Midsummer

The Sun sails high in a never dark sky
And Mabon rides the tide of Summer


Tall are the grasses grown in the field
And the Breeze sighs through them singing of Summer


The Forest's adorned with a crown of green
And beneath plays the God in the glades of Summer


The harp of Maponos vibrates the air
And late, in the twilight, still it's Summer.

Invocation to MAPONOS

Andedion uediiu –mi diiiuion risu naritu Maponon

Aruernatin: lotites sni eθθic sos briχtia Anderon

(Gaulish tablet found in a sacred spring at Chamelières)

which, freely interpreted, is rendered as:

Maponos of the deep, great god

I come to thee with this plea:

Bring the spirits of the Otherworld

To inspire us who are before thee.

Propositions and Questions about Maponos and Poetic Inspiration

If – as is attested – Mabon Son of Modron is Maponos Son of Matrona, the divine Son of the divine Mother, and if also – as is attested – he is the spirit of Poetic Inspiration such as is embodied in the inspired [literally*] possession of the Awenyddion as mentioned by Gerald of Wales, and therefore he is the inspired source of their prophecies, and if, cognate with this, The Spirit of Poetry mentioned in Cormac’s Glossary as inspiring the young lad who engages in a rhyming competition with the female poet and may be linked – as is attested – to Aeongus Óg, and if this same inspired possession is the source of  Henry Vaughan's account of the poetic spirit actually entering the young shepherd in the form of a hawk carried by a “a beautifull young man with a garland of green leafs upon his head, & an hawk upon his fist: with a quiver full of arrows att his back”

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Then is there a link between the God of Youth and the Spirit of Poetry which survives in the fragments of story making their own way through the world as episodes in a medieval tale, accounts of poetic & prophetic inspiration and illustrative glosses on words in an exegetical grammar?

But if (as argued by Robert Graves) the source of that inspiration is a goddess rather than a god, whether as Muse or, in the native tradition, the Queen of Faëry as embodied in ballads such as those about Thomas of Ercildoune or  Thomas the Rhymer Who also features in native faërie lore, or in poems such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats which are also making their own independent ways through the world,

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Then should we, as Graves suggests, perceive a transfer of power from feminine to masculine deities as the source of inspiration as evinced by Apollo’s inspiration of the priestess at Delphi?

And if so, does the release of Mabon (who was snatched from his mother when three days old) from a dungeon below Caer Loyw in Culhwch and Olwen signify a release of that prophetic and youthful power into the world by the warrior Arthur and how are we to compare this to the adoption of prophetic power by Taliesin from a brew prepared by Ceridwen whose own cauldron of Inspiration – like that retrieved from the Otherworld by Arthur – became a source of male rather than female power?

Or should gender not be an issue here?

• ‘Inspiration’ – from ‘inspirare’, to breathe in.

Maponos, Angus Óg and Midsummer

… so we have the Welsh example of a figure clad in green leaves with a quiver full of arrows and a hawk, clearly a hunter who is also able to enter a shepherd and inspire him to write poetry. A figure we can associate with Maponos or Mabon in a later development of his name.

And we have in Irish a figure who is transformed from all that is ugly to all that is beautiful and is identified as the spirit of poetry. A figure we can associate with Aengus Óg.

Consider Aengus:

And as to Angus Og, son of the Dagda, sometimes he would come from Brugh na Boinne and let himself be seen upon the earth.
It was a long time after the coming of the Gael that he was seen by Cormac, King of Teamhair, and this is the account he gave of him.

[…..]. "And he was a beautiful young man," he said, "with high looks, and his appearance was more beautiful than all beauty, and there were ornaments of gold on his dress; in his hand he held a silver harp with strings of red gold, and the sound of its strings was sweeter than all music under the sky; and over the harp were two birds that seemed to be playing on it. He sat beside me pleasantly and played his sweet music to me, and in the end he foretold things that put drunkenness on my wits."

The birds, now, that used to be with Angus were four of his kisses that turned into birds and that used to be coming about the young men of Ireland, and crying after them. "Come, come," two of them would say, and "I go, I go," the other two would say, and it was hard to get free of them. But as to Angus, even when he was in his young youth, he used to be called the Frightener, or the Disturber; for the plough teams of the world, and every sort of cattle that is used by men, would make away in terror before him.

