Legendary scryers: Morgaine from The Mists of Avalon

Viviane opened a little bag she wore about her neck and took out a small quanitity of crushed herbs, which wafted a sweetish-musty scent through the chamber.  She sifted only a few grains into the basin of water before saying in a low, neutral voice, "Look into the water, Morgaine.  Make your mind perfectly still, and tell me what you see."

Morgaine came and knelt before the basin of water, looking intently into its clear surface.  The room was very silent, so still that Viviane could hear the small chirping of some insect outside.  The Morgaine said, in a wandering, unfocused voice, "I see a boat.  It is draped with black and there are four women it it...four queens, for they wear crowns...and one of them is you...or is it me?"

"It is the barge of Avalon," Viviane said, low.  "I know what you see."  (The Mists of Avalon (1984), Marion Zimmer Bradley)

There are few pagans and witches of a certain age who don't recall Marion Zimmer Bradley's Avalon books with a sense of fondness.  The formula of epic Arthurian fantasy percolated through Berkeley neopaganism made for a delicious cuppa--and for those of us without access to a pagan/occult community, it quelled a mighty craving.  I snuck it out of my mom's book pile as a kid, bookmarked all the witchy and sexy bits, and pored over them until the pages got grubby.  I also devoured the inferior prequels (Lady of Avalon, Priestess of Avalon, etc.), until my small-town library figured out they were basically pagan porn and quit buying them.

For the handful of people who don't know, Mists covers the Camelot saga from the viewpoint of Morgaine (better known as Morgan le Fay), King Arthur's half-sister.  As the story begins, Morgaine is the loner at her father's court, a plain and stubborn girl who Nobody Understands.  (Bradley liked this trope--she later repeated it with Cassandra of Troy in her 1986 novel The Firebrand.)  The best part of the book was when Morgaine's cool Aunt Viviane, who just happens to be the Lady of the Lake, comes to visit Morgaine at her father's castle.  She figures out that Morgaine has the Sight.  (The liberal use of capitals is one of the book's hallmarks.)  Right away, she vows to adopt Morgaine away from her politically preoccupied family.  Morgaine gets to escape the repressive court of Camelot and go live on Avalon in the House of Maidens, where she basically gets naked and does magic all the time.  You might call this part of the book my Adolescent Fantasy, or even a Latent Psychic Baby Dyke's Wet Dream.

Morgaine does most of the scrying in the book, but everyone of the Old Blood (King Arthur's mother's side of the family) has the gift to some degree.  The ladies of Avalon prefer to scry in water, outdoors, in a natural pool not shaped by human hands--though in a pinch, a metal wash-basin does the trick.  (What those magic herbs are, nobody knows.) All the mirror gazing in Mists serves two basic plot functions:  It works like a two-way radio that the Avalon can gals use to communicate across vast distances (well, as vast as they have in England).  It's also a handy foreshadowing device--thanks to their mad scrying skills, Avalon's priestesses get to gloomily prophesy the doom of Camelot and the end of the Old Religion on every third page.

If it sounds like I'm snarking on Mists, I only halfway mean it.  I was re-reading parts of the novel recently (the witchy and the sexy parts, like old times).  And it's held up pretty well over the years.  Sure, the 80's Wiccan feminism is heavy-handed in spots, but to characterize the whole thing retro-camp is unfair.  In my opinion, it's still the best retelling of the Arthur story to date.  The film version (with Julianna Margulies as Morgaine) wasn't half bad, either.