Taliesin and the bards: poetic ways to prehistory

Michael Everson

I read this paper at a Celtic Studies Conference at UCLA in 1986. It was my first public lecture -- showing my interest in mystical experience as a universal human experience, as it may have been expressed in the Celtic tradition.

Since I am talking today about Taliesin as an historical figure, and taking the works traditionally attributed to him as palimpsests under which we can read the record of history, I need to take a moment to establish which Taliesin I mean. In The poems of Taliesin, Sir Ifor Williams observes that the poems in the Book of Taliesin fall into two categories: the work of the "legendary" Taliesin, Elphin's bard, who "combines the powers of a magician, a sorcerer, and a prophet", and the work of the historic Taliesin, Urien's bard, whose panegyric poems are a good deal more straightforward than the mystical poems, and which can serve to date that Taliesin as a genuine historical figure. [Williams 1968:xv-xix] I am interested today in looking at the first, the mystical Taliesin, and will suggest that, in some ways, he and the works attributed to him may indeed be historical, or can in any case bring us to a better understanding of some of the social aspects of the early Welsh bardic schools. The poems I am interested in are the transformational poems of the Book of Taliesin, and especially "the Interrogation of the Bards", "the Rebuke of the Bards", and "the Satire on the Bards" from the Tale of Taliesin of Elis Gruffydd.

In the past, it has been suggested that much of Celtic poetry and mythology appears to be mystical in content, though such investigations have been characterized by a general looseness in rigor and academic seriousness. I should take a moment here to define what I mean by the word "mystical". I consider the mystical experience, as historically attested, to be a fundamental transformation in perception of the self and its relation to the world around it. The individual described as a mystic characteristically realizes a manifest identity between his self and the whole of space, or with God, or with any of a hundred other expressions of the same principle. The mystic describes this experience or state as transcendent, and often relates a number of non-objective effects precipitated into his consciousness, among which are universal love, joy, bliss, and an acute intelligence pervading himself and all that he perceives. Time does not permit us a more detailed exploration of the evidence for mystical transformation in consciousness among the bards and druids than this -- nor is it certain in any case that such exploration will result in anything more "conclusive" than a strong suggestion of and a reasonable defense for such transformation. Still, we can look at the evidence for a tradition of compositional techniques which appear to have parallels with other, clearly mystical, practices in other cultures, and we can ask whether we can see traces of the effects of mystical experience in the poetic record left us by the Celts.

It is unfortunate that the evidence we have for the compositional practices of the British Celts is so poor; we must here, as often elsewhere in Celtic studies, rely on the two-edged sword of analogy: we must look to the cognate tradition in Ireland, and trust that we can learn about Wales from there.

One of the techniques of Celtic composition is attested in Cormac's Glossary: the imbas forosna, or "wisdom that illuminates". [Ford 1974a: 71] It is a description of a method of divination, which, as Cormac tells us, "discovers what thing soever the poet likes and which he desires to reveal." [Stokes 1983: 157] The ritual aspects of this are decidedly shamanistic in appearance, what with the chewing of raw pig-, dog-, or cat-flesh, and the chanting of incantations -- but the protracted meditation, in which the poet was left undisturbed for two or three days, looks more traditionally mystical to me. [Stokes ibid.; Ford 1974a: 71, 1974b: 58 and n.] It is difficult to discuss the relationship between the state of consciousness attained by the shaman in his ecstatic trances and the sort of mystical insight attested in other traditions. On the other hand, perhaps the ritual aspects of the imbas forosna are secondary or tributary to its meditative and divinatory aspects. We find an interesting correlation between the trance of the imbas forosna and Giraldus Cambrensis' description of the "possession" of the Welsh awenyddion:

When you consult them about some problem, they immediately go into a trance and lose control of their senses, as if they are possessed.... Words stream from their mouths, incoherently and apparently meaningless and without any sense at all, but all the same well expressed.... When it is all over, they will recover from their trance, as if they were ordinary people waking from a heavy sleep, but you have to give them a good shake before they regain control of themselves.... They seem to receive this gift of divination through visions which they see in their dreams. Some of them have the impression that honey or sugary milk is being smeared on their mouths; others say that a sheet of paper with words written on it is pressed against their lips. [Giraldus 1978: 246-47] Giraldus' description is of an ecstatic trance, in contrast to Cormac's, which appears more meditative or quietist. This latter method would appear to be the more effective of the two for mystical divination, but we find here the objects of ritual, though we would expect to find them in the more ecstatic practice of which Giraldus writes. A method of stilling and calming the mind appears to be the most common, or certainly the most long-lived, practice in Ireland. Patrick Ford has seen this sort of practice as reflecting a tradition of initiation to the bardic guild, which in part it may well be. But my feeling is that we can see such practices rather as a fragmentary attestation of a highly developed methodology for the attainment of insight. I suggest that this insight is analogous to the sort of noetic (that, is, intellectually apprehended) experience we find in the Hindu or Christian mystics of other centuries. It is a real mystical experience, a greater thing than what is ordinarily understood by the term "divination". It is not objective. J. E. Caerwyn Williams says that the general custom in Ireland was for the fully trained poet to withdraw to his bed and enclose himself in darkness when composing a poem. He quotes Martin's 1703 Description of the western islands of Scotland, in which the poets are said to

