Dan Snow's History Hit - Merlin, The Occult and British Politics

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Who was the real Merlin? Dr Francis Young says the closest is John Dee, Elizabeth I's occultist advisor who gave her the idea for a British Empire. Dee believed it was her destiny to rule the New World - from his supposed conversations with angels - and that she could trace her lineage back to King Arthur. His mystical and astrological calculations influenced her decision to take on the Spanish.So, the Philosopher's Stone, the occult and spell books aren't just in fantasy novels but very real things that have determined the decisions of those in the highest seats of power throughout Britain's history for centuries. Dan is joined by Dr Young, a historian and folklorist specialising in the history of religion and belief who takes Dan through a potted history of magic and magical advisors from the Middle Ages to the Victorians.Dr Francis Young's book is called 'Magic in Merlin's Realm.'Produced by James Hickmann, and Mariana Des Forges and edited by Anisha Deva.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up at https://historyhit/subscription/We'd love to hear from you- what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In the myth of Arthur, the good king is brave, he's just, he's strong in battle. But one of his greatest attributes, one of his greatest strengths, is the man at his side, Merlin. He's a magician, he's a wise man, he's a seer, he's a wizard. Well, my podcast today is about the real Merlins. wizard? Well, my podcast today is about the real Merlins. Men who, inspired by that original myth, have sat at the right hand of real sovereigns, have helped to shape policy, change the destiny of the kingdom. This is the story of magic at the highest levels of government. Joining me on the podcast to talk about it can only be Francis Young.

He's a wonderful historian. He's an expert in the occult, in magic, folklore, belief. He's wonderful on social media. His work is fantastic. Go and check him out. He's the author of Magic in Merlin's Realm, a history of occult politics in Britain. And he and I chat about men like John Dee, the real Merlin.

He was Elizabeth I's key magical advisor, an astrologer, a predictor of the future. He was the man who worked out the best day for Elizabeth I's coronation, when the auspices were most propitious. And Elizabeth went with his suggestion. He's also credited with coming up with the phrase, the British Empire. We also talked about Roger Bacon. He was the magical advisor to Henry III, aka Dr. Mirabilis. It's a great title. He was the first European to describe the chemical composition of gunpowder. I think

this really demonstrates how there certainly was a porous membrane between the occult, between magic and what we would today call science. Perhaps even today, there still is. Enjoy! with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Francis, very good to see you again. Great to have you on the podcast. It's brilliant to be back. What I want to talk to you today is about magic and not sort of popular superstitions, which you're so brilliant at as well,

but this is how magic affects decision-making at the highest level. Magic and magicians and wizards at the highest levels of government. And I guess that begins with the mythical figure of Merlin, this idea of a wizard who sits at the right hand of the sovereign. Is Merlin essential in this English story? Yes, I think he's absolutely central to it. He provides the prototype, the paradigm for that kind of royal magical advisor, the person who claims to have some kind of occult expertise that can help monarchs. And here we run into the kind of the ambiguous relationship between power and magic, where those in power are simultaneously very afraid of the negative potential of magic, but they're also quite willing to exploit it

if it serves their own purposes. So it's got that kind of double-edged aspect to it. Remind me, it's Geoffrey of Monmouth, I think, first comes up with Merlin. Is it in the early Welsh poem? Well, Geoffrey of Monmouth manufactures Merlin from some pre-existing fragments. And so basically what he does is a very clever literary confection where he puts together two totally unrelated characters, both of whom exist in the work of the early Welsh bards. And one of them is a guy called Myrddin, who is the bard of King Gwynfolu. And at the Battle of Arthuret, which is a 6th century battle that may or may not have really taken place in the Scottish borders, Myrthyn goes mad after King

