THE MODERN OCCULTIST INTERVIEW
with
John Michael Greer
JMG Three books did it. One was Nikolai Tolstoy’s The Quest for Merlin, a first-rate study of the historical realities behind the Merlin legend; the other two were R.J. Stewart’s The Prophetic Vision of Merlin and The Mystic Life of Merlin, which unpack two of the core medieval Merlin texts to show the profound occult philosophy woven into them. By the time I finished reading those it was clear to me that the Disneyfied Merlin I’d grown up with was not merely fake but a crass debasement of a deep spiritual reality.
MO
On a personal note, do you have a favorite on-screen Merlin? Full disclosure, Nicol Williamson IS Merlin to me… Merlin's Wheel: Self-Initiation in the Druid Tradition & The Secret of the Temple: Earth Energies, Sacred Geometry, and the Lost Keys of Freemasonry Aeon Books, 2025 & 2026
MODERN OCCULTIST
I’ve long admired how one of your earlier books, The Occult Philosophy Workbook, can be used as a perfect primer for nearly any magical or esoteric systems that a reader would continue to study postcoursework. Your most recent works, however, have largely combined your own passions in ethical nature-based philosophies with modern Paganism—which I love!
JMG There I’m going to have to disappoint you. I’ve never seen a visualmedia version of Merlin I liked. That’s one of the two reasons I put Merlin as a character in my novel The Weird of Hali: Arkham, the last volume of my epic fantasy with tentacles—I wanted to portray Merlin something like the way I imagine him. (The other reason was that H.P. Lovecraft, whose stories gave me much of my raw material, included Merlin as a minor figure in “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward,” and that was far too tempting a morsel to leave out of my tale!)
“On the one hand, the ceremonial magic scene is still trying to grapple with the sheer volume and complexity of a tradition far older and vaster
JOHN MICHAEL GREER Thank you. I’ve gone back and forth between these two general themes through most of my writing career. I first broke into print with a sequence of Golden Dawn-themed books back in the 1990s, starting with Paths of Wisdom, then started writing about Druidry in the next decade, and—well, my interests include both those themes as well as others, so my book projects wind back and forth across a fairly broad landscape of ideas. We’ll talk a little later about how artificial the current barriers between those themes really are.
MO
In Merlin's Wheel you make a compelling case that the figure of Merlin— pop culture wizard aside—preserves the memory of a genuinely archaic Celtic deity, one whose myths encode a system of spiritual transformation that predates Stonehenge. How did you first begin to suspect that the Merlin legends were pointing back to something that ancient, and what was the moment in your research when that suspicion became a conviction?
MODERN OCCULTIST MAGAZINE
than most people realized until recently. On the other, most modern Pagans, at least in the U.S., are so caught up in political activism these days that it’s surprising they have time to do anything else.”
MO
The fissure you describe in Merlin's Wheel between ceremonial magicians and the broader Pagan community is something many of our readers will recognize acutely—they've lived on one side of it or the other (and many, like myself, due to your wonderful previous books on the Grail and its place within modern Pagan practices!). Your work in
SUMMER SOLSTICE 2026
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