Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

Wales remembers one poet above all others, and remembers him as something more than a poet. The medieval bards called him Taliesin Ben Beirdd —Taliesin, Chief of Bards—and when they wished to claim authority for their own verses, they put them in his mouth, until the manuscript known as the Book of Taliesin had gathered prophecy, cosmology, riddle, and battle-song under a single luminous name. A historical Taliesin very probably lived: a sixth-century court poet singing the praises of Urien of Rheged in the old North. But the figure the tradition enthroned is another being altogether—a child of two births, a thief of wisdom transformed through the bodies of beasts, swallowed by a witch and born again from her womb, radiant of brow and terrible of tongue. His legend is nothing less than the initiation manual of the British bardic mysteries, folded into a tale that could be told by a fireside to children. It begins, as the deepest Welsh mysteries so often begin, with a cauldron. The Ye...