Lux Esoterica (Nifiluz)

She enters the oldest prose literature of Britain at a walking pace, and no one can catch her. In the First Branch of the Mabinogi —the four linked Welsh tales written down in the Middle Ages from matter incalculably older—Pwyll, prince of Dyfed, sits upon the mound of Arberth, a hill with a property: whoever sits on it will receive either blows or a wonder. He receives the wonder. Along the road below comes a lady on a shining white horse , dressed in gold brocade, riding at an unhurried amble; Pwyll sends his best rider after her, then his fastest horse, then gallops himself until his mount founders—and the amble stays ahead of the gallop, serene, unforced, always exactly out of reach. The pursuit is repeated on three days, futile as a dream, until at last Pwyll thinks of the one measure no man in the tale has yet attempted: he asks . Maiden, for the sake of the man you love most, wait for me. And the lady reins in at once and delivers one of the finest replies in medieval literatu...

Glastonbury Tor rises out of the Somerset flats like an argument for the invisible: a single conical hill, terraced with enigmatic ridges, crowned by a roofless tower, visible for twenty miles across country that was once sea-marsh and island. Christian legend planted its holiest things at the foot of it. But the Tor itself, the hill as hill, belonged in the older reckoning to another proprietor entirely, and the medieval Welsh texts name him without embarrassment: Gwyn ap Nudd —Gwyn, son of Nudd, White One son of Mist— king of Annwn , the Welsh otherworld, and king of the Tylwyth Teg , the Fair Folk. His court is inside the Tor; his hounds are the white, red-eared Cŵn Annwn , whose cry in the night sky foretells death; his office, fixed by one of the strangest sentences in medieval literature, is to restrain the devils of the abyss lest they destroy the world; and his hunt rides to gather souls. Arthur's Avalon, the saints' abbey, the pilgrims' holy wells all cluster at t...

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...