The Once and Future Grift
How Ancient Britain Is Weaponised by the Conspiracy Right
In September 2023, John Mappin, a Scientologist hotelier stood on a Cornish clifftop and announced that the wizard Merlin had personally turned up to bless David Icke.
He did not put it quite like that. He put it better.
John Mappin, owner of Camelot Castle Hotel in Tintagel, posted a small essay to X welcoming Icke, the banned conspiracy theorist and former Coventry City goalkeeper, along with his partner the filmmaker Christianne van Wijk, to his home. Overnight, a low fog had rolled in and swallowed everything but the tip of Tintagel Island, leaving “King Arthur’s Footprint” bathed in sunlight. Mappin has a name for this: the “Dragon’s Breath.” In the local mythology he was reciting, it is Merlin, in spirit form, manifesting as a mark of respect when “great beings of considerable power and influence” come to call.
He then made the subtext into text. Albion is awakening. Arthur is the once and future King. We are, he wrote, in the middle of THE GREAT AWAKENING, and Icke will “certainly not be overlooked in the history of these islands.”
Now. I am a history nerd. When I read that, I did not see mysticism. I saw an information operation, and a very old, very British one.
🐉 The American Version, and Ours
Trump the Divine Saviour
When the White House unveiled Donald Trump’s new official portrait this August, the reaction was immediate and visceral.
A while back I first wrote about this, I’d been picking apart Donald Trump’s official portrait: the man striding out of a wall of fire, haloed like a warrior-saint, framed in the exact visual grammar of medieval Christian iconography. American conspiracy sacralises through saints and inquisitions, because America’s deepest available myth is Christian.
Britain doesn’t reach for that. We reach for something older and closer to the bone: Arthur, Merlin, Camelot, Avalon, Albion, the sleeping king who will return in the nation’s hour of need. Mappin’s fog is the same machine as Trump’s fire. Same operation, different mythology. And ours is arguably more dangerous, because we’re far less alert to it. We’re conditioned to file King Arthur under “heritage” and “tea towels,” not “recruitment poster.”
🏰 A Myth Built on a Myth (Built on a Myth)
Here’s the part that should make the hair stand up.
The Tintagel-Arthur connection is not ancient. It is a medieval information operation that we can date.
Around 1136, a cleric named Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote the Historia Regum Britanniae, a swaggering, largely invented history of Britain’s kings. It was Geoffrey who planted Arthur’s conception at Tintagel: Merlin’s magic disguising King Uther as the Duke of Cornwall so he could lie with the Duke’s wife, Igraine. That’s the whole scene. Mappin quotes it almost word for word in his post, without, I suspect, quite realising he’s citing a twelfth-century work of bestselling propaganda rather than a chronicle.
Then it happened again. Around 1233, Richard, Earl of Cornwall and brother of the King, built a castle on that Tintagel headland. Historians are fairly blunt about why: the site had little strategic or economic value. He built it there to borrow Arthur’s prestige, to wrap a Plantagenet power-grab in the glamour of the Once and Future King. The ruins tourists photograph today are, in effect, the archaeological remains of a spin campaign.
Then it happened a third time. The actual “Camelot Castle”, the building, is Victorian. It opened in 1899 as King Arthur’s Castle Hotel, designed by Silvanus Trevail to cash in on the Tennyson-fuelled Arthurian craze sweeping the Empire. Mappin bought it in 1999 and rebranded it “Camelot.” At every single layer, someone has borrowed Arthur to launder their own authority. The mysticism was manufactured, and then re-manufactured, and then re-manufactured again.
So when Mappin summons Merlin’s fog to anoint David Icke, he is not breaking with Tintagel’s tradition. He is continuing it. He is the fourth man on that cliff to point at the weather and tell you what it means about power.
✨ The Ascended Grifter
Why Merlin, specifically, for Icke?
Because in the esoteric tradition these men swim in, it isn’t random at all. Researchers who’ve traced Icke’s early New Age phase note that his channelled “guide”, an entity he called Rakorski, is the Comte de Saint-Germain of Theosophy: the eighteenth-century adventurer and alleged immortal whom Blavatsky, then Alice Bailey, then the American “Ascended Master” churches elevated into a deathless spiritual sovereign. In that same tradition, Saint-Germain is claimed to have previously incarnated as Merlin.
