by Colin Wilson
The king was naturally delighted, for Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History had represented Arthur as one of the greatest conquerors since Julius Caesar. (According to Geoffrey, Arthur had conquered Ireland, Scandinavia, and France and was about to march on Rome when news of Mordred’s rebellion forced him to return to England.) He was also relieved to hear that Arthur was buried in Glastonbury. As the great-grandson of William the Conqueror, he was familiar with the legend that Arthur would return in England’s hour of need. If he could prove that Arthur was well and truly dead, the latter would cease to be a rallying cry for rebels like the men of Bodmin.
Besides, Henry had an affection for Glastonbury, because the abbot Henry of Blois had played a part in making him king. So Henry went to call on the abbot to tell him the good news.
Oddly enough, the abbot was not as pleased as he might have been. Glastonbury Abbey was already one of the richest in England; it didn’t need any more fame to attract pilgrims. And “between two pyramids” might mean anything.
Then the situation changed dramatically. On 25 May 1184, the abbey caught fire and was left in ruins. The encouraging thing about it was that the image of Our Lady of Glastonbury had survived undamaged, which suggested that God still had great things in store for the abbey. Henry II produced funds to start rebuilding; many nobles contributed. And in 1191 one of the monks died after expressing a wish to be buried on the grounds, between two crosses. These stood on two marble pillars that tapered toward the top and might have been described as tall pyramids. For some reason – perhaps because they remembered the words of the Welsh bard – the monks went on digging below six feet and at seven feet encountered a stone slab. They prized it up. On its underside was a leaden cross, with a Latin inscription that read: Hic jacet sepultus inclytus Rex Artorius in insula Avalonia (“Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon”).
They went on digging – it probably took days to make a hole sixteen feet deep and wide enough to allow several diggers to operate. But at sixteen feet, just as the old bard had foretold, the mattocks struck wood. An enormous coffin, hollowed out of oak, was unearthed. Inside, they found the huge skeleton of a man, whose skull had been smashed by heavy blows. A monk saw a lock of yellow hair and leaned over to grab it. It dissolved in his fingers, and the monk fell into the coffin. Later, they identified fragments of a smaller skeleton and realized that the hair was that of Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. One chronicler, Giraldus Cambrensis (Gerald of Wales), who actually saw the bones and the cross in the following year, says the inscription on the cross also mentioned “Queen Wenneverla” (Guinevere).
From that moment on, the abbey became the most popular tourist site in England, if not in Europe. The abbey was soon rebuilt on a magnificent scale.
Scholars have accused the monks of Glastonbury of inventing the whole story, yet this seems unlikely. Giraldus Cambrensis seems to have been an honest man – he was one of the few to denounce Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History as a pack of lies – and he specifically claims to have seen both skeletons and the leaden cross. This cross was still around for many centuries, and in 1607 an antiquarian named William Camden published a picture of it. His text spells Arthur Arturius, an ancient form that was in use in the time of King Arthur but had not been used since. (Even the Easter Annals spell his name Arthur.)
Moreover, a re-excavation of the site in 1963 by C. A. Radford showed that the monks were telling the truth about digging down sixteen feet. Besides, as the Arthurian scholar Geoffrey Ashe has pointed out, Glastonbury is also supposed to be the burial site of Joseph of Arimathea, the man who gave Jesus a decent burial; if the monks faked the grave of Arthur, why did they not go on and fake Saint Joseph’s too?
So, on the whole, there can be no doubt that King Arthur – or rather, General Arturius – really existed and that he deserved his reputation as a great hero. Dozens of questions still remain, but some of these are slowly being answered. For example, many scholars believe that we now know the location of King Arthur’s court at Camelot. In 1542 a writer named John Leland wrote that a fortified hill in South Cadbury, Somerset, was, in fact, “Camallate, sometime a famous town or castle . . . Arthur much resorted to Camallate”. In 1966 excavations were begun at Cadbury Castle (not a castle in the medieval sense, but a fortified hill). On top of Roman remains were found the foundations of impressive buildings that were clearly occupied, in Arthur’s period, by a chieftain of considerable power and authority.
Even Geoffrey of Monmouth’s absurd story about Tintagel Castle begins to look as if it has some foundation. The present Tintagel Castle was built around 1140, at the time of Geoffrey’s History. Historians have pointed out that in the time of King Arthur there was only a Celtic monastery on the site. In 1924 the “visionary” Rudolf Steiner visited Tintagel and devoted a lecture to it, identifying various places as the Hall of the Round Table, the sleeping place of the knights, and so on. It all sounded like pure fantasy.
