‘Gwyn son of Nudd… forced Cyldedyr to eat his father’s heart… Cyledyr went mad.’ How Culhwch Won Olwen
We have eaten the hearts of our ancestors.
We have bitten them down in pieces. We have choked on them, retched on them, tried to refuse to eat them at our peril.
We have swallowed them whole.
We have made them palatable with condiments – ketchups squeezed from blood and mustards from bile.
We have been unable to stop eating even when told to stop.
We have seen our faces with blood dripping from our mouths on the front of the newspapers and pointed our fingers at everyone else – those heartless heart-eaters.
We have blamed the gods who told us to do it.
We have gone mad with grief and guilt.
We have wandered the Forest of Celyddon with Cyledyr, with Culhwch, with Myrddin Wyllt, tried to become poets and we have failed.
We have not heard your whisper in the woods~ in the little cavern within our right atrium, thought of the hunger of the future.
I have no children so to who will you feed my heart?
Nine towers of stone. Around each coils a wyrm. No way in – no door, lock, key, but a single row of windows at the top where I think I glimpse the face of a madman. They are old as the grey mountains. I want to claim they were built by the haulers of scree, the wyrms summoned and bound by the might of magicians or that they came of their own free will raising the towers from some secret land underground that has never been seen. Share rumours of a sibylline prophetess who consulted the wyrm’s heads but whose words are not recorded in dusty books in an arcane language eaten by bookworms. But no explanation rings true or exists. I feel like banging my head against the stone demanding an answer from the inexplicable unblinking eyes and long stony tongues silent as the purple skies. I cannot accept this vision defeating poetry.
I wrote the poem above a couple of years ago and the vision it is based on has stuck with me. It’s only since I started writing my new mythic book, The Dragon’s Tongue, that I realised that the nine towers correspond to the nine heads of the Dragon Mother Anrhuna and that when she was killed her nine heads were bound on the towers so the creator gods had power over the nine elements (stone, earth, magma, fire, air, wind, water, mist, and ice). I’ve finally got round to trying to draw the scene, which I find helps.
was the night you were furthest away from the world like a distant asteroid – like Pluto.
From now you’re coming back – your land of ice and darkness will thaw and the mists will make it beautiful again.
From the coffin where you dream of nuclear winter you will step into a new suit of armour.
Summer is a’coming to Annwn and winter is already on its way here.
This poem is based on my gnosis that whilst it is summer in Thisworld it is winter in the Otherworld. It is addressed to Gwyn ap Nudd, a Brythonic ruler of the Otherworld and Winter’s King, who is killed by his rival, Gwythyr ap Greidol, Summer’s King, on Calan Mai, and sleeps through the Summer.
After I received this poem in a vision this morning I looked up Pluto, a planet named after the Roman King of the Underworld and saw that, in Japanese its name is Meiōsei – ‘Star of the King of the Underworld’. I thought this was very beautiful and apt for the planet that rules my birth sign, Scorpio, much as Gwyn, my patron god, is the ruling force in my life.
I then returned to an essay by Brian Taylor called ‘Photographing the Underworld? A Note of NASA’s Pluto Fly-by’ which has had a big influence on me. Here he speaks of how the photographing of Pluto ‘ruler of occultation, and protector of the integrity of mystery’ may have been saved from being an act of ‘casual intrusion’ by the plutonium powered spaceship carrying the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh ‘discoverer of Pluto’ (as a kind of offering to the underworld gods?).
Brian also speaks of how he ‘traced the exteriorisation of Pluto in the history of the nuclear era, and found the planet’s signature etched into the geography of the discovery region, most notably in an extraordinary spatial co-incidence. Pluto was discovered in 1930 at the Percevall Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Ten years later Plutonium was manufactured at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory in California, and five years after that the first atomic bomb was detonated at the Trinity Test Site north of Alamagordo in New Mexico. Curiously these three sites fall in an almost perfect straight line, about a thousand miles long, that maps the connection between the planet and the nuclear project on to the land in the most unexpectedly graphic way.’
Coincidentally I have been returning to these themes, which I touched on in The Broken Cauldron, in the later sections of the new book I am writing, which explores more deeply the influence of the gods within the modern world and Gwyn’s connections with nuclear war and nuclear winter.
At the bottom of the essay I saw an old comment I left for Brian in 2015 mentioning a dream I had about Gwyn and nuclear winter, leading me to recall it. Brian notes that the spaceship made closest contact with Pluto on a dark moon and the moon was dark last night.
Spoke the Prophet with the Dragon’s Tongue, The Voice of the Goddess with Nine Dragon Heads: “The Dragon Goddess shall be slain and in Human Form She shall be reborn as the Mother of the Son.
In His darkest dreams the King of Annwn will tear Out the Eye of Bel, He will tear down the Sun and put it Inside the Belly of His Dead Mother and the Queen of Annwn Will shape for Her Dead Mother a new Earthen Form
And They will send Her in a boat to Portus Setantiorium Where She will be met on the Western Shore with Reedlights And up the River of Belisama will sail to Ribel-Castre And there the Eye of Bel will once again be reborn
As Maponos ‘the Son’ to Matrona ‘the Mother’. Yes! Throughout Belisama’s Vale in the Sacred Groves At the Springs and Wells and the Roaring Fords at the Roman Altars and in the Temples They shall be Honoured.
