Rhiannon – Feminism and Religion

The Furious Sun in Her Mane: Nine Poems to Goddesses by Annie Finch

Poet’s Note: I composed this sequence of poems for performance, for chanting, and for devotion. I wanted people who would hear, read, memorize, and speak each poem to channel the original energetic patterns that the poets who best knew that Goddess used to connect with Her. So for each poem, I researched the meter and prosody of the original language in which that Goddess was first worshipped. Then I carried the exact rhythmical pulse of Her language into my poem to Her in English.

The sequence was set to music by composer Laura Manning and choreographed by Georgia Bonatis, and I directed and performed a devotional dance collaboration version of it in 1994. That archival video of this performance has just been recovered for the first time in 31 years. It is now posted on my Youtube channel.

Rhiannon as Midlife Queen Mother by Kelle BanDea

We tend to think of Rhiannon as the fairy maiden on the white horse who entices Pwyll, the King and her future husband, into the Otherworld. Or she is the young mother who is unfairly blamed for the death of her own child until he is restored to her. This is Rhiannon’s story as it is most well-known, and she has become a beloved figure due to it. The image of the beautiful fairy woman on the white horse has become equated, to modern neopagan folks and Goddess-women, with the ancient Celtic and Indo-European horse goddesses. Of all the women in the medieval Welsh lore that we know as the four story ‘branches’ of the Mabinogi, Rhiannon is perhaps the most beloved.

But this is only half of the story.