(Lady Gregory: Gods and Fighting Men)

Now think of Maponus, or Mabon Son of Modron, the divine son, and consider that Maponus was associated with Apollo, that Mabon emerged from the darkness into the light of life. And consider how god identities might shift. So that Aengus Óg might walk the woods of Ireland in a similar guise. So for me it is Maponus at Midsummer. And it's not that he is, or he isn't a Sun God; not that he is or he isn't a Vegetation God ... and though he is certainly the god that plays the sweetest tune, he doesn't ask us to judge but to listen (though Apollo asked for judgement between himself and Pan, there was an element of asking for judgement between his new and his old self in that). He is the Awen, the spirit of Summer, youth transforming itself to the fullness of age but remaining ever young, the inspiration and the expiration of the Muse and he plays his music in what seems like an endless day.

And the Piper remains too:

He pipes all the wood through and fills it with magic
He fills every heart with a joy bursting free
On Midsummer morning when the wild pipes are calling
Oh! where but the greenwood could we wish to be.


Does a god have different identities in different places? Do gods ‘take on’ the identities of other gods? Do the other gods yet remain? Here are puzzles for Midsummer games. The key in which the music of the Master of the Revels is set might provide the answer, but it is not in his nature to offer neat solutions but rather to propose a conundrum that confounds those who seek such easy answers. His speech is not prose, but poetry; the sense of his song is the Summer.

Aengus Óg?

Following the last post where a god or spirit of poetry was identified as a representation of Maponos, I’m following up Bo’s identification of a parallel passage in Cormac’s Glossary. The Glossary is ascribed to Cormac, King and Bishop of Cashel who was killed in battle in 908 though the linguistic evidence suggests a later date for the manuscripts that have survived. Some of the glossarial definitions contain apparently gratuitous stories linked with the words defined, and one such is a story about a Chief Bard of Ireland in the seventh century called Senchán. He is embarking from Ireland to the Isle of Man with a retinue of bards when “a foul-faced lad (gillie) called to them from the shore as if he were mad: ‘let me go with you’.” No-one much likes the look of him. He is described as having pus running out of his ears if anyone presses his forehead; as having a ‘congrus craiche’ (translation uncertain) over the crown of his head as if “the layers of his brain had broken through his skull. Rounder than a blackbird’s egg were his two eyes; blacker than death his face; swifter than a fox his glance; yellower than gold the points of his teeth; greener than holly their base; two shins bare, slender; two heels spiky, black-speckled under him. If the rag that was round him were stripped off it would not be hard for it to go on alone unless a stone were put on it, because of the abundance of its lice.” In spite of his appearance Senchán allowed him on board along the steering oar after he asserted that he would be of more use to him than all the other bards in the boat. They make room for him by all moving to the other side nearly causing the boat to capsize and tell Senchán that he has allowed a monster on board, which, it is said, explains why he was named Senchán Torpeist – ‘Senchán to whom a monster (peist) has come’.

When they reach the Isle of Man they are accosted by an old woman poet whose whereabouts have been unknown for some time. She challenges Senchán to a rhyme-matching competition but he is unable to match her rhyme so the lad does so instead. She tries again, and again the lad matches her rhyme. They take her back to Ireland with them and then see that the lad is no longer the bedraggled ‘monster’ that he was but “a young hero with golden-yellow hair curlier than the cross-trees of small harps: royal raiment he wore, and his form was the noblest that hath been seen on a human being.” At this point the Irish text changes to Latin for the following two sentences: “He went right-hand-wise round Senchán and his people and then disappeared. It is not, therefore, doubtful that he was the Spirit of Poetry.”

While there are parallels with the story from Vaughan, there are also differences. If we can make the ascription to Oengus mac Óc, the god here does not enter the young shepherd as Maponos does, but actually appears in the guise of a ‘gillie’ of horrible appearance. His true(?) appearance, when he adopts it, is of a noble hero. He is not, as in Vaughan’s story, a hunter with arrows and a hawk though (in a later manuscript version) he has a sword. If the Spirit of Poetry is manifest in Oengus in Ireland, and Maponos in Britain and Gaul, and if these seem to share some characteristics with Apollo according to the Romans, we have a lot to go on in discerning the nature of this god. But gods regarded as ‘equivalent’ by Roman commentators and by mythographers are often more elusive in the forms they take in particular locations. There is more yet to be said …