At the birth of every child She shall appear Threefold To Breathe the Blessings of the Awen into the Infant Mouth. As the Three Mothers of Destiny She shall be Revered In all the Holy Places in the Hills and Vales of the Old North.
And she shall appear Ninefold the Dragon Daughter Of the King of Annwn as Morgana and her Sisters breathing Life into His Cauldron before spiralling into Serpent Forms. And the Nine shall be Recoiled in Circles of Stone.
And when the Priests of Christendom come armed With Book and Vestment and Mitre treading widdershins Around our Holy Wells with splashings of Unholy Water But failing with their Prayers to undo our Spells.
Henceforth she will be known as Mary in Nine Churches In Belisama’s Vale: at Peneverdant, at Prestatun, at Wahltun, At Euxtun, at Leyeland, at Sceamlburgh, at Bamber Brig, At Ruhford, at Fernihough, she will be Honoured.
At Cockersand Abbey as Mary of the Marsh As the Magdalen in Maudlands in Nine Times Nine Churches Across the Islands of Prydain and beyond she will be Honoured,” Spoke the Prophet with the Dragon’s Tongue.
This poem was written as an early experiment in writing in the voice of ‘The Prophet with the Dragon’s Tongue’ in a Blakean style and brings together some of the mythic overlayerings of mother figures I have perceived within my landscape, in the Brythonic myths, and in visions and journeys.
I recognise this will not accord with everybody else’s perception of these deities and is very much a personal revelation. And, of course, I won’t be attempting to imitate Blake again, which I knew before setting out is impossible and foolhardy. I see it as a first step on the way to creating a myth to live by.
approaches with a little bit of Chernobyl in its deadly stride.
A big black bell is ringing inside it.
Its face is a man’s.
There is nothing behind it.
I wrote this poem following a dream of which I remember little but the vivid image of a lean menacing wolf with a man’s face and the knowing because I’d seen it, been its presence, I was going to die.
I’ve had a handful of dreams in which I’ve had this gnosis. In one I was a captured soldier awaiting execution and Gwyn prepared me for death by telling me I must go into the hazel, and the beetle, and something I can’t recall. In another I was a clawed creature clinging to a lift descending to the abyss. And in another I was and was not a dark magician, who in a magical battle against mechanical forces, was cut into a thousand pieces by whirling blades and resurrected as a vampiric woman.
Through these dreams I know I have lived many lives, died many deaths, in Thisworld and in Annwn, and perhaps in worlds beyond. That a part of me, which I call my soul, carries these memories.
When I was talking to my dad about his funeral plans I was surprised to hear that he, like me a philosophy graduate, had never thought about whether he had a soul or what would happen when he died. He might have theorised about it but had never really contemplated what would happen to him.
Such questions have been on my mind as long as I can remember. Like my dad I theorised about them, attempting to find answers through philosophy, until I met Gwyn and he taught me to journey to Annwn. Until he and his father, the dream-god Nudd/Nodens, helped me to sleep and listen to my dreams.
For the first time since the Second World War people in Britain are suddenly facing death, due to the threat of the coronavirus. This is a complete unknown for people of my mum and dad’s generation, for mine, and the next generation, who might have included my children, if I’d had them.
I understand that one of the reasons Gwyn appeared in my life and taught me to journey was to help me prepare for death. I know a small handful of others who have had similar experiences with him and different gods, and of those who have gained their own understanding without experience of deity.
In contrast to the advice I’ve seen in various places to focus only on the positives, I believe at this time, when so many of us have so much extra time, there is no better time to contemplate the lean wolf.
Creiddylad most majestic maiden in the Islands of Britain, let me know your majesty
in this garden
on my knees two hands clasped together on this trowel making offerings of water
amongst flowers where you walk unveiled, stunning, bees dancing around you.
Let me be your bee!
Feed me when I’m hungry. When I fall exhausted pick me up gently
and I will make the sweetest honey.
“Stay here in this garden,” my patron god, Gwyn ap Nudd, advised me a week before the lockdown. A couple of days before my conservation internship was cancelled and, like many, I was rendered jobless.
We’ve been on lockdown in the UK for over a fortnight now and how I’ve to-and-froed, some days accepting this advice and, on others, after reading the news, wishing I was doing something more important, more heroic, than shopping and cleaning for my parents, tending the garden, doing my best to find the focus to pray, meditate, spend time in devotion to my gods, and to write for my supporters.
My main battle has been against feelings of guilt and uselessness caused by my awareness of the utter contrast between my easy life, touched by the bliss of the spring sun, and the hell that the nurses and doctors are going through on the front line, risking their lives fighting for the lives of others. The risks taken by the funeral services. The chaos and stress faced by supermarket staff. Our dependence on the long hours and monotonous work of fruit and veg pickers usually imported from abroad.
I’ve thought of applying for, have actually applied for, some of these jobs (which may have necessitated moving out of my parent’s house so I do not put them at risk), but nothing has come of it.
