Don – the Mother of Primordial Waters

Don is a Brythonic goddess who is best known as the mother of ‘the Children of Don’. In ‘The Fourth Branch’ of The Mabinogi she is named as the sister of Math ap Mathonwy (this shows Mathonwy was her father), and her children are named as Gwydion, Gilfaethwy, and Arianrhod. In the Bonedd yr Arwyr they are listed as Gwydion, Gilfaethwy, Gofannon, Efydd, Amaethon, Hunawg, Idwel, Elestron, Digant, Kynnan, Hedd, Addien, Elawg, and Arianrhod.

In Triad 35. Beli Mawr is named as the father of Arianrhod and this may suggest Beli fathered some or all of her other children. Beli is also named as the father of Nudd/Lludd Llaw Eraint, Caswallon, Nyniaw, and Llefelys in Lludd ac Llefelys and it is possible they too are Children of Don.

Don is likely to be identical with Anna, the consort of Beli, in the Harleian Genealogies, and is thus the grandmother of Afallach (Gwyn ap Nudd), who is the father of Modron and the grandfather of Mabon. Don and Anna are named as the forebears of the lineages of many of the kings of the North and Wales.

Parallels exist between the Children of Don and the Tuatha Dé Danann ‘the Children of Danu’. Unfortunately we know nothing about Danu from inscriptions, place-names, or Irish literature. The nominative *Danu is a hypothetical reconstruction from the genitive ‘Danann’.

However, there are strong parallels between some of their children. Nuada and Nudd/Lludd are both warrior-kings with silver arms, Gofannon and Goibnu are both divine smiths, and Lugh and Lleu (more distant descendants of Danu and Don) are many-skilled gods who wield deadly spears.

I was highly excited when, online, I found claims for links between Don and Bel and Danu and Bile. I was disappointed to find out these are based on a loose claim about ‘British analogies’ from Charles Squire in Celtic Myths and Legends (1905) and there are no etymological or textual grounds for Danu and Bile having been consorts or parents of the Tuatha Dé Danann.

Nothing more is known about Don from medieval Welsh literature or from inscriptions but she gives her name to the rivers Don in Yorkshire and Aberdeen and perhaps to the river Dee. This forms part of the boundary between the the Wirral and Wales and is known is Wales as the Afon Dyfrdwy. This might derive from Dyfrdonwy with Donwy being an earlier name of the goddess Don.

It is possible that there might be connections between the Irish Danu, the Brythonic Don, and the Hindu goddess Danu rooted in a shared Indo-European tradition. Her name may derive from the Proto-Indo-European root *dʰenh₂- ‘to run, to flow’ and be the source of the river-name Danube.

In The Rig Veda Danu is named as the mother of the 100 Danavas – demonic beings known as asuras. One of these is a dragon called Vritra who holds back the water of the world’s rivers. Vritra is slain by the thunderbolt of Indra and the river-water is released. Vritra then attacks and defeats Danu. This suggests Danu and her descendants are associated with primal waters and rivers.

This is of deep interest to me as it suggests parallels between Danu as the mother of the dragon, Vritra, who is slain by Indra, and Don as the mother of the dragon-goddess Anrhuna, who is slain by Lugus. (Anrhuna is not known in any Brythonic sources but she revealed herself to me as the consort of Nodens/Nudd and the mother of Vindos/Gwyn ap Nudd. I was inspired to write a story about how she was killed by Lugus. I hadn’t guessed that Don might be her mother until now. In my story it was not Don who birthed hundreds of demons but Anrhuna who birthed monster-serpents).

The notion that, like Danu, Don is the mother of primordial waters, is one that has long accorded with my intuitions. Several years back I had a vision of Don as the source of generation and I associated her with Fidelma Massey’s ‘Water Mother’ sculpture on the cover of Greg Hill’s Creatures.

The possibility that Don did not only birth the ‘culture gods’ but the dragon-goddess Anrhuna and maybe other dragons and demon-like beings associated with water is one that speaks deeply to me.

As I have been writing this essay the words an dubno have repeatedly come into my mind. When I looked them up I recalled that several years ago I came across the proto-Celtic root *dubno or *dumno meaning ‘the deep’ or ‘dark and gloomy’ and Liz Greene’s claim Danu’s ‘dark face was Dumno’.

An means ‘not’ or ‘very’. The term an dubno thus shares its meaning with Annwn, ‘Very Deep’, the Otherworld. Perhaps this is telling me that Don was originally an Annuvian goddess who proceeded Anrhuna as the Mother of Annwn. In my story both Don and Anrhuna were amongst the oldest children of Old Mother Universe but I am now considering that Anrhuna may be the daughter of Don. This opens new possibilities for when the time returns to resume work on my mythic book.