shut their Doors and Windows for a Days time, and lie on their Backs with a Stone upon their Belly, and Plads about their Heads, and their Eyes being cover'd they pump their Brains for Rhetorical Encomium or Panegyrick. [Martin 1971: 120] Sensory deprivation of this kind is a common practice in mystical ventures; 20th-century mystic Franklin Merrell-Wolff writes that "it was a standard practice in the Orient to place candidates for the transformation inside caves at certain periods, and often for very long periods." [Merrell-Wolff 1973: 79] It is perhaps not saying too much to suggest that the ends sought and achieved by the British bards were closely analogous to those of the Irish, however the means to those ends may have diverged as reflexes of the earlier Celtic tradition of composition. Irrespective of the methods used, it is clear that the poets were induced into a sort of trance or other state in which knowledge and song would flow through them in an effective way.

In connection with the illumination and inspiration characteristic of poetry and poetic composition, Patrick Ford stresses the recurrence of the themes of "potent illuminating wisdom, found in water, ... whose possession endowed the privileged few with extraordinary powers." [Ford 1974a: 74] We can compare this with a feature of mystical insight which Merrell-Wolff calls "the Current". He claims to have attained to mystical insight, and has described "the Current"

[insofar] as it affects the outer consciousness including the physiological man. To the sensuous consciousness It appears as of the nature of a fluid, for there is a sense of "flowing through"... Along with It, a more than earthly Joy suffuses the whole nature. To myself, i called It Nectar. Now, I recognize It under several names. It is also the "Soma," the "Ambrosia of the Gods," the "Elixir of Life," the "Water of Life" of Jesus, and the "†Baptism of the Spirit" of Paul. It is more than related to Immortality; in fact, It is Identical with Immortality. [Merrell-Wolff 1974a: 20, 31] Now to quote the Vedic S´atapatha Brâhman*a, "Water is the elixir of immortality", it is the vehicle of spiritual life and sustenance. [Panikkar 1977: 118] But it is fire in water which evokes the ancient wisdom sought in divination and poetical composition. Ford has written of this in connection with Ap’u Nap’t, the "Descendant of the Waters" [Ford 1974a: 67 ff.], whom Raimundo Panikkar notes is "also considered to be an aspect of Agni", who is "the water-born" as well as "the divine Fire". [Panikkar 1977: 870, 867] A Judaic formulation of this Way to Knowledge was known even to Giraldus, who notes the similarity between the awen trance and Esdras' prophecies, quoting:

Behold, a voice called me, saying, Esdras, open thy mouth. Then opened I my mouth, and, behold, he reached me a full cup, which full as it were of water, but the colour of it was like fire. And when I had drunk of it, my heart uttered understanding, and wisdom grew in my breast. [Giraldus 1978: 247] Comparison between these different traditions reveals their similarities: meditative trance engenders a kind of knowledge or inspiration which is variously described, though often in terms of water and fire (flowing and burning), but useful and satisfying enough to the individual poet, as well as to the tradition in its social context, to make it a part of the traditional methods of poetical composition, and part of the curriculum of the bardic schools.

