"As if whatever is not their truth, must be falsehood."

Mists of Avalon V

In the Hebrew Bible, we read a story in the book of Joshua about the people of Israel taking possession of their “Promised Land.” Moses has led them out from slavery in Egypt and forty years later, they stand on the borders of Canaan, ready to cross the Jordan and begin their new life as a settled community atop the ruins of a people and culture that they intend to dispossess. When they arrive at the present day site of Shechem, Joshua places half the people on Mt. Gerazim and half on Mount Ebal and has them recite the blessings and cursings of the law as laid down in Deuteronomy. First among the commandments is the command to have “no other gods before me.”

Soon after, a debate emerges in the religious faith of the community. Are they to have no other gods that matter more than their God? Or no other gods at all? In keeping with the ideas of the time, it seemed foolish to many to ignore the gods who had been, for time immemorial, living upon and influencing the life of the land they had just occupied. These Hebrews were also inclined to take into consideration some of the gods of Egypt whose powers they clearly saw at work in the land of Egypt. Many see the need to pay necessary allegiance to the gods who resided in the land of Canaan. They had their own God (Yahweh) to be sure, for had not Yahweh delivered them from bondage in Egypt? But should he not be simply their principle divine benefactor in a world of many divine benefactors? Not long after that occupation as recorded in Joshua, they have a rather eclectic assortment of deities that they are in the habit of appeasing.

Joshua eventually calls them all together and holds them to account:

In Joshua 24, the people are assembled again at Shechem and Joshua recounts the great deeds that the Lord their God had performed in their service. He concludes his narrative with a demand that they put away their accessory gods. Their response is, to summarize, “We plan to serve Yahweh always. No need to worry about that. But to discard all other gods would be the height of foolishness.” Here is how the argument goes.

“’Now fear the Lord and serve him with all faithfulness. Throw away the gods your ancestors worshiped beyond the Euphrates River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord.  But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’”

Then the people answered, ‘Far be it from us to forsake the Lord to serve other gods!  It was the Lord our God himself who brought us and our parents up out of Egypt, from that land of slavery, and performed those great signs before our eyes. He protected us on our entire journey and among all the nations through which we traveled.  And the Lord drove out before us all the nations, including the Amorites, who lived in the land. We too will serve the Lord, because he is our God.’

Joshua said to the people, ‘You are not able to serve the Lord. He is a holy God; he is a jealous God. He will not forgive your rebellion and your sins.  If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, he will turn and bring disaster on you and make an end of you, after he has been good to you.’

But the people said to Joshua, ‘No! We will serve the Lord.’
Then Joshua said, ‘You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen to serve the Lord.’
‘Yes, we are witnesses,’ they replied.
 ‘Now then,’ said Joshua, ‘throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.’
And the people said to Joshua, ‘We will serve the Lord our God and obey him.’

Notice that they do not say anything about discarding the foreign gods. They intend to remain loyal to all potential divine powers. Spiritually, they are committed to “diversifying their investments.” The argument is a simple one when it is all boiled down to gravy: Is it in a person’s best interest to put all their eggs in one spiritual basket, or is there something to be gained by selecting from a menu of several alternatives?

In Mists of Avalon, Book Four, this theological debate comes to the forefront and there are several positions that reveal themselves. There are those among the Christians who believe that all spiritual powers other than the Christian God are demonic in origin and evil in nature, but they believe that people are allowed to believe wrong if they wish to. And then there are others who would eliminate any and all competitive options. There are those among the pagans who believe the same of the Christian God presented by Father Patricus and his ilk. There are pagans who follow their pagan deities and traditions and who pay homage to the Goddess but who see no harm in letting the Christians believe as they choose and sometimes, they adopt some of the Christian rites and rituals. There are those Christians who lean into their Christian faith but find nothing of great harm in letting the people who wish to remain pagans remain so. There are some characters who think that both paganism and Christianity are suspect and they believe in neither. There are some who believe that they are two names for the same thing.

