Transcript: Episode 17

Today’s episode is going to be a bit similar to the one I did a while back about the mythology of the Trickster and the creative center, which I think was episode nine… the one called Hearth and Horizon, about Hestia, Hermes, and Brigid. This month I’m going to be talking about myth and folklore again as a source of some deeper sustenance and mental reframing for our creative paths.

Before I get going, just a brief heads up about some language I’ll be using throughout the episode. The title might have tipped you off, but I’m going to be talking about some cultural ideas around quote-unquote “madness” and its connection to creative inspiration. I want to be clear that I’m not intending to use this word as a description of any specific mental illness, or to characterize those who experience mental illness (a very large umbrella under which I myself am sometimes standing). But I will be using the term “madness” in the context of the cultural history of the tortured artist trope.

This is a trope or belief that comes up quite often on this podcast, since it has its sticky and maladaptive fingerprints on so much of the Western cultural narrative around creativity. But there are a couple previous episodes in particular that explore angles on this creative suffering trope: Back in episode 8 I looked at the idea that “nothing worthwhile grows the comfort zone,” and episode 10 on story structure got into the ways trauma is often valorized in the way we talk about writing craft (and about the value of art in general).

The sort of folklore-informed counter-narrative that I want to share today is essentially a more nuanced and I think a more supportive take on the idea of emotional suffering as the most true or the most powerful source of our creativity. And here I guess I should thank Taylor Swift for releasing The Tortured Poets Department last month and thus making this episode kind of topical… though it’s still going to be coming out way too behind the moment to be any kind of hot take.

(That’s also literally the only reference I’m going to be making to T Swift, as I know next to nothing about the album and also have very few opinions about T Swift herself. So this is truly not even a lukewarm album take, Swifties do not come for me.)

One of the pieces of folklore I’ll be drawing from today is a specific written piece of Irish lore dating from the middle ages called the Cauldron of Poesy. The first time I came across a reference to the Cauldron of Poesy, I was immediately imagining like a Halloween-themed planter pot filled with quaint little orange-and-black flowers (which actually sounds kind of cute and is making me want to go to a corn maze and eat an apple cider doughnut, because I am nothing if not a basic autumnal girlie). But it turns out that “poesy” spelled p-o-e-s-y is actually an archaic term for poetic inspiration, which really correlates to storytelling as a whole and not just literal verse poetry.

Before we get into what a cauldron has to do with storytelling, I want to sort of set the stage for the Cauldron of Poesy by way of a connected bit of lore that is common not just in Celtic cultures, but across many cultures with Indo-European roots – the trope of seeking out inspiration by spending the night in a sacred place. (I’d actually guess that this may be a common story and practice just in human culture as a whole, but I’m going to be talking about the variants I’m most familiar with and have done the most research on.)

Stories about this kind of inspiration-seeking almost always involve an aspect of what I’m going to describe as spiritual risk. So at least at first glance, there’s a similarity between this flavor of inspiration and the modern concept of the tortured poet. These inspiration-seeking pilgrimages usually happen either in a temple, on a burial mound or other sacred hill, or at some kind of physical boundary marker – places in-between, where the human and the other-than-human are more likely to brush arms.

There’s a version of this story that will be familiar to a lot of Americans, especially if you’re from the South: In North American folklore, the theme of having an otherworldly encounter at a boundary has combined with threads from African culture to create the legend of the devil at the crossroads. Blues musicians in particular like Robert Johnson were said to have gotten more-than-human inspiration and artistic skill by meeting with a dark man at the crossroads, or by practicing their instrument at midnight in the graveyard. (Goth metalheads only wish they were as hardcore as the average 1930s Blues guitarist.)

The potential pitfalls of meeting up with the actual devil at midnight are fairly obvious. But the Celtic take on the story is a little different, especially in its oldest surviving forms. Instead of offering up your soul in return for a specific skill, in a sort of straightforward-if-highly-ill-advised exchange, you’d go sit out or sleep in a sacred place at a key moment in your life in hopes of receiving a visionary gift – some kind of insight or aid that would help you understand and achieve your fate.

