Friday, March 11, 2011

You know, I don't think I've really gone into detail about my interpretation of the story of King Arthur, Morgan le Fay, Lancelot and Guinevere. It's a little involved, so bear with me.

I've always thought there were some missing pieces to the King Arthur story.

Let's start with Arthur's kids. He doesn't have any. Not legitimate ones, at least. Guinevere never gives him any kids.

Now, I have lots of friends who don't have kids. But they also don't have kingdoms. In medieval times, for a king not to have an heir was terrifying. It was practically a guarantee of civil war. Uther Pendragon, for example, had no heir -- because Merlin takes Arthur away. After Uther dies, Britain collapses into anarchy.

And think what Henry VIII was willing to do in order to get a male heir. A devout Catholic (he earned his title Defender of the Faith) who loved his queen, he nonetheless divorced her and made England Protestant, all so he could marry Anne Boleyn, in the hopes of getting a son. You know the rest of the story: divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.

And yet Britain's legendary king has no legitimate heir by Guinevere and nobody says anything about it. Nobody urges Arthur to divorce her. No mention of prayers for the Queen to bear a son. They search for the Holy Grail for its own sake, not in the hopes that the Queen's barrenness will be lifted and the kingdom blessed with an heir.

Why?

The best reason I can think of, is that everyone is terribly embarrassed about it. I think they don't mention it because they know exactly why the king doesn't have an heir, and to talk about it would be to humiliate the King.

I think the King is either not sleeping with Guinevere, or he can't consummate their marriage.

And yet he clearly adores her. So what's up?

The way it makes sense to me, Arthur can't do it with Guinevere because he does not love her as a woman. He loves her as an ideal. She is his Queen, but she is not truly his wife. He adores her, the way millions of Catholics adore the Virgin Mary.

And that is why her affair with Lancelot goes on so long. Arthur has to know she's got the hots for Lance. And it's got to be obvious to everyone that Lance has the hots for her. But he can't blame them. After all, he's not being a proper husband to his wife.

That's why it's not till after years of what had to be an open secret that Gawain and his buddies nab Lancelot in flagrante delicto and the King is forced to deal with it.

So who does Arthur have the hots for?

Well, who does he actually have a child by? Morgan le Fay. She bears him a son, Mordred.

Now we get into the time in which Arthur lived. According to Geoffrey Ashe's DISCOVER OF KING ARTHUR and other books, the historical Arthur would have flourished around 500 AD. (That's why my novel is set then.) Britain is still Celtic, with a thin overlay of Roman civilization. Britain is partly Christian, but even Rome has only been officially Christian since 313 AD, so it's likely that many, many families still worship the old Celtic religion, and even more families worship Christ and the Celtic gods, just to be safe. (If you consider that there are still a few Zoroastrians in Persia, 1400 years after the Muslim conquest... old gods die hard.)

The people around Arthur would have had two ways of looking at him having a romance with his half-sister.

The Christians would have been appalled. Arthur is not only an adulterer, he's an incestuous adulterer? The thought is too hideous. They would have considered Mordred the bastard progeny of incest. No wonder they couldn't consider him an heir.

However, the followers of Lugos and Bellona Morigenos (known in Ireland as the Morrígan) would have not seen the problem. Marriages between brother and sister weren't unheard of, especially among the ruling class. (If you think that's odd, consider the Egyptian pharoahs, who almost always married their sister. Cleopatra married her brother before she married Caesar.)

The Celts also weren't quite so formal about marriage. If you were living with a woman, she was your woman.

So to the Celts, Mordred was the obvious heir to the throne. And thank Lugos there finally was one!

And Mordred would have felt entirely righteous when he came to court and demanded to be treated like the King's son that he was, and the heir that he ought to be. And Morgan le Fay would have felt entirely within her rights to support her son's demands.

Another King than Arthur would have simply ditched Guinevere as a barren failure and welcomed Mordred.

But Arthur is an idealist. And a purist. He has a vision of Camelot as a place of laws and honor and modesty and dignity and all those other good Christian ideals. He looks at the pagan Celtic world and sees bloody vendettas enshrined as glorious epic legend. He can see that Britain needs a single god in order to survive the barbarian Saxon onslaught.

And so he rejects Morgan, and Mordred. And calamity ensues.

From Morgan's side, the story is equally fraught. She loves Arthur as a lover, and as a brother. (I suspect she falls in love with him before she knows he's her brother. But once you've fallen in love, it's hard to put it away.) But she hates him as the offspring of her mother's rape and her father's murder. And she hates him as the man who denies their son his birthright. Which explains why she is both the woman who destroys him at the battle of Camlann, and one of the three Queens who comes to take him, mortally wounded, to Avalon, to be healed.

(Perhaps if he is the King Who Sleeps, she sleeps by his side?)

Okay, a caveat. I'm describing the legend as it is in my head. It has coalesced there out of historical research, and movies, and modern novels of King Arthur like The Once and Future King. There isn't an Official King Arthur Legend™. It's a coherent version of the story. But of course Marion Zimmer Bradley is entitled to her, very different, version.

The closest "original" canonical version is Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Of course that makes Arthur into a medieval Christian king, because Malory is writing in the Middle Ages about king from legendary times. In Malory, if I remember correctly, Arthur has three half-sisters. Morgause is the one who has the bastard by Arthur. Morgan le Fay is the sorceress. But I think we can all agree that one sister makes for a better story, can't we?

