The roots of Merlin’s magic can be found in the Enarei, the Scythian shamans, a name is derived from “Anarya,” which translates as “not men.”
Born male, the Enarei underwent a transformation, adopting female attire, speech, and societal roles. They wielded immense respect and political power as chief advisors to the king. They used divination to determine causes of royal illnesses and national crises and were in charge of fumigation rituals that burned cannabis in braziers in tents. Red hot stones were placed in a brazier followed by stalks of flowering buds. While the tent filled with smoke, the not-men led prayers, chants and songs.
The Scythians worshipped a sacred deer, an ancient stone-age myth that circulated through numerous cultures over the world that depended on deer to survive famines. In Scythian mythology, the Golden Deer acted as a celestial guide and mediator between realms, transporting the dead to the afterlife. Deer antlers were mounted on the heads of Scythian war horses and headdresses of the Enarei.
Everything we know about the Enarei comes from two sources: Herodotus and Hippocrates, and neither visited a Scythian encampment, but relied on testimony of travelers, so it’s all unreliable, secondhand info. Herodotus got as far as the primary Greek port on the north coast of the Black Sea, a port that traded extensively with the Scythians.
Since Scythians descended from the Yamnaya, the first horse riders, they ruled the roads connecting Europe with China and India, and established a huge oasis at Bactra, where the trail split, leading either to China or the Khyber Pass. Controlling trade along this route produced vast wealth and Scythians dominated trade in slaves, spices, grain, fur, wool, lapus lazul, and livestock.
For centuries, the sight of marauding Scythians on horseback was the equivalent of gangsters today driving race cars while brandishing automatic weapons . At an early age, male and females mastered the composite and recumbent bow, the AK-47 of the ancient steppes.
When attacked or engaged, Scythians avoided hand-to-hand combat, but rode away to a distance where they could continue to pummel the attacker with poison arrows while remaining immune from any incoming projectiles.
The Scythians wore leather pants, a garment unique to their culture, and something necessitated by daily horseback riding. They had no permanent villages because they traveled in covered carts pulled by oxen and horses. Their lifestyle was preserved after a large migration moved from Bactra to Romania, where they became known as the Gypsies.
The Scythians were especially adept at firing arrows while fleeing, as evidenced by numerous Scythian artifacts depicting what became known as the Parthian shot. It is assumed the most elaborate Scythian-style artifacts were created by Greek artists.
When a Scythian king died, his slaves and horses would be ritualistically killed and buried in a circle around his tomb, which was buried under a mound of earth. The king would be buried with all the essential objects and supplies to carry him to the afterlife.
The coming-of-age ceremony was celebrating someone’s first kill. This ceremony could happen on the battlefield, or back at the camp. If held at the battlefield, the skullcap would be chopped off and the assembled warriors would use it as a cup to drink blood. Only a fully made member of the tribe was permitted the honor of chopping off a skull cap, but anyone who killed an enemy was immediately awarded the privilege.
These skull caps became treasured possessions and often encased in gold, bronze or leather. They were undoubtedly used eventually to drink bhang after a wave of fire temples appeared along the Silk Road serving Soma, also known as Haoma in Persia. This ritual was the foundation for the Christian Eucharist, and the myth of the holy grail goes all the way back to the Scythians.
The myth was never about an actual cup as every warrior was buried with theirs. It was about the medicine that went into the cup, something that healed the sick and brought peace to the kingdom. Although this connection has been obscured and hidden, it seems likely Merlin’s magic was derived from cannabis intoxication, which allowed him to visualize the future and communicate with animals, all traits of the original Enarei., and Merlin shares structural and functional traits with the archetype: The original Merlin was likely gay or at least multi-sexual.
While Greek culture detested effeminate males, the Scythians viewed them as closer to god. The Greeks believed horse riding caused impotence and led to gender transformation.
The Gender-Fluid & Transgressive Shaman: In early Welsh poetry (such as the tales of Myrddin Wyllt), the proto-Merlin is a “wild man” of the woods who loses his mind in battle, sheds civilized taboos, and speaks with animals. Like the Enarei, who stepped completely outside traditional male warrior roles to gain spiritual authority, Merlin operates entirely outside the standard patriarchal and military hierarchy of Camelot.
