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Night drive, daffodils.

Mark Beck

i am so sleep deprived after two days of long exams and stress and i'm just on the bus with my face in the sun

everything's going to be alright, actually

spoiler alert everything was alight

i wanted to post the full picture but i only have the edit i made where the mom is smoking

Please See Right Through All Of Me

The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.

I mean, 'appropriation' sounds like absolutely the right word to me, especially in regard to that last paragraph... If we were talking about a tradition that comes from somewhere outside of Europe, people would be absolutely howling the A word, but it doesn't necessarily ping on their radar in this case because Welsh folks are white and not as obviously a minority group to most of them. Which.... is its own can of worms with potential for some pretty gross takes in it, unfortunately (said as someone in a field that has to cope with neo-nazi types trying to misappropriate from it on the daily). It is awesome that the world is learning about endangered cultural traditions and are more keen to embrace them rather than condemn them as other and weird as was done in the past, but the key word in that should be learning. Good on you, OP, for calling this out.

You may be right. Though funnily enough, I actually think a lot of the acceptance of the Mari Lwyd in recent years is actually because of her being seen as Weird and Other, in counterpoint to your last point - that's why people like her. And like... sure, she is weird, I guess. But in a very mundane "now let's get drunk" kind of way.

I think it possibly varies by case - for example, as I say, I actually do love a lot of the Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art, I recognise that it's an evocative image, and it's fun to explore. One of my favourite pieces is this one:

Here's one from Shoggoth.net, where she is literally a cryptid:

And this is a fairly common motif:

And to be clear - I love all of these! These are great!

But equally, each of these is part of this overall make-her-a-cryptid trend. She's a creature in her own right; she's sinister; she represents the creep of untameable nature, the dead come to life, something that wants to get in. She has antlers in that last one, something horses do not have, but they feel... idk, correct? This is evocative of the Old God imagery, so she gets antlers. I have seen many antlered Mari Lwyd pieces at this point. It's a semi-common theme.

And if you google Mari Lwyd images, or even if you look in the Tumblr tag, this is the kind of artwork you get. Ancient, wild, untameable, sinister, thing-that-wants-to-come-in. It's fun! I do enjoy many of them!

But

There's a Welsh artist, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and he has produced some amazing Mari Lwyd art over the years. Some of that is sort of cryptid-like, too. But he grew up as a child afraid of his dad doing the Mari and having nightmares about it, so is coming at it from an insider perspective, and I think you can tell. Most of his pieces make the human component clear:

And I think even the more nightmarish and abstract ones still, at their core, retain the idea that this isn't a magical creature from the woods of Annwfn but something constructed out of an actual horse and actual people:

Compare that to most of the Mari Lwyd art on Tumblr, and it's all "dark and wild creature representing the Old Gods"; because that's increasingly how she's known and seen.

And like. It's a hedonistic pageant figure who wants cheese and fun. She's not here to eat your children. She's here for fun and also fermented produce to get her bladdered. She is supposed to be silly. Her attendants - never mentioned, by the way, that's another thing - are fucking Punch and Judy characters. The pwnco isn't high art, it's not a faerie spinning riddles - those insults become "So's your FACE" type insults. It's supposed to be ridiculous, and stupid, and fun.

So it gets weird to me when people present her as a Dark Christmas alternative. Not appropriation necessarily? But certainly projection; she looks like an Old God kind of figure because she has a skull for a head, and she sings to come in, and if you phrase it like that, it can sound sinister and therefore like a very familiar type of aesthetic. I suppose it's then easy to project that aesthetic on, without even realising it. Plus, I think a lot of people like to try to reject the trappings of Christian culture including the iconography - things like Krampus and Mari Lwyd seem to run counter to them, so they get gleefully seized upon as anti-Christmas icons.

That said I would legit be much happier with all of the Sinister Old God shit if every artist who did it wrote the words "Wel dyma ni'n diwad gyfeillion diniwad, i ofyn am gennad..." in the air around their cryptid to include the Welsh. Like, that would genuinely go a long way to help the issue. Still weird! But much more respectful.

This is getting away from me! I shall finish by showing you all the absolute best Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art I have seen recently on Tumblr, though, which is this one:

Sillay.

“Death blowing bubbles,” 18th century. The bubbles symbolize life’s fragility. This plaster work appears on the ceiling of Holy Grave Chapel in Michaelsberg Abbey, Bamberg, Germany. (+)

#hey maybe Death just likes to blow bubbles man #you don’t gotta read into it

[id: a plaster work of a skeleton draped in floaty cloth. it is resting one foot on a shovel as it blows bubbles out of a pipe, holding a shell in its other hand /end id]

Strawbs!!

text post by @crazysodomite

'Whispering Souls'. Chris Cyprus. 2021.