In Search of Merlyn - Introduction

This is the introduction for a travel memoir project that I plan to undertake when the opportunity to complete that journey arises. I went to the UK for thesis research in 2000 and intended to begin this project by walking through SE England, Wales, Ireland and Scotland, finishing at Findhorn, tracing the remnant histories of the fairies and Celtic earth magic in pre-Roman Britain. Circumstances prevented this ambition at the time, but its something I still plan to do. As this introduction indicates, the travel memoir interweaves ancient sociocultural history and personal mythology with the immediate sensual experience of the land and its people. I'd love to do this project with a photographer who has a similar yen for the magical wonder of nature.

In Search of Merlyn's Cave:

The Chthonic Yearning of the Celtic Aesthetic

A travel diary of the interior by

Teri Merlyn

How many layers of skin in

This deep ecology of belonging?

Where blood’s wellspring

Courses with chthonic memory

Of that nascent being,

Emerging into consciousness

First dreamed itself Human,

And loved being so

Looked up from their labours

And loved the land

First as the hand that fed

Then for its own sake

A Sense of Belonging

An Australian 'baby-boomer', my ancestry is 2nd Fleet Welsh-Irish on the paternal side and post-WWI emigrant Scots-French on the maternal. Along with my peers, I grew up suckling on the pap of all things British. As all emigrant groups are wont, we British had transported our cultural selves with our trunks and technology when we came to this land. We breathed new air, ate from new soils, drank new water, saw new colours and gradually assimilated our bodies and adjusted our minds to separation from the 'mother country'. But we continued to interpret that phenomena from within a British cultural umweldt[1] and the adjustment of our spirits to a new land's iconography has been much slower. There is more than pragmatism at stake in the current contention over becoming a Republic. It is also the deep-seated resistance by those of Anglo-Celtic backgrounds to that final symbolic severing from the parent culture. Culture is like that. It permeates everything. It travels with you like the bacteria in your gut, rendering every new experience into a digestible form or violently rejecting what it cannot.

To continue the metaphor, while some have stronger digestive systems and can graze upon the cultural bazaar with impunity, so much as a sip of exotic water for some means an instant dose of 'Dehli Belly'. So it is with culture. Culture itself is a slippery concept. It can mean high or low, ethnic or dominant, and the languages that carry culture can develop variations with their vernaculars. Here, it is global, describing the aesthetic umweldt of a people, developed over thousands of years, encompassing all the vagaries and permutations with which untold generations of human conflict, concourse and inventiveness worked to forge an identity and the very elements of the land are embedded in the language. In an alien environment many avoid cultural indigestion by clinging to common understandings, using the iconography of familiar things. With the benefit of hindsight and two centuries of assimilation to this land, we now criticise those early settlers for their cultural opacity, their inability to spontaneously accept what the new land offered and their insistence on transporting as much of the old-world environment as possible. But we overlook this fundamental human need for the familiar face of their culture. Its not that those explorers, who starved amidst unrecognised plenty, were any less intelligent; their cultural filters were just stronger than their hunger.

However, being a highly adaptive organism and inevitably dependent upon its historicity, an old culture will gradually assimilate to the new environment, adapt old cultural bacteria to the new conditions, synthesize an aesthetic from old roots and elements of the new land with which to apprehend the new surroundings. In time, the culture reinvents itself, becomes something different again. In our case it has remained underpinned by the language of the old culture, although in a new form to fit the elements of its new land. In recent times Australians, as a nation of peoples gathered from many parts of the world, can be said to have formed a distinct culture, one that is still British in origin but now separate and unique to this land. Yet its people, while appreciating their new environment, still blend the elements of their various old lands into the new. When my own generation was growing up Australia was pretty much a monoculture. The umbilical cord that kept us tied to the British mother-culture was stretched but as yet uncut.

Now attenuated to breaking point, this bond makes its presence felt only in a chthonic yearning of this emigrant Celtic aesthetic, a mostly unconscious ache for that deeper belonging. I think that perhaps my own generation will be the last for whom the source of that ache is identifiable. It is enough to drive many of us back to a place we have never been, feeling blindly for something we vaguely know is missing. Tourists from ex-colonial British countries flock to the motherland in droves, exchange their hard-earned dollars for an exorbitant Pound to gawk at a reified Culture in carefully composed museum settings, a Ye Olde Worlde theme park on a massive scale, and think "this is our Culture". But it isn't. Most are more recent cultural artifacts, preserved for their value as cultural theatre, they are Disneyfied historical sites, many that interpret the relatively recent institution of royalty as a given, and pretty symbols of British imperialism at its peak. This is not what I am looking for. My pilgrimage is to places where I can feel the old soil, breathe the old air, drink the old water, see real colours unlit by stage lights. I am going to Wales and hug a tree, one that grew from a seed in soil where my earliest people left their bones, that sprang from a seed of a long line of trees going back to the tree of my spirit's language. I will walk in the wild places, on the earth where my ancestors trod, in the air where their spirits whisper on zephyr winds and howl on the moors. I will drink from the birthplace of singing streams and bathe in moonlight that has shone on my most ancient self. Although many of those emigrants were already well and truly urbanised when they landed here they were closer, much closer, to the source of all this. And I want to know in my bones what my ancestor's bones knew.

