Interview with Author Simon Stirling

Simon Stirling: History versus Truth
Simon is the author of Who Killed William Shakespeare and The King arthur Conspiracy, Simon takes what we know about historical figures and turns that knowledge upon its head! He is currently writing for Pagan and esoteric publisher Moon Books and regularly blogs upon the true roots of the yearly festivals that stem from pagan beliefs.
Mabh: You were into acting and writing from an early age, so how did you become so interested in history and legend?
Simon: I guess acting/writing and history/legend go hand in hand. As an actor, you’re often being introduced to history in one form or another (plays set or written in different periods), and as a writer you’re drawn to ready-made stories – which is basically what history is – and legends. Legends, in particular, reveal story archetypes (I’m about to start teaching screenwriting at university, and so I’m exploring once again the mythic archetypes of the hero and his/her journey). Where history is concerned, the stories might be more specific and personal, but they are human stories all the same. Every story begins (I believe) with a “What if …?” and history supplies some excellent ones: what if I were around during the English Civil War – which side would I take? How would it have felt to be in London during a time of plague? What would it have been like to meet Emma, Lady Hamilton? So history is ready-made story material, and legends show us how to shape those stories, and what the enduring features of storytelling are.
MS: You obviously have a fascination with Scotland. How did this come about?
SS: My earliest holidays as a child were spent in Wales. I was 8 or 9 when we first visited Scotland, and I was entranced. It’s such a huge canvas! The landscape alone is amazing (I love it when you can see land, water and sky together: mountains, moors, rivers, lakes, beaches, islands – all in one view), and the wildlife takes your breath away. I soon discovered that the landscape of Scotland is a vast repository of stories, many of them tragic, of course, and some very ancient; some romantic, some domestic. Every place-name has a human history to it, and I spent much of my adolescence trying to recapture the excitement I felt in Scotland when I was back home in England: I read anything I could about the country – Argyll in particular, which was the cradle of the Scottish nation – and began to pick up a smattering of Gaelic and Lowland Scots.
I was incredibly lucky, in that roundabout the age of 11 or 12 we got involved with Barcaldine Castle, near Benderloch. It’s now a wonderful guesthouse, but back then it was a sort of historic, bohemian playpen, whose hereditary custodian or “laird” was a Scottish actor. He taught me a great deal about entertainment and hospitality, and I admired him hugely. He gave me the opportunity to live and work in an environment that was pure history, and to encounter the spirits of some of those who’d lived there before. It meant that, for me, history – and especially Scottish history – became a sort of living thing, a process that you engage with, rather than an academic subject.
MS: The King arthur Conspiracy is tag-lined ‘How a Scottish Prince became a Mythical Hero’; I think most people would be surprised to hear that Arthur was a Scot. What first put you on to the scent of the Scottish roots of the legends?
SS: It was probably a natural step for me to extend my fascination with Argyll into a preoccupation with the Isle of Iona – the royal burial isle of the early Scottish kings. From my very first visit in 1985, I became hooked on Iona: there’s nowhere like it. I took to studying its history and topography, and when my partner and I decided to get married in 2002, we chose to do so on Iona (my wife is half-Scottish, her mother having been born and raised in Argyll).
Having renewed my acquaintance with Iona, I resumed my research into the island, and I was investigating a historical king of the Scots – Áedán mac Gabráin, who was “ordained” by St Columba in AD 574 – when I discovered that King Áedán had a son named artúr (or artuir) and a daughter named Muirgein. Straightaway, I reasoned that if artúr mac Áedáin had been the original arthur (and his sister the original “Morgan le Fay”), then the likeliest place for his burial would have been on Iona, because that was the sacred isle on which Scottish kings were buried.
I soon discovered that there is no surviving mention of anyone called “Arthur” before Artúr son of Áedán, and while some scholars insist that Artúr must have been named after an earlier hero called Arthur, that argument strikes me as daft: there’s no hard evidence at all for an earlier arthur, and so the reasoning is entirely circular (the first named arthur cannot have been the original arthur but must have been named after a speculative arthur about whom we know nothing, and for whom no evidence exists!). Realistically, it’s only anti-Gaelic prejudice and a kind of misplaced nationalism which stops scholars from looking properly at artúr mac Áedáin. He died in 594, and within a year most of North Britain had been overrun by the Angles. Just four years earlier, in 590, the Britons of the North, along with their Irish allies, had all but wiped out the Anglian presence in the North. But when artúr died, Britain fell, and so he became a legend.
