When Merlin left Arthur he had reached the chapter in his life where he went to Morgan le Fey. He had a deep resentment by then that did not mind the idea of displacing Arthur, but he did not admit this to himself. When Merlin saw what was configuring there in Morgaine, Merlin thought she was right, Arthur didn’t know what he was doing, but he did not want to admit this to his conscious mind, either.
Morgaine was building power within herself and was feeling power come into her. She thought she was gaining power through the practice of her magical arts, but she was taking in lost Will rage at the Father of Manifestation (Arthur), including some of the Mother’s rage, and her magical arts were calling this to her.
Over and over, she talked to the ethers, forming her plan and drawing to her any energy that would be in alliance with her plan, drawing only feelings similar to her own. She also had ears at the castle and especially did not want to hear that Guinevere was pregnant. Potions were delivered to the castle and given to Guinevere to drink without her knowing that they prevented pregnancy. When the opportunity came to disgrace Arthur through Lancelot’s appearance she took full advantage of it. Then, she felt, if an heir was ever produced, it would be easy to cast doubt on the parentage.
She found herself drawing lords who opposed Arthur. They wanted to have sex with her. They all pressed themselves on her. She told them all, “If you help me take Arthur from his throne and put Mordred in his place, you can have me sexually.”
They had many years to wait while Mordred had to grow up, and it was not easy to keep her allies together for that time, but she continually reminded them that they had a mission and a purpose for remaining allies there. She also kept them in a sexual frenzy by dosing them with potions of hallucinogenics and aphrodisiacs and then telling them her sexuality was the most powerful.
Morgaine thought she could control them through sex, and especially power sex, but her allies were restless and insisted they wanted another heir presented to them in case anything went wrong with her plan. Now Morgaine was put in the position of having to decide who the father of this child was going to be.
When Merlin came, he felt like the piece she needed. He had bloodlines she liked; they were celtic. The others did not like that, because it could not be established clearly who he was or where he came from. They were all still more interested in putting themselves on one of their sons on the throne, but Morgaine thought that if she established a bond with Merlin, he would put her son on the throne the way he had Arthur.
When she saw that Mordred might not be powerful enough on his own or he would have more heart for winning the battles she thought he needed to be winning to wrest the throne from Arthur, and less laziness, as she saw it, she decided he needed more power, and more magic was how she planned to get it; even if she had to trick him, Merlin was going to help her.
Merlin was feeling he would have been more the right person to have had the throne there, but he was more interested in magic than he was in doing battle for power, and was too old and had been too reluctant for too long to be able to step forward publicly and do it then. It did not escape Merlin that his own bloodlines were close to what they would have needed to take the throne, though, and he felt that if he fathered a son through Morgan le Fey, the right bloodlines would be there.
Morgaine was determined to replace Arthur with her own son, which at the time was only Mordred, and if not, then with the next son, who she was going to have with Merlin. When Merlin made his proposal to Morgaine, Morgaine did not let him know that she had been thinking this herself. She feigned cool aloofness to the idea but then she said she would agree to the proposal only if Merlin would teach her his magic and entrust her with all he knew as the mother of his son.
Merlin knew Morgaine was being played there by the opponents of Arthur who were going to support Mordred only long enough to use him to kill Arthur and then take the throne for one of them by raising public opinion against him as having killed his own father.
Merlin thought that his son would be a more loving and balanced presence to have on the throne than Mordred ever could be and, so, thought their bacck-up plan of putting his son on the throne was a better plan; if he could put his heir on the throne. But first, Merlin needed to be there to help his son grow up the way he wanted him to.
Merlin thought that agreeing to teach Morgaine was his only real opportunity to be near his own son and raise him, instead of letting Morgaine do what she did to Mordred all over again, but he was going to need to drag this out over the many years it was going to take his son to grow up by being a reluctant teacher and by stressing that he had studied magic all his life and that what he knew was no quick mastery of potions.
He did not think he could go down, himself, there. He eventhought that he could teach her in such a way that she would not be able to use it properly for her own power, and when she played inept in his presence as part of her fluttering femininity act, he even thought it did not matter what he really taught her, but dragging it out as he did gave her much time to practice over and over what he taught her and get really good at it.
Merlin thought his own son would get to grow up in his presence and would not fall prey to the hatred Morgan le Fey had trained her own son to have and that he would not have to experience the cruelty of her rage, either, but after giving birth to Merlin’s son, she began to have fits of rage which she took out on the child when Merlin would not teach her what she wanted to know quickly enough. Morgan le Fey was intimidating him with her rage, which he did not like having to experience there or have his son experience either. He did not like her rage there, and he did not love her, but he did not leave.
Whenever taking her rage out on their son did not work, as a manipulation tool, Morgaine used her sweetness and guile, which worked better on him than he thought it would, because he was love starved. Even though he was a participant who saw what Morgaine was doing to Arthur, Merlin did not think it could happen to him. He thought he was smarter than that and could not go down the way Arthur would, which was correct. He was going to go down another way. Hmmph.
When Morgaine did not think she had to learn magic from Merlin anymore, she was really finished with him and began to have more fits of rage, alternating with begging him to teach her the one last thing she really wanted to know. She wheedled her way to getting Merlin to show her by telling him she would not take her anger out on their son anymore if he did not make her so angry by refusing to teach her what she wanted to know.
She kept insisting there must be more to his magic than he was letting her know. She keps insisting that she wanted to be able to manipulate the elements which he did not want to let her learn because of her rage and the role it was playing there. He finally told her he would teach her how to slow down her breathing and go into deep meditation the way he did, because he thought it might calm down her rage. He told her it would make her ageless, like him.
He could go for a long period of time without breathing by lowering his vibratory rate and, thus, his metabolic rate. When he was not very conscious anmore, which she had helped along by putting something in his last meal he had eaten there, she sealed him in the cave where they were with no way out. Now Merlin really could not be there for his son anymore, and his son did not know where to look for him.
Morgaine simply told him his father had gone away with no explanation. This son was never seriously considered for the throne, either. No one really believed that Merlin was the father of this son, no one really knew who Merlin was or where he had really come from and Merlin was not there to argue his case.
After this, Merlin did not know for a long time how he wanted to move outwardly, or if he even could move outwardly. He spent a long time thinking he would not try to recover his magic. He felt betrayed and did not recognize his own role in setting himself up there. He hated rage and yet found himself surrounded by it. He always tried to be the loving one that did not have to rage.
One of the most important messages in all of this is to move our own rage instead of letting ourselves be encircled by it in a state of denial, while thinking we are more loving than that.
All Morgan le Fey had to say about it was that she could not have imprisoned him in stone if he had not already imprisoned his own heart that way.
