Between Two Worlds: Paganism, Spirit Belief and Shamanic Traditions in Wales
With particular reference to East Carmarthenshire
The mountains, lakes, caves, rivers and ancient stones of Wales have never been merely a physical backdrop to human history. Welsh mythology and folklore preserve a landscape inhabited by beings and forces that challenge the modern distinction between nature and culture, human and non-human, material and spiritual. This is particularly apparent in East Carmarthenshire, where prehistoric monuments, medieval mythology, Christian sacred sites and contemporary alternative spiritualities occupy the same landscape.
It is tempting to describe all this as surviving Celtic paganism. Such a conclusion, however, would go beyond the historical evidence. Paganism, spirit belief and shamanism need to be distinguished from one another. What is more defensible — and arguably more interesting — is the possibility that Welsh traditions preserve elements of a relational understanding of nature, in which humans existed within a landscape populated by other-than-human beings possessing agency, power and significance of their own.
Before Christianity: the sacred landscape
We know frustratingly little about the religion practised in Wales before Christianity. The inhabitants of Iron Age Wales left no theological texts explaining their beliefs. Roman writers described druids and Celtic religious practices, but they were outsiders and sometimes hostile observers.
Archaeology provides firmer evidence. Prehistoric Wales contains burial cairns, standing stones, hillforts and places where objects were deliberately deposited. Rivers, springs, caves, mountains and other conspicuous natural features appear repeatedly within the ritual landscapes of prehistoric Britain.
East Carmarthenshire contains an exceptional concentration of such places. Carn Goch, near Bethlehem, is one of the largest Iron Age hillfort complexes in Wales and incorporates evidence of earlier prehistoric activity. Across Mynydd Du, Bronze Age cairns occupy conspicuous positions within the upland landscape. Carreg Cennen combines a dramatic limestone crag with a natural cave beneath the later castle and evidence of human activity predating the medieval fortification. Mynydd y Betws similarly contains prehistoric monuments, including cairns and the much-debated Bancbryn stone alignment.
None of these features proves that a particular god was worshipped there. Their importance lies instead in demonstrating that the landscape had cultural and probably ritual dimensions long before Christianity reached Wales.
Christianity and an inhabited landscape
Christianisation did not necessarily erase this older relationship with place.
Wales developed a particularly rich geography of holy wells, saints' springs, sacred trees and healing places. Some may have acquired Christian significance because they were already important, although it is dangerous to assume that every Christian holy well originated as a pagan sanctuary.
What is striking is the persistence of the idea that particular places are different from ordinary places.
A spring can heal. A lake can contain beings. A mountain can be encountered as a place of supernatural danger. Particular trees should not be damaged. Lights can foretell death. A person can inadvertently cross the boundary separating the everyday world from another realm.
Such beliefs continued within a profoundly Christian society.
This suggests that Christianity and older vernacular understandings of landscape did not always exist in opposition. They became intertwined.
The Tylwyth Teg and the Welsh spirit world
Perhaps the best-known inhabitants of the Welsh supernatural landscape are the Tylwyth Teg, literally the "Fair Family".
Modern representations of fairies can be misleading. The Tylwyth Teg were not necessarily tiny benevolent winged creatures. They constituted a category of other-than-human beings whose relationship with humans could be beneficial, dangerous or ambiguous.
They were associated with particular places — hills, lakes, streams, caves and fairy rings. Stories warned against disturbing their places or violating rules governing encounters with them.
Other beings populated the Welsh landscape. The gwyllion were associated particularly with mountains and lonely places.
Bwbachod could inhabit domestic and agricultural spaces. coblynnau became associated with mines. The spectral Cŵn Annwn, the hounds of the Otherworld, belonged to another category again.
Welsh tradition therefore presents something much richer than a collection of ghost stories. It describes a world inhabited by multiple categories of non-human or supernatural person.
Annwn: another world beside this one
Central to understanding this worldview is Annwn, conventionally translated as the Welsh Otherworld.
Annwn should not simply be equated with the Christian heaven or hell. In medieval Welsh literature the boundary between Annwn and the human world can be remarkably permeable.
Humans enter the Otherworld. Otherworld beings enter human society. Supernatural animals cross boundaries. Lakes, mounds and other landscape features sometimes appear to provide points at which different realms encounter one another.
This permeability is one of the most remarkable characteristics of Welsh mythology.
It suggests a cosmos composed not of an exclusively human social world surrounded by passive nature, but of overlapping communities of beings.
Llyn y Fan Fach: a Carmarthenshire Otherworld
Nowhere is this better expressed than at Llyn y Fan Fach, beneath the Carmarthenshire escarpment of Mynydd Du.