 Arthur, who holds the final power to effectively promote one religion and suppress the other, is someone raised in Avalon (paganism) who has been made king by Christians. Over the course of his reign, he moves in the direction of his wife’s orthodox and fundamentalist faith but he maintains that it is his duty to protect Avalon and the Druids and religious liberty generally. The Merlin is willing to serve as an adviser in Arthur’s Christian court in spite of the fact that he remains a Druid committed to the work of the Goddess. Morgaine exemplifies one who believes that one should stay true to their pagan beliefs even in Camelot and that if the time comes where this is not possible, they should retreat to Avalon to retain their integrity. She eventually executes the Merlin for being a traitor to Avalon. Morgause is generally a skeptic towards all religious institutions but favors the one that gives her the most power or freedom. Lancelot is an agnostic until later in life when he has a holy experience of the grail, unsure of whether his experience flows from Christian or pagan wells, content in the possibility that it could be either or both. Multiple minor characters find themselves in between these extremes or off their map altogether.

Arthur’s queen is always found on the side of the Christian fundamentalists, insisting that the sacred groves of paganism be cut down. And then, she finds herself barren and calls up her local Lady of the Lake, Morgaine for a spell. Sigh. But periodic inconsistencies are a vice everyone in the novel allows themselves from time to time. Almost no one remains an absolutist other than Viviane and Patricius whose positions at the heads of their respective religions incentivize them to be absolutists.   

Sometimes the main characters are forced by some expediency to pretend that they are one thing when they are really another. Consider this exchange between Gwen and Morgaine:  

“’But if the young people now are turning back to heathen ways, then we must do something—perhaps, even, cut down the grove.’

‘If you do, I shall do murder,’ Morgaine thought, but schooled her voice to gentleness and reason. ‘That would be wrong. The oaks give pig food and food for the country people—even here we have had to use acorn flour in a bad season. And the grove has been there for hundreds of years—the trees are sacred—‘”

Arthur tries to reason with his wife’s intolerance from time to time, but to no avail. All the influence goes one way.

“[Arthur] said dryly, ‘The Merlin of Britain is one of my councilors and has always been so, Gwen. Those who look to Avalon are always my subjects too. It is written: Other sheep have I which are not of this fold. . . .’
‘A blasphemous jest,’ Gwenhwyfar observed, making her voice gentler, ‘and hardly suitable for the eve of Pentecost—‘”

 “It would be a sad day if it should be lost forever,” Arthur says of Avalon, the island home base of paganism.

“As it is sad for the peasant folk to lose their own festivals . . . town folk, perhaps, have no need of the old rites. Oh yes, I know, there is only one name under Heaven by which we may be saved, but perhaps those who live in such close kinship with the earth need something more than salvation. . . .”

Gwen would be delighted to see Avalon go the way of Atlantis.

“’Avalon, that accursed place!’ She wished it would sink into the sea like the lost land of Ys in the old tale, and never be heard of again!”

Arthur is content having men of virtue serve as his companions. Their religion is of no particular concern to him.

“’I have always wanted my Companions to be men dedicated to the right,’ said Arthur. ‘I do not demand that they be godly men, Galahad, but I have hoped they would be good men.’”

The mind of Arthur’s wife is not elastic enough for this kind of sophistry. As Marion Zimmer Bradley puts it, “If Gwenhwyfar were not so fanatically, mindlessly Christian, she would have loved Morgaine well.”

Galahad is the sort of Christian that does not care to eliminate anyone else’s faith but he will be happy to see erroneous faiths die out. He hopes that Arthur will live a long life and have a long reign but he looks forward to the demise of pagan believers in the long run.

“May that time be far—surely, my lord, you will live many, many years—and by then all those old folk who still believe they must give allegiance to the pagan ways will have gone.”

Periodically, the members of these different camps dispute one another.

“The sacred groves still stand, and in them, the old ways are done as they have been done from the beginning of the world,” says Morgaine’s paramour, Accolon.

“We do not anger the Goddess by denying her worship, lest she turn upon her people and blight the harvests and darken the very sun that gives us life.”

Galahad is startled by this statement.

