The Mysteries of Merlin
Merlin the enchanter has become one of the stock characters of the modern imagination, but the usual image of him that people have in their heads today—the old man with the pointed hat spangled with moons and stars, and the rest of it—is a recent invention. Trace the legends back into the past and Merlin reveals himself as a much stranger and more interesting figure.14 It’s this more authentic vision of Merlin that is central to the rituals presented in this book, and so a little time spent learning about Merlin will not be wasted.
To make sense of the archaic presence of Merlin, and thus of the powers invoked in the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel, it’s helpful to start with the sources of the Merlin legend that date from before he was turned into a cliché. There are three broad categories of older sources: a handful of obscure Welsh documents dating from the Dark Ages, the writings of a single bestselling author of the early Middle Ages, and the poems and stories written by a galaxy of minstrels over the couple of centuries that followed that author’s time. Trying to make sense of these is a challenge because they don’t present a single consistent picture.
Instead, what comes through is a jumble of fragmentary images that never quite fit into a meaningful biography, or even a consistent story. That’s all but universal for legendary figures from the Dark Ages, the five centuries of chaos that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome. As we’ll see, though, it has deeper roots as well.
The Old Welsh writings that have to do with Merlin—or rather Myrddin, the Welsh spelling of his name—are a medley of intriguing fragments. A few very ancient poems in Welsh, laments for heroes fallen in battle in the wars of the sixth century, were supposedly written by Merlin; a passage in another ancient Welsh poem, Y Gododdin, refers to “the inspiration of Merlin”; the Welsh Triads, a collection of enigmatic texts that summarize old lore in sets of three, mention him a few times;15 and a strange passage in the White Book of Rhydderch, a medieval book of Welsh stories and poems, states that before Britain was settled by human beings, its name was Clas Myrddin, Merlin’s Enclosure. That is all—enough to make it clear that Merlin was not simply an invention of some medieval poet, but not enough to go much further.
The bestselling medieval author was Geoffrey of Monmouth, a Welsh clergyman and writer who lived during the twelfth century. Geoffrey is the reason you’ve heard of somebody named King Arthur. Around the year 1136, he completed his most famous work, The History of the Kings of Britain, a sprawling chronicle that claims to record the history of Britain from its original settlement by refugees from the Trojan War all the way up to the beginning of the Middle Ages. At the center of the entire story is the reign of King Arthur, who united the Britons against the Saxon invaders and established a brief, glorious kingdom amid the chaos of the oncoming Dark Ages—and Merlin plays a crucial role in the rise of Arthur’s kingdom. While Geoffrey was never averse to concocting details to make a better story, many modern scholars now believe that he had access to oral traditions and possibly written documents as well, and used these as raw material for his tale.
The minstrels who picked up Merlin where Geoffrey left him were entertainers rather than historians. Some of them seem to have had access to ancient traditions relating to Merlin and put material borrowed from those traditions into the stories and songs they wrote. Others simply let their imaginations run wild and turned the result into lively tales that helped create the star-spangled Merlin of the modern imagination. As we try to make sense of the Merlin legends in the chapter ahead, some of the themes picked up by the minstrels will provide useful clues, but a great deal of care has to be taken in sorting out authentic traditions from medieval inventions.
Merlin the Prophet
We can begin with Geoffrey of Monmouth, who provides the nearest thing to a coherent story of Merlin that can be found in any of the old sources, and whose account of Merlin is a central source for the rituals in this book. Merlin’s adventures comprise just a small portion of The History of the Kings of Britain, where it makes up one of the tales Geoffrey recounts from the time of troubles just before Arthur’s reign. As Geoffrey tells it, King Vortigern seized the British throne from its rightful heir and imposed his tyrannical rule over the land. In order to secure his power, Vortigern hired a band of Saxon mercenaries headed by the canny warlord Hengist. Once Hengist and his people had settled in Britain, though, they brought over more Saxon warriors from the mainland and set out to take Britain for their own.
Trying to protect himself from his former allies, Vortigern ordered his servants to build a strong tower on the hill of Dinas Ffaraon in northern Wales. No matter how hard the laborers worked during the day, however, each night the stones and timbers vanished into the ground. Vortigern consulted with his entourage of wizards, and they told him that the tower would only stand if the mortar for the stones was mixed with the blood of a child who had no father.
Vortigern, Geoffrey’s story continues, sent messengers across the length and breadth of his kingdom in search of such a child. When the messengers came to Carmarthen in south Wales, they heard one boy shouting at another, “How dare you dispute with me? My father is a king, and you never had a father at all!” The messengers investigated and learned that the boy at whom this accusation had been flung was named Merlin, the son of a princess of that country, and no one knew who his father was.