“Stay here in this garden.” I accept the gods have their reasons when the Blasted Oak, spelling disaster, appears in a tarot reading on what will happen if I take a veg picking job.
And deep within I know if I took any of the above jobs I’d likely get physically or mentally ill. That there is something fundamentally wrong with this industrialised and militarised system that keeps comparing the ‘fight’ against this virus with the Second World War and tries to inspire a wartime ethos.
And so I tend my parents’ garden, cutting back years of overgrowth, clearing the paths, weeding amongst the many beautiful flowers that already grow here – hyacinths, daffodils, bluebells, honesty. And the shrubs and trees – apple, pear, rose, quince, camelia. Watering the raspberry canes. Sowing herb and lettuce seeds in troughs and veg seeds – carrot, turnip, onion, cauliflower, broccoli – in the soil.
And somewhere along the way it enters my mind this is ‘Creiddylad’s Garden’. And once the thought has entered it will not leave. I come to see the face of Creiddylad, ‘the most majestic maiden in the islands of Britain’, one of our Brythonic goddesses of flowers and spring, in each flower.
Creiddylad is a sovereignty deity who walks between worlds and lovers. This ‘majestic maiden’ is truly a majesty, a Queen, the lifeforce of nature who inspires great awe in her worshippers and the male deities, Gwyn and Gwythyr, Kings of Winter and Summer, who fight for her every Calan Mai.
Through the Winter she dwells with Gwyn, in the Otherworld, as Annwn’s Queen. In the Summer, with Gwythyr, she is May Queen, a great sovereign in Thisworld, revealing herself slowly flower by flower.
In Creiddylad’s contrary nature I find a better understanding of my own pulls between darkness and light, Thisworld and Otherworld. There is a part of me that wants to walk with Gwyn, a warrior and psychopomp, facing death, disease and sorrow. And at the same time an awareness he and other humans do this so the rest of us can appreciate the flowers and the sunlight and the lives that are our gifts.
It sometimes seems easier, more worthy, to embrace pain than pleasure. Why? I do not know. Only that in Annwn the sadness of the dead is transformed into great beauty and joy, and it this is that Creiddylad brings with her when walks from the Otherworld, into the light, and embraces Gwythyr.
Many of the flowers in my garden speak of similar myths through the correlates of other cultures. The narcissus, or the daffodil, was the plant Persephone was picking before Hades took her to… Hades. The hyacinth was born from the blood of Hyacinth, the lover of Apollo, killed by his rival Zephyrus, and its beautiful petals are inscribed with ‘AI AI’ ‘Alas’. Lungwort’s petals turn from pink to blue as the flowers are pollinated, edging toward death, like flesh, or deoxygenated blood.
Nature and myth, death and life, Thisworld and Otherworld, are deeply intertwined in Creiddylad’s garden. A place where I work slowly, contemplating the mysteries, where I meet flowers, goddess, gods. It seems they don’t want me to be a hero but instead a small suburban bee offering a taste of Creiddylad’s honey.
I. They’ve got jobs – we finally see the key workers:
the paper-clad doctors and nurses saving the sick and the dying (or trying to on the linen streets of the front lines)
the stackers and cashiers within the tin-packed walls of the supermarkets who are saving us from starvation
and the students and unemployed bar staff stepping up to pick and pack berries and lettuces packed with vitamins to keep us healthy
whilst the grave diggers and funeral service pack post-vegetable bodies back into the earth
and the binmen in their bleeping lorry continue to turn up weekly to remove our waste.
II. And no, I have never seen a binwoman, but I was asked if I was one when I was litter picking. Now even this small job has been taken away
I am flicking through job descriptions application forms fingers hovering over wonky letters stuck on keys because the originals were rubbed off over long years of writing (which has never quite been a ‘proper job’) weighing
the balance between making myself enjobbed useful and the risk to my seventy-odd year old parents.
III. All the while the name of a job that I have never seen advertised online or even in a fluffy cloud in a Pagan magazine is pressing its silver lining against the back of my brain:
low risk, innocuous, invisible: ‘MYSTIC.’
“By the Stars of Annwn are you having a laugh?” I rage at my gods before joining them laughing loud and hysterically.
‘guided by Barinthus to whom the waters and the stars of heaven were well known. With him steering the ship we arrived’ Vita Merlini
What stars will you navigate by when they have fallen from the sky? Where is North when there is no North Star? How will the swans fly?
When your boat is stuck on a turning oar in the blackest of midnights shall I tie my blindfold with a sailor’s knot? Trust your sightless eyes?
Speak the words that have never been heard this side of the sunrise? Place my payment shiny and cold in your spitless mouth that never lies?
Your cloak of stars ragged torn will you wrap around my shoulders tight as you swear by dead sea-gods we will arrive on your boat that flies
on the wings of a swan where the sea is filled with the Northern Lights? Find the frost-dark isle of my mysterious god where the sun escapes the sunrise?
Where the living are dead and the dead alive and the blind no longer blind will we find the oar, the compass, the stars, bring them back with the starlight?
*This image is the Six of Arrows – Transition – from the Wildwood Tarot.
The Sanctuary of Vindos 