This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Every reader of the Arthur legend knows Morgan le Fay as Arthur's enemy, the sorceress who schemes against Camelot from its edges. Marion Zimmer Bradley's 1983 novel The Mists of Avalon asks what the same story looks like if you put her at the center instead, renamed Morgaine and reframed not as a villain but as a priestess trying to save a faith that is dying around her.
That faith belongs to Avalon, a sacred island reachable only by those trained to find it through the mists that give the novel its title, home to a Goddess centered religion built on seasonal ritual and a matrilineal line of spiritual authority. Viviane, the Lady of the Lake, leads it when the novel opens; Morgaine, her niece and eventual successor, spends the book watching it lose ground to an advancing Christianity that the novel does not treat as simple progress. Bradley gives real weight to what is being lost: a faith rooted in the land itself, led by women, practiced through ritual rather than doctrine, pushed steadily to the margins by a religion arriving with the authority of kings behind it.
Arthur himself sits between the two faiths his whole life, crowned with Avalon's blessing and ruling in Christianity's name, and the novel's tragedy is as much his as it is Morgaine's: a king who can never fully choose either mother.