Dancing Round Merlin’s Wheel
The eight rituals of Merlin’s Wheel can be worked entirely by themselves as a system of personal initiation with nothing added to them. For those who want to go further, though, additional studies, practices, and activities can be combined with the rituals as given in this book. The rituals of Merlin’s Wheel can also be practiced together by more than one person. Finally, for those who feel themselves called to the hard but rewarding labor of training in ceremonial magic, in addition to the rituals of self-initiation taught in these pages, it’s entirely possible to practice the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel and the additional practices that go with them alongside the course of training and initiation in Druidical magic set out in my book The Celtic Golden Dawn. The pages that follow will explain how each of these things can be done.
Learning More About Merlin
One simple and straightforward way to make the experience of self-initiation richer and more meaningful is to explore the legends from which the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel draw their symbolism. As discussed earlier in this book, Merlin has been turned into a pop culture icon over the last few centuries, and in the usual way of such things, most of the depth, strangeness, and power that once gathered around the archaic Celtic god Moridunos, He of the Sea-Fortress, has been replaced by an assortment of glossy clichés having more to do with today’s cultural fashions and crowd psychology than anything else. The more effectively you are able to get past the modern veneer of pop culture to the real Merlin—ancient Celtic god, Dark Age prophet, mythic figure at the heart of an archaic mystery tradition—the more power the initiations of Merlin’s Wheel will have for you.
Fortunately, there are several good modern books that can help bridge the gap. The best currently available introduction to the Merlin legend and its implications is Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin, which starts with Geoffrey of Monmouth and goes from there to put the Dark Age figures of Merlin Ambrosius and Merlin Caledonius in their historical context.
On a deeper and more magical level, R. J. Stewart’s The Prophetic Vision of Merlin and The Mystic Life of Merlin (now available in a single volume titled, appropriately enough, Merlin) explore Geoffrey of Monmouth’s two Merlin narratives, the Merlin passages in The History of the Kings of Britain and The Life of Merlin, with a keen eye for the many mystical, occult, and psychological meanings concealed in these enigmatic texts. Stewart has written and edited a number of other books about Merlin and his legends, and also helped produce a tarot deck based on the symbolism woven into the Merlin legend. While these are based on a different magical system than the one used in this book and go in directions that differ from those explored here, they are worth studying in their own right.
Some readers, especially those who are already familiar with the Western occult tradition, will also find much of value in two works by contemporary occultist Gareth Knight. The Secret Tradition in Arthurian Legend is a detailed analysis of the entire legend of Arthur from the standpoint of one system of Western occultism, the system created by the influential British occult author and teacher Dion Fortune. Knight has also edited a collection of Fortune’s own writings on Arthurian matters, together with those of several more recent writers in the same tradition, under the title The Arthurian Formula. Both are well worth reading.
All these are excellent starting places. From there, the journey leads straight to the medieval Merlin narratives themselves. Nearly all of these are found embedded in the legends of King Arthur; fortunately the vogue for all things Arthurian in recent decades means that most of the traditional accounts of Merlin are readily available. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s The History of the Kings of Britain is in print as I write this, translated into English and available in an inexpensive paperback edition. Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, in which Merlin features at length, has not been out of print for something like two and a half centuries. Other medieval versions of the Merlin legend are less readily available, but a little searching in used bookstores, online or off, will very often turn up treasures.
The literature of the Middle Ages takes some getting used to if you haven’t read any of it before. Medieval stories were written to be read aloud—one of the most common ways to pass the time in those days was to have someone read aloud from a book while the other members of the household busied themselves with handicrafts or relaxed in the warmth from the glowing hearth. A story meant to be read aloud needs a different sense of pace and rhythm than a story meant to be read silently by one person alone. (Try reading a passage from a medieval Arthurian tale aloud sometime, imagining that you are a squire or lady-in-waiting in a noble household and the other members of the household are listening to you; you’ll find that the habits of medieval authors make much more sense once you’ve done that.)
The reason it’s worth making the effort to read medieval stories about Merlin, rather than just relying on modern versions of the legends, is that nearly all the modern versions have been watered down to an embarrassing degree. Popular fiction nowadays, even when it’s supposedly set in some distant time or in a world of pure imagination, stocks its stories with characters who are basically modern people with modern interests and concerns. That helps us place ourselves in the characters’ shoes and share their adventures and experiences, and thus makes the story more enjoyable for most readers, but much is lost in the process: above all, the genuine power and strangeness of distant times. The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there, and even in the medium of fiction, flattening out the past into a rehash of the present is one of the ways we make the world duller and less vivid than it would otherwise be.