Read that again. In the belief system underwriting all of this, Merlin and Icke’s personal spirit-guide are the same immortal being. Mappin’s fog isn’t a nice touch. It’s theology. He is telling his followers that the ascended master who guides Icke has shown up in person to sign the visit off.
It would be funny (genuinely, it’s a wonderful bit of clifftop theatre) if the man being sanctified weren’t David Icke. This is someone whose “reptilian” and “Rothschild” cosmology is judged by the Community Security Trust, Hope not Hate and others to recycle textbook antisemitic tropes, up to and including The Protocols of the Elders of Zion; who was refused entry to Australia in 2019 and banned from the entire Schengen Area in 2022 as a threat to public order; and whose family runs a slick subscription-streaming operation, Ickonic, selling the whole worldview back to the faithful by the month.
Mythology is the wrapping paper. Grievance is the product.
🧩 Why This Matters
Strip away the fog and the flags, and myth does a very specific job for an information operation. It gives a movement a sacred timeline: a golden age, a fall, and a promised restoration. “The Great Awakening” is just Arthur’s return in fancy dress, the king who sleeps until Albion needs him, remapped onto a movement that needs its followers to believe rescue is imminent.
It does three things at once, and it does them better than any policy platform could:
It casts the audience as characters in an epic. You are not a bloke doom scrolling in a spare room. You are a knight in the awakening of Albion.
It sacralises the leader. Icke stops being a former sports presenter with some very dark ideas and becomes a “vital and powerful mover” whom the very landscape rises to honour.
It cannot be argued with. You can fact-check a claim about vaccines or voting machines. You cannot fact-check a fog. Myth is unfalsifiable by design. That’s the point of it.
📜 We Have Been Here Before
This is the bit that keeps me up at night, because the pattern has a long and bloody CV.
Richard of Cornwall used Arthur to gild a power grab. The Victorians turned Arthur into imperial ideology, with Tennyson dedicating the Idylls of the King to Prince Albert and chivalry recast as a model for Christian empire. And in the twentieth century the darkest regimes on the continent reached for exactly this drawer: Himmler’s fixation on the Grail, the blood-and-soil mysticism, the deliberate fusion of ancient legend and modern politics into a story of destined national rebirth. Fascism has always understood that myth outperforms manifesto.
The modern “Albion rising” aesthetic, all rune-adjacent fonts and misty landscapes and talk of a stolen golden age, is not a coincidence and it is not new. It is the oldest trick in the book, and Tintagel is one of the places it was invented.
⚠️ Why It Works
Because myth is stronger than fact. Because in anxious times people do not want a leader with a spreadsheet; they want a saviour with a sword. Because Cornwall genuinely does produce spectacular low fog, and the human brain is a pattern-hungry organ that will happily read a wizard into the weather if you prime it first. Mappin primes it beautifully. That’s the craft of it.
🔮 The Warning
The fog over Tintagel is just fog. The footprint in the rock is a rock. Arthur is a story a Welsh cleric embroidered nine hundred years ago to make his book sell.
But the story pinned to that fog is a working machine, one that turns a banned conspiracy theorist into a prophet, a Scientologist’s hotel into a shrine, and a nation’s oldest daydream into a recruitment tool for the conspiracy right. The genius of using Arthur is that it doesn’t feel like propaganda. It feels like heritage. It feels like ours.
So the next time someone tells you Albion is awakening, ask the only question that ever really matters on that clifftop, and has for nine centuries:
Who profits from the dream?
For further reading:
My earlier piece on conspiracies in the UK - “The Information Battle of Britain”
Isobel Cockerell, “Castles, crystals and conspiracies: the spiritual home of British QAnon”, Coda Story
Mark Townsend, “Fan of Trump and Farage raises far-right ‘Q’ flag at his Cornish castle”, The Guardian, Jan 2020
On Arthur as manufactured tradition: the work of Ronald Hutton and O.J. Padel on Geoffrey of Monmouth and Tintagel