The medicine story I offer to you today comes from the deeper layers of the Brythonic Celtic culture, the people who are my ancestors and once stewarded most of the island of Briton. They are known as the Britons and continue on as the Welsh. This story was re-discovered in the modern era in a Old Welsh text known as The Mabinogi that we think was written in the 1200s.

Many scholars and most storytellers understand the stories in this text to be much older, having been carried in the oral tradition for generations previously.

The story of Rhiannon is a continuation of the story of Pwyll and Arawn (my telling here) and Rhiannon and Pwyll (my telling here) completing the First Branch of the Mabinogi.

It’s not an easy story. I’ve resisted telling it for some time. But that is often the way of medicine stories, they take some swallowing down, some digesting, before they give up their secrets. I told this story recently at the monthly women’s story and song circle I hold with Jennifer Armstrong (Honey for Your Heart on Substack) and the reflections from the other women opened it up even deeper for me. We leant into the wisdom of surrendering into the mystery of life, of not needing to know or be seen to be right, to simply let life show the way.

I’m curious to know what this tale brings forth in you.

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This is one of my favorite tales. It calls to the wild part of me, the one that longs to sleep on the earth and find moss in my hair. The story follows the thread of the balance between the wild and the domesticated It warns us of the lack of fertility that seeps into life when we live too far from the earth. It strikes me that this is not a modern problem.

This story was first written down in Norway in the mid 1800s and shares many themes with Celtic tales. I’m curious what medicine it might carry for you.

To delve deeper into the images and archetypes that stand out for you in this story I invite you to subscribe to the free email course: Working with Archetypes here https://soul.kathoughton.com/working-with-archetypes

This one again. This story won’t leave me alone. This is a re-telling of Merlin’s story as it comes through me often. We have little on record of this battle, the battle of Arfderydd recorded in the year 573. It’s location is thought to have been in what is now an old field just north of the Scottish- English border. And it is recorded as one of the three futile battles of Britain.

It is also recorded that this is the battle in which merlin went mad and spend 3 days and 3 nights without food, drink or sleep in the wildwood.

In this telling the story of the battle and what happened after is my imagining - having spend time up there on that land and time fasting out in the woods. the prophesy at the end of this telling has been recorded in multiple ways in multiple texts.

I recommend you give yourself some space to listen to this one. It’s not good driving material. It might require you to dig into your own loss, and what we’ve lost collectively. And from that the seeds of knowing push through the dark soil bringing new life. I invite you to reflect on what it might mean to turn yourself into soil.

To delve deeper into the images and archetypes that stand out for you in this story I invite you to subscribe to the free email course: Working with Archetypes here https://soul.kathoughton.com/working-with-archetypes