What is inspiration?

These days artists, writers and makers are celebrated for ‘their creativity’, but this idea of creativity being located within an individual is a recent departure from an ancient understanding of inspiration as a sacred gift, drawn from all life — a communal resource able to be brought through skilfully by those who could listen deeply and who had honed their skills to bring it through in service to the community.

Our modern understanding of the individualisation of creativity emerged in two main phases. During the Italian Renaissance, as humanism shifted emphasis from divine inspiration and inherited craft towards the artist’s personal ingenuity, the idea of the ‘creative genius’ arose. Much later, in the post-war period, particularly in the 1950s, with an exponential growth in interest and understanding of psychology, creativity was further reframed as an innate and measurable trait of the individual mind, rather than primarily as the sacred source or finished product of creative work.

In the native British tradition, often referred to as the Brythonic Tradition, creativity is frequently portrayed as an elevated and sacredly inspired act, connected to an otherworldly source or, more specifically, to Annwfn, the Brythonic Otherworld.

In the poem Angar Kyfundawt, in the Book of Taliesin, the poet sings:

'Awen a ganaf, o ddwfn ys dygaf' 

I sing inspiration, I draw it from the deep.

To understand the significance of what the poet is stating here, we need to understand a few things about Brythonic cosmology. Firstly, let us consider ‘the deep’. This is a poetic way of alluding to the old Brythonic Otherworld, known as Annwfn, and sometimes as Anwn. Annwfn means something like ‘the utter deep’. It is conceived of as a dimension enfolded within our own, operating alongside everyday reality, in which the ‘shining ones’ — gods and goddesses, otherworldly beings, and the ancestors — abide. It is a place into which we mortals may enter and return from, but always, we return changed. It is a place of soul learning and growth. The beings of the Otherworld equally step into our own dimension from time to time to teach or guide us. The veil between these dimensions is permeable. Acts of creativity, song, dreaming, storytelling and ceremony can help us penetrate the veil, and certain locations in the natural world are understood as portals: still bodies of fresh water, such as lakes and pools, as well as crossroads, groves and caves, and the deep woods among them.

Let us look, then, at ‘Awen’. Awen is a very specific kind of inspiration: an elevated form of creative guidance from the Otherworld. Within this culture, it is understood as the purest, most prized and most direct form of creative inspiration. Later, through contact with the English idea of ‘the muse’, and perhaps through a lack of understanding of the native tradition, Awen becomes wrongly identified as some kind of goddess of creativity.

The origins of this concept are far more interesting. Awen is a divine creativity — and by divine here, we do not necessarily have to think only of gods and goddesses. For the pre-Christian Britons, and even within aspects of early Celtic Christianity, as well as for their Celtic ancestors, the divine was present in all creation. It is the very weave of creation: the breath of divine life in all living things.

The story of the Birth of Taliesin is an example of how the bards, the professional poets of Britain, worked with older lore around Awen and creativity, and employed the story that in all likelihood had existed in many forms within the oral tradition (as attested by some variations and many allusions to it in early poetry), in order to celebrate the sacredness of Awen and elevate poetry and the bardic arts. Through what we know of the bardic schools, we can just about trace a philosophical and cosmological lineage back to the druid schools of pre-Roman Britain.

While the bards were not the direct descendants of the druids, the early poetry of the master bards, and what we can glean of the traditions of the bardic schools, suggest that some Druidic understanding may have gone underground during the four centuries of Roman occupation, to emerge in partial form in the teachings and practices of the Bardic Schools of post-Roman and Early Medieval Britain. By this stage, of course, these traditions were also coming into contact with the doctrines of early Celtic Christianity.

A sense that the natural world and human beings were fully permeable to each other — intertwined and woven in deep empathy — pervades some of the early poetry – as does claims of shape shifting (though that’s an exploration for another day!). The great myths that also make their way from the Iron Age — and possibly from as far back as the Bronze Age – past the Roman gaze and to the Early Medieval period, to eventually be captured in ink on vellum in the scriptorium of the later Middle Ages — were presumably also kept alive through this bardic tradition. Storytelling, or the art of the Cyfarwydd, may originally have formed part of that tradition before becoming its own distinct occupation.

The magical story of The Birth of Taliesin, holds within it deep metaphors for the development and initiation of a bard. From the gift of Awen, which young Gwion Bach obtains through imbibing a magical drop of distilled knowledge and wisdom, following a hard year of toil stirring and heating the cauldron, through a series of dramatic prey and predator transformations, to his being consumed and annihilated in the Goddess Ceridwen’s stomach, only to be magically transformed into a foetus in her belly and reborn as a divine child, and then born again from the Otherworld into this world. It is a profound myth — one of our most potent — and it holds within it soul-shuddering lore about the great mystery of death, rebirth and renewal, the regeneration of the soul from life to life, and the very nature of inspiration and creativity. If there is any text we have that explores the nature of creativity, it is this one!

What is teaches is that Awen is rooted in the Otherworld. This form of inspiration is a sacred gift, available to all, but it is only truly a gift to those who have done the hard graft. To the unprepared, it is poison — it is both a gift and a curse, relentless in its hounding once it has found a skilled channel and root into the world. In the Birth of Taliesin, the gift is that of divine utterance: the bard’s art. Yet through this lens we might also consider that the same is true for all creativity linked to Source. It is not ‘my creativity’; rather, it is the sacred, the Otherworld, Spirit, or the Universe working through us, to birth something into the world that is necessary. Our part of the deal is to hone our skills so that we can land this gift artfully, skilfully, and generously into our communities and into our world.

If you’d like to delve deeper into these matters, we’ll be exploring these ideas and more over four evenings in our online Summer Salon Series ‘TALIESIN’ between 27^th July and 14^th September. Click here for more information.

THE BOOK SHELF

If you’d like to continue your exploration of these things, here are some books that might be of interest:

Legendary Poems from the Book of Taliesin, Edited and Translated by Marged Haycock. Published by CMS Publications, Department of Welsh, Aberystwyth University, 2015.

The Mabinogion Translated by Lady Charlotte Guest, Illustrated by Alan Lee (not all collections of the Mabinogion include the Taliesin story, this one does). Harper Collins Publishers, 2002.

Taliesin Origins – Exploring the Myth of the Greatest Celtic Bard by Dr. Gwilym Morus-Baird. Published by Celtic Source, 2023.

Lost Knowledge of the Imagination by Gary Lachman. Published by Floris Books 2017