The British had got to Australia first (or so they insisted), at the peak of their colonial imperative, and made their imprint upon the country in no uncertain terms. By the 1950s, despite the presence of this land's indigenous people, early immigrant groups from other parts of the world, the post-war influx of migrants from Europe and a vocal dissenting minority, Britannia still ruled the waves and Australian culture was still British . So what is this British culture anyway? What is so powerful about it that, despite two hundred years of separation, even now that my adult self owns to a well and truly assimilated, Australianised aesthetic, a chthonic yearning for the cultural iconography of the motherland gnaws at my metaphorical entrails? This vague, restless yearning for the land of my Dreaming, the land that formed my organic self, may be attenuated but it is not a phenomena unique to indigenous peoples. The term 'Dreaming' itself, one that was first treated as childlike and naïve by colonials, has proved so apt, so universally appropriate to this sensibility, that it has proved valuable linguistic currency in the language of all origin mythology.

Once upon a time all peoples were 'indigenous' peoples, belonging somewhere, to a land of their beginnings. In that place, which their primeval ancestors had claimed for their genesis, a cultural ethos had formed breathing that air, eating from that soil, drinking that water, seeing those colours and worked to build the human-land interface that is their cultural iconography. From this came the early languages that resonated with those places, a unique cultural gut that digested all this, fed its people spiritually, emotionally and physically and imprinted itself in their genetic memory; became their unique Dreaming[2]. Due to the vagaries of cultural development, climate and topography, some groups achieved a more powerful link with their patch of planet than others. Those who failed to find a reliably hospitable piece of earth on which to form an unbroken chain of belonging, or grew too populous, reached out in migratory waves that dominated the more permeable cultures, destroyed their enemies and assimilated with those that were resilient. From these groups grew more mobile, permeable cultures that rose and fell with remarkable frequency during the European Bronze Age.

The demographic history of most of this planet is one of such migrations. Few but those living in the most inaccessible regions had complete isolation from the press of the migratory hordes. So it was, and still is, with the indigenous peoples of the British Isles. Although they had long enough in isolation to send down deep roots into their fertile soil, the hapless Britons were perpetually under siege. Conflicts from within and invasions from without, their little isle attracted successive waves of slaughter, each new arrival producing a layer of cultural phenomena like sediment over the indigenous land. Yet the culture formed in that old, deep soil of Britain was fecund and its old life did not fossilize under the weight of but permeated all that overlay it. Owing to its predominantly oral culture, the iconography of British Celtic mythology is acknowledged to be mutable, anything can mean almost anything. Perhaps that is why it has been so resilient.

Since those earliest peoples had a cabalistic, oral culture that leaves few tangible traces, there has been much speculative consideration about just what it is that they believed. There is some contention as to whether we can ever really know anything about them beyond what archaeologists divine from their ruins. But this is to deny the strength of an indigenous Druidic culture that built such miraculous structures as Stonehenge and is rumoured to have had an established cultural and educational exchange with Hellenic Greece. Indeed, once looked for, the thread of the British mythology is evident, deeply embedded in the contemporary cultural imagination, in our language and our inspiration. Quietly, as we listen to the echoes across millennia, the resonance of the old Briton's heritage sounds like a deep harmonic hum, a resonance never completely extinguished by Roman boots and bells or Anglo-Saxon tenure. Mutant and reified, there is nevertheless a lingering trace of the old bones, strong enough to strike a deep chord when we hear those names, sense the old story's bones in new clothes.

The Olde Country

As the science of 20th century archaeologists, anthropologists, ethnologists add to the findings of earlier scholars of British Celtic myth and legend, old bones take on flesh, drape in fur and flax, leather and gold. Over two millennia of invasions by the Picts, Saxons, Angles and Scots, their respective cultures, overlaying, assimilating, but never completely extinguishing those earliest of Celtic forms. For, as Britain in its own imperialist period found, the iconic pantheons invaders bring are not a perfect fit in their new home, as Charles Squire (1975:4) exclaims:

How strange Apollo would appear naked among icebergs, or fur-clad Thor striding under groves of palms! But the Celtic gods and heroes are the natural inhabitants of a British landscape, not seeming foreign and out-of-place in a scene where there is no vine or olive, but "shading in with" our homely oak and bracken, gorse and heath.

