prove that one god from one people (living 150 miles away over an easily-crossed channel) cannot possibly have been the same god as another remarkably similar one.

Thus, we'll run into a problem with this next association:

The Morrigan:

I am suggesting that Arianrhod and the Morrigan are related. I am not suggesting they are the same, any more than I am suggesting that the Morrigan and Morgan la Fay are the same (but, guilty by association, you'll see I think Morgan and Arianrhod are also related).

A good place for a Brothel.

Names are sometimes also titles.  Arianrhod's name means "Silver Wheel."  Is this here name or her title? Or are they both the same?  The Morrigan is both a name and a title.  We run into this problem often, particularly when gods seems to mix together.  For instance, take Maponus Apollonius; that is, Mabon/Apollo, shown to have been worshiped in what is now France.  Druids were said to have worshipped Mercury on top of a hill in what is now Paris, where a christian priest named Denis (Dionysus, actually) and his companion Eleutherius ("Liberator," an epithet for Dionysus) were both martyred and then spilled wine out of their necks.  Fun fact--that hill? it's now called Montmartre...you know, where the Moulin Rouge and all the sex is in Paris. As if it's a temple to Dionysus or something...

Sort that complication out and you've come close to understanding the very nature of divinity.  Good luck with that. Most might be tempted to use Jung here, or Neoplatonism, but I find this inadequate for a myriad of reasons I will explain another time.

Someone who's probably done more active work in the building of the cultus of Dionysus than anyone else alive once put it to me this way in an email "I don't know how this works, but sometimes the gods seem to inhabit each other."

This is the best explanation I've heard.  This also explains perfectly why, despite having had no experience with The Morrigan and having made no supplications to her, she appeared after a vision which I am certain (you don't need to be, by the way) came from Arianrhod.

To be clear, I didn't enjoy the experience.  The Morrigan is maybe the harshest goddess I've encountered, and sometimes I wonder if she's sorting us all out on behalf of the other gods, making sure we really mean this stuff.  After confronting two of the mysteries of Arianrhod (I'll get to this in another post), the third involved The Morrigan.  Not until beginning this series did I even understand the relationship to that mystery and The Morrigan, and--I'll be a bit honest--each time I write that name, I get chills.  I understand why some might flee to Christianity after meeting her.

St. Catherine

Speaking of fleeing into Christianity, remember that prophecy I mentioned in an earlier post, from the toothless madman?  "Cathedral steps, great place to fuck."

They're not, it turns out.  However, if you're ever having the trip of your life, wandering in the most vivid
waking dream you've ever experienced in a foreign city founded by the aforementioned King Gradlon, the city of three rivers, tell the hills I say hello.  I'll be there again, but maybe not for a little bit.

And when you go to the Cathedral of St. Corentin, the bishop who claimed to have drowned Dahut in the sea, go look at the gate leading north and stare at the statue of the only saint above that gate.  Stare at the wheel she holds and smile, thinking of the Queen of the North and her Crown.

Morgan la Fay

There is a very compelling case to be made that Morgan la Fay, Maelgven/Dahut and Arianrhod are related to each other. Morgaines are sea spirits and sometimes sea goddesses in both Breton and Welsh tales, Dahut was turned into a Morgaine, and, similarly, the sister of the irish sea goddess Fand, Li Ban, was in a christian baptism renamed to "sea-born," or Muirgen).   Morgana is a sorceress from an isle, sometimes called Avalon/Avallach.  Arianrhod is a sorceress on an island which later disappears under the sea.  If the same process happened in Wales as it did in Ireland, Morgan could be a diminution of Arianrhod.

Ariadne

Later.

VII. Other Names and Epithets

Depending on how you read what I've just written above, you might consider calling Arianrhod by the name of one of more of the aforementioned divine figures. I don't, as I see her distinct from them, and prefer Arianrhod.   No harm done (really) if you don't see it my way.

Instead, the following titles seem to work best in worshipping her.

Iniatrix: Arianrhod is often seen as the Iniatior of Bards and Mystics.  Taliesin mentions having been "three times in Caer Arianrhod," and this is taken as either reference to bardic initiation.

Crown of the North: This one keeps coming to me as meaningful, and is why I've titled this series as such.  Not only because of the stars of her constellation also being the Coronoa Borealis (Northern Crown), but also because of relationship to sovereignty.

Queen of Witches:  This title is already taken by Hecate and a few other goddess.  However, I call her this, as it is what she asked me to call her.  I do so.  You may do as you please.

Lady of the Stars, Lady of the Wheel, and Lady of the Tower: The first two are easy enough to understand.  The Tower refers to another name for her constellation and castle, Caer Sidi, the tower that turns.  Some take this to mean the zodiac, some to mean an actual turning tower, and a few to mean a labyrinthine tower.