Of all the reams of modern fiction written about Merlin, I know of only two novels in the English language featuring him that capture some of the archaic mystery that once gathered around He of the Sea-Fortress: That Hideous Strength by C. S. Lewis and Porius: A Romance of the Dark Ages by John Cowper Powys. Lewis, though mostly famous today as the author of The Chronicles of Narnia and a friend of iconic fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien, spent his career as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, and understood the culture and worldview of the Middle Ages more deeply than any other scholar of his generation. The Merlin of his novel is truly medieval, a figure Geoffrey of Monmouth or Sir Thomas Malory would have recognized.
John Cowper Powys’s Merlin is a stranger and mightier figure still. Powys’s friends called him “the Old Earth Man,” and for good reason; Powys saturated himself in the traditional folklore of the British landscape and drew from it the raw material for two novels and a great deal of vivid poetry. The Merlin of Porius is a wild woodland figure, somewhere on the misty borderland that connects human beings with animals and with gods, and his magic has a degree of authenticity to it worlds away from the glossy Hollywood special-effects foolery so heavily featured in pop culture these days. My guess, though it’s only a guess, is that the version of Merlin presented in Powys’s novel is as close as we will ever get to the primal Celtic god once worshiped on the hilltops of southern Wales and the slopes of Hart Fell.
Celebrations of the Seasons
The rituals of Merlin’s Wheel can also be practiced alongside some more general pattern of seasonal celebrations linked to the eight festivals of the modern Pagan year-wheel. If you already follow a Pagan spiritual path, odds are that the tradition you follow already sets out a sequence of rituals or other practices to be done at the eight stations of the year. The same is true of many varieties of alternative religion that don’t identify with the word “Pagan”; most Druids and many Heathens, for example, celebrate the same eight festivals as their Pagan friends and neighbors, though of course the celebrations take very different forms.
There are a great many books in print just now that explore meditations, practices, and household activities relating to the cycle of the year and its eight stations, and much of the material these books present can be woven into the practices in this book with good effect. Almost anything that brings you into contact with the cycles of nature will help feed the subtle linkage between myth, ritual, and seasonal cycle that gives the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel their effect. The simple habit of spending some time out of doors at least once a week around the cycle of the year, quieting the mind and simply attending to what nature is doing, is an effective way of accomplishing this goal. Plenty of books that discuss Pagan spirituality from one or another perspective have other methods to offer that help to do the same thing.
On the other hand, I don’t recommend trying to mash together the rituals of Merlin’s Wheel with those of any other traditional set of rites celebrating the stations of the year. The rituals set out in this book have been crafted carefully to accomplish the work of self-initiation and, for that purpose, to have certain specific effects on the practitioner. Those effects may well not be compatible with the effects some other ritual is meant to produce; the result of mixing up rituals is too often rather like what happened to the inexperienced cook who wanted to bake a cake, found that the sugar jar was empty, and decided that two cups of salt would be a good substitute for two cups of sugar! Instead of trying to blend unrelated rituals together, it’s normally best to participate in the ritual of your existing tradition without alteration, then, a day before or a day after, set aside the necessary time to perform the appropriate ritual from this book.
Even so, there is one form of celebration almost universal in ancient Pagan cultures that can easily be combined with the ceremonies of Merlin’s Wheel. This is the sacred feast. Depending on your circumstances and preferences, this can be as simple as ordering an especially fancy pizza on the nights when you perform the rituals in this book, or as complex as helping to cook and serve an elaborate dinner for your family, friends, or fellow practitioners of these mysteries.
Whatever kind of feast fits your schedule, your pocketbook, and your taste, one thing should always be included: an offering of part of the food to the deity who presides over the seasonal ritual. This is what transforms an ordinary meal into a spiritually powerful action. Simply take a portion of the main dish—a slice of the fancy pizza, if that’s what’s on the menu that evening—put it on a plate of its own, and set it on something that’s higher than the level of the table from which you’ll be eating. As you set the offering in the place you’ve chosen, say, “[Name of deity], please accept this offering and join us in this celebration.” You can use some more ornate ritual of offering if you follow a tradition that includes one, but something this simple is entirely sufficient.
Then, when you’ve finished your meal, take the offering down and set it on the table from which you’ve eaten your share of the food. You (and everyone else present, if you have guests) should then eat the offering in silence.58 When it’s gone, say, “[Name of deity], thank you for your bounty and your blessing.” Again, you can use some more complicated prayer of thanks if you wish or if the tradition you follow provides one, but a few simple words of thanks are all that’s necessary.
