An apple left on the waterA healing given without being askedA candle for a sister who was written as a villainThe name of the island spoken aloudA mending of something broken
Invocation Approach
Tone
Cool exacting ambiguous
Address
MorganMorgan le FayQueen of AvalonSister
Relationship
The healer the court chose to call a witch
Warning
She is both the hand that wounds and the hand that mends
Resonance
Healers women who were cast as the problem those working with the old way
Symbols
The appleThe isle of applesThe bargeThe herb gardenThe nine sistersThe raven
Mythology Summary
Morgan first appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini (c. 1150) as Morgen, the eldest of nine sisters on the Isle of Apples who can fly through the air and heal wounds, and who receives the wounded Arthur after Camlann. The Vulgate Cycle makes her Arthur's half-sister, daughter of Igraine and Gorlois, and turns her into the court's enemy and the abductor of Lancelot; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight names her as the instigator of the beheading test. Malory knows both versions and gives her the barge that carries Arthur to Avalon. She is never one thing: the healer on the island survives alongside the adversary of the prose romances.
Modern Practice
No cult, but the most usable of the Arthurian figures for practice, because her two faces are both workable: the herb garden and the mending hand on one side, the hard lesson and the refusal to be grateful on the other. The practice is a healing actually given, an apple left for the island, and the refusal to let a court define what a woman's power is.