The Way of Self-Initiation
A metaphor might help make sense of the process by which the magical legacies of the past are being recovered and put back into use today. Imagine for a moment that some vast and intricate machine of glass and bronze was battered to pieces by a furious mob, and the fragments smashed and trampled underfoot, so that all that remained were glittering shards scattered through the gutters and trash heaps of a great city. Imagine furthermore that every record of the machine’s structure and function had been destroyed to keep anyone from figuring out how to rebuild it.
Now imagine that many years later, you learn of the machine and decide to try to put it back together again. Day after day, you prowl the streets of the city, and when you find something that might once have been a piece of it, you pick it up, take it back home with you, clean off the grime, then try to figure out how it might have fit together with the other pieces you’ve already gathered, and what the shape of the whole machine might originally have been.37
That was what the pioneering occultists of the Renaissance did with the surviving fragments of the ancient world’s spirituality and magic, and that’s what occultists across the Western world have been doing ever since. Now and again, overenthusiastic searchers have convinced themselves that the pieces they had collected made up the entire system—the whole machine, in terms of the metaphor I’ve just used—but even today we’re still a long way from that goal. While the entire “machine” remains elusive, however, several of its important parts have been restored to working order.
There are also “spare parts,” so to speak, that have come from other sources. Some of them were borrowed from the spiritual and magical traditions of other cultures. Others have been newly invented, or reworked to make them fit the needs of the evolving occult tradition. Some purists like to take offense at this sort of creative borrowing, but two facts need to be kept in mind. The first is that people in the ancient world loved to borrow things from other cultures, too, and also to make things up from scratch. That was how the mysteries of Mithras and Isis came to be celebrated in corners of the Roman Empire far from Persia or Egypt, the original homes of the deities these mysteries invoked. It was also how new mysteries were founded straight through the history of the ancient world, and how older mysteries came to be celebrated in new ways. While the mysteries had ancient roots, they constantly had to adapt to changing circumstances and always remained open to new ideas.
Nowadays, the same flexibility is at least as necessary as it was in ancient times. What’s more, there’s a critical flaw in the kind of fundamentalist thinking that insists that if it wasn’t done in such and such a way in the fifth century CE, it’s wrong. The problem with this is simply that we don’t know enough about how it was done in the fifth century CE, and we never will. Large parts of the machine, to return to the metaphor, were melted down as scrap or crushed so thoroughly that no trace of them remains. If we can’t borrow or invent new traditions and practices to replace the ones that have vanished forever, we’re going to be stuck permanently with a fragment of the whole.
Thus, rediscovery and reinvention are both important parts of the work of restoring the ancient wisdom. Both these approaches have been central to Western occultism since the Renaissance, and both have been particularly important in the tradition of Western occultism in which most of my work takes place—the tradition launched on its way in the eighteenth century by the founders of the Druid Revival.
Druidry and the Mysteries
The original Druids, as most people know these days, were the priests, wizards, and intellectuals of the ancient Celtic peoples of Ireland, Britain, and Gaul (the modern country of France). Nobody knows much about them now. The surviving data consists of testimonies written by a small number of Greek and Roman authors, a larger body of references in medieval Celtic literature, and a great deal of archaeological evidence that can be interpreted in many ways. One of the few things that’s known about them for certain is what happened to them: the Roman Empire suppressed the Druids in Gaul and the southern two-thirds or so of Britain, and Christian missionaries and priests finished the job in northern Britain and Ireland. Since it was one of the customs of the Druids never to write down anything sacred, their teachings perished with them.
More than a thousand years later, in eighteenth-century Britain, men and women who were dissatisfied with the two religious choices on offer—dogmatic Christianity on the one hand, and an equally dogmatic scientific materialism on the other—found inspiration in what little was known about the ancient Druids. A tradition among British Druids today claims that the first modern Druid organization was founded in London in 1717, and while no documentary evidence of this original Druid order has been found, there were unquestionably Druid groups meeting in London and Wales toward the middle years of the century. Ever since, Druidry has had an active presence in Britain, and spread from there to other countries—notably the United States, which saw its first Druid organization founded in upstate New York in 1798.
The history of modern Druidry is a many-colored tapestry in which Celtic lore and legend, borrowings from other spiritual traditions, and creative innovations have all played important roles. Start with so diverse a set of raw materials and the results are going to be equally diverse. This not a disadvantage; it’s a point of pride in most modern Druid groups, in fact, that no two Druids have exactly the same beliefs or do things in exactly the same way. The flexibility encouraged by this custom has allowed Druidry to absorb useful ideas and practices from an astonishingly wide range of sources and weave them into a coherent whole.
One particular borrowing is particularly relevant here. In 1887 a group of English occultists founded the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret organization intended to teach its initiates a complete course of occult study and practice. Like most of the occult lodges of the time, it had elaborate initiation rituals that drew heavily from the ancient mysteries as well as from a wide range of other sources. (To cite only one example out of many, the officers of a Golden Dawn temple have the same titles—Hierophant, Hiereus, Hegemon, and so on—as the chief officers of the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece.)
