Sacred fantasy in G ame of T hrones

Three major religious forces, each aligned with magical systems, define natural and supernatural realities in George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire. A primordial religion of the trees – consisting of old gods of the wood – marks the beliefs of the north of Westeros, including the Stark family and the wildlings living north of the Wall in a treacherous wintery wilderness. An imported religion of the Seven, in which believers worship and pay homage to a set of seven archetypal gods, brought to Westeros long ago from Essos, the eastern continent, has seven gods for seven kingdoms, overseen by priestly septons at their temples; this is the dominant religion of the land. Somewhat more remotely, but growing as a result of evangelical fervour, there is the worship of R'hllor, the Lord of Light, a fire god imported from Essos, who is locked in a dualistic, eternal combat with the forces of darkness. (Worshippers of R'hllor say prayers of welcome to the sun each morning as well as prayers of warding as the sun departs each evening.) Each of these religions connects to a potent magical system in Westeros and Martin's created world more broadly, just as one or more characters enact apocalyptic change through or in spite of the religion at hand. These interactions of religion and magic, character and apocalypse, transpiring in a dynamic, intermediating zone where all these elements intermingle, define the plot and its ramifications in Martin's novels. One of the first glimpses of the religious realities that permeate Westeros comes in the second chapter of A Game of Thrones, which is narrated by Catelyn Stark, born of House Tully, an ancient noble family from the mid-southern part of the continent, and who is married to Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell, scion of another ancient noble family that has ruled over the north for centuries. It was a legendary Stark ancestor, Brandon the Builder, who erected the 700-foot wall of ice that separates the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros from the wild unruly wilderness to the north of it, legendary domain of giants, shapeshifters, wild free folk, and the mysterious Others – White Walkers neither dead nor alive but as lethal as frostbite and who have recently awakened from a dormancy of several thousand years. In this second chapter, Catelyn, who has never felt at home in the north, prepares to find Eddard – called Ned, familiarly – who in the first chapter of the novel has, in his role as Lord of Winterfell, beheaded a young man found guilty of deserting his duties as a man of the Night's Watch, an ancient order of Westerosi men, mostly outcasts and derelicts, who take vows to protect the Seven Kingdoms against the menaces that lurk north of the Wall. Winterfell is south of the Wall, but located nevertheless in an unforgiving north country of bitter cold nights, windswept days, and hard-scrabble existence. The people at Winterfell live by the prophetic motto of House Stark, Winter is coming; even the noble people who benefit from life inside the walls of Winterfell are of a sort tougher than the people to the south, or at least that's the implication. Catelyn knows where to find Eddard: he will be in the godswood. Growing up at Riverrun, the castle of House Tully, she knew bright and airy fields, flowing rivers, and a godswood ‘where tall redwoods spread dappled shadows across tinkling streams’.1 Making her way into Winterfell's godswood, she feels something different: a kind of uncanny dread. ‘The gods of Winterfell kept a different sort of wood,’ she ruminates. ‘It was a dark, primal place, three acres of old forest untouched for ten thousand years as the gloomy castle rose around it. It smelled of moist earth and decay ... This was a wood of stubborn sentinel trees armored in grey-green needles, of mighty oaks, of ironwoods as old as the realm itself ... This was a place of deep silence and brooding shadows, and the gods who lived here had no names.’2 At the centre of the godswood of Winterfell is what Eddard calls ‘the heart tree’, a weirwood, which is a species of deciduous tree that grows across Westeros, with bone-white wood and blood-red leaves and sap. ‘A face had been carved in the trunk of the great tree,’ observes Catelyn, ‘its features long and melancholy, the deep-cut eyes red with dried sap and strangely watchful.’ Customary in godswoods of the north are these carved faces: eerie, anthropomorphising, and ancient. The weirwood trees in Winterfell's godswood are old enough to have seen Brandon the Builder set the first stone of the castle, which is to say thousands of years old. ‘It was said that the children of the forest had carved the faces on the trees during the dawn centuries before the coming of the First Men across the narrow sea.’3 Eddard Stark belongs to an old faith whose primordiality is ascertained from legendary implications: children of the forest, an heroic ancestor, the dawn of time. These elements belong to what Mircea Eliade, characterising sacred time, called the illud tempus, that time in which not only the world but reality itself has its origins, when the cosmos gushes outward into existence, ‘the stupendous instant in which a reality was created, was for the first time fully manifested’, and to which, Eliade insists, humans seek periodically, through the creation, invocation, and reactualisation of sacred time and space, to return.4 Catelyn, as a southerner, belongs to a different faith, the imported religion of the Seven, in which believers worship and pay homage to a set of seven archetypal gods – the father, the mother, the warrior, the maiden, the smith, the crone, and the stranger – brought to Westeros long ago from the eastern continent across the Narrow Sea. This faith has seven gods for seven kingdoms, overseen by priestly septons at their temples and by tutelary septas in the homes of the noble families. The faith of the Seven is the dominant religion of the land. ‘Catelyn had been anointed with the seven oils and named in the rainbow of light that filled the sept of Riverrun,’ we learn. ‘She was of the Faith, like her father and grandfather and his father before him.’ In contrast to her husband, Catelyn's gods had names, ‘and their faces were as familiar as the faces of her parents’. For Catelyn, faith consists of a censer smoking with incense, a septon incanting prayer, a service in a sept. ‘In the south,’ she thinks, ‘the last weirwoods had been cut down or burned out a thousand years ago’.5 Adherents to the faith of the Seven, we are to understand, are suspicious and even frightened of the uncanny Old Faith of the north. To these two religions, Martin adds a third, another import from the east, in this case a dualistic faith of light and dark, in which an all-powerful God, R'hllor, the Lord of Light, wages an accelerating cosmic battle against the forces of darkness actualised by the night itself. The religion of R'hllor combines monotheism and dualism in an original synthesis: R'hllor is an all-powerful god – the one creator God, in fact – but reliant on his adherents to contribute to the outcome of a profoundly consequential cosmic battle between forces of good and evil. Not surprisingly, his followers are prone to fervour. In A Game of Thrones, we encounter Thoros of Myr, the ‘red priest’, a cartoonish figure in the high court at King's Landing, who brandishes a sword he lights on fire during royal jousts. He abides, at least in the first volume of the series, as a colourful oddity, whiffing of otherness. But mainly, we learn of R'hllor through the figure of Melisandre of Asshai, a priestess devoted to the Lord of Light who has become the counsellor of Stannis Baratheon, the Lord of Dragonstone, a lonely island in the Narrow Sea. Stannis is the younger brother of Robert Baratheon, king of the Seven Kingdoms, whose death in A Game of Thrones triggers a crisis of leadership in the land the subsequent books in the series chronicle. Stannis believes himself to be the rightful heir to the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms because he has learned, through the detective work of Eddard Stark, that the children believed to be the offspring of Robert and his wife Cersei, of the conniving House Lannister, are in fact bastard children sired by Cersei's twin brother Jaime, from which sin (in the Greek tragic sense of hamartia) the entire plot of Martin's novels develops. (Eddard Stark will be beheaded for his discovery before the conclusion of A Game of Thrones.) Adding to Stannis's feelings of entitlement are Melisandre's convictions that Stannis is the second coming of Azor Ahai, an archaic hero who forged a sword of unequalled power, called Lightbringer, tempered by having been driven through the heart of the hero's wife, and used to drive back the Others to the frosty northern wastes in a battle that took place in a primordial foretime. In Melisandre's reckoning, Stannis embodies the power to save the land by driving its supernatural enemies back into the far north and uniting its peoples in a way as much prophetic as it is heroic. As Azor Ahai, Stannis is an instrument of R'hllor. In this respect, he bears no small resemblance to the Mahdi, the hidden Twelfth Imam, whose coming is prophesied by many Shi'ite Muslims, the figure of a pre-eternal covenant whose appearance, marked by eschatological signs, signals the beginning of the End of Days. The Mahdi, writes Seyyed Hossein Nasr, ‘is also the secret master of this world and can appear to those who are in the appropriate spiritual state to see him’.6 Hence Melisandre. We first encounter the significance of Melisandre's convictions in the prologue to A Clash of Kings, the second novel in the series, narrated from the perspective of Cressen, a Maester of the Citadel. The knowledge of the maesters occupies a place of importance parallel to that of religion in Westeros. The maesters are an order of scholars, healers, messengers, and forecasters who learn their art at the Citadel in Oldtown, a city in the far south of Westeros. Maesters serve the noble families, teaching their children and advising kings and queens, lords and ladies about what they should do and how they should do it. There is an anticipatory quality to their knowledge that exceeds scholarship to verge into something like fortune telling. It's up to the maesters, for instance, to discern the change in the seasons in Westeros, which relate not to the rotation of the planet they inhabit but to a magical system hidden in shadow. When A Game of Thrones begins, summer has been lasting for more than a decade, something not uncommon in the history of Westeros. (As the series develops, there are intimations that the length and intensity of the seasons are connected to the lives of dragons, which have been lost to the world until Daenerys Targaryen, a teenaged queen across the Narrow Sea in Essos and potential heir to the Iron