In the surviving mythological tales, it’s often kings and other highborn warrior-class folk who do this, but powerful seers and poets can also access this kind of communication with great ancestors and deities, with helpful land spirits, or both. The more aligned these mythological characters are with their particular fate, in terms of their deeds and their relationships, the more likely they are to receive otherworldly aid from spirits who have an interest in helping them live out that fate.

This is by no means guaranteed to be pleasant – the visions bestowed on the seeker could be confusing or frightening. And on the poetic side, the peak of this kind of creative inspiration is often described as a wild frenzy of words, with oracular poetry and prophetic imagery pouring like a flooding stream from the mouth.

In the Christian era, these tales shift to be stories about meetings with faeries, and they take on somewhat a less aristocratic air: anyone who spent the night on a faery mound or lonely mountaintop could expect to wake up the next day “dead, mad, or a poet.”

Granted, in medieval and early modern Ireland, winding up a poet was still a fairly respectable outcome, but certainly the other two left a lot to be desired. And the further into modernity you get, the more the line between madness and poetry starts to feel a bit blurred.

(Sometimes I think maybe I chose to study fiction writing because it seemed at least marginally less bonkers than a degree in poetry…)

The folklore I’ve been talking about is just one historical element that feeds into the contemporary theme of the tortured poet, or the tortured any-kind-of-artist. But I’ve always felt especially drawn to these tales, especially when I was a younger writer. And I think honestly I initially liked them because I was a maudlin, sad-pixie-dream-girl sort of young adult, and these tales often get referenced in romanticized takes on creative suffering, that familiar conviction that quote-unquote “madness” and creativity are naturally and inextricably linked.

But now I find that my personal interpretation of the lore has shifted. Because when you actually look at it, especially with the benefit of even a small and inexpert bit of historical cultural context, that formulation of “dead, mad, or a poet” actually implies the opposite of the modern ideal of the suffering artist – the artist who can only create their true work out of madness or pain.

I mean, it’s not “dead, mad, and a poet.” The “mad” bit isn’t a heavy-but-romantic price you pay in exchange for the gift of inspiration. It’s what happens when something has gone awry – when someone has gone after their fate or their gift in the wrong way. It’s what happens when they aren’t approaching their deep encounter with inspiration through correct or appropriate actions.

In the faery folktales, the characters who wind up mad (and/or dead) are usually the ones who go into their encounter motivated by greed or malice or jealousy. Their madness and suffering isn’t a mark of having successfully accessed their inspiration – it’s the mark of having demanded something without demonstrating the appropriate actions and beliefs to back up their claim to the gift.

It’s worth saying that in the most Christianized of these folktales, there can be a heavy overlay of demonizing real people who are quote-unquote “mad” or who have physical disabilities, by essentially teaching that these characteristics are a punishment for sin. So, you know, yikes. But I think it’s possible and even powerful to engage with other meanings for the lore .

And this is where the Cauldron of Poesy comes in, because this bit of written lore is essentially an extended metaphor describing one possible correct approach to accessing artistic inspiration. The core metaphor is, unsurprisingly, a cauldron, or rather a set of three cauldrons: the Cauldron of Warming, the Cauldron of Motion, and the Cauldron of Knowledge.

In the Celtic mythos, cauldrons are extremely powerful symbols of abundance, creation, and wisdom. They often appear as “cauldrons of plenty,” magical vessels that are always filled with an unending supply of mead or meat or milk or whatever is needed to feed any gathering of people. Cauldrons are also portals for birth and rebirth – both Irish and Welsh myths feature cauldrons that can bring slain humans and animals back from the dead. And cauldrons are sites for both distilling and dispensing knowledge. The legendary Welsh bard Taliesin gains his skills after tasting three concentrated drops of wisdom brewed in the witch Cerridwen’s cauldron.

This symbolic power of the cauldron as a container where the substance of the world is transformed and elevated is the central literary device in the Cauldron of Poesy. There’s only one known surviving copy of the text, that dates from the early 1500s. But some of the content of that text is potentially as old as the 800s, and presumably draws on oral tradition going back even further. It’s a mix of poetic stanzas, prose, and explanatory comments.