VIII: Common Misconceptions

I haven't heard any, actually.  For being quite popular with Witches and Pagans, I've yet to hear anyone say anything about Arianrhod which sounds so off-base that I think she'd be offended.

There are priests and priestesses of other gods who will get awfully enraged if you say something that does not fit their (venerable) knowledge of their deity.  Many of them happen to also be worshiping some rather fierce gods known for cantankerous personalities.  But sometimes this is just ego.  If Arianrhod should ever choose me to be her priest rather than just her bard, throw that statement back in my face hard, please.  One of the biggest barriers to learning about the gods is the ferocity with which some people approach honest seekers.

What I will say it this, though. I'll happily harangue and harass anyone who dares suggest she, or any other celtic deity, should only be worshipped by celts.  You're racist, and they don't need you.  Nor do we.

The Crown of the North: Arianrhod, Part Two

(Third installment in my series on Arianrhod.  

First is here

Second is here)

Want to embark upon a difficult, fascinating journey of words, an alluring tapestry of stories woven from tangled threads which glisten silver and blue in which stands a woman, sounding of the sea into which a myriad of stars have reflected their light?

Sure?  Okay.  I almost want to gnaw my fingers off, actually, both from the excitement and also the soreness of untangling so many threads...

Last night, lying in bed after my (sometimes neglected) greeting of the gods, I kept thinking of the meaning of thresholds.  Gates, liminal places between where one stands and where one is going.  Pass over that spot, that line, and you are no longer where you were.  Stay just on this side, and you enter nothing.  And in the middle, just at threshold, just over the rod delineating here and there, you are in a third place.

That place is the place of magic, of vision.  It's almost overkill that they used a wand to create it.

IV. Arianrhod of the Mabinogion

The only significant tale we have of Arianrhod is from the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh bardic tales first verifiably compiled in the 12th century.

I love the written word.  I like it better when it's on paper, as opposed to typed on screens.  Ink on paper and all that.  But writing things down has a downfall; it becomes set, locked into an act of creation which cannot be undone, only destroyed or deleted.  Books are great (I mean this more than you suspect), but books do not live on their own.

Ever given much attention to the process of reading?  Your eyes scan a page or a screen, moving from one direction to another, following thin shapes which denote sounds.  Letters are symbols for sounds, glyphs, runes, an invisible sort of magic.

Those symbols, strung together in patterns create a sound in your head, a sound which represents a meaning, or a meaning we've identified with a sound.  The words lift from the page into your head through the gates of your eyes, shaping themselves into more complicated symbols which conjure, in the theatre of your mind, the things which those symbols represent.  I write "apple," you read the word, conjure an apple in your head by a process so quick, so seamless, so invisible that you forget you've done it.

I write "taco," and maybe you become a little hungry, identifying the physical experience of eating crisply-fried corn tortillas filled with well-seasoned meat or beans, the sharp but invigorating jolt of chipoltle-lime salsa, the almost exotic earthy-sweet smell of cilantro, the...

You see my point, perhaps. Or maybe you dislike tacos. Or maybe you're thinking what you're going to have for dinner, or the last time you made tacos with your lover and found yourself, despite the monotony of making dinner, feeling oddly close to him, his scent mixing with the spices in the kitchen, your feeling of warmth both from the heat of the stove and the proximity of familiar flesh.

Words are fucking magic.  I forgot I was talking about reading, or writing, and honestly forgot anyone else was going to be reading this.

The story of Arianrhod in the Mabinogi is the oldest written story we've got, and it's much newer than the written scriptures of the Hebrews or the countless retellings of the stories of Dionysus. And yet I worship her and not the Hebrew god, and I find myself currently more concerned with her cultus than with that of the well-attested god to whom she's related (I'm getting there, trust me).

This one goes like this:

A powerful sorceror king named Math was under a geas (these are like curses, but not; closer would be one of the older meanings of taboo): when he was not at war, or not preparing for war, he had to rest his feet upon the lap of a maiden.

One of his two nephews fell in love with the maiden, and along with the other nephew (Gwydion,his brother), conspired together so that the love-struck nephew could have her instead.  They start a war, pretending to be Bards in order to steal a herd of pigs from another kingdom.

Math leaves his throne, people are slaughtered, a solo combat ensues between Gwydion and the lord of the other kingdom.  Gwydion survives, the other lord is slain, the war is over, and Math returns to his throne, preparing for peace until finding the maiden had been raped.

 Enraged, Math (maybe the only nice guy in all of this), marries the maiden and makes her his queen, and then magically transforms his two nephews into paired animals. First, a set of deer, then a set of wild boar, and thirdly, a set of wolves. Two brothers becoming animals, one male, one female, sent off into the wilderness and returning each time with male offspring.

