I have always been interested, as an artist and writer, in inspiration. Where does it come from? What is its nature? Why is it such a fickle friend at times? One of the old stories most intimately connected to the idea of inspiration is the tale of the birth of Taliesin. For those unfamiliar with the story, I will offer my version below:
Once, long ago, on the shores of a lake in Wales there lived a great and powerful witch named Cerridwen. She lived there with her husband, Tegid Foel, and their two children. One was a daughter, Creirwy, who was fair of features and in whose eyes the light of wisdom shone. But the other child was a son, Morfran, who showed signs of neither wisdom nor valor, in whom there was neither art nor poetry, and in whom no loveliness of any kind could be found. In fact, he was so ugly that he was known as Afagddu, “Utter Darkness.”
Even in a time where people were far less shallow than in our own dark days, Cerridwen knew that being so ugly, and with scarce any other virtues to recommend him, her son would have a difficult life. Cerridwen loved her son, and wished that she could find a way to grant him some virtue that would win him renown and love among his peers, and would soothe the sting of his ugliness.
Now, as I said, Cerridwen was a witch of great power and wisdom, so she was not content to wring her hands and waste her wishes. No, she set to work, and she found a method for brewing a great potion, a mighty brew which would distill the very essence of the Awen–the flowing, living, liquid breath of inspiration. Whosoever partook of this potion would have all wisdom, and be inspired to great and powerful feats. They would be a bard beyond compare, a spinner of songs, one who not only tells tales but who understands the wisdom at their roots, the soil of truth from which all legends grow.
So, determined to rescue her beloved son from his darkness, she set to work. She prepared herself for the task, retiring in secret to the forest to gather the hidden herbs. Over the course of a year and a day the potion would brew (these things can’t be rushed), and she would daily come to add fresh herbs to her great cauldron, and replace the water that boiled away as the potion reduced down and gained in concentration and potency.
She left the tending of the fire beneath the cauldron to an old, blind man named Morda and to a young farm boy, Gwion Bach, who was his guide. For a year and a day, the two of them carefully tended the flame, as night and day the mighty potion bubbled in the great iron pot.
At the end of the year and a day, Cerridwen knew two things would happen: first, out of the pot three drops would spring on their own–three drops that contained within them the essence of all wisdom and inspiration. Those drops must be caught before they touched the ground, and they would bless the catcher who drank them with the gift of the Awen. The second thing that would happen was that the remainder of the potion, all that was left behind in the pot, would become the bitterest, most lethal poison in the world.
When the day came for the potion to reach its full potency, Cerridwen sent for her son, and had him sit by the cauldron beside old, blind Morda, so that he could catch the three drops when they sprang from the charmed pot. She then left them, and went about her business, confident that her son would soon have all wisdom, and be loved by the people as dearly as he was by her. But as the pot bubbled, and young Gwion Bach tended the flames, suddenly three drops of the potion leapt up and landed on the young boy’s finger. Instinctively, he popped his finger into his mouth to soothe the scald, and as he did so, the great wisdom and inspiration of the Awen flooded into him. Almost immediately, the rest of the liquid that remained within the cauldron soured, and became so noxious that the pot could not stand to hold it, and the cauldron shattered with a deafening CRACK!
The sound brought Cerridwen rushing to see the results of all her planning and careful labor. But when she arrived, rather than the brilliantly wise son she expected to greet her, she was presented with a young boy whom she had barely noticed before, but from whose eyes shone the wisdom of a sage.
Cerridwen was enraged, and Gwion Bach, who now had the wisdom to realize the danger he was in, threw himself out the door in a desperate attempt to escape. With Cerridwen in pursuit, he knew he would need to run faster than his legs could carry him, but now he found he knew how to do things he could not even imagine before. With a quick bound into the brush, he began to change himself, and in an instant the running farm boy was magically replaced by a scampering hare.
Gwion Bach, however, had possessed all knowledge and wisdom for less than a minute, while Cerridwen had been studying the secret things all her life, and she wasted no time in replying to the boy’s trick in kind. In the blink of an eye, Cerridwen’s dress was lying empty upon the ground, and a sleek hound was giving chase to the hare, its mouth frothing with the desire to kill.
Gwion Bach saw danger again closing on his heels, and knew that even as a hare he would never be so swift as to outrun Cerridwen’s rage, and so with a mighty effort he jumped over a stream running into Cerridwen’s lake, and in midair transformed once again. His body, now covered in sleek, silvery scales, splashed into the water, and where a hare had been leaping half a heartbeat before, now a salmon was swimming furiously upstream.
