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If these many tragedies represent holding all things in balance, what might chaos look like?

About the only approving reference Mists makes to Christianity is in treating a monastery as a refuge for women who burn out on the ways of the goddess. "Suffering brings women to God," says Igraine, mother of both Morgain and Arthur, who has since become mother superior of the monastery. She should know, after losing her first husband, a Christian duke, to a battlefield killing at the hands of her otherwise decent second husband, a pagan who becomes king of England. (The Lady of the Lake proclaimed this change of husbands necessary by the will of the goddess. It must be that "holding all things in balance" business again.)

Even Morgain takes refuge at the monastery for a time, but before long she has reunited with the mercurial Lady of the Lake and is serving the goddess again. When Arthur bemoans his sins, Morgain says that she too has sinned but lectures him, "Are we going to let those sins drag us down, as some priests would have it, crawling on our knees and sending us begging forgiveness, or are we going to rise above them and do what we were put on this Earth to do?" Call it Camelot's version of redemption by positive mental attitude.

But none of this represents the most outrageous moment in Mists. That occurs when the director briefly shows the courage of ending his film on a sad note—but suddenly offers a twist that should inspire both power-obsessed goddess feminists and the fiercest Catholic-bashers.

If there is any basis for constructive conversation between evangelicals and neopagans, as a Christianity Today contributor has dared to hope ("The Bewitching Charms of Neopaganism," Nov. 15, 1999, p. 55), it does not rest with the muddle-headed theology of this film.

Leave The Mists of Avalon to Beltain celebrations and knitted-brow discussions by supporters of the United Religions Initiative. Christians and neopagans who take their respective faiths seriously will know that our beliefs cannot be reconciled so tidily by such fundamentally dishonest storytelling.

Douglas LeBlanc edits The CT Review.

Copyright © 2001 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

The official TNT site for Mists of Avalon has a lot of pictures of women scowling.

Stories of King Arthur have been popular since before the 11th century. One of his greatest enemies was Morgain le Fay.

Loren Wilkinson's article "The Bewitching Charms of Neopaganism" is available on our site.

Charlotte Allen's Atlantic essay finds that "in all probability, not a single element of the Wiccan story is true."

The official Marion Zimmer Bradley site has a complete listing of her works. Empire:ZINE also has a good bio of the author.

Starhawk, the neopagen priestess who served as inspiration for Bradley, has authored several books and other writings.

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July 8 2001, Vol. 45, No. 9