But in the dry summer of 1983 a fire on the island destroyed the grass, and wind and rain went on to reveal the foundations of more than a hundred small rectangular buildings and of a hall more than eighty feet long. Down below, at the foot of the cliff, is a small natural harbor, and pottery discovered on the island indicated that large quantities of wine and oil were once imported. (There is more imported pottery on the site than on all the other British and Irish sites put together.) A stone “footprint” on the opposite side of the island looks out over old Celtic Christian burial mounds; such a “footprint” was often made by a chieftain who planted his foot and surveyed his kingdom. (In this case, he would have looked across to the graves of his ancestors.) All this sounds as if Tintagel were once the fortress of a considerable chieftain, not simply a monastery. The objection that Tintagel was essentially uninhabited in the time of Arthur cannot be sustained.
So the evidence for the real historical existence of King Arthur is very strong indeed. In a book entitled Arthur: Roman Britain’s Last Champion, Beram Saklatvala has even argued that there is evidence for the existence of the sword Excalibur and of the Holy Grail. The Latin word for stone is saxo, which is close to “Saxon”. If some early chronicle mentioned Arthur taking a sword from a Saxon – some warrior he had killed – then it could well have been the origin of the legend of the sword in the stone. Geoffrey of Monmouth calls Arthur’s sword Caliburn; and Caliburn is a combination of two words for “river” – the Celtic cale and the Saxon burn. Swords need, of course, to be tempered in cold water, and as the Anglo-Saxon word cale means “cold”, caliburn could be translated as “the cold stream”. So Arthur’s sword could have been named after the stream it was tempered in, the Cale, near Sturminster, in Dorset.
As to the Grail – the cup that Jesus was supposed to have used at the Last Supper and that Joseph of Arimathea is said to have brought to Glastonbury – this was probably a much larger vessel, too large for a drinking cup, that was used for ritual purposes. In 1959 a large marble urn was found during excavations of a Roman palace in North Africa; the palace dated from the same period as did Arthur. The urn had a cross carved on it, and the lid had rivet holes in the shape of a cross, indicating that it had once had a metal cross on it. The urn probably contained the bones of a saint and was almost certainly used for administering oaths, as we now swear on the Bible. A libation hole suggests that it was used in some special ritual. Arthur would fairly certainly have had a similar urn in his own chapel for the administering of oaths. If this sacred vessel had been captured during one of Arthur’s many wars, Saklatvala suggests, then the quest for the Grail could well have been based on fact.
But what of the magician Merlin? Surely he was an invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth? In fact, Geoffrey followed up his successful History with a Life of Merlin, a poem written for a smaller audience. If Geoffrey had invented Merlin, we would expect the poet more or less to repeat the story as told in the History – or at least, not to contradict it. Merlin was obviously a great deal older than Arthur,
for he was a boy when King Vortigern was alive – and the monk Gildas tells us that Vortigern made the fatal mistake of inviting the Saxons into England in AD 443. Yet in the Merlin poem, Geoffrey has Merlin fighting with a king named Rodarcus against a Scottish king named Guennolous – and these real historical characters lived a century later, after the death of Arthur. Geoffrey is aware of this and explains it by saying that Merlin lived to a phenomenally old age – more than a century. But it looks as if Geoffrey has found material about Merlin that obliges him to try to explain why his original dates were wrong.
The explanation that is accepted by most scholars is that Merlin was based on a Welsh bard named Myrddin, who was alive after AD 573. The Welsh language only came into existence after the death of Arthur, so Myrddin could not have been older than Arthur. This identification of Merlin with Myrddin is accepted by Robert Graves in his mythological study The White Goddess (1948) and by Nicolai Tolstoy in The Quest for Merlin (1985). But it is obviously a somewhat disappointing theory, for if it is correct, Merlin was not even called Merlin. (The usual view is that Geoffrey of Monmouth changed Myrddin to Merlin because merde in French means “shit”, and a magician named Myrddin would have invited ridicule in an age when England was ruled by the French.) Moreover, Myrddin cannot have known Arthur, for even if their lives overlapped, he would only have been a child at the time of Arthur’s death. Geoffrey Ashe agrees that Merlin is Myrddin and that Geoffrey of Monmouth made him Arthur’s senior merely for the sake of a good story.
