A Poet Born from Utter Darkness

Old wisdom from a Welsh myth

The new year, as we like to say, is like a baby—fresh and new and full of possibilities. Like the Sun tarot card in the major arcana: a shining child astride his steed, illuminated by divine and holy light. We did it. The sun is returning. Let us make ourselves new again in the darkest depths of winter—lest the labor pains required to birth this child become too painful, too dangerous, too bloody.

Lately, I’ve been mulling over the myth of Taliesin, the Welsh poet nicknamed Shining Brow, whose words and knowledge have survived for over a millennium. Frank Lloyd Wright built a grotto named for him. This myth is the first lesson Phillip Carr-Gomm teaches in the worldwide Order of Ovates, Bards, and Druids. Taliesin was born from the womb of the mother goddess Ceridwyn. The story, of course, is more complicated than this. Taliesin tricked her, and Ceridwyn was bound and determined to kill him—but upon seeing the fair face of the poet, she instead sealed him in a hide bag and cast him out to sea.

But it is not Taliesin who has held my attention.

No, the figure who spurns this old myth forward is the darkness itself. Avaggdi, Affagdu, Morfran. His name means Utter Darkness, derived from y faggdu, ‘a night of unordinary darkness’. A child born as one of a set of twins to the mother goddess Ceridwyn. His twin sister is exquisitely beautiful. Avaggdi is hideous—so ugly that no one can bear to look upon him. Ceridwyn is heartbroken for her son, seeing only an eternal life of pain and suffering before him.

If only she could grant him divine wisdom, something to bring peace to his malignant brow.

She gathers specific herbs under specific moons and brews a potion in a cauldron to call upon the AWEN, the sacred union of masculine (au) and feminine (wen). The cauldron must be brewed for a year and a day. But Ceridwyn, being a mother goddess, cannot toil over it herself. She finds a beggar boy in the forest, collecting wood for an old man, and beguiles him with warmth, shelter, and food in exchange for watching her wisdom stew. A year and a day pass, and Ceridwyn returns to the cabin with Avaggdi.

Here is where the myth leaves Avaggdi.

The boy is startled, or perhaps nervous, by their arrival. He burns his thumb on the brew and instinctively sucks three drops of the potion. In other versions of the myth he steals it outright. The cauldron wails and shatters. Its poisonous contents flood the valley below, sowing chaos and destruction in their wake. The boy, granted knowledge of all things—shapeshifts to escape the raging pursuit of Mother Ceridwyn.

Eventually, he is reborn as the shining poet Taliesin.

But what of Avaggdi?

We become so distracted by the hero and his transformation, how he beat the odds and emerged triumphant. Avaggdi remains. Not redeemed. Not transformed. Not even killed. His home is poisoned, and his mother now carries the child she once tried to destroy.

Utter Darkness later appears on the battlefield in Arthurian legend as Morfran: a demon of war and devastation, a figure of hideousness and beastliness.

I know Avaggdi well. When I read myths, I understand that every character can be an aspect of myself. And when twins appear in story it is often a sign that we are being shown the full spectrum of human nature, both what we celebrate, and what we abandon so that something shinier can survive.

Perhaps it is my own struggle with darkness that makes me think of Avaggdi. The years of pain and addiction that have made me brittle. The darkness that I carry that I tried my best to ignore. It is shameful to have a life so beautiful and blessed and still to be consumed by pain, anxiety and depression. My family’s patterns are to sweep it under the rug and perform, and finally generations of that behavior caught up to me.

My own mythic cauldron shattered in a house fire.

I watched everything I had collected, built, made, and loved reduced to cinders. What hurt most was not the loss itself, but the knowing: I had caused the accident. I carried the weight of having harmed others, of having brought fear and trauma into the lives of my friends. In the year that followed, my nervous system lived on edge. Panic rising at every small mistake, convinced I had burned something else down, convinced I would always be the one who ruined things.

This is how Avaggdi survives in us.

This is the part of us deemed too dangerous, too unsightly, too inconvenient to be included, and we fix, fix, fix it until it erupts, until the cauldron breaks, until poison floods the valley.

During that horrible year I read a book that has much to do with Avaggdi. Martin Shaw’s Courting the Wild Twin—the idea that each of us carries an untamed, often exiled counterpart who holds our vitality, grief, and unassimilated truth. The Wild Twin is not the self we present to the world, but the one who lingers at the edge of the forest, carrying what could not be made acceptable.

Shaw suggests a regimen of baths- the first of lye, the second of milk, and to repeat until our beastliness is shed. The image stays with me. Not of purification, exactly, but of contact. Of staying with what burns and what nourishes, again and again, until something changes.

Taliesin does speak of Avaggdi in his poetry. From the Book of Taliesin:

Until death it shall be obscure -

Afagddu’s declamation:

skilfully he brought forth

speech in metre.

Avaggdi became a poet. How, we will never know. When I enter the myth as Avaggdi, I see the cauldron break and my home destroyed with the poison of the brew.

There is nothing to do but to walk among the suffering.

Perhaps here is where Avaggdi gained his wisdom.

The horrors of the past year ask to be witnessed. No magic potion will grant us divine wisdom, no turning of the calendar will undo what has already happened. I recognize Utter Darkness now—not as something to be eradicated, but as something that demands our presence. As we step into another year marked by war, ecological collapse, and collective grief, perhaps our resolutions need not be promises of self-improvement or brightness. Perhaps they can be quieter vows: to stay awake, to tend what has been broken, and to refuse the comfort of forgetting.

My resolution is not to transcend it, but to remain in relationship—to walk among the suffering without turning away, to refuse the old bargain that trades wholeness for a patina shine. If Avaggdi is still with us, then perhaps this is the work of the year ahead: not to become new, but to become honest

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