Three years of punishment (and three sons later), Gwydion proposes to his uncle, who has not yet found a new maiden, that Arianrhod, daughter of the same mother as the two nephews, be considered.  She's summoned from her castle, and King Math asks her if she's still a maiden.  Her answer?

"I know no other than that I am."

(That is, "Sure." Or, "what a strange question for you, my uncle, to be asking...")

A test is devised: King Math lays down the same wand that he used to transform his nephews into animals, Arianrhod is made to walk across it, and she has two...children.

The first grows immediately into a lad and returns to the sea.  The second is not really a child, more a thing, an ill-formed blob or perhaps a placenta, which Gwydion locks away in a chest at the foot of his bed.

Arianrhod returns to her castle and then the thing in the chest becomes a child.

Gwydion (having already been a mother at least once in animal form), adopts the child and takes it to Arianrhod.  She asks him if he'd name it, he replied "no," and then she places a geas upon the child so that he'd have no name unless she gave him one, and she does not.

Gwydion, now acting as both mother and father to the child, "tricks" Arianrhod into doing so by compelling her to leave her castle in order to meet a shoemaker.  While outside, she sees the disguised child kill a wren with a slingshot, remarks on his skill and his appearance, and the child earns the name Lleu from her description.

Arianrhod then puts a geas on the child, that he will not have weapons unless she arms him.  Again, Gwydion "tricks" her by disguising Lleu. This time he conjures ships upon the sea so that Arianrhod (who lives in a sea-castle), would believe herself under attack, and so she makes certain everyone is armed, including the disguised Lleu.

And finally, a third geas, that Lleu would have no human mate.  Gwydion and his uncle, King Math, create a woman with enchantment and sorcery from flowers and wood, naming her Blodeuwedd, and giving her to Lleu to marry.

And from her, Arianrhod disappears from the story.

One can summarize her tale in the Mabinogion in several ways:

• Niece of a Sorceror King gets tricked into giving birth in front of everyone.
• Half-sister of a trickster-mage abandons her two children; one becomes a sea-monster, the other a giant-king.
• An isolated princess is shamed into revealing her infidelity and then seeks ineffective vengeance on those who shamed her.

I don't like any of these summaries.  I'll tell you the one that came to me last night, laying in bed, thinking about the threshold/wand, the one that suddenly made a lot of other things I'd been thinking about, particularly after my pilgrimage to Bretagne and some crazy dreams.

Magicians and kings interact with a goddess from an older time, a woman from an Other realm who appears repeatedly in multiple stories, and each time fail miserably. 

It's an old story, actually, and also a still-unfolding new one.

V. "Family."

 

You'll forgive me, perhaps, if I've never really quite understood how geneologies of the gods work.  I've always suspected that, since family is mostly a universal concept throughout history (we've all had mothers, whether we've known them or not), our human attempts to understand the gods reach for symbols from nature.  If you want to order things which are related, you can describe them as families--in fact, scientists technically still do this for all living things (taxonomies, etc).  I sometimes wonder if this is how we got stuck with heirarchies.  It's certainly interesting that, at least still, the common family branch name in taxonomies is still "kingdoms!"

In myths and legends (the "lore" of a god or goddess, as it's often called), there are often family histories.  Do gods marry, have sex, give birth, have parents, etc.?  I really don't know.  They are said to by some.  If you get into Monism or Neoplatonism, then you get some fascinating contortions (including the primal god-mother having sex with her first child in order to birth the world).  I don't delve much into this, and I'm not a fan of incest (unless, as in the story of Arianrhod's "brothers," this involves two men becoming animals and having children--that's something plenty of furry-friends of mine should enjoy greatly).

...Okay.

Several characters are mentioned in the Mabinogion as being related to Arianrhod.  Of them, three of them seem most important.

Dôn: The sister of King Math and the mother of Arianrhod, Gwydion, and several other people. I've never been able to find any mention of her mates.  Several people have suggested that she is equivalent to Danu, the Irish Mother-goddess of the Tuatha Dé Danann.  She may be, she may not be.  It really should be noted that she's got no husband, it's never clear if her children are "full" siblings or half-siblings, and it's particularly interesting that it doesn't matter.  Children now take on their father's family name; many of the Celtic societies seem to have been matrilineal.  Also, they had goddesses as well as gods--the monotheists only have one god, and he's male.

