THE SCENE: What was the source of Merlin’s magic? Well, according to Geoffrey of Monmouth, he was the son of an incubus.
THE TEXT: The messengers lost no time. They hurried off to the governor of the town and ordered him in the King’s name to send Merlin and his mother to Vortigern. When the governor knew the object of their errand, he immediately sent Merlin and his mother to Vortigern, so that the King could do what he wanted with them. When they were brought into his presence, the King received the mother with due courtesy, for he knew that she came of a noble family. Then he began to ask her by what man she had conceived the lad. “By my living soul, Lord King,” she said, “and by your living soul, too, I did not have relations with any man to make me bear this child. I know only this: that, when I was in our private apartments with my sister nuns, some one used to come to me in the form of a most handsome young man. He would often hold me tightly in his arms and kiss me. When he had been some little time with me he would disappear, so that I could no longer see him. Many times, too, when I was sitting alone, he would talk with me, without becoming visible; and when he came to see me in this way he would often make love with me, as a man would do, and in that way he made me pregnant. You must decide in your wisdom, my Lord, who was the father of this lad, for apart from what I have told, I have never had relations with a man.”
The King was amazed by what he heard. He ordered a certain Maugantius to be summoned to him, so that this man could tell whether or not what the woman said was possible. Maugantius was brought in and listened to the whole story, point by point. “In the books written by our sages,” he said to Vortigern, “and in many historical narratives, I have discovered that quite a number of men have been born in this way. As Apuleius asserts in the De deo Socratis, between the moon and the earth live spirits which we call incubus demons. These have partly the nature of men and partly that of angels, and when they wish they assume mortal shapes and have intercourse with women. It is possible that one of these appeared to this woman and begot the lad in her.”
– Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain, 12th Century AD
