“We are old, Raven and I, and we shed blood no longer from the womb but from the heart . . .and wondered afterward what she had meant.  Raven bent to her and licked the blood away from the small cut; Morgaine bent and touched her lips to the small welling stain at Raven’s breast, knowing that this was sealing long past the vows she had taken when she came to womanhood.  Then Raven drew her again into her arms.
 I gave up my maidenhood to the Horned One.  I bore a child to the God.  I burned with passion for Lancelot, and Accolon created me priestess anew in the plowed fields which the Spring Maiden has blessed, yet never have I known what it was to be received simply in love . . .”
 “Morgaine clasped her close and kissed her, rocking her like a child.  Then, as if they entered together into a great silence, she held Raven against her, touching her, caressing her, their bodies clinging together in something like frenzy.  Neither spoke, but Morgaine felt the world trembling in a strange and sacramental rhythm around them, in no light but the darkness of the dark side of the moon--woman to woman, affirming life in the shadow of death.  As maiden and man in the light of the spring moon and the Beltane fires affirmed life in the running of spring and the rutting which would bring death in the field to him and death in childbearing to her; so in the shadow and darkness of the sacrificed god, in the dark moon, the priestess of Avalon together called on the life of the Goddess and in the silence she answered them . . .” (765)

 This is almost the perfect picture of love, both physical and spiritual, this bond
shared between Morgaine and Raven.  Certainly a far cry from the treatment Lancelot received for his homosexual nature.  Morgaine sees it as a very natural thing.
 
 
 Bradley, Marion Zimmer. The Mists of Avalon.  Alfred A. Knopf, 1982.