SOURCES

Alexei Kondratiev, ‘Danu and Bile: The Primordial Parents’, The IMBAS Journal of Celtic Reconstructionism, Vol. 1, No. 4, (1998)Asterope, ‘Danu/Don’, Deity of the Week, (2011), http://deity-of-the-week.blogspot.com/2011/11/danudon.html
Peter Bartrum, A Welsh Classical Dictionary: People in History and Legend up to about A.D. 1000, (National Library of Wales, 1993)
Rachel Bromwich (ed), The Triads of the Island of Britain, (University of Wales Press, 2014)
Sarah E. Zeiser, ‘Performing a Literary Paternity Test: Bonedd yr Arwyr and the Fourth Branch of The Mabinogi’, Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colliqiuim, Vol. 28, (2008)
Sioned Davies (transl.), The Mabinogion, (Oxford University Press, 2007)

*Updated 15/11/2020 to include the river Don in Aberdeen following a comment from angharadlois.

Afagddu’s Declamation

‘Until death it shall be obscure –
Afagddu’s declamation’
The Hostile Confederacy

I am bedraggled tonight, unwelcome,
the one taught to hang his head
in his mother’s court:

Utter Darkness, the Dark Son,
the Ugly One she wishes
utterly forgotten.

I carry no shield, spear, or sword.
The brushing of damp fur
on my thighs

unnerves the courtly women.
My hair hangs like ivies over
the face of a bridge,

disappears like rain into a dark adit.
They compare me to Sanddef
the angelic.

Wings tarred to my back, I am
the sea-bird abandoned
in the oil-slick.

I drag myself in with my shadow,
carping words in metres
they can’t name.

The slow swooshing of my feet
reminds them of wetsuits.
From my feathers

sadness drips like tears of oily rain.
When I shake myself off
like a wet dog

they flinch away from the globules.
Looking into my green eye
they are beholden.

With my reptilian beak I speak
of swallowing sorrow
like stones,

plummeting down to the deep
in search of lands
unpoisoned

by my mother’s toxic cauldron.
From the darkest places
I won my awen.

I cleared the blowholes of whales,
untangled sea turtles
from gillnets.

On islands of bottles, pill packets,
polystyrene, prosthetic limbs,
I laid out the dead.

I learnt to divine from the plastics
in the entrails of copepods,
euphausiids,

mussels, mackerel, jellyfish,
sea gulls who rattled
in flight.

From bottle caps and cotton bud sticks,
pieces of red, green, blue, yellow
Lego bricks,

an alphabet of magnetic letters
stuck to a sunken fridge
I read the future.

Of course they were upside down,
back to front, in another
language.

I was forced to turn myself inside out
like a rabbit unskinning
to decipher it.

I’m still not sure whose future
I brought back in
my pockets.

I empty them out and letters writhe
like sea worms spelling
an inky fate

to the chant of plastic-eating bacteria:
Ideonella sakaiensi I gathered
from the deep.

The courtiers draw back their chairs,
weapons aglinting,
curse me.

I am but the messenger – the angelus.
Nevertheless they take aim.
A terrible poetry

of microbeads spills from my belly
as I fly up like a fury
to declaim…

Methanogens and the End of the World

I. In the Deepest of Places…

They’re possibly the oldest living beings on earth. They possess the power to create and destroy life-giving climates. They thrive in the deepest of places and most extreme conditions – submarine springs, volcanic vents, hot desert sands, glacial ice – as well as in marshlands, rice paddies, landfills, sewage plants, and in the guts of termites, ruminants, and humans. Discovering their existence forced scientists to restructure the phylogenetic tree and rethink the origins of life.

Their name is only just beginning to make it into our mainstream vocabulary. They are methanogens.

Methanogens are methane generating microorganisms who can only survive in anaerobic environments. Because of their microscopic size and inability to survive in air containing oxygen they weren’t identified until the 20th century. Yet suspicions about their existence had been inferred.

In 1776 Alessandro Volta discovered the flammability of marsh gas on Lake Maggiore. Poking the reedy bottom of the marsh with his cane he collected the bubbles in a gas container then set fire to it, producing ‘a beautiful blue flame’. Natural scientists called this ‘swamp air’ ‘carbonated hydrogen’ and in 1865 ‘methan’ was proposed. ‘Methane’ was accepted in 1892.

Pierre Jacques Antoine Béchamp was the first to suspect methane was formed by a microbiological process as the result of a fermentation experiment in 1868. It was not until 1936 that the first methanogen, Methanobacillus omelianskii, was isolated with Delft canal sediment by Horace Albert Barker. This marked ‘the beginning of the modern era for the study of methanogenesis.’

Scientists went on to find out methanogenesis, a form of anaerobic respiration which uses carbon rather than oxygen as an electron acceptor, takes place in three ways: carbon dioxide reduction (hydrogenotrophic methanogenesis), cleavage of acetates (acetoclatic methanogenesis), and the breakdown of methylated compounds (methylotrophic methanogenesis).