Androgyny and Shape-Shifting: Merlin is a consummate shape-shifter, frequently shifting between male and female forms, or old and young personas. The Enarei embodied a similar ritual androgyny, which the Greeks viewed as an “effeminate disease” but the Scythians revered as a divine gift from the goddess Artimpasa.
Royal Kingmaker and Prophet: Just as the Enarei were the ultimate spiritual authorities behind the Scythian throne, Merlin exists primarily to guide, protect, and legitimize the king (Uther and later Arthur) through absolute prophetic foresight.
The Batraz and Nart Saga Connection
In the Nart Sagas—the epic folklore of the Ossetians (the last remaining descendants of the Alans)—Batraz is a central superhuman warrior associated with a magical sword and lightning.
While Batraz himself is a direct prototype for King Arthur or Lancelot rather than Merlin (most famously mirrored when Batraz, on his deathbed, demands his unstoppable sword be thrown into the Black Sea, causing the water to turn blood-red and seethe), the magic and structural world surrounding Batraz mirrors Merlin’s acts:
The Smith-Sorcerer Kurdalægon: In the Batraz cycle, the hero is tempered and forged in a celestial furnace by the heavenly blacksmith Kurdalægon. This figure acts as a divine mentor, physician, and engineer of destiny. This directly parallels Merlin’s role as the supernatural architect who engineers Arthur’s birth, protects him with magical defenses, and guides the retrieval of Excalibur.
The Mysteries of the Enaree: The Androgynous Shamans of the Scythians
Lavish burials were important for the Scythians, whose tumuli still stand today after many centuries. And in those burials, the Enaree played a crucial role, conducting their shamanistic practices to help the deceased depart to the afterworld.
After the burial, the Enaree would ritually clean themselves with the vapors of the cannabis plant, which has been attested archaeologically in Saka Scythian tumuli. In these were discovered various receptacles containing remnants of cannabis, including tripods, braziers and incense burners. One of the famous Pazyryk Scythian burials contained a pot inside which were fruits and cannabis, and a copper censer in which the latter was burned.
The Enaree played numerous roles in Scythian society, one of which was the role of divination. They acted as seers, and performed special forms of divination that utilized the inner bark of the linden tree. They would cut the inner bark of the linden into three pieces, and then plaiting and unplaiting them around their fingers in order to obtain the answers they wanted. For example, whenever a Scythian King would fall ill, the Enaree were called in to divine and discover which enemy had “bewitched” the King.
“The Anarya were especially consulted when the king of the Scythians was ill, which was itself believed by the Scythians to be caused by a false oath being sworn upon the king’s hearth. Once the Anarya had identified the suspect who had sworn the false oath, the said suspect would claim to be innocent. If the Anarya maintained the accusation, six more soothsayers were consulted, and if they upheld the original accusation, the suspect was executed by being beheaded. If the additional soothsayers declared the suspect was innocent, the process of consulting more soothsayers was repeated. If the soothsayers all found the accused to be guilty, the culprit was executed through beheading, and his property was divided among the Anarya who had found him guilty. If the larger number of soothsayers still declared the suspect to be innocent, the initial accusers were executed by being put into an oxen-pulled wagon filled with brushwood which was set on fire was made to be pulled by the oxen, who eventually also burned along with the wagon and the disgraced soothsayers; the sons of these Anarya were also all killed, but their daughters were spared.”
—Hippocrates, On Airs, Waters, And Places
The study of Western mythology was greatly impeded by the myopic Joseph Campbell, who never once wrote (nor spoke) about Scythian, Persian, Bactrian, Chinese, Middle Eastern nor Greek use of cannabis for divination. Although he spent immense time on the most obscure cultures on earth, he ignored the most influential. The foundational myths of Western Culture were born in Scythia, home to Heracles (Hercules in Rome), Prometheus, and the Holy Grail. 