The Golden Dawn also developed an extraordinarily detailed and effective system of magic for its initiates. It’s probably necessary to take a moment here and talk about what magic is, since so many unhelpful notions have gathered around it over the years. Magic, to borrow a definition attributed to the great twentieth-century British occultist Dion Fortune, is “the art and science of causing changes in consciousness in accordance with will.” The tools of magic—the words and gestures that make up magical ritual, the incense and candles that play roles in setting the scene, the robes and wands and other working tools of the operative magician—are so many means of focusing and redirecting the human mind so that it comes into contact with the hidden powers of the cosmos. Some systems of magic are relatively simple, others are more complicated, and the one the Golden Dawn pieced together out of the magical traditions of the Renaissance was among the most elaborate and effective of them all.
Unfortunately, like many more recent magical groups, the Golden Dawn was much better at teaching occultism and performing rituals than managing its own internal politics. Beginning in 1900, after a long series of poorly handled disputes, the order blew itself to smithereens in a cascade of vicious power struggles, and bitter quarrels among the fragments made life difficult for everyone in that end of the British occult scene for several decades thereafter.
It so happened that just then, the Druid scene in Britain was going through a relatively placid period in its history, and it also happened that a significant number of Golden Dawn initiates were interested in Celtic traditions. The result was predictable: a great many people who fled the Golden Dawn because of the poisonous internal politics of the order’s final days ended up becoming members of various Druid orders instead—and brought with them the entire toolkit of Golden Dawn magic.
During the years between the two World Wars, accordingly, there sprang up a series of hybrid orders working various fusions of Druidry and the Golden Dawn. The Ancient Order of Druid Hermetists, the Cabbalistic Order of Druids, the Nuada Temple of the Golden Dawn, and several other similar organizations thrived during this period,38 and worked out their own rituals of initiation and their own magical practices using blendings of the two traditions.
The magical syntheses created during those years apparently didn’t survive the shifts in countercultural fashion that followed the end of the Second World War. That was why, as I discussed in the introduction to my book The Celtic Golden Dawn, I set out to recover what was lost by reverse engineering an entire system of Druidical Golden Dawn magic from scratch. As a longtime student and practitioner of the Golden Dawn tradition, as well as a Druid who had completed the full course of initiations in three different Druid orders, I was tolerably well prepared for the task, and the system of magic and initiation I created has gone on to attract its share of students and practitioners since The Celtic Golden Dawn saw print.
The possibilities opened up by the reinvention of Druidical Golden Dawn magic aren’t limited to those I explored in the pages of The Celtic Golden Dawn, however. Several years after I finished the experimental work that resulted in that book, I realized that the techniques I had developed could be put to work reviving the mysteries of Merlin.
It’s probably necessary to state in so many words that the rituals, meditations, and other practices that will be presented in the chapters that follow are not the same as the ones that were practiced on Bryn Myrddin in the waning years of Roman Britain. The mysteries of that time are lost forever. Even if somehow it became possible to recover the words and ritual actions that once made up the mysteries of the god Moridunos, for that matter, their meanings have passed beyond recovery. Like all meanings, spiritual and otherwise, they unfold from a context in which language, culture, and history all take part. No one alive today can possibly experience the world in the same way as a Roman Briton of the fifth century CE, and for exactly the same reason—even if the ancient mysteries of Moridunos were available in their original form—no one alive today could possibly experience those mysteries in the same way that a Roman Briton would have done in the fifth century CE.
Times change, and so do the mysteries. The Eleusinian mysteries themselves underwent countless changes, major and minor, over the period of more than a thousand years that they were celebrated. The transformations that apparently turned the mysteries of Merlin Caledonius into the Master Mason degree of modern Freemasonry are, as we’ve seen, far from unusual in the history of initiatory rites. What’s more, just as there were many different mysteries in ancient Greece that centered on the myth of Demeter and Persephone, using different rituals to do so, the mysteries of Merlin set out in this book are only one of many possibilities. In the work of initiation, there’s no such thing as “only one right way.”
The rituals that follow, therefore, make use unapologetically of the system of Druidical ceremonial magic I reverse engineered for my book The Celtic Golden Dawn. They also make use of another entirely modern tradition—the custom of celebrating the festivals of the modern Pagan eightfold year-wheel.
The Stations of the Year
The eightfold year-wheel is, among other things, a fine example of the sort of inspired invention that helped create the ancient mysteries, and is helping to refound them today. Despite claims widely circulated in an older generation of Neopagan books and teachings, the year-wheel isn’t an ancient tradition. According to widespread oral recollections in the British Druid scene, in fact, it was invented in a London pub around 1952 by two men, Gerald Gardner and Ross Nichols, over a couple of pints of good brown ale.
Gerald Gardner, as most readers of this book will doubtless be aware, was the central figure in the creation of modern Wicca, the man who wove a diverse assortment of fragments from many sources into the most widespread Pagan religion of the late twentieth century, and inspired many thousands of other people to ring their own changes on the themes he popularized. In 1952 his creation, then called Wica, was still very much in its formative years, and at that time it celebrated four seasonal festivals: Samhain (November 1), Candlemas (February 2), Beltane (May 1), and Lammas (August 1), which Gardner had borrowed from medieval Irish lore.
