It must have been around 2014 that the Mari Lwyd first cantered into my life with her bells and ribbons and sense of mischievous fun. I was co-leading a Yule ritual for my local pagan moot and I was not expecting a Mari Lwyd to be there, but she appeared as an emissary from the other world determined to bring good luck, joy and laughter.
When I initially encountered her I was filled with an overwhelming sense of joy. Firstly, because Mari inspires this in and of herself and secondly, because I now knew that culturally Wales did have something really valuable to add to the cultural mix. I had read about and occasionally visited other parts of the world where colourful traditions exist. Mexico has given us the Catrina and the Day of the Dead, Romania has given us the dance of the bear and the Capra. Krampus appears in Austria and Germany. All expressions of the human need to connect with the divine and these cultural expressions have been shared with the world. Celebrations of the seasons and celebrations of life and death. We are here and that is something worth celebrating.
In the UK things are often grey but not in a good Mari Lwyd way. They are just grey, grey buildings, grey interior design that has been so fashionable of late, and grey clothing. It follows then that I often see greyness of the mind and spirit characterised by a complete lack of a sense of humour and forgetfulness of the spirit of joy, a joys that’s so easily found in nature. In discordianism this greyness of the spirit is often referred to as “grey face” meaning a curse that takes deep roots in a person’s soul sapping away all joy and love so that all you are is a mechanical joyless individual full of gravity and seriousness. Often “serious and important”, puffed up with pride and yet filled with the power of misery, completely unable to achieve the levity necessary for spiritual or magical enlightenment. It’s called enlightenment for good reason, to achieve it one needs to lighten up! Grey face cuts us off from the joy of spiritual connection trapping us in the mundane and while the form or ritual of spirituality may be observed, the ritual is empty, grey face banishing any joy or real connection with the spirit.
The charge of the goddess tells us that we must have mirth and reverence, and it’s my view that you cannot have one without the other. That laughter and joy and rejoicing in the spirit of life is necessary for connecting to the source of the universe regardless of how one names that source. This is why laugher is sacred and it’s frequently employed in the ceremonies that I present to the community.
There can be a lot of pressure to conform to the ridged and restrictive rules of the grey face. I have always done my best to experience the laugher of the world via colourful clothing and hair and while grey face has appeared to heavily criticize my colourful approach to life I will not waiver. It’s crucial to resist the conformity of greyness and to dance your dance of life in colour, in joy and in drinking deep from the well of creativity.
Therefore I banish grey face at every opportunity and the Mari Lwyd is more than happy to help me do this. Her red ears are significant as in welsh literature a creature with red ears means that they come from the Otherworld. The Mari appears around Christmas and New Year, bringing joy laugher and good luck to all that encounter her. She also brings the chaos and the mayhem needed to do some serious banishing of all that is holding one back from seeing the beauty of life and all that prevents you from feeling the love of life. She disrupts the orderly world of the grey face to bring mayhem, chaos and freedom. In this way she opens the roads for us to have a deep human connection to the Great Sprit bringing the fun in and enabling us to experience joy.
I’ve never been much of a spectator, if I enjoy a thing I must engage in the thing. So it has been with the Mari Lwyd. Not content to attend Mari Lwyd events I needed to be in the Mari Lwyd events and bring my own contrition to the mix. To those ends myself and my partner obtained our own Mari Lwyd and I spent months decorating her by sewing a white sheet and creating a mane and ears. The eyes were a bit of a challenge but eventually we found what we needed.
We do not know historically the exact roots of the Mari Lwyd. Her origins are lost within the realms of oral histories but she hints at a pagan connection and is possibly related to the English hobby horse, the hooded horse found in the Kent area, and the Cornish Penglaz, another skeleton horse that appears at mid-winter, plus many other traditions involving horses and skeletal animals found within the British Isles. The wassail tradition also works well within the Mari Lwyd tradition. Morris dancing, wassailing and the appearance of various horses some of them in skeleton form, all play nicely with each other in the modern incarnation of these traditions and are frequently merged within the same event.
Each individual Mari while an embodiment of the general idea of Mari also carries her own name and significance. Our Mari is the Ffynone Mari. Ffynone is a welsh word meaning well or spring so is a nod to the amount of springs that we have in my area of Wales that arise due to the number of underground streams. In Wales we do not just have water coming down from the sky when it rains; we have the water coming up from the ground as well. In paganism the well or spring is seen as a portal to the otherworld so as the ffynones rise they bring that connection between our world and the other world at the dark time of the year. The Ffynone Mari then springs from the well bringing love, luck, joy and hope to carry us through the darkness into the light, banishing all traces of grey face in her wake.
