03/08/2026
In 1986 I was living in Horham in Suffolk and in discussions with Bernard Stringer who had designed the successful Prediction Tarot deck in 1985 and Illustrated by Peter Richardson, to create a Celtic Tarot. On one occasion Bernard Stringer presented me with a project he had been working on and consisted of 6 sheets of A4 paper with mystical directions to build a magical apparatus, he called Excalibur, the Rock and the King.
This was in the early days of my Merlin connection that started in 1983 and though M had collaborated on Merlin The Immortal there was always the feeling there was a more powerful synergy to come. My drawing board was often covered in lights and the energetic pressures on my body were often intense, but there was always the sense that I was still a novice in the work we did together. I think that this was mostly my fault as I couldn’t let myself free of my thought process and just go with the flow of this otherworldly direction.
I had been preparing to begin work on The Celtic Source Book, which was my first book for a major publisher, and it meant a heavy schedule of work to get it completed on time. My studio at the time consisted of an A3 lightbox resting on a small wicker table in the living room.
For some reason the idea of creating art for the Excalibur, The Rock and The King project fired me up, though there was no fixed idea how we would take it further. My wife at the time owned a very old caravan at a North Sea coastal caravan park in Southwold on the Essex coast and I decided to go on my own for four days to work on the artwork. As with old caravans they are cold, damp and smelly, but made the best of it and prepared to start work.
As I started work on the rough outlines, I was conscious that there was something, possibly a symbol embedded in the paper and it was radiating and connecting with my heart. So began 3 days of intense work, without my lightbox or photocopier that I normally relied on to build the images in preparation for colouring. The 3 days I worked were erased from my memory, it was as if I had been placed in another dimension and returned to the caravan for brief times to eat and drink, there was no memory of sleeping, I had dreaded sleeping in the musty smelling bedroom area so it was a relief that there was no memory of sleeping there or if I had actually slept at all.
The times I expect a strong connection with M and it doesn’t happen and early attempts to force any kind of contact only lead to disappointment. The more I will the connection the further the chance of it happening.
Theres lots of videos on my Youtube channel Spirit Of Celtia