Gwentholu is killed and his army is defeated. And Myrthyn goes into the woods and becomes a kind of wild man, but also acquires magical powers, which is a kind of Celtic belief that when you go into the wilds, you also gain access to sacred power. So that's the first Merlin, Wild Merlin, or Merlin Sylvester. And then in Nennius' Historia Britannum, History of the Britons, which is a real early medieval Welsh document, we have the story of Ambrosius. And Ambrosius is a boy who is selected by King Vortigern as a sacrifice to strengthen the foundations of his castle at Carmarthen. And Ambrosius is spared from being sacrificed because he works out that the reason the castle is unstable is because two dragons are fighting

one another underneath it, one white and one red, and they represent the white, the English, the red dragon represents the British people. And so they managed to solve this and Ambrosius is rewarded. But because Carmathan can be interpreted as Cainmirdin, as in the castle of Merlin, Geoffrey says, well, this Ambrosius, this boy was Merlin. So basically, we've got these two characters that he puts together. And then he creates the story that Merlin is linked to the court of King Arthur. And that is totally made up by Geoffrey of Monmouth. But Merlin originally is primarily a prophet.

He is not a magician. So he is somebody who is able to foretell the future, and that way he gives Arthur an advantage against his enemies. And he is also a craftsman. He is someone of great ingenuity and skill, and famously manages to move Stonehenge from Ireland to Britain. Yes, I've just made a programme about Stonehenge, and that has to get a mention in theories around how Stonehenge came into being. Although it is true, of course, that the blue stones were brought from the far west. So there are whispers of truth in Geoffrey's wonderful, wonderful work.

Geoffrey Monmouth, everyone, you may have heard I did a podcast a few weeks ago on the real King Arthur, and I just cannot advise enough. It's an astonishing account of Arthur. But Merlin-like figures, you presume, existed certainly in the early medieval period, but pre-Christian period. Yeah, well, I mean, Geoffrey wouldn't have created the figure of Merlin as a royal magical advisor, if the possibility of such people being real hadn't been contemplated. Because Geoffrey of Monmouth's history reflects the realities of 12th century political life. It's a mirror to the age in which it was written, as so much literature is. And were there such people in pre-Christian times? I think it's difficult to say. My own view is that it's really

something which is happening in Geoffrey's time for the first time in the 12th century. And the main reason for that is that these new types of knowledge are coming into Britain from the continent. And they are types of knowledge linked to the Crusades, linked to the Islamic world, new sciences, or what they would have considered sciences, like alchemy and astrology, that are appearing in Britain for the first time and hadn't existed or been practiced in Anglo-Saxon England. Have you been able to find any names of these people, whether they're working for the Mercians or the King of Wessex or one of these pre-English kingdoms? Well, the first indications that we have of this kind of royal magical advice, we have legendary accounts of people like Dunstan. So St. Dunstan, who was abbot of Glastonbury,

Archbishop of Canterbury, was credited later with alchemical powers. Now, whether he really was an alchemist is rather doubtful, but he gains this reputation. But in terms of historical accounts, the earliest account that we have of a horoscope being cast before a battle is for the Duke of Gloucester during the anarchy of Stephen and Matilda. So that's 12th century. historically served as a magical advisor is Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon being a great Franciscan natural scientist, philosopher, astrologer, you know, he was a polymath of his age. And he does seem to have served this purpose for King Henry III and dedicated treatises to Henry. And Henry does seem to have believed that Roger had the power to increase his political potency by being a magical advisor. Am I right in thinking he had a sort of talking head in his study? Yeah, well, this is a story which actually it goes back to Pope Sylvester II is supposed to have been the person who first came up with this magical talking head. It's the idea that magical powers can be drawn down from the heavens and animate inanimate objects. It's something which can be traced all

the way back to the ancient world, this belief, that if the alignment of the stars is right, if the incantations are right, if the magical spells are correct, then you can bring down these powers. And yeah, Roger Bacon is one of the people who was supposed to have had this brazen head. And the famous story associated with that is that Roger is trying to get exactly the right time at which the head will prophesy something crucial, and he gets the time wrong. And the head says, time is, time was, time yet to come. And so it's like the time is never right, that the head will actually give the right prophecy, if you like. So the thing about magic, it's very, very hard to get right

in all these legends and stories. It's not something which is easy. You've got to get the right time. You've got to get the right words. You've got to get the right preparations. It's like analysing the Delphic Oracle. There's never a straightforward answer. And how did they square this with their Christianity?

