🐺FIONN IS RUDRA (The Koryos God) 🐺

Kris Kershaw, in her book on Odin and the Indo-European männerbund or “koryos” tradition, cites the suggestion of the scholar Stuart Piggott that Fionn Mac Cumhaill could be the Gaelic god matching the Vedic Rudra and Norse Odin.

It turns out this intuition was right.

⁃ Fionn is the god of the wandering warband and hunting party, called the Fianna.
⁃ The legendary band of Fionn reflected a real Fianna band in Gaelic society. They would spend summers living and hunting in the wilderness, and would return to the fortresses of lords and kings during the winter months, during which time they were also known to train their poetic knowledge. They had a policing and mercenary or bodyguard function, but also were known to be raiders at certain times. Caoilte, a member of Fionn’s Fianna, is known for a rampage during which he madly kills livestock, a common feature of the rudras in Vedic tradition. All of these things are in line with what we know of the männerbünde of other Indo-European societies. As Kershaw shows, the Rudra type god is the leader of this special hunting and warband, the Rudras, and Fionn likewise is leader of his band of Fianna.

⁃ Fionn thus is both a hunting and a war god, with his two hunting dogs always by his side, and with his wife taking the form of a deer and his son being named Oisin or “little deer”. The war god aspect of this Celtic god is emphasized much more clearly in Fionn’s Welsh counterpart, Gwyn ap Nudd, who in one poem is called “the hope of armies” and emphatically states “I come from battle and conflict”.

⁃ Fionn has the myth paralleling the Rudra-type god Odin when Odin famously hangs from the windy tree: the Irish version of this myth is called “The Hunt of Slieve Cuilinn”:
⁃ In this tale, Fionn 3 times swims the lake of the Cailleach, which turns all things white, a quality it shares with Urd’s well from the Norse myth, he is aged to an old man, drinks from a magical cup, and then fasts underneath a magical tree, finally gaining the power of prophecy thereby.
⁃ This myth also parallels the sacrifice of the rudra incarnation Ashwatthama of his own self to his higher Rudra-self in the Mahabharata, and it also parallels the myth of Apollo chasing the tree nymph Daphne and then receiving the power of prophecy from her leaves once she is frozen into tree form. The bow-wielding Apollo is another well-established Rudra-type god that we can then triangulate with Fionn and Odin.

⁃ After this myth, Fionn is shown to have the power of prophecy and magical insight in multiple tales.

⁃ Fionn’s Welsh linguistic and mythic cognate Gwyn is the leader of the Wild Hunt, like Odin, and is also known for his hounds who run among the clouds, as well as for the demons and fairies he is tasked with keeping contained in the Otherworld.

⁃ Fionn’s name means “The Knower,” “The Seer” or “The White” or “Blessed” and comes from one of the most important archaic root words connected to seership, Proto-Indo-European *weyd-, meaning “to see”. He is thus the Irish seer-god par excellence.

⁃ Fionn heals with water, as Rudra also is known to do.

⁃ Fionn is the one who drinks from the well of wisdom and tastes the Salmon of Knowledge, granting him all knowledge, much like well-known myths of Odin, and the role of Rudra as esoteric initiatior and god of consciousness, intellect and yogic enlightenment. Rudra is said to share a drink of some sort of illumination with the long haired ascetic in the Rig Veda hymn to the Kesin.

⁃ We have to remember that all of the mythic Fianna members are equivalent to rudras, with Fionn being their summation. Thus the Fianna member Goll Mac Morna, Goll meaning “one-eyed,” along with other Fianna members like Caoilte, demonstrate the more destructive side of the Gaelic Rudraic deity.
⁃ Goll is one-eyed, and another figure named Fintan, who shares the root of his name with Fionn and has all the world’s knowledge, is also one-eyed.

This then shows that even though Fionn Mac Cumhaill is not said to be one-eyed, the connection of the one-eye motif to the Rudraic types is retained in Celtic myth as it is in Norse myth.

⁃ A variant of Fionn named Eber Finn has the same function in the Irish creation myth that Odin and Rudra have in their respective creation myths. As Odin and his brothers divide the unity of Earth and Sky known as Ymir in the Norse creation myth, and Rudra-Agni divides the union of Sky and Sky’s own female aspect in the primordial moment of Rig Veda 10.61, Eber Finn and his brothers also break up the marriage of Earth and Sky, here called Eriu (meaning Ireland, this being the Irish Mother Earth) and Mac Greine (who is Sky) in the Irish creation myth. In this tradition, the act of division is depicted as a brief war and the union of Sky and Earth is described as a marriage, but the meaning of the underlying myth remains the same, as the genealogy of Eber Finn confirms.

⁃ Thanks to the well-preserved albeit coded Irish creation myth, we can verify that Eber Finn has the very same paternal lineage as Rudra does in Vedic myth.
⁃ His father is the god of Desire (in Irish this is Galam, meaning “Ardor”, in Vedic this is Kama), his grandfather is the “Prajapati” type god, who in Vedic myth is the World Tree god (this is Irish Bile, bile being the word for sacred trees in ancient Gaelic culture) and his great-grandfather is the Brahman or the Absolute itself (this is the Irish Breoghan, lord of the great tower of Brigantia).

The preciseness and detailed correspondence of this genealogy, if it is understood, confirms to a degree complete certainty that Fionn is no other than the Irish Rudra, very much the same god in nearly every quality and every myth.

