Board Thread:Rewatching "Merlin" - Season One/@comment-5102537-20130413094642/@comment-5674726-20130420000130

''On the other hand, we only learnt in season five that all of a sudden, Morgana was immortal... nobody ever explained why (or did I simply miss it?). She was very vulnerable and mortal in season three after all...''

Morgana wasn't immortal, she just couldn't be killed by mortal blade - a very recent development, since it looked like a mortal blade would have finished her off at the end of Season Four, if not for Aithusa showing up to heal her, and she was a High Priestess at that point.

One idea that struck me reading this is that the Triple Goddess may have made Morgana invulnerable to mortal blades in order to set her up to be a martyr for the Old Religion. Surely it would have been within the Triple Goddess' power to make Morgana immortal for real, invulnerable to all weapons, mortal or otherwise, if She so chose. Making her invulnerable to mortal blades made Morgana overconfident enough to let her guard down, leading to her death at Merlin's hand.

For whatever reason, the Triple Goddess either didn't believe that Merlin and Arthur were going to benefit Albion, or didn't want them to fulfil the destiny Kilgharrah told Merlin they shared. The Disir, speaking for the Triple Goddess, effectively sentenced Arthur to death, and in his five years on the throne, he did not achieve the great things he was supposedly going to achieve. When Gaius was speaking to Alator, he told him that Emrys was going to unite the powers of the old world and the new, and that's something that some magic users, including Alator, believed in and wanted to see happen but the Triple Goddess, through the Disir, wanted Arthur to submit to the Old Religion.

What if the Triple Goddess didn't want a union between the Old Ways and the new? What if She wanted the Old Religion to continue as it was?

I know that some believe that Guinevere was going to go on to restore magic, build a peaceful Albion, etc, but this was never shown. Given that Merlin appears to be waiting for Arthur to return, it seems probable that the golden age had not yet happened.

We know that Morgana had at least some supporters among people with magic, and it'd hardly be surprising if there were followers of the Old Religion were angry over the killing of the last High Priestess, especially when her knowledge of the Old Ways could not be passed on. Perhaps they were so angry that, even if Guinevere made moves to reverse or soften the anti-magic laws - and there is no guarantee that she did - they viewed it as too little, too late, and weren't interested in any kind of reconciliation. They could have seen it as a betrayal on Emrys' part that he tortured and killed fellow creatures of magic in order to protect a King who persecuted magic users. If so, they may have continued to work to bring down Camelot in order to avenge Morgana.