MS: From the early pages of TKAC, it is clear that the legends you are exploring are full of magic and transformation. What was the most fascinating and magical legend you came across while researching arthurian history/mythology?
SS: That’s one heck of a question! There are so many. But I think we should differentiate between “archetypal” legends, which appear almost everywhere, and localised legends, which can often be traced back to a historical individual or incident. Over time, the latter kind might have been “misplaced” – i.e. transferred to another part of Britain, or Ireland – but you can sometimes triangulate various sources and find that certain legends match. That’s one of the ways I pinned down the site of Arthur’s battle on Mons Badonis (Badandun Hill, on the edge of the Cairngorms).
So it’s often not a case of one legend being especially fascinating, so much as two or more legends coming together and finally making sense. I’ll give an example, which I’ve just been doing a bit more work on:-
In “The King arthur Conspiracy” I stated that Arthur’s head was buried on Iona (the burial mound can be visited), but the rest of him was buried on the adjacent Isle of Mull, at a place called Sithean Allt Mhic-artair, the ‘Spirit-mound of the Stream of the Sons of Arthur”, in the hills of Brolass, above the settlement of Pennyghael (“Head-of-the-Gael”). After the book was published, I began to trace the legend of a phantom headless horseman who haunts that area (“the best-known and most dreadful spectre in the West Highlands”). The last reported sighting of this headless horseman, known as Eoghann a’ Chinn Big or “Ewen of the Little Head”, was in 1958.
The story goes that “Ewen Maclaine” (Eóghan Mac’ill-Eathain – literally, “yew/noble-born son of Áedán’s lad”) had a very demanding wife known as Corr-dhu (“Black-Crane”). She forced him to demand more land from his stubborn uncle. Soon the two were at loggerheads, and a great battle loomed.
On the eve of the battle, “Ewen” encountered a bean-nighe or Washer at the Ford, who told him that if his wife offered him butter with his breakfast, he would succeed in the battle, but if no butter was there, he would be killed. Of course, there was no butter, and “Ewen” lost his head in the battle with his uncle. His remains were eventually transferred to Iona, where the Maclean’s Cross shows a carving of an armed horseman, said to have been “Ewen of the Little Head”.
The first thing to note is that Ewen’s phantom pony leaves hoof-prints which are said to be round indentations, “as if it had wooden legs”. This suggests that “Ewen” was not a medieval Scot but a figure from the Dark Ages whose horse was shod, not with horseshoes, but with Roman hipposandals (flat-plates attached to the hooves). But there’s more …
One of the earliest Arthurian literary adventures is the legend of Culhwch and Olwen, which can be read as a potted account of Arthur’s career. At the end, after the last great battle, the heroes have to take the blood of a witch whose cave is at the “Head of the Valley of Sorrow” in the North. One Welsh word for “sorrow” or “grief” is alaeth, and I’ve uncovered plenty of evidence that Arthur’s last battle was fought near Alyth in Angus. Now I argued in The King Arthur Conspiracy that the witch in this instance was Arthur’s wife, Gwenhwyfar (there’s an ancient Scottish tradition that Arthur’s queen was held prisoner in the Iron Age fortress on Barry Hill, above the town of Alyth, and then buried at Meigle, a couple of miles to the south). The witch, in the Culhwch and Olwen story, is called ‘Orddu’. But you can’t help noticing the similarity between the “Super-Black” witch, Orddu, and Corr-dhu or “Black-Crane”, the difficult wife of the phantom headless horseman of Mull.
I could go on, and explain what that business with the butter was all about, but we’ll leave it there for now.
MS: Merlin is often still revered as a Druid or Seer; do you think he was a real man, and if so, what evidence is there of his magical talent?