Ross Nichols, a less famous figure today, was equally influential in the London occult scene at that time. A poet and painter of considerable talent and a frequent contributor to occult periodicals, he was an important member of the British Druid movement and went on to become the most influential writer and teacher in twentieth-century Druidry. His epochal 1946 essay The Cosmic Shape,39 which called for the revival of the ancient mysteries as a way to bring modern industrial humanity back into relationship with the cycles of nature, had an immense influence on the first generation of the Neopagan revival.
As we’ve already seen, Druidry as it now exists is a modern invention rather than an ancient tradition, but “modern” is a relative term. By the time Nichols was initiated into the Druid Order of the Universal Bond, one of the premier British Druid orders at that time, the Druid Revival had more than two centuries of history behind it and offered students a wealth of ritual and lore. At that time most Druids celebrated four seasonal festivals: the two solstices (which occur around June 21 and December 21 each year) and the two equinoxes (around March 21 and September 22 each year).
Exactly what inspired these two men to combine the calendars of their respective traditions is anyone’s guess, but that was what happened. Wica, soon to be renamed Wicca, added the solstices and equinoxes to its ritual calendar, and when Nichols founded a Druid order of his own in 1964, the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), he added Samhain, Imbolc (another name for Candlemas), Beltane, and Lughnasadh (another name for Lammas) to the Druid ritual calendar. The result was the calendar shown in table 3–1. Over the decades that followed, the same eightfold cycle of celebrations became standard in most modern Pagan traditions. Since it was a common habit in twentieth-century Neopaganism to give innovations a veneer of respectability by backdating them to the dawn of time, many Pagan writers and teachers proceeded to claim that the eightfold wheel of the year dated from ancient times, and for a while that belief was very nearly an article of faith among many people in the Neopagan scene.
|
Approximate Date* |
Current Neopagan Name |
Traditional Welsh Name** |
|
1. December 21 |
Yule |
Alban Arthan |
|
2. February 2 |
Imbolc |
Calan Myri |
|
3. March 21 |
Ostara |
Alban Eilir |
|
4. May 1 |
Beltane |
Calan Mai |
|
5. June 21 |
Litha |
Alban Hefin |
|
6. August 1 |
Lammas |
Calan Gwyngalaf |
|
7. September 22 |
Mabon |
Alban Elfed |
|
8. November 1 |
Samhain |
Calan Tachwedd |
|
* In the Northern Hemisphere. ** For a small country, Wales has an impressive amount of local and regional diversity, and there are several traditional Welsh names for each of these days. I have chosen the specific set used in one of the Druid traditions into which I have been initiated. |
||
Table 3–1: The Stations of the Eightfold Year-Wheel
It so happens that plenty of ancient Pagan calendars survive from various corners of the Europe and the world, and the eightfold wheel of the year can’t be found in any of them. That’s a matter of simple fact. That said, the mere fact that the eightfold wheel of the year isn’t ancient doesn’t make it wrong. As already noted, innovation has a necessary place in any spiritual tradition, especially when that tradition has been interrupted by history and is still being reinvented for a new era. A set of eight festivals set at roughly equal points around the cycle of the seasons has turned out to be extremely well-suited to the purposes of Pagan nature worship, and that is all the justification it needs.
In the usual way of things, the eightfold year-wheel has picked up an extensive body of symbolism in the traditions that use it. In modern American eclectic Wicca, the most widely practiced Pagan faith here in the United States, that symbolism includes specific details such as the association of Imbolc with the birth of lambs and of Lammas with the baking of the first loaf of bread from the new harvest. There’s nothing wrong with these, but such symbols vary from one tradition to another. In Druidry, for example, Imbolc is often celebrated as a festival of light and water without reference to lambing, while celebrations of Lughnasadh (Lammas) focus on the rolling of a flaming wheel in celebration of the sun’s temporary triumph over the gathering forces of the waning year. Other traditions use yet other symbols.
Partly this diversity reflects the fact that the seasonal cycle follows different patterns in different parts of the world, and partly it’s because different magical and religious traditions choose to emphasize different aspects of the seasons in their rites. The cycle of the year-wheel is rooted in the common patterns of astronomy—the solstices and equinoxes, which anchor the cycle, are defined by the movement of the sun against the background of the stars—but the climate and ecology of different parts of the world, not to mention the cultural and spiritual orientations of different traditions, express that astronomical cycle in different ways.
What makes this relevant to our present purpose is that the eightfold wheel of the year need not be limited to the celebration of the seasons. It can also be a framework for a process of self-initiation. Just as Pagans in late classical Athens used to celebrate the mysteries of Attis and the Great Mother every spring and the mysteries of Demeter and Persephone every autumn, a modern mystery working can place different initiations around the wheel of the year to achieve the same goals of spiritual awakening. That is what I have done in this book.
The revived mysteries of Merlin presented here thus comprise eight ceremonies around the cycle of the year—the eight rituals of Merlin’s Wheel. Though I’ve included ways to link these ceremonies to the cycle of the seasons, in whatever way that cycle expresses itself wherever you live, the rituals as such aren’t keyed to any one version of the seasonal cycle. Instead, they link the cycle of the year to the human life cycle as reflected in one version of the mythic life of Merlin. This makes them just as relevant to the year as experienced in California, Alabama, Australia, or Brazil as to lowland Scotland or southern Wales, or, for that matter, the seasonal cycle I experience in my home in Rhode Island. As we’ll see, it also allows these rites to be practiced alongside other rituals that celebrate the cycle of the year without any confusion of symbols, and it opens the door to a fusion between the eightfold year-wheel and the ancient mystical and magical diagram known as the Tree of Life.
