Having left the question of shape-shifting hanging as an afterthought last time, here are some further thoughts on interactions with animals. These fall into three categories:
1. Personal encounters in the natural environment. I have recorded some instances in verse that had profound significance for me at the time: HERE
1. Personal encounters in the natural environment. I have recorded some instances in verse that had profound significance for me at the time: HERE
Empathy rather than shape-shifting is involved in these examples.
2. As a given subject for guided or focused meditation. I have had some significant results in travelling with animal spirit guides in this way and there is the potential for shape-shifting too as in some cases the transition between travelling with an animal guide and becoming that animal to complete the journey has been a feature of some deeper meditations.
3. Literary sources: Ovid’s Metamorphoses give well-known examples of people being involuntarily changed into animals and such transformations seem to be much more common than a willed shape-shifting. There is often an element of punishment or malicious intent here. Irish examples include people changed into salmon, deer and swans. In the Welsh tales notable examples include the boar Twrch Trwyth who is said to have been a king changed into a boar as punishment for evil deeds. In the Fourth Branch of Y Mabinogi. ‘Math fab Mathonwy’, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy are changed by Math as a punishment for unnecessarily causing a war and the rape of the maiden Goewin.
The two brothers are changed first into deer, then into boar and finally into wolves. Math says: “I will make you fare together, and be coupled, and of the same nature as the beasts whose guise you are in”. There is an element here of having to experience sexual activity from both sides, as the brothers are alternately male and female as their animal guises change. They produce offspring at the end of each year which Math transforms into human form and takes into his care. But this seems primarily to be a banishment from human community. At the end of the three-year banishment they are restored to fully human status and able to take part in human affairs once more. Later in this tale Lleu temporarily takes the form of an eagle when Gronw tries to kill him and Blodeuwedd is punished by being turned, apparently permanently, into an owl.
Shape-shifting for a willed purpose is less common. We can set aside the horse nature of Rhiannon as something quite different. Similarly the shifting between human shapes of Pwyll and Arawn and the ability of Gwydion to temporarily conjure illusory horses and dogs are not shape-shifting between humans and animals. There is a brief example of this in Culhwch where Menw transforms himself into a bird in order to confirm that the treasures are between the ears of Twrch Trwyth. But in the Third Branch of Y Mabinogi, ‘Manawydan fab Llyr’, there is a larger scale example of willed shape-shifting where a horde of attackers in the guise of mice strip the corn that Manawydan has planted and destroy the crop. This is part of the strategy of Llwyd fab Cil Coed to mount a magical attack on the land of Dyfed over which he has already cast an enchantment. We are to suppose that this attack comes from Annwn, the Other World, where willed shape-shifting might be more common. For humans it was a perilous and often unpleasant experience, certainly not to be undertaken on a whim.
Something on Manawydan’s response to the magical attack on Dyfed next time …..