SS: Yes, he was a real man, although the name “Merlin” is a later invention. He was not very much older than arthur, and I believe that he was raised in Arllechwedd, in North Wales, and trained at Llyn Tegid (Bala Lake), before he moved up to the Scottish Borders to serve as a bard, seer and “enchanter” to a pagan prince named Gwenddolau. Everything went wrong for him at a battle fought in 573 near Longtown in Cumbria (“Gwenddolau fell; Merlin went mad”) and he never fully recovered. But the madness caused by that battle – call it trauma, or horror, or a terrible sense of failure and shame – was the making of him. It turned him from a trained poet-prophet into an authentic shaman figure. He fought alongside arthur as one of his “battle-horsemen”, and he was there right till the end and beyond.
As for evidence of his magical talent, that evidence has been tainted by Christian writers, who tended to cast him as a hairy and foolish Wildman who needed a saint to look after him, and though there is a fair amount of prophetic verse attributed to him, much of it has been altered or added to over time. But I think the earlier sources provide some evidence for his shamanic talents.
MS: You refer to the phrase ‘a myrddin’; was Merlin or Myrddin a title rather than a name?
SS: There was more than one “Myrddin”, which of course has led to confusion. The word seems to have meant “crazy-man” and the role was something between a king’s fool and a divinely-inspired prophet. Of the two Myrddins on record, it is Myrddin Wyllt (“Wild Fool” or “Crazy-Man of the Wood”) who was both a contemporary and an associate of Artúr mac Áedáin. The other “Myrddin” – Myrddin Emrys – had nothing whatever to do with Arthur.
MS: Why, out of all the Celtic seers, druids and healers, did the legend of Merlin become so much larger than any of the others?
SS: That’s mainly down to Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (c 1137) did so much to popularise and muddle the legend of arthur. But Geoffrey drew on the wrong “Merlin” – Myrddin Emrys – for his portrayal of Merlin in the Historia, and his Merlin plays a very small role in his version of Arthur’s story. Some years later, Geoffrey wrote his Vita Merlini, which was based on the true “Merlin”, Myrddin Wyllt (sometimes known as “Merlinus Caledonius” or “Merlinus Silvestris”). He kind of created the cult of “Merlin” as the great prophet of Britain.
It is a mistake – again, largely created by Geoffrey of Monmouth – to imagine “Merlin” as arthur’s aged Druidic mentor. That role was more likely played by an even better bard: Taliesin, the Primary Chief Bard of Britain in the late 6th century, who wrote of arthur as a contemporary. Taliesin was of an age with arthur’s parents, whereas Myrddin Wyllt was more like a schoolfellow.
By muddling up all these figures – Myrddin Emrys, Myrddin Wyllt and Taliesin – Geoffrey created a kind of Super-Seer, the wisest man in the history of Britain. The notion that he was a mentor turns him into an archetype (like the original Mentor), and so a new kind of myth was woven around him: that he tutored the young Arthur. The whole process kind of snowballed, growing out of Geoffrey’s curious blend of fact and fable, with layer upon layer of romanticism added on top.
MS: And similarly the legend of King arthur has the power to inspire to an incredible extent; what do you think of people like ‘arthur Uther Pendragon, Raised Druid King of Britain’ who has not only proclaimed himself the reincarnation of arthur, but has been upheld by 5 druidic orders as such?
SS: I always say that there are two arthurs. There’s the myth (“King arthur”) and then there’s the historical original (artúr mac Áedáin). Just as there are two Jesus Christs – the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith – and the two are forever being confused. From what I know of “arthur Uther Pendragon” (most of it thanks to C.J. Stone), I kind of like the guy. But his idea of arthur is a strangely English one, and arthur himself was no more English than Genghis Khan.
It reminds me of a book I once read, which included a section on reincarnation and past lives. An American had become convinced that he had previously been a knight at King arthur’s court. He had researched it, he said, and the things he’d seen in his dream or vision were entirely accurate and consistent with “the time of King arthur”. Except that he was talking about medieval Europe in the 12th or 13th century. Nothing to do with Arthur at all. He had sort of projected himself into a fantasy version of the King arthur myth. This happens a lot, in that people get so hung up on all that latter-day chivalry and courtliness, and the way that the legends were rewritten to reflect the obsessions of the Middle Ages, they cannot look beyond. They’ve confused the myth with the history, the legend with the man, and it distorts their thinking. So, while I hold nothing against “arthur Uther Pendragon”, I don’t see him as a credible reincarnation of the real Arthur.