The poems in the text are written in the first person, and the speaker is another legendary bard, the Irish figure Amergin, who plays a major role in the mythic origin story of the rulers of Ireland. [I’m not sure if I’m pronouncing that right, apologies to Irish people living and dead.] Amergin is essentially the great ancestor of the Irish literary tradition, and in these poems, he’s giving an allegorical description of how bards and storytellers develop both artistry and wisdom over the course of their lives – a kind of instructive mythology of attaining and working with creative inspiration.

We don’t know exactly where this mythology ultimately originated, but there is some evidence that it may be a surviving remnant of actual bardic training systems that would have been followed during the early medieval era, when Irish culture still had a certain level of direct continuity with pre-Christian traditions.

I wanted to share the basic history of the Cauldron of Poesy for context (and just because I think it’s cool). But I admit that the history is really only partly relevant to the way I’m drawing on it today. What I’m sharing is a very modern take on one potential meaning of this very old mythology of inspiration – I’m just some lady with a library card and cheap microphone over here, not any kind of Irish cultural expert.

But I’m not just saying that in the interest of intellectual transparency. I think the practice of drawing meaning out of very old stories in a way that’s relevant to our own experience is a kind of poetic alchemy that arguably aligns with the spirit of the Cauldron of Poesy itself. So, what is actually in this text?

I already mentioned the three cauldrons: the Cauldron of Warming, the Cauldron of Motion, and the Cauldron of Knowledge. These cauldrons are the vessels of our creativity, and they fill and empty over the course of our lives according to our inborn natures, our external circumstances, and our dedication to a chosen craft.

The Cauldron of Warming comes into the world with each of us when we’re born. The original Old Irish can also be translated as the Cauldron of Incubation, Sustenance, or Maintenance. This cauldron is born upright and already full, meaning that we all begin our lives with a foundational capacity to both learn and create.

Our Cauldron of Warming is filled with our basic inheritance as humans – the energy and potential of our bodies, the material blessings of nature, and our core relationships and obligations as members of the human family. This cauldron contains and bestows the wisdom of childhood and youth – our core, unrefined, and abundant instincts and capacities, as well as the foundational knowledge we learn from our elders through our earliest study of a craft.

The second cauldron is the Cauldron of Motion, also called the Cauldron of Vocation. This cauldron is born on its side – in order to fill it, we first must turn it upright, by developing the base capacity of the Cauldron of Warming through poetic discernment and skill. The majority of the text in the manuscript lays out the ways and means of this internal motion toward inspiration.

Once that inner motion is achieved and fully alive, we begin to turn the final cauldron, the Cauldron of Knowledge or Wisdom. This cauldron is born on its lips – only the deepest expression of our craft can turn it. In one of the poems, the legendary Amergin puts it this way:

“I sing of the Cauldron of Knowledge
which bestows the merit of every art,
through which prosperity increases,
which magnifies every common artisan,
which exalts each person by means of their gift.”

The Cauldron of Knowledge can only be approached or accessed through first turning our Cauldron of Motion upright. So the Cauldron of Motion is a kind of transitional state or vocational portal between the foundation of the Cauldron of Warming and the poetic peak of the Cauldron of Knowledge.

This middle cauldron is where we have the most agency in developing our skills and preparing to access our highest inspiration – it’s only by turning the Cauldron of Motion, filling it, and working to transform its contents that we can reach the fullest expression of our chosen art.

According to the text, there are two pathways of turning the Cauldron of Motion: sorrow and joy. And the text specifically tells us that while sorrows come to us from external events and forces, they do their work on us from within. One way to interpret this is that it’s our internal human capacity for empathy and grief that gives sorrow its creative potential, its potential to be worked and transformed into art.

Joy, on the other hand, is described as both human and divine. And both are required to turn the cauldron. Human joys come from good fortune and from our own dedication to living well – to pursuing our chosen craft and participating ethically in our chosen communities. But divine joy is called a “visitation” – an encounter with something beyond our own internal, individual capacity.

This is where I see a connection to all that folklore of the encounter at the lonely crossroads or at the top of the burial mound. It’s not madness we’re supposed to be seeking when we go out to the edge of ourselves in search of inspiration – it’s divine joy. The kind of joy that by its more-than-human nature isn’t going to look or feel the way we’d expect it to, but that will bring us closer to our truest fates.

