‘Magic in Merlin’s Realm’ by Francis Young
Review: Dr. Francis Young, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022, ISBN: 9781009067133 (Kindle Edition)
review by Craig ‘VI’ Slee
Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain is a history book. It’s a history book written by an academic, a Cambridge-educated historian of religion, and a Fellow of The Royal Historical Society.
It is dense, in both terms of references and implications. In all honesty, it is the book that has taken me the longest to read for Paralibrum review – so far at least – in order that I could absorb it properly. There’s a lot to absorb, particularly if, like me, you have only a hazy memory of your school history lessons about the Tudors, Stuarts, and earlier dynasties – if you were even taught that, of course.
So, some might ask, why bother reading it? After all, history books are generally unexciting. They rarely get the blood pumping, unless you’re a particular kind of person, and this reviewer is friends with several academics, historians and otherwise, who would cheerfully describe themselves as nerds. Should one read it because of its rigorous bibliography and endnotes, or the way almost every chapter has a clearly defined, subheaded Conclusion which brings you back to the point Young is making, if you become lost? Should one read it because it is clearly written in everyday language, with minimal jargon?
Should you read it because of Young’s thesis that magic has been alongside religion, as a political force – rather than some ignored stepchild, or lowly by-blow from an orgy of superstition – throughout British (and European) history?
I think so.
By using the figure of Merlin as created by Geoffrey of Monmouth, Young provides a lens for us to understand that the idea of the magical practitioner was not confined to solely peripheral figures such as the proverbial witch on the edge of the village but that the image of the magus is its double, found at the heart of mediaeval, early modern, and even modern politics – often at the heart of British court life. As Young points out, however, court life does not necessarily mean at the monarch’s right hand – yet in some cases, British monarchs deliberately cultivated the image of a Hermetic magus:
As much as masques and architecture, the temporary architecture and elaborate decorations which accompanied Stuart royal processions in London constituted ‘a form of ceremonial magic centred on the image of the monarch as the sun’. (loc. 5764)
With Merlin comes Arthur, the rightful, legitimate king of the Britons. This is something Young makes abundantly clear – that several monarchs and dynasties have used the mythological grounding of Arthur, Solomon, and the persona of a Hermetic magus, as proof of legitimacy in the face of rebellion or political unrest. Yet, as he repeatedly shows, even at the most cynical, such marriages of political, mythological and occult power were used because people believed in magic. It was part of the worlding performed – its imagery operated in a “cult of the visual”, which was for, at least the Tudors, also a “cult of chivalry […] a cult of occult wisdom” with ‘“a dark side [which] was the potential magical misuse of pictures of the monarch. Elizabethan culture was preoccupied with double meanings, so that symbols (like the Tudor rose, itself a symbol of secrecy as well as a dynastic badge) were frequently suffused with occult power and significance.” (all loc. 3822)
Such things reach further back: the Norman kings promoted Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Merlin because he prophesied their coming, allowing them to position themselves as just one more proper phase in the history of Britain. Further, Young highlights that William I himself is recorded as “engaging a female magical practitioner” against Hereward in the earliest record of a monarch employing a practitioner. This raises the idea that the Normans’ reliance on Merlin and his prophecies meant that “their own self-representation effectively depended on an occult tradition.” (loc. 2355). Rather than Arthur, however, it was new shapes of knowing and knowledge from the Islamic world – preservations and iterations on, and of, Hebrew, Graeco-Roman, and Egyptian understandings – which began to move more strongly into the worldings of magic in Britain post-Conquest.
Thusly, for over a thousand years, magic as we know it has been part of the recorded political fabric of this island and its fellows. Young makes it quite clear that, rather than magic being an act-of-last-resort, as perhaps may be the case in Britain and elsewhere today, it was instead an act-of-first-resort. Astrologers drew up charts for almost anything – and for many centuries it was not that sorcery itself was illegal, but sorcery against the monarch was illegal – a very particular form of treason. The very notion that occult power existed was taken as fact – both as guarantor of, and potential threat to legitimacy itself.
Of course, this is an ancient idea – the divine right to rule stretching back to Ancient Egypt and many other cultures. The occult-as-hidden is a potency which has a Janusian ambiguity, something that Young illustrates quite neatly in his historical sources. When Jeanne d’Arc was captured and delivered to the English, the accusations of sorcery served to exculpate the English leaders from “accusations of incompetence that they were unable to defeat a French army led by a teenage girl.” (loc. 3091)
Whether deployed as character assassination or fearful response, it was not solely British nobility which held Jeanne to be an agent of a hidden power. Young tells us that, at the coronation of the French King Charles VII, nobles who had lost a royal gift of gloves asked her to locate them through her magical powers. Even Shakespeare mentions her as a witch, proving how far her magical presence extended, along with magic’s popular currency in general. Young shows us that what is held as real is the power and potency of magic. Its moral and spiritual context is that which is up for grabs; it is the ability to interpret these powers in the way one wishes which lies at the heart of a thousand years of British and European recorded history.
