taliesin...meImyself......'TALIESIN' (6.15.97)

Taliesin, as far as I can remember, is a legendary Welsh bard based on a historical bard of the late 6th century A.D. Though the merit of the historical personage is questionable, he became famous as the hero of a series of Welsh poems written in the 12th century. My reference is to the legendary figure, not the historical bard.

Here Taliesin is taken as a cipher for narration and the issues of representation. And this site is about the impulse to narrate. What I mean by narration is the making sense of things by structuring representations and studying the patterns. It's just a quark fascination of mine which I take too much to heart.

There's something magical about narration and representation which finds resonance in the miraculous legend of Taliesin. I learnt of the tale through Robert Graves' magical extraction in his non-fiction book on 'a historical grammar of poetic myth' titled The White Goddess. The book deeply moved me and spurred me on to consider the rationale of 'matri-focal' religions such as Wicca. In fact the book draws quite a following among the witches and there's no end to the number of Taliesin's and Cerridwen's and Gwion's -- the main characters in the tale -- amongst them. But as far as I'm aware of Graves himself wasn't involved in any neo-pagan religion, rather he's the accredited author of such fictions as I, Claudius or non-fiction on the his experience in the First World War in Good-bye to All That, and a poet too. There are in fact academic-ish web sites and journals devoted to his works. The White Goddess is itself a rather academic offering.

A brief summary of the tale: Cerridwen goofed and gave birth to the most beautiful girl and the ugliest boy in the world. So she contrived to give the boy intelligence as a compensation. Her scheme was to cook up some magic potion which needed to be simmered for a year and a day. Gwion was hired to stir and guard this cauldron full of inspiration and knowledge. Toward the end of his employment 3 drops of the brew splattered on Gwion which he promptly licked off. And of course that gave him all the knowledge in the world, including knowledge of Cerridwen's plan to get rid of him once his task was done. Thus ensued some magical cat-and-mouse chase. In the end Cerridwen, as a black hen, ate him, who had turned into a grain of winnowed wheat, and she became pregnant with him. Now as her child she didn't have the heart to kill him. Instead, she set him off into the sea in a leather bag -- as if that's any better -- much as Moses was set off in a basket. A local prince spotted the bag, adopted the boy, and named him Taliesin. Later on Taliesin saved the prince from an evil uncle by means of his magical poems and incantations.

How much people used to believe in the magic of words is an open question. Nowadays words are no less important -- just ask any advertising agency -- but in a different way it seems. Today, as the cultural descendents of Greek philosophers, we tend to ridicule the myths and the ancient attribution of magic to words and representation in general. The White Goddess gives an alternative reading of the ancient myths as poetic short-hands for historical events of military and religious conquests. If Graves reading is academically unaccredited, at the very least it will be a mental exercise to prepare us for cooking up replies to some of the shackles and problems facing the predominant views of our time.