The famous story tells of a young man who encounters a beautiful woman associated with the lake. She agrees to marry him under particular conditions. The marriage prospers and supernatural cattle accompany her into the human world. Eventually the conditions governing the marriage are broken and she returns to the lake, taking the cattle with her.
Her descendants become associated with the celebrated Physicians of Myddfai, whose traditions of healing and medicinal plants became famous throughout Wales.
Whether every element of the surviving story is ancient is impossible to determine. Anthropologically, however, its structure is extraordinary.
The lake is not simply scenery.
The woman associated with it possesses agency.
She establishes the terms under which humans may enter into relationship with her.
Animals participate in the relationship.
Rules govern interaction between worlds.
And healing knowledge ultimately emerges from that relationship.
The story therefore connects landscape, human society, animals, supernatural agency and healing.
Twrch Trwyth and the Amman Valley
East Carmarthenshire possesses another remarkable mythological landscape.
In the medieval tale Culhwch ac Olwen, Arthur and his companions pursue the supernatural boar Twrch Trwyth and his offspring across Britain.
Scholars have attempted to identify elements of the story's geography with real places. Sir John Rhŷs, writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, identified Mynydd Amanw and Dyffryn Amanw with the mountain and valley associated with the modern River Amman.
Traditions associated with the hunt have consequently become attached to the landscape around Betws, Mynydd y Betws, Glanaman and Garnant.
Again, the important feature is the relationship between animals and landscape.
Twrch Trwyth is not merely an unusually large wild boar. He belongs to a mythological world in which the distinction between human person, animal and supernatural being is unstable.
The Amman Valley can therefore be read not simply as the setting for a medieval story, but as part of a mythological geography.
Corpse candles and the persistence of spirit belief
These ideas did not disappear with the Middle Ages.
One of the most striking later Welsh traditions concerned canhwyllau cyrff — corpse candles.
Mysterious lights were believed to appear before a death and sometimes travel along the route subsequently taken by a funeral procession.
Carmarthenshire became particularly famous for such traditions. Accounts survive from the Llandeilo area and elsewhere in the county.
Fairies, apparitions, prophetic dreams and supernatural warnings similarly continued into comparatively recent times.
This matters because nineteenth-century Carmarthenshire was hardly pagan. It was becoming one of the great strongholds of Welsh Nonconformist Christianity.
A person could attend chapel, believe deeply in Christianity and nevertheless accept the existence of corpse candles, fairies or supernatural manifestations.
Rather than seeing Christianity and spirit belief as mutually exclusive, we should recognise the emergence of a distinctive Welsh vernacular spirituality in which they could coexist.
Were there Welsh shamans?
The term shamanism requires particular caution.
"Shaman" is not an indigenous Welsh category. The word ultimately derives from northern Asia, and anthropologists have subsequently applied it comparatively to religious specialists elsewhere.
It would therefore be misleading simply to call druids, Welsh healers or medieval poets "shamans".
Nevertheless, Welsh historical evidence contains phenomena that invite comparison with societies conventionally described as shamanic.
One of the most fascinating concerns the awenyddion.
Gerald of Wales, writing during the twelfth century, described inspired individuals in Wales who could be consulted when information was required. According to his account, they entered an unusual condition and produced streams of apparently confused speech from which an answer ultimately emerged. Afterwards they could have difficulty remembering what they had said.
Whatever explanation we place upon this phenomenon, the description contains several features familiar from comparative studies of spirit mediums and shamans: altered consciousness, inspiration, divination and the reception of knowledge unavailable through ordinary means.
It does not prove the existence of "Welsh shamanism". But neither should the evidence be dismissed merely because medieval Wales lacked the word shaman.
Awen and inspired knowledge
The concept of awen makes this particularly intriguing.
Today awen is strongly associated with poetic inspiration and modern Druidry. Historically its meanings are richer.
Knowledge and inspiration can be conceptualised as something that comes into a person rather than something generated exclusively within the autonomous individual.
The poet, prophet or inspired individual therefore becomes, at least temporarily, the recipient or conduit of something beyond the ordinary self.
This is significantly different from modern Western ideas about authorship and individual consciousness.
It also provides an intriguing point of comparison with traditions elsewhere in the world in which specialist individuals mediate knowledge between different orders of existence.
Modern Paganism in Wales
Modern Welsh Paganism represents another historical layer.
Wales today contains people identifying as Pagan, Druid, Wiccan, Heathen, animist, witch and shamanic practitioner. The 2021 Census provides quantitative evidence for these identities.
Modern Paganism should not, however, be represented as an uninterrupted continuation of Iron Age Celtic religion.
