The Mabinogion in the Stars: Decoding Welsh Mythology Through Astrology
Wales Has Its Own Mythological Universe
When people think of mythology and astrology in the same breath, they tend to reach for the familiar: Zeus and Jupiter, Aphrodite and Venus, Ares and Mars. The Greek and Roman pantheons have been so thoroughly woven into the astrological tradition that it can feel as though the two are inseparable. But myth is not the exclusive property of the Mediterranean world. Every culture that looked up at the same sky and tried to make meaning of what they saw produced its own symbolic language, its own gods, its own stories.
Wales has one of the most extraordinary such bodies of material in the whole of Europe. The Mabinogion is a collection of eleven medieval Welsh tales drawn from mythology, folklore, and heroic legend, preserved in two fourteenth-century manuscripts , the White Book of Rhydderch and the Red Book of Hergest. The tales themselves are considerably older than the manuscripts; scholars believe much of the material was transmitted orally for centuries, possibly millennia, before being written down. They are some of the earliest prose narratives in any European vernacular language, and they carry within them the compressed residue of a pre-Christian Celtic cosmology that was already ancient by the time anyone thought to write it down.
What makes these stories so compelling for anyone working at the intersection of astrology and psychology is that the characters in the Four Branches of the Mabinogi appear to be Christianised versions of earlier Celtic deities , divine beings whose natures, relationships, and stories map with striking fidelity onto the archetypal energies that astrology has always sought to describe. The sky that shone over Gwynedd and Dyfed was the same sky. The patterns are the same. Only the names differ.
Rhiannon: The Moon That Cannot Be Caught
No character in the Mabinogion announces herself more dramatically than Rhiannon. She appears to Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, riding a pale horse at a walking pace , yet no matter how hard his men ride, they cannot close the distance. She does not gallop. She does not flee. She simply remains, impossibly, ahead. Only when Pwyll calls out to her directly does she stop and turn.
Scholars widely regard Rhiannon as the Welsh counterpart of the Gaulish horse goddess Epona and a figure of sovereignty , a goddess whose marriage to a king conferred legitimacy upon his rule. Her name derives from a Brittonic root meaning "Great Queen." She is associated with the moon, with birds whose song can lull the living to sleep or wake the dead, and with the threshold between this world and the Otherworld.
In astrological terms, Rhiannon resonates most powerfully with the Moon. She embodies the lunar qualities of mystery, cyclical suffering, and resilience across time. Her story in the First Branch is one of the great injustices of Welsh mythology: when her newborn son Pryderi disappears, her nursemaids , unable to face consequences , frame her for infanticide. She accepts her punishment with extraordinary dignity, carrying visitors to court on her back like a horse. Truth takes years to emerge, but it does emerge. She is exonerated. She endures.
This is lunar endurance in its deepest expression: the capacity to hold injustice, to suffer publicly, to wait. The Moon in a natal chart governs how we receive and process emotional reality , what we carry and how we carry it. Rhiannon does not rage or plot revenge. She waits in the knowledge that truth has its own timing. For anyone working through experiences of false accusation, enforced patience, or the slow and painful process of being seen correctly after being misread, Rhiannon's archetype offers something that few myths do: not the promise of a dramatic rescue, but the image of sovereign composure held across a long stretch of difficulty.
There is also a Jungian dimension worth noting. Rhiannon possesses the Birds of Rhiannon , magical songbirds that, according to the Welsh Triads, "wake the dead and lull the living to sleep." This is the language of the threshold, of liminal states, of the unconscious. The Moon rules these territories in astrology as in Welsh myth.
Arianrhod: The Silver Wheel in the Night Sky
If Rhiannon is the Moon of the Mabinogion, Arianrhod is something stranger and older , a sky goddess who literally inhabits the stars. Her name means "Silver Wheel," and the Welsh name for the constellation Corona Borealis is Caer Arianrhod , the Castle of Arianrhod , a fortress of circling stars around the North Star. According to tradition, it was here that astrologers and poets came to learn the wisdom of the heavens. Arianrhod presided over fate, reincarnation, and the journey of souls between lives.
Her story in the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogi is one of the most psychologically complex in the entire collection. When her brother Gwydion forces her into a magical virginity test by Math, King of Gwynedd, she unexpectedly gives birth to two sons , a humiliation she did not choose and cannot undo. Her response is to place three binding curses on the second of these sons, Lleu Llaw Gyffes: he shall have no name, no weapons, and no wife of any human woman , the three pillars of masculine identity in the Welsh world , unless she herself provides them. She refuses, and means to refuse forever.
Gwydion tricks her into granting all three, one by one. Each time, she is outmanoeuvred. Each time, she places a new restriction.
In astrological symbolism, Arianrhod sits at the intersection of the Moon and Saturn , lunar in her celestial dwelling and her governance of fate and reincarnation, but Saturnian in her role as the one who withholds, binds, and places restrictions that must be outwitted rather than overcome directly. Her control over her children's status was not cruelty but a form of cosmic guardianship , the enforcer of legitimacy and lineage. She is the wheel that keeps turning whether anyone consents to it or not.