There’s a different surviving poetry text called the “Song of Amergin” that calls poetic inspiration a “fire in the head” – and I think this fire can be seen as the living interaction or collaboration between the artist and the visitation of divine joy. There’s a wildness to the image of fire that captures the sense of risk in going out to spend the night on the sacred mountain, seeking inspiration; the poet who makes this attempt has to be willing to meet divinity as it arrives, in a spirit of joy, or else be swept away into madness.

This could all be taken as weirdly Pollyanna-ish, like “you won’t go mad if you’re just not sad!!” But I don’t think this divine joy is just a heightened state of happiness and optimism, which is often the modern sense of the word. I think this is more like joy in the sense of deep wonder, a wild and wide-open recognition of the presence of something awe-inspiring. And when the poet meets, receives, and expresses this kind of joy, their art is inspired along with their awe. That’s the source of their power, their ability to fully live their fate.

There’s a section from the Cauldron of Poesy that sums up the dual power and necessity of sorrow and joy on the path of poetic transformation:

           “I sing of the Cauldron of Motion…
           the noble womb in which is brewed
           the true root of all knowledge…
           which poetic ecstasy quickens
           which joy turns
           which is revealed through sorrow;
           it is an enduring power
           whose protection does not diminish.
           I sing of the Cauldron of Motion.”

Those two lines about joy and sorrow hold a deceptively simple piece of this allegory of inspiration. Sorrow may reveal or call forth our innate creative urge. But it’s joy that turns the cauldron upright, making it possible to transform our creative urge into the poetic ecstasy of its deepest expression. Or put another way, sorrow may spark the fire of knowledge, but joy is what makes Amergin’s fire in the head continue to burn.

And we are filled with creative joy only when we fashion ourselves into a vessel capable of containing it – when we practice our craft not as an excavation deeper and deeper into suffering, but as a turn outward toward awe.

 

So what could this symbolic story of the three cauldrons actually mean in the context of a real creative practice? In terms of specific practical advice, the Poesy text is somewhat difficult to translate into modern terms. However, there are some general principles that I think could apply to a modern take on working with our Cauldron of Motion.

Regular listeners will know I’m a sucker for alliteration and I insist on dragging you all along with me, so I’m describing these principles as duty, diligence, and discernment.

I did a recent episode on writing practice that I think aligns pretty well with the principle of diligence, and what that can mean for writers beyond just the sort of butt-in-chair-hands-on-keyboard, meet your daily word counts and quit whining sort of approach. So I won’t rehash those thoughts here, but if you haven’t heard that episode, it’s number 14: Practice vs praxis (Or, getting the real work done).

This leaves us with duty and discernment. In the context of the Cauldron of Poesy, duty relates to the Irish tradition of poetry as a highly skilled and highly regulated lineage of oral cultural knowledge. Becoming a poet meant becoming a dutiful apprentice to that lineage – both literally, in terms of learning the craft from elders, and figuratively or spiritually, in terms of practicing an art that played a central role in creating and maintaining cohesion within a community. So this was a very socially powerful and socially bound kind of poetics. And the language in the Cauldron of Poesy reflects this; there are references to studying “the law of every art” and to poetry being “dispensed according to the rule.”

And the “warming” part of the Cauldron of Warming seems to be referring to this dutiful, socially-embedded view of artistic craft. Warmth and brightness was used to describe things and people that provide spiritual and intellectual nourishment – Celtic saints and mythic heroes are often associated with metaphors of having a bright-shining face or being a bright and warm sun that sustains growth or uplifts the hopeless.

So the foundation of artistic inspiration is called the Cauldron of Warming because it holds all the core nourishment and warmth that the apprentice poet will then study and work with and ultimately transform within their Cauldron of Motion – dutifully using the fuel of both sorrow and joy to distill their art and dispense it back into the human community.

In the context of a modern creative practice, here’s what I’m taking from this bardic principle of artistic duty. Even though the majority of us are not apprentice druids carrying on an unbroken lineage of arcane knowledge and law…  I think we can see the Cauldrons of Warming and Motion as a call to recognize our work as a vessel of sustenance – a call for our art to be both filled with life and nourishing for life.