Gwydion: Two variations of his name have been brought up as important; Gwyddion, which means forest or trees; gwyddonydd, which means "scientist."  His actions and magics in the Mabionogian certainly lead one to believe that he possesses many of the talents ascribed to ancient Druids.  Particularly fascinating is his choice to pretend to be a Bard in order to steal the pigs.
There are all kinds of ideas that Gwydion is sort of a proto-Arthur.  This is very alluring, and maybe also distracting.  There is one linkage I'll explore later, but suffice it to say that I suspect the Arthurian legends, much like the Mabinogion and plenty of other tales (like the Hebrew scriptures), are re-tellings of tales for a specific purpose (for those familiar with Christianity, think of Jesus's parables--did they "actually" happen, or was he merely telling a story to prove a point? Maybe both). 

Blodeuwedd: The magically-created woman given to Lleu to marry as a way of getting around Arianrhod's geas on him.  King Math and Gwydion create her together, and then later curse her to live out an eternity as an owl because she chooses to love another king, betraying Lleu's secrets of invulnerability.
I think that Blodeuwedd is actually more crucial to understanding Arianrhod than Gwydion or even Arianrhod's "son," Lleu.  But this will involve more myth-telling.

Aside:

I've been researching and writing this all day.  That is, I woke up, drank tea, started this, and now it's seven pm or some rot.
There was lots of tea in the middle of this, also some coffee, and I maybe ate after realising I was getting a little dizzy.  It's kind of exhausting...

...and so much fucking fun. There's much, more more to write, but I'll leave you with this for now, a greeting for Arianrhod.

Greetings to you, Arianrhod, Silver-Wheel.

Greetings to you, Crown of the North.

You who deny in order to fulfill, I greet you.

You, Queen of Witches, Initiator of Bards

May I remember my times in your Caer

And embrace the Stars that wheel around you.

The Crown of the North: Arianrhod, Part One

(This is the second installment of my series on Arianrhod.  The first can be found here )

My last day at work as a social worker in a residential building for the mentally-ill, a rather traditionally "mad" client asked what I wanted before I left to Europe. I answered him a bit off-handedly, part-jokingly, "you have any advice?" 

This man, I should say, had passed beyond all recognition of sanity for years, babbling incoherently so often that any few intelligible sentences he did utter always took us by surprise.  Drug-addicted, severely schizophrenic, and relentlessly in a different world.

He returned, 20 minutes later.  He'd donned a dress, a wig, and some makeup, unusual for him.  Smoking with him on the front porch on break, he danced around a bit, and then said, laughingly, through his toothless mouth,

"Don't want to take a plane? The woman in the stars will come down to take you back with her.  Oh, and cathedral steps? Great place to fuck."

On the gods

I think maybe, before writing about Arianrhod, I should write about deities in general.  I'm a Pagan, or more specifically, a "polytheistic" pagan.  That is, I believe in the actual existence of multiple gods.

As opposed to, say, Monotheism (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), which believes in the actual existence of just one god, the best god, or one-true-god, or what have you.  I don't have a problem with them, only that I think they can be bit grumpy at times, particularly when they try to jail gays or burn pagans or silence scientists.

This is also opposed to Atheists, who believe in no gods at all, or no supernatural anything.  They make some great companions, though, and tend to read as much as I do.  And I've got no problem with them, except when they get so angry at the Monotheists that they support all kinds of bloody wars in the middle-east to liberate women from a certain form of clothing.

There are other ways to delineate my beliefs, but these get boring and technical.  Ever sat through a debate between a Leninist or a Trotskyite? Or, better say, a Pre-tribulationist versus Post-tribulationist argument? No?

Good.   Let's begin. (1)

I. Who's Arianrhod?

You maybe never heard of her.  I hadn't, much, except for a short passage in a collection of Welsh mythology call the Mabinogion.  The name would sometimes get stuck in my head--it sounds cool, is spelled awesome, and always felt a little familiar.

Arianrhod, in Welsh, means Silver Wheel.  (2)

That tells you little, except it sort of tells you lots.  There's a fun thing about myth and mythic language; like poetry, it unfolds over time.  Turn the phrase around in your head, look at it directly, say it a few times, and then forget about it completely until it suddenly appears in the theatre of your mind, seemingly out of nowhere.  You're staring at something, or thinking about something else, and Silver Wheel comes into your head and you're not sure why, but it somehow fits with what you're thinking about.  Like an off-handed remark uttered by a stranger 8 years before which startlingly takes on profound, severe meaning when you're in the shower, or kissing a lover, or bolting out of a crosswalk to avoid an on-coming car.

She's a goddess, it turns out, as appear to be many others in the Mabinogion.  Daughter of a King with a strange curse, mother of two children whom she didn't keep.  Said to live in both a castle and a tower, Caer Sidi or Caer Arianrhod.  Somewhere in the west, somewhere in the stars.