MS: You’ve spoken at Pagan Pride on Arthur and the Grail. Why do Pagans hold arthur in such high regard, would you say?
SS: If you look past the Christian revisionism of the Middle Ages, what you glimpse in the arthurian legends is something of Britain’s native past. We’ve said that arthur was a Scot – in fact, I understand him to have had more British than Irish (Scottish) blood, and his historical achievement was to come unbelievably close to ridding Britain of the Angles (which would, of course, have meant that there was never an Engla land). Beyond that, he represents the last gasp of what I think of as the Divine Age in Britain, a time before Christianity imposed a whole new way of thinking and of behaving towards each other and the world around us. arthur’s society was heroic, and it was attuned to the universe and the environment in a way that many of us are now trying to rediscover. So I think that many have intuited that – if you can dissolve some of the medieval overlays – the stories of arthur take us right back to a past which was, in many ways, considerably more spiritual than anything since, a time when the ego was not yet triumphant, when there was no great separation between the human and animal worlds, and when it was a given that the world we live in is alive with spirit. It was a time of magic (if we accept that magic is the interaction between human and spirit), before that magic was stolen or forgotten or condemned. It was also a time of sharing – arthur and several of his contemporary princes were described as “generous” or “liberal”, which to me means that they recognised the responsibility of a leader to his people. We lost most of that when we lost Arthur.
MS: You are currently doing a series called The Grail for Moon Books. Tell us a bit about your involvement with Moon Books and how this came about.
SS: I was looking for something to do. The King arthur Conspiracy had just been published, and the manuscript of Who Killed William Shakespeare? had gone off to The History Press. I’d been continuing my research into Arthur, and finding more stuff, but I didn’t feel ready to sit down and write out a whole new book. Then Trevor Greenfield announced on Facebook that he was looking for a project or two that could be published, one chapter at a time, in monthly instalments on the Moon Books blog. That struck me as a really interesting exercise – a sort of year-long study of the Grail, building on what I already had. We started in January, and I found a great guy and a very talented artist (Lloyd Canning) who lives in the same village as me, and who was very keen to provide a black-and-white illustration for each monthly chapter, and I’ve been liaising with an American friend of mine (John M. Gist), who’s an excellent writer and a post-graduate philosophy student, and who checks out and comments on each chapter for me before I write up the final draft. We’re hoping to publish the finished product next year.
MS: Ceridwen and her cauldron are the root of the tale of Gwyn who becomes Taliesin. Is the cauldron the seed of the grail legend, or do you believe the grail a separate entity?
SS: The Grail wasn’t an object, it was a process. Or, if you prefer, it was the key element in an initiatory ritual. The term Saint Greal or Saint Graal is sort of medieval nonsense. I’m pretty sure that it’s a phonetic rendering of a Gaelic or Early Irish term – sant grathail (pronounced ‘saant gra-hal’) – which meant something like “terrible desire”.
The cauldron itself served what Taliesin described as the “liquor of science and inspiration”. It was a form of mead, although I’m sure it sometimes contained other substances (two I would suggest are poison hemlock and Sweet Gale or bog myrtle), and its purpose was to send the spirit out of the body (if you read the Biblical accounts of the Crucifixion very carefully, you’ll see that there was something very similar going on there). It was a way of initiating poets, warriors and prophets (who were, all in all, pretty much the same thing) by giving them a glimpse of the beyond. It dissolved barriers between the “I” and everything else – animals, elements, the cosmos – and took the initiate across the ultimate border and into the Otherworld (there was a mechanism or strategy for bringing them back).
The cauldron wasn’t the Grail, as such, because the Grail wasn’t a thing. But the cauldron was essential, as was the drinking horn that dispensed the “mead” and the spear used to make a healing wound which would drain the toxins from the body.
MS: The grail is seen as a Christian symbol, and the cup or cauldron is a Pagan symbol in many different paths. From a historical perspective, why do you think we see such a cross over between the different religions when it comes to tools and symbolism?
