“In the name of the Goddess, I swear the same to you.” For you have returned to me already, my love! her heart added silently. Both of us have won our victory!
“Look—” he said then, pointing across the ring toward the short, southeastern stone.
The plain was dark, the earth still covered by night’s veil, but in the eastern sky, the new day was coming, rose-pink shading to a refulgent gold. It was not like fire at all, Tiriki realized, but rather like the blossoming of a flower, whose rosy reflection brought sudden life to the great sarsens.
“Behold, Manoah comes, robed in Light—”
“Ni-Terat is made fertile in His embrace,” Tiriki answered him. The words were ancient, but she had never truly understood their meaning until now.
“Hail, Lord of the Day!”
“Hail, Dark Mother!”
A line of brightness flared along the horizon, light washed across the world, and suddenly the dim earth was robed in glowing green.
“Hail, Lady of Life—” they cried together as that radiance bloomed, and the Daughter of Ni-Terat and Manoah arose and blessed them with the first sunlight of midsummer day.
Afterword
From Atlantis to Avalon
In Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, Igraine recollects a past life in which she and Uther were a priest and priestess of Atlantis and watched the building of Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. Such a notion is not, of course, original. English folklore is rife with reference to lost civilizations. They have become the expected explanation for such disputed features of the landscape as the Glastonbury Zodiac, or the more plainly evident spiral path around the Tor. From Atlantis to Camelot, we have been haunted by legends of a golden age, the shining dream of a realm of peace and harmony, of power and splendor, which flourishes for a time, and then tragically falls. In The Mists of Avalon, Marion told of the ending of Arthur’s kingdom, but long before that book was written, she had addressed the story of a much more ancient realm.
As a rule, Marion was not particularly interested in maintaining consistency among her books. The reference to Atlantis in The Mists of Avalon is her recognition of something more personal, a reminder of her first book, a brooding occult romance with the suggestive title Web of Darkness. The distinguishing marks of that private Atlantis can be clearly seen in the otherworldly magic of Avalon no less than in the telepathic Darkovans of her numerous science fiction novels, and indeed in almost every other power-plagued individual (and society) of her fiction.
Web of Darkness was originally written in the 1950s. It was a story of occult mysteries, pride and power and redemption, and above all love, set in the temples of the Ancient Land, parent to the Sea Kingdoms of Atlantis. In the 1980s, when the emerging adult fantasy market made publication of such a story possible, Marion was busy with other projects, and asked her son David, who had read the original version as a child, to revise it. It is David’s knowledge of this material that has made it possible to write Ancestors of Avalon.
In 1983, the year after The Mists of Avalon began its ascent to fame, the book, in two trade paperback volumes from Donning Press, Web of Light and Web of Darkness, at last emerged. A mass-market version was published by Pocket Books the next year. Later it was reissued by Tor in a single volume under the title The Fall of Atlantis. The struggles of the characters in that book result in the birth of two children who, according to the prophecies, will survive the cataclysm in which Atlantis is destined to be destroyed.
When I was working with Marion on the revision of The Forest House, she told me that she had always felt that two of the main characters, Eilan and Caillean, were reincarnations of the sisters Deoris and Domaris, who in Web of Darkness bind themselves and their offspring to each other and to the Goddess for eternity. We concluded that their children, Tiriki and Micail, had reappeared in that book as Sianna and Gawen. After that it was easy to trace the line of reincarnations through The Mists of Avalon, The Forest House, Lady of Avalon, and Priestess of Avalon.
Clearly there was a connection between Atlantis and Avalon. How, I wondered, did the Sea Kingdoms fall? And how did the survivors of that cataclysm reach the misty islands to the north and find the magical Tor that would one day be known as the isle of Avalon? Clearly another story was waiting to be told.
To interlace legend with archaeology has been a challenge. I am grateful to Viking Books for asking me to tell that story, and to David Bradley for his insight and assistance in developing the setting and characters in a spirit consistent with Marion’s original vision. Thanks also to Charline Palmtag for permission to use the solstice hymn in Chapter Nine.
To those who would like to know more about prehistoric Britain, I would recommend The Age of Stonehenge by Colin Burgess; Hengeworld by Mike Pitts; Stonehenge by Leon Stover and Bruce Kraig; and the English Heritage volumes on Bronze Age Britain and Glastonbury. For the Tor, The Lake Villages of Somerset by Stephen Minnitt and John Coles; John Michell’s New Light on the Ancient Mystery of Glastonbury; and the books on Glastonbury by Nicholas Mann are recommended. The article “Sounds of the Spirit World” by Aaron Watson (Discovering Archaeology 2:1, January/ February 2000), which I encountered in my doctor’s office after I had already decided that the structure of Stonehenge had to have had some interesting effects on sound made within the circle, reports on experiments into its acoustic properties.
1
A note on Atlantean astrology: Four millennia ago, the sky was different in many ways. Due to the precession of the equinoxes, for instance, the solstices fell in early January and July, and the equinoxes in early April and October. The signs of the zodiac were also different, so that the winter solstice occurred when the sun entered Aquarius, and the spring equinox when it entered Taurus. The constellation names, in the Sea Kingdoms and the ancient civilizations around them, were different as well.
Marion Zimmer Bradley, Ancestors of Avalon
(Series: Avalon # 5)
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