One of the big changes for today is a new skin, hearkening back to the days of my yore–before the Tribe of Anthropik, before even Tribal Dawn, when my interests lay in the post-Roman period, in the British Isles, and I was better known for The Saxon Shore than contemporary politics. My original draw was the question of “the historical King Arthur,” and the legacy of that decade-long obsession is several shelves of scholarly tomes on the subject. At the time, I thought it was a purely academic exercise with no application. Now, I’m not so sure.

By the fifth century, the Roman Empire was in a state of collapse. Romans experienced it very much as the end of the world, and apocalyptic fervor was strong. Geoffrey Ashe writes of the clamor for a Restitutor Orbis–Restorer of the World. Roman control of the British Isles was lost in a major fiasco in 409-410, when Constantine III’s bid to duplicate the feat of his namesake came to an abrupt end in the same year that Alaric sacked Rome. Honorius, holed up in Ravenna, could hardly afford the manpower to reassert control over Britannia. As history showed, no subsequent emperor could afford it, either.

This era is often glossed over as “the Dark Ages” in history books, but archaeology has shown that it was not nearly as horrible as we’ve so long imagined it. Kenneth Dark’s Civitas to Kingdom highlights how much continuity there was between Roman Britain, and “sub-Roman” Britain. Chris Snyder’s An Age of Tyrants rejects that misleading term for “post-Roman.” Tintagel was bursting with trade; South Cadbury was home to a potentate of considerable wealth and power. In many material ways, post-Roman Britain was a distinct improvement over the Roman. The old idea of “sub-Roman” Britain as a place that was substantially worse off than Roman Britain (especially Late Roman Britain) simply does not stand up to modern evidence. The only thing that’s particularly “Dark” about that era is the lack of historical, documentary evidence.

One of the most interesting bits of evidence comes from the old hill forts, the centers of Celtic life in the pre-Roman Iron Age. In the post-Roman period, they were refortified. The old Celtic tribal divisions re-emerged along the civitates fault lines. One of the few ideas of John Morris’ to survive is his observation that while the Anglo-Saxon invaders quickly overcame the highly Romanized southeast, those areas that had not been quite so thoroughly Romanized, where Celtic tribal life had lived on and mingled with Roman tradition, fought on against the Anglo-Saxons, and even scored a victory so momentous that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle cannot find a single victory for a century thereafter: the Battle of Badon Hill.

It’s one of the few events of the age we have contemporary evidence for–in De Excidio Britanniae, from St. Gildas, sometimes called Gildas Badonicus because he marks the year of the victory at Badon as the same as his own birth. When you pursue the history of King Arthur’s legend, you eventually come back to Badon Hill. There are dozens upon dozens of theories, but for me, whoever led the British charge down Badon Hill–whoever stopped the Saxons dead in their tracks for a century–is the “historical” King Arthur. That is the real person who won a victory so momentous, so inspiring, that it could reasonably be draped in myths of titanic struggles between good and evil, and the general who conquered the Saxons that day could be considered the messianic figure they all hoped for–the Restitutor Orbis.

The refortification of the old Iron Age hillforts–including enormous work done at South Cadbury, which traditions even into the 1600s identified as “Camelot,” sparking the archaeological interest that discovered its post-Roman pre-eminence, along with Arthur’s legendary birthplace, Tintagel–is very telling. When Rome collapsed, it was not the LPRIA (Late Pre-Roman Iron Age) all over again: it was something new, a synthesis of Roman and Celtic.

“King Arthur” was a man whose civilization was in shatters, who seemed to be living at “the end of history,” who was able to move beyond mere Roman civilization, meld it with the native, Celtic traditions of his island, and form a whole so vibrant and powerful that it held the Anglo-Saxon hordes at bay for a hundred years.

The new stone age will not be quite like the old stone age. We’ve passed through civilization, and perhaps we’ve learned a thing or two. Collapse is not about reversion, and our response to it must not be simply going “back.” There is no “back.” There is no “Noble Savage.” There are merely lessons in human nature–in what works, and what doesn’t work. History plays variations on a theme, not simply mindless repitition. Our future lies in syncretism, not dogmatism; in adaptation, not purity; in a willingness to experiment and the daring to pursue truly radical, truly inventive, truly awe-inspiring visions of what we could be.

There’s also Arthur’s tutor to consider: Merlin. After dismantling the illusions of neoshamanism, Noel recognizes that we do need some means of reclaiming our shamanic heritage–without falling prey to the lures of cultural appropriation and “Noble Savage” Romanticism. He suggests an approach based in Jungian psychology (another long-standing fascination of mine, with its own bookshelf again), and the figure of Merlin.

As I mentioned above, I don’t think we can conceive of these matters–how to relate, as Westerners, to a shamanic spirituality–without psychology. So that relates us to Jung, among other shapers of modern Western psychology. Moreover, Jung was involved in the areas that are, to me, most relevant: imagination, the reality of the psyche, dreams, the need for spirituality and “the symbolic life,” etc. The connection from Jung back to Merlin is not ironclad, by any means, but his own personal fascination with the Merlin figure and legend, as attested in part by the anecdote you recounted about his Bollingen stone, seems at least a suggestive connection, an opportunity to imagine possible parallels. I also suggest in my book that as Merlin disappears from the outer affairs of Arthur’s court and military concerns and is enchanted into invisibility by Niniane/Viviane/Nimue, he becomes a figure of story, an inner figure, a part of the Western psyche. Thus he inhabits a realm where psychology and aesthetics overlap–he takes his “Celtic shamanism” there, if you will–and that is a realm where Jung set up shop in our century. Merlin is a possible Western shamanic role model–one whom I connect, somewhat loosely, to Jung. But there are other figures that have been thought of as Western arch-shamans: Orpheus, for instance, or Faust. I needed a model, with a story, to lend flesh and bones to my abstract points about Western (neo)shamanism as a possible, a viable, enterprise. But there’s no Merlinian orthodoxy here. I could’ve gone with Orpheus or Faust–and could even have drawn connections to Jung. But Merlin, and the Merlin-Jung connection, such as it is, spoke to me most evocatively, elicited my imagining–which is halfway to shamanic practice, for the likes of me. (1999 Interview)

The earliest stories of Merlin make him a bard who sees his patron killed in battle, driving him mad. He runs off into the woods, naked, and when he is next seen–years later–he is riding into another lord’s court (still naked), on the back of a stag and issuing prophecies. Such is the stuff shamans are made of.

Whether it is my earlier fascinations, or my Celtic blood crying out, I cannot help but find many layers of meaning and importance in the “sub-Roman” history of Arthur and his court, and through it all, the Western Romantic vision. The “post-Roman” becomes the “sub-Roman.” A successful warlord becomes “King Arthur,” and a Celtic shaman becomes the wizard Merlin. But perhaps that mythic dimension we add–if we can bear in mind that it is, indeed, myth–shows that we are not yet completely lost, that we can still see the particular events that unfold around us, and yet retain the capacity for wonder, to percieve in them a reflection of cosmic truth.

The new skin is an homage to that, a meditation on those themes, and a reminder that the future that lies in store for us is not one of reversion, but of supreme invention.