Seeking the cauldron of Ceridwen
Ah, the women of the cauldron, where are you?
Joseph Campbell once said: “Women don’t need to make the journey. In the whole mythological tradition, the woman is there. All she has to do is to realize that she’s the place that people are trying to get to”. In my explorations in researching cauldrons and the women who stir them, they are elusive, from Circe to Ceridwen and the unnamed witches that grace the pages of so many stories. Women are ever-present in the stories, but they don’t have the same Hero’s Journey most attributed to the masculine.
Women contribute in stories by birthing heroes, cooking, fetching and carrying water, holding and parenting children, and being lovers to heroes, but in many of our fairy tales women and girls are neither named nor in the title. For example, in The Six Swans, the protagonist is an unnamed girl who rescues her six swan brothers, but she is nowhere to be found in the title. There are countless other examples where the protagonist is not named or in the title (feel free to share them in the comments). But I digress.
I’m currently diving into Welsh mythology and working on the Birth of Taliesin. Mythology is a different beast than researching folk and fairy tales, mostly because of the characters, symbolism, motifs, traditions, beliefs, and of course, the landscape in which the stories were birthed. The story opens with Ceridwen’s desire to bring light to her unfortunate son of darkness. She gathers the ingredients, organises others to do the hard work of stirring and maintaining the pot and when the potion is accidentally stolen, she punishes Gwion Bach and subsequently gives birth to his reincarnated form, thus ending her role in the story, before moving into the hero’s journey motif.
This is a common thread among stories of heroes in mythology. The Finnish Kalevala is another example. It begins with the hero’s mother Illmatar and the 700-year gestation that she undertakes to give birth to Väinämöinen. It’s not my intention to make this post a gender-dividing argument. But it is to discover who these women were, and how hard they are to find information about them that a. hasn’t been corrupted by religion, b. gives us a sense of who they were, or who inspired them and c. hearing their voice in the texts. I had a similar challenge with The Morrígan: powerful women in myth are both elusive and omnipresent.
“Again, the omnipresent Ceridwen is there, in the cauldron as poetry, words, inspiration, and wisdom. It takes a different perspective to look at the women of mythology. They are not like you or I mortal beings. They have a space more in the liminal edges of our consciousness and in that way, they are elusive.”
Ceridwen only appears in passing in five books (The Black Book of Carmarthen, Peniarth 3, The Book of Taliesin, The Red Book of Hergest, and Prydydd y Moch) and without an ability to read Welsh/translation, these documents are difficult to access. Of course, the most we know about her is from the Birth of Taliesin episode. But on a deeper level, she is ever present in the story of Taliesin and I have many more questions than I can answer. As a storyteller who loves looking at primary source material to learn about the characters (I am limited to English translations), I’m left to look around the character to discover more about her.
I seek things like objects (the cauldron - and what it does), her qualities (shapeshifting, protection of her children), context (when the story was recorded, or set, other mythological characters surrounding her, the landscape in which the story was born), academic research done by people who know far more than me and who may be experts in the field and whether it is a myth possibly influenced from earlier mythology.
The earliest reference to another witch-like woman with a magical cauldron was from the Greek pantheon. Circe transformed people into animals and was a powerful sorceress and like Ceridwen, her cauldron was associated with power. Macleod (2006) suggests that Irish and Welsh cauldrons are associated with wisdom and inspiration. In a fascinating article, Crowther discusses water and wine as sources of inspiration for poetry from the Greek and Roman periods. Then, the idea that water is the source of all life on Earth both within a woman and more broadly. And of course, we have the idea that weaving words into spells and incantations is a special type of power that storytellers and poets create. There are so many threads of exploration in this story.
From the reading I have done (understanding that research is never finished!), we can learn more about Ceridwen from the cauldron itself. In the Book of Taliesin, the poem, The Spoils of Annwn (13-17):
“My poetry from the cauldron
it was uttered.
From the breath of nine maidens
it was kindled.
The cauldron of the chief of Annwfyn:
what is its fashion?
A dark ridge around its border
and pearls.
It does not boil the food of a coward:
it has not been destined.”
From this poem, I went down a research hole to find an Irish giant (Diwrnach) who refused to part with his cauldron that could distinguish between a coward and a brave man, as a result, he was killed and the cauldron and its contents became the spoils of war. Again, the omnipresent Ceridwen is there, in the cauldron as poetry, words, inspiration, and wisdom. It takes a different perspective to look at the women of mythology. They are not as you or I are mortal beings. They have a space in the liminal edges of our consciousness and in that way, they are elusive.
So, I prepare my story for performance using not only all of these things but with a deeper sense of who I think she may be based on the minimal evidence I’ve discovered. It is by no means in-depth research and, like most storytelling performances, it will grow and change as I learn more about her. Just like The Morrígan, I will continue to learn and be guided by these incredible feminine energies that permeate through all of our stories.
*I have used the above spelling for Ceridwen, despite finding no less than eight different spellings of her name
**References are linked above when mentioned. I find this is a much better way of referencing than the cumbersome academic methods!