It’s worth taking a moment here to explain the point of this little rite because too many people these days tend to confuse the traditional Pagan concept of making offerings to the gods with the Christian concept of sacrifice, with all its attendant baggage of self-denial and poorly camouflaged masochism. You don’t make offerings to the gods because you think you’ve been bad or because you think that depriving yourself of something you like will make the gods happy. (It won’t.) You make offerings to the gods in precisely the same spirit that you might offer a visiting friend a cold beer or a seat at the dinner table.59
To the ancient Pagan way of thinking, while there’s an important difference between gods and human beings, it’s not the absolute distinction as the monotheist faiths generally insist on. The gods are wise, strong, and generous to a quite literally superhuman degree, but the relationships between gods and human beings are more a matter of fellowship and community than cringing subservience. You offer a portion of your feast to the god or goddess who presides over the station of the year-wheel to welcome his or her presence. The god or goddess receives the gift and returns it, blessed with his or her spiritual power, and you partake gratefully of the food that he or she has blessed in acknowledgment of the abundant gifts that the gods shower on humanity and the living earth.
Group Workings
The rituals in this book have been designed for aspirants to the mysteries who work the rites of Merlin’s Wheel alone. Given the diversity of the modern Pagan and magical scenes, that’s necessary—most of the people who purchase this book and set out to practice its rites won’t have access to anyone else interested in working the mysteries along with them. As we’ve seen, it also reflects the role of self-initiation in the mystery traditions of late classical antiquity, and in the long years of hiding since open celebration of the mysteries was suppressed by force.
Nonetheless, if the response to my previous books on Celtic spirituality and Druid magic is anything to go by, there will be some readers who want to perform the rituals in this book together with other people. That’s an option for those who wish to pursue it. Since the groups in question will more than likely cover the entire range of numbers from two people to several dozen, and the level of previous magical experience among the participants may range from complete novices to capable operative mages with decades of practice under their ceremonial belts, detailed scripts and instructions would be a waste of time. Certain basic principles, however, can be reviewed here.
The first principle is that the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel are not intended to be a spectator sport. As far as possible, every participant should take some role in the ceremony. It requires very little training in ritual performance to purify the space with water, to consecrate it with fire, or to read aloud the narrative of the season. It requires very little more to perform the Lesser Ritual of the Pentagram or to perform some other more complex part of the ritual work.
The kind of esoteric grandstanding in which a single more experienced person does all the ritual work while everyone else is assigned the role of admiring audience is embarrassingly common in some corners of the Pagan and magical communities these days and should be avoided. The more demanding parts in the ritual can certainly be assigned to more experienced participants, at least at first, but part of the goal of any group magical working should be to help all the participants get to a level of experience and skill that will allow any of them to handle any part successfully. One of the initiatory dimensions of the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel is precisely that it teaches the practitioner to perform an effective set of magical workings; that same dimension is as important in group work as in solitary self-initiation.
That said, there’s a flip side to the point just made. Not everyone who wants to get involved in a ceremony of this kind will necessarily be willing to invest the necessary time to learn and practice a part, or the effort needed to do it well. You owe it to yourself, and to the other participants in the ceremony, to reserve the roles that take work for those who are prepared to do the work in question, and to assign those who don’t have the time or the willingness to prepare for the ritual to less important parts, or to the sidelines.
It also happens from time to time that someone gets involved in a ritual working of this kind with the intention, conscious or otherwise, of disrupting it. Many people these days have unresolved feelings of personal inadequacy and rebelliousness, and some of them vent those feelings by taking an adversarial role in any group setting. Those of my readers who have been involved in any part of the alternative-spirituality scene have likely seen this pattern of behavior in action far too often for their comfort. If you have such a person in a group that’s enacting the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel and a friendly conversation or two with the person doesn’t result in any change in behavior, it really is the best option either to remove that person from the group, if that’s an option, or to walk away. Nothing will be gained by trying to placate a person whose interest in the group is limited to how much disruption he or she can cause and how quickly the group can be wrecked or hijacked for some unrelated purpose.
The second principle is that practice makes perfect. Just as you need to practice each of the elements of the ceremony beforehand if you’re working the rites of Merlin’s Wheel alone, if you’re doing the ritual with others, your group needs to meet at least once and go through the complete ceremony before celebrating each station of the Wheel. This is true even when the group has been meeting and celebrating the rituals for years. Inevitably people will rotate into new ritual roles, experienced participants will forget how things worked a year before, and so on. Regular practice is the one way to keep this sort of thing from messing up your ceremony—and of course this means solitary practice, for those who have significant ritual work to do, as well as group practice for all.
A great many people in today’s alternative-spirituality scene like to focus on spontaneous, improvisational ceremonies. That’s fine, but it limits the kind of ceremony you can perform to those that can be done by untrained participants without practice and preparation. The ceremonies of Merlin’s Wheel don’t fall into that category. To borrow a metaphor from music, there are pieces of music that are suited to community sing-alongs and there are pieces of music for which you need capable musicians willing to put in hours of practice, and restricting things to the community sing-along level means that there’s plenty of really good music that will never be performed. The ceremonies of Merlin’s Wheel aren’t all the way over to the end of the spectrum occupied by Bach and Mozart, to be sure, but they aren’t the kind of thing you can just pick up and start singing out of the book. Invest a little time in study, practice, and preparation, and the results will more than repay your efforts.
