Taliesin's Map

The Great Lunar Cycle: The Horse Twins and the Grail: Part 10 of 12 < Part 9     Part 11 > The Welsh Horse Twin(s) and the Grail As we have seen, the Welsh mythological corpus takes the central myth of the Horse Twins and the Gandharva-Wasteland myth, likely two parts of one cycle to begin with, and emphasizes their continuity, compressing them into a more unified narrative, thus ultimately laying the groundwork for the legends surrounding the great object of mystique, the Holy Grail.          Pwyll and Rhiannon's son – Pryderi – has often been put forward as both a Horse Twin and the prototype of the grail quester. So far we have seen how he takes the same role in the Welsh version of the "Aesir-Vanir War" that is taken by Irish Aengus, Norse Freyr, Roman Titus Tatius, and the Vedic Asvins. Pryderi is born on the same night as a horse, which is raised up with him as his own, and indeed almost as his twin. After being kidnapped on the night of ...

        The Great Lunar Cycle: The Horse Twins and the Grail: Part 9 of 12 < Part 8     Part 10 > The Welsh "Aesir-Vanir War"       In the next portion of the  Mabinogion , Pryderi also fights a war very reminiscent of the Norse Aesir-Vanir war. Gwydion desires a pretext to cause Math to go to war, and also desires the otherworldly swine belonging to Pryderi. So Gwydion offers in exchange for the swine a great deal of enchanted fungus that he has temporarily turned into dogs, war horses, and shields. Pryderi accepts the deceptive trade, and we should be reminded of the deceptive deal made in the similar circumstance by the Irish Horse Twin Aengus to win Brugh na Boinne, only the Horse Twin Pryderi has here become the dupe. "And they consulted together, and determined to give the swine to Gwydion, and to take his horses and his dogs and his shields," we read, and the third function quality of the swine is here placed in clear contra...

The Great Lunar Cycle: The Horse Twins and the Grail: Part 8 of 12 < Part 7     Part 9 > Myth Grouping 3: Samvarana = Pwyll            Thus far we have demonstrated how two sets of myths have parallels across the Celtic, Norse and Vedic branches, and how these two sets of myths, the myths of the Moon God and the myths of his son or foster son(s) the Horse Twin(s), intertwine and essentially form a connected set of tales that follow one another in a greater Lunar Cycle, as we see, for example, in the way Freyr's wooing of Gerðr follows his father Njorðr's marriage to Skaði.   To fully complete the puzzle of the greater cycle, and in particular its relationship to the Welsh branch and from there its later form in the Grail legend, however, we must bring in a third grouping of mythic parallels, this time stretching uncannily from Wales to India. One reason this third set must be brought into the equation is that, for the Welsh Horse Twin...