Well, this is a really interesting aspect of medieval magic. And I think it's a lot more Christian than many people might think. And the reason for that is that there are characters in the Bible who engage in magic, or in the Apocrypha, in the sort of associated books that aren't part of the Bible, but a part of that biblical writing tradition. And one of those characters is King Solomon, who is the son of King David, renowned for his wealth and his splendor and his wisdom, but he takes his wisdom a bit too far, especially in some of these Apocryphal books, and becomes a commander of demons. So in other words, he asserts his power

not only over earthly kingdoms, but also over the, if you like, infernal realms of demons. And this idea is taken into Christianity, and it's certainly not an orthodox idea, but it's an idea that lots of clerics seem to have adhered to, that if you were a cleric, and if, for example, you were ordained to the order of exorcist, it gave you the power to command demons. And that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because it was an assertion of your superiority as a Christian and as a priest, you have this power over demons. But of course, it's also abused for selfish ends. And so you'll have these books of magic, these grimoires, where instructions will be given on how a priest, in particular, these books are generally designed for priests, can command demons or angels or sometimes fairies in order to achieve

wonderful effects or rather less wonderful effects. I mean, there's one document which I came across, which was the magician can command a demon to make women lift up their skirts whilst dancing. So some of this stuff is very, very kind of self-obsessed. It's kind of egotistical. It's sort of rather abusive to get money, to get power, to get sex. It's this sort of thing. And yet it's couched in this very kind of superficially Christian language. Did you say The Wonderful World of Grimoire? Yes, a grimoire is a book of spells. I mean, that's fabulous. And would these be a book of spells used by people at court? Well, some of these were. And we know from various magical scandals that occurred at court that magic was very popular in a court

environment. And I think there's a very clear reason for that, which is that life at court is very uncertain. The wheel of fortune goes up, the wheel of fortune goes down, according to the king's favor. And so when people live in very uncertain circumstances, they tend to look at any opportunity that they can find to gain certainty. And one of those things is magic. And not only that, but these are also people who have a higher level of literacy than the population at large. And a lot of them are clerics as well. You've got lots of chaplains and priests and bishops at court. And so it's the perfect environment for people to start looking into magic. And magical scandals happen where somebody is exposed as having cast a king's horoscope, for example, to try and work out when the king is going to die, or what's going to

happen in the king's life, whether the king's favor will remain. And then the book will be found, the book will be confiscated, the book might be brought out at trial. But what's frustrating for me as a historian is that the book is then almost certainly destroyed because it's considered evil. And so part of, if you like, the punishment is that the book is destroyed. And so what I've had to do is go to these books, these magical texts that are found in libraries around Britain. There's about 30 of them that still survive from the Middle Ages and the early modern period. So only a handful of these books. And try and work out what are the spells in these books similar to the kind of spells that are described in these magical scandals. And because they follow a textual tradition, you know, scribes are copying, recopying these spells, you can generally get some sort of idea, a plausible

case that, you know, it is this spell or something like this spell that was being used in this particular historical event. If Roger Bacon's working for Henry III, I mean, his equivalent working for King John, his dad, he must have had grimoires coming out of his ears. But what I'm really struck in your work is if you look at Bacon, and then if you look at John Dee, who you can tell me about in a second, presumably there's this license to operate because they are also talking about physiology. They're scientists. They're researching the natural as well as the magical world. They're working on gunpowder. They're thinking about how the human body operates. Yeah, that's absolutely right. And in fact, the most common term that is used for spells

throughout this period is the word experiment. They will call them experiments. So it's the idea that this is venturing into the unknown. It's forbidden knowledge. It's doing things which are not authorized by the philosophy and the theology that are approved by the church. It's going beyond those things and trying to find out what you can from any source of knowledge. So it's like no source of knowledge is beyond the limits of what's acceptable. And that, of course, is the modern scientific ethos with the difference that modern scientists probably wouldn't be conjuring demons and angels in order to find out that knowledge. So that's the difference of worldview. But in terms of the attitude, the attitude of

