Before he was the kindly old mentor in a starry hat, Merlin was engineered by a council of demons to be the Antichrist, saved only by a priest's baptism at birth. This deep dive peels back the layers of the wizard's biography, showing how Geoffrey of Monmouth fused two older Welsh figures around 1130: Myrddin Wyllt, a bard driven mad by the Battle of Arfderydd, and Ambrosius, the fatherless boy who revealed the red and white dragons beneath Vortigern's collapsing tower.

We explore why Geoffrey changed the name to avoid a Latin pun on excrement, how Robert de Boron's demonic origin explains Merlin's knowledge of past, present, and future, and how he used it to engineer Arthur's conception, the sword in the stone, and the Round Table. We then follow his retreats into the wilderness, his fatal obsession with Vivienne, his invisible prison, and ...