Throne herself, hatches three dragon eggs, reinvigorating the world with draconian magic.) In this respect, the maesters bear a similarity to the Mentats in Frank Herbert's Dune books. (And comparisons to Dune don't end here; structural similarities abound, as well even as some narrative strategies.) Cressen is the Maester associated with Dragonstone; he serves Stannis Baratheon as his counsellor and healer. When we encounter him, he is ageing and anxious with foreboding that the world is disintegrating and Stannis won't be capable of surviving it. Stannis's younger brother Renly is also making a claim for the Iron Throne. While Stannis is sullen and taciturn, Renly is charismatic and adventuresome. Stannis writhes with loathing toward his brother as Cressen counsels him to broker a deal with Renly or with Robb Stark, oldest-born of Eddard and Catelyn Stark, called ‘The King in the North’ by his followers, despite being only a teenaged boy. Stannis angrily refuses Cressen's counsel. Instead, he intends to gather his followers and wage war on the impostor kings of Westeros, including and especially Joffrey Baratheon, bastard son of Cersei Lannister and her twin brother Jaime, but heir to the Iron Throne as Robert Baratheon's supposed first-born son. Behind this impulse, Cressen suspects Melisandre, who has ingratiated herself as the adviser to Stannis's wife Selyse as well as to Stannis himself. ‘The woman was the heart of it,’ fumes Cressen. ‘Melisandre of Asshai, sorceress, shadowbinder, and priestess to R'hllor, the Lord of Light, the Heart of Fire, the God of Flame and Shadow.’7 Cressen schemes to poison Melisandre, pitting, it seems, the wisdom of the Citadel against the religious fervours of the East. The maester loses: Melisandre somehow transforms the deadly poisonous crystals he has sprinkled in her wine into a weapon. What she swallows is harmless, but when Cressen takes a swallow, he wilts to his death. Melisandre's devotion cannot be trumped by a scheme. From this moment, her prophetic intensity magnifies in Stannis, whom she convinces eventually to turn his attention away from fighting battle in the Seven Kingdoms to pitting his powers against the supernatural forces massing beyond the Wall. In these two scenes, Martin presents his readers with a major thematic thrust of the novels in A Song of Ice and Fire; namely, a long-standing agitation between the natural structures and orders of the world (weirwood trees, for instance), ones whose archaism portends supernatural power, and the pursuit of civilisation by interloping humans (the so-called ‘game of thrones’), who have brought with them from afar their own ideas of religion. It's tempting, of course, to map elements of our world onto Martin's Westeros: Eddard Stark radiates a pre-Christian Gaelic–Nordic intensity arising from a virtuous pagan cosmic order. The Starks and the other northerners are like the Druids in Blake's prophetic poems. Catelyn Tully's faith involves clearly Christian trappings of ritual, hierarchy, and ecclesiology, reminiscent of the medieval Catholic Church above all, but with Byzantine glamour thrown in for good measure. The Seven feel like the Holy Trinity as innovated in a session of Dungeons & Dragons. Likewise, the religion of R'hllor combines the cosmology of Zoroastrianism with the eschatology of Islam into a theodicy of conflagration: the Lord of Light will burn the imperfect world into new life. But the value of the implications of the religious systems in Martin's world, which include these and several others, lies not in the ways we might attest to an allegory at hand but rather in the verisimilar ease with which Martin includes religion as an essential cosmological fact in the narrative project of his world building. Put another way, while it's compelling to think about the ways religion is involved in Martin's series of fantasy novels, it's more interesting to think about what Martin's imaginary world tells us about religion. The Zohar, or Book of Splendour, is a 700-year-old mystical ‘homilectical commentary in Aramaic on all the portions of the five books of the Pentateuch, as if they were ancient midrashic works’, in the words of Joseph Dan, a scholar of Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism.8 When the book appeared in southern Spain in the late thirteenth century, supposedly translated by the hand of Rabbi Moses de León, it was presented as the work of an ancient wisdom, written in lyrical Aramaic, drawn from some forgotten historical well. When de León died in 1305 and his followers appeared at the door of his house, asking his wife to see the Aramaic manuscripts from which the rabbi had made his translations, she reported to them that her husband ‘wrote from his own mind’, and that there was no source from which he was copying.9 The sophisticated literary structure of the whole, which involves a series of nested, sagely, disputatious, and metaphorically dense conversations between Rabbi Shim'on and Rabbi El'azar, was entirely invented by de León, presenting a simultaneous theogony, cosmogony, and cosmology in one unified myth, describing how the ‘universe reflects in its structure the and in it, in the and in the parallel the of than being in the sacred of the world, the that because it takes of the of religious and a scholar of Jewish has ‘The is a work of sacred He by this than what he the Zohar, one of the of mystical in the is a work of in which an world in the of its into reality and