The princess and her son were taken straight to Vortigern’s court, where she admitted that she had been made pregnant by a spirit in the shape of a young man. The young Merlin then confronted the king, who admitted that he had sent for the boy to sacrifice him. Merlin asked him to send for his wizards and demanded that they explain why the tower would not stand. When they could not, Merlin told Vortigern that there was a lake beneath the hill, and two stones under the lake, and a dragon inside each stone, and the conflict of the dragons caused the tower to tumble down each night.
Vortigern ordered the workmen to dig into the hill and they found the lake; once the water was drained away, the rocks appeared, and the dragons leapt out of them and began to fight each other. As they struggled, Vortigern asked Merlin what the combat meant, and the boy burst into tears and began to prophesy. Geoffrey devoted an entire chapter of The History of the Kings of Britain to Merlin’s prophecies, which became as popular in the Middle Ages as the prophecies of Nostradamus are today.
Thereafter, when the rightful heir Ambrosius returned to Britain and defeated Vortigern, Merlin became his counselor and built Stonehenge for Ambrosius, bringing stones across the sea from Ireland for the purpose. When Ambrosius died, in turn, Merlin advised his brother Uther. When Uther fell in love with Ygerna, the wife of the Duke of Cornwall, it was Merlin who cast a spell on Uther to give him the appearance of Ygerna’s husband, and it was in this way that Arthur was conceived.
That is very nearly Merlin’s last appearance in The History of the Kings of Britain. Once Geoffrey’s hugely successful book made Merlin famous, however, the minstrels took up the theme and filled in the gaps in Merlin’s biography. According to these tales, Merlin took the child of Uther and Ygerna, the future King Arthur, shortly after his birth, and had him fostered by a noble knight, the Sir Ector of later legend. When Arthur came of age, Merlin arranged for the test of the sword in the stone that proved Arthur to be the rightful king. He then guided Arthur in his wars against the rebellious barons and helped establish the peace that followed. Finally, as a very old man, he was buried alive in an underground chamber. The version most commonly remembered today, in which he fell in love with a young woman who talked him into teaching her magic and then trapped him underground to get rid of his unwanted attentions, is only one of several attempted explanations of this odd fate. As we’ll see later in this chapter, it echoes themes from extraordinarily ancient lore.
As noted earlier, some of the later authors who embroidered the story of Merlin seem to have had access to authentic Celtic traditions, while others relied on Christian theology or on their own vivid imaginations to pad out the tale. Very few of them seem to have known that Geoffrey of Monmouth had more to say about Merlin. Many years after he finished The History of the Kings of Britain, though, Geoffrey wrote a shorter book, The Life of Merlin, which places Merlin in the midst of a strangely different story.16
According to this second account, Merlin was a king in southern Scotland who went mad and fled into the forests of Scotland in the aftermath of a great battle. His sister Ganieda tried several times to lure him back to civilization, and her husband King Rodarcus imprisoned him, hoping to bring him to his senses, but Merlin always fled back to the woods whenever he could. In time, the great poet Taliesin came to speak with him and reminded him of the distant time when the two of them had helped take the wounded King Arthur to a magical isle across the western ocean, where the king would be healed of his wounds. Thereafter, through a series of strange events and the sudden appearance of a magical spring, Merlin was restored to his senses; his sister Ganieda, now a widow, came to live with him and built an observatory with seventy windows in which Merlin could spend his final years contemplating the heavens.
Except for the scene where Taliesin describes the last voyage of Arthur, this Scottish Merlin has no apparent connection at all with the Welsh Merlin recounted in The History of the Kings of Britain. The lack of connection is made even more striking by the fact that both Merlin stories seem to have some historical basis. The story of Merlin and Vortigern occurs in a very old collection of Welsh historical documents, the Historia Brittonum, compiled by a scribe named Nennius in the ninth century. The version that Nennius put in his collection gives the wise child the name Ambrosius rather than Merlin, but Geoffrey and several other sources reconcile this by saying that Ambrosius was one of Merlin’s other names.
The story of The Life of Merlin, though, also connects back to actual events during the early Dark Ages. The battle after which Merlin went insane, according to old British chronicles, was the battle of Arderydd in the year 573, where the Pagan king Gwenddolau was defeated by the Christian armies of the sons of Eliffer. Gwenddolau and the battle of Arderydd are mentioned in Afallenau (The Apple Trees), one of the very early Welsh poems attributed to Merlin, and the wizard’s hiding place is described in both the poems and The Life of Merlin as the forest of Caledon, the great woodland that covered most of southern Scotland during the Dark Ages.
Geoffrey tries to turn these two distinct figures into a single Merlin, but the chronology simply won’t work. Vortigern, the king who tried to sacrifice the boy Merlin, was a historical figure, a king of Britain whose reign extended approximately from 425 to 459.17 If Merlin was a child when Vortigern died in 459, he must have been born sometime around 450, and yet the Life of Merlin has him not merely alive but fighting a battle in Scotland in 573, and active for many years thereafter. No actual human being could have had such a lifespan.