The Celtic Rudra type is a god of multiplicity, he may appear under multiple names, and so we must know the myths in order to track his forms. For example, the whole band of Fianna are offshoots, fragments, spiritual children of the Rudra type, and share his qualities in different ways. In Welsh myth we have the clear parallel with Gwyn ap Nudd. But we also have Taliesin, who is born as Gwion, a variant of the name Gwyn, and whose myth of sudden enlightenment via a magical meal and a burned finger strikingly parallels that of Fionn. There is the aforementioned Fintan, and there is the son of Fionn, Oisin. We also have the giants Balor in Gaelic myth and Ysbaddaden in Welsh, who at first seem only like demonic fiends but who, when we trace their myths, turn out to be offshoots of the destructive aspect of the rudra type, much like Goll of the Fianna who there is evidence to show may have been a variant of Balor. Finally we have Efnysien of Welsh myth and his brother Nisien. This pairing is the clearest example in all of European mythology of a Rudra-Siva pairing, the destructive and the peace-bringing, auspicious sides of this god presented as a clear duality. This pair may require an entire post to themselves in the future, but their very existence is able to prove that the Rudra-Siva duality is no later development, but goes back to the time of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, and was a core element of their theology.


To learn more about Fionn and the Celtic Rudras, check out the articles below.

Fionn, Taliesin, Balor, and the Celtic Rudras
https://taliesinsmap.blogspot.com/2021/05/fionn-taliesin-and-celtic-rudras.html?m=1

The Irish Parallel of Odinn on the Windy Tree: The Trial of Fionn at Slieve Cuilinn
https://taliesinsmap.blogspot.com/2021/07/the-irish-parallel-of-oinn-on-windy.html?m=1


- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

New video is out.

Fionn mac Cumhaill = Rudra = Odin. Learn about the Celtic Rudra(s) below.

Fionn is Rudra, god of the “Koryos” and the Wild Hunt (Celtic Mythology Decoded)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DiwbwiNVr_8

- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

New video is out.

Bres and Elatha are the father and son Sun Gods of Irish myth.

The Sun God is the god that must be overcome by the Divine Sovereign (Lugh/Mitra) in order to achieve final victory and immortality.

This theology is found in the Vedas, the epic tradition, the cult of Mithras, and at the climax of both branches of Celtic mythology.

In this video I read and do an in-depth analysis of two crucial passages from Irish and Indian mythology.

The uncanny match between these texts is one of the most incredible things I’ve found during my research, and I read them out to people in full any chance I get.


𝐁𝐫𝐞𝐬 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐄𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐚 𝐚𝐫𝐞 𝐒𝐮𝐫𝐲𝐚, 𝐟𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐒𝐮𝐧 𝐆𝐨𝐝𝐬 (𝐂𝐞𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐌𝐲𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐲 𝐃𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐝𝐞𝐝)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KkqJYuBd_jM

- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

🌞BRES & ELATHA ARE BOTH SURYA🌞

The hot tempered and cruel half-fomorian, half-Tuatha de Danann king Bres has long been misunderstood. Indeed, his multidimensional nature and his special divine role within the overall theology has been repeatedly defamed by a shallow grasp of the material. The Sun God is both cruel and life giving, but he must be overcome for the sovereign soul to reach perfection.

⁃ First, The Sun God incarnation of the Mahabharata, Karna, is one of the two main warriors of the opposition against the Pandavas, the incarnations of the main gods of society; so if parallels from the Mahabharata hold with Irish mythology, as we have seen repeatedly to be the case, we should actually EXPECT the Sun God to be one of the primary opponents of the main gods. Another two cases of this feature of archaic Indo European theology is the handsome archer Paris from the Iliad, and the hunter Gronw “The Radiant” of Welsh mythology, both of whom are forms the same deity as Bres, the handsome former ally, often an archer, who becomes one of the chief antagonists, the sun being that which must be overcome by the divine sovereign in order to achieve true victory and immortality.

⁃ Once we understand that Nuada is Varuna and Lugh is Mitra, we can see that their reigns as kings of the Tuatha de Danann should fall during the first and last halves of the yearly cycle respectively, with the Mitraic god generally having his festival in Autumn as Dumezil explains, and with Lugh indeed having his festival, Lughnasadh, at the point which marks the beginning of autumn. Thus if Nuada’s reign is during the beginning half of the yearly cycle, and Lugh’s is connected with autumn, then Bres, who rules between them must rule during the heat of the summer specifically. This middle point of the cycle is analogous to both the peak of summer and the noon of the day, when the sun is highest in the sky.

⁃ Bres begins as an ally of the main gods and then his rule becomes cruel an inhospitable, mirroring the progress of the sun from gentle sunrise to harsh midday, or midsummer, sun.

⁃ When Bres is satirized by the poet Coirpre at the height of his reign, it is said that “naught but decay was on him from that hour”. This again can be read as describing the decline of the sun’s power as it falls from its peak in the sky, or from its maximum during the middle of summer.