For those drawn to Jungian work, Arianrhod is a particularly rich archetype. She has been read as representing the Great Mother in her binding aspect , the force that simultaneously creates and withholds, that gives life and refuses to make that life easy. Gwydion must become a trickster to circumvent her power. Truth alone is insufficient; intelligence, disguise, and creative subversion are required. The Silver Wheel cannot be stopped by direct force. It turns on its own terms.
Lleu Llaw Gyffes: The Solar Hero and His Impossible Death
Lleu Llaw Gyffes , "the bright one of the skilful hand" , is one of the most layered solar heroes in any mythology. His name connects him linguistically to the Irish Lugh and the Gaulish Lugus, both solar deities of skill, light, and sovereignty. His story is the central drama of the Fourth Branch: born under a curse, denied identity, arms, and a natural wife, he receives instead a woman fashioned from flowers , Blodeuwedd, made by Gwydion and Math from the blossoms of oak, broom, and meadowsweet.
Blodeuwedd is beautiful and entirely autonomous in her desires. When Gronw Pebyr, Lord of a neighbouring land, passes through, she falls in love with him immediately. Together they conspire to kill Lleu , and to do so, they must discover the exact and peculiar conditions under which he can die, because he cannot be killed simply. He can only be slain by a spear forged over a year during the hours of Sunday worship, while standing neither inside nor outside, neither on horseback nor on foot, neither in water nor on dry land. His death requires a very specific liminal threshold.
Lleu is struck with the spear under just these conditions and transforms into an eagle, mortally wounded but not dead. He perches high in an oak tree, wasting away. Gwydion tracks him through the singing of englynion , a sequence of ancient Welsh verses , and coaxes him down from the tree. He is healed, restored, and returns to claim his kingdom.
Many scholars interpret Lleu as a solar figure whose death and resurrection encodes the seasonal cycle , the waning of the sun's power at the harvest, and its eventual restoration. The oak in which he shelters as an eagle is a liminal space between worlds, the axis around which the seasons turn. His impossible death conditions , neither inside nor outside, neither mounted nor afoot, neither in water nor on land , mark him as a threshold being, someone who exists at the edges of categories rather than within any single one.
In astrological terms, Lleu maps powerfully onto the Sun , but a Sun that has experienced Pluto. He is not the uncomplicated solar king; he is the solar principle that has been brought down, stripped, transformed, and restored. His betrayal by Blodeuwedd and the years he spends wasting in the oak as an eagle are not aberrations from his story , they are its centre. The wound is where the meaning lives. For anyone working with themes of identity reclaimed after betrayal, of authority slowly restored, or of the solar self rebuilt after a profound dismantling, Lleu is the Welsh archetype of that process.
Pwyll and Annwn: The First Descent
Before any of the Fourth Branch's complexity, the Mabinogion opens with a simpler and perhaps more immediately recognisable astrological story. Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed, wanders into the territory of Arawn, King of Annwn , the Welsh Otherworld, a realm beneath the surface of the ordinary world that is neither the Christian heaven nor hell, but something older and stranger.
Arawn asks Pwyll to take his place as King of Annwn for a year, in disguise, and to fight and kill Arawn's great enemy Hafgan. The condition: he must strike Hafgan once, and only once. A second blow will restore him to life. Pwyll agrees, spends a year in the Otherworld, defeats Hafgan with a single strike, and returns to his own kingdom changed. The two men become deep friends , Penn Annwn, "Head of Annwn," becomes one of Pwyll's lasting epithets, an honour rather than a shame.
This is the mythological grammar of Pluto in astrology. Pluto governs descent into the underworld , the confrontation with hidden forces, with the shadow, with what lies beneath the surface of ordinary life. The Plutonian transit, in astrological experience, does not ask for dramatic displays of strength. It asks , as Arawn asks Pwyll , for precise, controlled action under extreme pressure, and then a period of living in a transformed state before returning to the ordinary world. The person who returns from a Pluto transit is not the same person who descended. The meeting with Arawn changes Pwyll at the level of identity. He carries the title of the underworld across the rest of his life.
What makes Pwyll's descent notably Welsh , and notably distinct from, say, Orpheus's descent to Hades , is that it is not a rescue mission. He goes not to recover something lost, but because Arawn asks. The Otherworld in Welsh mythology is not a realm of punishment or exile; it is a place of strange intimacy, of transformation through sustained contact with an alien order. This is much closer to the modern astrological understanding of Pluto: not catastrophe, but enforced depth.
The Family of Dôn and the Zodiac of Stars
There is a tradition , preserved in early Welsh scholarship and glimpsed in medieval poetry , that the figures of the Fourth Branch correspond to actual constellations in the night sky. The family of Dôn, the great Welsh mother goddess from whom Gwydion, Arianrhod, and their siblings descend, has been compared to the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann, themselves associated with divine skill, magic, and celestial origin.