The American professor Norma Lorre Goodrich rejects this notion in her book Merlin (1988) and argues convincingly that Merlin was a real person who was about thirty years older than Arthur, although she agrees that some of the legends of Myrddin have been incorporated into the Merlin story. She suggests that Arthur’s Merlin was born in Wales and buried in Scotland. In fact, she ends by suggesting that “Merlin” was a title rather than a name (a merlin is a type of hawk) and that the original Merlin was a bishop named Dubricius, who crowned Arthur. Myrddin, on the other hand, was a “Wild Man of the Woods”, a poet who went mad, lived in the wilderness, and achieved certain magical powers. This Merlin is, in fact, the one Geoffrey of Monmouth learned about after writing his History. His Life of Merlin is, indeed, about a Welsh leader and prophet who went mad after fighting in a battle against a Scottish king and who became a wanderer in the wilderness, delivering a great many prophecies. The Merlin of the History is also, we may recall, a prophet: in fact, Geoffrey published a book of Merlin’s prophecies first, then incorporated them into the History. It sounds as if he learned about the Welsh prophet Myrddin after writing the History and decided that Myrddin and Merlin must be the same person. Nicolai Tolstoy agrees with this theory and devotes much of his Quest for Merlin to an analysis of various poems and legends that tell of the “Wild Man of the Woods”.
It would seem, then, that we have two contesting theories: that there were two Merlins, a view first suggested by Giraldus Cambrensis; and that there was only one Merlin, who was really called Myrddin and who was a Welsh bard and soothsayer. Yet Goodrich and Tolstoy both argue their theories so brilliantly that it seems a pity to have to choose one or the other. Goodrich is most convincing on the subject of the two Merlins and in her argument that the original Merlin was the counselor of King Arthur. But Tolstoy has some profoundly important things to say about Merlin the Wizard.
To understand what he is suggesting, we have to forget our modern images of wizards and magicians, derived from Shakespeare’s Prospero, Tolkien’s Gandalf, and T. H. White’s amiable and bumbling Merlin. These are recent inventions. In the age of Arthur a magician would have been a combination of a priest and a witch doctor, a shaman.
For an account of a magician in action, it is necessary to turn to A Pattern of Islands, Arthur Grimble’s account of his years as Land Commissioner in the Gilbert Islands in the South Pacific. Told that he ought to eat porpoise flesh, Grimble inquired how he could obtain some. He was told that some islanders farther up the coast were the hereditary porpoise-callers of the island and that his informant’s cousin could also call them. Grimble was invited to the village, where a feast was laid out. The fat and friendly porpoise-caller retired into his hut, and for several hours there was silence. Then the man rushed out and fell on his face, crying, “They come, they come”! The villagers all rushed into the water and stood breast-deep, and to Grimble’s amazement, hundreds of porpoises began to swim in to the shore. It seemed that they were in a trance. The “hypnotized” porpoises were then gently lifted into boats, taken ashore, and slaughtered.
It is not difficult to hypnotize animals, and it has been argued elsewhere in this book (see chapter 25) that hypnosis may involve a kind of telepathy. But “hypnosis” of porpoises from a distance sounds absurd.
Absurd or not, it seems fairly clear that this is a power possessed by many primitive witch doctors and shamans. The study of modern primitives leaves no doubt that Stone Age cave drawings of “magicians” dressed in animal skins are not a form of Palaeolithic art but are dipictions of rituals that were designed to attract animals into the vicinity of the hunters, exactly as Grimble’s shaman summoned porpoises. A remarkable book, Wizard of the Upper Amazon by F. Bruce Lamb, describes the experiences of a Peruvian named Manuel Cordova, who was kidnapped by Amahuaca Indians and spent his life among them. Lamb makes it clear that the primitive hunters of the twentieth century use exactly the same techniques as their Stone Age counterparts. Cordova describes how the hunters kill the sow who leads a herd of pigs, then bury the head with ritual chants, to ensure that the herd will always return that way. And in one remarkable sequence he describes how the Indians drink a “vision extract” called hini xuma, and how they then shared visions of snakes, birds, and animals; a black leopard appears among them at the height of the ceremony but does no one any harm.