SS: It’s partly a matter of archetypes. The ingestion of food or drink is very important – it keeps us alive, and by taking a substance into ourselves we make that substance part of ourselves; we become one with it. On certain occasions, that process becomes hugely significant and is associated with special objects (think of the Native American tobacco pipe). In a sense, the drinking horn which dispensed the liquor from the cauldron was akin to the cup from which Christ and his disciples drank: in both instances, initiates were taking something godly into themselves which transformed them, and in the process they made themselves different from others: an exclusive club, held together by a common bond. This sort of thing is common to pretty much all cultures. Problems only arise when one culture, or one religion, sees it as its right to dominate, to proclaim itself as the only truth and to attack and destroy everybody else’s cultural heritage. The Grail was never a Christian thing. I’ll say that again, very clearly: the Grail was never a Christian thing. Only many years after Arthur’s death did Cistercian monks begin to delve into the history, and a new version of the Grail was created – the version based on a strange sort of Christian mysticism combined with the code of chivalry. As such, the Grail suffered the same fate as Arthur himself: resurrected, many years later, by his enemies, to serve their own ends.
MS: And on the other side of this, how did the grail become such a sought after artefact?
SS: The Grail was always sought after (it was the “terrible desire”) because who would not want to join the ranks of the elite, the horsemen, the warrior-poets, the Druidic wise ones? The way I explain this in my Grail book is by examining, as scientifically as I can, the death-and-rebirth rituals of the Mystery cults. I argue that, in some cases, there really was a death involved. The Celts weren’t quite as afraid of death as we are, but even so it was a terrifying thing to put yourself through: drinking poison in the hope that, after three days rest in a cool sepulchre, you’d be back among the living and a whole lot wiser.
There are a lot of mixed emotions surrounding the Grail. I think we can trace its earliest appearance in western literature back to Medea, and her magical cauldron. That had the ability to induce sleep, restore youth and vitality, but it could also be used to take life. It was a very powerful form of magic, and so it was both enormously attractive and fascinating and deeply, deeply troubling.
Very little of this survived the Christian revisions of the story – but you can still glimpse it, in those authentic features which made it through the rewrites, and the sense that the Grail is a kind of test that only the most worthy can pass.
MS: In your most recent blog post, you talk about the conspiracy of the Gunpowder Plot; are you naturally drawn towards conspiracy theories, or are you simply inclined to dig through what we consider ‘fact’ to determine the truth behind the history?
SS: There’s a very big difference between “conspiracy theory” – which is often an obsessive and hysterical form of paranoia – and detailed research into what actually happened. The main difference, I would say, is that the conspiracy theory starts out with a theory (“the government did it”) and then actively seeks out the evidence to support the hypothesis, ignoring – or twisting – anything which disproves the theory. A lot of mainstream historians work that way too, indulging in “confirmation bias” to reinforce their political viewpoint of the past. That kind of scholarship always makes me think of the way certain police detectives used to pick a suspect on a hunch and then “fit him up”. It made for a lurid story and a travesty of justice.
If you examine all the evidence you can find, and keep searching, keep digging, keep asking questions, you often find that a very different picture begins to emerge from the one you started with. This isn’t coming up with a theory and setting out to prove it by hook or by crook. This is a long, painstaking process of finding things out, of going back to the beginning time and again, of asking yourself “Have I got this right?” It’s the difference between proper detective work – which, all being well, leads you slowly but surely to the right answers – and shoddy, prejudicial, inept and criminal police work, which makes you look foolish and brings the whole system into disrepute.
Or, if you prefer, it’s the difference between the “scientific” way of doing things and the “religious” way. One explores, questions, measures, tests, refines. The other predetermines, manufactures or misplaces evidence, constructs logical fallacies, proceeds from belief. Conspiracy theories ultimately rely on the latter methodology: they’re entertaining, often ingenious, but they based purely on belief. I prefer a more scientific approach.
MS: I was pleased to read in your post about Samhain, that you acknowledge the fact that bonfires would have been burning in Britain around the start of November, long before the Gunpowder Plot. How many other modern festivals and anniversaries do you think have their roots in Pagan or Celtic celebrations?