Allowing himself to look back, however, Gwion Bach saw that close on his pumping tail, an otter was sinuously sliding through the water with unimaginable speed. As the otter opened her jaws, flashing her needle teeth mere inches from his fins, Gwion Bach shot up through the water like an arrow. Breaking the surface in an explosion of droplets, he let his scales fall from him, and took off into the bright air as a wren.
As his wings lifted him ever higher, he heard a wrenching scream of rage that chilled his blood to ice, and he looked down to see, rising up to meet him, a furious hawk. Cerridwen would not be denied her revenge. She gave chase through the trees and into the clear sky. Miles they flew, with the great hawk gaining steadily on the swift wren. Gwion Bach then looked beneath him to see that the lake and its forest were far behind, and below them was open farmland. Spying a farmer’s pile of freshly-winnowed wheat, he decided to try one last inspired trick. Just as Cerridwen’s talons were about to close upon Gwion Bach, and she was preparing a cry of victory, her wicked claws snapped shut on empty air. Where before there had been a terrified wren, there was now only a single grain of wheat falling to the earth.
Lying on the ground, surrounded by millions of grains just like himself, Gwion Bach allowed himself to feel a moment’s relief. It was short-lived, however. Moving steadily toward him upon the ground, pecking as she went, came a great hen, hungrily gobbling the grains. Knowing there was no escape, Gwion Bach waited for his end in the belly of Cerridwen.
After finishing the entire pile of grain, Cerridwen went home, glutted but satisfied that the impertinent young boy who had dared to steal the mighty gift she had brewed for her son was no more.
The Awen, however, does not die so easily. A short time later, Cerridwen realized she was pregnant, and she knew beyond all doubt that the child she carried was none other than Gwion Bach reborn. Again full of rage, she committed herself to throttling the infant as soon as she brought him forth from the womb. When the day came, however, she found that upon looking at the tiny face crowned with the light of the Awen, she could do him no evil. Still, she would not raise this child who, in her eyes, had caused her and her family so much grief. So she took the boy to the water, placed him in a coracle, and set him adrift, abandoning his fate to the waves.
Many years passed, with the child magically sustained by pure Awen within the coracle, until one day the son of a lord was checking his salmon weirs, and in the water he found floating this small child. Upon seeing the wisdom radiating from him, the lord’s son named him Taliesin, or “Bright Brow.” The child would grow to become the world’s greatest bard, and his wisdom still inspires us centuries later.
Now, that’s a lot of story! And there is so much that can be gleaned from it–the inexorable nature of Fate, the value of standing and fighting rather than running (or vice versa), the potential capriciousness of the gods. But what I want to focus on is an early acknowledgement of (and wisdom for dealing with) a reality that has plagued me as an artist for years.
It is almost a trope, isn’t it–the depressed or troubled artist? Indeed, it seems inescapable. And I think the tale of the Birth of Taliesin addresses this.
Cerridwen is honored as the provider of inspiration, as one who bestows wisdom and the fire of creation upon us, upon all who are devoted to artistic pursuits, or who are devoted to her specifically. And with good reason. But I think we focus too much on those three drops of wisdom and inspiration, and not enough on what was left in the pot. The price of those three drops is the production of a poison of utter malignance, so dark and vile and caustic it will shatter any vessel that attempts to hold it. And I don’t think there is any doubt that the history of creative individuals is a litany of shattered vessels. Picasso was utterly brilliant, but completely consumed by his work and unable to maintain relationships. Van Gough’s troubled mind is the stuff of legend and actual song. Ernest Hemingway threw himself into every self-destructive passion and habit he could find, and Dylan Thomas, himself literally a modern Welsh bard, drank himself to death in New York City. (I’ve visited the shrine in the bar where he did most of it.) The joy of those three drops is magnificent, but the pain of the poison is never far behind.
And I think that the tale of Cerridwen and Gwion Bach/Taliesin bears this out, and says that the darkness is necessary. Not only was the poison an inevitable byproduct of the potion, but the entire story seems to point to the fact that pain and inspiration are forever entwined.