The fact is magic and its associations have been present for this long in the varying world-making projections of those both in and out of power. This is telling on its own – the ambiguous, tricksterish presences and manifestations of magic may shift meaning and form, but they still exist, not as peripheralisms, but as practices of necessity. Whether that be local cunning folk, jockeying courtiers, or image-conscious monarchs, magic is still there.
An example of this can be found in the discussion of Elizabeth I as “Fairy Queen” when fairies were “still objects of fear”. Elizabeth was “worshipped” by her knights and went to lengths to strengthen her rule as much as possible. In a propaganda coup via a masque, fairies are now transformed into something more benevolent, recorded as: “The hagges of hell, that hateful are of kind, / to please the time, had learnd a nature a new” (all loc. 4342).
Quite clearly, Elizabeth was attempting to usher in a new age – unsurprising when we consider that the phrase The British Empire was coined by her sometime counsellor, Dr John Dee. Young tells us that in 1577 (one year before publication of On The Limits of The British Empire) Dee encouraged Elizabeth to pursue her title to the Americas. This claim came by way of the Tudor dynasty’s ancestral Welsh links to Madoc ap Owen, who, it was claimed, had discovered the New World in 1170. This was a further echoing of Tudor mythology, via Geoffrey of Monmouth – itself via John of Cornwall’s Prophecies of Merlin – that Arthur had ruled the Americas. Add to this Henry VIII’s declaration that “this realm of England is an empire.” (loc. 4423) which was intended to place Henry on a footing with the Holy Roman Emperor as challenge to Papal authority, and we can see that the Tudor vision was one of sovereignty backed by both religious and occult authority. Dee’s vision that the British Empire was to restore all the lands once ruled by Arthur, even beyond the Americas, appealed to the angel-conjuring Abbot Johannes Trithemius, and Dee’s own occult experimentation with angels may explain why he was driven to write On The Limits…
It should be noted, following Young, that “in the language of the time, this did not mean that England was a nation with imperial colonies or possessions, but that the monarchs were subject to no authority, including that of the pope as ‘father of kings and princes’.” (loc. 4447)
Contrast this new, supposedly wizard, fairy and angel-backed sovereignty with another, perhaps more feral and rebellious view. Allegations that Henry VI’s son, Prince Edward, was a fairy changeling, or that the Plantagenets had “come of the devil, and to the devil they would go” (loc.2392) abounded throughout history. Further, rebels were not above claiming occult authority themselves.
In 1451, a hundred men ‘in riotous manner and arrayed for war’ broke into the Duke of Buckingham’s deer park at Penshurst, covered with long beards and painted on their faces with black charcoal, calling themselves servants of the queen of the fairies. (loc. 3153)
Whether it be for propaganda purposes or otherwise, it is clear that occult agencies were simply a fact of life, and being so, were inevitably entwined with the political and social fabric. Even the political upheaval of the Reformation contained magic – Catholics and their liturgical rites being associated with conjuring, while their Protestant counterparts were summoning angels and performing acts of necromancy to justify imperial expansion – perhaps a larger form of the magical hunting for treasures present in Europe and the Americas for centuries?
This reviewer does not have the space to explore the religious nuances as Young does in the book. Suffice to say, the author is a historian of religion by trade, known for his previous studies on both Catholic and Anglican exorcisms and magic. Equally, he spends time carefully pointing out regional differences – the Scots’ belief in second sight as innate in distinction to the more generally English notion of divination as skill, or the way some areas feared lone practitioners vs. the more European version of conspiratorial covens.
What is telling about this book is the way Young gives us such a thorough overview throughout history, drawing from many sources (some of which are well known, others less so) and subtly suggesting that we are in fact, not as far away from these earlier times as we might think. In his introduction to the book, he situates it in reference to recent history on both sides of the Atlantic, be it the Brexit project in the UK, or the Trumpian MAGA phenomenon, both associated with imagistic, perhaps occult, notions of sovereignty.
Nor does he stop with kings and queens – we are taken through the 20th Century too, past the usual suspects, with brief but telling notions of the Second World War and the Cold War, the then-radical currents of Chaos Magick [sic] and the like.
From the Greeks and Romans until today, Magic in Merlin’s Realm gives us a thorough grounding by which we might contextualise such things as the miles-long queues to visit the coffin of Queen Elizabeth II, the imagery and symbolism of her funeral – and of course the recent coronation of Charles III earlier in 2023.
No matter one’s views on politics, monarchies and the like, this book may very well start one wondering who exactly benefits from the myth of disenchantment, while at the same time surrounding us with images and branding drawn from the wildest dreams of propagandists, spin doctors and advertisers.
If nothing else, it may serve as fruitful contemplation of who exactly teaches or draws distinction between magus and witch/sorcerer, with all that it may imply.