Merlin the God
To make sense of the legends is no easy task, but Geoffrey of Monmouth made it a good deal easier than it might have been. When he assembled the fragmentary records and poems about Merlin into his two narratives, he added a great deal of incident and local color—medieval writers were expected to do that—but he included as many details from his sources as he could, and changed very little. As a result, Geoffrey gives Merlin an oddly divided life. As a child and a young man he is active in Wales and southwestern Britain in the middle years of the fifth century; as an old man he is active in southern Scotland in the last quarter of the sixth century. The obvious conclusion—a conclusion already reached by medieval scholars less than a century after Geoffrey’s time—is that he mistakenly ran together accounts of two different people.
Gerald of Wales, who wrote an account of his travels through his homeland in the last decade of the twelfth century, explained the matter this way:
There were two Merlins. The one called Ambrosius, who thus had two names, prophesied when Vortigern was king. He was the son of an incubus and was discovered in Carmarthen, which means Merlin’s town, for it received its name from the fact that he was found there. The second Merlin came from Scotland. He was called Caledonius, because he prophesied in the Caledonian Forest.18
Many modern scholars who have investigated the Merlin legend have agreed with Gerald’s straightforward summary. According to this theory, we have two different Merlins contributing to the legend: a Merlin Ambrosius who lived in the fifth century, and a Merlin Caledonius who lived in the sixth. The story doesn’t end here, though, for there are more Merlins to consider.
In a famous 1965 study of Stonehenge, Gerald Hawkins pointed out the shadowy presence of a third Merlin.19 He noted that Geoffrey of Monmouth, unlike later authors, had Merlin use machinery rather than magic to haul the stones of Stonehenge by sea from Ireland to Salisbury Plain, and speculated that behind Geoffrey’s story might linger some distant folk memory of the actual builder of the great stone circle.
What makes this speculation plausible is that some of the stones of Stonehenge did in fact come by sea, just as Geoffrey claimed. The great gray stones that make up the largest part of the monument are local rock, of a kind found all over Salisbury Plain, but another set of smaller stones—called “bluestones” because of their color—were brought by water from quarries in the Prescelly Mountains of southwestern Wales. Wales is not Ireland, to be sure, but from the site of Stonehenge the Prescelly range lies in the same direction as Ireland, and Geoffrey can be forgiven for getting a few of the details wrong when the moving of the bluestones happened three thousand years before he wrote.
Behind these three Merlins lies a fourth, the strangest of all. This is the one referenced in the passage from the White Book of Rhydderch mentioned earlier, which says that before the first human beings settled the island of Britain, it was known as Clas Myrddin, Merlin’s Enclosure. This makes no sense if Merlin was the name of a prophet of the fifth century or a madman of the sixth, or even of both of them; it makes only a little more sense if Merlin, or rather some fantastically archaic equivalent of that name, was the master-builder who transported the bluestones by sea and land to Stonehenge. It was Geoffrey Ashe, in a valuable 1987 essay, who pointed out that these quandaries all make perfect sense if Merlin is a god.20
It was actually quite common in the Dark Ages for Christian scribes to convert the gods and goddesses of the old Pagan religions into faux-historical human characters. Thus Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla, a chronicle of the Norwegian kings written around 1230, redefined the god Odin as an ancient king in Asia, and the medieval Irish Glossary of Cormac turned the Irish sea-god Manannan mac Lir into a famous merchant of the past, whose skill as a sailor and pilot led to his being called the god of the sea.21 If the same thing happened in the case of Merlin, it would make instant sense of all the perplexities surrounding his legend.
It’s true that the sparse and fragmentary records of Pagan Celtic religion in Britain that still survive include no reference to a god called Merlin, or to any god with a name similar enough to Merlin that time might have rounded off the name into the form we know today. This is less of an objection than it might seem, though, because records of ancient Celtic religion in Britain are incredibly sparse. Very nearly the only available sources are those Roman inscriptions that include Celtic as well as Roman names for deities. Where the Celtic name has been overlaid by a Roman one, in the usual fashion of the interpretatio Romana, we have precisely no way of guessing what Celtic name might have been used by the native peoples of Britain for any particular “Mercury” or “Mars.”
What makes this even more confusing is that most of the “names” that appear on inscriptions are actually titles. Cernunnos, the term for the antlered god of fertility and prosperity, is the title “He of the Horns”; Sucellos, the term for the hammer-swinging thunder god, is the title “the Good Striker”; Epona, the term for the horse goddess mentioned earlier, is the title “She of the Horse.” The true names of these and other Celtic deities were apparently never written down, and may only have been known to an inner circle of their Druid priests and priestesses. What’s more, we have no way of knowing whether more than one title might have been used for the same deity, or whether more than one deity might have been known by the same title.