II. Ancient Things

In 1997, during an experiment with RNA, Carl Woese discovered that methanogens are phylogenetically different from bacteria and eukaryota (this branch includes fungi, plants, and animals) establishing a third domain on the phylogenetic tree.

This new group of microorganisms was named archaea, ‘ancient things’. Because their ‘methanogenic metabolism is ideally suited to the kind of atmosphere thought to have existed on the primitive earth: one that was rich in carbon dioxide and included some hydrogen but virtually no oxygen’, Woese asserted they could be the earliest living beings on our planet.

According to James F. Fasting their generation of methane, a greenhouse gas, from carbon dioxide and hydrogen, kept the young earth warm between 3.5 and 2.5 billion years ago when the sun burnt only 80 per cent as brightly as today. They played a significant role in the chain of events that led to the development of other life forms.

Methanogens were driven underground by the great oxygenation event 2.3 billion years ago – a time that corresponds with the first Global Ice Age. The world-changing effects of methanogenesis were felt again 252 million years ago when a bacteria transferred two genes to methanosarcina. This allowed them to feed on carbon on the sea floor, releasing immense amounts of methane into the atmosphere, raising the temperatures and acidifying oceans, leading to the Permian-Triassic Extinction Event, which killed 96% of species on the earth.

III. A Dangerous Game

The greenhouse gases responsible for global warming in our current era are carbon dioxide (82%), methane (10%), nitrous oxide (5%), and fluorinated gases (3%). Although methane only accounts for 10% ‘it is 25 times more powerful than carbon dioxide in global warming potential’.

74% of methane emissions in our atmosphere are produced by methanogens. The main sources are wetlands (22%), coal and oil mining and natural gas (19%), enteric fermentation (16%), rice cultivation (12%), biomass burning (8%), landfills (6%), and sewage treatment (6%). Our ability to understand and work with methanogens will play a crucial role in our future. A great deal of research has been carried out into the pros and cons of methanogenesis.

A study by Susannah G. Tringe et al. focuses on ‘a pilot-scale restored wetland in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta of California.’ Tringe notes that wetlands are effective carbon sinks, but methane production can outweigh the benefits in terms of emissions of greenhouse gases. By mapping the relationships between microbial communities and gas measurements her group aims to ‘reduce methane flux to the atmosphere and enhance belowground carbon storage.’

Several studies have been carried out on methanogenesis in coal mines. It has been discovered that the majority of emissions from mines are biogenic as opposed to thermogenic and take place by acetoclastic methanogensis from hard coal and mine timber. Ways of using the methane for energy are being explored. Methanogenesis also occurs in shale and experiments in biostimulation to improve productivity in combination with fracking are in progress.

Studies on landfills, a new source of organic (and inorganic) matter for these ingenuous microorganisms, show that methanogenesis, which follows hydrolysis, acidification, and acetogenesis, is an essential process in the breakdown of ‘municipal solid waste’. In landfills, as well as in wetlands, coal, and shale, acetoclastic methanogens work with acetate-producing bacteria in a syntrophic relationship. This also occurs in the breakdown of sewage. Again, ways of using the methane for energy and thus reducing emissions are being explored.

A common theme that cropped up in all these studies is that the complex interrelationships between methanogens and other bacteria and the role of methanogenesis in the global cycles are not fully understood. Nothing is said about the intelligence and agency of these secretive near-invisible beings who have played a key role in the shaping of our climate for billions of years.

Science, measuring, quantifying, postulating, manipulating, rarely listens to or respects its subjects. The Permian-Triassic extinction, which took place as the consequence of a small genetic change, highlights the potential dangers of attempting to manipulate these complex microorganisms. Without understanding, without relationship, we are playing a dangerous game.

IV. Listening to the Deep

For me as an awenydd working with Brythonic cosmology, methanogens, chthonic beings who inhabit the deepest of places and feed on organic matter composed of dead organisms, seem associated with Annwn, ‘the Deep’, the Otherworld, where the dead and dead worlds reside. Death-eaters par excellence, their activities release the gaseous spirits of the dead into the air.

These processes are essential on both physical and spiritual levels and are part of the earth’s innate balance. When this is disturbed, as now, by mankind’s raiding of Annwn for fossil fuels and release of its spirits, extinction events swiftly follow to correct the disequilibrium.

This knowledge from the depths of time is embodied in Brythonic mythology wherein Gwyn ap Nudd is said to contain the spirits of Annwn in order to prevent their destruction of the world.

Whereas we once mined with due reverence for the rules of the gods of the deep (Nodens/Nudd,‘Lord of the Mines’ was venerated at an iron ore mine at Lydney), who keep its spirits in check, their forgetting has led to all-out ravaging with disastrous consequences.

