The Mists of Avalon (Avalon, #1)

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

I have no quarrel with the Christ, only with his priests, who call the Great Goddess a demon and deny that she ever held power in this world.

“For all the Gods are one God,” she said to me then, as she had said many times before, and as I have said to my own novices many times, and as every priestess who comes after me will say again, “and all the Goddesses are one Goddess, and there is only one Initiator. And to every man his own truth, and the God within.”

No woman knows, when she lies down to childbirth, whether her life will not be demanded of her at the hands of the Goddess.

“The Goddess has a fourth face, which is secret, and you should pray to her, as I do—as I do, Igraine—that Morgause will never wear that face.”

Quite simply, when she came near him, she knew that she had discovered some lost part of herself; with him she was whole. Whatever might happen between them as ordinary man and woman, something lay beyond it which would never die or lessen in its intensity. They shared a destiny, and somehow they must fulfill it together . . .

“Even should I never again look upon his face in this life, I am bound to him and I shall be so bound until I die. And I cannot believe the Goddess would have wrought this upheaval in my life, if I was meant never again to see him.”

“We are bound and sworn, life to life and beyond;

Even if you think it wicked and shameful, would you pretend to know what is right for another? Even the wise cannot know everything, and perhaps the Gods have more purposes than we, in our little knowledge, can see.”

and again if I was Lancelet’s son! I cannot see the resemblance so much myself, but then I am not really familiar with my own face . . . I look into a mirror only when I shave myself!” “Still,” said Morgause, “anyone who had seen Lancelet, especially anyone who knew him in youth, could not look on you without knowing you his kinsman.” “Some such thing as that I said—I put on a Breton accent, sometimes, and said I too was kinsman to old King Ban,” Gwydion said. “Yet I would think our Lancelet, with the face which makes him a magnet to all maids, would have fathered enough bastards that it would not be such a marvel to all men that one should go about wearing his face! Not

from the time a man comes into the world we spin his baby clothes, till we at last spin a shroud. Without us, the lives of men would be naked indeed. . . . . . .

You cannot call down God to serve your own purposes this way. God blows through human purposes like a mighty wind, like the rush of angel’s wings which I heard in this hall this day, and tears them asunder. . . .

Sometimes I believe, Lancelet, that it does not matter what we do. The Gods move us as they will, whatever it is that we think that we are doing. We are no more than their pawns.”

My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know.