Our Non-Fiction
Vanishing Tricks of a Goddess by Imogen Rhia Herrad
I should like you to meet someone. She is rather old (ancient, in fact) but
a fascinating woman still. She's not a lady - no, I wouldn't call her that.
She has been known - at various points during her long life - as a goddess,
a healer, an enchantress, a fairy, a witch.
Her name? Morgen, Morgue, Morgaine, Margan, Morgane la F�e, Fata Morgana. Morgan
le Fay.
The one thing we can be virtually certain of is that she never existed. Unlike
Arthur (in whose historical existence I myself, for one, rather like to believe)
Morgan le Fay never lived.
It was in all likelihood Geoffrey of Monmouth who first put into writing the
stories that had grown up around the exploits of Arthur. In the first half of
the twelfth century he wrote the work he is still known for today, the - largely
fictitious - History of the Kings of Britain. At the end of this History
the dying Arthur is taken to the Isle of Avalon; but not until Geoffrey's next
work, The Life of Merlin, are we told who will look after him:
The Island of Apples gets its
name 'The Fortunate Island' from the fact that it produces all manner of plants
spontaneously. ... That is the place where nine sisters exercise a kindly rule
over those who come to them from our land. The one who is first among them has
greater skill in healing, as her beauty surpasses that of her sisters. Her name
is Morgen, and she has learned the uses of all plants in curing the ills of
the body. She knows, too, the art of changing her shape, of flying though the
air, like Daedalus, on strange wings. ... It was there we took Arthur after
the battle of Camlan, where he had been wounded. ...Morgan received us with
due honour. She put the king in her chamber on a golden bed, uncovered his wound
with her noble hand and looked long at it. At length she said he could be cured
if only he stayed with her a long while and accepted her treatment. (1)
All other characters in the narrative - Merlin-Myrddyn, Arthur, Taliesin - had
an existence of their own, as it were, before Geoffrey wrote them into his stories.
Not so Morgen. No traces of her have been found (in writing, at least) anywhere
before 1148. There are however some previous instances of a ninefold sisterhood
in some sort of sacred setting - like this one, narrated by Pomponius Mela in
the first century AD.
The Isle de Sein in the British Sea is famous for the oracle
of a Gaulish god, whose priestesses, living in the holiness of perpetual virginity,
are said to be nine in number. The Gauls call them Senae and believe them to
be endowed with extraordinary gifts, to rouse the seas and the wind by their
incantations, to turn themselves into whatsoever animal form they may choose,
to cure diseases which among others are incurable, to know what is to come and
to foretell it. (2)
And, of course, there are the nine maidens whose breath kindles up the
otherworldly cauldron in the Welsh poem Preideu Annwfyn, 'The Spoils
of Annwn'; composed God knows when and first written down any time between the
ninth and the early twelfth centuries - long before Geoffrey's Life of Merlin
at any rate. (3) Here, too, nine women live in an otherworldly island, guarding
what is quite possibly an ancestor, so to speak, of the Holy Grail: A sacred,
life-giving vessel.
And not only that. Ifor Williams, quoting the Llansteffan MSS, shows that Morgan
herself had at one time been called a deity of the Welsh Otherworld: the Goddess
of Annwn, Margan dywes o annwfyn. (4) She would have started out as a
life-giving deity, mistress of the Otherworld; a place where indeed - as Geoffrey
wrote - all manner of plants [grow] spontaneously, a land of plenty where
there was no death - not even for the mortally wounded Arthur.
* * *
It is impossible to say with any certainty, after so many centuries, exactly
when (or indeed why) the stories about Arthur began to travel from the firesides
of a defeated people out into the world, where they turned into international
best-sellers. Well, European ones, anyway, but even so the speed with which
they spread is startling. (And of course, they still fascinate us today - otherwise
I would not be writing this, and you would not be reading it.)
In or around 1135 Geoffrey published his History of the Kings of Britain.
Some time between 1120 and 1140 an unknown artist, today known only as the Arthur
Master, chiselled some strange shapes and figures into the stones over the north
portal of the Cathedral of Modena. In Italy. There are knights, among them (the
sculptor has helpfully given their names) Artus de Bretania, Galvagin (Gwalchmai/Gawain?)
and Che (Cei/Kay); and a woman held captive in a tower, Winlogee (Gwenhwyfar/Guinevere?).