Over two thousands miners in Lancashire alone have lost their lives, many as a result of explosions caused by methane, which is also a threat at landfill sites. Flammable methane haunts the taps of people whose water has been contaminated by fracking. Global warming, caused by greenhouse gases, is claiming the lives of at least ten thousand species a year.

As the death toll rises I believe it is no coincidence that methanogens have begun to reveal themselves to us (as opposed to us thinking we are so clever finding them); coccoid, baccilic, in enigmatic strings and webs, under the UV illumination of fluorescence microscopes. These 3.5 billion year old microorganisms who dwell deep in our guts are clearly communicating.

Will we learn their language? Will we listen? If we do will they lead us to redemption or destruction?

Gwyn ap Nudd,
you who have travelled time
to know the secrets of archaea:
their containment and release,

you who exist in the no-time
of Annwn between life and death
please teach us to listen
with reverence again

before you and your spirits
decide our end.

SOURCES

Carl Woese, ‘Archaebacteria: The Third Domain of Life Missed by Biologists for Decades’, Scientific American, (2012, originally published 1981)
Colin Schultz, ‘How a Single Act of Evolution Nearly Wiped Out All Life on Earth’, Smithsonian
Daniela Buckroithner, ‘Microbiology of Landfill Sites’, University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Masters Thesis, (2015)
Fabrizio Colozimio et al.,‘Biogenic methane in shale gas and coal bed methane: A review of current knowledge and gaps’, International Journal of Coal Geology, Vol. 165, (2016)
James F. Kasting, ‘When Methane Made Climate,’ Scientific American, (2015)
Ralph S. Wolfe, ‘A Historical Overview of Methanogenesis’, Methanogenesis: Physiology, Biochemistry & Genetics, (Chapman and Hall, 1993)
Sabrina Beckman et al, ‘Acetogens and Acetoclastic Methanosarcinales Govern Methane Formation in Abandoned Coal Mines’, Applied and Environmental Biology, (2011)
Shaomei He et al., ‘Patterns in Wetland Microbial Community Composition and Functional Gene Repertoire Associated with Methane Emissions’, American Society for Microbiology, (2015)

Winter Break

Winter is a time
of nurturing deeper dreams
whilst the land sleeps beneath
the rule of Winter’s King

so I’m going to be taking a break from blogging here until Imbolc to work on my new book and other gestating ideas and to explore the landscape. Best wishes to everybody for the cold season.

Peneverdant, A Lunar Cycle

I. Dark Moon

On a dark moon
the lady in the ivy
winds down the dark hill
and the falling graves.

All memory
is sliding into darkness,
the river’s tides
her open mouth.

She is waiting
for the return
of her tribe
on their oaken boats.

The moon is dark
over the river-
an eye, a maelstrom
between the worlds.

The fleet are ready,
the church is empty,
graves as hollow
as the old green hill.

She will be waiting
in the ivy
for the return
of her tribe
on their oaken boats.

II. New Moon

All is darkness
but the splash of the tide,
the wing of an owl.

Lady Ivy
recounts her losses
on the hill
and the bank
where the hangman
wore his cowl.

They are waiting
in the maelstrom eye
of the new moon-
the river’s entryway
to living day
and deep Annwn.

They are waiting,
her hidden tribe
on their oaken boats
in a slit of light,
an opening moonbeam
to row through
the night
to the old green hill.

III. Moon First Quarter

There is wisdom
in the eyes of an owl-
a demand,
a categorical imperative.

Behind cumulonimbus clouds
secretly moon’s orb
is swelling.

They row.
History is written
in their woad-
gods and goddesses,
an oak king,
the lakes and water courses
of their oaken fleet,
the moon’s eye
in the shining river
and all the laws of the deep.

IV. Full Moon

The moon is full
behind the clouds.
She casts no light
on the empty boats,
the processional route
around the old green hill,
the moving river of woad.

Lantern bearers
pass the old iron rails,
the gloomy gathering of graves
to assemble on the mound,
igniting the beacon fire.

By the wing of an owl
the clouds are moved.
The moon looks down,
victorious.

They salute her orb
in the shining river,
the gods of the hill
and the deep.

On this night
of opened graves
anything is possible
in the light of the beacon fire
before the lambent eye of the moon.

V. Moon Last Quarter

Night has fallen
from the moon’s closing eye.

The owl has flown
to the hunt.

The fire gone cold
with the lanterns’ glow
is eclipsed by street lamps
and brake lights.

The by-pass roars
by the old green hill.
The river is concreted
back in her new course.

Lady Ivy
winds down
the hill and the graves.
She waits
for the tribe to row
to the river-moon
on their oaken boats,
to her maelstrom-eye
between the worlds.