Ceridwen lived, according to the tradition, on the shores of Llyn Tegid — Bala Lake — with her husband Tegid Foel and their two children: a beautiful daughter, Creirwy, and a son, Morfran, also called Afagddu ('utter darkness'), who was so ugly that his mother feared he would never be welcomed in any court in Wales.
To make up for what she could not give him in looks, Ceridwen decided to give him awen — the bardic gift of inspiration, prophecy, and poetry. She set up a great cauldron, gathered a precise list of herbs at the precise hours the old astrology demanded, and lit a fire under it. The brew had to simmer for a year and a day. Only three drops, at the very end, would carry the gift. The rest would be deadly poison.
She set a blind old man, Morda, to tend the fire, and a small servant boy, Gwion Bach, to stir the cauldron. For a year and a day they kept the brew going. On the last day, three drops leapt from the cauldron and struck the back of Gwion's hand. He yelped in pain, lifted his thumb to his mouth — and tasted them. In that instant he knew everything: every herb in the world, every star in the sky, every secret in Ceridwen's mind. He also knew, immediately, that she would kill him for it.
He ran. The cauldron split in two behind him and poisoned the stream that ran out of it, killing Tegid Foel's horses where they drank. Ceridwen came after Gwion in fury. He turned himself into a hare. She turned into a greyhound. He turned into a fish. She into an otter. He into a bird. She into a hawk. At last, exhausted, he turned himself into a single grain of wheat and hid in a great pile of threshed grain on a barn floor. Ceridwen turned into a black hen — and ate him.
Nine months later, she gave birth to him. She could not bring herself to kill the child, who was extraordinarily beautiful, so she tied him in a leather bag and threw him into the sea. He drifted in the bag for forty years — or, in other tellings, for two nights — until he was pulled from a salmon weir on the Dyfi by a young prince, who looked at his shining forehead and said, simply, 'Taliesin' — radiant brow.
From Ceridwen's cauldron, in the end, came the first poet of Wales. The story has been quietly retold for fifteen hundred years because it is the truest one Welsh tradition has about where inspiration actually comes from: a year of dull work, three accidental drops, a chase you cannot win, and a rebirth in a bag on the sea.
Wear something inspired by Ceridwen and you wear the cauldron at the bottom of Llyn Tegid — the year-and-a-day brew that made Taliesin, and the old Welsh idea that awen is not a gift you ask for, but one you are unlucky enough to catch.