John Michael Greer - The Mysteries of Merlin: Ceremonial Magic for the Druid Path

Llewellyn Publications

Woodbury, Minnesota

Copyright Information

The Mysteries of Merlin: Ceremonial Magic for the Druid Path 2020 by John Michael Greer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any matter whatsoever, including Internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Publications, except in the form of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

As the purchaser of this e-book, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. The text may not be otherwise reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or recorded on any other storage device in any form or by any means.

Any unauthorized usage of the text without express written permission of the publisher is a violation of the authors copyright and is illegal and punishable by law.

First e-book edition 2020

E-book ISBN: 9780738759678

Cover design by Shannon McKuhen

Editing by Nicole Borneman

Interior art on pages by Eugene Smith. All other art by the Llewellyn Art Department

Llewellyn Publications is an imprint of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending)

ISBN: 978-0-7387-5949-4

Llewellyn Publications does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business arrangements between our authors and the public.

Any Internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific reference will continue or be maintained. Please refer to the publishers website for links to current author websites.

Llewellyn Publications

Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd.

2143 Wooddale Drive

Woodbury, MN 55125

www.llewellyn.com

Manufactured in the United States of America

Contents

: Rites of Initiation

: The Mysteries of Merlin

: The Way of Self-Initiation

: Rituals and Meditations

: The Ovate Circle

: The Bardic Circle

: The Druid Circle

: Dancing Round Merlins Wheel

: Other Mysteries, Other Gods

Introduction

T his book sets out a system of self-initiation that is based on ancient Celtic Pagan spirituality but uses the tools of modern ceremonial magic. That combination, though it has roots going back many centuries, may startle readers familiar with the attitudes of todays Pagan and occult communities, so a few words of explanation are probably necessary here.

For many decades now, an awkward fissure has run through the middle of the magical scene in most English-speaking countries. On one side are ceremonial magicians, who practice complex magical disciplines based mostly on the Hermetic tradition of ancient times as reworked in the Renaissance and then again in the modern magical revival. On the other side are Pagans, Heathens, and others who practice a range of religious, spiritual, and magical practices founded on ancient polytheist faiths. Druidry, my own spiritual home, has long been poised even more awkwardly between the two sides of the fissure, embracing elements of both movements and regarded with a certain amount of suspicion by the more doctrinaire members of both camps.

Less than a century ago, however, that split did not yet exist. Its a matter of historical record, for example, that Dion Fortuneone of the twentieth centurys most influential occultistswas also among the pioneers of what became the Neopagan movement and celebrated public rituals in honor of Pan and Isis in London in the late 1930s. Many other occultists of her time occupied the same comfortable middle ground between Pagan spirituality and ceremonial magic without seeing any contradiction between the two.

In the second quarter of the twentieth century, a number of Druid groups in Britain set out to take that fusion of occultism and Paganism a major step further by reworking the Golden Dawn tradition of ceremonial magic so that it used Druid symbolism and called on the powers of Pagan Celtic deities. For complex historical reasons, those traditions faded out after the Second World War, but scraps of their teachings survived. As a Druid and a Golden Dawn initiate, I found those scraps tantalizing and eventually set out to reverse engineer a complete system of Druid ceremonial magic along the same lines set out by those pioneering Druid mages of the 1920s and 1930s. The system that resulted saw print in 2013 with the publication of my book The Celtic Golden Dawn .

That book got an enthusiastic welcome from Druids and others who wanted to practice ceremonial magic but werent comfortable with the way that existing traditions relied on names and symbols drawn from Judeo- Christian sources. Several similar projects are currently underway to provide effective techniques of ceremonial magic to Pagans, Heathens, polytheists, and others who are drawn to ceremonial magic but want to invoke their own gods and goddesses in magical rites.

At the same time, the toolkit of ceremonial magic has unexpected gifts to offer todays rebirth of the old polytheist faiths. Dion Fortunes rites of Isis and Pan, mentioned above, point to one of these. Using methods derived from her background in Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, Fortune crafted rituals that filled the same role, and invoked some of the same powers, as the mystery initiations of the classical Pagan world. Her rites are worth careful study and, for those drawn to them, ritual reenactment. At the same time, they point toward possibilities that have not been explored in the Western world in sixteen centuries.

As the first chapter of this book shows, the ancient mysteriesthis is the traditional name for rituals of initiation linked to seasonal cycles and based on the mythic narratives of Pagan gods and goddessesplayed an important role in the spiritual lives of people in the classical world. Those rituals were lost many centuries ago and in all probability will never be recovered. As Dion Fortune showed, however, it is entirely possible to use the methods of ceremonial magic to create new rituals that will serve the same purpose.

Fortunes rituals were designed to be performed by a group of ritualists for an audience, the way that some of the ancient mysteries seem to have been done. There is another option, however, and that is the way of self-initiation. Ceremonial magicians have known for centuries that the same effects produced by a formal initiation in a temple or lodge, conferred by a team of experienced ritualists on a candidate, can also be produced by an individual aspirant in solitude by the repeated practice of an appropriately designed set of ceremonies and meditations.

That was the method I used in The Celtic Golden Dawn , so that students of the system could initiate themselves into it by their own perseverance and hard work. The same principle can be used to self-initiate into an equivalent of the ancient mysteries, and that is the option I have set out to provide here. The mystery I chose for this working, though poorly documented, also has much of value in its own right to teach todays spiritual seekers: the rites once practiced in honor of an archaic Celtic god whose myths come down to us in garbled and fragmentary form as the legends of Merlin.