How Morgana le Fay Inspires Me

There’s a figure who lives somewhere between legend and dream, veiled in enchantment and misunderstood power. Her name is Morgana le Fay. Some call her wicked. Others call her divine. She is the enchantress of Arthurian lore, the sister, the seer, the storm, and the silence. Her name carries weight, suspicion, and allure. For me, she carries something else entirely, a mirror. A muse. A myth I find myself tangled in.

I wasn’t drawn to her because of her beauty, though stories do not fail to mention it. Nor was it her magic, though the idea of a woman wielding power outside of masculine rule always thrilled me. What captured me was her duality. Her resistance. The way her story seemed to be one of becoming. Becoming feared, becoming undone, becoming whole in her own way. She is painted as both villain and victim, goddess and ghost. And in her contradictions, I found space to exist.

Morgana was never meant to be simple.

The first time I read about her, I remember how the language clung to her like vines-dark, sorcery, treachery, seduction. Even when she wasn’t the antagonist, she was still othered. She was not the beloved Queen Guinevere. She was not the noble knight. She was the woman who dared to act outside of the expected. A healer who became a threat. A sister who became a stranger. A sorceress who chose herself.

And maybe that’s why she stirred something in me. I know what it feels like to be misread. To have your strength mistaken for defiance, your intuition mistaken for moodiness, your complexity mistaken for instability. Woman, especially those who don’t shrink into digestible roles, are often cast in one-dimensional lights. We are too much, too wild, too mysterious. Or worse-too aware.

Morgana’s story, as fragmented as it is across retellings, feels like a warning and a promise. It warns us what happens when women claim their voices in a world that wants them silent. But it also promises that there’s power in refusal. Power in reclaiming the narrative. Power in not softening the edges of your truth just to be accepted.

For a long time, I did what I was told. I kept my voice light, my desires hidden, my knowing subdued. I played the roles given to me: the good girl, the helper, the one who made sure everyone was comfortable. I smiled when I wanted to scream. I apologized for taking up space. I called it survival. But it was a slow erasure.

Morgana was a whisper in my psyche. What if you stop apologizing? What if you let yourself be whole, even if it means being misunderstood?

There is something hauntingly liberating about the way she refuses to fold. She learns. She grieves. She acts. Whether or not she is “right” by the moral compass of Camelot doesn’t interest me. What interests me is her embodied power. She’s not waiting to be saved. She doesn’t contort herself to become likable. She studies magic. She wields it. She becomes the storm when the world tells her to hush.

We don’t talk enough about how healing it is to see women who don’t hush.

Her story is a reclamation of self in a myth that tries to paint her in shadows. And maybe that’s the point, maybe the shadows aren’t meant to be feared. Maybe they are sacred. Maybe Morgana isn’t the villain. Maybe she is just the woman who refused to be erased.

That thought changed something in me.

I began to revisit my own darkness, not as a flaw to fix but as a place of fertile soil. My anger, my sorrow, my unmet longings… they weren’t wrong. They were data. They were the places I had abandoned myself. And Morgana, in all her thorned glory, reminded me to return.

When I felt like my softness was a weakness, I remembered that she was both healer and harbinger. She knew herbs. She knew spells. She also knew grief. Her femininity wasn’t dainty. It was elemental. It could soothe or burn. And so could mine.

I don’t want to be sanitized anymore.

I want to be a woman who knows. Who listens to the aching in her bones. Who speaks with velvet and steel. Who lets her intuition guide her, even when logic doubts. A woman who is unafraid of her own depth.

Morgana was once trained in healing. That part is always left out of the villain stories. Before she was feared, she was wise. Before she was bitter, she was heartbroken. The world doesn’t always allow space for feminine rage, but it simmers beneath so many of us, waiting to be transmuted.

She shows me that it can be.

My connection to Morgana isn’t about sorcery in the traditional sense. I don’t practice spells or claim ancient magic. But I do believe in energy. I believe in intention. I believe that every woman carries a kind of quiet magic inside her. Rituals made sacred through meaning, intuition that pulses louder when we stop pretending we don’t hear it.

In Morgana’s presence, I feel permission. Permission to feel the ache. To name the fire. To find beauty in the complexity of becoming. She reminds me that the world may not always know what to do with a woman who won’t betray herself, but that woman must still rise.

There are moments when I feel her inside me. Not literally, but symbolically. When I choose not to dim. When I walk into a room fully embodied, not hiding the way I see or sense or feel. When I say no with softness but certainty. When I protect the parts of me that once begged to be chosen. In those moments, I am not just myself. I am every woman who refused to be silenced.

Morgana is more than myth to me. She is the shape of resistance wrapped in velvet. The echo of intuition under centuries of noise. She is not meant to be tidy. Neither am I.

And maybe that’s the most radical thing I’ve learned from her. That being misunderstood is not failure. That taking up space, asking questions, feeling deeply, loving wildly, protecting yourself fiercely, creating from your core-that is not villainy. That is life. That is legacy.

Morgana le Fay may not have the happy ending of a crowned queen or a wedding veil. She does not vanish into the arms of a hero. She remains rooted in myth, in magic, in the minds of every girl who grew up tired of being told what a woman should be.

She reminds me I do not have to choose between softness and strength, wisdom and wildness. I am not here to be palatable. I am here to be whole.

And in that, Morgana-misread, rewritten, reborn, becomes not only a figure of legend but a lighthouse in my own story.

A reminder that there is no shame in being seen in your full, untamed, truth.

Only power.

Xo, Lana