AUTHOR’S NOTE:

This short story was originally written as part of my latest novel, American Goddess. Although the novel has a contemporary setting (less than a decade in the future) it was my intention to include a series of short stories illustrating the mythologies underlying the narrative. This story was an attempt to explore a possible origin for Morgana as the Welsh mother goddess, Modron. Unfortunately space constraints meant that much of the overt mythology had to be cut, and so I now include it by way of compensation for the delay in launching American Goddess until 2021. Ironically, the book was set post-pandemic. Here’s hoping.

My thanks to our Sparsile artist for the wonderful illustration.

And finally a warning, the story contains material of an adult nature and is not suitable for children.

Enjoy.

The Origin of the Legend of
Morgana Le Fay

L. M. Affrossman

EVEN AFTER THE RAINS OF the equinox stopped, the sky was still lost, and only through clefts and crannies in the heaving cliff-face of dark cloud could the Divine Modron spy glimpses of the harvest moon. It was bound and imprisoned. But its pull was sufficient to lure the child, and she felt the shape of him pressed against her belly. Two hands, two feet, a head. A human shape then. So be it.

The clouds parted a little further and the Divine Modron felt her body draw in tight. Only ten weeks after the rape and her son was ready for the world. His precocious growth did not trouble her, knowing as she did that this child would grow four times faster than his human father, even though that father was a king.

And king he was. Urien of Rheged, himself the son of a king, Cynfarch Oer, the Cold One, who was son of a king himself. And so it went back in a line of kings all the way back to Hen Coel, the first to introduce the worship of Christ the Anointed. Men of men. Men for men. Men whose gods were men. Not that they lacked courtesy. A chivalric code was bred into them by their tonsured tutors, who themselves revered a lackluster and sexless vision of womanhood known as the Queen of Heaven. But, while they could neuter their goddess, they could not neuter the idea of womanhood, and so they had to give her a second face as the whore of Magdala.

It was this face that Urien met when he galloped his fine stallion through the ford, sending up curtains of water that soaked the Divine Modron, who had been washing clothes at the water’s edge. She jumped up and stood there, her hair full of glints, tendrils of liquid streaming down her back, like the water streaming in rivulets between her breasts and down her rounded calves.

Urien pulled his horse up, aware that he was in the presence of something unworldly. But he was wearing the armor of a Christian knight and could not see through it. They looked at each other, the king and the Divine Modron, and Urien could feel the swelling of his lust beneath his armor. He dismounted slowly and walked towards her, but as soon as he had closed the distance to two strides, she turned and ran.

It fired Urien’s blood, and he cast off his mail shirt and his greaves and went running after her. She moved, like a hind, lithe and nimble, while he crashed and roared through the trees so blinded by the urgency of the chase that he quite failed to notice that he was hunting that which was hunting him.

He found her at the heart of the forest, at the centre of a ring of oaks, waiting. The air was very still, the light unholy, chimerical. A man, who had supped the blood of Christ, should have heeded the warnings, but his hunger made him bold, and he entered the Divine Modron’s temple, like a slavering wolf, crushing the poisonous mushrooms beneath his boots.

And, as he drew near, he smelled loam and clay and all the secret earthy places of her. His mind was all red and she was all green. With no thought to the consequences, he ripped the woolen shift from her body, spinning her around and forcing her down on all fours.

He entered her roughly, pushing her face against the ferns and the bracken and the dirty, dirty earth, howling out his pleasure and riding her, like a storm, a cloudburst that poured its moisture into the dry pores of her body until her mouth opened, like a chasm and she let out a scream of such unholy delight that the ground trembled and the sky shuddered and the oaks let loose a confetti of viridian leaves all around them.

The scream frightened Urien. He got to his feet, blinking, like a man, who cannot wake up then he looked down and saw the naked body of the Divine Modron, her legs wantonly apart, and the dark red gash between her thighs that now looked like the mouth of a cave that led all the way to Hades. He staggered back, recoiling from the rank female scents, the mouldering leaves, the rotting bones of little animals, all the things that belong to the earth, and, turning, fled the forest, as though all the demonesses of hell were after him.

But the divine Modron was little troubled by his departure. She had been disturbed by thoughts of the Christ child, a divine son for a male god. Who does not know that a son belongs to his mother? And so she had bethought to redress the balance herself with a union between the Divine Modron, Great Mother, Universal Creatrix and a man who followed God, the father.

Her son would be born in ten weeks’ time, four times faster than a human child and she would call him Yvain, but he would always be hers, and she would know him only as Mabon, son. And when he was born they would return to the isle of Avillion, where her father Afallach ruled as king, and he would grow up as a foster brother to young Lanzelet. But that is a story for another time.

Extract from Tales before the Mabinogion, Date Unknown. (Scotland)