Labels: Arthur, Morgan le Fay, myth

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Sunday, February 27, 2011

What was Morgan le Fay's religion? Whom did she worship, and how?

I think it's fairly safe to say she was not a Christian. "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" says Exodus, and a badass witch with a direct channel to the old powers of the Earth is exactly what the Israelite elders were worried about.

But Christianity wasn't universal in Britain in her time. As far as I could tell from my research, Arthur flourished around 500AD. That's the date Geoffrey Ashe identifies a British war leader named Riothamus whose exploits match those of the legendary Arthur (and Riothamus just means "High King"). It's also around the date that South Cadbury Castle, a hillfort thought to be Camelot, was refortified in the Roman style.

Until 400 AD, Britain was part of the Roman Empire; culturally, it still was in 500 AD. But the Empire itself had only been officially Christian since 313 AD. Until then, Christianity was illegal and secret, one of the few religions the Romans didn't tolerate. The Roman Army was full of Mithra worshippers. Most people worshipped their old tribal gods, though various Eastern religions swept through the West from time to time.

Morgan probably worshipped the old Celtic religion.

We don't know a whole lot about the old Celtic religion. The Celts didn't write anything down until they were conquered by the Romans. The Romans did, but they liked to equate other people's gods with their gods, so when they talked about Lugos, for example, they'd say he was the Celtic Apollo and tend to sweep the differences under the mat.

It's not always easy to tell when the Romans are writing propaganda. For example, Caesar says the Celts liked to put their captured enemies in giant wicker men and burn them. He wasn't a scholar writing for history, though. He was a politician who'd just slaughtered large numbers of Celts.

But we do know the Celts were headhunters. (Did you know that?) We have shrines with alcoves to put heads in. Multiple sources, including the old Irish legends, suggest that the Celts liked to cut off the heads of their enemies in battle and tie them, by their hair, to their chariots. The Irish would then keep their enemies' heads around to show to guests.

Angel Gulermovich, in her Ph. D. thesis, War Goddess: The Morrígan and her Germano-Celtic counterparts, makes a pretty convincing case that the Celts had a warrior cult something like the Vikings did. The men hoped to die in battle. If they were valiant, the war goddess would take the form of crows and eat their bodies, taking them to the afterlife. (She's what you call a "psychopomp," meaning she can take you to your final destination.) She was often called "Badb," which just means "Crow."

(If you read old accounts of battles, you often hear about the crows gathering in huge numbers in the trees before the battle. Somehow, they knew they'd be feasting. Crows are smart.)

In Britain, the Morrígan would have been known by her British name, Morigenos, by the common people, and by the name of the Roman goddess of war, Bellona, by the educated people who spoke Latin.

Of course Bellona Morigenos wasn't the only important Celtic god or Goddess. Lugos (British) or Lugh (Irish) had lots of cities named after him, including the city the Romans called Lugodunum, which we call London, and the city of Lyons, France. Lugos was a god of light; that's why the Romans conflated him with their sun god, Apollo. The Irish had a god known as the Dagda, which just means "the good God."

The Morrígan loved the legendary Irish warrior Cú Chulainn. Rejected, she causes his death, and then appears to him at his death, I imagine to take him to the Irish Valhalla. It's not hard to imagine that Morgan had an affinity for the war goddess. Later in her legend, she causes Arthur's death, but then appears to take him to island of Avalon to live forever as the King Who Sleeps.

(Incidentally, their names have nothing to do with each other. Morgan means "sea-born." Morrígan means "queen of shadows"; her name could also be spelled Mórrígan, which means "Great Queen." Since the Irish didn't actually write down their accents back then, we don't know.

But there's religion and there's spellcasting. If Morgan prayed, she might have prayed to the Great Queen of Shadows, whether she knew her as Bellona Morigenos, the Morrígan, or her many other names, which meant Crow, Terror and Panic.

But a witch would have needed to do more than ask nicely. She would have had to channel the power herself.

There's no archeology of what happens during a spell. All we have to go on is contemporary spellcasting, which is, to say the least, underpowered compared to what Morgan had. For that we have to turn to contemporary witchcraft, known as Wicca.

When a modern witch casts a spell, she (or he) generally casts a circle. It's intended to focus the powers she raises. Then she calls on the powers of earth, air, fire and water. There doesn't have to be a visible circle; the chalk and the knife and the candles are there to help the witch focus. She invokes these powers into her circle and into herself.

From there she channels the energies into the working she hopes to do. Witchcraft is about changing reality.

Most of the witches I know are trying to change their own reality. You don't have to believe their spells change the rules of the universe. It's enough if they change themselves. If a love spell makes a witch more confident, it may lead to more love.

Morgan would have had far greater power, power to rupture time or open the gates to other places across the Veil between Seen and Unseen. The book is an attempt to imagine how that would have felt to her. It's not a question of having a wand and saying the right words. It's a question of becoming a gateway for immense, primal powers; and having the discipline to control those powers and shut the gateway afterwards.

Morgan would have had two religions, I guess. She would have had a goddess she worshipped. I like to think that was the Morrígan. And then she would have been in touch directly with the powers. They have no names.

Labels: Morgan le Fay

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