The Druid Tree of Life
No one today knows what symbolic patterns the hierophants of the Eleusinian mysteries might have used to understand the way that their rites awakened the inner lives of the mystai and epoptai who came to Eleusis each year. We do know that Pythagoras, one of the founders of ancient Greek philosophy and an initiate of many of the mysteries celebrated in his time, taught his students to make sense of the universe and themselves using a pattern of ten points, or circles, called the Tetractys.
Pythagoras lived in the sixth century BCE, when ancient Greece was emerging from its own medieval period and beginning to develop its own unique visions of philosophy and spirituality. Over the centuries that followed, the basic idea of the Tetractys was expanded and transformed in many ways and taken up by a wide range of spiritual traditions across the ancient world. Eventually, as a result of this process, it gave rise to the more familiar tenfold pattern known ever since as the Tree of Life.
51
The Tree of Life is the great symbolic glyph of Western occult wisdom, a pattern of ten spheres and twenty-two paths that sets out the inner structure of the universe and the individual—in the language of traditional occultism, the macrocosm (great universe) and the microcosm (small universe). The version of the Tree of Life most often seen in modern magical literature comes from the Jewish tradition, which borrowed it from Gnostic sources in the early Middle Ages.40 Long before it found its way into Judaism, though, the Tree of Life diagram was described in the writings of the Pagan author Celsus and his Christian opponent Origen, and a version of it, the Wu Chi Tu, found its way into Chinese mystical literature a century before the Tree of Life first appears in Jewish Kabbalahistic writings. We are dealing here with a very ancient and widespread symbol, one that has found its way into many traditions across the millennia.
The version of the Tree of Life worked in the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel uses, as names for the ten spheres of the Tree and the unnumbered point between the third and fourth spheres, eleven traditional titles of the Divine found in Barddas, Iolo Morganwg’s great collection of Welsh Druid Revival documents.41 (Readers who are more familiar with the Hebrew titles for the spheres may find table 3–2 useful.) The spheres are stages in the process of creation by which the world comes into being, and they are also stages in the process of redemption by which each of us can awaken into wholeness, wisdom, and power. Both these aspects are expressed in the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel.
|
Number |
Welsh name and meaning |
Hebrew name and meaning |
|
1 |
Celi, the Hidden |
Kether, the Crown |
|
2 |
Perydd, the Maker |
Chokmah, Wisdom |
|
3 |
Dofydd, the Tamer |
Binah, Understanding |
|
(unnumbered circle) |
Iau, the Yoke |
Daath, Knowledge |
|
4 |
Ener, the Namer |
Chesed, Mercy |
|
5 |
Modur, the Mover |
Geburah, Severity |
|
6 |
Muner, the Lord |
Tiphareth, Beauty |
|
7 |
Byw, the Living |
Netzach, Victory |
|
8 |
Byth, the Eternal |
Hod, Glory |
|
9 |
Ner, the Mighty |
Yesod, the Foundation |
|
10 |
Naf, the Shaper |
Malkuth, the Kingdom |
Table 3–2: The Spheres of the Tree of Life
Understanding the Tree of Life in its fullness is the work of more than one lifetime. Fortunately it’s possible to work the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel with a very basic understanding of it! To begin with, the spheres aren’t other worlds or alternate dimensions of existence; they’re principles present in everything that exists. Take yourself as an example—after all, you know yourself more thoroughly than anything else. Your material body, the structure of bones and muscles and organs that gives you your foothold in the world of matter, is the Naf, the tenth sphere, of your individual Tree of Life. Materialists like to think of the material body as the whole individual human being; practitioners of magical spirituality, on the other hand, recognize it as a small portion of the whole.
Closest to the material body is the Ner of yourself, the vital body, which is composed of the life force: the subtle vitalizing energy called qi in Chinese, ki in Japanese, prana in Sanskrit, pneuma in ancient Greek, ruach in Hebrew, and so on.42 (In Welsh Druid tradition it’s called nwyfre, pronounced “NOO-iv-ruh.”) Alongside the vital body is the lower mind, the Byth of yourself, which receives and processes the messages of the physical senses, and the emotional self, the Byw of yourself, which experiences feelings. These four make up the lower self, the parts of the self that we have in common with the animals.
The three parts of yourself further up comprise the higher self, the distinctively human part of you. The Muner of you is thought; the Modur of you is will; and the Ener of you is memory. Most of us have these only in partial and occasional forms; human beings who develop any of them in an unusual degree are called geniuses; human beings who learn how to use all three of these capacities fully are ready to go on to another mode of being.
Finally, the three highest parts of yourself are the threefold spirit, the part of you that exists eternally. The Celi of yourself is your spiritual self; the Perydd of yourself is the spiritual self’s will, or capacities for action; and the Dofydd of yourself is the spiritual self’s understanding, or capacities for perception. They connect to the higher self through the Iau of yourself, which is intuition.
