There is a comfortable story about the legendary wizard. He is old, he is wise, he serves the greater good, and his magic is really just knowledge worn as a robe. It is a story that flatters both the wizard and the reader, and it survives mostly because very few people go back to the texts.
Go back to the texts and the picture breaks apart. The most famous magician-king in Western tradition ends his story enslaving demons and then losing everything to idolatry. The most famous wizard in Britain begins as a fatherless boy about to be sacrificed to make a tower stand up. The Egyptian god of magic is a bureaucrat, and a rather severe one. And Japan’s greatest sorcerer held a salaried post in a government ministry with an examination system attached.
These are stranger and better stories than the archetype. What follows is four of them, read from the sources rather than from the archetype, plus a fifth group of traditions the archetype tends to leave out entirely.
Merlin: The Boy Who Was Not Sacrificed
Merlin enters written literature in the 1130s, in Geoffrey of Monmouth, and he does not enter it as a sage. He enters it as a child.
King Vortigern is trying to build a tower. The tower keeps collapsing. His advisers tell him the foundations must be sprinkled with the blood of a boy born without a father. The boy they find is Merlin, and instead of dying he explains the real problem: two dragons are fighting in a pool beneath the foundations. He is right. He then delivers a long sequence of prophecies, and Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae is off and running.
This origin matters, because it sets the shape of everything Merlin does afterwards. His power is not the power to command. It is the power to see, and specifically to see what is under the floor. The famous later episodes follow the same pattern. He transforms Uther Pendragon into the likeness of Gorlois so that Arthur can be conceived, which is an act of disguise. He moves the Giants’ Ring from Ireland to Salisbury Plain, which Geoffrey presents as engineering rather than sorcery: Merlin’s skill is knowing how, and the stones are dismantled and shipped rather than flown. He never once wins a battle by throwing fire.
The site’s Merlin entry describes him as the shape-shifting prophet whose magic engineered the birth and reign of Arthur, and engineered is exactly the word. Merlin is a fixer. The tragedy attached to him is that a man who can see everything can prevent almost nothing, which is why the later tradition has him outmanoeuvred by a student, imprisoned, and removed from the story before the story ends.
He is also not the only magician in his own legend. Morgan le Fay is Arthur’s half-sister and, in Geoffrey’s Vita Merlini, the chief of nine sisters ruling the isle of Avalon, skilled in healing, in flight, and in changing her shape. She begins as a healer and is demoted to a villain over four centuries of retelling. That demotion is a better index of how English and Welsh tradition came to feel about powerful women than anything in the Merlin material itself.
The Welsh material also has its own figure of the same kind, older and odder. Taliesin is the radiant-browed poet reborn out of Ceridwen’s cauldron after a shape-shifting chase, then found adrift in a salmon weir. Where Merlin sees, Taliesin knows, and his knowing is acquired by accident and pursued at speed. The two of them mark the two poles of the Celtic magical imagination: the counsellor at the king’s elbow, and the poet who has been everything and remembers all of it.
Solomon: The Magician-King the Legend Cannot Rescue
King Solomon appears in the Hebrew Bible as a wise judge and a temple-builder. The magical Solomon is a later and much wilder creature, and the text that makes him is the Testament of Solomon, a Greek work usually placed somewhere between the first and fifth centuries CE. It is a pseudepigraphon, written under a famous name long after that name was dead. It is not a grimoire in the medieval sense, though nearly every later grimoire bearing his name is drinking from it.
In the Testament, Solomon is given a ring by the archangel Michael and uses it to summon, interrogate and enslave a long procession of demons. Each must state its name, its function, the illness it causes, and the angel who thwarts it. He puts them to work building the Temple. The book is, structurally, a demonological catalogue with a construction project wrapped around it.
Two things about this deserve saying plainly, because the popular version gets both wrong.
The ring is a ring, not a hexagram. The object in the Testament is a signet ring with a seal engraved on it. The six-pointed star now universally called the Seal of Solomon is a later development, elaborated chiefly in medieval Islamic and Jewish magical traditions, and it is not what the Testament describes. The five-pointed and six-pointed figures attached to his name accumulated over roughly a thousand years. They were not there at the start.