II. How'd I find out about her?

There's two histories here.  I'm not sure which one to tell.  Now that I think about it, probably three.  History is like this--it's all in the telling, like story.  The threads I choose to pull out and weave together create a tapestry which is a story, but I never seem able to use all the threads.  Ever try writing and finishing a novel? It's just like that.

I'm gonna try this question again. When did I first know her by name? That one's easier.  I was praying one day and suddenly blurted out her name, adding her to the names of the other gods I usually greeted.  By "praying," I mean, in essence, sometimes I merely say "hello" to gods, which I also sometimes do to birds, dragonflies, trees, and friends.  Again.  I believe they actually exist, just like I'm pretty certain trees and friends do, too).

Actually, I did that more often in the beginning.  I got maybe a little too playful with a god, or flippant, shall we say, but it turned out rather good at the end, and I'm glad he decided to see how serious I was, rather than just ignoring my childishness. And said god's got something to do with her, but we're not there yet, and I've got 30 questions to answer and at this rate, I might as well be doing National Novel Writing Month.

Back to that moment.  I just sort of blurted out her name, with an image of a woman and a wheel in my head (one of her most popular depictions), and then I got her attention.

No, that's wrong.   She had mine.

III. Her symbols and icons

I've already mentioned this.  It bears repeating.  Also, hey--did you try what I suggested earlier, playing with the english translation of her name?

What's a silver wheel, huh?

At night, if you stare at the stars in a place where you can still do such a thing, if you stare at the stars repeatedly over a period of time, you'll notice they move.  They don't, of course (thanks, science!), but they appear to.  Also, more fun, they appear to move around a specific spot, appearing to circle a stationary star.

Ever seen a time-lapse photo of the stars?  They appear to wheel.  In fact, there's a phrase, used much less often now that we don't read ink on paper, and I think it should be used more often. Wheel can be used as a verb, and I like it that way.  Stars wheel overhead.  You can sit out all night with a lover under the wheeling of stars (I recommend it, both to you and myself, as I've done much less than I ought to).


Another fun thing, except this starts to get messy.  There's a constellation close to the pole star, called in Latin Corona Borealis, or The Crown of the North.  This same constellation is reputed to be called Caer Arianrhod.  No problem here, yet, except Corona Borealis is already claimed not just in name but in myth to a certain mortal woman, elevated to deity by a certain other deity.  Her name? Ariadne.  And please note--the mere fact that they share letters doesn't mean they're related, anymore than Santa and Satan.  Still...I'll take this up later. There's some interesting stuff here.

So, a Crown is also a silver wheel.  The stars wheel, and are kind of silver.  And there's also another silver wheel around the moon, a lunar halo.  All these and a few other things have been said to relate to Arianrhod.

And...hmm.  There are other wheels, too.  The moon is sort of a wheel (more a disc, actually, so I tend to ignore this, and besides, Ceridwen's a bit better with the moon).  Also, there are other wheels (carts have them, as do cars now, I've heard), and there's one more wheel that's worth noting.

One of the fun things about Paganism is that, like other naturalistic philosophies (including Atheism, actually), it takes most of its symbolism from nature.  Interacting with nature and studying nature all of the time, rather than computers and celebrities (stars? really?), gives you this huge wealth of symbolism and also lots of oxygen, sunlight, moon- and star-light.  And noticing that certain things seem to repeat themselves (the first snow, the first flowering, the first really hot day) on a regular pattern makes one some look for symbols to represent this (this is where pagans and modern scientists tend to differ-scientists like to find ways to predict things and come up with workable and often-accurate theories to do so; pagans often stay with symbols).

Wheels turn.  So do seasons (from summer to autumn to winter, etc.), so do days (from light to dark), so does the month (which, when based on the silver disk's shifting in the night sky, is roughly a 28 day turning, a wheeling within a wheel), and years seem to do so.  So does the earth, making both its own turning around an axis as well as a turning around the sun, another wheel within a wheel (though that one's a bit flat, ellipitical, as it were). 

Arianrhod, then, symbolised by a wheel of silver, which is the meaning of her name...what does that mean?


I've got the rest of the month to go into that.



--

1. Though, for those who care, I'm equal parts Reconstructionalist and Revivalist, belonging not very well to either group.  The Celtic Recon's sometimes get stuck on their "back to tradition" beliefs that they miss how a god or goddess is currently being worshipped, and also sometimes get racist; the Revivalists tend to slip too much into Rainbow-Dazzle-Sparkle-Unicorn talk; I like Unicorns, I don't like Dazzle as much, though sometimes I do.


2. Arian, Ariannaid= Silver; Wheel, Orb, Ecliptic=Rhodau

The Crown of the North (30 Days of Arianrhod--Preface)

Several writers I follow have decided to take up a sort of writing/devotional challenge, the "30 Days of Devotion."  Essentially NaNoWriMo, except not at all.

