Rhiannon

From Traditional Witchcraft Wiki Project

Rhiannon, the Celtic goddess of inspiration and the moon was a Welch goddess.The goddess Rhiannon's name meant “Divine Queen” of the fairies. In her myths, Rhiannon was promised in marriage to an older man she found repugnant. Defying her family’s wishes that Rhiannon, like other Celtic goddesses, declined to marry one of her "own kind".Instead she chose to marry the mortal Prince Pwyll (pronounced Poo-ul or translated as Paul) as her future husband,but at her very wedding the older man she’d once been promised to marry was making a scene, arguing that she should not be allowed to marry outside her own people.so rhiannon being so cunning and gifted in magic, slipped away from pwyll's side and turn turn the older man into the size of her hand and placed him into a draw stringed bag, which she throw him in to a lake near by. After three years after they married rhiannon delivered a fine and healthy son, which this baby, however, was to become the source of great sorrow for Rhiannon and Pwyll.It is said that, rhiannon being weck of her child birth, fell asleep all to wake up the next morning to find her baby was missing from its cradle.Pwylldevised a plan to cast the blame on the goddess Rhiannon,who they considered an outsider and not really one of their own people.Killing a puppy, they smeared its blood on the sleeping Rhiannon and scattered its bones around her bed, which these very people accused the goddess of eating her own child.So alarmed was Pwyll,her order that rhiannon was to sit by the castle gate, bent under the heavy weight of a horse collar for the next seven years, greeting guests with the story of her crime and offering to carry them on her back into the castle. Until one day a noble-man, his wife and a child came to the front gate to her, and placed in her hands a piece of cloth, which rhiannon reconized as her babys clothing that she woven herself.The noble-man began to tell Rhiannon that the child which standed infront of her was her child and began to tell her that he found a new born baby amongst the fields one day which did not have neither a mother nor a father and raised the child as if he was his own. The child then was taken to the castle, to Pwyll and was explain to him the story but the story didnt not matter to him so much as both Rhiannon and Pwyll knew the child was there by its fathers eyes and Rhiannons features. After that the poeple of Pwyll, who kidnapped there child was punished and Rhiannon was welcomed back to her throne to sit aside her husband, as queen.

The story of the Celtic goddess Rhiannon reminds us of the healing power of humor, tears, and forgiveness.The goddess Rhiannon is a goddess of movement and change who remains steadfast, comforting us in times of crisis and of loss.