Apply the same principles to anything else and you have a basic sense of the spheres of the tree. In everything there’s a spiritual essence; that’s Celi. There’s an inner capacity for will and action; that’s Perydd. There’s an inner capacity for understanding and experience; that’s Dofydd. There’s a link between these spiritual essences and their manifestation in space and time; that’s Iau. There are capacities for order, for change, and for knowledge; those are Ener, Modur, and Muner. Finally, there are feelings, perceptions, life, and physical existence: those are the four lowest spheres.
The Tree of Life has potentials that haven’t yet been developed as far as they can be, and some of those unfold from its relationship to the wheel of the year. Ten spheres make up the Tree, of course, and the year has eight festivals, but an important detail of magical teaching makes it easy to relate them to one another. The three highest spheres of the Tree of Life—Celi, Perydd, and Dofydd, in the version of the Tree used here—are spiritual realities outside the reach of our present level of human consciousness. Between the three higher and seven lower spheres of the Tree lies a boundary or barrier; traditional Cabalistic writings refer to it as the Abyss, while the Druidical Cabala sees it as the dividing line between the three roots of the Tree, hidden from our sight in the soil of the Unmanifest, and the seven branches of the Tree, which rise out of that soil into our awareness.
The three highest spheres therefore play no direct role in the kind of ritual work discussed in this book. We can know them only indirectly, through their effects on ourselves, or other things in the universe—and those effects act through the unnumbered point, Iau, the reflection of the three highest spheres that shape the seven lower spheres. For practical purposes, therefore, eight powers—seven of the ten spheres and Iau—make up the palette of energies we have to work with in ceremonial magic, and each of these corresponds to one of the festivals, as shown in table 3–3 below.
|
Date |
Festival |
Sphere(s) |
|
December 21 |
Alban Arthan |
Naf, the tenth sphere |
|
February 2 |
Calan Myri |
Ner, the ninth sphere |
|
March 21 |
Alban Eilir |
Byth, the eighth sphere |
|
May 1 |
Calan Mai |
Byw, the seventh sphere |
|
June 21 |
Alban Hefin |
Muner, the sixth sphere |
|
August 1 |
Calan Gwyngalaf |
Modur, the fifth sphere |
|
September 22 |
Alban Elfed |
Ener, the fourth sphere |
|
November 1 |
Calan Tachwedd |
Iau, the unnumbered point |
Table 3–3: The Festivals and the Spheres
The Spheres and Their Deities
Each of the spheres of the Tree and the festivals of the year-wheel also corresponds to one of the deities traditionally invoked by the Druid Revival, and some basic familiarity with these deities and their symbolism will be helpful in working with the ceremonies of Merlin’s Wheel. In the paragraphs below, we’ll survey this lore, along with the basic concepts of the spheres of the Tree of Life and the festivals of the year-wheel as they are understood in the Druid Revival tradition.
Alban Arthan/Naf: Olwen
Naf, the tenth sphere of the Tree, is the realm of material existence, where the light of spirit reaches its lowest ebb; it corresponds to the ground center in the human body, which is between the feet when you are standing upright, and also to the element of earth. In much the same way, the winter solstice is the point of the annual cycle at which the sun has reached its lowest point in the southern sky. It’s not accidental that many gods have their traditional birthday around this time of year, for the imagery of light and new life kindling in the darkness fits the energies of the seasons well.
The deity assigned to this festival is Olwen of the White Track—“white track” is the meaning of her name in Welsh—who appears in the story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, the great treasury of Welsh traditional legend. While her apparent role in the story is that of a human princess, she is the daughter of a magical giant, Yspaddaden Penkawr (literally, “Hawthorn, Chief of the Giants”), and four white flowers spring up wherever she steps. In the Druid Revival traditions she is recognized as the maiden goddess of the waxing year, whose “footprints” are the first flowers that bloom amid the melting snow to proclaim the approach of spring. The Mabinogion describes her as blonde and pale-skinned, dressed in a gown of flame-red silk. Around her neck is a torque of gold set with pearls and rubies.
Calan Myri/Ner: Coel or Sul
The ninth sphere of the Tree of Life, Ner the Mighty, is the realm of the life force, of the tides of subtle substance that unite all living things. It corresponds to the genital center in the human body, and to the element of water. Its correspondence in the wheel of the year is Calan Myri, the first festival of the waxing year, a celebration of light and water that honors the lengthening days and the first stirrings of life in the newborn year.
As the sphere corresponding to reproduction and sexuality, Ner has two deities assigned to it in Druid lore, a god and a goddess, representing the polarization of sexual energies into masculine and feminine. The god Coel is dimly remembered in the children’s rhyme:
Old King Cole was a merry old soul
And a merry old soul was he …
The god of the life force, he is the patron of woodlands and wild animals. His name is the Welsh word for “faith” or “trust.” In modern Druid lore he is envisioned as a massively built man with wild hair and beard, dressed as a huntsman in russet and dark brown, with stag’s antlers rising from his head.
The goddess Sul is also a deity of the life force, associated with the healing springs at Bath in England, where the Romans revered her as Sulis Minerva. Her name is derived from an ancient word for the sun. The daughter of the year-god Belinus, she rules the threefold fire—the sun, the heat within the earth, and the fire in the hearth—and is the divine patron of healing and of all domestic crafts. Modern Druid lore pictures her as an adult woman with golden hair, wearing a white gown, a red cloak, and golden ornaments.
