Painting by Emil Johann Lauffer (19th century). Merlin presenting the future king Arthur (while wearing a headdress that feature’s a shaman’s horns).

Updated 22 May, 2025 - 22:55 John Matthews

The Enduring Legacy of Merlin: Shaman, Warrior, Wild Man, Magician, Prophet

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Imagine the scene. Merlin, however you see him—as a grey-bearded but ageless man, or youth with more knowledge in his eyes that he should have—sits in a room somewhere in Wales. He is speaking to a second man, a cleric or possibly a monk, who writes as fast as he can, with a sharpened quill on parchment, by the light of a rush lamp or wavering candle, the words of the great prophet.

Almost in what we now would call stream-of-consciousness Merlin, perhaps with eyes closed, watches events unfold on the screen of his eyelids, unfolds the things only he can see: the coming of the Great Dragon, the Antichrist; the crowning of Arthur, the greatest king of the western world; the fall of kingdoms, the loss of crowns.

All this and more. And in between these prophetic utterances, fragments of stories from the vast panoply of Arthurian romance, some familiar—the quest for the Grail, the adventures of Lancelot and Percival—others never heard before: the dream of Guinevere and the bringing of letters to King Arthur from the mighty Prester John, whose fabled Kingdom in the Far East became a beacon of hope for the beleaguered West in this long-ago time.

Guinevere and the Court at Camelot, painting by Raimund von Wichera, circa 1900. (Public Domain).

According to the Medieval French Story of Merlin, the last person to hear the voice of the great magician was the great knight Sir Gawain. He was himself, at the time, in some difficulty, having been turned into a dwarf. But having recovered from this adventure he carried home to Arthur the last words of the mage:

'Never shall no man speak with me after you, therefore it is for nothing that any man should try to seek me out.'

But this last call, the 'Cri de Merlin' as it is called, still echoes in our ears, just as the figure of Merlin himself continues to exert a profound fascination on the Western world.

Dozens of books, plays, and films have appeared in recent years, which have kept the focus of attention on this remarkable being, who combines the roles of wise man, seer, prophet, and shaman and whose story is one of the great native epics of Britain. Volumes of prophecies, attributed to Merlin, have appeared over the centuries since this story was written down—his cry taking this form so that all could hear it.

That this Merlin is a British or at least Celtic figure is important. While the Arthurian legends of which he is such an important part betray the extensive influence of French and Germanic story-tellers, the story of Merlin, in its purest form, draws entirely upon native British traditions and beliefs. Despite efforts to trace his origins back to Atlantis, he remains essentially a Celtic figure, whose characteristics are traceable to specific themes within Celtic tradition.

An illustration of Merlin as a druid in The Rose (1848), by unknown engraver. (Public Domain)

Merlin and Apollo

Having started this much, we should also mention the deep mythic and cultural connections between Merlin and the primal Apollo, both originating in the tribal prophetic traditions shared by the Celts and their cousins the ancient Greeks.

The Greeks themselves had a tradition (quoted by Diodorus Siculus) that Apollo came to them from the land of the Hyperboreans. In the primal stream of tradition that holds the deepest lore of Merlin and Apollo, both beings are concerned with the light within the land, the Sun at Midnight, the Underworld. In later formal religion, Apollo becomes the deity of an arisen Sun, while the Medieval Merlin, whose texts hold many traces of Classical Greek mythology and astrology, becomes a Druidic figure holding together many strands of wisdom teaching through the prophecies and tales associated with his name.

Merlin indeed represents a very ancient strand of wildness within human nature. He grows out of the tradition of the Wild Man who was seen, by medieval writers, as akin to 'natural man' a being somehow poised between the states of wildness and civilization, belonging perhaps to a lost golden age. This is especially poignant when we consider that Merlin himself strove to re-create that golden time, a perfect earthly kingdom over which Arthur, his protégé, would rule, guided by the mage's wisdom, protected by his magic, steered through the shoals of life on his way to winning the greatest of goals—the Quest for the Grail.

‘Piety: The Knights of the Round Table about to Depart in Quest of the Holy Grail’ by William Dyce (1849). (Scottish National Gallery/Public Domain).

But these things were not to be, given the nature of humanity. The kingdom fell because the vessels—including Arthur himself—were too weak to contain the glories of the Grail. The great vision of the Round Table, built by Merlin himself—'Round, in the likeness of the world'—where all men would meet as equals, fell away, broken by the internecine quarrels of the knights, the illicit love of Lancelot and Guinevere (strength and beauty personified), wracked by the bitterness of Arthur's own son, Mordred, begotten on his own half-sister. Small wonder if Merlin chose to flee from this failure of his dream—chose to withdraw into his 'Esplumoir', the observatory built for him by his sister, and there to live out his days—perhaps into and beyond our own time - in study of the patterns within the heavens: a far more productive study than that of human frailty.

It is this atmosphere of possible glory crossed by impending doom, which gives the Arthurian cycle its peculiar power to enthrall us to this day. We know the torments and suffering of these human people as well as we know ourselves. Merlin, a principle mover in all of this, is bound to capture our attention, concentrating, as he does so many of the themes of the great cycle in his person.