Pagan Portals - Merlin: Once and Future Wizard

by Elen Sentier

Merlin is a god of edges. He is without limits. He brings us to the brink of what we know and helps us leap off the cliff into what we don’t yet know. He stands at crossings, borders and frontiers, places of initiation where we go from one state to another, and takes us to the rim of the world, the rim of our knowing, and then on and out beyond, he helps us move beyond our limits and climb out of the box we’ve been living in up to then. Merlin is often called uncanny, meaning something that is strangely familiar as well as unknown. He is indeed enigmatic, shadowy, cryptic and covert. He, like the threshold, is both mysterious and also strangely familiar for, whether we remember or not, we really have been there before.