Alban Eilir/Byth: Mabon 43
The eighth sphere of the Tree of Life is Byth the Eternal, the realm of sensation and perception, which corresponds to the element of air and the navel center in the human body. It corresponding festival is Alban Eilir, the spring equinox, which marks the renewal of vegetation and the triumph of light over darkness.
As explained in Chapter Two, the name Mabon simply means “The Son.” As Mabon, son of Modron (“Son, son of Mother”), he plays an enigmatic role in the story of Culhwch and Olwen in the Mabinogion, and some scholars believe that the word “Mabinogion” itself comes from an archaic Welsh phrase meaning something like “tales of the Mabon.” According to the tale, Mabon was taken from his mother when he was three days old, and he remained a prisoner until the warriors of Arthur, guided by the oldest animals in the world, came to rescue him. In modern Druid lore he is the eternal child, at once the god of youth and the guardian of a timeless wisdom. He may be pictured as a child with dark hair and bright eyes, barefoot and bareheaded, and dressed only in a plain sleeveless tunic of unbleached cloth.
Calan Mai/Byw: Elen
Byw the Living, the seventh sphere of the Tree of Life, is the realm of emotion and intuition; it corresponds to the solar plexus center in the human body, and to the element of fire. Its festival is Calan Mai, a festival of flowers and greenery, when spring has come into its own and the natural world is aflame with the verdant fire of growth.
Its deity is Elen of the Roads. Like Olwen, Elen appears in humanized form in one of the stories from the Mabinogion, “The Dream of Macsen Wledig.” Her name is a Welsh word for “angel” or “female spirit.” In her divine form she is the goddess of love, and also of dawn and dusk, the times of day when her planet Venus appears as the morning and evening star. Finally, she is the divine power ruling over the old straight tracks, the ancient network of energy paths and sacred sites often described (and too often misunderstood) as “ley lines.” The Mabinogion describes her as auburn-haired and beautiful, dressed in a white gown with a surcoat and mantle of gold brocade, with a broach, belt, and jeweled hair band of gold.
Alban Hefin/Muner: Esus
The blazing heart of the Tree of Life, Muner is the sixth sphere and stands at the midpoint between Celi, the hidden spirit, and Naf, the material world. It corresponds to the heart center in the human body and the first aspect of the element of spirit, Spirit Within. In the same way, Alban Hefin, the summer solstice, stands at the midpoint of the year between one winter solstice and the next. It is traditionally celebrated by Druids with a vigil from midnight to dawn, a ceremony to welcome the midsummer sunrise, then—after a few hours of sleep!—music, poetry, and feasting when the sun stands high in the heavens at noon.
The chief of tree-spirits, guardian of green things, and emissary of the great Druid god Hu the Mighty, Esus takes his title (“Lord” in the old Celtic language) from an ancient Gaulish deity of whom very little is known. His role as a god of the modern Druid Revival tradition is largely a result of visionary experience among nineteenth- and twentieth-century Druids. He is pictured in Druid lore as a lean brown man of indeterminate age who sits perched in the first fork of the sacred oak. His garments of brown and green look like bark and leaves; his hands are long, brown, and strong as roots, and his eyes are very bright.
Calan Gwyngalaf/Modur: Taranis
Modur is the great center of dynamism and force on the Tree of Life; it corresponds to the throat center in the human body, where the power of the voice has its central focus, and to the second aspect of the element of spirit, Spirit Below. Its festival is Calan Gwyngalaf, when the summer heat is strongest and the sun does battle each day with the gathering forces of the year’s waning half.
The thunder god of the ancient Celts, Taranis (“He of the Lightning”) has close equivalents all through Indo-European mythologies; his name and character are akin to the Norse Thor, Old English Thunor, Lithuanian Perkunas, Russian Perun, and many others of the same kind. He may be pictured as a man of immense strength with rippling muscles and red-gold hair and beard, bare to the waist and dressed below that in leather trews (trousers going to just below the knees) and sturdy boots. Like his equivalents in related mythologies, he wields a mighty hammer.
Alban Elfed/Ener: Belinus
The fourth sphere of the Tree of Life, Ener is the sphere of space and expansion; the highest of the seven lower spheres, it accordingly marks the highest level of being, according to Druid philosophy, to which human beings and other created entities can aspire. It corresponds to the brow center in the human body and to the third aspect of the element of spirit, Spirit Above. Its festival is Alban Elfed, the middle of the harvest in the temperate zone, when the bounty of the earth is most evident.
The year-god who dies and is reborn at the winter solstice, Belinus (“The Shining One”) is the lord of the seasonal cycle in the Druid Revival tradition; the numerical value of the Greek letters that form his name, 
, add up to 365, the number of days in a solar year.44 In modern Druid lore, he traces out the cycle of the seasons as he passes through the stages of his journey from pale infant to strong young god, to lover and mate of the living earth, to king, to sacrifice, to pale corpse laid out on the bier of the sky. In his role as lord of Alban Elfed, he may be pictured as a strong and virile man of middle years with golden hair and beard, wearing a red tunic and cloak ornamented with gold, and carrying a long spear and a golden shield.
