pagan and Gnostic figure of Philemon was reported by Jung to be a psychagogue,
psychopomp or guide facilitating access to his own and the collective unconscious
(Wehr, 1985:183-185). I ndeed, in her biographical study C. G. Jung: His Myth in
Our Time (1975) Marie-Louise von Franz closes with the chapter Le Cri de Merlin
(the final five chapters are all on Merlin) in which it becomes clear that Jung was
not only fascinated by Merlin but, as Noel asserts, actively identified his psychology,
if not his own personality, with Merlin’s powers (Noel, 1999:19). Jung explained
that he had the idea to inscribe the phrase Le Cri de Merlin on the back face of the
Bollingen stone because:
... what the stone expressed reminded me of Merlin’s life in the
forest, after he had vanished from the world. Men still hear his
cries, so the legend runs, but they cannot understand or interpret
them ... His story is not yet finished, and he still walks abroad. I t
might be said that the secret of Merlin was carried on by alchemy,
primarily in the figure of Mercurius. Then Merlin was taken up
again in my psychology of the unconscious and remains
uncomprehended to this day (Jung, (MDR), 1961:228).
To be sure, the figure of Merlin is that of the archetypal Western shaman.
Before Merlin became Arthur’s advisor and court magician in the late medieval texts,
he had been seer, bard, Druid, Wild Man, and, most unquestionably, shaman, a
theory substantiated by Noel (1999:15). Tolstoy (1985) also provides an excellent
account of Merlin or Myrddin as pagan Druid or bard surviving in a predominantly
Christian age and also of his influence on Western literary tradition. The poet,
philosopher, historian and storyteller Jean Markdale in his remarkable work of 1981,
Merlin l’Enchanteur, (translated into English in 1995, as Merlin, Priest of Nature) not
only places the actual Merlin in history but also illustrates the influence of Merlin
and the Merlin myth throughout the Western canon.
6.3 The Fictive Power of Neo-shamanism
Daniel Noel suggests that neo-shamanism was born because of the ‘fictive
power of imagination’ (Noel, 1999:58) that not only provides a more mindful
interaction, a type of “ ...honest literary lying” for the writer (Noel, 1999:10),
discerned especially in the fantasy works of Eliade but more especially identifies the
likes of Carlos Castenada, perhaps beginning with Tales of Power (1975), and
Ronald Sukenick, as ‘shamanovelists’. I t must also be remembered that the person
who led the field in contemporary studies of shamanism, the scholar of