There is an inevitability around suffering and creativity that sounds almost maudlin to a lot of people, but it certainly is not maudlin to those who are burned by the drops and broken by the poison. For my part, creativity looks almost like a manic-depressive seesaw ride. When I am engaged in making art–either drawing/painting or writing or singing and writing songs–I am feeling truly alive. I am happy, I am free. Until I haven’t drawn anything for two days. Then I am depressed. By seventy-two hours I am convinced I will never draw anything ever again, that inspiration has left me and that I am a withered burned-over shell. Until I draw something else, or write another poem. And then I am great again until another day or two of nothing. And then it starts all over again. After going through this cycle for a few months, usually I stop drawing or writing for several weeks, or sometimes several months. Once or twice, it even lasted years. And when I am in one of these creatively dormant phases, I am more or less stable. But I’m not making anything. And so it never lasts, thankfully. But this all seems inevitable–I can’t have one side of the coin without the other. Without the poison, there would be no potion.
And the ultimate lesson regarding this in the story seems to me to be that there is no way to true inspiration and wisdom without suffering and even destruction. Now I am NOT–in no way, shape, or form–endorsing the idea that there is anything romantic or necessary about artists engaging in self-destructive behaviors. Let me make that abundantly clear. I only mean that it seems the process of making art always extracts a heavy toll from those who would embrace a creative life. Take Gwion Bach–he escaped the poison in the cauldron, but the true venom was the rage of Cerridwen. All his newfound tricks could not ultimately save him, and he was consumed. But after being swallowed, he was dissolved, and out of the dissolution of Gwion Bach came Taliesin, the greatest bard to grace the world of humans. There is a deep alchemy at work here. Absorbing the Awen into oneself requires transformation; it is an instance of Solve et Coagula, the exchange of one state of being for another–an exchange that requires the former to be destroyed in order to be replaced by the latter. The final form cannot come to be if that which came before it remains. If Gwion Bach had escaped his fate, he would never have emerged as Taliesin. Even the wise and powerful Cerridwen seems unable to alter this fate. She could not gift her son the Awen. Not truly. Because to truly claim it, to truly BECOME it, Gwion Bach had to die. He had to be consumed within her and emerge again. Cerridwen wanted to gift three drops of Awen to her son, and watch him become wise. But Morfran could never become Taliesin, because to be born as Taliesin, one had to suffer and die: the three drops of Awen are not enough; the bitter draught was also vital to the process. Even mighty Cerridwen could not change that.
There are, I believe, parallels between this story and that of Odin winning, or rather stealing, the Mead of Poetry. Some are obvious–the inspiring drink, the theft from the giantess, the shape-shifting chase back to Asgard. But one of the less-talked-about elements of this story is the price Odin paid. As the giant Suttung rightly charged Odin before the gods of Asgard with breaking sacred oaths, Odin’s honor was stained–one could argue forever. He gained one of his many names on this adventure–Bolverk, or “Bale-worker”–and a reputation for being untrustworthy. Odin paid dearly for bringing the Mead to his people.
But the story of Cerridwen not only tells us that artists must suffer–it shows a way through. Those three drops are powerful medicine, and the process itself–the act of being a channel for Awen, if we really want to give ourselves airs–is the means by which we come through the dark. In the end, despite all his efforts to avoid his fate, when Gwion Bach submits to the transforming power of Cerridwen, of the source of his wisdom, he is changed. He becomes what he was meant to be. By pushing through rather than fleeing from the dark, he becomes the “Shining Brow.” And Cerridwen, brewer of the potion of Awen, becomes both his destroyer and his creator, as our art both destroys and creates us.
I will try and remember this going forward, as I am attempting to draw from these waters of creativity yet again. I will try not to run. Perhaps we all can learn from Gwion Bach that Awen, too, can be a two-sided thing, that creation is always wedded intimately to destruction, and that in all things: sometimes the only way out is through.
JON GOODFELLOWE
Jon was born and raised in the heart of the Appalachians, in the eastern United States. Growing up at the rusty buckle of the Bible Belt, the Crafte was all but unknown–but also everywhere around him. His great aunts saw haints, his grandmother knew people’s day of death weeks in advance, and his father made sure he knew Merlin before he knew Moses. Being brought up in a family of story-tellers, the dead were never far away, and previous generations were kept alive at the dinner table through the tales they inhabited. Studying literature and art (and seeking to master every craft for which it is hard to get paid), his romantic nature made him seek to throw himself into some greater purpose–and he picked a bad one, lingering in fundamentalist religion for many years. Finding his way out, he has rediscovered his family’s strangeness, the stories that fill him up like air, and has begun to hear again the voices that never stopped speaking to him–those of his ancestors, and the mighty Mountains that cover their bones