What I mean by this is that the tortured poet trope is inherently isolating and kind of self-cannibalizing; it celebrates the state of being trapped with your suffering, and it takes you down a creative path where the only meaningful destination is more suffering. And when this kind of madness is the artistic ideal, then the lineage of the poet is ultimately sterile: heartbreak feeding on itself. And is that really the artistic vision we want to offer to our human and more-than-human community?

I think we have a duty to liberate our stories from the cult of the tortured poet. But not by turning away from or denying suffering – the poetic duty isn’t about putting a happy-but-hollow spin on reality. We have a duty to be vessels for awe because in a world of massive climate change and genocide and injustice, we need stories that affirm life. We need sources of cultural meaning that teach us to be communities of life – that teach us how to live in alignment and collaboration with life. We need stories that feed us. We need to eat the fruit of awe and joy so that we can become that fruit for others.

Along with the principle of duty, the Cauldron of Poesy also expresses a bardic principle I’m describing as discernment – the ability to perceive and understand the world around us and to choose how to bring our perception into our craft. Poetry and storytelling in the bardic tradition was seen as a way of expressing and maintaining natural order; the most skilled and inspired poets knew that their craft was part of the fabric of their world.

In the opening lines of the Poesy text, Amergin announces himself as the speaker of the poem by declaring:

“Mine is the dutiful Cauldron of Warming
which God has given me out of the mysteries of the elements
a noble privilege that magnifies the womb
which pours forth the stream of poetry.”

And elsewhere he says:

“The Cauldron of Motion sings
with insights of grace
with currents of poetic knowledge…
it brings enlightenment…
[and] swift discernment…
crafting historical lore…”

The manuscript ends with these stanzas:

“The Cauldron of Motion
gives, is given
magnifies, is magnified
nourishes, is nourished
exalts, is exalted
fosters, is fostered
sings, is sung
binds, is bound
arranges, is arranged
distributes, is distributed.

Good is this well of measure
Good this dwelling of speech
Good this confluence of power:
it builds up strength
greater than any domain,
better than any inheritance.
It brings one to wisdom
adventuring away from ignorance.”

Maybe all this lore doesn’t feel very directly relevant to the making of art in the 21^st century… but as storytellers, we are by nature shaped by the stories we apply to our understanding of our own creativity. And we get to discern and choose what stories to align with – we get to choose our lineages and how we apprentice ourselves to this work. So if we don’t want to be the tortured artist… we don’t have to be. We get to be something more.

The tortured artist can, at best, point out silver linings. But the inspired artist carries the warmth of life into the storm. They have taken the risk to spend the night on the mountain and have opened themselves up to hold both sorrow and an awe-filled joy. And in the morning, they are neither dead nor mad – they’re a poet.

 

If this episode has got you curious to read the full text of the Cauldron of Poesy, I’m including links to two scholarly translations. One of these is open-access, but the second can only be read through the JSTOR academic research website, so you’ll need an account to actually read that one. But JSTOR now lets everybody read 100 free articles a year even if you aren’t connected to an academic institution! Hurray for the partial democratization of knowledge!

I’m also including a third link to a less scholarly source. That version of the text is specifically written for a neopagan audience, and the author has taken a few liberties with her translation, but she lays that out very transparently so I think it’s still a reliable translation to look at.

And speaking of transparency, the excerpts I shared from the Cauldron of Poesy text are quotes that I Frankensteined together by pulling what I think are the nicest-sounding lines from all three of these translations. (If this were an academic podcast, I would never in a million years do that, but it isn’t, so I did.) Academic translations of poetry tend to be like the verbal equivalent of AI-generated artwork where the people almost look like people but then you look closer and you’re like no, that’s not a people. So I did my best to make the verses sound like they were written by an actual human.

Anyway, all those translation links and some general references for the folklore and history mentioned in this episode are in the show notes. Thanks so much for sharing virtual space with me today to nerd out about myths and symbols and creativity. I hope you found some shiny, inspiring bits to file away for the next time you find yourself feeling like an unwilling member of the tortured poets department.

Until next time, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.