no holds barred search for knowledge, I think is very much in tune with the modern scientific spirit. And of course, it is true that some of the things that they devise are genuine technologies. And you mentioned gunpowder. The making of gunpowder was very much associated with alchemy. So Edward III, for example, who was building some of the first cannon that we use in warfare by the English, he has a whole load of alchemists who he effectively keeps captive in the Tower of London from all nations. You've got the Spaniards in there, Catalans, Frenchmen. Whenever an alchemist arrives in the country, I put them in there. I tell you, Edward III, you don't want to lend the man money or turn

up with specialist military applicable knowledge, do you? He was brutal. Yeah, absolutely. But of course, this kind of science of artillery is very similar to the kind of thing that the alchemists are doing because they have knowledge of how sulfur works. They have knowledge of how sulfur combines with other chemicals. They have the chemical knowledge to create gunpowder that actually works. Now, at the same time, Edward is also saying, I want you to use the philosopher's stone to try and make me limit the quantities of gold. That doesn't work so well, but the gunpowder definitely does. And of course, the porous boundary between astronomy, astrology, and staring at the heavens has been a pastime. Every court through history has had someone specialising in celestial movement.

Yes, absolutely. And these astrologers were people who had deep knowledge of genuine astronomy. They were very, very learned people who were observing the heavens genuinely, and the records that they make are very important still today, you know, in terms of understanding astronomy and astronomical phenomena, even though the interpretation that they were laying on it was of an occult nature. And so yeah, there are genuine branches of learning that are tied up with all of this. You listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about magic. More coming up. tales and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit,

wherever you get your podcasts. so we have to imagine a medieval and even early modern courts as being filled with people who have a clerical background as a religious background but also are occultists or alchemists are a scientist you could say, astronomers, teachers. It's something quite difficult for our modern mindset to comprehend. Yes, I think so. It's sort of simultaneously very, very strange because the belief systems and the frameworks of expectation and belief are very different from our own. But I think the attitudes and the mindsets are very similar. And I think the idea of an obsession with new technologies, even though they are supernatural technologies in this case, is something we're very familiar with. But also, I think the over-reliance on technologies or sort of investing unrealistic

hopes in them. I mean, we can see that today when tech entrepreneurs are making these wild claims about artificial intelligence or self-driving cars or whatever it is that turn out not to be quite as good as they promised i mean you see that again and again reflected in early modern courts where astrologers and alchemists will turn up promising to you know foretell the future with accuracy or create limitless quantities of gold and you know technologies that will overwhelm the king's enemies and all these kind of things i mean nothing, nothing has changed in that regard. Now tell me, I've always been a huge fan of John Dee because he lived, well, in his pomp, he lived in Mortlake on the Thames in London, where I grew up. And he is one of these figures who you've painted that picture of. He was both

a brilliant mathematician and a scientist and a political player, but also an alchemist and occultist and all sorts of things. Tell me more about his extraordinary range of interests and who he was and what he did. Well, if there's one figure in English history who was the real Merlin, it's surely John Dee, in that he really does play this extraordinary political as well as magical role at the court of Elizabeth I. So John Dee is somebody who has a fairly obscure early life, goes to various universities, including Oxford and Louvain in the Low Countries, ends up in hot water during the reign of Mary I, because he has rather Protestant sympathies when Mary, of course, has re-adopted Catholicism for the realm, but gains the patronage of the Princess Elizabeth, who of course

is the future Elizabeth I. And when Elizabeth becomes queen in 1558, Dee becomes prominent quite early on. He is the one who works out using astrology the best day for Elizabeth's coronation, and she does actually go with that recommendation that he comes up with. And over the years, he is a magical advisor to her and to some of her key courtiers as well. He is quite closely linked with Leicester, for example, who's one of her key courtiers. Probably the most important role that he plays is coming up with the idea of the British Empire. So he is the person generally credited with coining that phrase. He makes an argument that Elizabeth is the successor of the Welsh princes, because of course, she's a Tudor. And the Tudors linked their ancestry all the way back to Arthur. And John Dee was Welsh as well by birth, wasn't he?

