The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

Morgaine knew that he spoke truth, and bowed her head in anguish. “And since their view of a God is what shapes their reality, so it shall be—the Goddess was real while mankind still paid homage to her, and created her form for themselves. Now they will make for themselves the kind of God they think they want—the kind of God they deserve, perhaps.” Well, so it must be, for as man saw reality, so it became. While the ancient Gods, the Goddess, were seen as benevolent or life-giving, so indeed had nature been to them; and when the priests had taught men to think of all nature as evil, alien, hostile, and the old Gods as demons, even so they would become, surging up from within that part of man which he now wished to sacrifice or control, instead of letting it lead him. She said, remembering at random something she had read when she had looked into the books of Uriens’ house priest in Wales, “And so all men will become even as that apostle who wrote that they should become as eunuchs for the Kingdom of God . . . I think I care not to live within that world, Lancelet.”