The name Merlin, in fact, seems to have started out as a title rather than a name. Geoffrey of Monmouth, along with other medieval writers, claimed that Carmarthen (in Welsh, Caerfyrddin) was named after Merlin. That seems to make grammatical sense—Caerfyrddin does look like Caer-Myrddin, “Merlin’s Castle,” with the M changed to F according to the rules of Welsh grammar—but more recent historical research has turned this on its head. It turns out that Carmarthen in pre-Roman times was named Moridunum, the Fortress of the Sea, and this ancient name changed over the centuries to Castrum Moridunum, to Caer Myrddin, then to Caerfyrddin and Carmarthen.
And the name Merlin or Myrddin? Linguists learned a long time ago that similar words in the same language change in parallel ways over time. If you take the same linguistic transformations that turned Castrum Moridunum into Caerfyrddin and run them in reverse on the Welsh name Myrddin, you end up with the ancient Celtic title Moridunos, “He of the Sea-Fortress.” The sea-fortress mentioned in the name may well have been the island of Britain itself, over which the passage in the White Book of Rhydderch says Merlin ruled. The god’s true name, the name his priests and priestesses invoked in secret, is impossible to guess today.
Was Merlin, then, purely a god, and his appearances as a Dark Age prophet and wizard only garbled mythology? That is a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The line between humanity and divinity was taken seriously in ancient times, but persons of unusual holiness and power were sometimes identified by later generations as an incarnation of the god or goddess they served. (The case of Jesus of Nazareth was far less unusual at the time than modern Christians like to pretend.) Though the fragmentary surviving data won’t settle the question one way or another, it is entirely possible that in the turmoil of Dark Age Britain, two priests or initiates of the god Moridunos played important historical roles—one in southern Wales in the late fifth century, the other in southern Scotland in the late sixth century—and folk memories of their deeds became mingled with the myths of Moridunos himself in the centuries that followed. This would certainly help explain why the legends of Merlin are such a jumble!
Whether or not this is what happened, at least two shrines of the god Moridunos can be identified from the legends. In his manifestation as Merlin Ambrosius, he has close ties with the town of Carmarthen in southwestern Wales. According to one set of Welsh legends, he lived at a hill named Bryn Myrddin (Merlin’s Hill) near the river Tyfi, two and a half miles from Carmarthen. Local legends speak of a cave under the hill where the wizard lived and worked his magic, and where he descended into the earth and still abides today. Other traditions place him further up the Tyfi near Llandeilo, on the grounds of Dynefor Castle, where a cave close to the river has the same reputation as the one under Bryn Myrddin.
The cult of Merlin Caledonius also has a geographical location. In his valuable book The Quest for Merlin, using clues from old Welsh poetry as well as a later Arthurian tale, Nikolai Tolstoy tracked down the site where the Merlin of Geoffrey’s second story spent his woodland days. In the Scottish county of Dumfriesshire lies a hill called Arthuret Knoll, the site of the battle of Arderydd. North of there, at the end of a long valley, a mountain named Hart Fell rises up to dominate a broad reach of the Scottish lowlands. Though Hart Fell is bare of trees today, it was once thickly forested, and rose out of dense woodland. High on its southwestern flank, a chalybeate 22 spring rises in a narrow valley that must once have been covered in deep shadow from overhanging trees. This, Tolstoy suggests on very solid grounds, is the Well of Galabes that Geoffrey describes as Merlin’s woodland refuge.
Hart Fell is relevant for another reason. It is located near one of the major strongholds of Celtic Pagan religion in the early Dark Ages, a sacred place of the Celtic god Maponos or Mabon famous enough to be recorded in a late Roman geographical text now known as the Ravenna Cosmography.23 The locus Maponos (“Place of Mabon”) listed in that text has been identified as the modern Scots town of Lochmaben. Not far from Lochmaben is a huge boulder, the Clochmabenstane (“Stone of Mabon’s Head”), where local tradition claims Pagan rituals were enacted in ancient times.
Mabon is another archaic Celtic deity of whom very little is known. His apparent name is yet another title—Maponos in the ancient British language means simply “the Son.” Certain inscriptions from Roman Britain refer to him. So does The Mabinogion, the great collection of Welsh legends, which includes a story—“Culhwch and Olwen”—in which Mabon ap Modron (literally “Son, son of Mother”) is an important character.24 Nikolai Tolstoy, in the same book mentioned above, presents evidence that Maponos was another title of the same god we know as Moridunos or Merlin. Certainly the Welsh Merlin’s role as magical child, the son of a mother but not a human father, fits this title well.
This same area of lowland Scotland just mentioned, and the northern end of England immediately to the south, had been a major center for the Roman military presence in Britain. Garrisons defending the Roman province of Britannia against the wild Pictish barbarians north of Hadrian’s Wall had their forts and camps there—and where the legions went, the mysteries of Mithras and other traditional Roman religious practices inevitably followed. This was one of the historical realities Jessie Weston discussed in making her case that the mysteries of the Grail had survived in northern England from late Roman times to the present, and the same case can be made for the survival of the mysteries of Moridunos-Maponos, Merlin the Mabon, in southern Scotland.