Bede's Ecclesiastical History (1890, 1959:25-7)) tells of how fair and fecund the Isles those early invaders found, with Ireland, 'the true home of the Scots', as the fairest, most abundant of all. Much of what those barbarian hordes and Roman legions brought to the British Isles made itself at home, by persuasion or force, bringing with them their gods and bestowing the land's old gods with new names, building new churches on the old temple sites, grafting new branches on the old linguistic tree. The Angles and Saxons, first invited in by the Briton as mercenaries to defend them against harassment by the Scots and Picts, in turn became invaders. Their original fee involved land but they took more by force, made their homes there and, like all migrant groups, brought their own cultural practices but gradually assimilated into the British landscape.

From around 700AD the Vikings began to raid, spread their semen and, mostly, return to their icy aeries with their plunder, but many also stayed behind and assimilated into the existing population[3]. Dublin and York are old Viking towns and the Orkneys were almost entirely populated by Nordic tribes and while English are referred to as Anglo Saxon, in truth there is perhaps a greater presence of the Vikings in contemporary English language and culture. Indeed, the Norman French who have had so much to do with England's historiography can be traced back to those Vikings who began raiding the 400s AD and in 911AD held Paris under siege for so long that they were given Normandy to distract them. Unlike these permanent settlers, the Roman Empire in Britain was a relatively short physical occupation, but the 470 years of Roman rule had perhaps the most profound influence.

The Roman's enormous capacity for civil organisation and rapacious imperialist energy, extant in the Church of Rome, worked hardest to expel old Celtic Britain from its grounds. However it is the power of the land itself that, in the end, forges the essence of such cultural phenomena. Despite these waves of invasion and the massive cultural imperialism of the Roman Church, the old roots held true, entwining up through the Viking pirates and Anglo-Saxon mercenaries who had made that part of England their home, first by invitation, then by plunder. The elemental force of the air, the soil and the water eventually permeated all these invaders as the hybrid gains its vigor from the old root stock. In more recent times, driven by conflict and famine, our ancestors went out into the world to find new homes in strange lands, there to gradually assimilate to an alien aesthetic. Yet, like the briar root stock, the old elementals live on in our memory, the old spiritual rites still dwell in our hearts and the old names resonate in our mouths, even here, halfway across the world.

My childhood imagination was fed on the Empire's best, on Rudyard Kipling and H. Rider Haggard, Schoolgirl's Own Annual and Enid Blyton, Roundheads and Cavaliers[4]. Most importantly for me, the tales of Arthur, his knights of the Round Table and my especial hero, Merlyn the magician. I read every fictional permutation of those cycles that my local library could provide, steeped my imagination in the iconography of an ancient Britain. It was not until my early twenties that I read Tolkien and by then, with a more sophisticated understanding of cultural iconography, recognised that what I felt was my deepest soul resonating to the images and the language of an older world still. I realised then that what had stirred me all along was not the prettified tales of the French Romances, but the deeper images and sounds that lay like still water beneath the frivolous waves. For that is what Tolkien also taps into. With the iconic forms his characters take, and their ancient-sounding Celtic names, they resonate with my deep-soul-self, the genetic memory that permeates to the marrow like an organic version of the astral body, not yet expunged by assimilation to this new land.

This most recent generation born here in Australia is somewhat different to mine. They are a more successful synthesis, an adaptation of the many different lands their parents have

come from and much closer yet to the unique iconography of this land of their birth. The old British cultural aesthetic is slowly being replaced by the new land's elements, as something these diverse progeny all share in common. Their very differences will be what eventually draws them together, for the sake of mutual survival, provides the ethos of a shared culture. Perhaps, one far distant day, Australian culture will have more affinity with that of the indigenous people of this place. For now, with my generation in its maturity, a chthonic yearning for the old land's elements still permeates our cultural dreaming, the old words resonate in the most ancient corners of our souls. All my life I have seen my new land through the filtered lens of another world, tried to describe it with a language formed to describe another land, tried to apprehend it through another aesthetic.

Do not, for one moment, think that I do not love this land of mine, do not, everyday, thank those powers that brought my ancestral genes to this place. With its air that captures the feel of a 360 degree horizon and lets my spirit expand to its utmost, its wild and secret waters that quench any thirst I bring to it, its thin but fertile soils that have given me this big, strong body and the brightest, clearest colours for my eyes to feast upon. I do, indeed, love this place with almost all of my heart. There is no way that I desire to exchange these wide-open-spaces for the wall-to-wall people of the old place. But there is this chthonic layer of my soul that yearns, that aches, like a long-distant, timeless empty space, to see, to feel, to stand in that place where my people began, where those old words sprang from the air, the water, the soil that grew the trees that gave these sounds form. For that is the foundation of the old language, trees. Well, Robert Graves, in his seminal The White Goddess has said so, convincingly enough for me as an intellectual construct, and Tolkien's sentient trees the Ents confirmed it to my heart. The iconography of the oldest world lies deep in the marrow of my bones and the language of my mind.