And his magic is not selfless. This is the claim the archetype most wants to make, and the one the source most flatly refuses. Solomon compels demons by force and holds them in bondage. The Testament then ends with him falling for a Shunammite woman, being persuaded to sacrifice to foreign gods in order to have her, and losing the spirit of God and his power along with it. The book is a warning about a magician, not a portrait of a saint. Reading it as “he used magic only for the greater good” requires ignoring its own ending.
Solomon’s afterlife is enormous. He is the reason so much later European ritual magic is addressed to named spirits holding named offices, and he supplies the frame into which Asmodeus and much of the later demonological tradition are fitted. The djinn of Islamic and Arabic tradition are bound by him too, in a parallel body of story where Sulayman commands them by the same ring. Very little of the Western idea of a wizard who summons survives without him.
Abe no Seimei: The Wizard as Civil Servant
Abe no Seimei is the most famous magician in Japanese history, and he is usually introduced to English readers as a shaman. He was not one, and the mistake is worth correcting carefully, because it is the same mistake this series has spent several articles arguing against.
Seimei was an onmyoji, a practitioner of onmyodo, and onmyodo is not an ecstatic tradition. It is a body of Chinese-derived calendrical, divinatory and astrological science: yin and yang, the Five Phases, the sexagenary cycle, directional taboos, and the calculation of lucky and unlucky days. It was administered by the Onmyoryo, the Bureau of Yin and Yang, an actual organ of the Heian state with ranks, salaries and a largely hereditary staff. Seimei worked inside it. He appears in court diaries. He held official rank.
So the right comparison is not the Siberian shaman entering trance. It is closer to a court astronomer who is also the court’s expert on ritual pollution, and whose professional opinion determines whether the emperor may travel north this week.
That is a less romantic figure and a considerably more interesting one, because it means Japan built magic into the machinery of government and paid for it out of the treasury. The legends that gathered around Seimei afterwards are correspondingly grand. He commanded shikigami, spirit servants. He identified a curse concealed inside a gift. And, as the site’s entry records, he was said to be half kitsune, the son of a white fox named Kuzunoha. That last detail is folklore layered onto a documented bureaucrat, which is precisely how the strongest magical reputations tend to be made.
His world was full of things a court diviner had professional reason to worry about, from tengu in the mountains to the broader run of yokai, and being the man who could name them was a career.
Thoth: The God Who Keeps the Records
Thoth is the ibis-headed Egyptian god of writing, magic and the moon, and the striking thing about him is how administrative he is.
He invents writing. He reckons time and divides it. He is the scribe at the judgment of the dead, standing at the scales where the heart is weighed against the feather of Maat and recording the result. When Osiris is dismembered and Isis works to restore him, Thoth supplies the words. When Horus and Set take their dispute to the tribunal, Thoth sits on the panel. In the Duat, it is his formulae the dead need.
The pattern is consistent. Thoth’s power is not force. It is correct wording in the correct place, which is also what Egyptian magical practice largely consisted of. Writing was not a metaphor for his power. Writing was his power, and the reason he is the patron of magicians is that Egyptian magic ran on precisely spoken and precisely written formulae. Compare Nabu, the Babylonian god of writing and prophecy and patron of scribes, and the same logic surfaces in Mesopotamia. Where literacy is scarce and powerful, the god of literacy is the god of power.
Greek writers later identified Thoth with Hermes, which is how the Hermetic tradition got its name and how a very late body of Greek philosophical and magical writing came to be attributed to an Egyptian god. That identification is a Greco-Roman development, not an Egyptian one, and it has done more than anything else to make Thoth look like a wizard rather than a functionary of the cosmos.
Egypt also supplies the clearest real case of a wise man becoming a god. Imhotep was a vizier and the architect of the first pyramid, an actual person of the Third Dynasty, and across roughly three thousand years he was deified into a god of medicine and wisdom. The Greeks then identified him with Asclepius. The wizard-sage is not always a fiction. Sometimes he is an administrator who was very good at his job and kept getting promoted after death.
The Wizards the Archetype Leaves Out
Line up Merlin, Solomon, Seimei and Thoth and it is easy to conclude the wise magician is universal. He is not. He is a particular figure, and the traditions that do not produce him are as informative as the ones that do.
