Ceridwen: Source of Divine Inspiration
I am the storywitch, old as the sun,
I first drew my breath when the world was begun
Brewing wisdom and awen, the new and the old
stories belong to the teller and told
— Jessica Starr
(Card on header image is from Johanna Polle's The European Goddesses and Spirits Oracle)
By the side of Llyn Tegid, in Gwynedd, stand three figures. A man, who is tending a fire above which a cauldron is bubbling. A small boy stirs the pot. A woman adds plants, which she has gathered according to her great wisdom and the lore of the ancients, to add to the mix. She speaks words over the brew.
This is the story of Taliesin, the most famous bard in Wales. But here I am more interested in the antagonist of that story - the one who knew how to brew a potion that confers divine wisdom and inspiration on anyone who drinks it: Awen.
I am talking of course about Ceridwen.
In the context of modern paganism Ceridwen is considered a goddess. And I personally believe this to be a true label for her. Though in the few original texts that mention her she is never called that. She is a woman - a wife and a mother - who has extraordinary knowledge of herbcraft, astronomy, and magic.
Ceridwen does not appear in the Mabinogion, legendary collection of Welsh medieval tales preserved in the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. She is not attested archaeologically. There is no altar to her, no Roman inscription, no liturgical material that names her as a goddess in ancient Wales. The primary narrative we have is Hanes Taliesin - the History of the poet Taliesin - which survives in manuscripts from the sixteenth century. The earliest written version is by a chronicler named Elis Gruffydd, who noted that the story was already widely known in both written and oral form in his time. The tale itself almost certainly draws on much older material, but how old, and in what form, it is impossible to say.
Earlier even than that written prose tale, we have the poets. Medieval Welsh court bards - male, professional, working within a Christian cultural framework - invoking her name as the source of their art. Cuhelyn Fardd, writing in the early twelfth century, spoke of being inspired by her song. Cynddelw Prydydd Mawr, later that same century, acknowledged her as the origin of his craft. Prydydd y Moch, at the turn of the thirteenth century, named her cauldron specifically as the source of the gift of awen. These references also appear throughout the Book of Taliesin, which suggests that they are part of the common lore for that extended period of time.
So what do we have? An incredibly powerful enchantress, keeper of a cauldron of poetic inspiration, who appears in the bardic imagination as a wellspring from the 12th century onwards, and whose full story comes to us through a late medieval tale, filtered through centuries of Christian Celtic culture. Not explicitly a goddess, but certainly a powerful woman with otherworldly skills, such as shape-shifting. (And this is in common with other otherworldly "goddess/ not goddess" figures from the Mabinogi, such as Rhiannon, who I also relate to as goddesses).
The story itself (from Hanes Taliesin) is worth reading in full, and I'd encourage you to do that. Though the freely available translations online - including Lady Charlotte Guest's influential Victorian version - are not always accurate, and tell us as much about nineteenth century Romantic ideas about Celtic tradition as they do about the original Welsh. Read them knowing that. If you want to go deeper, Marged Haycock's scholarly translations are the more reliable guide to what the Welsh texts actually say (though pricey as its an academic text).
The broad shape of the tale is this: Ceridwen brews a potion of awen: divine inspiration and wisdom. It is intended for her son Morfran (also called Afagddu, meaning Utter Darkness) to compensate for his apparently hideous appearance. The brew must simmer for a year and a day while she adds ingredients according to the correct astrological timing. She gets a blind man named Morda to tend the fire. And a boy, Gwion Bach, stirs the cauldron. While stirring, three drops of the brew splash onto Gwion's thumb; he puts it to his mouth, and in that moment he receives the wisdom intended for Morfran. Now all-knowing, Gwion realises Ceridwen's fury will follow. He runs and she chases. We have an epic shapeshifting pursuit - hare and greyhound, fish and otter, bird and hawk - until Gwion becomes a grain of wheat and Ceridwen, as a black hen, swallows him. Nine months later she gives birth to a child she cannot bring herself to kill. She sets him adrift on the water in a leather coracle. He is found, named Taliesin - Shining Brow - and becomes the greatest bard Wales has ever known (though Wales as a country did not exist in that time as it does now).
There is much more to the tale after that, but Ceridwen does not appear again after this initiation part of Taliesin's story. She is the antagonist that causes Taliesin to be born. His murderer, when she eats him, and also his mother. This is all we hear about her until the Victorian era, scholars and Romantic poets discovered the Welsh myths with considerable excitement, and considerably variable accuracy.