“But this is a Christian land! Have no priests come to you to show you that the evil old Gods among whom the Devil had sway have no more power now? Bishop Patricius has told me that all the sacred groves have been cut down!”

‘Not so,’ said Accolon, ‘nor will be while my father lives, or I after him.’

Morgaine opened her mouth to speak, but Gwenhwyfar saw Accolon lay his hand on her wrist. She smiled at him and said nothing. It was Gwydion who said, ‘Nor yet in Avalon, while the Goddess lives. Kings come and kings go, but the Goddess shall endure forever.’ What pity, Gwenhwyfar thought, that this handsome young man should be a pagan! Well, Galahad is a good and pious Christian knight, who will make a Christian king!

Morgause represents the universal skeptic in many ways. She finds Christian sacraments particularly boring but she disagrees with Morgaine’s refusal to at least pretend to hold to the faith of the dominant powers. She knows where her bread is buttered.

“Morgause put a plump hand over her mouth, smothering a yawn. However often she attended Christian ceremonies, she never thought about them; they were not even as interesting as the rites at Avalon where she had spent her childhood, but she had thought, since she was fourteen or so, that all Gods and all religions were games which men and women played with their minds. None of them had anything to do with real life. Nevertheless, when she was at Pentecost, she dutifully attended mass, to please Gwenhwyfar—the woman was her hostess, and the High Queen, after all, and a close relative—and now, with the rest of the royal family, she went forward to receive the holy bread. Morgaine, attentive at her side, was the only one in the King’s household who did not approach the communion table; Morgause thought lazily that Morgaine was a very great fool. Not only did she alienate the common people, but the more pious among the King’s household called Morgaine witch and sorceress, and worse things, among themselves. And, after all, what difference did it make? One religious lie was as good as another, was it not?”

Arthur’s son Gwydion challenges the right of any King or Queen to “presume to declare one truth for all of mankind throughout the world?”

“Call you that presumption?” Gwenhwyfar immediately responds, “It is the one truth, and a day must come when all men everywhere will acknowledge it.” King Uriens find’s this a reprehensible excess. This leads to contention between he and Gwenhwfar.

“’I tremble for my people that you say so,’ said King Uriens. ‘I have pledged myself to protect the sacred groves, and my son after me.’
‘Why, I thought you a Christian, my lord of North Wales—‘
‘And so I am,’ said Uriens, ‘but I will not speak ill of another’s God.’
‘But there are no such Gods,’ Gwenhwyfar began.
Morgaine opened her mouth to speak, but Arthur said, ‘Enough of this, enough—I did not bid you here to discuss theology!’”

The Queen can not let her absolutism rest though. “A day will come when all false Gods shall vanish and all pagan symbols shall be put to the service of the one true God and his Christ,” she says. Morgaine gives her a piece of her mind:

 “’I did not speak to you, you canting fool,’ said Morgaine furiously, ‘and that day will come over my corpse! You Christians have saints and martyrs—do you think Avalon will have none?’”

 “My dear sister,” Arthur says pleadingly, “I beg of you, do not quarrel with me about the name by which we call our Gods. You yourself have said to me that all the Gods are the One God.” He says to his son, “Oh—times I believe one thing, times another, like all men. It does not matter what I believe.” He holds loosely to anything that might threaten to disturb his ability to govern a diverse population.

Sometimes, characters soften their stances and acknowledge that much of their contentiousness is the consequence of leadership, and not the original vice of those they lead. “It was not Gwenhwyfar herself that she hated,” Morgaine admits, “it was the priests who had so much influence over her.” And yet, it is difficult for her to extend grace to those who slavishly follow Gwen’s tribe even deeper into absolutism.“Gwenhwyfar’s ladies were the kind of pious idiots with whom Gwenhwyfar always surrounded herself,” Morgaine mopes.

The Merlin Kevin is asked why it is that there has to be just one way of seeing the world.

“’Why should we all meet in one afterlife? Why should there not be many paths, the Saxons to follow their own, we to follow ours, the followers of the Christ to worship him if they choose, without restraining the worship of others. . . .’

