Merlin Heart-fire
Merlin stands shining bright in his cave, silently looking out through your eyes.
The heart-fire swirls out of his stillness, invisible tongues flicking out, far and fast, transforming all they touch.
Merlin, the figure of a bearded and wise older man, the magician with a staff in his flowing robes, is not a personification of the heart-fire. This archetypal character functions as a guide and witness; he brings you to the point at which you are able to feel the Earth pulse and to allow it to work on you and through you and then to observe its effects. Merlin heart-fire is is formed by the Earth-Venus pulse, in synchrony with the heartbeat and mind-field resonance. It is a transformational energy and a state of being. It is
the alchemical child that the Earth births through the open-space of unconditional love we create within ourselves. Of course, it is temporary, something or some one is always going to bump us back into polarity sooner rather than later.
Merlin heart-fire is the magic behind the magician. It’s not intentional magic, in which the magician uses their mind, their acquired knowledge and their skills to bring about a desired observable effect. This is the ancient way of Merlin as shaman, in which he uses his mind to dissolve all the mental constructs of himself, so that only the observer remains. He becomes the furnace in which the Earth-Venus pulse fans the flame of his eternal self, to generate the heart-fire. He allows the burning of his own impurities to become the medicine that goes to where it will and not by his direction. His acquired skill is in the ability to surrender to the power and to describe the event after, so as to bring the resolution into consciousness.
Merlin as the guide and witness is a masculine energy, that is equally available to both men and women. The heart-fire is mercurial, both masculine and feminine.
All shaman are magicians, but all magicians are not shaman. The difference is that shaman know the nature powers, elemental beings and the aspects of the living in the invisible world and use his/her imagination to interact with them. This has been presented as a specific set of beliefs, which is a deception of the most epic proportions.
Belief, in this context, is the projection of your multi-dimensionality, named and neutered by various ‘authorities’ and mirrored back to you, so you can create another version of you – a version that depends on such authorities for validation and constructs society on their behalf. Belief came into common use around the 12th century, by way of a courtly ‘by your leave’; an expression of respect for some one in whom you have trust and confidence, which in turn hardened into the ‘permission’ that supports external authority. This was the time-frame in which both Geoffrey of Monmouth and Chrétien de Troyes wrote of Merlin and Arthurian legend.
Monmouth was a catholic bishop from Monmouth in Wales and de Troyes was a court poet, attached first to the court of Champagne in France and later to Philippe d’Alsace, of Flanders. They stoked the heart-fire, then smothered it in belief. The historical Jesus was undoubtedly a shaman and a heart-fire adept, as was Siddhartha Gautama, but their teachings were corrupted as soon as they were written down..
Monmouth drew on stories related to the lives of several men to create his Merlin character. These were Myrddin Wyllt, or ‘Myrddin the Wild’, another bard named Taliesin and some one named Lailoken, which may have been the given name of Merlin, if Merlin was a ‘job title’ nickname. They all lived from around 540-600 AD and a significant event in their lives was the Battle of Arthuret in 573CE. Merlin fought in this battle, his king lost and his nephew was killed. This is said to have driven him mad, so that he retreated to the Caledonian Forest of Scotland, where he remained until he died.
The ‘who was the original Merlin’ debate, misses the point entirely. It is not about the individual. When you shift your attention to the energy behind the man, the heart-fire, it becomes obvious that it has flowed through many men and their stories are told through all cultures. It flowed through women too, but our stories didn’t survive genocide, witch-burning, slavery and all else involved in the repression of the feminine that went along with state enforced religion.
The Dark Ages, from around 400-1000 AD, was when the heart-fire was brutally extinguished in the northern hemisphere, from Europe to the Himalayas. After a brief rekindling, via the grail legends, it was again snuffed out by warring fiefdoms, hard labour, taxation, poverty and plague. It fired up into a new ‘Age of Enlightenment’ in the 14th century, when the art, science and the humanist philosophy of the Renaissance period broke the omnipotency of the Church, so that it could no longer determine our relationship with the world, the universe and the Divine. Imagination needs basic conditions to be met in order to flourish and Nature needs imagination to balance the world. Since the Renaissance, the heart-fire has been burning evermore brightly, despite the endless wars and ceaseless efforts of the empire brutality.