Calan Tachwedd/Iau: Ceridwen
Iau, as already noted, is not a sphere of the Tree of Life, but a link or point of contact between the three higher spheres and the seven lower spheres. It corresponds to the crown center in the human body and to the divine reality that lies above the element of spirit. Its festival of Calan Tachwedd, called Samhain by the Irish, is the point in the annual cycles at which the barriers between this world and the otherworld are thinnest, the harvest is over, and the earth sinks into its winter sleep.
The goddess of the moon, Ceridwen—her name in Welsh means “bent woman,” and refers to the shape Americans call “the man in the moon” and Welsh tradition pictures as an old woman stooping over a cauldron—is the keeper of the secrets of Druid initiation. She plays a central role in the legend of the great Druid bard Taliesin. In that story she has three children: a daughter named Creirwy (“Heron’s Egg”), a son named Morfran (“Sea Raven”), and another son named Afagddu (“Complete Darkness”). These are the different forms of the moon: Creirwy as the full, Morfran as the crescent, and Afagddu as the days close to the new moon when no sign of the moon can be seen at all. She is pictured in modern Druid lore as an old woman with moon-white hair, clad in heavy garments of brown and black, stirring a steaming cauldron.
It’s probably necessary, while talking about gods and goddesses, to clarify a point that sometimes gets confused in modern magical literature. The polytheist faiths of the ancient world were by and large very clear about the difference between human beings and deities. Some people of unusual holiness and power, as we have seen, came to be recognized after their deaths as incarnations of deities, or as minor deities in their own right. This was the exception that proved the rule, though, and was subject to stringent tests—in both Athens and Rome, for example, before divine honors could be conferred on any dead person, the legislature had to investigate the case and pass a bill to that effect. (The Roman Catholic process by which saints are investigated and proclaimed is descended from the Roman version of this custom.)
The point I hope to make here can be put even more plainly. You are not a god or a goddess, and practicing rituals of self-initiation will not make you one. The goal of initiation as the ancient mysteries practiced it, and as the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel confer it today, is to come into a closer relationship with the transcendent spiritual realities at the center of being, not to elbow those realities aside so that your ego can take their place.
Furthermore—and this is crucial—these rituals will not turn you into Merlin, or make you a priest or priestess of the god Moridunos, or give you any other special status you can parade in front of your friends. Their purpose is to attune you with the profound spiritual forces that are expressed through the traditional stories of Merlin, which “never happened but always are,” and to participate in the energies corresponding to eight Celtic deities who correspond in a subtle but real manner to the eight stations of the year. That process of attunement and participation will lead to greater insight and personal growth, just as a similar process gave the same gifts to the mystai and epoptai of the Eleusinian mysteries.
Initiation and Self-Initiation
In the course of the year, according to the scheme of eight festivals just outlined, it’s possible to work with each stage of the ancient legends of Merlin in turn, and in the process, to awaken each of the spheres of the Tree of Life accessible to human consciousness in a systematic manner. This adds a new and important dimension to the ancient custom of working mystery rituals at intervals around the cycle of the year, and makes it possible for those rituals to function as the keynotes in an effective system of self-initiation.
The origins of the ancient mysteries are lost in antiquity, but some modern scholars have suggested that they began with seasonal reenactments of a sacred story. Over time, the process by which each new generation came to participate in those rites took on greater and greater importance, until the mysteries served primarily as a way of initiation and the purely seasonal elements faded into the background. Even after the mysteries had been reworked so they could be done in private houses, they remained a group practice, something done by epoptai for the benefit of mystai. The idea of self-initiation only emerged very late, as the ancient world approached its end and initiates of the mysteries searched for ways to preserve their rites and teachings in the face of Christian persecution.
Yet emerge it did, and several surviving rituals show how self-initiation was practiced in ancient times. Among the many rituals preserved in the Greek magical papyri found in Egypt, for example, is a liturgy of Mithras adapted for solitary use. The great scholar of religions Albrecht Dieterich argued that this ritual derives from the highest of the seven degrees of Mithraic initiation. Whether or not this is the case, it shows that the mysteries of Mithras had been adapted by the third century CE to use the technical methods of ancient ceremonial magic for the purpose of self-initiation.45
An equally revealing ritual of self-initiation can be found in the Picatrix. Derived from the austere and intellectual mysteries of Hermes Trismegistus, this ritual is intended to awaken the Perfect Nature or higher self of the initiate. It was performed once each year at a day and time when the moon was in the first degree of Aries. The practitioner made offerings of wine, oil, and incense, faced east, chanted the four secret names of Perfect Nature, and recited an invocation—all of these, of course, are technical methods that saw much use in the ceremonial magic of the time.46 Elsewhere in the Picatrix, similar rituals allowed mages to initiate themselves into the mysteries of the planetary gods.
Nowadays religious persecution is no longer a problem in most of the world’s industrial nations, and for several centuries now, initiation rituals of various kinds have again been performed by groups of experienced practitioners for new initiates. Self-initiation, however, remains a valid approach, and for many people it remains the best of the available options. Not everyone, after all, lives within easy commuting distance of a group that performs one of the modern magical initiatory systems, or can find the free time and the money to travel to such a group on a regular basis and help support its work.