In another firsthand narrative of years spent among the natives of Papua, New Guinea, Mitsinari (1954), Father André Dupreyat gives an account of a sorcerer named Isidoro who can turn himself into a cassowary (a kind of ostrich) and is consequently able to make a five-hour journey over a mountain in two hours. He also describes his own clash with sorcerers who place him under a “snake curse”, after which snakes attack him on several occasions. (Snakes will normally do their best to escape from the vicinity of human beings.)1
So it is a mistake to think of a magician as a Walt Disney cartoon character wearing a tall conical hat with stars painted on it. Real sorcerers are closely related to modern “spirit mediums”; they assert that their power comes from spirits. Modern “magicians” – such as the notorious Aleister Crowley – believe that power can be obtained over spirits by the use of certain precise rituals, which must be performed with punctilious accuracy.
The traditional role of tribal witch doctors and shamans is as intermediaries between human beings and the spirit world, and their chief function is to ensure good hunting or good harvests. Celtic druids belonged to this tradition. Druidism was a form of nature worship; it came to Britain around 600 BC with the Celts, but many older forms of nature religion had existed long before that: Stonehenge, for example, was a temple for such worship and is precisely aligned to the stars.
Nicolai Tolstoy is convinced that Merlin was “the last of the druids”. Druidism was driven into Wales with the Celts and survived there long after Christianity had stamped it out in the rest of the British Isles. Tolstoy points out that the Myrddin stories – particularly those of bards like Taliesin – are full of clues that link the magician with druidism. He invokes sacred apple trees (the druids worshiped in sacred groves) and has as familiars a pig and a wolf. He takes on many of the characteristics of the horned god of pagan mythology. Tolstoy places the “wood of Calidon”, to which Merlin fled after going mad, in Scotland, near Hart Fell, where the rivers Annan and Clyde both have their source. And, according to Tolstoy, Merlin fulfilled his own prophecy that he would meet a “threefold death”, clubbed, speared, and drowned. Afte
r being beaten for days by shepherds, he slipped into the river Tweed and was impaled on a stake before he drowned.
Professor Goodrich prefers the traditional story, in which Merlin is murdered by a maiden named Ninian or Nimue, the Lady of the Lake (also called Vivian), of whom he becomes enamored and to whom he offers to teach magic. She refuses to become his mistress and finally uses one of his own spells to bind him and entomb him in a cave under an enormous rock. Another commentator has argued that the maiden Nimue is actually the Christian Saint Nimue and that the story of her final triumph over Merlin is really the triumph of Christianity over paganism.
The books by Nicolai Tolstoy and Norma Lorre Goodrich are rich and complex detective stories that will leave most readers in a state of “enlightened confusion”. The final picture that emerges is of a real King Arthur, who was one of the greatest generals of the Dark Ages, and of a real Merlin, a shaman and druid, who was Arthur’s counselor and adviser. Both were men of such remarkable stature that, even within a few decades of their deaths, they became the subject of endless legends. The legends have blurred the reality to such an extent that it is now virtually impossible to discern the outline of the real men who lived sometime between AD 450 and 550. But the outcome of all the detective work is at least a certainty that they actually existed.
2
Atlantis
The Submerged Continent
Atlantis has been described as the greatest of all historical mysteries. Plato, writing about 350 BC, was the first to speak of the great island in the Atlantic Ocean which had vanished “in a day and a night”, and been submerged beneath the waves of the Atlantic.
Plato’s account in the two late dialogues of Timaeus and Critias has the absorbing quality of good science fiction. The story is put into the mouth of the poet and historian Critias, who tells how Solon, the famous Athenian lawgiver, went to Saïs in Egypt about 590 BC, and heard the story of Atlantis from an Egyptian priest. According to the priest, Atlantis was already a great civilization when Athens had been founded about 9600 BC. It was then “a mighty power that was aggressing wantonly against the whole of Europe and Asia, and to which your city [Athens] put an end”. Atlantis, said the priest, was “beyond the pillars of Hercules” (the Straits of Gibraltar), and was larger than Libya and Asia put together. It was “a great and wonderful empire” which had conquered Libya and Europe as far as Tyrrhenia (Etruria in central Italy). Deserted by their allies, the Athenians fought alone against Atlantis, and finally conquered them. But at this point violent floods and earthquakes destroyed both the Athenians and the Atlantians, and Atlantis sank beneath the waves in a single day and night.
