The call of Ceridwen; a poem

Recently I spent a wonderful weekend with a group of women storytellers in West Wales, following the call of Ceridwen and her story embedded in the landscape. She’s linked with other areas of Wales too. This poem began to form after an experience at Pentre y Fan (known by some as Ceridwen’s womb tomb) that weekend. I scribbled the bare bones of it in my notebook while sitting on the rocks in Ceibwr Bay, having just returned from The Witch’s Cauldron on the nearby coast.

If you’d rather listen to a spoken podcast version of this article, that was also updated in January 2025, then play the video below. Otherwise, read on.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxkHZA7kgPI&ab_channel=SemeleXerri

The divine feminine is frequently closely linked with the earth’s formation, fertility, and depths. For me, Her presence is most strongly felt in the beauty of these natural spaces, removed from the evidence and clamour of human society. Also, often, in those places sacred to our ancestors who knew what it was to honour and respect the Great Mother of life, death, and rebirth.

The call of Ceridwen

The sun’s ancient warmth soothes my memoried bones,
Softens the civilised muscles,
Unmasks, dismantles, strips the cultured covering.
My lungs swell with sweet scent of hawthorn;
Tree of fertile magic and love’s union.
A seagull calls, the plea of a lamb
Cracks open the anatomy of my heart
To the wild body of landscape.
My animal psyche pricks up sharp ears,
Noses the air, proffers its clawed paw
To the animate earth,
Quivering with instinct sleeping deep in the belly.
Just as the summit of angels slopes down,
And the ancestor capstone points West
To the sea, to the Source, as if to
Temporally stopper the tides,
So the salt water falls on my cheeks and seeks
The same, familiar course.
The neck of a woman arches back on the mountain,
Her eyelids heavy with agony or ecstasy, I cannot tell.
“It’s both!” A hollow voice drums through my bed of rock;
The fair song of the blessed beloved. Ceridwen!
“Come closer to my cauldron.
What is your pain? Where your joy?
Cast them in, daughter, cast them in;
The darkness and light,
The honour and shame,
The love and the fear.
Keep nothing to or of yourself
And spell it all out.
Stir it up with patient purpose.
Sing and weep over the steeping brew
While I hunt you and hound you beyond
What you think you or I can bear,
Until the old is scalded by the gold
Of who you will become.”
I drift on the internal dark for centuries
In seconds, an unfathomable night.
Cradled, swayed, drifted to an unknown shore.
The day’s radiance blinds my undone eyes
Momentarily, before the vision clears.
A spinal spiral from which nebulous wings
Reach out across the topaz sky
To greet and grasp it All.
What was, what is, and is to come.
The now, transmuted.

You can read a short version of the story here, but the original source story is told in The Book of Taliesin, written in the 15th century. There’s an interesting article about the sources of the story here. How typical that although there would be no Taliesin without Ceridwen, her name is not included in the title and she is obviously not viewed as a central character at all. Perhaps this is a later medieval culture projecting ever-increasing patriarchy onto the story?

You may also like to read my article Diving into the deep world where I write a bit more about exploring Welsh mythology.

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Semele Xerri

© Semele Xerri is a psychic intuitive guide, healer, animal communicator, and Reiki Healer / Master Teacher. To find out more about her and her services, go to her Work with me page.

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