Ancient Cymric Star Names
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Welsh Name |
Translation |
Celestial Object |
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The list above is taken verbatim from “Barddas…”, and other Cymric star names and astronomical terms will be added as we encounter them. Any suggestions as to which stars, constellations or other celestial phenomena are referred to in the list above would be most welcome. Please Contact Us if you know of any other ancient Cymric star names, star-lists or astronomical terms, especially those still in use today. Ancient Welsh star-names, and any stories associated with them that your grandparents might have told you, could well be important pieces of a jig-saw puzzle of oral traditions containing vestiges of the ‘ancient wisdom of the megalith builders passed down through the generations over millennia. What ancient mysteries they may resolve remains to be seen, but they should be gathered and preserved for future generations of astro-mythologists to consider.
But from the perspective of the search for “Caer Sidi”, the list does give an insight into the usage of astronomical terms in the poems of ancient Wales. Owen ‘Morien’ Morgan found much the same in his analysis of the oral traditions of the South Wales valleys, which are steeped in sky lore and contain the accurate observations of ancient skywatchers that are reflected in the place-names where those ancient ‘observations’ were held.
In his analysis of the “Hanes Taliesin”,
Robert Graves comments about the great differences between both translations, and offers his opinion regarding the physical location of Caer Sidi:
“But I learned a good deal from the variants. In place of the ‘land of the Summer Stars’, ‘the land of the Cherubim’ is mentioned. Both mean the same thing. The Eighteenth Psalm (verse 10) makes it clear that the Cherubim are storm-cloud angels; and therefore, for Welshmen, they are resident in the west, from which quarter nine storms out of every ten blow. The Summer Stars are those which lie in the western part of the firmament.
The first two lines in stanza 18, ‘I have been in an uneasy chair above Caer Sidin’ helped me. There is a stone seat at the top of Cader Idris, ‘the chair of Idris’ where, acording to local legend, whoever spends the night is found in the morning either dead, mad, or a poet. The first part if this sentance evidently belongs to the Idris riddle, though Gwion, in his ‘Kerdd am Veib Llyr’ mentions a ‘perfect chair’ in Caer Sidi (Revolving Castle), the Elysian fortress where the Cauldron of Caridwen was housed.”
[2]
What better way to describe the belt of star-groups that comprise the constellations of the zodiac than as a ‘revolving castle’. Certainly observing from the viewpoint of the Earth, any ancient skywatcher untainted by the dry scientific language of the 20th century might well accurately describe the zodiac in such terms. In its daily rotation on its axis the Earth presents each of these constellations to almost every part of the planet in a very consistent order – and therein lies the key to the many mysteries of the ancient world.
Some constellations are only visible at certain seasons for the inhabitants of lands above and below certain latitudes. But throughout the course of the natural solar year, all the constellations of the zodiac belt present themsleves in the same consistent order to all the inhabitants of the Earth, with only the circum-polar stars in each hemisphere never being visible to those living in the higher latitudes of the other hemisphere. In both the daily and the annual cycles of the interaction between the Earth and the Sun, the so-called ‘rising’ and ‘setting’ of the various celestial bodies, be they the sun, moon, planets or groups of stars, is only ‘apparent’. They do not ‘rise’ or ‘set’ at all, and the castle of “Caer Sidi” does not ‘revolve’. One of nature’s simplest optical illusions, there is ample evidence that ancient peoples around the world were very much aware of it.
In the D.W. Nash translation of the “Hanes Taliesin” stanza 18 provides a very definite indication that ancient skywatchers in the islands of the Hyperboreans were aware of this optical illusion regarding the zodiac supposedly ‘revolving’:
“I have been in an uneasy chair
Above Caer Sidin,
And the whirling round without motion
Between three elements.”
[3]
What better words than “whirling round without motion” could be used to poetically describe this fundamental scientific principle of astronomy – that it is the Earth revolving on its axis which gives the illusion of ‘risings’ and ‘settings’ in the daily cycle, and the orbiting of the Earth around the Sun that gives a similar illusion of the ‘revolving’ stars of the zodiac belt (Caer Sidi) in the annual cycle. Throughout the course of the annual cycle the interaction of the Earth with the Sun produces the seasons, and the Earth looks much different in winter than it does in spring, summer and autumn.
For this reason ancient peoples the world over gave a wide variety of seasonally-descriptive names to both the Earth and the Sun – names often associated with the particular star groups that were visible in the night sky at particular seasons. They also paid great attention to comets and meteor storms, which often brought in their wake abrupt and devastating climate changes, disrupting agricultural societies as dust veils in the atmosphere blocked out the light from the sun causing Dark Ages – a time when little vegetation could grow for many years, and survivors of meteoritic bombardments described their terror in legends involving ‘fiery dragons’ and very descriptive tales of ‘celestial battles between the gods’…
Back in the times of the reputed open-air universities of the druids, the ‘hedge schools’, the ancient teachers of astronomy did not have over-head projectors or slide projectors with which to illustrate their courses of instruction. They had the‘live sky’ – the ever-changing backdrop of celestial phenomena, to use not by way of analogy, but to illustrate simply that at particular seasons certain constellations were opposite to the Sun, whilst other constellations formed the individual ‘houses’, or ‘castles’, in which the Sun was regarded as being imprisoned. This ever-changing backdrop of star groups were viewed as ‘directly affecting’ the changes in vegetation and animal behaviours observed at the various seasons.
As Caer Sidi, or Sidin, was “the Elysian fortress where the Cauldron of Caridwen was housed”, and as “Caer Sidi” is the ancient Welsh term for the stars of the zodiac, should we search for the “Cauldron of Caridwen” in the skies? Or did the “Caer Sidi” of the ancient Welsh bards have a ‘physical’ Earthly counterpart? Certainly local West Wales historian, Lewis Edwards, was convinced that it did, and he proposed that it was located in northern Carmarthenshire, centred on the village of Pumpsaint. In 1947 he wrote a paper detailing the results of his researches that two years later became a three-part series of articles in the magazine, “Atlantis Research”. It was entitled “The Welsh Temple of the Zodiac”.
A Selection Of
Books About
Druids & Celtic Mythology
“A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg”
Geraint H. Jenkins
(Editor)
“Light of Britannia”
Owen Morien Morgan
“The White Goddess”
Robert Graves
“The Illustrated Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion”
Elizabeth Somer
“Awen: Quest of the Celtic Mysteries”
Mike Harris (Foreword)
Gareth Knight
“The Book of Druidry”
by Ross Nichols & Philip Carr-Gomm (Foreword)
“Celtic Mysteries: The Ancient Religion”
by John Sharkey
VHS NTSC version
(USA and Canada)
VHS UK PAL version
(UK and Europe)
VHS NTSC version
(USA and Canada)
“The Celts – Rich Traditions & Ancient Myths”
VHS NTSC version
(USA and Canada)
“A Rattleskull Genius: The Many Faces of Iolo Morganwg”
Geraint H. Jenkins
(Editor)