⁃ The conception of the incarnation of Surya, Karna, found in the Srimad-Devi Bhagavatam, Book 2, Chapter 6 and the conception of Bres found in the Cath Maige Tuired match point for point:

1.The Sun god appears suddenly to the woman in her room. In the Indian case this is explicitly stated. In the Irish case, the fact that this is the Sun god is only alluded to by the description of his gold circlets, clothes, hair, and jewelry.
2.The woman is possibly an earth goddess. Kunti’s original name Pṛthā is the feminine form of pṛtha, closely related to Pṛthvī, goddess of Earth. Eriu, as indicated by her name, is the embodiment of the land of Ireland.
3.The woman is a virgin. This is stated outright in the Indian case. In the Irish passage, Ériu comments that “the young men of the Túatha Dé Danann have been entreating me in vain,” implying that she had been a virgin as well.
4.She denies him with her first words. The first thing Kunti says is: “I am highly pleased to-day seeing Thy form; now go back to Thy sphere.” The first thing Ériu says is: “I certainly have not made a tryst with you.”
5.He is pushy, and asks specifically for “intercourse” or “copulation.” Due to how often sexual allusions become softened or covered up, especially in Indian mythology, it cannot be overemphasized how significant it is that both accounts use equivalent unadorned terms for the sexual act at this very point. Surya says, “you have made me your subservient so take me for intercourse.

” Morgan Daimler, in a literalist translation of the Cath Maig Tuired, translates Elatha’s request as as: “Shall I have an hour of copulation with you?” Thus the similarities of the two texts occur right down to the use of approximately the same explicit terminology at a key moment.
6.They lie together.
7.The woman expresses anxiety over losing her virginity. Just before they lie together, Kunti says, “O Witness of all! O knower of Dharma! You know that I am a virgin girl. O Suvrata! I bow down to you; I am a family daughter; so do not speak ill to me.” Just after they lie together, Ériu says that one of the things she laments is that “The young men of the Túatha Dé Danann have been entreating me in vain—and you possess me as you do.” That is, she is anxious about having given up her virginity.
8.He removes her anxiety about this. Surya says, “If you satisfy me, your virginity will remain.” Elatha says, “Your anxiety about those two things will be removed,” and gives her a gold ring. Because there is no clear indication of how the gift of the ring will alleviate her anxiety over her lost virginity, the possibility must be considered that Elatha may also restore Ériu’s virginity along with this gift, and that this fact is again only being obliquely alluded to, as other details have been. Due to all of the other alignment between these parallel passages we must attempt to imagine that these details regarding the alleviation of the virginity-anxiety may have in some way had a unified meaning in some kind of a shared origin.
9.The father foretells that a son will be born. A son is born who is exactly like his father. This is stated explicitly in the Indian case: “there will be born a son to you, exactly like me.” The Irish case similarly has: “You will bear a son as a result of our meeting.” However, in the Irish case, the fact that the son is just like his father is only alluded to, but it is not exactly hidden either. The ring that Elatha gives to Ériu he takes off of his own finger. He then tells Ériu to give this ring only to the man whom it will fit. The only man whom the ring fits ends up being Elatha’s own son, Bres, and it would fit no other. With the context of the Indian version, it becomes clear that this is an illustration, as opposed to an outright statement, of the same fact that we find in the Indian case: that the son is identical to the father. The father’s ring fits only his son because his son is just like his father. Their fingers, as every other part, are perfect doubles. Their fingers are being used as synechdoches in this way, one part standing in for the whole. The full meaning of this Irish passage can indeed only be grasped by its comparison with the Indian case: it is not telling us that Bres has only a family resemblance to his father – it is telling us that Bres is his father’s double. And as his father Elatha is the golden-haired god wearing the golden circlets and clothing, a blatant solar figure, so Bres is also the Sun God, born again from his Sun God father.
10.The son is specifically said to be very beautiful upon his birth. “In time, a very beautiful son” is born, says the Indian text. So beautiful is Bres said to be upon his birth that he is named “Eochu Bres (that is, Eochu the Beautiful), because every beautiful thing that is seen in Ireland...will be judged in relation to that boy, so that people will then say of it, ‘It is a Bres.’”
11.A type of ring jewelry is given by the father to the son which marks him as son and double of the Sun God. Surya’s son, Karna, is born wearing earrings that make his face shine, along with a breastplate. It is implied that these come from his Sun God parentage, inborn gifts from his father that manifest his solar quality and show him as the son of the Sun. Elatha gives Ériu the ring upon Bres’ conception that Ériu later gives to Bres, which itself is a symbol of Bres’ identity with his father the Sun. Thus although Bres receives the ring later, while Karna has the earrings at birth, they carry the same meaning and provenance.
12.

The father leaves the mother abruptly immediately after the conception, and the son does not know his true father until an event connected to the Great War. Karna does not find out his true parentage until well into the Kurukshetra War, while Bres finds out who his father is after the First Battle of Maige Tuireadh and right before he sparks the Second Battle of Maige Tuireadh, thus midway through the double war of the Irish myth.
13.From one of the two of this parent couple springs many of the other main gods or god-incarnations. That is, this is an important divine “ancestor” pairing.
14.While Karna is explicitly a manifestation of the Sun deity, Bres is called “Eochaidh,” or “Horseman,” a not uncommon title for various chiefs, but also fitting for a solar figure, the horse being a common solar symbol. He also is said to grow, from birth, at twice the normal rate, another solar trope possibly mirroring the sun rising rapidly in the sky.

One thing to note is that the Sun God fathered by his own self from the previous cycle is a well-established feature of Egyptian mythology. As such, it is likely that we should consider this Indo-European myth along the same lines. Elatha and Bres are the same divinity at core; one is merely the sun from the day or the year before. Perhaps the rebirth of the sun from mother earth was even ritually connected to the time around or following the winter solstice, when the sun of the new year rises from darkness.