These were characterized in general by a great conservativeness, which in some respects is reminiscent of the conservatism of the Vedic school in India. Both the Celts and the Hindus maintained their traditions orally, to preserve the tradition's integrity and to keep it alive and vital in the minds of its students; this is not unusual, for even Caesar recognized that "the help of the written word causes a loss of diligence in memorizing by heart." [Tierney 1960: 272] In the Vedic tradition, it was necessary to preserve uncorrupted "not only the text, but also the pronunciation of the Vedic hymns, the precise and accurate pronunciation of which is held to be essential to the efficacy in Hindu ritual." [Lyons 1968: 20] in Ireland, language, subject matter, and metrical usages were all rigorously controlled, in a tradition which, from the 12th century onward, had grown so very strict that, as Dillon and Chadwick have said, the great families of hereditary bards were able to cultivate a language and diction which remained unchanged for five hundred years. [Dillon and Chadwick 1967: 272-73] Prior to the 12th century, then, it would seem that the bardic schools in Britain and Ireland were characterized by a greater measure of compositional freedom than this. Yet their tendencies toward conservatism would have been inherited from earlier Celtic practice, and possibly, if the similarities between the Celtic and Vedic traditions are cognate and not parallel innovations, from earlier Indo-European practice. In any case, it is certainly safe to assume that the bardic schools which the British Celts must have had would also have controlled the forms and content of poetry. And the poets were aware of their tradition per se; J. E. Caerwyn Williams says that

If Irish poets of the seventeenth and the preceding centuries tried to keep alive the memory of poets who lived, as they believed, in the fifth and sixth centuries imitated their predecessors in the sixth century, it is reasonable to believe that both Irish and Welsh poets of the sixth century were conscious that they too were the heirs of a long tradition, and although we shall never know what that tradition meant to them, it is important that we should look for traces of it. [Williams 1971: 98] I believe that the traces which the historical record does leave afford us indeed a better understanding of the early British bards than Williams hoped for. Imagine just what it would mean for the members of a strong traditional poetic order when their language changed so much that, effectively, none of the traditional poems could be understood. Though John Koch has shown that "there is absolutely no direct evidence to suggest that Late British [i.e. the language of the interval between lenition and syncope, c. 450-c. 550] had declension", still, some remnant of the British declensional pattern persisted as reduced final syllables until the 6th century. This is analogous to the situation in English, where by 1200 the Old English inflectional endings had been reduced for the most part to -e and -en, and lost their use as case markers. While these were by Chaucer's time lost in hiatus and in most polysyllabic words, and were largely optional in monosyllables, still they persist in the adjectival declension almost until Early Modern English, though here for prosodic reasons, rather than grammatical ones per se. [Minkova 1984: 445 and UCLA lecture, 1986-04-29] Thus just because the phonetic material of final syllables no longer reflects anything about case distinctions, still they can remain long after the blurring and loss has ceased to operate, which Koch dates (for consonant-stem declensions in Brittonic) to somewhere between the late 1st century and the end of the 3rd. And they did persist in this way in Late British, until they became so weak against penultimate stress that they were lost at last. Kenneth Jackson dates the reduction or original final short vowels to schwa, and long vowels to short ones, by the first half or the middle of the 5th century. [Jackson 1953: 574, 578] For the ultimate demise of final syllables, he says that

Everything points ... to the end of the fifth century as the period of grave weakening, the first half of the sixth as that of gradual loss, and the middle of that century as the time of the complete disappearance of final syllables. [Jackson 1953: 632]

Combined with this loss of final syllables, there were what Koch calls "the drastic Brittonic phonological changes in the mid fifth to late sixth centuries", and which Jackson outlines in ß 120 of Language and history in early Britain. [Koch 1983: 233, Jackson 1953: 695 ff.]

It is perhaps hard for us to imagine the upheaval it would cause to have the bulk of one's culture- and history-bearing literature -- that is, the poetry -- to be rendered unintelligible, yet this was the result of a series of changes which encompassed some 150 years, spanning just six generations. Perhaps this rate of change would not appear obvious to the ordinary speakers of the language; but it would become quickly plain to the keepers of conservative ritual language, the language of the druidical liturgy, or of the bardic traditional poems. In the midst of the unrest which these changes must have caused among the British bards as they were forced to reorganize their order, it is likely that there arose some contention between more conservative factions, wishing to keep the old (British) metrical patterns and poems, and those more progressive poets who desired to preserve the content of the tradition --that is, the means of composition as well as the subject matter-- while at the same time insisting on the need to compose a (Welsh) poetry which could be understood by their audiences. We know that there were new poets, for they are recognized as such and identified by the tradition. They are called Cynfeirdd, "first" or "original bards".

