The Mists of Avalon

The Mists of Avalon portrays time and history as cyclical. Avalon is rooted in its rich customs and tradition, many of which involve cycling through different stages of life. The Goddess, Avalon’s primary deity, has three faces that correspond to each stage of a woman’s life: Maiden, Mother, and Crone. For instance, when Viviane goes to visit her dying friend Priscilla, she thinks, “I have brought life and now I come as the Death-crone…Mother, I do for her only what I would that one might do for me one day” (341). Viviane recalls when they had their babies together and is shocked that they have grown old so fast. In confronting death in someone dear to her, she must reckon with her own. Acknowledging these cycles is often what prompts many characters to act. Once Viviane faces the reality of her age, she reflects on her lost relationship with Morgaine and hopes to make her the Lady one day, thus ensuring that her cycle will continue.

Cycles also inform the very structure of the book. The Mists of Avalon spans multiple generations, and they all face similar struggles. For Igraine, Morgaine, and Mordred, struggles with fate and identity seem to be genetic. Igraine harbors resentment toward Viviane and Taliesin for thinking that they can control her. Despite this, she is still caught up in their plan to have her marry Uther. Though Igraine is not unhappy with him, she realizes that fate “had not brought them together for her own joy” (107), and that this will be a marriage bound by their duty to the land. Morgaine’s journey centers around a similar cycle of events. Viviane tells her that she needs to remain a virgin until she receives a signal from the Goddess. Though she wants to lose her virginity to Lancelet, Morgaine stops herself, holding on to the idea that the Goddess has a plan for her and inadvertently sleeping with her own brother. This leaves her unmoored—she is unable to figure out her relationship with Avalon until it is too late, and she can never have successful, long-term romantic relationships. Her son Gwydion must also deal with the expectations of others from the moment of his birth. All of Avalon thinks he will be their savior, and all of Camelot thinks he could be a great knight and a great king. Gwydion is torn between these two identities, and his final descent into corruption can be read as a way of desperately attempting to reconcile his two identities. At the end of his life, he melds patriarchal Christianity with polytheistic Avalon, creating an ideology that reads as incoherent and disastrous.

The novel also depicts these cyclical events in similar styles. The best example of this is the parallel between Morgaine’s ritual with Arthur and Morgaine’s ritual with Accolon. Zimmer Bradley describes Arthur’s frenzied running with the deer in punctuated phrases: “[H]e swayed and struggled, wrestling the deer with his strong hands and young body…a knife slashed upward; blood spilled on the earth, and he was bleeding too, the Horned One, blood on his hands” (176). The beginning of her ritual with Accolon has a similar rhythm:

[A]nd suddenly it was as if a horn rang out, far and eerie, through the hazel grove…or was it the hazel grove? And then the leaves lifted and stirred, and there was the rushing of sudden winds, making the branches creak and sway (677).

In describing both rituals in succinct phrases, Zimmer Bradley establishes both as moments of frenzied ecstasy. Their similarity is apparent despite them occurring years apart from each other.