For more on this topic please read the comparison of Paris, Bres and Karna in my article on the Iliad heroes.

https://taliesinsmap.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-heroes-of-iliad-as-indo-european_90.html?m=1

⁃ O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

🌊NUADA IS VARUNA🌊

The Irish king of the Tuatha De Danann, Nuada, corresponds to the Vedic king of waters, night sky, and the sovereignty of the beginning phase, Varuna.

⁃ The first thing to understand about Nuada is his position in the cycle of kings of the Tuatha De Danann. We have already discussed how The Mitraic king Lugh rules the end of the cycle, corresponding to Autumn, and how Bres the Sun God rules the middle of the cycle, this being the heat of summer. As Dumezil explains, Varuna is king of the first part of the cycle because he is the sovereign of Night, which is the beginning of the cycle, corresponding to winter, more or less. Similarly, Nuada is the king when the Tuatha de Danann arrive to Ireland and thus he is the first sovereign of the cycle that they initiate as the gods of society.

⁃ As Varuna is characterized by the creative energy of beginnings, which Dumezil calls celeritas, meaning speed or haste, he is the king who epitomizes the wars of conquest that violently establish order and expand dominion. Heroes of the Varunian type, such as the direct Varuna incarnation Pandu, or the Iliad hero Agamemnon, are expansionist warrior kings who create massive kingdoms that the Mitraic type generally brings lasting stability to later. Nuada similarly is king during the first war against the Fir Bolg, defeating them to first establish the power and dominion of the Tuatha De. As Nuada is an important god of kingship like Varuna, the name nuada even became a noun that was used to mean a hero, champion, or king in Middle Irish.

⁃ Nuada’s reign ends due to a physical wound signifying his imperfection and loss of sovereign power: the loss of his arm, which the physician god later replaces. The loss of the vitality that makes one king is also a theme of Varunian figures: While Nuada abdicates the throne when he has his arm severed, Pandu, Varuna’s incarnation, abdicates the throne when he is cursed to be unable to embrace his wife, once again expressing the idea of the tainted or maimed king not being fit to rule. The version of this motif connected to Varuna himself is that he becomes impotent and has to be healed by the Gandharvas. Pandu also is born with an affliction that makes his skin pale white, while Nuada’s replacement arm is said to be silver.

⁃ Varuna is a god of the waters (probably the Greek Poseidon is a parallel), while Nuada and his cognate form Britain, Nodens, are also repeatedly connected with the water element in particular. Nodens of Britain is represented on a priest’s headdress found at his shrine at Lydney as a Neptune-type sea king, riding on a chariot pulled by sea horses and holding a scepter and a sea serpent. He is also flanked by fish centaurs carrying anchors and there is a depiction of a fisherman with gills catching a fish.

⁃ A mosaic from the Nodens temple shows two more sea-serpents and several fish, possibly salmon. The temple overlooks the river Severn.

⁃ As Lorna Smithers explains:
“Pilgrims came to Lydney for dream-healing. They would arrive at the guesthouse, bathe in the baths, then make offerings to Nodens through a funnel in his temple (which suggests he dwelled below in the deep). They would then retire to a long row of cells to enter a sacred (likely drug-induced) sleep during which they would receive a vision from Nodens. The dream-interpreter would listen to the dream then suggest a method of healing based on Nodens’ message.”
This further connects Nodens to the nocturnal side of things, like Varuna the king of night.

⁃ Most of the inscriptions found at Lydney are from people asking Nodens for healing, while Varuna is called the healer with a thousand remedies.

⁃ The Welsh noun nudd, spelled n-u-d-d, from which we get the Welsh names for Nuada, means 'mist, haze, fog', leading to a reconstructed Proto-Celtic stem *snowdo- ('mist, haze'), from Proto-Indo-European *snewdh- (meaning 'mist, cloud'; cf. Latin nūbēs 'clouds'), Scholars have also linked the Celtic names with the stem *néud- (cf.

Gothic niutan, meaning 'to catch, attain, acquire' and nuta, meaning 'catcher, fisherman').

⁃ Thus Nodens’ name may connect him either to the misty waters of the sky or to the concept of “catching,” whereas it is Varuna who in the Vedas catches sinners or opponents with his magical noose and his many spies.

⁃ According to Isolde Carmody, Findias, the Island from which Nuada’s sword comes, has a meaning related to light, whiteness, holiness, and swiftly running water (as in “white water”), while the druidic teacher from Findias is named Uiscias, which is most likely from the root uisce, meaning “water.”

⁃ As John Carey has detailed, Nuada apparently became syncretized with another god of waters over time, Nechtan, leading to the name Nuada Necht. This doesn’t imply that he was Nechtan to begin with, but it does make clear how strongly he was connected to the waters to lead to this conflation.

⁃ As we will discuss in the future, Lludd, the Welsh Nodens/Nuada, is in the same position in relation to Llefelys as Varuna is in relation to Prajapati of the Vedas. As I will show, Llefelys is not Lleu as usually is hastily presumed (Lleu being Mitra), but is instead a name of the Prajapati type of Celtic myth. When the myth of Prajapati teaching Varuna is understood and compared to the myth of Llefelys teaching Lludd, we see that the Welsh Varuna is once again in a mythic position corresponding to none other than Varuna.