The Welsh name for the Corona Borealis, Caer Arianrhod, is documented in medieval sources, establishing a direct link between at least one character of the Mabinogion and a named constellation. The antiquarian William Owen Pughe, who produced some of the earliest English translations of material from the Mabinogion, noted in his scholarship possible correspondences between figures from the Fourth Branch and astronomical constellations , though this material remains speculative.
What is less speculative is the cosmological framework implied by the tales themselves. The Mabinogion operates within a three-realm structure: land, sea, and sky. The sky is not simply scenery; it is a domain with its own inhabitants, its own rulers, its own significance. Arianrhod's fortress revolves around the North Star. Gwydion is associated in Welsh tradition with the Milky Way, known in Welsh as Caer Gwydion. The celestial dimension of these stories is not incidental , it is structural.
Professor Sioned Davies, former Head of the School of Welsh at Cardiff University, has described the Mabinogion as "timeless, proving to be just as fascinating to modern audiences" as to medieval ones. Part of that timelessness is precisely this celestial dimension , the sense that the stories are not simply tales of people and kingdoms, but of principles, of forces, of the same patterns that have always governed both the sky above and the interior life below.
Why Welsh Mythology Matters for Psychological Astrology
One of the gifts that the Jungian tradition brings to astrological practice is the recognition that mythological figures are not merely historical curiosities or cultural ornaments. They are living patterns in the human psyche , what Jung called archetypes, configurations of energy and experience that arise across cultures because they correspond to something universal in the structure of human consciousness. The same pressure that shaped the Greek myth of Persephone's descent shaped Pwyll's year in Annwn. The same force that created Saturn-Kronos as the Lord of Time created the Welsh tradition of the Silver Wheel turning in the circumpolar sky.
But Welsh mythology offers something that the Greek and Roman traditions sometimes cannot: proximity. For anyone in Wales, or with Welsh ancestry, or simply living in these islands, the Mabinogion carries a cultural resonance that the Olympians cannot quite replicate. The landscapes described in the tales are real landscapes , Dyfed, Gwynedd, the Lleyn Peninsula, the hill country of the north. The language in which they were first told is a living language. Rhiannon is not an abstraction from a culture that ended two thousand years ago; she is a figure woven into the living fabric of Welsh identity, present in place names, in music, in the way this land understands itself.
When Martyn Shrewsbury at the Wilfred Hazelwood Clinic works with clients through the lens of both Jungian psychology and astrological analysis, he brings to that work a tradition of Hellenistic and Psychological Astrology that is deeply grounded in the archetypal understanding of planetary energies. The planets do not cease to be meaningful because a client is Welsh rather than Greek. But the mythological language through which those planetary energies are understood can be enriched , deepened, personalised, made more culturally resonant , by drawing on a tradition that belongs to the land where the client lives.
Rhiannon carrying an unjust burden with sovereign composure is not a different truth from the Moon in difficult aspect. It is the same truth, told in Welsh.
Reading the Mabinogion as an Astrological Text
To read the Mabinogion through astrological eyes is not to impose a foreign framework onto Welsh material. It is to recognise that both traditions are attempts to describe the same underlying patterns , the forces that shape human life, the energies that awaken and subside, the cycles that govern seasons, relationships, and the interior movements of the soul.
- Rhiannon, riding slowly and impossibly ahead of all pursuit, embodies the Moon: the principle that cannot be caught by force, only invited.
- Arianrhod, presiding from her revolving castle in the stars, embodies the binding and releasing function of Saturn combined with lunar fate , the wheel that turns on its own terms and cannot be stopped.
- Lleu Llaw Gyffes, the bright solar hero who must be dismantled and rebuilt, embodies the Sun as it moves through a Plutonian passage , identity destroyed and reclaimed.
- Pwyll's year in Annwn encodes the Plutonian descent: not punishment, but transformation through sustained contact with the hidden depths.
- Blodeuwedd, made from flowers and transformed into an owl, carries the energy of Venus in its most uncontainable expression , beauty, desire, wildness, and the refusal to be owned , punished, in the end, by being made into the very creature that hunts in darkness.
None of these correspondences are exact or exhaustive. Myth resists the reduction to single meanings. But the resonances are real, and they open something up , a way of working with both astrological symbolism and Welsh mythological material that honours the depth of each tradition without collapsing one into the other.
An Invitation
The Mabinogion has been with Welsh culture for over a thousand years in written form, and for much longer in the oral tradition that preceded it. It has never stopped speaking. Its characters have found their way into everything from medieval romance to Tolkien's legendarium, from the lyrics of Welsh football chants to the songs of Fleetwood Mac. They persist because they point at something real , something about the structure of experience that does not change across centuries or cultures.
At the Wilfred Hazelwood Clinic, we believe that the most useful astrological and psychological work draws on the richest possible symbolic vocabulary , one that includes not just the familiar classical tradition but also the native mythological heritage of these islands. If you are curious to explore your own chart in the light of both Hellenistic astrological techniques and the deeper currents of Jungian psychology, we would be glad to talk with you.
The wheel is always turning. It helps to know whose wheel it is.
