Merlin's Map

If you are familiar with the Tarot – not the arcane, mystifying deck of cards employed by lesser guides, but the cards whose images represent archetypal moments and movements in life – you will recognize its patterns and elements in places and phases of your own life. They were, after all, the result of many years of inner science in the western world, a system of symbols similar to the Chinese I Ching, that could be used to shake up your habits of thought, and let you see deeper into a situation than you normally would.

In effect, any of these oracles is a checklist, to make sure you don’t conveniently forget pieces of the puzzle of life, when you are trying to make a sensible picture of it.

The original Tarot consisted of 21 cards which stood for primary forces in life. It begins with creation and moves outward: the first card, The Fool, is number 0 – the flow, the current of life. When you dissolve into the act of love, when the birth of a child sweeps you up in its moment, when you let go of controlling your life and allow its possibility to come to you, that is all the domain of The Fool.

The second card is not the force of life itself, but mastery of the forces of life. The Mage is not merely the “flow”, but the channeling of that flow. The greatest masters of spiritual or physical practice stand squarely in the role of the Mage, opening to the river of life and allowing it to flow through their fingers, mystics whose role on the planet is to subtly organize creation into forms that serve us.

That’s where Merlin comes in.

I was considering the medieval masters of such arts: a rough parchment is unrolled, to reveal the outlines of a kingdom, its major cities and towns, the roads which connect them, and principal geographies, from mountains to coast, from lakes into rivers into the ocean. All containing place names. The traveler looks at the map and says, “Let’s see… we left Cornwall yesterday, so we must be about… here.” 

Ah, but Merlin is The Mage, has perfected his manipulation of the stuff of life. He says a few words in Latin, gestures with his hand, drops a little powder on the map and tells the traveler, “So long as a grain of this powder remains in the parchment, the bearer will know precisely where he is.” Indeed, as he speaks, a beautifully calligraphed hand appears, whose finger points to a point along the road… some miles from the position that had been guessed.

Can you imagine being in possession of such a map, half a millennium ago? Pure magic.

Does it lessen the magic to know how Merlin achieved his wizardry? Yesterday I was leading a group of hikers down a mountain trail in northern New Hampshire. We had been on the trail for a few hours, everyone was tired and looking forward to their dinner and conversation around a campfire and sleep. I consulted out Merlin’s map, where a simple symbol pointed our location…

I looked at the map, and on the map was a symbol that followed us wherever we went, and told us where we were. Not only that – Merlin having lived so long ago, you would expect some improvements on his wizardry in all these years – the map also told me:

  • How many miles to the end of our trail
  • How many minutes it would likely take for us to arrive there
  • When the next trail junction would occur, warning me with a sound when we approached it, and telling me which fork of the trail to take
  • How fast we were walking, how long we had been stopped, how long we had been on the trail
  • All the points of the compass
  • When sunrise and sunset, moonrise and moonset would occur
  • Our altitude above sea level, and how that altitude had changed over time
  • Whether a storm front was approaching or receding
  • Where water sources were in the vicinity
  • I could ask the map to take me to any named point or roadhouse in the United States and it would guide me there over the best possible route

The map remembered every step I took, and if I needed to show anyone the path we had taken, I could recall it for them.

Of course, this bit of magic is a handheld GPS unit. Can you imagine what this bit of magic would have looked like to people even 50 years ago? Does it matter that we had to put our spies in the skies, feeding positional information to our little map-with-a-brain? Does it matter that, should our little chemical powder run out, we have to replace it?

The sheer power of modern science and technology cannot be denied. It must be measured and balanced. It must not stand between us and our connection to the world. It must preserve and give us more intimacy with the world.

But… how to doubt the existence of wizards? The wizards are us.