Lady Charlotte Guest's translation of the Mabinogion, published between 1838 and 1845, brought these stories to a wide English-speaking audience and included Hanes Taliesin. John Rhys, writing in 1878, was already speculating about Ceridwen as a dawn goddess, drawing on the Solar Myth theories fashionable at the time. These early interpreters preserved interest in and access to these stories, while simultaneously laying down a layer of their own ideology over the original material. (As is inevitable I feel, I am doing the same myself and it is part of this mystery path to be drawn in my the sources and then follow those threads through gnosis - personal connection).
Then came Robert Graves.
His 1948 book The White Goddess is, depending on your perspective, one of the most important or most problematic books in the history of modern paganism. Probably both. Graves was a poet, not a scholar, and honest about that, wove Celtic myth, tree alphabets, lunar symbolism, and his own considerable poetic imagination into a sweeping theory of an ancient universal goddess underlying all European mythology. He was not himself reconstructing history (though plenty of people have done this following on from his work). He was, in his own terms, writing as a poet about the language of poetic myth. Ceridwen became, in his framework, an aspect of the destructive face of the goddess, the crone, the devourer.
Graves directly influenced Gerald Gardner, who was building what would become Wicca at roughly the same time. And through Wicca, and through the explosion of goddess spirituality in the latter twentieth century, Ceridwen became firmly established as a goddess of transformation, of rebirth, of the cauldron of change. And she continues to appear in that form in contemporary pagan books, websites, and oracle decks. This is the Ceridwen most people encounter first.
I do not think this lineage makes Ceridwen less real, or the experiences people have of connecting and working with her less valid. Direct contact with divine energy is real. Personal gnosis is real. The bards of the twelfth century were already invoking her as a living source of inspiration, not as a historical artefact. Something is genuinely there to be met. But I wanted to be clear about what we do have from primary sources, which is not much. I think it's important to be mindful of that.
I think it matters to know the layers. To know that the goddess most contemporary pagans encounter is in part a Victorian Romantic, in part a Gravesian poet's vision, in part a Wiccan construction, all overlaid on a medieval enchantress who probably holds the memory of something much older, though we cannot be fully sure of that (I feel sure). Knowing these layers doesn't diminish the encounter. For me it deepens it. It means I can approach her with curiosity, asking Her who she actually is, forming a living relationship.
The Silenced Divine Feminine
There is something else worth sitting with from those medieval sources. The bards who invoked Ceridwen - Cuhelyn Fardd, Cynddelw Prydydd Mawr, Prydydd y Moch - were all men. Professional men, working within a Christian courtly culture, calling on a woman as the source of their art. She is the well. She is the origin. She is what they draw from.
There were no female bards.
The woman who brews the awen, who pursues and swallows and gestates and births, disappears from the story once Taliesin is born. Implying that her work is complete with that act.
I find this worth naming. The Welsh tradition puts words at the centre of everything. Naming, speaking, calling things into being. And the origin of all that word-power is a woman who was herself oddly silent after Hanes Taliesin. We recieve her only as the source of bardic power. The muse, not the poet.
I feel she holds knowing about that particular invisibility that many of us feel, of erasure, of only being valid when we have a part to play in the hero's journey. I feel she has plenty more to say if we will listen and not force words into her mouth.
A Goddess of Opposites
Ceridwen seem to have the ability to holds opposite without resolving them.
Look at her children. Creirwy, her daughter, named in the Welsh Triads as one of the three most beautiful maidens in Britain. Morfran, her son, Great Crow, later called Afagddu, Utter Darkness, whose appearance is so awful no magic can fix it. Beauty and ugliness, held in the same arms, loved by the same mother. She does not try to make them the same. She loves them in their difference, and she acts from that love.
Antagonist and also mother to Taliesin. She pursues Gwion Bach with every intention of killing him. She swallows him. And then she cannot destroy the shining child she carries, and instead becomes his mother. Murderer and mother.
The chase itself is a dance of opposites in constant reversal. Predator and prey, shape after shape, element after element - earth, sea, sky - until the boundary between them dissolves entirely and he becomes part of her. She becomes the vessel of his rebirth. There is no clear line between the one who destroys and the one who creates.
In my experience, Ceridwen arrives when two things that cannot both be true are both true. When what needs to die is also something loved. When the transformation required costs something real. She is not a goddess of easy change. She is the one who shows up when you actually need the fire of the crucible to create big transformation.
And the brewing takes time.
A year and a day. Each ingredient gathered at the moment of its greatest potency, according to astrological timing. There is no shortcut through this. Though we can call on help to tend the fire. To stir. (Though it is also true that the transformation may go in a completely different direction that we thought).
