Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley [530]
“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. “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.”
The weary knight sighed and shook his head. “I think I care not for it either, Morgaine. Yet perhaps it will be a simpler world than ours, and it will be easier to know what is right to do. So I came to seek Galahad, for though he will be a Christian king, I think he would be a better king than Mordred. . . .”
Morgaine clenched her hands under the edge of her sleeves. I am not the Goddess! It is—it is not mine to choose! “You came—here to seek him, Lancelet? He was never one of us. My son Gwydion—Mordred—he was reared at Avalon. If he left Arthur’s court he might come here. But Galahad? He was as pious as Elaine—he would scorn to set foot in this world of witchcraft and fairy!”
“But as I told you, I knew not that I came here,” said Lancelet. “I sought to reach Ynis Witrin and the Isle of the Priests, for I heard a rumor of a magical brightness which comes and goes in the church there, and they have renamed their Well, I have heard, the Well of the Chalice—I thought perhaps Galahad rode this way. Another old habit brought me here.”
She asked him seriously then, face to face, “What do you think of this quest, Lancelet?”
“I know not, truly, cousin,” said Lancelet. “When I took this quest on me, I went as once I went to kill old Pellinore’s dragon—do you remember that, Morgaine? None of us believed in it then, and yet I did in the end find that dragon and slay it. Yet I know that something, something of great holiness, came into Camelot that day we saw the Grail.” And when she would have spoken, he said vehemently, “No, tell me not that I imagined it, Morgaine—you were not there, you do not know what it was like! For the first time, I felt that there was a Mystery somewhere which was beyond this life. And so I went on this quest, though half of me felt it was mad—and I rode awhile with Galahad, and it seemed that his faith mocked mine, because he was so pure and his faith so simple and good, and I was old and stained—” Lancelet stared down at the floor, and she saw him swallow hard. “That is why, in the