The Scythians were riding horses a thousand years before the Greeks and there’s a good reason. Scythians lived on the steppes, a great flat ocean of grass easily crossed with horses and carts. The Greeks lived in mostly mountainous terrain where runners could travel faster than horses over steep rocky trails. Both cultures descended from the Yamnaya, but the ones who preferred sailing and a southern climate moved south, while the others settled in the shadow of Mt. Elbrus, where Heracles was born, or at least where he went looking for his stolen cattle.
The top ring shows two men stretching a golden fleece, while another man milks a sheep, and a colt drinks from his mother. The distinctive Scythian quivers for holding arrows and bow are liberally distributed around.
Tragically, most of the Scythian art was melted down after the kurgans were raided, starting around 200 BC and continuing until 1715 when Peter the Great pleaded with the raiders to sell him the artifacts intact rather than melt them.
The three bands I was most interested in copying were the Sonics, Chocolate Watchband and West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band. I called this synthesis “psychopunkadelia.” David Bither was lured into a rehearsal. I already had a guitar player in mind who I knew from the garageband scene back in C-U, Illinois. So I was hoping David would play keyboards as he had recently left a band he’d been playing keyboards in. Dave could also sing like a bird and was a potential lead vocalist. But Dave only wanted in if he played guitar.
When Dave Allen left as art director, I brought in Flick Ford, who had designed my Art After Midnight book and been art director at the East Village Eye during my brief tenure there. I thought the publisher/editor had assembled a great staff, most of whom worked for free, but he was shortsighted and incapable of taking the publication to the next level. So Flick and I (along with John Howell) ended up creating New York Beat, a weekly covering the downtown scene. That only lasted a few wonderful weeks before the investor pulled the plug. And that’s when Howell moved over to High Times. I soon followed.
I ended up going solo to the Minnesota National Rainbow Gathering, which is where I learned a ton about pagan ceremony and participated in numerous OM circles. The OM is the only thing the original stoners in the Ukraine have handed down to us. That and the myth of the holy grail. When Wagner created his ring cycle, he opened with the grail descending from heaven. He was using the Scythian version of the story. There is no Jesus in King Arthur because Arthur was built on top of Heracles. Both were sun avatars, and had twelve labors (battles) to win, a reference to the sun’s progression through the zodiac. Of course, Jesus is also a sun avatar, which is why he has 12 mythical disciples.
When he failed to respond to the email, and never broached the topic with me, and continued his campaign to have me de-toothed and dethroned, I knew something was terribly wrong.
By eliminating the Gnostic versions of Christianity, Rome successfully wiped rational deists out of Christianity, but the belief came back when Europe discovered the classics. There is no need to worship at any altar or blindly accept rules from anyone. There is only one rule: don’t hurt anybody.
I often get mired in a project before I realize why I am doing it, like Dreyfus in Close Encounters. Anyone watching me here knows I’ve been obsessed with creating a deck of Tarot cards showing my Saints of the Grail, which is my rampage through the history of Western culture and spirituality, tracing the most important influencers, starting with Heracles.
As this illustration shows, troubadours were not typically solo acts. The best players always prefer to work with other good players (on different instruments) because spirituality moves through telepathy, and the quality of your combo along with the quality of your audience greatly enhances the quality of your performance.
Wolfram von Eschenback was a knight, composer, singer and lyre player in Germany, and also one of the first to put the grail story on paper. Since Wolfram was illiterate, the song had to be dictated. Wolfram was also the Bob Dylan of his era.
Scythian culture was immensely savage, and had to be tamed as it evolved through Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. The tempering was accomplished through the rise of a concept called chivalry. Armored knights had a responsibility to behave in a decent manner, and that was especially true when upholding the rights of the weaker sex. Chivalry ran on love power.
The Pope in Rome at first tried to negotiate with the Cathars in France, around Languedoc. After that failed, he declared the first crusade, the Albigensian Crusade, which could have been an even bigger and more horrific ethnic cleansing than Mani’s. 
The last hold-outs were in Montsegur. In 1244, their fort was stormed after a brutal 10-month seige. The 200 inhabitants were thrown on a bonfire.
The secrets of the young gay Scythian have long been lost, and the kingdom has been in perpetual war ever since. The king assembles his best knights and commands them to find the secret that will bring peace to the kingdom, which according to ancient legends is a golden grail held captive in a blackened forest.