Shapeshifter
Ceridwen's shapeshifting in the chase shows us her nature - or natures. She is not fixed in a single form, but has the capacity to move between shapes and elements, to be multiple things (I wrote about this quality in Morgan le Fay, and we find it again here). These very old energies do not stay still. They flow and change.
This is, I think, part of why the question of whether Ceridwen is a goddess or an enchantress or a literary figure from a medieval Christian tale ultimately feels less important to me than who she actually is when we encounter her. She was something before any of those names existed. She will be something when all of them are forgotten.
I connect her, in my own practice, with the energy that presides over the passages where the old form has to be completely dissolved before the new one can emerge. So, not the goddess of death, or of becoming, but of the in-between, when we are neither what we were nor yet what we will be. And the heat is on, so the only thing to do is stay in the pot until it's time. And we will know when.
The StoryWitch
When I first started my YouTube channel - Jessica and the Moon - in (I think) 2017, I originally called it The StoryWitch. (The poem at the opening of this piece sprang from that time and that name). That name arrived in the form of awen - divine inspiration that feels like remembering or being gifted something, rather than inventing it with the mind.
I feel that Ceridwen is a storywitch.
The Welsh tradition knows that words hold power. The bards were performers and keepers of memory - they could also speak things into being. Language was not a tool for describing an objective and separate reality. It participated in the creation of that reality. To name a thing calls it into being.
This idea is also echoed in the Christian mythos, woven through the same culture medieval Celtic Christian culture - In the beginning was the Word. It is a very old kind of knowing, that crosses many traditions: speaking is a sacred act that creates reality.
Ceridwen is, for me, a root-source of that power.
She is why naming matters to me so much in my work. The strange ones I write and speak for are often people, like myself, who have spent years without helpful language for their own experience. Who have been handed other people's words for who they are - too much, too sensitive, too strange/ weird, broken, wrong - and have lived inside that mislabelling. Suffering. Finding true language for our own experience is not a small thing. It is, I believe, a form of awen. A form of coming into being.
I cycle through seasons of brewing, becoming, dying and then bewing again. Probably we all do, if we are paying attention.
A Gift and an Invitation
If Ceridwen is calling you, I have created a workbook to support you in working with her through a complete moon cycle. Inside you will find journal prompts, practices, and reflection questions for each moon phase. These are tools for sitting with the opposites she holds, for tending what is brewing in you, and for finding your own words for what has perhaps been too long unnamed.
Join Us Inside MoonWise
Each moon cycle within the MoonWise Membership we walk with a different aspect of the divine feminine. We connect with goddesses and the moon cycles, honouring both the scholarly record and direct personal gnosis, building practices that are genuinely meaningful for our lives now.
If you are ready for a practice that meets you where you are, you will find that here.
Follow the Thread
Sources and further reading for those who want to go deeper:
- Hanes Taliesin — the primary source for Ceridwen's story. Lady Charlotte Guest's translation is freely available online through Sacred Texts. Read it knowing it is a Victorian rendering, shaped by the ideology of its time as much as by the original Welsh.
- The Black Book of Carmarthen — one of the oldest Welsh manuscripts, containing some of the earliest poetic references to Ceridwen. The National Library of Wales holds the original and has digitised it.
- The Book of Taliesin — the collection of bardic poetry in which Ceridwen appears as the source of awen. Also held and digitised by the National Library of Wales.
- Marged Haycock, Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin (2007) — the most rigorous scholarly treatment of the early poetry. Academic and pricey, but the most reliable guide to what the Welsh texts actually say. Worth requesting through your local library.
- Marged Haycock, 'Cadair Ceridwen' in Cyfoeth y Testun (2003) — her detailed cataloguing of Ceridwen's name across the early manuscripts. Not freely available online sadly; request through your local library via interlibrary loan
- Ronald Hutton, The Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles (1991) — essential context for understanding what we can and cannot claim about pre-Christian Celtic religion. Measured, rigorous, and readable.
- Robert Graves, The White Goddess (1948) — not scholarship as mentioned in the blog above, but enormously influential. Worth reading as what it is: a poet's mythic vision, not a historical reconstruction.
- Kristoffer Hughes, Cerridwen: Celtic Goddess of Inspiration (Llewellyn, 2021) — written by a first-language Welsh speaker and Chief of the Anglesey Druid Order, this is the most substantial contemporary pagan treatment of Ceridwen, grounded in the original Welsh source material.
I encourage you to source books through your local library or independent bookstores. If you are buying online, Bookshop.org (UK/US) and World of Books offer more circular and community-focused alternatives to major global retailers.