The Threefold Death
At this point it’s necessary to point out another key difference between the Welsh Merlin Ambrosius and the Scottish Merlin Caledonius: the manner of their deaths. Merlin Ambrosius, according to Celtic traditions picked up by medieval writers, went down in the earth—into a crystal cave, as some of the old texts claim—and abides there in an otherworldly form of life. Geoffrey gives Merlin Caledonius a variant of the same fate, in the form of his withdrawal into the observatory with seventy windows. Other sources suggest a far stranger death for the Merlin of Scotland, and Geoffrey himself weaves that motif into The Life of Merlin in a sidelong way.
According to Geoffrey’s version, after King Rodarcus imprisoned Merlin and tried to bring him back to his senses, Merlin won his freedom by revealing to the king that his queen, Merlin’s sister Ganieda, had been unfaithful to him. Ganieda set out to discredit her brother’s prophetic powers by having the same boy presented to him three times, once with long hair, once with short hair and different clothing, and once dressed as a girl, while Ganieda asked him how the child would die. Merlin prophesied the first time that the boy would die by falling from a high rock, the second that he would hang from a tree, and the third that the “girl” would drown in a river. As a result of this ruse, King Rodarcus decided that Merlin must be wrong about Ganieda’s behavior. Later on, however, when the boy was grown and he was hunting, he slipped from a high rock and fell headfirst into the river in such a way that one of his feet caught in the branches of a tree, and the rest of him ended up underwater. Thus he died in all three of the ways Merlin had prophesied.
According to other versions of the same story, though, it was Merlin himself who died in three different ways. A curious legend that became part of the medieval biography of St. Kentigern, the patron saint of Glasgow, tells of a madman named Lailoken who shared most of the characteristics of the Scottish Merlin, and who prophesied on three separate occasions that he would be clubbed and stoned to death, impaled on a stake, and drowned. Not long thereafter Lailoken was beaten and stoned savagely by a group of shepherds, and as he was dying of his wounds, he fell into a river, was impaled by a wooden stake in the water, and drowned. One of the two medieval accounts of Lailoken’s death quotes two lines from an old poem that make it clear who the original victim of the triple death was:
Pierced by a stake, suffering by stone and by water,
Merlin is said to have met a triple death. 25
Behind this curious tale lies the shadow of an ancient and terrible tradition. Human sacrifice was practiced now and again by most of the peoples of the ancient world.26 The ancient Celts, according to some Greek authors, used it as a means of capital punishment for the most detested crimes. Some of the people the Celts sacrificed were burned, some stabbed, and some shot with arrows—again, three ways of death.
A very widespread custom in cultures that practice human sacrifice is to have the victims imitate the god or goddess to whom they are offered. Thus in Scandinavia in Heathen times, for example, when human beings were offered to Odin, they were hung from a tree and then stabbed with a spear, in imitation of the god’s own self-sacrifice upon the World Tree Yggdrasil. If the threefold death of Merlin Caledonius echoes an ancient rite of sacrifice once practiced on or near Hart Fell, the victims offered up to He of the Sea-Fortress may well have been struck by three different weapons, or in some other way made to pass through a threefold death of their own. As we’ll see, this tradition has a surprising modern echo—one that will allow us to draw unexpected conclusions about the later history of the cult of Moridunos.
The Crystal Cave
A tradition stranger and even more archaic than the threefold death, in turn, lies behind the very different fate of Merlin Ambrosius. As already noted, he was believed to have descended into a cave far beneath the earth and remains there, still alive in some sense, despite all the centuries that have passed. The ancient tradition that lies behind this tale has left echoes of itself in many other legends and lands, for Merlin is far from the only master of arcane wisdom who is said to have ended his visible life in this way.
In Japan, off the other end of the Eurasian continent, a remarkably similar story is told about the wizard-saint K
b 
-Daishi, who lived from 774 to 835 CE. The founder of the Shingon sect of Buddhism, K b -Daishi can fairly accurately be described as Japan’s Merlin. As a young man he traveled from Japan to China, where he was initiated into the deepest mysteries of esoteric Buddhism. When he returned to Japan in 806, he became an adviser to emperors and founded the famous Shingon monastery on Mount K ya. Countless legends describe his arcane powers. At the end of his life, he withdrew into a grotto near the monastery on Mount K ya, and according to tradition he is still there, deep in meditation, waiting for the arrival of Miroku, the Buddha of the future.
The legend of Christian Rosenkreutz, the legendary founder of the Rosicrucians, is practically the same story. According to the seventeenth-century Fama Fraternitatis (Report on the Fraternity), the first of the original Rosicrucian manifestoes, Rosenkreutz was born in Germany in 1378, and as a very young man set off on travels that took him across the Middle East, where he learned all the secrets of magic. Returning to Germany, he founded the Rosicrucian fraternity. At the end of his life he was buried in a mysterious vault with seven sides. When the vault was rediscovered 120 years later, his body was found perfectly preserved, and in his hands was a book containing the inner secrets of Rosicrucian occultism.