Kevin shook his head. ‘My dear, I do not know. There seems to be a deep change in the way men now look at the world, as if one truth should drive out another—as if whatever is not their truth, must be falsehood.’”

Kevin is among that tribe of “Unitarians” who thinks that people make too much of the peculiarities of their respective faiths. “It is the sword of the Gods,” Kevin says of his pagan faith and the sword Excalibur,

“And all the Gods are one. I would rather have Excalibur in the world where men may follow it, than hidden away in Avalon. So long as they follow it, what difference does it make which Gods they call on in doing so? . . . ‘I know not what to call myself now,’ said Kevin quietly, ‘save perhaps servant of those who serve the Gods, who are all One.’”

Sometimes, characters do evolve from their original positions to be sure. Morgaine, for example, holds views towards her Goddess that are similar to the views of ISIS toward Allah. But in time, she begins to realize that one should always consider the possibility that the founders of religions are not always fans of their own followers.

“In those days they [Christians] came in numbers to Avalon to escape the harsh and shrivelling winds of persecution and bigotry. [Father] Patricius had set up new forms of worship, a view of the world wherein there was no room for the real beauty and mystery of the things of nature. From these Christians who came to us to escape the bigotry of their own kind I learned something, at last, of the Nazarene, the carpenter’s son who had attained Godhead in his own life and preached a rule of tolerance; and so I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.”

Morgaine just resents the way that the Christians abscond and appropriate with the sacred objects of other faiths into their own and then do not acknowledge the origins of their power.   

“They would use the Holy Regalia of the Goddess to summon the Presence . . . which is One . . . but they would do it in the narrow name of that Christ who calls all Gods demons, unless they invoke in his name!”

“Now, using the ancient things of the Goddess, they would invoke their own narrow God; yet instead of the pure water of the holy earth, coming from the clear crystal spring of the Goddess, they have defiled her chalice with wine! But never again will they be profaned by priests of a narrow God who would deny all other truths. . . .”

Sometimes, characters find themselves caught in a trap of their own logic regarding their faith systems. “If some priests are bad men,” said Nimue, “I find it not wholly beyond reason that some Druids might be good ones.”

“There must, thought Gwenhwyfar, be some error in that reasoning, but she could not make it out.”

At one point, Lancelet and Morgaine get into a conversation about the relative merits of Morgaine’s paganism and Patricius’ Christianity.

“’If [Arthur] survives the quest of the Grail—or if he should abandon it—still his rule will be circled about by the priests, and through all the land there will be only one God and only one religion.’ Morgaine says.

‘Would that be such a tragedy, Morgaine?’ Lancelet asked quietly. ‘All through this land, the Christian God is bringing a spiritual rebirth here—is that an evil thing, when mankind has forgotten the Mysteries?’

‘They have not forgotten the Mysteries,’ she said, ‘they have found them too difficult. They want a God who will care for them, who will not demand that they struggle for enlightenment, but who will accept them just as they are, with all their sins, and take away their sins with repentance. It is not so, it will never be so, but perhaps it is the only way the unenlightened can bear to think of their Gods.’

 Lancelet smiled bitterly. ‘Perhaps a religion which demands that every man must work through lifetime after lifetime for his own salvation is too much for mankind. They want not to wait for God’s justice, but to see it now. And that is the lure which this new breed of priests has promised them.’
Morgaine knew that he spoke truth, and bowed her head in anguish.”

This perhaps is the clearest statement of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s own critique of Christianity. That it is a religion for lazy people who want to live in paradise without making themselves worthy of it? Though clearly, Morgaine is no saint herself.

As the novel draws to a close, both Avalon and Camelot begin to disappear, as if the places where ideas are born and thrive disappear as the ideas that had their origin in them stop being believed. The paganism of Avalon and the syncratic tolerance of Camelot are both eventually displaced by a disbelief in all that is sacred. And so both Camelot and Avalon recede into the mists, inhabited only by ideological monastics who accept that they can no longer have any influence in the world outside them.