⁃ I find that many people are stuck on the idea of Nuada as a Mitraic god, because Nuada loses his arm while the Mitraic god Tyr loses his hand. But Nuada’s arm is lost during a battle while Tyr’s is lost from a wolf bite during a deceptive pledge, and these two maimings have entirely different meanings and outcomes. We must understand the specific contexts. The loss of Nuada’s hand is not connected to the Mitraic function of justice, compared to Tyr’s lost hand which carries a specific meaning relating to the wounding of the pledge hand of the god of pledges during a pledge. Even Dumezil renounced the comparison between Tyr and Nuada for this reason in his later writings. When this great red herring of a comparison is released back into the sea, it becomes clear that, if one knows the facts about Varuna and Mitra, it is Nuada who instead stands alone as the Varunian sovereign of Irish myth, the king of the beginnings, of night, of the waters, of the loss of sovereign vitality, and his pairing with Lugh is equivalent to the Varuna-Mitra pairing of Vedic myth, and as with Varuna and Mitra, the Varunian king arrives first, and the Mitraic king follows later.


For more information on the Varunian-type incarnations, check out my article on Agamemnon and Pandu below.
https://taliesinsmap.blogspot.com/2020/12/the-heroes-of-iliad-as-indo-european.html?m=1

⁃ O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

New video is out.

Nuada is the sovereign of the night phase, the first half of the cycle, a god of healing and of the waters.


Nuada is Varuna, sovereign of waters and night (Celtic Mythology Decoded)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WOK_njk7F8k

- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

THE SUN RIDERS OFFICIAL MONTH OF MARS CHALLENGE III

Ready to shake off Winter‘s shackles?
As in the last two years, we invite you to join us in challenging ourselves physically, mentally, and spiritually; getting ready for another season of action, productivity, building, and growing.

Here are our major goals for this March:

Goal I - Physical Fitness
Strengthen your body with regular exercise.
Set new goals for weight, reps, frequency etc, and achieve them. Don‘t slack!

Goal II - Reading and Studying
Read for at least 30 minutes every day and tackle those books you‘ve been meaning to get to.
Take notes, be present with the material.

Goal III - Spiritual Practice
Perform daily ritual, for example libation, prayer, meditation, and honor your gods and ancestors.

Goal IV - Abstinence/Fasting
Overcome your vices. Cut out unhealthy habits such as smoking, drinking, sugar, late night snacking, mindless scrolling etc.

Push yourself! Tackle as many goals as possible.
Honor your commitment!

@solarcult

🏹Efnysien and Nisien are Rudra and Siva - The Celtic Creation Myth Part 1 🏹

We can identify the Mabinogi tale Branwen, Daughter of Llyr as the Welsh Creation Myth, and the seemingly psychopathic figure Efnysien as the primordial form of the Welsh Rudra, and thus his brother Nisien as the primordial Welsh Siva.

The decoding of the Welsh Creation Myth, however, relies on the proper understanding of the Vedic Creation Myth, something that is rare to find.

In the Rig Vedic Creation Myth, not the Nasadiya Sukta usually referred to as the creation hymn, but rather the version found in RV 10.161, Father Sky is portrayed raping his own “daughter”, as if in a primordial union with her.

An archer, who is invoked with a “Rudriyan formulation,” a raudra brahman, and is in fact Rudra-Agni according to scholar Stella Kramrisch, divides this sexual union of Father Sky and his female other-half using an arrow shot. The semen of Father Sky (Dyaus) spills down and creates the site of the primordial sacrifice and also spawns the ancestors of human beings.

This is told cryptically in Rig Veda 10.61, and 1.71.5 and due to its cryptic presentation most people don’t even know this myth, but scholars such as Arthur Anthony Macdonell, Stella Kramrisch, Stephanie Jamison and Joel Brereton and othets have brought clarity to these Vedic passages and the Brahmanas that elaborate the narrative.

In summary, Rudra-Agni violently divides Father Sky from progenetive union with his “daughter”, who is really his other half, leading to the creation of the ancestors of humans and the site of the primordial sacrifice. The identity of this daughter is debated among scholars, but Macdonell identifies her with the Earth goddess, which the comparative evidence from other branches also seems to confirm.

Returning to the Welsh myth: When we are able to identify Efnysien as Rudra, we can see that this same mythic structure forms the very backbone of the second branch of the Mabinogi, Branwen Daughter of Llyr and thus this tale is the Welsh Creation Myth, and is a very detailed version of the Indo-European Creation Myth at that.


Therefore, to show that Efnysien is Rudra, we can point to virtually anything he does, so thoroughly do his actions accord with the traits and myths of Rudra on the primordial scene of creation.

⁃ His name, Efnysien, means “hostile, wrathful”.

⁃ He is called the bringer of strife while Nisien, his brother is the bringer of peace. The text reads: “And one of these youths was a good youth and of gentle nature, and would make peace between his kindred, and cause his family to be friends when their wrath was at the highest; and this one was Nissyen; but the other [Efnysien] would cause strife between his two brothers when they were most at peace”. They are explicitly contrasted in their names and in their descriptions, presenting the same duality with which Rudra and Siva are contrasted. The scholar Patrick Ford (1996: 114) even exolains the implicit contrast of the names of Nisien and Efnysien as “Mr Peace (Nisien) and Mr Un-Peace (Efnisien).”

⁃ Efnysien mutilates horses while Rudra and his band of rudras are well known for mutilating various kinds of livestock.

⁃ In the Vedic creation hymn previously mentioned, a form of Rudra is Vastospati appears when Father Sky rapes his daughter, Vastospati meaning the “protector of the house.” Similarly, Efnysien defends the special house built by Matholwch as a trap for Bran, by violently cleansing it and crushing the skulls of all 200 assassins placed there to kill them.