Another very famous example from pop culture echoes the same theme. The famous horror-fantasy writer H. P. Lovecraft, like many of the other fantasy authors of his time, was well informed about occultism and borrowed various themes from occult teaching for his fiction. Cthulhu, the tentacled Great Old One who lies “dead yet dreaming” in the lost city of R’lyeh, is a funhouse-mirror reflection of the concept just discussed.
What lies behind these legends and the many more like them, according to occult tradition,27 is an archaic magical operation by which a sufficiently knowledgeable and strong-willed person can pass into another mode of existence at death and function for many centuries thereafter as the guardian spirit of a family, a community, or an occult school. Legends in many lands tell of great sages and heroes of the past who descended into stone tombs beneath the earth while still alive, and the stone-chambered mounds of northern and western Europe are routinely connected with such legends.
In Japan, where stone-chambered mounds and standing stones all but identical to those found in Britain and Ireland dot the landscape, a version of the traditional operation was still in use in one rural area as late as the nineteenth century. In this process, the practitioner stopped eating ordinary foodstuffs and subsisted on a special diet of nuts, berries, bark, and pine needles. The amount of food was then gradually reduced until, by the end of the thousand-day process, the practitioner had eaten nothing for many days. If everything went properly, the practitioner died while seated in meditation on the last day of the process. He was then put in a wooden coffin and buried in a stone chamber for three years, at the end of which his body was dug up, and found to be naturally mummified.
Several of these mummies are still on display in Buddhist temples in the isolated valley of Senninzawa—literally “Swamp of Wizards”—in Yamagata Prefecture. According to tradition, the monks who successfully completed this terrible austerity did not actually die; instead, they passed into a state of suspended animation called nyūjō, and like K b -Daishi, they will remain in meditation until the coming of the future Buddha Miroku.28 Local Buddhists consider these mummified monks to be sokushinbutsu, “living Buddhas,” and revere them as potent spiritual guardians. In the temples of Senninzawa, the mummies sit in the place usually reserved for statues of the Buddha himself.
The exact details of the procedure doubtless varied from one end of Eurasia to the other, but there is good reason to think that some process not too different from this was in use in very ancient times in the British Isles. The long barrows still found all over Britain, Ireland, and other parts of northwestern Europe were the places where this was originally practiced. In the early days of the tradition, according to occult teachings on the subject, the point of the practice was much the same as at Senninzawa: those who went into the earth in the great stone barrows merged with divine and ancestral powers and became guardian spirits, sources of wisdom, power, and protection for members of local communities, still in some sense alive and powerful—just as Merlin was said to be.
Later on, in Britain and elsewhere, the tradition was abused in various ways. Kings and nobles had themselves buried in stone-chambered mounds in the hope of cheating death, and this eventually led to such vast and useless creations as the pyramids of Egypt. When the magical process behind the tradition still worked, as it sometimes did, the results were even worse.
In his commentary on the Old English epic Beowulf, J. R. R. Tolkien—who was a brilliant scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and traditional lore as well as a great fantasy novelist—discussed the strange word orcnéas, which comes from orc, “hell,” and néas, “corpses.” Tolkien borrowed the traditional legends of these uncanny beings to create the “barrow-wights” in The Lord of the Rings, but they are discussed as real beings in Old Norse and early German sources, and have close equivalents in the folklore and magical teachings of many other lands. Tolkien described them as “(t)hose dreadful creatures that inhabit tombs and mounds. They are not living; they have left humanity, but they are ‘undead.’ With superhuman strength and malice they can strangle men and rend them.” 29 Later still, when the abuses of the tradition led to its abandonment across most of Eurasia, it survived in an even more corrupt and predatory form in a few regions of the world, where it contributed to the legends of vampirism.30
The legends of Merlin hearken back to an age long before the tradition became corrupt, when dim folk memories still recalled ancient sages who went into the earth to become one with He of the Sea-Fortress, the guardian deity of Britain itself. Since those legends cluster around Carmarthen, just as the legends of the threefold death cluster around Hart Fell, we can surmise that the legends of the god Moridunos current in southern Wales included the descent into the earth as their final element, while the legends from southern Scotland referenced the threefold death and the human sacrifices of ancient times.
Were there mystery cults connected with the god Moridunos? One crucial piece of evidence argues that there were. Despite all the centuries that separate the modern world from the days of ancient Rome, the central mythological pattern of the cult at Hart Fell, the threefold death, still survives in garbled, fragmentary, and misunderstood form in one of the few echoes of the ancient mysteries to survive into the present: the Master Mason degree of Freemasonry.
The Widow’s Son
For quite a long time now, it has been fashionable in Pagan and magical circles to claim that this or that spiritual tradition has survived in secret for many centuries without changing in any way that matters. Attractive though this notion is, history shows otherwise, and a clear sense of what actually happens to spiritual traditions that are forced underground is essential to make sense of what follows. Some examples will help make this clear.