I saw they were doing it, looked away from the screen and promptly tried to ignore the nagging notion that I should do so, too.

"But I'm new to all this stuff, and I'm hardly educated, and definitely not a good re-constructionist" I complained, and then tried to distract myself with the latest updates of my generally attractive friends' pictorial representations of their life on that blue-and-white site we're all stuck on.

Oh, right.  Blue and White. Back again to the thought. 

Then, I tried to distract myself by making lots of tea, and then I remembered a good friend of mine asked me for a Tarot reading.  I lost one of the Ogham fews he made for me, the one you'd prefer to lose because it means you probably lost it for a reason.  It's Koad, means Grove, and represents the "whole cycle/wheel of the year" and "central balance and possibility"  They were all made of a certain sort of wood sacred to one of my gods, and that wood doesn't grow around here, so I haven't been using said divination set. 

Thinking on this, I rolled a cigarette, walked outside to the oak tree to smoke and think before going back inside to do said divination, and then noticed that the bone, bell, crystal and wood fetish I'd made to honor the spirits of this place I'm living, strung together with the two wands I use, was moving slightly in the breeze (as I say, there was a breeze).  Staring at it and smiling, I remembered the wand I use most often, one of the two framing this charm, is of the same wood as my Ogham set.

No excuse. I cut off a piece, carved the line-and-x, and added it to the bag of the others.

"But I don't know enough," I complained to myself, throwing the Ogham fews to determine whether or not I should even bother with such a thing. 

The answer, in essence, "Yup."

"Which god/dess, then?" I said, expecting it to be the one I know most about, the one even Christians know plenty about. That's be fun and easy.

I got my answer. And then ignored it.

I then pulled the cards for my friend's divination, because I could use duty as an excuse to distract myself.  The aforementioned deity could almost be said to have sabotaged it, turning what was going to be a traditional wand-and-chalice spread into a Wheel spread.

 I don't know.  Like I said, I'm just some guy who--

Nevermind.  I'm listening.

So, over the next month (see the date? I'm starting late, but so are they), I'll be writing "answers" to 30 questions.  I honestly don't know as many answers as I'd like, or, better put, don't feel that I know enough to confidently speak about her in a way I can teach others about her. Unfortunately (or, rather fortunately), I've realised that's probably why she wants me to do it.  So I'll learn.

So, bear with me while an Anarcho-Punk, just-back-from-pilgrimage, tea-soaked Bard-in-Training with crazy dreams and way too many words attempts to answer the following 30 questions about the goddess he feels least comfortable talking about publicly.  See what she's on about?

(Also, I know most of my readers aren't pagan.  You may find this interesting anyway.  Or you may not. I promise to at least use some of my more interesting words.)

The Questions:
 I. A basic introduction of the deity
II. How did you become first aware of this deity?
III. Symbols and icons of this deity
IV. A favorite myth or myths of this deity
V. Members of the family – genealogical connections
VI. Other related deities and entities associated with this deity
VII. Names and epithets
VIII. Variations on this deity (aspects, regional forms, etc.)
IX. Common mistakes about this deity
X. Offerings – historical and UPG
XI. Festivals, days, and times sacred to this deity
XII. Places associated with this deity and their worship
XIII. What modern cultural issues are closest to this deity’s heart?
XIV. Has worship of this deity changed in modern times?
XV. Any mundane practices that are associated with this deity?
XVI. How do you think this deity represents the values of their pantheon and cultural origins?
XVII. How does this deity relate to other gods and other pantheons?
XVIII. How does this deity stand in terms of gender and sexuality? (historical and/or UPG)
XIX. What quality or qualities of this god do you most admire? What quality or qualities of them do you find the most troubling?
XX. Art that reminds you of this deity
XXI. Music that makes you think of this deity
XXII. A quote, a poem, or piece of writing that you think this deity resonates strongly with
XXIII. Your own composition – a piece of writing about or for this deity
XXIV. A time when this deity has helped you
XXV. A time when this deity has refused to help
XXVI. How has your relationship with this deity changed over time?
XXVII. Worst misconception about this deity that you have encountered
XXVIII. Something you wish you knew about this deity but don’t currently
XXIX. Any interesting or unusual UPG to share?
XXX. Any suggestions for others just starting to learn about this deity?

Answers to follow, possibly out of order.  There will be more questions than answers, too.  Insight welcome.
Also, want to know more about Odin, Eros, and Dionysos? Follow those links.  Cred goes to Ruadhán for initiating this whole thing.  And if anyone else is doing it and wants a link here, let me know.