⁃ As Kramrisch explains, Rudra is the defender of the integrity of the heavenly state before the moment of creation. He does not want the sacred liquid to be spilled into creation via the sexual act of Father Sky, as this would break the pre-cosmic wholeness and begin the unfolding of worldly generation. As the policeman of cosmic order within this precosmic state, he also is responsible for putting a stop to both the sexual violence and the procreative act that Father Sky is the agent of.

⁃ When this is understood, Efnysien’s cryptic hostility to Matholwch (who is Father Sky) and Branwen’s marriage and his anger at them being given the cauldron (the container of sacred liquid) finally becomes comprehensible.

⁃ Their marital union will result in the spilling of the sacred liquid that will have a domino effect leading to the bursting of the otherworld into creation. Rudra tries to stop this creation from happening, because it is a chaotic development compared to the perfect wholeness of the precosmic divine world, it is against cosmic order and equilibrium, but when the progenitive act does happen, he tries to then impose a new order onto the world that has been set in motion, to rectify its chaotic aspects and bring it back in line with the divine

⁃ Efnysien’s actions cannot be understood without reading them along these very lines, including the throwing of the son of Matholwch and Branwen into the fire, a very sudden and confusing act by Efnysien, but which is a perfect match for when, due to the arrow of Rudra-Agni striking him, the seed of the Vedic Father Sky falls to the ground and is there engulfed in flames, marking the site of sacrifice. Thus the offspring of the Welsh father Sky, Matholwch, being thrown down into the flames by Efnysien is the same as the seed of the Vedic Father Sky falling to the earth and being engulfed in flames when Father Sky is shot by Rudra-Agni. The child is in the same position as the seed, both being forms of the offspring of Father Sky.


⁃ Finally, Efnysien self-sacrifices in the cauldron of regeneration to help his side win the war. When he enters the cauldron, he makes his own heart burst with his effort to destroy it.
⁃ At the same point in Rudra-Siva’s myth, he goes into the “waters” in meditation, and castrates himself.
⁃ What the bursting of ones own heart and the castrating of oneself have in common is that they are both symbols of the site of the passions being snuffed out and overcome. The heart and the phallus are equally symbols of the site of the worldly passions, and the Welsh tradition has merely chosen to speak of the bursting of the heart rather than of castration.

⁃ The sacrifice of Efnysien should then be read as forming a bridge to the divine, as Rudra is the ferryman and liberator who leads to the other side, the yogi who meditates in the waters to gain samadhi, overcoming the worldly passions and leading to a transcendental state, the transcendent pillar or Sthanu that he becomes.

⁃ Of Rudra, who she calls the Liberator, Kramrisch says:
“The fierce guardian of the Uncreate, at the inception of life on earth, having entered into the created world, is the ferryman who leads to the other shore.”

⁃ When he bursts his own heart, the site of the passions, Efnysien like Rudra-Siva becomes the symbol of the attained state of integral wholeness or, an example of this state of reintegrated wholeness to all thereafter.

⁃ In the Vedic version it is much more clear that Rudra’s lost phallus is really symbolic of a maximizing of his spiritual virility rather than a simple neutering, and that while Rudra becomes an immovable transcendent pillar, he nonetheless has other manifestations on earth, whether called by the name Rudra or Pasupati or Vastospati or something else.

⁃ Rudra-Siva becoming the transcendent pillar or Sthanu is equivalent to the “death” of the Efnysien when he stretches himself to full length in the waters of the cauldron. Efnysien would then transcend to the otherworld, just a Cronus the Greek god in the same position does in the same place in his myth, when, after violently dividing the rape of Father Sky (Ouranos) and Earth (Gaia), Cronus becomes castrated and then goes to be the ruler of the highest afterlife destination, the Blessed Isles. As such we are able to be confident that Efnysien does similarly, even though it is not stated explicitly in the tale.

⁃ After the war ends, some women pregnant with the ancestors of today’s humans are found in a cave.

Thus the war results in the generation of humans just as the Vedic, Norse and Greek creation myths do.


Since Efnysien is therefore the Welsh Rudra in a primordial form, we see that the war that he causes and fights in is really the division of the abusive marriage of Father Sky and Mother Earth, Matholwch and Branwen, just as with the division of Sky and Earth by Cronus in the Greek tradition. This is again directly comparable to the violent sexual union of Father Sky and his female half or “daughter” in the Vedas which Rudra-Agni divides. Instead of a rape, in the Welsh version the violence has been portrayed as physical abuse and the union as marriage.

The rape of father sky’s female half, his “daughter”, calls Rudra to stop it with his arrow.
Likewise, the marital violence of Matholwch against his spouse Branwen calls Efnysien and his brothers to put a stop to it with a war.
This war and the arrow shot of Rudra are dramatizing the same core metaphysical event.

The existence of the duality of Efnysien and his peace-bringing brother Nisien shows that the Rudra-Siva duality existed from Proto-Indo-European times. This peace-bringing brother of Efnysien, blatantly contrasted with him along these lines, indeed cannot be explained in any other way than as the Welsh Shiva.