in some because of the of its and that this is than that it at and it especially at the of religious and Martin is not sacred fantasy in the in his own reckoning, he is by which he fantasy in which much and and and are As out in an that appeared in the of in ‘The in is not between and it is long on of the and It's not a world to live not for a it is because of the convictions with which religion is in that it of the as say this about is by no to the of its or the religious of its writes ‘The are filled with He includes secret and in this The literary in religion is Martin is not sacred he is fantasy in which the sacred a The in is a of He his sense of the sacred from of ‘the in which appeared in in his book The of the Eliade, as before him, the of before the before the the that an of he religious before the in which of being For religion is the that this and it's the power that from Melisandre's and Stannis to it's the uncanny of Eddard and it is say in the power of the of the Seven, which order the reality of Westeros and devotion and its as observes in his on the novels and the series in the of the of A Song of Ice and to be not only to the of the but to a three major religions whose and Martin in Martin's novels this kind of apocalyptic fantasy with a more familiar kind of fantasy in what as the literary of people they don't he say something the don't This no sense as an of that don't and as it that don't in the literary good at that don't ... no other of like of to Martin's of his invented as essential to the of his the quality of ‘the that for for the and of names, the – the called and the of and – that a sense of the reality of this The of that Martin's is one of the of his especially the ways that this fantasy in with a sacred fantasy something new to the compelling in readers an of the into we in of what we are To or or is to for a from the of life. But when a fantasy novel for just what are The to fantasy more than to can be seen in the includes in his don't can don't in Martin's with of other or forces to the dragons, a wall of White even When are to a fantasy world, one by the that and to the sacred that the of religious In insists, the serve as if they were of He is the never an on ‘The as well as but for many the is a for the – and not because also and in out that for with the supernatural and the that from a of with the result that of to the from fantasy in the is with while the fantasy to be at in Martin's novels a fantasy to the sacred fantasy to be found in the In a to what when he ‘The never an is the he in the of the In Martin's novels, we don't from reality into some we from the of reality into the of its to a world of and A that the Christian was a that had the of a The of the from a that reality is and for to is to take on in evil. with its of a world in which have been by an of a In ‘The a about Blake's and the prophetic in religious that because Islam a a and its believers have over the centuries into a a from the scholar of he calls this ‘the work of a He on to an to the that the of devotion to appearance, to In all is It is not of the but of the For this to a reality in a way that the from to through He the apocalyptic the is through the is our As has we have the to be and that all are through the the of fantasy be Not for not in a way that be more as far as religion is (in an Martin himself as a Martin from sacred and in order to his world more and toward the of his plot more As a way of the of own like to by at one of the plot in A Song of Ice and that and the religious realities Martin presents in his novels. The of Brandon Stark is the mysterious of Martin's novels. because a be made about and Daenerys as in the first chapter of A Game of Thrones, when he with his to his father a of the Night's the while back to Winterfell, the a in A is another of Martin's the of that the northern of Westeros and that serve as the for House The is seen as an brother Robb him a he has by others, one for each of the Stark As they they a on the it's a This one will belong to the Stark The of the living Not long who to the walls and of Winterfell for himself in on a not supposed to be in an part of the castle The King of Westeros, Robert Baratheon, is Winterfell to father to him south in King's to take on the role of the of the his King Robert has brought with him his wife Cersei, as well as an which includes Cersei's twin brother and Jaime, who serves as of the in his has himself in of a between the queen and her As their he in to see who they are not at this only to find them an of young to they are having Cersei, out a at which him in an of him from the of the on which he has been to the from the down by the In his to have he has of He also to be by of a who tells him that he can how to As these of the and his that they belong to power his to his a has The named is to the of the first three novels in the series, to that he has the to inhabit the and of He from in which he the night through the for and them with At these him before he that he has the power to to into at is a in Martin's a who has the power to into an at to is in by the of and at In A Clash of Kings, they are teenaged who have to their to Robb Stark of the death of Eddard Stark at the of the to that he has the which is the power of prophetic in which he is to by a that the of the magical is to the north, beyond the Wall. and a from Winterfell in an to the domain of the The narrative of

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