Nearly everyone, however, can find the time to carry out a program of self-initiation in their off hours. This was why, when I reconstructed the system of Druidical ceremonial magic set out in my book The Celtic Golden Dawn, I designed it around a process of self-initiation. In that process, each student proceeds at his or her own pace through the three traditional grades of Ovate, Bard, and Druid, using the daily practice of ritual, meditation, and divination to accomplish the work of awakening the magical potentials of the self.
The mysteries in ancient times, however, were not restricted to those few who intended to take up the demanding spiritual disciplines of ceremonial magic. The procession of mystai that went to Eleusis in the month of Boedromion each year included men and women from every walk of life. Some of them meant to turn initiation in the mysteries into the keynote of a life devoted to the search for wisdom, but many others made room for the mysteries as part of more ordinary ways of living. The same was true of most of the ancient mysteries, and it can be just as true of their modern equivalents.
Self-initiation in the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel does require a little more knowledge of ritual practice than it would have taken to be initiated into the Eleusinian mysteries, or for that matter the mysteries of Moridunos in late Roman Britain. After all, no one else is there to perform the ritual for you! In the next chapter, we’ll walk step by step through the rituals that will be needed for the eight ceremonies of Merlin’s Wheel.
One core advantage in self-initiation is that the newcomer to the work can start with a simple form of initiation, work at that level for a period, then use the skills developed at that stage of the work to add higher and deeper dimensions to the practice if he or she wishes to do so. The traditions of the Druid Revival make this easy by dividing the initiatory process into the three grades of Ovate, Bard, and Druid.
In traditional Druidry, the first or Ovate grade is the stage of beginnings, and its symbolic color is green, emblematic of the first green shoots of springtime growth. The second or Bardic grade is the stage of growth and development, of moving into higher and deeper levels of experience, and its symbolic color is the blue of sky and sea, emblematic of the heights and the depths. The third or Druid grade is the stage of mastery, and its symbolic color is white, emblematic of the shining light in which all colors are united.47
In the system of rituals presented in this book, the three grades are used as a basis for three Circles, which are three ways that the eight rituals of Merlin’s Wheel can be practiced. The Ovate Circle rituals are designed for complete beginners who have no previous experience of ceremonial magic, Druidical or otherwise. By the time you finish working through all eight ceremonies in their simplified Ovate form, you’ll be ready to proceed to the next set of rituals, those of the Bardic Circle, which have been expanded considerably by the addition of further ceremonial and meditative tools. A year spent working the Bardic Grade rituals, in turn, will prepare you to go on to the more complex and powerful rituals of the Druid Circle. If you come to this work as a beginner, it will take three years of steady work before you can perform the full set of eight rituals in their complete form—but those three years will also initiate you thoroughly into the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel and take you far along the path of self-initiation more generally.
If you come to these mysteries with experience in other magical traditions, you’ll find it useful to read through the rituals that follow and compare the work that’s needed to perform them to your existing skill set. If you have any doubts about the fit between your training and the work of Merlin’s Wheel, it’s probably wisest to start with the Ovate Circle rituals and work up from there—even if nearly all of the work is familiar to you, every initiate needs a refresher course in the basics now and then.
Finally, if you’re already a student of the system of Druidical ceremonial magic presented in my book The Celtic Golden Dawn, much of what follows will already be familiar to you—though there’s some new material to master here as well. The fine details of combining the work of Merlin’s Wheel with the broader training system of The Celtic Golden Dawn are covered in Chapter Eight.
37. I am indebted to John Crowley’s visionary novel The Solitudes (originally titled Aegypt) for this metaphor.
38. See Richardson and Hughes, Ancient Magicks for a New Age, for an account of one such group.
39. In Nichols and Kirkup, The Cosmic Shape.
40. See Scholem, The Origins of the Kabbalah, for the Gnostic origins of the Jewish Kabbalah.
41. See Williams ab Ithel, The Barddas of Iolo Morganwg.
42. It’s an interesting fact that the only languages on Earth that don’t have a common word for this basic human reality belong to modern Western industrial societies.
43. Some modern American Wiccan traditions associate Mabon with the autumn equinox. I am not a Wiccan and don’t pretend to understand the reasoning behind this attribution; in the Druid Revival traditions, the Mabon as a young deity is primarily a springtime god, and also features in some rituals of Lughnasadh/Calan Gwyngalaf as a figure representing masculine energy to balance the feminine energy of Imbolc/Calan Myri.
44. Julius Caesar wrote that the ancient Gauls used Greek letters for writing, so the numerical value of the name is unlikely to be accidental.
45. The ritual has been published in translation many times and can be found in full in Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries, 211–21.
46. The full text is given in Greer and Warnock, Picatrix, 150–51.
47. This order of grades—Ovate, Bard, Druid—was standard in nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Druid traditions. Ross Nichols, the founder of the Order of Bards Ovates and Druids (OBOD), deliberately changed this in his organization, putting the Bardic grade first to emphasize the poetic and artistic side of the tradition. As OBOD is the largest and most influential Druid order in the world today, Nichols’ order of the grades is the most common in contemporary Druidry; I prefer, however, to use the older approach.