8/9/2019 Arianrhod - Patricia Monaghan

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Arianrhodfrom Goddesses and

Heroines

Exerpt from Goddess & Heroines by Patricia

Monaghan[Used by permission. This text is NOT included in the Goddess Oracle]

The goddess of the "silver wheel" was a Welsh sorceress who,surrounded by women attendants, lived on the isolated coastal islandof Caer Arianrhod. Beautiful and pale of complexion, Arianrhod wasthe most powerful of the mythic children of the mother goddess Don.

It was said that she lived a wanton life, mating with mermen on thebeach near her castle and casting her magic inside its walls. She triedto pretend virginity, but a trial by the magician Math revealed thatshe had conceived two children whom she had not carried to term: inleaping over a wizard's staff, Arianrhod magically gave birth to thetwins Dylan-son-of-Wave and the fetus of Llew Llaw Gyffes. Dylan

slithered away and disappeared, but Arianrhod's brother, the poetGwydion, recognized the fetus as his own child, born of hisunexpressed love for his sister.

Gwydion took the fetus and hid it in a magical chest until it was readyto breathe. Arianrhod, furious at this invasion of her privacy, deniedthe child a name or the right to bear arms - two prerogatives of aWelsh mother-but Gwydion tricked Arianrhod into granting them.Eventually the goddess overreached herself, creating more magicthan she could contain; her island split apart, and she and her

maidservants drowned.

Some scholars read the legend as the record of a change from motherright to father rule, claiming that the heavenly Arianrhod was amatriarchal moon goddess whose particular place in heaven was inthe constellation called Corona Borealis. The argument has much inits favor, particularly the archetypal relation of Arianrhod to her sistermoon goddesses on the Continent, who like Artemis lived in orgiasticmaidenhood surrounded entirely by women. Other scholars,unconvinced that the Celts were matriarchal at any time, seeArianrhod simply as an epic heroine.

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Text from Patricia Monaghan's The New Book of Goddesses andHeroines

Published by Llewellyn, copyright 1997. Used by permission of the

author.

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