If we can look at Elis Gruffydd's Tale of Taliesin as preserving some part of the record of this period and the period immediately following, we see that there was a third faction as well: that of the poets who composed in the new language, and who wanted to leave the old methods of composition behind with the old words. It is this faction which the legendary Taliesin addresses in his Interrogation, Rebuke and Satire of the bards in the Tale. Here, he asks the panegyric bards ontological questions which they cannot answer; then in the Rebuke he laughs at their ignorance:

At last he Satires the panegyric school for their

Perhaps the poet's vehemence would be in part explained by the misgivings an "enlightened" poet might have of a move toward the reorganization of the bardic school and the "secularization" of poetry which went along with it. The mystical poets would fear the loss to the tradition of effective ways to insight and to composition -- which they might easily see as just as much a loss to the individual poet as to the society at large. This is not to say that praise-poetry hadn't had a place, or hadn't had a certain dignity within the tradition: J. E. Caerwyn Williams makes it clear, especially in §§ II and III of his paper "The court poet in mediaeval Ireland", that the role of praise-poetry in Celtic and Indo-European society was large indeed, and as important for the praised as for the praiser. What I do suggest is that there was a tension between two different classes within the tradition: one involved in eulogy and panegyrics, in cleverness and criticism, and another which sought and found in the divinations and meditations of compositional practices a complex and satisfying Way to Knowledge.

It is this Knowledge which begets the "transformation poetry", the first-person poetry of the legendary Taliesin, of Aneirin, of Llywarch Hen, and of the tradition in general, in which the poet identifies himself with a kind of omnipresence and omniessence. This is the stuff of the tradition; the Rebukes of Taliesin are more a sort of propaganda, though it is important to remember that we cannot, chiefly for linguistic reasons, ascribe the authorship of any of these poems to the historico-legendary personage to whom that are attributed. But we should not think that the question of whether or not he existed is irrelevant; we must remember that his persona as a pseudo-historical figure, and as the Cynfardd par excellence, remained very important to the Welsh for over a thousand years. As the influence of Christian orthodoxy and its religious xenophobia became more significant in Welsh culture, the kinds of bardic practices I have described above would have been declared disfavored and disapprobate, and their practitioners would have been forced to euhemerize their sources, or conform more rigidly to the demands of the Christian tradition. Compare Cormac's note of Patrick's banishment of the imbas forosna and declaration that "none who shall do that shall belong to heaven or earth, for it is a denial of baptism." [Stokes 1893: 157] If it was no longer proper (or safe) to invoke the all-too pagan awen, the "breath of knowledge", as the source of inspiration, then it might become appropriate to claim Taliesin, the father of this kind of poetry in Welsh, as its source, or as a metaphor for the mystical state out of which these omnipresence and omniessence poems are written, I grant that we must be very careful of our exegesis here. I do not mean to suggest that all of the poets composing Taliesin-like poetry were mystics; indeed, most bards, especially in the later centuries, were probably just transmitters (and redactors) of these poems. But we cannot avoid looking for what shards of truth we find among the stones. Rather than ask whether the poems in the Book and the Tale of Taliesin are "forgeries", we should remember the conservativeness of the tradition, and see that it tends to preserve the content of the older materials even if it changes the form. I think it unlikely that this poetry would have arisen and persisted without at least a fraction of the bardic community perpetuating, covertly in the conservative tradition, a heritage of mystical practices which led to real mystical insight. There was clearly a place for mystical poetry in Welsh society, alongside the secular historical and praise-poetry; for even the tradition of Taliesin's poetry survives late enough for Elis Gruffydd to collect it in the 16th century. We should trust what sense we seem to find within the poems of Taliesin; for when we do, we find in them a key to Welsh prehistory.

References

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Ford, Patrick K. 1974a. "The well of Nechtan and 'La gloire lumineuse'", in Myth in Indo-European antiquity. Ed. Gerald James Larson et al., pp. 67-74. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Ford, Patrick K. 1974b. The poetry of Llywarch Hen. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Ford, Patrick K. 1977. The Mabinogi and other medieval Welsh tales. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales). 1978. (c. 1188) The journey through Wales and The description of Wales. Tr. Lewis Thorpe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Jackson, Kenneth Hurlstone. 1953. Language and history in early Britain. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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Pannikar, Raimundo. 1977. The Vedic experience -- Mantramañjarî: an anthology of the Vedas for modern man and contemporary celebration. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Stokes, Whitley. 1893. (1891) "On the Bodleian fragment of Cormac's Glossary", in Transactions of the Philological Society (1891-1893), pp. 149-206.

Tierney, J. J. "The Celtic ethnography of Posidonius", in Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, LX, Section C, no. 5, pp. 189-275.

Williams, Ifor. 1968. The poems of Taliesin. Tr. J. E. Caerwyn Williams. Dublin: Institute for Advanced Studies.

Williams, J. E. Caerwyn. 1971. "The court in medieval Ireland", in Proceedings of the British Academy, LVIII, pp. 85-135.

Michael Everson, Evertype, Dublin, 2001-09-21