Norse tradition has no benign wizard-counsellor at all. It has Odin, who acquires knowledge by hanging himself on a tree for nine nights, gives an eye for a drink from Mimir‘s well, and consults Mimir’s severed head afterwards. It has the volva, the travelling seeress named for her staff, who prophesies from a raised seat and is summoned rather than employed. Norse magical knowledge costs something specific, and it is usually paid for in advance. Nobody in this tradition gives wise counsel from a comfortable chair.
Finnish tradition has Vainamoinen, who comes closer to the archetype than anyone else on this list and reaches it by a different road. He is old from birth, and he wins his contests by singing, out-performing a rival in a duel of incantation until the younger man sinks into a swamp. Magic here is a craft skill with a competitive circuit, and the best practitioner is the one who knows the most origins.
Romanian tradition has the Solomonari, wizards trained in an underground school who ride dragons above the clouds and command hail. The name is Solomon’s, arriving in eastern Europe by a long route, and the folklore does something no court tradition would tolerate: it makes the wizard a weather-terrorist whom farmers pay off.
And Greek tradition, which produced Western literature’s first magic-workers, made them women and made them dangerous. Circe turns men into swine on Aeaea. Medea wins Jason the Golden Fleece and then destroys him. Hecate presides over the crossroads. There is no Greek Merlin, because in Greek myth the person who knows the spells is not the king’s adviser. She is the obstacle, or the weapon, or the reason the hero’s story ends badly.
What the Comparison Actually Shows
The four figures at the centre of this article are not four versions of one archetype. They are four different jobs.
- Merlin is a seer. His value is foreknowledge, and his tragedy is that foreknowledge changes nothing.
- Solomon is a binder. His power is contractual, exercised over named spirits by a named authority, and it can be revoked. It is.
- Seimei is a technician. Salaried, examined and ranked, working a science of days and directions.
- Thoth is a recorder. His authority is that of the one who writes it down, and in Egypt that was the highest authority there was.
What unites them is not wisdom. It is that each is the person in the room who knows the correct procedure, in a world where procedure is understood to be load-bearing. That is an older and more human idea than the sage on the mountain: the specialist you call because the tower keeps falling down and nobody else can say why.
The archetype of the wise wizard, the one who serves the greater good and asks nothing, is real but late. It owes far more to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than to Geoffrey or the Testament. And it is worth noticing that we perfected it at roughly the point when we stopped believing any of it worked.
Further Reading
- Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, translated by Lewis Thorpe. The source of the Merlin material, and short enough to read in an evening.
- Nikolai Tolstoy, The Quest for Merlin. Speculative in places, and reasonably clear about which parts are the speculation.
- Pablo A. Torijano, Solomon the Esoteric King: From King to Magus, Development of a Tradition. How the biblical king became a magician.
- F. C. Conybeare’s 1898 translation of the Testament of Solomon remains the accessible English version, with the caveat that scholarship on the text’s date and layers has moved on considerably since.
- Bernard Faure, The Fluid Pantheon, for Heian religious practice in its institutional setting rather than as folklore.
- Robert K. Ritner, The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. The standard technical account of what Egyptian magic actually involved.
- Geraldine Pinch, Magic in Ancient Egypt. The readable companion to Ritner.
- Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. On how Thoth became Hermes Trismegistus and what Renaissance Europe did with him. Yates overstates the case in places and is still the book to start with.
- Neil Price, The Viking Way. For Odin, the volva, and what Norse magic cost.
Explore More on Gods and Monsters
Arthurian and Welsh: Merlin · Arthur · Morgan le Fay · Avalon · Taliesin · Cauldron of Ceridwen · Welsh Mythology · Celtic Mythology
Solomon’s inheritance: Asmodeus · Djinn · Solomonari · Islamic Mythology · Jewish Mythology
Japan: Abe no Seimei · Kitsune · Tengu · Yokai · Japanese Mythology
Egypt and Mesopotamia: Thoth · Maat · Isis · Osiris · Horus · Set · Duat · Imhotep · Nabu · Egyptian Mythology · Mesopotamian Mythology
The wizards the archetype forgets: Odin · Mimir · Volva · Vainamoinen · Circe · Aeaea · Medea · Golden Fleece · Hecate · Hermes · Asclepius