A group of people working together can also include other activities alongside practice and the celebration of the mysteries. There’s much to be said, for example, for setting up an informal book club for members of the group that want to study the Merlin legends together, and at least as much to be said for having a feast together after each celebration. Other seasonal activities can just as easily be added to the schedule depending on the time and resources available to group members.
The final principle I want to cover here is that group workings may be enjoyable (or may not be!), but they aren’t required. If you can’t find anyone else who wants to perform the ceremonies with you; if you simply would rather skip the drama and follow a solitary path; if you get involved in a group and it turns out, for one reason or another, to be more trouble than it’s worth—you can always do things entirely on your own. You don’t need anyone else’s help or approval to follow the path of self-initiation into the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel. When you bought your copy of this book it came with all the permission you need to work the rituals it contains. Now all you have to do is study, practice, and perform the ceremonies, by yourself or with others, with or without the additional studies or activities mentioned in this chapter, in as simple or as ornate a form as you happen to prefer.
The Mysteries of Merlin
and The Celtic Golden Dawn
One additional choice before you is whether you want to make your celebrations of the ceremonies of The Mysteries of Merlin part of the broader process of magical study and training outlined in my book The Celtic Golden Dawn. As mentioned in the chapters you’ve already read, the rituals of The Mysteries of Merlin rely on the system of Druidical magic taught in that earlier book. You don’t have to take on the labor of becoming an initiate of that system in order to benefit from the rites of self-initiation covered here. On the other hand, the material covered in each book is completely compatible with the other, and the two bodies of lore fuse together neatly to yield an even more effective system of magical self-initiation than either one provides on its own.
You’ll want to make a few minor adjustments if you’re celebrating the rituals in this book alongside the course of training given in The Celtic Golden Dawn. The opening and closing rituals in this book are simplified versions of the ones given in the earlier book, and the more complete versions from The Celtic Golden Dawn should be used instead. You should also have the cross and circle on your altar, in the position appropriate to the grade you’re working, and wear your white robe with the sash or sashes of any grades you have earned. Finally, once you have made and consecrated your wand and serpent’s egg, you may certainly use these in the Druid Circle ceremonies of The Mysteries of Merlin.
The rituals of the octagram presented in the Druid Circle of this book are not included in The Celtic Golden Dawn, but they can readily be incorporated into the rituals and practices of the Druid Grade of that book. They provide an effective way to summon and banish the energies of the spheres of the Tree of Life and may be used in place of the Supreme Ritual of the Pentagram in ceremonies of the Druid Grade.
A few words about meshing the grades and the circles may also be helpful. The system of training presented in The Celtic Golden Dawn assigns a minimum of four months preparation before the Ovate Grade initiation, a minimum of eight months before the Bardic Grade initiation, and a minimum of a year before the Druid Grade initiation. If you start work on The Celtic Golden Dawn and The Mysteries of Merlin at the same time, and complete the work of each grade in the minimum time allotted for it, the Ovate Circle will occupy the year you spend as an Aspirant and Ovate, the Bardic Circle the year you spend as a Bard, and thereafter, as a Druid, you may celebrate the ceremonies of the Druid Circle.
If it takes you longer than the minimum to complete the training of the grades, the choice is yours whether to advance to the next circle at the completion of the year or to hold off until you’re ready to take the initiation of the corresponding grade. The latter, while it requires a certain amount of patience, is worth considering. In magical training, there are no prizes for hurrying through the work—quite the contrary, those who succeed best are those who take their time and are sure they have mastered one stage before proceeding to the next. Those who approach the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel in that spirit will not be disappointed in the results.
58. It’s probably necessary to note that in modern Wicca, food offerings made to deities aren’t consumed by the worshipers, and some people of that faith overgeneralize from that habit to insist that no one should ever do so. That’s news to Hindus, who reverently eat prasad (food offered to divinities) as members of their faith have done for thousands of years, and to practitioners of Shinto, who sip rice wine that has been offered to the kami every time they visit a shrine. Most other polytheist faiths, ancient and modern, do some equivalent of the same thing. It’s wholly appropriate for Wiccans to practice their faith and deal with food offerings as they see fit, of course, but the mysteries of Merlin’s Wheel are not Wiccan ceremonies and needn’t follow Wiccan rules.
59. I have discussed this way of thinking about offerings at some length in my book A World Full of Gods.