Wizards

A literary heading rather than a religious one, for wielders of magic and arcane knowledge who act as mentors or as agents of supernatural power. Merlin shows why the heading sits awkwardly in an atlas of belief: no tradition worshipped him or held him to have lived. The figure took its present shape in twelfth-century writing that drew on earlier Welsh material about a prophet driven mad, and the counsellor of Arthur belongs to the romances that followed.