Oh, yeah, he is a Welshman. That's right. So he's steeped in that tradition. Yeah, exactly. So this kind of Tudor Arthurianism is very, very prominent, even in the reign of Henry VIII, but Dee supercharges it by saying to Elizabeth, well, King Arthur had this massive empire, which included the New World. The Spanish, therefore, have no right to it because Arthur took it first. And this is all linked with those stories about, you know, St. Brendan and various other travellers from Britain and Ireland who crossed over the Atlantic, these legends. And he basically says, you are therefore the ruler of a British empire. And I can prove this by means of magical contact with angels.

So he essentially undergoes these sessions where he works with mediums who look into a crystal ball and report back to him what the angels are saying. So all of this information he gets from angels. He doesn't necessarily tell Elizabeth that that's where he's getting it from, but she is deeply, deeply interested in alchemy. She's deeply interested in claims that Dee makes that there are ores containing silver that can be found in the New World in Newfoundland, which turns out not to be true. But Dee basically puts this idea into her head of a British empire. And so that idea is seeded from a sort of strange occult origin. I am obsessed with the idea that the genesis of the British empire,

the legitimacy for empire, that first great imperial spasm, is a result of mystical Welsh. It derives its legitimacy from Geoffrey of Monmouth, from Arthur's conquests on the continent beyond. That's wonderful. In order to take on the power of Spain, power which was relatively insignificant like England would have had to have more than just political motives in order to do that. And I think that's an illustration of how these kind of magical advisors are really important, because they can put ideas into the minds of monarchs that they would never, under purely pragmatic considerations, ever have contemplated. You know, Elizabeth was a very,

very pragmatic woman. You know, she was no fool. She would have understood that taking on the Spanish was not something that you do lightly. But if you add in this occult element, if you add in this element of prophecy, this element of destiny, this element that the angels are somehow communicating secret knowledge about these undiscovered lands, then suddenly things that under other circumstances you would never consider doing become possible. Now what happens to Dee? Dee is not, like many magicians, not brilliant at predicting his own or maintaining his own position. Yeah, that's right. He kind of goes through these waxing and waning periods of favour. And Elizabeth is very changeable, like all absolute monarchs. You know, she is somebody who sometimes wants his advice and sometimes doesn't. And in the end, Dee gets fed up and he ends up going to Bohemia, what's now the Czech Republic. And he goes with his very, very dodgy medium, a guy called Edward Kelly, who claims to have discovered the Philosopher's Stone. And essentially, once they get to Bohemia, Kelly ingratiates himself with the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who has a court in Prague. And Dee kind of gets frozen out of this. And Kelly gets ennobled by the Holy Roman

Emperor and is asked to make gold using the Philosopher's Stone. And poor Dee is basically penniless and has to go back. And he's going to eke out his life. He gets a job as the warden of a college in Manchester. Manchester in those days was really the middle of nowhere. And yeah, he dies in obscurity and penury, really. And it's only after Dee's death, about a century after his death, that it becomes clear that he was engaged in these extraordinary dialogues with angels through his scryers, through his mediums in the crystal ball. And this is something that Dee is quite guarded about during his own lifetime. But his secret diaries come to light. And so we now

know a great deal about what Dee was doing. Into the era of the Stuarts and beyond, do you think magic still had a place at court? Yes, absolutely. I mean, the fact that James VI of Scotland, who becomes, of course, James I of England in 1603, is obsessed with witchcraft, has quite a significant impact on the position of magic, really, in the early Stuart court. And in fact, the Stuart court is absolutely rife with sorcery. There are magical scandals that blow up in the 1620s and 1630s. There are disreputable wizards, there are people who are put on trial for attempting to assassinate one another by magic. And of course, in the middle of all this is the figure of James I himself,