In 1492, to cite one of the most famous instances, King Ferdinand of Spain ordered all Jews expelled from his kingdom. Some stayed behind and pretended to be Christians, hoping that the trouble would blow over in a few years. It didn’t, and for centuries thereafter their descendants had to hide from the Spanish Inquisition. In recent years, historians and folklorists in Spain and the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas have discovered surviving families of Marranos, as these covert Jews are called. How much survives in such families of the traditions of Judaism? In most cases, only a few customs and some garbled remnants of Jewish religious lore, heavily overlaid with ideas borrowed from the Catholicism of the surrounding culture.
On the other end of Eurasia in the sixteenth century, as Japan’s era of civil wars wound to an end, many Japanese on the southern island of Kyushu welcomed Jesuit missionaries and converted to Christianity. Once peace was restored by the Tokugawa shoguns, though, the Christian population was considered a massive security risk; missionaries were expelled, churches destroyed, and Japanese Christians ordered to renounce their faith on pain of death. Some of the converts continued to practice Christianity in secret. When religious freedom became law in Japan after 1945, these Kirishitan surfaced again. How much Catholic Christianity did they still practice? Again, a few customs and some garbled traditions survived, heavily overlaid with ideas borrowed from the Shinto and Buddhism of the surrounding culture.
Still another example has been discussed at length by William Sullivan in his fascinating book The Secret of the Incas: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time.31 In his research into the surviving traditions of the Inca peoples of South America’s mountains, he found time and again that fragmentary elements of their lore had been preserved under a superficial veneer of Christianity—and in particular, that native names and locations were replaced by borrowings from the Bible, in a process he came to call “guerrilla syncretism.”
If one of the ancient mysteries survived the coming of Christianity, the same thing would have happened to it. It would consist today of a handful of garbled traditions and teachings mixed up with a great many borrowings from the surrounding culture. This is exactly what we find when we look at the Master Mason degree, the central ritual of Freemasonry.
The Master Mason degree centers on the death of Hiram Abiff, the son of a widow, who was supposedly the master builder of King Solomon’s temple. In the legend recounted in Masonic ritual, three workmen who wanted to extract the secrets of a master mason from Hiram ambushed him in the half-completed temple one day. Each was armed with a different weapon, and each of them struck Hiram, the third fatally. They then buried his body in a hidden place, where it was later discovered, and the secrets communicated to each newly initiated Master Mason were revealed at the discovery of the grave.
Speculations concerning the origins of the Master Mason degree have covered a vast amount of territory. The great difficulty these speculations have always had to overcome is that the story of Hiram Abiff does not come from the Bible, the source of nearly all other Masonic rituals. A person named Hiram, a brass-worker who labored on King Solomon’s temple, is mentioned there, but the narrative of the assassination and rediscovery of the Widow’s Son is nowhere in the Bible. Nor is the story found in the abundant Jewish legends about the building of Solomon’s temple, recorded in the Talmud and elsewhere. Plenty of other sources have been proposed, but one clue—a geographical clue—has been missed.
The clue in question is that Freemasonry comes from the same area of the Scottish lowlands as the stories of Merlin Caledonius.32 The oldest surviving Masonic lodges are in and around Edinburgh. The hereditary Grand Masters of Masons in Scotland in the late Middle Ages, the Sinclair family, had their home in Roslin, south of Edinburgh, and the famous Rosslyn Chapel, with its links to medieval Masonry and the Knights Templar, is in the same area. Merlin’s old refuge on Hart Fell is only fifty miles by road from Rosslyn Chapel.
Thus it is unlikely to be accidental that the story of Hiram Abiff includes a garbled version of the threefold death of Merlin Caledonius. Just as Lailoken and Merlin were killed in three different ways, Hiram Abiff was killed by being struck three times by three different weapons. Furthermore, and crucially, the Word of a Master Mason—the secret at the center of the entire ritual—is an easily recognizable mispronunciation of the Celtic divine title Mabon, which as we’ve seen was closely associated with the Scottish Lowlands, and with Merlin.33 There are other important parallels between the two figures, as shown in table 2–1.
|
Merlin |
Hiram Abiff |
|
Had no earthly father |
Was the son of a widow |
|
Was the master-builder |
Was the master-builder of the |
|
Advised King Arthur |
Advised King Solomon |
|
Suffered a threefold death |
Suffered a threefold death |
|
Remained alive in his grave |
Communicated secrets |
Table 2–1: Merlin and Hiram Abiff
It’s important to remember that for something like a millennium—from the early Dark Ages until the late seventeenth century—the rituals that had started out as the mysteries of the god Moridunos were passed on only by word of mouth, in secret, and had to be adapted to changing conditions. Rituals mutate dramatically under such conditions. In her engaging account of a Shugendō 34 initiation in Japan, anthropologist Carmen Blacker has described how, in the ceremony she attended, certain parts of the traditional ceremony were shortened or omitted, and other practices were brought in from other sources to fill the gaps.35 Unless extraordinary efforts are made to enforce uniformity, changes of this sort happen routinely in initiation rituals around the world and throughout recorded history.