Modern Druidry owes much to the antiquarian and cultural movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the extraordinary influence of Iolo Morganwg. Wicca emerged principally during the twentieth century. Contemporary shamanic practice incorporates influences from numerous cultures as well as modern psychological and ecological thought.
Yet these movements increasingly encounter genuinely old Welsh landscapes and traditions.
A modern Pagan visiting Llyn y Fan Fach is visiting a place associated with an authentic Welsh Otherworld tradition.
A modern Druid invoking awen is employing a genuinely ancient Welsh concept, even if its modern ritual interpretation is different.
A contemporary animist interpreting a river or mountain as possessing agency may find striking parallels within traditional Welsh stories.
There is therefore both discontinuity and continuity.
The institutions and religions change; certain relationships with landscape repeatedly re-emerge.
Contemporary shamanism and animism
Contemporary Wales also contains practitioners explicitly describing themselves as shamanic. Practices may include drumming, altered states of consciousness, spirit journeys, work with ancestors, healing ceremonies and encounters with animal or landscape spirits.
Claims that these practices represent an unchanged tradition of "Celtic shamanism" require considerable scepticism.
A more defensible interpretation is that contemporary Welsh shamanism represents a modern spiritual movement interacting with much older Welsh mythological and folkloric traditions.
Modern animism perhaps provides an even more productive interpretative framework.
Anthropologists increasingly understand animism not simply as a belief that trees or stones "have spirits", but as a relational ontology: a world in which personhood and agency are not necessarily confined to human beings.
The important question becomes not merely:
Is this thing alive?
but:
With whom are humans in relationship?
From this perspective, some Welsh traditions begin to look remarkably different.
The Lady of Llyn y Fan Fach is a person associated with water.
The Tylwyth Teg constitute another society.
Supernatural animals possess intentionality.
Specific places impose obligations upon humans.
The boundary between human society and the rest of the world becomes permeable.
East Carmarthenshire as a spiritual landscape
East Carmarthenshire is particularly suitable for exploring these questions because several historical layers survive within a remarkably small geographical area.
Mynydd Du preserves a prehistoric monumental landscape.
Llyn y Fan Fach and Myddfai preserve one of Britain's most important traditions connecting water, supernatural persons, animals and healing.
Carn Goch provides an imposing prehistoric ceremonial and defensive landscape.
Carreg Cennen combines geology, cave, archaeology and later mythology.
Llandeilo and Dinefwr contain overlapping prehistoric, Roman, Christian and medieval landscapes.
Mynydd y Betws and Cwm Aman participate in the geographical traditions surrounding Culhwch ac Olwen and Twrch Trwyth.
Across this landscape are also springs, wells, rivers, ancient paths, burial places, significant stones and mountains whose folklore has yet to be fully recovered from Welsh-language sources and oral history.
From pagan landscape to contemporary ecological thought
We should resist constructing an imaginary unbroken line from prehistoric paganism to modern environmentalism.
Nevertheless, an intriguing intellectual continuity remains.
Modern Western society commonly conceptualises nature as property, resource or environment: something external to human society which can be owned, managed and exploited.
Traditional Welsh stories frequently present something considerably more complicated.
A lake may have inhabitants.
Animals may possess agency.
A landscape may provide access to another order of existence.
Certain places demand particular behaviour.
Human beings are participants within these relationships rather than necessarily their masters.
This is where old Welsh traditions acquire unexpected contemporary relevance.
The modern Rights of Nature movement similarly challenges the assumption that humans are the only entities capable of possessing legally recognised interests. Rivers, forests and ecosystems are increasingly being conceptualised as entities possessing rights or standing.
This does not mean that Rights of Nature is simply a revival of Celtic paganism. Nor should contemporary environmental ethics appropriate medieval folklore as though it represented a modern ecological manifesto.
But both raise a profound question:
Is the natural world merely composed of things, or does humanity live within a wider community of beings and relationships towards which obligations are owed?
East Carmarthenshire possesses an unusually rich cultural landscape in which that question has been asked, in different forms, for perhaps thousands of years.
Its prehistoric monuments, Otherworld women, supernatural animals, inspired seers, holy wells, corpse candles, fairy traditions and contemporary Pagans should not be forced into a single religious tradition.
They instead reveal successive ways in which people have understood themselves as inhabiting a landscape that is more than material.
Perhaps the most interesting Welsh inheritance is therefore neither paganism nor shamanism in isolation.
It is the persistent possibility that landscape itself participates in relationship — and that mountains, waters, animals and places cannot always be reduced to passive objects within an exclusively human world.