(5) Even accepting the latest possible date for their execution would mean that
the work on the Archivolt was carried out only a few years after the publication
of Geoffrey's Historia; quite possibly it was finished before then.
Only a few decades later stories were being told in southern Italy of how King
Arthur had not gone to the Isle of Avalon at all, but instead was living in
the island of Sicily. And not alone, either. In a mediaeval German Arthurian
poem, Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival, written between 1200 and 1210, Mount
Etna is called berc ze f�murg�n - the mountain of Morgan the Fairy. (6)
From Antiquity onwards, the volcano had been known as an entrance into the netherworld
or otherworld; in Christian times even as the entrance to hell. For roughly
the same length of time, the waters off Sicily had been the home of the legendary
Sirens, whose irresistibly sweet singing so fatally tempted unwary seafarers
to jump off their boats into the sea. (7) Now Morgan moved into both these local
legends. She set up shop inside Mount Etna with Arthur in a magical castle;
she went and lived at the bottom of the sea, in a splendid palace made all of
coral and crystal. In a mediaeval French Arthurian Romance, Floriant et Florete,
she is called 'mistress of the fairies of the salt sea', La mestresse [des]
f�es de la mer sal�e. (8)
It was in this siren-like form that Geoffrey's shape-shifter finally disappeared
from sight altogether.
The straits of Messina are known - and have been for centuries and quite probably
millennia - for their strange optical illusions, mirages, shimmering shapes
in the air and in the water; something to do with the salt and the wind and
the temperature. Now, they were given her name. In Italian, she was called Fata
Morgana or Morgana la Fata, Morgana the Fairy. She was said to live in the sea,
whence she lured appetising young fishermen down into the depths by dint of
causing an image of her palace to appear above the waves, so they would be dazzled
and lose their way. (9) There is an interesting echo here of the Morgan le Fay-Arthur-Avalon
motif: The woman-fairy-goddess taking a man to her otherworldly abode (across
or below the water) - although of course in this case her motives do not seem
to be entirely altruistic. Margan the goddess of Annwn who became Morgan le
Fay the evil enchantress had become Fata Morgana, the creatrix of optical illusions
to lead men astray.
With the translation of the tales from the Arabian Nights, she suddenly
appeared in Oriental garb. Their first translator rendered the Arab fairy Marg�na
into 'Morgane', conflating her with the already existing western fairy queen.
Thus travellers in the Sahara desert attributed the mirages they saw there to
her: the German 18th Century poet C.M. Wieland wrote of 'Fata Morgana's castles
in the air'. (1o) This image proved so powerful that in modern German the term
for 'mirage' is still Fata Morgana.
And so the once goddess, ruler of the Otherword and queen of Avalon-Afallon,
has, after the passage of many centuries and thousands of miles, today almost
completely vanished - if you see her at all, you will know that she is merely
an optical illusion.
But don't be deceived. She is, after all, a shape-shifter; and you know that
goddesses are immortal, don't you?
______________________________________________________________________________________
References:
(1) Basil Clarke (ed.), Vita Merlini; Life of Merlin,
Cardiff 1973; lines 908 - 938
(2) quoted in R. S. Loomis, Celtic Myth & Arthurian Romance, New York
1927, pp. 191-192
(3) Jon B. Coe & Simon Young, The Celtic Sources for the Arthurian Legend,
Felinfach 1995, pp. 135 ff.
(4) Ifor Williams, Pedeir Keinc y Mabinogi, Caerdydd 1930, p. 100
(5) Muriel Whitaker, Legends of King Arthur in Art; Cambridge, Mass.
1990
(6) Wolfgang Kauth, "Fata Morgana", in: Beitr�ge zum romanischen Mittelalter,
ed. Kurt Baldinger, T�bingen 1977, pp. 417-48
(7) ibid., p. 429
(8) quoted in Lucy A. Paton (ed.), Studies in the Fairy Mythology of Arthurian
Romance�, New York 197o; p. 136
(9) W. Kauth, op. cit., p. 417
(1o) ibid.
First published in May 2001 in "The New Welsh Review"
© 2000 - 2004 Imogen Rhia Herrad
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