who wrote a book in 1597 called Demonology, which was one of the most widely read books about witchcraft in Europe. And he's somebody who is very, very interested in his own ability to discern magical misadventures, if you like. He believes that he is a new Solomon. He believes that he's gifted with this wisdom. He also seems to believe, because of his Scottish origins, that he might himself have had some kind of second sight, some kind of spiritual discernment. And so he's not completely credulous. He's not somebody who sees witchcraft everywhere, but he does believe in his own ability to discern it. And he tries cases of witchcraft personally, unheard of for a monarch who normally delegates trials to judges and magistrates, to actually try

cases in person himself, acting as judge, jury and executioner. And so there's a few cases where he does this. And he actually, you know, people accused of witchcraft are brought before him. And he doesn't always find them guilty. So he's not somebody who is completely paranoid. But he is very, very interested in this sort of aspect of life. Obviously, Victorians, I mean, Victoria herself, seances and things, were there individuals, were there Merlin-like figures at these later courts? Well, the 19th century is a key period, because, of course, you've gone through this period of great scepticism of the Enlightenment, the 18th century, where belief in magic loses its social significance. So, you know, you can't say that you believe in

magic and anybody will take you seriously in the 18th century. But what changes that? As you mentioned, the phenomenon of spiritualism, and this comes along in around 1850. And it's the idea that somehow it's acceptable once more within high society to start talking to the dead. Now, there's no evidence that Queen Victoria herself was interested in this, but her son, the Prince of Wales, who later becomes Edward VII, does seem to have believed in talismans. There were times when he was ill at Sandringham when he would receive folk medicine from various local cunning women in Norfolk. So it seems that the royal family still retain this kind of interest in the occult. And it's something which carries

through even into the 20th and indeed 21st centuries, that the royal family does have these associations with alternative spiritualities and alternative ways of thinking. Slight tangent, but I'm reminded of poor Franz Ferdinand going to Sarajevo that fateful day in 1914 when he had various talismans around his neck that he thought would protect him from any assassins' bullets. Sadly, he was wrong. You tweet and write so beautifully about this state. Astrology, magic, tarot are things that we've compartmentalised, or do you think that's quite essential to how decisions are made in our society, how we still operate? I think magic is an unchanging constant of human existence. I mean,

you could say the same thing about religion, but I think magic is something which is always there. We might not necessarily use the same words to describe it that people did in the past. So you might not get today people talking so much of conjuring demons or conjuring angels, but we do find magical thinking absolutely rife within contemporary politics. And I think the idea that there are certain ideas which have power in and of themselves, regardless of any policies that are enacted or any changes that are enacted to bring those things about. That seems to be something that's very, very powerful. Conspiracy theories, conspiracist thinking seems to be deeply bound up with the occult. It's certainly something which, if you look at America,

is very, very prominent. And I think that the instability of politics in the last decade has really brought these aspects of political thinking to the fore. So it seems to be a much more enchanted place, politics, than it was even a decade ago, in the sense that the old certainties of sensible technocrats who get things done has been replaced with this rather unstable populism, where appeal is often made to ideas that are essentially magic, you know, solutions to problems that don't have any basis in reality. And I think it's more relevant now than it has been for a long, long time. As a medievalist, do you feel there's much familiar in the world around you today?

Yeah, absolutely. It makes more sense to me as a medievalist and as an early modernist now since 2016 than it did when I was growing up in the sense that I find a world where, you know, people are talking about portents and omens. People are talking about conspiracies of secret societies, deep state, this sort of stuff. And it's very, very much like the kind of political paranoia that you find in the 17th century or the 15th century or the 14th century. It's the same kind of thinking where it's almost as though the world around us is a total mystery. We don't truly understand why things are the way that they are. And therefore, we fall back on these magical explanations or occult explanations or hidden secrets in order to explain the world. And yeah, I think it's very, very familiar if you are somebody who has studied that period. I'm happy for you, but I don't know if I'm happy for all of us as a result of that answer. Tell us what your wonderful book's called. for all of us as a result of that answer. Tell us what your wonderful book's called.

So the book that I've been speaking about is called Magic in Merlin's Realm, A History of Occult Politics in Britain, and it's published by Cambridge University Press. I love it. Thank you so much, Francis Young, for coming on the podcast. Thank you very much. you