When we are talking about Avalon we can’t hide from faery tradition or death for very long. (Remember this chat about faery goddesses in Celtic lands?)
In fact, many of the greatest faery gods and goddesses of Avalon are underworld and death deities.
Take our girl Morgan le Fay. She’s a sorceress, a twilight shapeshifter, and a psychopomp – she rules the liminal places between day and night, life and death, and acts as a guide through these times of transformation. As death doula Morgan prepares King Arthur for his journey across the waters to Avalon, his final journey into death, meeting him on the shore and physically ferrying his out of the mortal world into the land of death.
She is a goddess of the darker more Scorpionic mysteries in life – sex, death, money and power – and holds the carrion crow as her sacred bird.
Intense!
My favourite Avalonian god is Gwyn Ap Nudd. He is the faery king under the hollow hill of Glastonbury Tor, holding court and messing with local christians for centuries.
Gwyn is known as the King of Avalon, son of the ancient healer godNudd (or Nodens or Núada, depending where in the British isles you are hanging out). He is an underworld god, guarding the gates between life and death. He leads the wild hunt, hunting souls at night with his pack of red-eared and white bodied hounds – the hounds of Annwn. Any unbaptised soul had better be wary when Gwyn rides forth – he will catch you and imprison you in faery land.
Of course, a lot of the Gwyn tales are Christian drama – we need to be terrified of those old pagan devils.
It’s more likely and I reckon that Gwyn was chasing evil spirits from his kingdom, and collecting the souls who had recently passed over to take them back to his court, so they have a safe protected space to move through on their death journey. As lord of the underworld he has a duty to protect the souls passing through his kingdom, so that’s what he does.
(This is Demi mythology here, not official. It’s my interpretation as a big Gwyn fan.)
Why is Avalon so associated with death?
Why are there so many specific death gods of Avalon?
Because death is the dance partner of life.
It happens to everyone and everything. If the world is sacred, alive and divine, the mysteries of death are at least as holy as the mysteries of life because it’s always a spiral of birth, growth, decay and death.
Death is the unknown and the unseen the shift into something not bound by our physical bodies – something spiritual.
For the ancients death would have been an everyday part of life -not sanitised and kept at a distance like today, with our funeral homes and weird creepy plastic embalming methods, with our chicken-in-a-plastic-box-from-the-supermarket and our ability to access good vegetarian food in the dead of winter.
And it makes sense that if your soul is passing in and out of life, it would also pass through the otherworld on it’s journey – the spiritual realm that kisses our own, the inner world to our outer world.
Death is such a core part of the magic of Avalon.
Very important to study for her modern day priestesses.