I first noticed the heart-fire working in January 2020, with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction, but I didn’t link it with Merlin and Venus until the Jupiter-Venus conjunction of April 30th 2022. As I write this today, on the full moon of 23rd May 2024, Venus and Jupiter meet again, this time in the Bull, in perfect alignment with Alcyone in the Pleiades, the Central Sun of our own Milky Way. In my own investigations and practice I’ve noticed what I’ve called the Earth-Venus pulse, which corresponds with Venus conjunctions and other significant points in the Venus orbit, some of which will be personal. I wanted to write this post earlier, but our internet was down due to solar flares and heavy rain and then I was almost knocked out by the Sun-Jupiter conjunction of 18 May, also in the Bull. A solar conjunction is also referred to as a ‘cazimi’, which is from Arabic, meaning ‘as if in the heart.’ Venus, goes ‘cazimi’ on 4th June, between the horns of the Bull, right at the crown. Of course, this isn’t news. Before organised religion, most cultures followed the Venus cycle, through wisdom rather than worship.
From my perspective, ‘covid’ was a healing/clearing response brought on by the surging heart-fire, as we moved into the ‘beginning of the end’ of the old era (marked by the aforementioned Saturn-Pluto conjunction). The internal waters holding trauma-based memory, cells and tissues with redundant patterns needed to be cleared, so we could open up and move on. Since then, in otherwise healthy individuals, all symptoms have been part of this clearing/healing/transformation process. I know many of us have experienced the burning sensations at night, with the ‘upgrading’ of the nervous system. I’ve had various pains, accidents and ‘spontaneous chiropractic adjustments’ through this period. Since the solar eclipse and polar vortex reversal of 8th April, I’ve felt a physical heart-wrenching, bruising and missed beats, as my heart-muscles have softened into a new rhythm. Hawthorn tincture has been very helpful over the past few weeks.
The hawthorn blossomed in early April this year and I was so drawn to the scent that I had to stop and question the signal. I’d made some hawthorn tincture in 2019, for some unknown reason. When I took it, I was able to relax more deeply and reach out further with my mind. There I found Merlin the Shaman, held spellbound in the unconscious by a Lady of the Lake until the conditions were ripe for his re-emergence, which is always an individual calling.
Merlin the Shaman, tells the story of how he serves the life force, another term for unconditional love, that flows through the Mother and the sovereign will, the masculine principle. He demonstrates this most eloquently by removing himself from the story because Arthur does not meet the conditions of service and cannot be a sovereign king while serving the Pope. The details of the story, that I won’t go into here, give us a narrative framework that unfolds like a mandala in the mind, opening our perception to the layer of reality in which miracles happen. The wild woods of the unconscious mind where Merlin the Shaman resides, permeates everything and is everywhere. His wisdom, which is yours too, will guide you to where the heart-fire glows, where ever you happen live.
It seems ironic that we can only get to unconditional love by passing through so many conditions and relinquishing all the negotiations and limitations that we impose on the forces of life. We want healing, we want problems solved, but only in a particular way and not for those who don’t deserve it. That’s why it’s such a fleeting state. Children are in this state of being all the time, as are animals. As adults it takes self-love and conscious effort to get out of our own way and then a particular kind of focus to notice what happens when we do.
A week or so ago, I had a small but irrefutable experience of the heart-fire. Dean went to the dentist as he broke a tooth that needed to be extracted. The dentist refused to pull the tooth unless Dean took a course of antibiotics, which he refused and left. We talked about it and decided that he would find another way or another dentist. I was concerned for Dean as he was in pain and Merlin was in my mind for sure, but I wasn’t thinking or looking for any solution and I surprised myself by murmuring: Merlin, show me your magic, and then I went to make some pancakes. Half an hour later the tooth dropped out in a pancake, no pain, blood or fuss.
If I hadn’t invoked Merlin first, I would have called it a coincidence.
Next post: From My Core Rise All, ancient forest roots revival
