Sublunary

“Between the moon and the earth there live spirits whom we call incubus-demons.”1 So declares Maugantius, summoned before the king to explain how a boy named Merlin could have been born without a father. Inter lunam et terram, be-tween a celestial globe in ceaseless circulation and the dull earth: in this intermedial space dwell creaturesat once human and angelic. Incubus-demons can assume mortal forms and descend to visit earthly women. “Many people have been born this way,” Maugantius asserts. Among the progeny of such intercourse is Merlin, destined to become our iconic wizard. This genesis narrative marks Merlin’s advent into the literary tradition. The story yields no evidence of his future as a be-spectacled and senescent figure, cloaked in robes and wielding a wand. Dumbledore is a diminished and modern avatar. The primordial Merlin is much more difficult to emplace. Between moon and earth is a gap that opens because the two realms cannot touch. Merlin arrives from a kind of heavenly lacuna, a suspended and disjunctive space created because two bodies that are two worlds endlessly withdrawn from each other. Aerial and moonlit, this middle realm is knowable only at se cond hand. Maugantius makes clear that his knowledge of what dwells between lunar possibility and the cold earth’s heft ar rives vicariously, through books of history and philosophy.