I wanted to share a book of spiritual offerings of awen that I have enjoyed so much, dipping into its pages over and over again in the past few depressing months for nourishment: The Deep Music: Offerings for the Awen. It is edited by Lorna Smithers, Greg Hill, and Lia Hunter and came out early this year, published by Awen ac Awenydd.
In the 12th century Geraldus Cambrensis, Gerald of Wales, wrote of the awenyddion, the inspired and visionary poets of Wales; these poets have many parallels with the filid of Ireland. Smithers relates a letter by Henry Vaughan from 1694 about a young man who fell asleep and dreamed of a beautiful, garlanded young man with a hawk on his fist. The hawk flew into the dreamer’s mouth, bringing the gift of poetry, which “they called awen.” The shepherd became the most famous bard of his time. She speculates that this vision was Mabon, who breathed in the gift of poetry. This is a lot like how the Muses breathed poetry into young Hesiod in Greece, when he too was a young shepherd.
The offerings are wide and deep, with many surprises.
Greg Hill writes in “The Way of the Awenydd” that “the ways to Faery are twisted into the weave of the landscape and are revealed through close relationship with particular places and the natural world.” If we take this path it “leads to the Nemeton, or sacred grove, where portals to the Otherworld may open and inspiration fill the seeker with knowledge for which it is difficult to find words, though seeking for the words that form as patterns of significance is also a path of discovery for an awenydd.” I’d say it may be difficult but that is our challenge.
Lorna Smithers tells of being taught to “walk the Star-Strewn Pathway” by her patron Gwyn ap Nudd. It can be walked in humble surrounds among backyards of earthworms and spiders in the compost as well as in ancient woodlands with the oak men. She visits the Fairy King’s hall but also reminds us that “Apostasies need voicing in cafes and bars, chain-stores and museums.”
Cat Heath in “Chasing Deer” shares an amazing personal initiatic journey full of encounters with the dead extending over several periods of time that brings her to Gwyn the psychopomp.
Kevin Manwaring shares an astounding encounter in a burial mound when hiking the Highland Trail in Scotland, as an arrogant youth (his description), he received the Green Music from the Lady who dwelt within; the kind of gift that require much in kind. “The price of the Green Music was my very soul.” If you are not familiar with him he has written numerous worthy books and won the Bardic Chair of Caer Badon (Bath) back in ’98.
Sithearan NicLeòid offers the “Wisdom of Fire and Water: A Pan-Celtic Awenydd Path” where she writes of her exploration of her Scottish, Irish, and Welsh heritage through music, scholarly study, and learning the languages. Her Pan-Celtic approach feels very refreshing in this time where the trend is too narrowly focus on modern national groups, partially, I think, due to the tsunami of social media identity politics. There are so many parallels between the Irish and Brythonic traditions, and as a person of Irish but also Welsh heritage this really resonates with me. She shares some remarkable encounters in the Scottish Highlands and along the Boyne river and at Emain Macha.
And there’s the wild ride Rhyd Wildermuth takes the reader on in “Awakening the Land” with encounters with giants, the mercurial Taliesin (“a mad liar, an awen-drunk poet slipping in and out of time and place to become everything, ..He doesn’t stay well in time”, Brân, Afaggdu (the Utter Dark) who he says ‘might be a beard-flaying bear), Arthur, Cerridwen, etc. Rhyd claims “to learn about a god, you must go mad.” Some prescient thoughts on the disenchanted world of contemporary tech, noting the kind of results you get putting the names of gods into a search engine and looking for the existence of Apollo give you info about moon-landing conspiracies. “But that’s what we think we’re left with, which his at least part of the reason why the world’s disenchanted, the collective symptom of our shared disease, the ones that’s infected both this world and Others, the ones where They live, the ones where it makes sense to plant legumes to a climb a world-vine to meet a giant or to hang a hundred feet above the ground to talk to one.” Makes me think about the poisonous (capitalist) pedagogies that we were disciplined with as children to accept the world of disenchantment. Lots of little gems scattered throughout like that of Brân being the original Fisher King of Arthurian romance.
Hilaire Wood in “As When the Mystic: Inspired Poetry and the Path of the Awenydd” reminds us that “Poetry is potentised language and even in our secular society it takes its rightful place at ceremonies of birth, marriage and death, the rites of passage.” And that the poem is its own entity with a life of its own as her experience with Keat’s “Ode to a Nightingale” showed her.
There is so much more here including poems by Catriona McDonald, Angharad Lois, Brian Hewitt, Charlotte Hussey, Hazel Loveridge, Aurora J. Stone, and Lia Hunter.
My only criticism is that it would have been good if received another round of proofreading (the 2nd Battle of Tadhg Mor was a real blooper, I hear).
You can get a copy of the book here:
Finnchuill's Mast 