Sorcerers: the Unofficial Guide to the Magical Arts by Hal Johnson

Author:Hal Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Odd Dot

Of course, you don’t have to go around helping knights, you know. King Arthur’s half sister Morgan le Fay made a very nice career out of thwarting knights. Not in a monomaniacal way, mind you. She had knights she would help out, just as any of us would help a spider that was having trouble catching a fly—knights such as Sir Yvain of the Lion, who was her son; Prince Floriant of Sicily, who was her foster son; and Sir Accolon, whom she just liked. But she sure spent a lot more time thwarting than helping!

Or both at once? In her travels through the woods near Camelot, Morgan once saw the knight Sir Manassen, bound and blindfolded and ready to be dropped into a pool by another knight. In other words, Manassen was about to be drowned.

Curious, Morgan asked what was going on, and she found out that Manassen, the knight in peril, was the cousin of her buddy, Sir Accolon. The other knight was nobody special.

“Well, in that case you’ll switch places,” said Morgan le Fay to the two knights, and through her magic it was accomplished. Sir Manassen drowned the other knight in the pool and prepared to head back to Camelot.

“Tell my half brother,” said Morgan le Fay, “that I totally do not want to kill him.”

A Maxim of Pythagoras: A criminal throws stones into fountains.

And a little later Morgan sent a damsel to Camelot bearing, as a gift to King Arthur, a glorious mantle—a cloak, you might call it—bedecked with the finest gems, all set close together. Before he could put it on, Nimue, the Lady of the Lake, popped up and suggested that maybe the damsel who brought the gift should try it on first.

“Oh, I’m just a messenger,” said the damsel, perhaps breaking into a sweat. “I could never wear a gift fit for a king.”

But everyone insisted, and the damsel put on the mantle and immediately caught fire. In seconds she was reduced to a pile of ashes.

Morgan went back to the drawing board. But she’d continue to try.

The important thing is that she kept busy.

“Let him who, in spite of the warnings of this volume, determines to work evil, be assured that the evil will recoil on himself and that he will be struck by the reflex current.”

—S. Liddell MacGregor Mathers, Clavicula Salomonis (1889)

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