Ceridwen's Gift (Samhain, 2013)

(copyright Will Worthington)

All this was a long time ago, I remember, 

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we led all that way for

Birth or Death?  There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

From The Journey of the Magi, T.S. Eliot

Death.

Speak the word with voice, not just your mind.
Look upon it.
Play with it.

It is to be feared less than Life.

I.
Some believe in only one god, a promise of life which comes after life, which defeats Death, as if they would also defeat Life.

Some believe in no gods, and no life after life, no life after death, only death and the mystery of Life.

I believe in gods.  I've been called by One who means Death-- Death, which is Life, which is again Death then Life.
Her cauldron is never still.

II.
Death is coming for a matriarch, and this is a great sorrow.  But in her face I saw the crone look out, reminding me to tend Her cauldron.

Death came for a patriarch, a life lived in suspension, in expectation of a peaceful life after work.  The tending was done before he'd finished, before he'd finally lived.
This was his lesson to me.
This is Her lesson to us.

Death came for an ancestor, death by his own hands, escape from a life unresolved.
She drowns children, She calls from the sea which is the womb of all life.
We crawled aeons before from Her salt tears to the rim of Her cauldron.
Some of us crawl back into the ocean, summoned or pulled or chased.

Death comes for others so quickly, so close to what seemed the dawn that we rage.
We foam like Her waves, we scream at and through Her moon.
We try to pull it down to understand, we try to blot it out, and all the while,
we stir Her cauldron.

Death will come for me some day, but this is less hard than what comes between Death.

III.
Death is the water of life.
It is our food, fed upon life cut down with scythes or blade, ripped from earth and plucked from branch.
It clothes us in skin no longer covering flesh, it warms us by mirthful hearths.
It runs our machines which run us into other lands, which will one day run us under a dying earth.

There is no sense to Death, except as the shape, the shadow, and the light of Life.
How can we see Life without its end?
How can we whet desire without its loss?

In love is Death.
What was, goes away, dies, clears for new life.

In Death is love, and this is not strange--
But beautiful, Her pale face
gazing upon the life she birthed with death,
the life she fed,
life cradled in her crescent arms,
her silvered sharpened scythe.

IV.

Death and Life dance in Her cauldron
and I think
Life is the greater Mystery.

V.

Do not shun Her gift.

Live.

Musings

On Writing:

It's been awhile since I've actually felt a bit "blocked" when I try to write.  For the past 9 months, and particularly those five weeks in Europe, I've had the opposite problem--great streams of words attempting to pour through whatever medium possible, impatient need to sit before a computer or find a pen (I'm frustratingly picky about my pens) to inscribe whatever is desperate to come out.  

I don't want to say I'm uninspired, for this isn't true.  But there's a different obstacle I find myself confronting.

On Stability:

Yes.  Stability.  Utter lack of stress.  Four of Wands and Cups and Swords and Pentacles, each of which keep showing up in my readings for myself.  Fours are structure.  Solidity.  A pause in movement, a sort of completion from which one can build.  But I thrive on the incomplete, on instability.  Foot upon cobble trudging to a tent, getting stuck in gorse and picking one's way out before the sun sets, getting lost, confused, needing wits, alertness.  It's frustrating to say I'm always at my best when I'm poor, uncertain.  Oh, and cold.  It's really warm here.

On Here:

It's quite nice, you know, being amongst family, being amongst warmth and stability.  It's calm.  The parts of me that are all fire, all air may be gnawing behind my eyes, but it's been quite a while since I've experienced that thing all you normal folk have been raving about for years.  It's nice.

It's also different.  Physical distances are immense here.  Walk an hour from my old home in Seattle and I was downtown.  Walk an hour here and I've reached a mall.

The trees are strange to me, or better said, I am strange to them.  Also, I didn't realize how much of my life has been surrounded with mammalian life until sitting under the full moon in a backyard and watching only lizards.  I've seen a (one) squirrel, and one rabbit. A tree-frog followed me in last night and I couldn't rescue him until just an hour ago.  His back was so sticky that he got stuck to the paper I used to trap him with, and the poor thing comically attempted to extricate himself, his legs flailing.  I feared I'd hurt him, but he appears to be okay.

On Appearances:

There's this old idea I had when staring at a small "downtown" area in British Columbia.  Perfect streets, perfect storefronts, precisely what one things when one thinks "downtown."  But there was nobody there.  

It felt like a film-set, until I realised how much of everything in North America, particularly of the newer-colonized areas, seems so one-sided, so insistently old-appearing but so vapidly new.  

Why build things to look old?  Why give the appearance of antiquity, and, more interesting, what makes us think old forms which take hundreds of years to develop can be merely replicated with architecture?