SS: Most of them, I’d say. May Day was Beltane, of course (although Christians prefer to think of it as Whitsun or Pentecost). Imbolc, I suspect, became Valentine’s Day (especially after the calendar shifted in 1752), so that we now “hold a candle” for our true loves, and celebrate youthful, innocent attraction, on the day the Church called Candlemas or the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin – the goddess being associated with Imbolc in her Maiden aspect.
I got into trouble recently when I pointed out that nowhere in the Bible does it indicate what time of year it was when Jesus was born, but as the powerful cult of Mithras celebrated the virgin birth of their solar hero on 25 December, the Church adopted that date in the 4th century. Funnily enough, the person who tried to take me to task over that soon declared that “Christ was born in the spring” – it’s that old problem of not being able to differentiate between history and myth.
What I regret is that our dissociation from the agricultural cycle, the seasons and the movements of the Moon, Sun, planets and stars means that our festivals have become little more than commercial exploitation. The Midwinter festival (which is now Hogmanay, or New Year, if you take the calendar shift into account) would have had immense significance in the past – the moment when the days stopped getting shorter and started to grow longer again. And I would love to see the old Beltane rituals revived – not just the fires, but the fire-walking, the disguising or “masking” using the ashes from the fires, the running into the woods for a night of passion, and the gathering of greenery to decorate the homestead in the morning. That’s what I call a festival!
MS: And how much does one have to dig before finding evidence of this, or is it fairly easy to discover for those who want to know?
SS: There are people who’ve spent most of their lives studying a certain subject – although, sadly, they’ve rather stiffly avoided asking any real questions, and many of them are engaged in spewing out repetitious dogma rather than genuine historical research. I think it was a BBC radio broadcaster who once said that when he’s doing a political interview the question that’s foremost in his mind is always, “Why is this bastard lying to me?” I feel that way quite often when I’m reading history.
Often, the trick is to allow yourself to look in the places where nobody else has, to cast your net wider, to pursue the leads that nobody else has followed – or even just to ask yourself whether there’s another possibility. If a historian says such-and-such didn’t happen because it couldn’t have happened, do some research. You might find that it could have happened and almost certainly did!
It’s a continual process. And, like panning for gold, you’ve got to sift through an awful lot of dirt before you find a nugget.
MS: What advice would you give to someone wanting to research the history of something already considered ‘well known’?
SS: Take nothing at face value. When you start your research, you’ll have to read up on what everybody else has said. There’s a strong chance that they’ve just repeated each other, and that no deep research has been done in a very long time. But you have to build up a framework before you can start on the details. Then, you should constantly ask yourself questions: “Is this right? What does this mean? What have I missed?” Don’t give up until you’ve found the answers. And by that, I don’t mean “Don’t give up till you’ve cobbled together some kind of answer” – that’s not good enough. Keep going till the pieces really do fit. Gather as many details as you can, then double-check and cross-reference everything. You’ve got to have that terrier instinct, but if you keep at it you might be amazed at what you discover. I absolutely love those “Eureka!” moments when you finally spot the connection, find the missing link, or stumble across the thing you didn’t believe existed. Like Shakespeare’s skull, for instance.
MS: How has your latest book, Who Killed William Shakespeare? been received?
SS: It’s been selling really well, although the Shakespeare community have done their best to ignore it. That’s okay – we might have a little surprise up our sleeve where they’re concerned.
MS: And what new projects do you have on the horizon?
SS: I’m inclined to take a bit of a break from arthur and Shakespeare for a while. I sort of feel like someone who’s been working the same two archaeological digs for years, and I really fancy a change of scenery. So I’m gearing up to write a book about the Jacobite rebellions and how the Gaelic society of the Highlands and Islands was betrayed and destroyed. Actually, it might not be that much of a departure (both my Arthur and Shakespeare books deal with times of huge upheaval, when new system of beliefs were being imposed by force and the traditional social bonds and rituals were being annihilated), but I think I’ll enjoy it.
Simon’s books are available through Amazon and other retailers, and you can keep up with his grail blog at Moon Books. He also regularly writes on BlogSpot.