Cultural Caves and the Iconic Merlyn

In an important essay Merlin the enchanter, and Merlin the bard, Nash (1899,1969:i-xvi) traces the legendary and fictional permutations of Merlyn, arguing that the Welsh Emrys is most likely a corruption of the Roman Ambrosius and quite possibly a Christian clergyman. But then, one has to consider the dominance of the Roman Church and its effect of masking earlier iconography. The deities of the Celtic mythological iconography are, in themselves, nebulous, without all the confabulations of their later appropriators. With such looseness comes license, and my own version of 'Merlyn', though informed by the fictional forms that have fed my imagination and augmented by later scholastic inquiry, is unique to me. My Merlyn[5] is much closer to the sun god Llud or Emrys and the Druid-bard Myrddin of fragmentary Welsh poems. Like Squire (1975:323), I see the iconic Merlyn character as a confluence of the Celtic Zeus and the actual people who wore this name in their role as human-god interface in Druidic cabalistic lineage. As pagan lore masters, the early druids passed on their cabalistic lore and title to each generation and, as The Book of Taliesin[6] tells, their presence spans the preliterate years of the most ancient Britons. These are the bones, this the earth that I need to feel, to know my old place.

King Arthur has a fairly consistent image as a war-leader who was the uniting force of his people. Squire suggests that the iconic Arthur is a confluence of an earlier divinity and an actual person who held the post of "Count of Briton" under the Romans. He replaces the earlier Gwydion, a benevolent god of culture and the Arts who is aided by a "mighty ruler of heaven … some knew him as Lludd, others as Myrddin, or as Emrys" (Squire, 1975:313, 329). While Gwydion- Arthur has a fairly straightforward role, and can be traced to a number of historical identities who actually existed, there are as many faces to Merlyn as there are storytellers and scholars.

Merlyn's cave, the place where he remains in thrall, that too resonates with deeper meanings than a French Romance of a sorry tale of a man's fatal weakness versus feminine power and deceit. For as Squire tells it, "according to Celtic ideas, all things came from the underworld" (330). It will be noticed that in the French Romances Arthur also fell foul of a woman. Women, with their internal sexual organs and wombs have long been associated with the cave, both in an erotic and a procreative sense. In patriarchal Christian society this became a means of male oppression, with the underworld becoming the domain of Satan and forging a conceptual link for the persecution of women designated as witches. These so-called witches were also a repository and perpetuators of the old Celtic pantheistic lore. Early Celtic society revered the social and symbolic value of women, in direct contrast to their invader's gender hierarchy, and the relegation of the underworld to a place of evil would have been just one more form of cultural destruction and domination. To destroy the cultural role and power of women was to destroy their knowledge, negate the whole balance of the Celtic culture and to encourage the Celtic males to adopt the new power, as the dominant gender, that their rulers offered.

It could be that the retreat of Merlyn to a cave was indeed symbolic, as a metaphor for the retreat of a whole culture to the womb-cave of its origins. As the harsh modern world dawned, that is where Merlyn retreated with the treasures of Britain.

References

Graves, Robert. (19 ) The White Goddess.

Miller, Thomas (trans.& ed.). (1959) The Old English Version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of

the English People (Part 1). London:Oxford University Press.

Squire, Charles. (1975) Celtic Myth and Legend. Newcastle Publishing Company.

Wheatley, Henry B. (1899,1969) Merlin on the Early History of King Arthur: A Prose Romance.

V.1. Early English Text Society, New York: Greenwood Press, Publishers.

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[1] From the German, meaning the constraints placed upon perception by sensory capacities.

[2] I do not feel that I am misappropriating an aboriginal word as this term was attached to the Australian aboriginal myths and legends by their European invaders, not one that they themselves defined their culture by.

[3] There are many linguistic traces, with words like 'knife' and 'calf' Viking in origin, as was King Canute (1016-1035), ruler of England, Denmark and Norway.

[4] Somehow those Cavaliers always seemed to be the oppressed heroes, cruelly persecuted by Cromwell's evil Roundeads.

[5] I use the 'y' to align my association of this name with its early Welsh heritage, as different in kind from the Merlin of the later French Romances.

[6] Squire cites this as attributed to a sixth century bard whose Book of Taliesin is found in mediaeval Welsh MSS.