In the last chapter, Morgaine visits the Christian church at Glastonbury where ostensibly, pagan worship has been completely obliterated. But what she finds there startles her, for instead of the worship of the goddess being banished forever, she finds that Morgaine’s ancient paganism has simply taken root in the vocabulary and forms of the new faith. The grail of the goddess has become the chalice of the Christian communion.

“In her dream she went, as she had never done in any Christian church, to the altar rail for the sharing of their bread and wine, and Lancelet bent and set the cup to her lips and she drank. And then it seemed to her that he knelt in his turn, and he said to her, ‘Take this cup, you who have served the Goddess. For all the Gods are one God, and we are all One, who serve the One.’ And as she took the cup in her hands to set it to his lips in her turn, priestess to priest, he was young and beautiful as he had been years ago. And she saw that the cup in her hands was the Grail.”

Morgaine finds herself sitting with the nuns and seeing them as sisters in a faith older than either her own paganism or Christianity.

“Never did I think I would stand side by side with one of these Christian nuns, joining with her in prayer. But then she remembered what Lancelet had said in her dream. Take this cup, you who have served the Goddess. For all the Gods are One . . .”

The sacred well of Avalon has now simply become the sacred well of the chalice. Though the nuns do not know it is the same, Morgaine realizes that it is.

“‘Come up to the cloister with me, sister,’ said the nun, smiling and laying a hand on her arm. ‘You must be hungry and weary.’ Morgaine went with her to the gates of their cloister, but would not go in. ‘I am not hungry,” she said, ‘but if I might have a drink of water—‘
‘Of course.’

The woman in black beckoned, and a young girl came and brought a pitcher of water, which she poured into a cup. And she said, as Morgaine lifted it to her lips, ‘We drink only the water of the chalice well—it is a holy place, you know.’ It was like Viviane’s voice in her ears: The priestesses drink only the water of the Sacred Well.’

As she rose, the girl said, ‘If you wish, Mother, I will promise to come here and say a prayer every Sunday for your kinswoman.’ For some absurd reason, Morgaine felt that tears were coming to her eyes. ‘Prayer is always a good thing. I am grateful to you, daughter.’

‘And you, in your convent, wherever it may be, you must pray for us too,’ said the girl simply, taking Morgaine’s hand as she rose. ‘Here, Mother, let me brush the dirt from your gown. Now you must come and see our chapel.’ For a moment Morgaine was inclined to protest. She had sworn when last she left Arthur’s court that she would never again enter any Christian church; but this girl was so much like one of her own young priestesses that she would not profane the name by which the girl knew her God. She let the girl lead her inside the church.

Morgaine followed the young girl into the small side chapel. There were flowers here, armfuls of apple blossom, before a statue of a veiled woman crowned with a halo of light; and in her arms she bore a child. Morgaine drew a shaking breath and bowed her head before the Goddess. The girl said, ‘Here we have the Mother of Christ, Mary the Sinless. God is so great and terrible I am always afraid before his altar, but here in the chapel of Mary, we who are her avowed virgins may come to her as our Mother, too.’

‘But Brigid is not a Christian saint,’ Morgine thought, ‘even if Patricius thinks so. That is the Goddess as she is worshipped in Ireland. And I know it, and even if they think otherwise, these women know the power of the Immortal. Exile her as they may, she will prevail. The Goddess will never withdraw herself from mankind.’

And Morgaine bowed her head and whispered the first sincere prayer she had ever spoken in any Christian church.

‘Mother,’ she whispered, ‘forgive me. I thought I must do what I now see you can do for yourself. The Goddess is within us, yes, but now I know that you are in the world too, now and always, just as you are in Avalon and in the hearts of all men and women. Be in me too now, and guide me, and tell me when I need only let you do your will. . . .’”

In the end, Morgaine concludes that one need not draw Joshua’s distinction between Baal and Yahweh.

“She need only step through the mists here, and be in Avalon.”

Question for Comment: Would the world benefit from a process of synchronizing religions? Or is it better served in a world where they all compete? A question of capitalism applied to religion I guess.