Thus, because the Welsh case had an explicit Rudra-Shiva pairing, it is possible to deduce that the Vedic Rudra also always implies his Shiva face. Shiva is the other side of Rudra, always present, as this concept must have been present during the Proto-Indo-European period in order to appear similarly in Vedic and Welsh, not to mention Norse, traditions. Hence when Rudra-Agni divides Sky and his female aspect, this is always really Rudra-Siva-Agni doing so. the name Rudra simply encompasses the Rudra-Siva duality as such in Rig Vedic hymns. Rudra is often said to have an “auspicious (siva) form” and is asked to show it, as in the Satarudriya litany.
We then have Rudra-Shiva-Agni as the main dividers of Father Sky and his female half.

Likewise, in the Welsh version we have Efnysien (or Rudra) accompanied by Nisien (or Siva) and Manawydan (or Agni) in his war against Matholwch (or Father Sky), which results in the end of his marriage with Branwen (or Mother Earth) and the death of his son who is thrown in the fire.

It is this trio, Rudra, Shiva and Agni, that is usually present at the dividing of the primordial union of Earth from Sky in the moment of primordial creation, as again with Odin who is Rudra, Hoenir who is Shiva, and Lodurr who is Agni, when they divide Ymir, who is the unquiet union of Sky-Earth, or Dyaus-Prithvi.

This is why it is specifically Efnysien, Nisien, and Manawydan who greet the son of Matholwch named Gwern, meaning “Alder”; this scene being the direct parallel of when Odin, Hoenir and Lodurr find the tree named human Askr, meaning “Ash,” on the beach

I will restate one last time: Rudra-Agni divides Sky from his own female half, but Rudra is always Rudra-Siva, as the Welsh and Norse trios are able to confirm.

If the idea of Nisien as a Welsh Shiva is rejected, then one has to explain why the Welsh Rudra, Efnysien, has a brother with nearly the same name, and why their two names are explicitly contrasting, and mean roughly “Mr Peace and Mr Un-Peace”. One has to explain who this Nisien could possibly be besides a god sharing an Indo-European root with Siva, the peaceful side of the “wrathful destroyer” god Rudra.


Now, clearly Gwyn ap Nudd is the Welsh Rudra in most myth and folklore, perfectly cognate with Fionn Mac Cumhaill of the Gaelic tradition as we have discussed previously. But we can now understand the continuity between Efnysien and Gwyn. Gwyn is perhaps the better known name of the god, but when Efnysien “dies” he of course goes to the Otherworld and must remanifest as Gwyn ap Nudd, just as Rudra becomes the transcendent pillar and goes to his sacred mountain after castrating himself in the waters and remanifests in other Rudra forms or as Pasupati or Vastospati, etc.

We can know confidently that Efnysien remanifests as Gwyn because in the Gaelic tradition we have the figure named Eber Finn in the position that Efnysien occupies in the Welsh Creation Myth. That is, Eber Finn and his brothers break up the marriage of Eriu (meaning Ireland, which then stands for Earth, and Eriu is Mother Earth, as we have seen) and Mac Greine (who as the primordial spouse of Eriu whose marriage is ended violently by this Rudraic Eber Finn, is apparently Father Sky). Eber Finn is subsequently the one who shares rule of Ireland briefly but is then killed, this being a variant that parallels the deposing of Cronus by Zeus or the death of Efnysien, which are all the same mythic event told slightly differently. The death or deposing of the primordial Rudra after the creation, leading to his later remanifestation in another form.
Clearly Eber Finn then remanifests simply as Fionn or Finn Mac Cumhaill, and their names much more blatantly mark the continuity of these figures.
Eber Finn becomes Finn.

Efnysien however becomes Gwyn, and thus we can see that the name Efnysien, “the hostile or wrathful one,” is just an epithet, a primordial byname of the god known otherwise as Gwyn.
Odin is called Odin when he divides Earth and Sky in the primordial moment, and is called either Odin or one of his many other epithets in his other myths. Thus his name doesn’t necessarily change between these two phases. Rudra is like Odin in that way, having his primary name and many epithets and forms. But the Greek tradition is more like the Welsh in this way: the primordial Greek Rudra is Cronus who divides Earth and Sky during a marital rape and is castrated and goes to rule the highest otherworld realm, and then must re-manifest in order for there to be a Greek Rudra-of-the-world deity, this being Apollo. The connection between Cronus and Apollo is then unspoken and esoteric within Greek tradition, like that between Efnysien and Gwyn in the Welsh tradition, but comparative analysis can demonstrate beyond doubt the through-line connecting these pairs. When we align their myths, it is plain to see: Efnysien is to Gwyn as Eber Finn is to Finn, or as primordial Odin is to Odin in his other myths. Thus Efnysien and Gwyn are continuations of the same deity.


⁃ Stella Kramrisch explains that in the Vedic myth, it is Rudra-Agni who has actually set the events in motion, by preparing the fire-seed and placing it in Father Sky, inflaming his passions and leading to his violent sexual act against his female other half. Thus Rudra-Agni sets the catastrophe in motion by the nature of his fire aspect, and then tries in vain to stop the rape and the expenditure of sacred liquid into the world, the generation of offspring. This explains Efnysien’s actions thoroughly. He first is against the marriage and so mutilates the horses, which also inflames tensions between the parties.


⁃ Manawydan, the Fire God (Agni), is present when Branwen marries Matholwch and leads the envoy sent to Matholwch to arrange to give him the cauldron as recompense for the offense of Efnysien.
⁃ Finally, near the the end of the war Efnysien says “Alas! woe is me, that I should have been the cause of bringing the men of the Island of the Mighty into so great a strait. Evil betide me if I find not a deliverance therefrom."”