In medieval Scotland, for similar reasons and in similar ways, the rituals of initiation once celebrated atop Hart Fell varied over the years, and the same process of erosion that reduced the once-robust faiths of the Marranos and the Kirishitan to half-remembered scraps had ample time to work on the mysteries of Moridunos as well. Furthermore, the constant threat of persecution from Christian authorities—for more than a millennium, worshiping any deity other than the Christian god was a crime punishable by the death penalty in Scotland—forced overtly Pagan names and symbols in the ritual to be given suitable Christian disguises; the replacement of Merlin with an imaginary “Hiram Abiff” and the relocation of the events from Hart Fell to Temple Mount in Jerusalem are typical of the sort of “guerrilla syncretism” William Sullivan documented. All things considered, it is impressive that the Master Mason ritual still has enough resemblances to the legends and traditions surrounding Merlin that the connection can still be glimpsed.
The complicated process by which the fragmentary legacies of a mystery initiation in Dark Age Scotland ended up in the hands of the founders of modern speculative Freemasonry need not be traced here.36 The point that matters is that the traces of the Merlin legend in the Master Mason degree provide a significant piece of evidence that mystery initiations were being practiced in Roman Britain using the stories of archaic Celtic deities as their foundation. Furthermore, they suggest that these initiations were powerful and meaningful enough that, in fragmentary and much-revised form, they are still practiced today. A modern revival of the mysteries could choose any traditional or nontraditional myth as its basis, to be sure, but for a variety of reasons—some of which will be discussed in the next chapter—I have chosen the mysteries of Moridunos for my contribution to this project.
I have not, however, focused on the version of those mysteries that was once enacted on Hart Fell. Those mysteries in a very real sense are still being practiced, in the form of the Master Mason degree of Freemasonry, and it’s a basic courtesy owed to living initiatory traditions—not to mention a requirement of my obligations as a Mason—not to enact any version of its rituals outside their proper context. Fortunately, no such intrusion is required, since the other half of the Merlin tradition has no such difficulties surrounding it. The mysteries of Eleusis, Agrai, and Andania all drew on legends concerning Demeter and Persephone for their rituals, without any sense that any of them were trespassing on the rites of the others. In exactly the same way, the ceremonies in this book draw from the legends of Merlin Ambrosius and thus, in a certain sense, reflect mysteries that may once have been performed on Bryn Myrddin near Carmarthen.
Much has changed since the days of the Roman Empire, however, and the original rituals of the mysteries are long lost. Nor do we even know enough about the technical methods used in the ancient mysteries to attempt a reconstruction. Fortunately, the traditions of ceremonial magic—rooted, as we saw in this book’s first chapter, in surviving traditions closely linked with the ancient mysteries—provide an ample toolkit for that project. In the next chapter, we’ll survey that tradition, in order to understand the toolkit of methods that will be central to the rituals later on in this book.
14. I am indebted to Stewart, The Mystic Life of Merlin; Stewart, The Prophetic Vision of Merlin; and Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin, for my introduction to Merlin’s older forms.
15. See Aneirin, Y Gododdin.
16. See Geoffrey of Monmouth, The Vita Merlini [The Life of Merlin].
17. Morris, The Age of Arthur, 512.
18. Gerald of Wales, The Journey Through Wales and The Description of Wales, 192.
19. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded.
20. This article appears in Stewart, The Book of Merlin, 17–46.
21. Ibid., 152.
22. That is, a healing spring with water that contains dissolved iron. The famous Chalice Well at Glastonbury is another chalybeate spring.
23. Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin, 204–7.
24. See Gantz, The Mabinogion.
25. Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin, 171.
26. It is easy for modern people to feel a sense of smug superiority about this, but little has changed. In our more secular age, we offer up human lives to political ideologies and economic interests, rather than to gods.
27. These have been described in detail in a variety of traditional and recent writings; see especially Knight, The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend, and Stewart, “The Tomb of a King.”
28. Blacker, The Catalpa Bow, 87–90.
29. Tolkien, Beowulf, 165–66.
30. My book Monsters discusses the latter stages of this tradition; see Greer, Monsters, 34–51.
31. Sullivan, The Secret of the Incas.
32. See Stevenson, The Origins of Freemasonry.
33. As a Freemason, I am prohibited by my obligations from writing the Word of a Master Mason here or elsewhere. Readers who are interested can find it quite readily online.
34. Shugendō is a shamanistic religious movement in Japan, dating from the Middle Ages, that combines Buddhist practices with the ancient Japanese faith in mountain-spirits.
35. Blacker, The Catalpa Bow, 208–34.
36. These will be discussed in detail in my forthcoming book, The Ceremony of the Grail.