There are more such places here, faux city-centers that become more tourist destinations than actually-used space.  There's certainly a desire for such places, and I'm certain also a need for them (and the exchange of thoughts/expressions/glances/words which typically occur in old market squares or naturally-grown centers), but what makes us think we can merely engineer them?

On Disney:

I'm becoming kind of fearfully obsessed with the place.  I've never been, and, like learning to drive, I've been hoping to live a long, full life without ever needing to do so.  

Again, why build fake castles and shallow tales except to fulfill some sort of human need?  I don't think anyone goes to Disney merely to be "amused," there's something more human being (ful)filled by (commercial) fantasies. I'm afraid I may have to get closer to the terror in order to comprehend it. 

On Fantasy:

I stopped playing video games just before I started formally studying druidry, and have oddly found myself quite uninterested in doing so.  I think games, particularly the RPG's I'd play, filled (but never fully sated) a longing for enchantment which I'd left ignored for too long.  Interestingly, I found myself also less interested in fantasy fiction, which presents an incredible problem for someone who's written two manuscripts in that genre.  

I've been almost reluctant to re-encounter fantasy, mostly because I've recognised it as having become a sort of distraction, if not actually addiction.  

But, well--Le Guin.  I re-read her collection of short stories, The Birthday of the World, and have begun to remember how falsehoods can be more true than Truth.

Re-Weaving

I am not where I thought I would be, and I am glad of it.

Weeks can be months, you know, or years.  It is an understatement to say this, and I don't think I can begin to make this clear through words, but the weeks I spent in Europe felt to me like years; better said, maybe, that I lived an entire life in the space of little over a month, the moon's full turning and then some.

Between two feasts of saints drest up to cover over an older truth, an older god, I wandered streets of cobble between ancient buildings in another land which feels ever more mine than the one into which I was born.  No longer difficult, really, to understand why so many stories of heroes or fools taken into the Otherworld become to them entire lifetimes before returning, I feel myself having somehow partaken of a stream issuing forth from time that is more than time, and, returning, am a bit off-balance, a bit confused, staring at pavement where once there were stars.

But this is not bad.

I did not dislike my life in Seattle while I was there, despite the ever-encroaching legions of profiteers and enthusiastic spenders spiraling the cost of a meagre existence ever upwards.  I did not think myself unhappy, and, truthfully, I was not until I understood what could be had.

Sometimes, we bury dreams we do not wish to let see light because they are so dear to us we'd hate to watch them wither.  But a funny thing about what we bury--sometimes, after winter's frost and the earth's heaving, after cold rains and unseen tumult of worm, some buried dreams sprout through the soil and live anyway, independent of our fears.

One of those is this: I'll be moving to Berlin next year, by Beltaine or Midsummer.

Until then, I've some re-weaving to do.  I'm wearing a pair of shorts with holes in every pocket through which coins and stones slip to the earth, and I find this an apt metaphor for my life.  Things which have worked but not completely, things which sufficed for only some things but not for everything. Things becoming threadbare with time, needing attention despite my desire to ignore them even as things I could have slip by me.

Did you know I have two unpublished manuscripts?  Just under this pile of soil and leaves over here, near the tree I didn't water but it lived anyway.  I'll be editing those.  The worms never fully got to them, it appears, and they've been tentatively reaching through the packed earth towards the sun from which I tried to hide them.  Published officially or online, you'll be seeing them soon.

The guy who buried them hadn't heard rivers whisper back, hadn't met spirits in dream who offered him ancient villages.  The guy who wrote them thought he knew the meaning of words like "will" and "manifest," until he hauled a 50lb pack up an old druid mount and then met some people and heard some things under the moon that he still can't quite understand but figures another part of him already does.

And there's some other re-weaving to be done.  Ancestors are tricky and sometimes kind of revolting, and I've got some stories to re-write on their behalf so they stop being so revolting and instead be what they are, souls for which life was unlived and death came either too quickly or by choice to escape what life should have been but never was.  There's a reason I'm near family just before Samhain, and there's a reason I'm too dense to plan such things.

I'm still here.  Actually, I'm more here.  I don't know where here is, though it has a name and has some fascinating trees and some endearing souls and lots and lots of distances crossed by big bits of metal on wheels which remain out of my comprehension.

Meantime, I'll be re-weaving stories.  Ones I've written, ones others failed to write, one which cannot be fully written until I've gone away.

And, also, hey--thank you.  You who've been reading these, who've sent me emails or comments, who've had dreams about me and were kind enough to pass them on, who've divined or prayed or maybe just merely thought upon me while I was watching the world explode into brilliance and meaning about me.  The pilgrimage was for myself, yes, but I hope my words warmed you, I hope my attempts to paint with symbols-for-sound what I saw made more beautiful your world.