To give them deliverance he self-sacrifices and breaks the cauldron of regeneration, and as I have said this self-sacrifice, in which his own heart is burst, must esoterically form the bridge back to the wholeness of the divine precosmic state that he had been seeking, as when Cronus becomes ruler of the Blessed Isles at the same point or when Rudra becomes the transcendent pillar in the waters and then goes off to his sacred mountain to meditate, reunified with higher absolute essence.

Clearly with this act Efnysien allows his side to win the war against Matholwch, to destroy the cauldron of regeneration that would lead to a hellish zombie state lacking the cycle of natural death (the muteness of the revived warriors that go into the cauldron symbolizing their being cut off from the essence of the divine, which is voice). Perhaps this short-lived primordial state of living death, separated from the divine, is similar again to when the Cyclopes and Hecatonchieres are trapped in Tartarus by Ouranos and then freed by Cronus at the end of the war.


So Efnysien and Manawydan, that is Rudra-Agni, together help to give Branwen to Matholwch in marriage, inflame the tensions between the two sides by mutilating the horses of Matholwch, and arrange to have the cauldron given to Matholwch. They then fight to separate Matholwch and Branwen, while Efnysien violently cleanses the house of Matholwch, as the defender of the house akin to Vastospati, then casts Matholwch’s offspring into the fire, and finally, realizing the fact that he has been the author of the whole sequence of events, self-sacrifices to destroy the cauldron of regeneration, bursting his own heart in an act that esoterically implies the overcoming of the passions and the return to the divine realm. The ancestors of humans are then discovered and populate the new world.


This is the Welsh Creation Myth, and as I have suggested it is repeated in a very sketchy form in the Gaelic Book of Invasions, in the sequence known as the Invasion of the Sons of Mil. Eber Finn is the Rudraic god matching Efnysien, his brother Donn, who sometimes appears as the singing severed head Donn Bo, is the lord of the island that is the gateway to the underworld, matching Efnysien’s brother Bran, who becomes a speaking severed head and the lord of the Otherworld isle of Gwales after the war, and thus the marriage of Eriu to Mac Greine is the parallel of the marriage of Branwen to Matholwch, Mother Earth to Father Sky, divided by the Rudraic god and his brothers.


They will seek long and fruitlessly who do not recognize the Celtic Creation Myth in these stories, for there is no other. The Celtic Creation Myth has however been left to us in remarkable detail, and in two versions no less.


It is understandable that the Celtic Creation Myth has not been decoded until now, as it is somewhat complex work until one gets to know the underlying pattern. That being said, henceforth, anyone who claims the Celts have no creation myth has simply admitted their ignorance of the subject.
And not only is this the Celtic Creation Myth, but the numerous similarities between the Welsh and Vedic creation myths allow us to deduce that the Proto Indo European Creation Myth must not have been far different in its narrative and esoteric meaning, and that the places of agreement between the Welsh and Vedic versions give us a clearer idea of what that Proto-Indo-European myth looked like.

Rudra, that is Efnysien, violently divides Sky from his other half, Earth, who are in an abusive progenetive union, and then he provides the paradigm for self-transcendence and the return to divine wholeness, rupturing the site of his own passions, and thereby forming a bridge to reconnect with the divine thereafter, while also instituting the cycle of natural death within the world when he breaks the cauldron of regeneration. The ancestors of humans then are found as a mysterious after-effect of this great event.

Writing on the self castration of Siva when he is in the form of the Pillar, the scholar David Shulman describes a pattern that also exactly fits the actions of Efnysien:

“This is the essential Saiva vision: one reaches the positive pole through negation.” - Shulman, 108
“Sthanu is the Pillar-rigid, removed from the world, chaste, intent on wholeness,
uncompromising, yet supportive of the limited order, sexually potent, the inventor of death.” -109
“the terrifying aspect of [Sthanu] also becomes defined as a kind of compassion or mercy, albeit the peculiar mercy of mortality” - 109

He concludes that, “the Destroyer's uncompromising demand for
perfection, his angry withdrawal and protest, and, finally, his furious self-mutilation form the essential conditions for his work of creation.” - 124

The myth of Efnysien and Rudra is in fact the mythic narrative of the god of the divine Intellect, who is the shaper of the world, for both Plotinus and Plato identify Cronus as the Intellectual-Principle or Nous, and Fionn’s own name comes from a root meaning “to see” and thus has the meaning of “Seer” or “Knower,” while Rudra is traditionally identified with the power of consciousness or mind in some fashion.
In Efnysien’s myth we see the complex demiurgic process that leads the perfection-seeking god of divine Intellect to reshape the catastrophe of existence into something that can once again approach order as well as divinity.


To read a more in-depth analysis of Efnysien and this Celtic Creation Myth please read my 4-part article on the topic:
https://taliesinsmap.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-celtic-creation-myth-branwen_21.html?m=1


⁃ O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

New video is out.

The REAL Celtic and Indo-European Creation Myth Part 1: Efnysien is Rudra (Celtic Mythology Decoded)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0SqgQDxRfmM

- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult

"King Attis stops his infinity through the castration; and the gods by this means exhort us also to cut off the infinity of our nature, and hasten back again to that which is bounded and uniform, and, if possible, to the one itself." - Emperor Julian

Attis is the Phrygian parallel of Efnysien, Eber Finn, Cronus, Odin, Rudra, as discussed in my recent Creation Myth video, and thus the above metaphysical interpretation can be applied to each of them.

- O’Gravy, The Sun Riders
@solarcult